That refers to Quicksilver , which in a nutshell, is a super efficient way to launch your applications, and also get at your files, music, oft-viewed webpages, etc.
I was just about to respond saying the same thing, but instead I'll provide some links. Quicksilver is gotten there, albeit a minimalist page that barely says anything useful. Dan Dickinson has a very good tutorial , appropriately named "A Better OS X In Just 10 Minutes."
It's like all the power of the CLI with the visual interface of a GUI.
But then why don't they allow you legally to run ONE copy of Vista in a VM, if that's really their worry?
This behavior is nothing other than their standard operating procedure to ensure dominance. Either they have to be the primary booted OS in charge, or you can pay them a hefty fee.
Well, on the bright side, in the old days you couldn't even pay Microsoft a fee to get Windows to play nicely with other OS's. So at least we're making progress in that arena:-)
The problem isn't that your choices are limited, the problem is that Microsoft lets you run your licensed copy of Vista ONLY if Vista is the primary booted OS and not virtual. Despite the fact that it's running on the same damn computer whether it's virtual or not. Oh, unless you pay them a few hundred bucks extra, then you can run it virtual. This is the typical age-old anti-trust behavior they've been engaging in for the past 20+ years.
Apple on the other hand lets you do whatever the hell you want with the hardware and software. They allow you to do whatever you want with OS X, as long as you're running it on OS X supported hardware.
You are complaining that the pool of OS X hardware is smaller, while most other people here are complaining that Microsoft charges you a hefty fee if you want to run Windows to run as a VM inside another OS even though you legally purchased it to work with that specific hardware.
Apple gives you the same rights on the same hardware, Microsoft makes you pay more unless they're the OS 'in charge' on your system.
I never understood why when Apple locks you out no one really complains, but when Microsoft does it, its horrible.
Inaccurate comparison, you're simplifying the situation (intentionally?)
Apple will let you run OS X on any computer it's licensed for, regardless of what other OS's may also be running on the computer. As long as you can run OS X on that computer, they don't give a shit what you do with it.
Microsoft, on the other hand, says you only have Vista rights if Vista is the primary OS at that time. Or you can pay them much more money to play fairly, despite the fact that you purchased a copy of Vista licensed to run on this particular computer. Microsoft is restricting your ability to use the software you purchased to run on that computer, and only let you do so if they're the software in charge. This is typical Microsoft behavior and has been since day one.
So, while you claim Apple is the restrictive party here, they're actually the more open party. Your complaint is only that Apple has a more limited pool of hardware to run OS X, however within that pool you can do whatever you want on those computers with your OS X. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a wider array of available hardware, but they only lets you run your licensed copy of Vista if they're the main player at the time, and won't let you run Vista within (ie, in a VM) to another OS unless you shell out significantly more cash.
yet the alt-tab has a live thumbnail of what the window is currently showing unlike OS X
However, you DO get live thumbnails in Exposé under OS X.
I re-mapped the middle mouse of my Mighty Mouse to bring up Expose (instead of the default option which is Dashboard) so I can find, analyze, and switch to various windows super easily, even with tons of apps running on what would seemingly be a cluttered desktop.
However - one of the major design points and motivation for the shuttle was the abiliy to retrieve satellites and bring them back down, hence use of the term 'shuttle'. Ultimately this was rarely done, and in the case of the Hubble Space Telescope the only shuttle which had large enough cargo bay to fit the Hubble was Columbia.
I highly disagree (or I agree with your sarcasm). In my experience, as an amateur musician, many times when I or other band mates set out to write a song per se, things sometimes feel forced and it's hard to find that muse. But in my experience (and I'm highly curious of others reading this) some of the best songs in my and my band's repertoirs are ones that just "came out", from either screwing around and stumbling onto things that rock, to making fun of something that happened, etc. This also occurs with famous musicians, they need to release a filler track at the studio just to finish the album and sometimes the filler becomes a chart topper!
Do you like garage rock, or even much rock from the 60's and 70's? Some common criticisms I've heard from popular musicians in those days compared with today's recording techniques is that things now are too controlled. Ie, back then you'd set up microphones, do some quick soundchecks, and play music. Today, with the high-tech audiophile equipment, you spend forever soundchecking and tweaking your parametric filters and pink-noise generators to get your ideal flat response curves. But - the complaint is that all the flat-response tweaking makes the sound kind of 'dull' and too 'studio', losing that gritty or grungy character of older rock n' roll.
