The last iBook rev was a disappointment for me mainly because the screen resolution wasn't improved. The rumours seem to be suggesting a new 13.3 widescreen format which sounds good - remains to be seen just how much extra space that yields however. The Intel/PowerPC thing doesn't bother me as long as It Just Works(tm), and the extra speed will be welcome. I do wonder how they will manage with all those third-party drivers, etc though? They will have had to work pretty hard getting all of those manufacturers to rev every driver to fit the new Intel model - either that or early Intel adopters are going to be going through a fair bit of pain waiting for their favourite gizmos to be supported again. I hope that's not the way it's going to be - any developers know anything much about this side of things?
Correct me if I've got my wires crossed, but I thought the sea temperature was about a constant 4 degrees all the way down, once you get below a certain distance of the surface. The reason being, that water colder than 4 degrees has lower density, therefore always floats upwards. That's why the ocean isn't frozen at great depths. It doesn't mean you couldn't tap that gradient anyway, but the depth required presumably wouldn't be all that much as long as you'd got at least as far as the 4 degree level.
You can load all types of little crazy applets, but after awhile I hardly ever used it
I must admit I found the same. It's annoyingly slow to get going the first time you invoke it too. All I use it for now is the calculator, and the older calculator app was much better.
On the topic of OSX, why would anyone want to write commercial software for the OSX market? If your product is successful, Apple will simply duplicate the functionality, include it in OSX, and act like they invented it.
I think that's a little unfair. There are thousands of apps that Apple would have no interest in duplicating, but on the other hand the key "bread-and-buitter" apps like Pages, Keynote, iTunes, etc - well, they pretty much have to have those to keep the platform viable so they're not going to leave their existence to chance. That still leaves a vast space of unexploited marketplace where OS X apps do very well indeed, and Apple will not interfere. If you as a developer decide to compete with iTunes then that's your lookout, but frankly there are plenty of other areas that you'd do better to look into, so that choice would be silly.
Obviously you're trolling, and obviously you'll get a stack of irritable responses from Mac fanbois. But what exactly are you referring to? Personally I find OS X to be as productive as it gets, on any platform, with any app that I use. Sure there is room for improvement, but much more room for the same on the other platforms. And in my experience, where poor UI is present on OS X, it's mostly down to bad choices by app designers. OK, let's leave the Finder aside for the moment - who uses that much anyway? Providing a decent widget library is down to OS X, using it wisely is down to developers. Some don't, but you can't blame the OS for that.
Talk about missing the point!
on
A Kilowatt of Power
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
1kW is a joke. Wake me up when they announce that a computer with at least as much processing power as today's top of the line runs on 1mW of power (yes, one MILLIwatt). Boasting about 1kW is like boasting that your car gets 1mile to the gallon.
over the long run all species evolve traits that assure their survival, a form of genetic "intelligence" itself.
By that argument, the wind is intelligent because air responds to pressure differences "intelligently" by moving from an area of high pressure to one of low pressure.
Nothing about evolution implies it is random and undirected
Genetic mutations are random. The only thing that is "directed" is a tendency towards a better fit with the environment, just as air directs itself to low pressure regions.
Just because evolution doesn't specify an Intelligent Designer doesn't mean there isn't one
Perhaps not, but Occam's Razor does. Since evolution can be explained without the need to bring in an intelligent designer, why bother invoking one, and all the attendent complexity and paradox that entails?
This is going to sound like an urban myth, but I promise you it isn't, because it happened not to a friend of a friend, but an actual friend!
Approaching an intersection, the lights changed to red, but the driver judged that it wouldn't be safe to stop in such a short distance so drove through on red. A patrol car spotted her and pulled her over on the next block and issued a ticket for dangerous driving and violation of the red signal. Her protests that pulling up so quickly would have caused a more dangerous situation - the following car was tailgating, as usual - fell on deaf ears. So anyway she took the ticket and drove away.
