Apple (and the other big players) have a much better idea of where the PC market is going over the next 5, 10, 15 years. My bet is they see more and more movement to cloud-based services, less need for local CPU power (and storage), more demand for portability and long battery life, more and more sophisticated security attacks which the current open/trusted architecture doesn't deal with well.
Compared to iOS users, macOS is a minority platform (I'm part of that minority). On top of which most Mac users don't care what the architecture is so long as it works, runs a web browser and apps, looks nice and doesn't need charging too often. Hell, I work in IT but that pretty much describes even me when it comes to my laptop - so long as I can do my job with it, I don't care what's 'inside'.
Virtualisation, Boot Camp, etc. are just a particular era's solutions to a particular problem - most 'normal' users don't virtualise, dual-boot. Those who do can probably get the same result now/in the future using PaaS, IaaS from Amazon, Azure, etc. If local, hardware, virtualisation is really important than maybe Mac isn't the platform - Linux/*BSD would be a better option.
Apple have already pretty much given up on the high-end desktop market, viz. Mac Pro. Even the new iMac Pro is more rich amateur creative than professional as all the best 'pro apps' are now Windows.
Microsoft seem to agree considering their repeated attempts with Windows RT, Windows S, both running on ARM. OK, they're not roaring successes but the fact that even so, MS keep trying, means they know it's an important tech branch to follow.
Intel haven't exactly covered themselves in glory recently, delayed launches, security exploits and worse, poor response to these exploits.
Janet, the Joint Academic Network, that connects all the UK universities, colleges, schools etc. has a strict policy against content-filtering - partly because it's against the ethos of an academic network and partly because they're bright enough to realise that it wouldn't work:
there is no centrally imposed filtering of web, e-mail or other content provided by the network; indeed, such filtering would be ineffective as the network provides many possible routes to bypass any solution implemented at a single point.
Bearing in-mind that most academic institutions use Janet for their student's Internet access, and most file-sharers are in the 18-25 age group, and something like 45% of 18-25 year olds go to university...
Yup, it's a shame that the vast majority of commercial power generation reactors are water cooled, primarily because most of the early design work in nuclear power reactors (in the US and USSR at least) was led by Naval interests wanting reactors suitable for vessel propulsion. Gas cooled reactors have their own issues but are far less likely to suffer a core meltdown due to loss of coolant than a water cooled reactor.
Yup, and I'm old enough to remember the multi-page article in Byte (from when it was great) on the move to kernel mode drivers in NT4 and the ramifications of said move. As I recall the gist of the article was that Microsoft was being brave/foolish compromising the stability of NT for the sake of graphics performance, particularly on NT Server.
Most of my generation (late 30's/early 40's) in the UK started out with Tom Duncan's excellent book, Adventures with Electronics. It's definitely old school - transistors, resistors, capacitors and (from memory) one project which used a small 3-pin IC in a radio receiver. No logic devices and definitely no PLCs. There's a follow-up, Adventures with Microelectronics and (after my time) a third book, Adventures with Digital Electronics. To me the great thing about the book was that it's divided into projects which you can just dive into - you don't need to follow the book sequentially, although it will help your understanding if you do. Every project had a written description of how it works, circuit diagrams, a layout to build it on an 'S-Dec' (solderless prototyping board) and ideas to change, improve, modify the circuit. Using the S-Dec for prototyping made it very easy to swap components to see what effect that had on the circuit's operation. All the components used were (are?) standard, unlike a lot of kits which involved daisy-chaining together proprietary modules. For a basic grounding in electronics you can't go far wrong and my son will definitely be getting my old copy and component box when he's old enough.
My advice would be to start with the basics of analogue circuits (as in the book above) and get a grounding in these things before you get into digital electronics. I have a friend who is an EE in mobile communications, at the moment 3G hardware, and he's always commenting on the lack of analogue/RF skills in the more recent EE graduates, who focus on digital. Which is good for him, as his skillset is much in demand. I'd agree with the two posters who mentioned audio/hi-fi and ham radio - hi-fi is more immediately practical in that you can make big amps etc. but there's nothing like VHF/UHF/microwave for teaching good construction skills.
Have fun and don't get too addicted to the smell of hot solder.
If one $500 drone can force the US to shutdown the entire GPS coverage for a region, that's a pretty big win for whoever launched that drone when you think of the amount of havoc that would cause.
Troll.
Since when was ham radio all about providing disaster comms? It's about radio - the electronics of the transceivers, the physics of propagation, the engineering of masts and antenna (not to forget microwave transceivers, which seems as much to do with precision mechanical engineering as electronics) and add in the mix a bit of old-fashioned social interaction by talking with people. It's a hobby, nothing more, nothing less and as hobbies go, a pretty benign one at that.