Finally, if you read the page, the point isn't to make your magnum opus this way, but to just get off your lazy urban-sprawl-induced fat ass and make some music. Have fun, you'll improve your chops, learn some things, and maybe possibly pull off a great tune that in the future you'll be glad you came up with.
Awesome, thanks alot, i'm checking out that interface guideline right now. There's so much 'hidden' stuff on OS X I keep surprising myself when I find some of it out. The book I've used is the Missing Manual, maybe your tricks are in there somewhere, I've skimmed through most of that book, but didn't look at everything in full detail.
Eg, some other examles of strange little things I never new about. Highlight several paragraphs of text in any application, eg Safari. go to Safari -> services -> summarize. Watch as OS X 'summarizes' your highlighted section. I've never actually used that service per se, but it did kind of surprise me how it does it. Or same thing with the services -> speech option.
I was also pretty psyched when I found the display color calibrator, and that my CRT was set way too dark. That explained why when I set picture color curves to look fine on my monitor, they looked way to bright on a properly calibrated one.
Thanks again for the links. I'm learning xcode right now, which means in my free time sometimes running through a tutorial on it. Hopefully one of these days I'll have some nice applications running.
Hey, so out of curiosity, did you try what the grandparent said regarding moving a copy of the Applications folder to the dock and right-clicking it? I just tried it, it works more smoothly than I would have thought.
I've been using OS X coming on 2 years now, and I didn't know about half those things in the GP's post. Anyway, I just put a copy of Applications onto the dock (I could only do it on the right side of the dock), and I was surprised to see how it acted when you right-click it. It's actually very much like the start menu of windows. If you only left-click it, you open a finder window into Applications, but right-clicking instead brings up a nice text-menu-box with all your applications, complete with submenus for the folders, akin to the windows start menu. I never knew you could do that, pretty cool.
in classical physics, which we know isn't fully valid, given a position and momentum at one instant of time for every particle in the system, and an understanding of the equations of motion of how those particles act with each other, you can figure out where the particles will be at any time in the future. well, you'll need numerical techniques to approximate, but you can get arbitrarily accurate. quantum is now differnt, you can only know position adn momentum within some finite uncertainty so it limits your ability to predict.
interestingly enough, even for 10^23 molecules in classical realm, you cannot adequately predict them, too much processing power, especially for 100-200 years ago, that's what thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is about, to look at average ensemble characteristics of the system. eg, pressure, which makes no sense when talking about a single particle, but makes perfect sense in an ensemble average.
I have no idea about what you're getting at regarding the Leopard/Spots book, although I vaguely recall something that it was characteristic of some kind of emergent behavior for the patterns of an underlying organizational layout on the skin. For topics on emergence, see Nobel laureate Laughlin's book. Or for what I'm talking about re spots, I believe this is covered to some degree in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
Well, physics is much more than freshman ballistics problems, but you're correct in that the complexity becomes significantly more difficult. Eg, in elementary quantum mechanics one can build a 'Hamiltonian' for any system, and usually you approximate things such as excluding the Coulomb force between every set of electrons, and that neutrons, electrons, and protons act as tiny magnets so they interact that way, and that there are spin-relational effcts, etc. Each of these adds terms to the Hamiltonian, but usually there's a convergence as the correction terms are smaller and smaller and can be neglected. Actually, that's why QED is so easy but QCD gets harder, because secondary and higher interactions in QED have decreasing significance but no so much in QCD where things diverge.
So in some sense you know the basic 'laws' of the universe, and right now we have pretty reasonable understanding of most things, neglecting large scales (dark matter, dark energy) and large energies (Higgs boson, gravitons, etc). But for stuff within our local spheres of observation, we have basic laws that account for most things we can see, so we should theoretically be able to model anything in this frame. The problem is that it becomes super complex very quickly.