Next block, the same thing happened, only this time she learned her lesson and hit the brakes to stop on the line. The following car barelled straight into her. And yes, it was the cop who just did her! Sweet justice... This time she asked him to get some other cops to come and deal with it, and there was a lot of argy-bargy... but eventually her ticket was revoked and the cop who did her was reprimanded. The law does allow you to run a red light if it has just changed and to stop would create a more dangerous situation than running the red light would. The only thing about this story I question is that here the lights go green-amber-red, so there is some warning of a change... so there was probably some element of her chancing it - but then again I know the stretch of road it happened on and the traffic speeds are quite high (60-70km/h) and the amber signal only lasts a second or so.
Faking it accurately enough such that there is no distinguishable difference means that you have, in fact, achieved the goal of AI. So it's a worthwhile approach, IMO. Of course, we are miles away still.
All empires decline eventually, and the American Empire is no exception. I expect the zenith was probably the 1960s, possibly earlier. Your current Prez is merely accelerating the inevitable.
Well, this announcement has no impact whatsoever on Mac OS 9 users who are already using IE 5 - it won't stop working. Since the OS itself isn't even supported by Apple, having one application on there no longer supported doesn't change your situation very much.
Actually, though I'm a Mac guy myself and just don't use Windows, it amazes me looking back that Apple had such faith in their OS and more importantly in developers' abilities to write solid code that they had next to nothing protecting anything in the system. They even placed things in memory in such a way that crashes were likely to be even more catastrophic - like placing key system variables in very low memory, not far off location 0 - and we all know what writing to NULL does, don't we?
The system bomb only appeared if you were lucky - in fact most crashes hosed the machine so badly that even that couldn't be displayed (and in spite of appearances, the system bomb isn't drawn in a real window, or uses any of the high-level code - it's just faked out to look that way, drawn by some very low level code in ROM that in theory should always be runnable... though to be honest the BSOD is probably preferable, since the bomb always made YOU feel like an idiot...)
What is remarkable looking back is not that the original Mac OS was crude compared to what we expect today, but that it actually worked at all. Things have changed massively on OS X - not only is there no system bomb, but very littl elikelihood of needing one. Yes, crashes do happen - I've had perhaps 2 kernel panics in the last year - but they are so rare as to be easily ignored. If Apple had somehow put in some of the memory protection that we take for granted now into the original Mac - I know, I know, technology wasn't available, blah blah - then the history of computing might have turned out differently. But then you could say that about a lot of things.
No mention of, a) 8-bit era, BBC Micro. OK, probably a UK-only phenomenon, but one of the best 8-bit machines of its day, with a big following. b) slightly later, and the successor to the BBC, the Acorn Archimedes. I know at least 1 person who had one, so its market share can't have been zero!
I didn't say he was in thrall to the US, I said he APPEARED to be - i.e. he acts AS IF he were controlled by the US, though as far as we can tell, it is in fact his choice. I am not blaming the USA for our problems, though god knows it has more than enough of its own. What is troubling is that supposedly intelligent and astute people (I generously include our esteemed PM in this group, despite evidence to the contrary) seem to think that the way the US conducts foreign policy is actually a pretty good model to follow. It's this voluntary copycat behaviour that is doing the harm, even though there is no compulsion to follow the US at all. It's a very puzzling phenomenon. Yes, we should be more careful about who we are selecting to represent us - and so should you.
Of course, you are quite right - ALP were more or less unelectable, and still are. Much the same story with opposition parties in the US and UK at the moment too. It's troublesome that at a time when balance is needed more than ever, none is to be found. We can only hope that judges around the world will step up to the challenge, as the last resting place of sense and reason in a world gone mad. There are some good signs there, but it shouldn't be like this.
I wholeheartedly agree that the only sensible course ofg action is to vote them out of office ASAP. If only!
Just yesterday, the Australian govt. passed two contentious laws - one that basically undoes hundreds of years of hard-won freedoms at a stroke in the name of "anti-terrorism" - you're not even allowed to makes jokes at the govt's expense now - in fact this posting breaks this new law. Free speech has gone. The other contentious law effectively removes hundreds of workers' rights in the name of 'streamlining the economy' and 'remaining competitive'. Basically it gives employers carte blanche to demand what the fuck they like of an employee, and if they don't like it, they can always leave. This is modern 'liberalism' though quite frankly it's a total abuse of that term that the current regime use it to describe themselves.