BTW - I'm not a ham, so no woodwork to crawl out of.
Tritium lights are great - I bought a couple and taped one to the dog's collar so I don't trip over him at night and one to the toilet seat so I can pee at night without putting the light on. The only thing was I got confused and peed on the dog...
You see plenty of them here in Cambridge, UK, but they generally tend to be ridden by the sort of people who would really benefit from having to pedal their bikes...
Funny thing is that running cable is a part of my work which I really enjoy - OK, it's mucky and doesn't take a huge amount of brain power but it's the one place where my normally messy and chaotic self can get really anal about neatness and getting everything just-so. Weird, but there you go...:)
That's fair enough. I must admit that (here's my age showing again) a subscription music service is something that's never appealed to me, although I've not given it much thought - maybe if I tried it, I might like it. OTOH I have around 500 CDs, most loaded into iTunes, which I don't get to listen enough as it is...
...when for $300 you could have an 8Gig iPod Touch, which is a a seriously nice bit of kit, even to a jaded oldie like me - that multitouch screen is truly lovely and (almost) everything about the interface is polished to a delicious, gloss, sheen.
This has been on the cards for some time, as a couple of years ago the rules on funny number plates were severely tightened up, essentially making anything but a plain vanilla plate illegal. How well they're enforced is a different matter.
AC.
P.S I agree - the idea is iniquitous and I'm really starting to get p*ss*d off with the continuous steam-rollering of draconian legislation as being for the national good.
You'll be thinking of the Alfa class attack boats?
The ones which used the BM-40A reactor. A lead-bismuth cooled design, making 150MW(th), which could push these boats to 43 knots - faster than any NATO torpedo when they were introduced. They could also dive to 600m due to their titanium hulls, and had a crew of about 30 - engineering and ordinance being automated from the the control room.
On the downside, they were fairly noisy, at least when they were at full power; and there were problems with the coolant freezing when the reactor was shutdown, which lead to the reactors never being shutdown. (On the other hand, they were much safer in a coolant loss incident than a water cooled reactor).
How many times does Apple need to learn that people don't want lock-in solutions.
How many times do (some) slashdotters need to learn that most people don't give a **** about lock-in, Ogg Vorbis support, etc. People want things which just work - as evinced by the iPod's market share.
My gf wants a player which just works, my sister wants a player which just works, my friends want players which just work, hell, after a day of sysadmin work, I want a player that just works.
"But the plan requires the building of a new kind of nuclear reactor, at a time when the United States is not even building conventional reactors. And the cost estimates are uncertain."
This isn't really correct - although pretty much all the power reactors in the USA are water cooled (primarily due to the Navy's interest is nuclear propulsion), there are plenty of gas cooled reactors elsewhere. Most of our (Britain's) nuclear generating capacity is from either AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors) or Magnox (named after the Mg-alloy fuel can) reactors, both of which use carbon dioxide as the coolant.
So, the technology may be new to the USA, but there's are wealth of knowledge on designing and running these reactors elsewhere in the world.
Oh yes, they're arguably quite a bit safer than PWRs as well!
Slashdot Mirror
Janet, the Joint Academic Network, that connects all the UK universities, colleges, schools etc. has a strict policy against content-filtering - partly because it's against the ethos of an academic network and partly because they're bright enough to realise that it wouldn't work:
there is no centrally imposed filtering of web, e-mail or other content provided by the network; indeed, such filtering would be ineffective as the network provides many possible routes to bypass any solution implemented at a single point.
http://www.ja.net/documents/publications/factsheets/072-janet-and-internet-filtering.pdf
Bearing in-mind that most academic institutions use Janet for their student's Internet access, and most file-sharers are in the 18-25 age group, and something like 45% of 18-25 year olds go to university...
Yup, it's a shame that the vast majority of commercial power generation reactors are water cooled, primarily because most of the early design work in nuclear power reactors (in the US and USSR at least) was led by Naval interests wanting reactors suitable for vessel propulsion. Gas cooled reactors have their own issues but are far less likely to suffer a core meltdown due to loss of coolant than a water cooled reactor.
Yup, and I'm old enough to remember the multi-page article in Byte (from when it was great) on the move to kernel mode drivers in NT4 and the ramifications of said move. As I recall the gist of the article was that Microsoft was being brave/foolish compromising the stability of NT for the sake of graphics performance, particularly on NT Server.
My advice would be to start with the basics of analogue circuits (as in the book above) and get a grounding in these things before you get into digital electronics. I have a friend who is an EE in mobile communications, at the moment 3G hardware, and he's always commenting on the lack of analogue/RF skills in the more recent EE graduates, who focus on digital. Which is good for him, as his skillset is much in demand. I'd agree with the two posters who mentioned audio/hi-fi and ham radio - hi-fi is more immediately practical in that you can make big amps etc. but there's nothing like VHF/UHF/microwave for teaching good construction skills.