Okay, so why there are so few solvable problems is mathematical. Eg, in the hydrogen atom, we can easily solve the differential equation that comes from the Schrodinger equation. Ie, you write the kinetic energy as T=p^2/2m, you write the potential energy as U=-e^2/r, giving a total energy of E=p^2/2m - e^2/r. You should recognize this as the standard kinetic energy written using momentum instead of velocity, and the Coulomb potential energy between the electron and proton. The system is an electron orbiting a proton, and in the center-of-mass units r is the distance between the two, and m is the reduced mass, which is fairly close to the electron. This is all well and good, and when put into the realm of quantum mechanics, r and p go from being canonical coordinates to being canonical operators. When put into the position basis, the p operator acts as a derivative of the r coordinate, and this yields a differential equation that must be solved to give the eigenstates of the solution. The system is spherically-symmetric which makes things much easier, and after solving the three-dimensional 2nd-order differential equations you get the solutions of atomic orbitals that you probably studied about in high-school chemistry class.
Now this is the 'simple' system. When you start adding relativistic corrections to that kinetic energy and when you add the interaction of the electron's magnetic moment interacting with the magnetic field creating as it orbits the proton, this yields the fine structure. You can also add in the spin-spin interaction between the magnetic moment of the electron and the proton, which gives the hyperfine interaction. Each of these things makes the differential equations MUCH harder to solve, and at some point we just don't mathematically know how to solve these complex systems of equations. Helium atom gets much harder because there are now two position coordinates of each atom, and an extra Coulomb interaction term. This is a quantum three-body problem, and even in classical mechanics the three-body problem cannot be solved in general. Ie, there is no KNOWN exact solution for any three bodies.
Anyway, you can see where this is going. But while we cannot know exact solutions, we can approximate them numerically to arbitrarily-small precision (at least with classical mechanics where there is no uncertainty principle). This is where the shiny computers come in. We can model easily how 10 bodies orbit around the sun AND interact with each other, but to get a general algebraic solution of them for any point in time, we cannot do.
Scientists have been modelling chemical systems within the quantum realm for almost a century now. The problem is that there are very few problems which can be exactly solved. Eg, the hydrogen atom is one of the few solvable ones, but in reality that's only solvable when ignoring all the fine structure corrections (no spin-orbit, relativistic, or spin-spin perturbations). Once you get to the 'difficult' problem of only a mere helium atom, which in its simplest form neglecting fine structure is 'only' two interacting electrons orbiting a nucleus that you model as just a point mass with charge +2e, things get very complicated very quickly. Now imagine modelling something more complicated like a benzen ring, then imagine an actual protein.
This isn't anything new per se, just that the complexity of the modelled systems is getting larger, and due to the numercal estimation processes needed to get anything remotely usable these realms haven't been accessible until lately with the increase of computing power. So where does one draw the line between physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and biology? In these cases, what's being modelled are primarily systems consisting of electrons, neutrons, and protons, interacting with Coulomb force (like-charges repel), spin-orbit interactions, spin-spin interactions, Pauli-exclusion principle, etc. Add more atoms, system gets more complicated, and needs bigger computers.
So it's an age-old problem, using almost age-old numerical techniques, running on new shiny computing clusters
It is almost certainly what the GP is talking about, the "Repair Permissions" trick is usually the standard thing to try when your system might be behaving strangely, eg through third-party installed software. But to claim this must be done every five minutes, much less every five days or even every five weeks, that's just ridiculous. Considering this is one of the selected user-submitted quotes the Information Week authors chose to include in this article, it shows to go you just how useless TFA actually is. Perhaps they're trying to engage in an intentional flame war for increased site clicks.
You say particle physics hasn't had any surprises in the last 30 years, and everything is tested and well-understood? You say the standard model works far too well?
Hmmm, well there is the discovery of neutrinos being massive, which is quite a significant departure from the standard model. Additionally, what the hell are dark matter and dark energy and how exactly do they fit into the standard model?
I took the Physics 123 course at Harvard back in 1999 (that's the course A of E is based on). It was taught by Horowitz and Hayes, as Hill moved on to his own electronics startup. Horowitz and Hayes wrote the 2nd edition lab manual, as well.
I remember someone talking about some applications their friend made with a PIC, and Horowitz showed interest in potentially using that in their 3rd revision of the book. So that was almost 8 years ago, and there was at least talk of it, but that's the first and last I've heard of a 3rd revision.
Although the lab writeups didn't use the lab manual, they gave us printouts which were obviously based on the lab manual but had many new added sections. I'd imagine these would have been worked into the 3rd edition lab manual.