This situation has come about because the Australian people were duped into voting for a totally unevenly balanced parliament, railroaded into this vote by a series of lies and distortions and scare tactics at the last election. (Don't vote for the other lot, they'll take away your right to SHOP!) The resulting majority means that they can currently pass whatever they like and no-one can really fight it. This is NOT what the Australian people thought they were voting for, as neither of these new laws were part of the election manifesto. Just like the USA, who our Prime Minister appears to be in thrall to, we are sleepwalking into a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.
If they so choose, this porn bill (if it becomes one) could well pass, then they'll worry about implementation later, no matter howe impractical it might actually be. However, in the scheme of things, this is nothing compared to what they've ALREADY done.
Scientists have announced that they have managed to create a gigapixel per square inch "light sensor" using only silver halide molecules coated onto a transparent plastic substrate. On exposure to light, some molecules change state by dissociating into pure silver. Exposure times of just a few milliseconds were all that were needed. This image is not visible to the naked eye, but can be "developed" using chemical processing to amplify the image to make it visible. The final image can be then fixed and rendered no longer light sensitive by bleaching out the remaining halides. The image is then rendered permanent. With its vastly higher resolution than ordinary digital CCD sensors, scientists are hailing the discovery as a breakthrough for creating ultra-high resolution images. They have also speculated that by creating a sandwich of light sensitive layers and colour filters, colour images could be recorded by the same process. The only question is, is the usual digital imaging that we have all grown used to doomed by this new process?
Well, it would be very easy for us to sign up a musician. It would be very hard for us to sign up a young musician that was successful. Because that's what the record companies do. Their value is in picking that 1 out of 5,000. We don't do that.
So why don't they just sign up everyone on a simple basis - you get X% of whatever you sell. We don't promote you beyond the presence on iTunes and a little blurb. Let the market decide/dictate whether you're successful. We don't stop you from promoting yourself or getting an agent to do it. (and yes, I know this won't fly, but whatever happened to 'think different(ly)'?
Personally, I welcome the variable pricing if it means more obscure artists are cheaper, since that's what I like to seek out and listen to. It's rare that I bother with anything mainstream or charting these days. On the rare occasions when something mainstream does interest me I'll get it from the P2P networks - no-one is really hurt since that artist and label has already done well from the track. More interesting/struggling bands are, on the other hand, much more worth paying for.
I have been downloading from iTunes to Australia for well over a year, because I have a UK bank account as well as an Australian one. The choice from the UK store is probably better than the Australian offering at the moment anyway. Apple doesn't care where your IP address is from, they only check that your credit card is registered in the territory that the music store is located in. This seems to work around the regional disaster that is the record industry quite neatly. In fact, I'd say it makes a mockery of the whole regional distribution model, and really it's about time that the record industry realised that it needs to wake up and smell the coffee as far as globalisation is concerned. As for any tracks I still can't get legally? Well, there's always Acquisition...
I hope this will lead to a better Mac client, since both of them suck on Mac. Recently what features were there stopped working properly because a new version was required (Yahoo) but they haven't yet bothered to update the Mac version. MSN looks better, but still lacks lots of features that Windows version has. To be honest, it's all a pile of s**t - what we need is an open, widely adopted protocol that anybody can write a client for... oh, wait. Yeah, well, "widely adopted" is the thing....
Maybe I just got lucky, but my very original 1G iPod 5GB is still going strong on its original battery and a full charge is still gives 6-7 hours (though less with iTrip attached - that thing does suck down the power), reasonably close to what it started out at.
I know there were some battery issues for some people, but why do folk go on about that as if it applied to 100% of the number sold. It must be only a few batteries that are duff and that's just bad luck which applies to any similar consumer device - some batteries test OK at the factory and then turn out to be no good in the long term, but that's just the state of battery technology for you.
Siting = choosing the location of something.
Citing = quoting a reference. I think this is what the original poster was getting at.
Sighting = seeing something.
Didn't Mr and Mrs Gates Snr ever teach their son not to tell lies? Seems to me this rather fundamental bit of parenting is missing from large swathes of our supposedly great and good these days. Bush is another one. Just tell a lie with enough confidence and conviction and repetition and people will HAVE to believe it. Seems to me that's the way it's all going. Maybe these people don't even know they're telling great big fat whopping porkies, but in that case that points to a whole series of additional failings.