Have fun and don't get too addicted to the smell of hot solder.
AC :)
If one $500 drone can force the US to shutdown the entire GPS coverage for a region, that's a pretty big win for whoever launched that drone when you think of the amount of havoc that would cause.
Troll. Since when was ham radio all about providing disaster comms? It's about radio - the electronics of the transceivers, the physics of propagation, the engineering of masts and antenna (not to forget microwave transceivers, which seems as much to do with precision mechanical engineering as electronics) and add in the mix a bit of old-fashioned social interaction by talking with people. It's a hobby, nothing more, nothing less and as hobbies go, a pretty benign one at that. BTW - I'm not a ham, so no woodwork to crawl out of.
Tritium lights are great - I bought a couple and taped one to the dog's collar so I don't trip over him at night and one to the toilet seat so I can pee at night without putting the light on. The only thing was I got confused and peed on the dog...
You see plenty of them here in Cambridge, UK, but they generally tend to be ridden by the sort of people who would really benefit from having to pedal their bikes...
...with three bullets holes in it would give Steve Balmer a chubby.
Erm, apart from the fact the HP's Procurve networking kit is already enterprise class and shed loads better than anything 3Com has made in many years.
Debian is in effect raising BSD from the dead. IMO it's a good thing, the more OSes there are, the better.
If being made into the un-dead means becoming more like GNU/Linux, I'd rather just keep me and my demonic servers six feet under please.
Funny thing is that running cable is a part of my work which I really enjoy - OK, it's mucky and doesn't take a huge amount of brain power but it's the one place where my normally messy and chaotic self can get really anal about neatness and getting everything just-so. Weird, but there you go... :)
That's fair enough. I must admit that (here's my age showing again) a subscription music service is something that's never appealed to me, although I've not given it much thought - maybe if I tried it, I might like it. OTOH I have around 500 CDs, most loaded into iTunes, which I don't get to listen enough as it is...
...when for $300 you could have an 8Gig iPod Touch, which is a a seriously nice bit of kit, even to a jaded oldie like me - that multitouch screen is truly lovely and (almost) everything about the interface is polished to a delicious, gloss, sheen.
I've seen that video so many times before, but I can't seem to resist watching it again. Each time I do, it disturbs me, greatly.
Why don't I have (positive) mod points when I need them.
This has been on the cards for some time, as a couple of years ago the rules on funny number plates were severely tightened up, essentially making anything but a plain vanilla plate illegal. How well they're enforced is a different matter.
AC.
P.S I agree - the idea is iniquitous and I'm really starting to get p*ss*d off with the continuous steam-rollering of draconian legislation as being for the national good.
You'll be thinking of the Alfa class attack boats?
The ones which used the BM-40A reactor. A lead-bismuth cooled design, making 150MW(th), which could push these boats to 43 knots - faster than any NATO torpedo when they were introduced. They could also dive to 600m due to their titanium hulls, and had a crew of about 30 - engineering and ordinance being automated from the the control room.
On the downside, they were fairly noisy, at least when they were at full power; and there were problems with the coolant freezing when the reactor was shutdown, which lead to the reactors never being shutdown. (On the other hand, they were much safer in a coolant loss incident than a water cooled reactor).
All in all, a very impressive boat.
Total Recall...
How many times does Apple need to learn that people don't want lock-in solutions.
How many times do (some) slashdotters need to learn that most people don't give a **** about lock-in, Ogg Vorbis support, etc. People want things which just work - as evinced by the iPod's market share.
My gf wants a player which just works, my sister wants a player which just works, my friends want players which just work, hell, after a day of sysadmin work, I want a player that just works.
Easier solution - get into '70's prog rock and you'll only fit two songs, complete with guitar/bass/drum/triangle solos, onto a 1 gig iShuffle
This isn't really correct - although pretty much all the power reactors in the USA are water cooled (primarily due to the Navy's interest is nuclear propulsion), there are plenty of gas cooled reactors elsewhere. Most of our (Britain's) nuclear generating capacity is from either AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors) or Magnox (named after the Mg-alloy fuel can) reactors, both of which use carbon dioxide as the coolant.
So, the technology may be new to the USA, but there's are wealth of knowledge on designing and running these reactors elsewhere in the world.
Oh yes, they're arguably quite a bit safer than PWRs as well!
>however I think I'd have skipped over this one when 5 years old. ;)
:)
I didn't - so I guess that's why I'm here
AC.
P.S. Somewhere I (read - my parents) still have that book, the '71 edition, I remember the cover.