The sucky thing about the iphone, IMHO, is the two-year lockin to cingular. Does anyone know what the typical fee is for early termination of a cingular contract?
The Art of Electronics is IMHO the best book for getting an intuitive sense of analog and digital electronics, and quickly. It'll get you from knowing next to nothing to building complicated and crazy stuff in no time. One of the authors, Paul Horowitz, is a Harvard prof that works on SETI. The other author, Winfield Hill, used to be a Harvard Prof, but then formed his own electronics company. Don't just take my word for it, read the Amazon reviews .
This book was based off the one-semester course Physics 123 taught at Harvard. In the course itself, which is taken by people of all majors, you design and build all kinds of things like radio receiver and transmitters, amps, filters, and after maybe 4-5 weeks you actually design and build a circuit to take an audio signal, figure out a way to transmit it via infrared diodes, receive it with infrared photodiodes across the room, and rebuild the audio structure and play back on a speaker. This was satisfactorily done in the class by psychology majors with absolutely no prior electronic or much physics background. If they can do it, you can.
The second half of the book (and the course) is digital electronics, culminating in the building of a 68008 digital computer with a motherboard-based breadboard. People have gone on to add things such as putting two DACs and feeding the output to an oscilloscope to draw pictures, and programming the CPU to make a PacMan game, for example. Really wild stuff.
The book is awsome, it starts with resistors, then capacitors, and goes on to transistors, and then op-amps, going from ideal to real-world structures. And you really only need some high-school level algebra to follow it. The reading is not dry at all, the authors actually make it interesting to read.
The only criticism I ever heard about this book was by a guy with a masters in Electrical Engineering who commented that one of their circuits wouldn't work in the high-Megahertz range and was a faulty design, and said much of their stuff isn't high-end design. This guy has a masters degree, and spent 6 years of education taking advanced EE courses, so if that's his critique of the book then you can bet that for people trying to go from nothing to complicated systems it's a great book.
I have Verizon's pay as you go plan, so I don't know anything about these lock-in contracts. But is there a reason you couldn't you get the phone, terminate the contract, and immediately opt to pay the contract termination fee? Ie, I'd imagine you could then be able to use the carrier of your choice, by effectively just forking over a lump sum to Cingular. What is typical contract termination fee, $200?
They transmitted visible light through the coax, which basically means it's like a typical coaxial cable transmission line we're used to, but due to the small geometry they can still send TEM waves up to the frequencies of visible light.
In other words, this nano-coax-cable has the proper physical characteristcs such that optical frequencies of EM radiation (ie, visible light) can be transmitted without significant dissipation or dispersion .
In the simplest sense, light here refers to light 'waves', which are the propogating electric/magnetic fields which are solutions to Maxwell's equations given the proper boundary conditions of the coaxial cable.
Of course this particular case involves a tiny coax, so if the wavelength of light is of order or larger than the size of the coax (I'm too lazy to read the article to see what wavelengths are used), then one would probably need to consider quantum mechanics and QED, to get the full behavior of the dynamics of these propagating waves.
But anyway, even in the classical sense there's no bizarro-world phsyics going on at all, any AC signal sent down a coaxial cable is actually sending 'light'. You might not think of a measly 10 MHz signal as being 'light', but it really is, it's propagating EM waves. That's why you need to properly terminate your coax, otherwise you can get electronic reflections and signal degradation, which is the exact analog to getting reflections at an interface between optical components where indexes of refraction are mismatched (glass/air for example).
And regarding your inductance of light phenomena, look up characteristic impedance in a decent E&M text, you might want to check out what the impedance of free space is.
Not to disagree with your other points, but regarding the Mac Mini, my GF and I had the very first one that came out, the 1.25 GHz G4. The stock 256M of RAM is too little we 'upgraded' to 512M of RAM. It worked great for most stuff, occasionally we'd get the pinwheel of death w/ too many applications going. Did you run with only 256M of RAM? That was a mistake, IMHO, Apple should have started with at least 512M RAM at the first go, although they fixed this with the first revision to the mini.
A few months ago we got the stock version of the latest mini, the dual-core Intel. It is $100 more than the older mini, but comes w/ 512M Ram default, and a faster dual-core processor. Much better performance.