Slashdot Mirror
why are there so many fucking shows about work?
I guess it's because we all do little else these days. Sitcoms sort of reflect real life.
The last iBook rev was a disappointment for me mainly because the screen resolution wasn't improved. The rumours seem to be suggesting a new 13.3 widescreen format which sounds good - remains to be seen just how much extra space that yields however. The Intel/PowerPC thing doesn't bother me as long as It Just Works(tm), and the extra speed will be welcome. I do wonder how they will manage with all those third-party drivers, etc though? They will have had to work pretty hard getting all of those manufacturers to rev every driver to fit the new Intel model - either that or early Intel adopters are going to be going through a fair bit of pain waiting for their favourite gizmos to be supported again. I hope that's not the way it's going to be - any developers know anything much about this side of things?
Since the site is slashdotted into oblivion at the moment, can anyone tell me if it includes the southern hemisphere?
Correct me if I've got my wires crossed, but I thought the sea temperature was about a constant 4 degrees all the way down, once you get below a certain distance of the surface. The reason being, that water colder than 4 degrees has lower density, therefore always floats upwards. That's why the ocean isn't frozen at great depths. It doesn't mean you couldn't tap that gradient anyway, but the depth required presumably wouldn't be all that much as long as you'd got at least as far as the 4 degree level.
You can load all types of little crazy applets, but after awhile I hardly ever used it
I must admit I found the same. It's annoyingly slow to get going the first time you invoke it too. All I use it for now is the calculator, and the older calculator app was much better.
On the topic of OSX, why would anyone want to write commercial software for the OSX market? If your product is successful, Apple will simply duplicate the functionality, include it in OSX, and act like they invented it.
I think that's a little unfair. There are thousands of apps that Apple would have no interest in duplicating, but on the other hand the key "bread-and-buitter" apps like Pages, Keynote, iTunes, etc - well, they pretty much have to have those to keep the platform viable so they're not going to leave their existence to chance. That still leaves a vast space of unexploited marketplace where OS X apps do very well indeed, and Apple will not interfere. If you as a developer decide to compete with iTunes then that's your lookout, but frankly there are plenty of other areas that you'd do better to look into, so that choice would be silly.
pretty suck ass for getting real work done
Obviously you're trolling, and obviously you'll get a stack of irritable responses from Mac fanbois. But what exactly are you referring to? Personally I find OS X to be as productive as it gets, on any platform, with any app that I use. Sure there is room for improvement, but much more room for the same on the other platforms. And in my experience, where poor UI is present on OS X, it's mostly down to bad choices by app designers. OK, let's leave the Finder aside for the moment - who uses that much anyway? Providing a decent widget library is down to OS X, using it wisely is down to developers. Some don't, but you can't blame the OS for that.
1kW is a joke. Wake me up when they announce that a computer with at least as much processing power as today's top of the line runs on 1mW of power (yes, one MILLIwatt). Boasting about 1kW is like boasting that your car gets 1mile to the gallon.
over the long run all species evolve traits that assure their survival, a form of genetic "intelligence" itself.
By that argument, the wind is intelligent because air responds to pressure differences "intelligently" by moving from an area of high pressure to one of low pressure.
Nothing about evolution implies it is random and undirected
Genetic mutations are random. The only thing that is "directed" is a tendency towards a better fit with the environment, just as air directs itself to low pressure regions.
Just because evolution doesn't specify an Intelligent Designer doesn't mean there isn't one
Perhaps not, but Occam's Razor does. Since evolution can be explained without the need to bring in an intelligent designer, why bother invoking one, and all the attendent complexity and paradox that entails?
This is going to sound like an urban myth, but I promise you it isn't, because it happened not to a friend of a friend, but an actual friend!
Approaching an intersection, the lights changed to red, but the driver judged that it wouldn't be safe to stop in such a short distance so drove through on red. A patrol car spotted her and pulled her over on the next block and issued a ticket for dangerous driving and violation of the red signal. Her protests that pulling up so quickly would have caused a more dangerous situation - the following car was tailgating, as usual - fell on deaf ears. So anyway she took the ticket and drove away.