But IMHO for businesses, if they're seriuosly looking at the mini, it's probably worth going just $400 more, at least to the 17" iMac, which gives you the built-in display, dual-core processor, keyboard/mouse, all in a nice small-footprint. At $1000 a pop, it's not a bad desktop solution for most situations. (yeah, yeah, i know you can buy a dell w/ screen for $500, but let's compare apples to apples).
Other than that I totally agree with you, lamenting the lack of a middle option between the iMacs and the $2500 Mac Pro. Ie, it would be nice if Apple had a headless box w/ expandable slots, in the $1000 to $1500 range.
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XCode is about ten years behind Microsoft Visual Studio. Apple really needs a modern development enviornment
Care to elaborate a bit more on that?
That refers to Quicksilver , which in a nutshell, is a super efficient way to launch your applications, and also get at your files, music, oft-viewed webpages, etc.
It's like all the power of the CLI with the visual interface of a GUI.
But then why don't they allow you legally to run ONE copy of Vista in a VM, if that's really their worry?
:-)
This behavior is nothing other than their standard operating procedure to ensure dominance. Either they have to be the primary booted OS in charge, or you can pay them a hefty fee.
Well, on the bright side, in the old days you couldn't even pay Microsoft a fee to get Windows to play nicely with other OS's. So at least we're making progress in that arena
The problem isn't that your choices are limited, the problem is that Microsoft lets you run your licensed copy of Vista ONLY if Vista is the primary booted OS and not virtual. Despite the fact that it's running on the same damn computer whether it's virtual or not. Oh, unless you pay them a few hundred bucks extra, then you can run it virtual. This is the typical age-old anti-trust behavior they've been engaging in for the past 20+ years. Apple on the other hand lets you do whatever the hell you want with the hardware and software. They allow you to do whatever you want with OS X, as long as you're running it on OS X supported hardware. You are complaining that the pool of OS X hardware is smaller, while most other people here are complaining that Microsoft charges you a hefty fee if you want to run Windows to run as a VM inside another OS even though you legally purchased it to work with that specific hardware. Apple gives you the same rights on the same hardware, Microsoft makes you pay more unless they're the OS 'in charge' on your system.
Inaccurate comparison, you're simplifying the situation (intentionally?)
Apple will let you run OS X on any computer it's licensed for, regardless of what other OS's may also be running on the computer. As long as you can run OS X on that computer, they don't give a shit what you do with it.
Microsoft, on the other hand, says you only have Vista rights if Vista is the primary OS at that time. Or you can pay them much more money to play fairly, despite the fact that you purchased a copy of Vista licensed to run on this particular computer. Microsoft is restricting your ability to use the software you purchased to run on that computer, and only let you do so if they're the software in charge. This is typical Microsoft behavior and has been since day one.
So, while you claim Apple is the restrictive party here, they're actually the more open party. Your complaint is only that Apple has a more limited pool of hardware to run OS X, however within that pool you can do whatever you want on those computers with your OS X. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a wider array of available hardware, but they only lets you run your licensed copy of Vista if they're the main player at the time, and won't let you run Vista within (ie, in a VM) to another OS unless you shell out significantly more cash.
yet the alt-tab has a live thumbnail of what the window is currently showing unlike OS X
However, you DO get live thumbnails in Exposé under OS X.
I re-mapped the middle mouse of my Mighty Mouse to bring up Expose (instead of the default option which is Dashboard) so I can find, analyze, and switch to various windows super easily, even with tons of apps running on what would seemingly be a cluttered desktop.
However - one of the major design points and motivation for the shuttle was the abiliy to retrieve satellites and bring them back down, hence use of the term 'shuttle'. Ultimately this was rarely done, and in the case of the Hubble Space Telescope the only shuttle which had large enough cargo bay to fit the Hubble was Columbia.
Do you like garage rock, or even much rock from the 60's and 70's? Some common criticisms I've heard from popular musicians in those days compared with today's recording techniques is that things now are too controlled. Ie, back then you'd set up microphones, do some quick soundchecks, and play music. Today, with the high-tech audiophile equipment, you spend forever soundchecking and tweaking your parametric filters and pink-noise generators to get your ideal flat response curves. But - the complaint is that all the flat-response tweaking makes the sound kind of 'dull' and too 'studio', losing that gritty or grungy character of older rock n' roll.
Finally, if you read the page, the point isn't to make your magnum opus this way, but to just get off your lazy urban-sprawl-induced fat ass and make some music. Have fun, you'll improve your chops, learn some things, and maybe possibly pull off a great tune that in the future you'll be glad you came up with.
Liposuction clinics combined with gas stations You mean, as in using the liposucked fat as fuel for those new-fangled waste-oil-powered automobiles?
Awesome, thanks alot, i'm checking out that interface guideline right now. There's so much 'hidden' stuff on OS X I keep surprising myself when I find some of it out. The book I've used is the Missing Manual, maybe your tricks are in there somewhere, I've skimmed through most of that book, but didn't look at everything in full detail.
Eg, some other examles of strange little things I never new about. Highlight several paragraphs of text in any application, eg Safari. go to Safari -> services -> summarize. Watch as OS X 'summarizes' your highlighted section. I've never actually used that service per se, but it did kind of surprise me how it does it. Or same thing with the services -> speech option.
I was also pretty psyched when I found the display color calibrator, and that my CRT was set way too dark. That explained why when I set picture color curves to look fine on my monitor, they looked way to bright on a properly calibrated one.
Thanks again for the links. I'm learning xcode right now, which means in my free time sometimes running through a tutorial on it. Hopefully one of these days I'll have some nice applications running.
Hey, so out of curiosity, did you try what the grandparent said regarding moving a copy of the Applications folder to the dock and right-clicking it? I just tried it, it works more smoothly than I would have thought.
I've been using OS X coming on 2 years now, and I didn't know about half those things in the GP's post. Anyway, I just put a copy of Applications onto the dock (I could only do it on the right side of the dock), and I was surprised to see how it acted when you right-click it. It's actually very much like the start menu of windows. If you only left-click it, you open a finder window into Applications, but right-clicking instead brings up a nice text-menu-box with all your applications, complete with submenus for the folders, akin to the windows start menu. I never knew you could do that, pretty cool.
in classical physics, which we know isn't fully valid, given a position and momentum at one instant of time for every particle in the system, and an understanding of the equations of motion of how those particles act with each other, you can figure out where the particles will be at any time in the future. well, you'll need numerical techniques to approximate, but you can get arbitrarily accurate. quantum is now differnt, you can only know position adn momentum within some finite uncertainty so it limits your ability to predict. interestingly enough, even for 10^23 molecules in classical realm, you cannot adequately predict them, too much processing power, especially for 100-200 years ago, that's what thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is about, to look at average ensemble characteristics of the system. eg, pressure, which makes no sense when talking about a single particle, but makes perfect sense in an ensemble average. I have no idea about what you're getting at regarding the Leopard/Spots book, although I vaguely recall something that it was characteristic of some kind of emergent behavior for the patterns of an underlying organizational layout on the skin. For topics on emergence, see Nobel laureate Laughlin's book. Or for what I'm talking about re spots, I believe this is covered to some degree in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.
Well, physics is much more than freshman ballistics problems, but you're correct in that the complexity becomes significantly more difficult. Eg, in elementary quantum mechanics one can build a 'Hamiltonian' for any system, and usually you approximate things such as excluding the Coulomb force between every set of electrons, and that neutrons, electrons, and protons act as tiny magnets so they interact that way, and that there are spin-relational effcts, etc. Each of these adds terms to the Hamiltonian, but usually there's a convergence as the correction terms are smaller and smaller and can be neglected. Actually, that's why QED is so easy but QCD gets harder, because secondary and higher interactions in QED have decreasing significance but no so much in QCD where things diverge.
So in some sense you know the basic 'laws' of the universe, and right now we have pretty reasonable understanding of most things, neglecting large scales (dark matter, dark energy) and large energies (Higgs boson, gravitons, etc). But for stuff within our local spheres of observation, we have basic laws that account for most things we can see, so we should theoretically be able to model anything in this frame. The problem is that it becomes super complex very quickly.