Next block, the same thing happened, only this time she learned her lesson and hit the brakes to stop on the line. The following car barelled straight into her. And yes, it was the cop who just did her! Sweet justice... This time she asked him to get some other cops to come and deal with it, and there was a lot of argy-bargy... but eventually her ticket was revoked and the cop who did her was reprimanded. The law does allow you to run a red light if it has just changed and to stop would create a more dangerous situation than running the red light would. The only thing about this story I question is that here the lights go green-amber-red, so there is some warning of a change... so there was probably some element of her chancing it - but then again I know the stretch of road it happened on and the traffic speeds are quite high (60-70km/h) and the amber signal only lasts a second or so.
Faking it accurately enough such that there is no distinguishable difference means that you have, in fact, achieved the goal of AI. So it's a worthwhile approach, IMO. Of course, we are miles away still.
All empires decline eventually, and the American Empire is no exception. I expect the zenith was probably the 1960s, possibly earlier. Your current Prez is merely accelerating the inevitable.
Well, this announcement has no impact whatsoever on Mac OS 9 users who are already using IE 5 - it won't stop working. Since the OS itself isn't even supported by Apple, having one application on there no longer supported doesn't change your situation very much.
Bye! Close the door behind you on the way out. You won't be missed.
Actually, though I'm a Mac guy myself and just don't use Windows, it amazes me looking back that Apple had such faith in their OS and more importantly in developers' abilities to write solid code that they had next to nothing protecting anything in the system. They even placed things in memory in such a way that crashes were likely to be even more catastrophic - like placing key system variables in very low memory, not far off location 0 - and we all know what writing to NULL does, don't we?
The system bomb only appeared if you were lucky - in fact most crashes hosed the machine so badly that even that couldn't be displayed (and in spite of appearances, the system bomb isn't drawn in a real window, or uses any of the high-level code - it's just faked out to look that way, drawn by some very low level code in ROM that in theory should always be runnable... though to be honest the BSOD is probably preferable, since the bomb always made YOU feel like an idiot...)
What is remarkable looking back is not that the original Mac OS was crude compared to what we expect today, but that it actually worked at all. Things have changed massively on OS X - not only is there no system bomb, but very littl elikelihood of needing one. Yes, crashes do happen - I've had perhaps 2 kernel panics in the last year - but they are so rare as to be easily ignored. If Apple had somehow put in some of the memory protection that we take for granted now into the original Mac - I know, I know, technology wasn't available, blah blah - then the history of computing might have turned out differently. But then you could say that about a lot of things.
No mention of, a) 8-bit era, BBC Micro. OK, probably a UK-only phenomenon, but one of the best 8-bit machines of its day, with a big following. b) slightly later, and the successor to the BBC, the Acorn Archimedes. I know at least 1 person who had one, so its market share can't have been zero!
I didn't say he was in thrall to the US, I said he APPEARED to be - i.e. he acts AS IF he were controlled by the US, though as far as we can tell, it is in fact his choice. I am not blaming the USA for our problems, though god knows it has more than enough of its own. What is troubling is that supposedly intelligent and astute people (I generously include our esteemed PM in this group, despite evidence to the contrary) seem to think that the way the US conducts foreign policy is actually a pretty good model to follow. It's this voluntary copycat behaviour that is doing the harm, even though there is no compulsion to follow the US at all. It's a very puzzling phenomenon. Yes, we should be more careful about who we are selecting to represent us - and so should you.
Of course, you are quite right - ALP were more or less unelectable, and still are. Much the same story with opposition parties in the US and UK at the moment too. It's troublesome that at a time when balance is needed more than ever, none is to be found. We can only hope that judges around the world will step up to the challenge, as the last resting place of sense and reason in a world gone mad. There are some good signs there, but it shouldn't be like this.
I wholeheartedly agree that the only sensible course ofg action is to vote them out of office ASAP. If only!
Just yesterday, the Australian govt. passed two contentious laws - one that basically undoes hundreds of years of hard-won freedoms at a stroke in the name of "anti-terrorism" - you're not even allowed to makes jokes at the govt's expense now - in fact this posting breaks this new law. Free speech has gone. The other contentious law effectively removes hundreds of workers' rights in the name of 'streamlining the economy' and 'remaining competitive'. Basically it gives employers carte blanche to demand what the fuck they like of an employee, and if they don't like it, they can always leave. This is modern 'liberalism' though quite frankly it's a total abuse of that term that the current regime use it to describe themselves.