Okay, so why there are so few solvable problems is mathematical. Eg, in the hydrogen atom, we can easily solve the differential equation that comes from the Schrodinger equation. Ie, you write the kinetic energy as T=p^2/2m, you write the potential energy as U=-e^2/r, giving a total energy of E=p^2/2m - e^2/r. You should recognize this as the standard kinetic energy written using momentum instead of velocity, and the Coulomb potential energy between the electron and proton. The system is an electron orbiting a proton, and in the center-of-mass units r is the distance between the two, and m is the reduced mass, which is fairly close to the electron. This is all well and good, and when put into the realm of quantum mechanics, r and p go from being canonical coordinates to being canonical operators. When put into the position basis, the p operator acts as a derivative of the r coordinate, and this yields a differential equation that must be solved to give the eigenstates of the solution. The system is spherically-symmetric which makes things much easier, and after solving the three-dimensional 2nd-order differential equations you get the solutions of atomic orbitals that you probably studied about in high-school chemistry class.
Now this is the 'simple' system. When you start adding relativistic corrections to that kinetic energy and when you add the interaction of the electron's magnetic moment interacting with the magnetic field creating as it orbits the proton, this yields the fine structure. You can also add in the spin-spin interaction between the magnetic moment of the electron and the proton, which gives the hyperfine interaction. Each of these things makes the differential equations MUCH harder to solve, and at some point we just don't mathematically know how to solve these complex systems of equations. Helium atom gets much harder because there are now two position coordinates of each atom, and an extra Coulomb interaction term. This is a quantum three-body problem, and even in classical mechanics the three-body problem cannot be solved in general. Ie, there is no KNOWN exact solution for any three bodies.
Anyway, you can see where this is going. But while we cannot know exact solutions, we can approximate them numerically to arbitrarily-small precision (at least with classical mechanics where there is no uncertainty principle). This is where the shiny computers come in. We can model easily how 10 bodies orbit around the sun AND interact with each other, but to get a general algebraic solution of them for any point in time, we cannot do.
Scientists have been modelling chemical systems within the quantum realm for almost a century now. The problem is that there are very few problems which can be exactly solved. Eg, the hydrogen atom is one of the few solvable ones, but in reality that's only solvable when ignoring all the fine structure corrections (no spin-orbit, relativistic, or spin-spin perturbations). Once you get to the 'difficult' problem of only a mere helium atom, which in its simplest form neglecting fine structure is 'only' two interacting electrons orbiting a nucleus that you model as just a point mass with charge +2e, things get very complicated very quickly. Now imagine modelling something more complicated like a benzen ring, then imagine an actual protein.
This isn't anything new per se, just that the complexity of the modelled systems is getting larger, and due to the numercal estimation processes needed to get anything remotely usable these realms haven't been accessible until lately with the increase of computing power. So where does one draw the line between physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and biology? In these cases, what's being modelled are primarily systems consisting of electrons, neutrons, and protons, interacting with Coulomb force (like-charges repel), spin-orbit interactions, spin-spin interactions, Pauli-exclusion principle, etc. Add more atoms, system gets more complicated, and needs bigger computers.
So it's an age-old problem, using almost age-old numerical techniques, running on new shiny computing clusters
It is almost certainly what the GP is talking about, the "Repair Permissions" trick is usually the standard thing to try when your system might be behaving strangely, eg through third-party installed software. But to claim this must be done every five minutes, much less every five days or even every five weeks, that's just ridiculous. Considering this is one of the selected user-submitted quotes the Information Week authors chose to include in this article, it shows to go you just how useless TFA actually is. Perhaps they're trying to engage in an intentional flame war for increased site clicks.
You say particle physics hasn't had any surprises in the last 30 years, and everything is tested and well-understood? You say the standard model works far too well?
Hmmm, well there is the discovery of neutrinos being massive, which is quite a significant departure from the standard model. Additionally, what the hell are dark matter and dark energy and how exactly do they fit into the standard model?
I took the Physics 123 course at Harvard back in 1999 (that's the course A of E is based on). It was taught by Horowitz and Hayes, as Hill moved on to his own electronics startup. Horowitz and Hayes wrote the 2nd edition lab manual, as well.
I remember someone talking about some applications their friend made with a PIC, and Horowitz showed interest in potentially using that in their 3rd revision of the book. So that was almost 8 years ago, and there was at least talk of it, but that's the first and last I've heard of a 3rd revision.
Although the lab writeups didn't use the lab manual, they gave us printouts which were obviously based on the lab manual but had many new added sections. I'd imagine these would have been worked into the 3rd edition lab manual.
No, you don't need to make use of calculus through the rest of the book, that's the point.
The sucky thing about the iphone, IMHO, is the two-year lockin to cingular. Does anyone know what the typical fee is for early termination of a cingular contract?
This book was based off the one-semester course Physics 123 taught at Harvard. In the course itself, which is taken by people of all majors, you design and build all kinds of things like radio receiver and transmitters, amps, filters, and after maybe 4-5 weeks you actually design and build a circuit to take an audio signal, figure out a way to transmit it via infrared diodes, receive it with infrared photodiodes across the room, and rebuild the audio structure and play back on a speaker. This was satisfactorily done in the class by psychology majors with absolutely no prior electronic or much physics background. If they can do it, you can.
The second half of the book (and the course) is digital electronics, culminating in the building of a 68008 digital computer with a motherboard-based breadboard. People have gone on to add things such as putting two DACs and feeding the output to an oscilloscope to draw pictures, and programming the CPU to make a PacMan game, for example. Really wild stuff.
The book is awsome, it starts with resistors, then capacitors, and goes on to transistors, and then op-amps, going from ideal to real-world structures. And you really only need some high-school level algebra to follow it. The reading is not dry at all, the authors actually make it interesting to read.
The only criticism I ever heard about this book was by a guy with a masters in Electrical Engineering who commented that one of their circuits wouldn't work in the high-Megahertz range and was a faulty design, and said much of their stuff isn't high-end design. This guy has a masters degree, and spent 6 years of education taking advanced EE courses, so if that's his critique of the book then you can bet that for people trying to go from nothing to complicated systems it's a great book.
I have Verizon's pay as you go plan, so I don't know anything about these lock-in contracts. But is there a reason you couldn't you get the phone, terminate the contract, and immediately opt to pay the contract termination fee? Ie, I'd imagine you could then be able to use the carrier of your choice, by effectively just forking over a lump sum to Cingular. What is typical contract termination fee, $200?
In other words, this nano-coax-cable has the proper physical characteristcs such that optical frequencies of EM radiation (ie, visible light) can be transmitted without significant dissipation or dispersion .
In the simplest sense, light here refers to light 'waves', which are the propogating electric/magnetic fields which are solutions to Maxwell's equations given the proper boundary conditions of the coaxial cable.
Of course this particular case involves a tiny coax, so if the wavelength of light is of order or larger than the size of the coax (I'm too lazy to read the article to see what wavelengths are used), then one would probably need to consider quantum mechanics and QED, to get the full behavior of the dynamics of these propagating waves.
But anyway, even in the classical sense there's no bizarro-world phsyics going on at all, any AC signal sent down a coaxial cable is actually sending 'light'. You might not think of a measly 10 MHz signal as being 'light', but it really is, it's propagating EM waves. That's why you need to properly terminate your coax, otherwise you can get electronic reflections and signal degradation, which is the exact analog to getting reflections at an interface between optical components where indexes of refraction are mismatched (glass/air for example).
And regarding your inductance of light phenomena, look up characteristic impedance in a decent E&M text, you might want to check out what the impedance of free space is.
Not to disagree with your other points, but regarding the Mac Mini, my GF and I had the very first one that came out, the 1.25 GHz G4. The stock 256M of RAM is too little we 'upgraded' to 512M of RAM. It worked great for most stuff, occasionally we'd get the pinwheel of death w/ too many applications going. Did you run with only 256M of RAM? That was a mistake, IMHO, Apple should have started with at least 512M RAM at the first go, although they fixed this with the first revision to the mini.
A few months ago we got the stock version of the latest mini, the dual-core Intel. It is $100 more than the older mini, but comes w/ 512M Ram default, and a faster dual-core processor. Much better performance.
But IMHO for businesses, if they're seriuosly looking at the mini, it's probably worth going just $400 more, at least to the 17" iMac, which gives you the built-in display, dual-core processor, keyboard/mouse, all in a nice small-footprint. At $1000 a pop, it's not a bad desktop solution for most situations. (yeah, yeah, i know you can buy a dell w/ screen for $500, but let's compare apples to apples).
Other than that I totally agree with you, lamenting the lack of a middle option between the iMacs and the $2500 Mac Pro. Ie, it would be nice if Apple had a headless box w/ expandable slots, in the $1000 to $1500 range.