This situation has come about because the Australian people were duped into voting for a totally unevenly balanced parliament, railroaded into this vote by a series of lies and distortions and scare tactics at the last election. (Don't vote for the other lot, they'll take away your right to SHOP!) The resulting majority means that they can currently pass whatever they like and no-one can really fight it. This is NOT what the Australian people thought they were voting for, as neither of these new laws were part of the election manifesto. Just like the USA, who our Prime Minister appears to be in thrall to, we are sleepwalking into a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.
If they so choose, this porn bill (if it becomes one) could well pass, then they'll worry about implementation later, no matter howe impractical it might actually be. However, in the scheme of things, this is nothing compared to what they've ALREADY done.
Scientists have announced that they have managed to create a gigapixel per square inch "light sensor" using only silver halide molecules coated onto a transparent plastic substrate. On exposure to light, some molecules change state by dissociating into pure silver. Exposure times of just a few milliseconds were all that were needed. This image is not visible to the naked eye, but can be "developed" using chemical processing to amplify the image to make it visible. The final image can be then fixed and rendered no longer light sensitive by bleaching out the remaining halides. The image is then rendered permanent. With its vastly higher resolution than ordinary digital CCD sensors, scientists are hailing the discovery as a breakthrough for creating ultra-high resolution images. They have also speculated that by creating a sandwich of light sensitive layers and colour filters, colour images could be recorded by the same process. The only question is, is the usual digital imaging that we have all grown used to doomed by this new process?
Well, it would be very easy for us to sign up a musician. It would be very hard for us to sign up a young musician that was successful. Because that's what the record companies do. Their value is in picking that 1 out of 5,000. We don't do that.
So why don't they just sign up everyone on a simple basis - you get X% of whatever you sell. We don't promote you beyond the presence on iTunes and a little blurb. Let the market decide/dictate whether you're successful. We don't stop you from promoting yourself or getting an agent to do it. (and yes, I know this won't fly, but whatever happened to 'think different(ly)'?
Personally, I welcome the variable pricing if it means more obscure artists are cheaper, since that's what I like to seek out and listen to. It's rare that I bother with anything mainstream or charting these days. On the rare occasions when something mainstream does interest me I'll get it from the P2P networks - no-one is really hurt since that artist and label has already done well from the track. More interesting/struggling bands are, on the other hand, much more worth paying for.
I have been downloading from iTunes to Australia for well over a year, because I have a UK bank account as well as an Australian one. The choice from the UK store is probably better than the Australian offering at the moment anyway. Apple doesn't care where your IP address is from, they only check that your credit card is registered in the territory that the music store is located in. This seems to work around the regional disaster that is the record industry quite neatly. In fact, I'd say it makes a mockery of the whole regional distribution model, and really it's about time that the record industry realised that it needs to wake up and smell the coffee as far as globalisation is concerned. As for any tracks I still can't get legally? Well, there's always Acquisition...
I hope this will lead to a better Mac client, since both of them suck on Mac. Recently what features were there stopped working properly because a new version was required (Yahoo) but they haven't yet bothered to update the Mac version. MSN looks better, but still lacks lots of features that Windows version has. To be honest, it's all a pile of s**t - what we need is an open, widely adopted protocol that anybody can write a client for... oh, wait. Yeah, well, "widely adopted" is the thing....
with a 1.5yr life thanks to the battery
Maybe I just got lucky, but my very original 1G iPod 5GB is still going strong on its original battery and a full charge is still gives 6-7 hours (though less with iTrip attached - that thing does suck down the power), reasonably close to what it started out at.
I know there were some battery issues for some people, but why do folk go on about that as if it applied to 100% of the number sold. It must be only a few batteries that are duff and that's just bad luck which applies to any similar consumer device - some batteries test OK at the factory and then turn out to be no good in the long term, but that's just the state of battery technology for you.
Sigh.
Siting = choosing the location of something.
Citing = quoting a reference. I think this is what the original poster was getting at.
Sighting = seeing something.
Didn't Mr and Mrs Gates Snr ever teach their son not to tell lies? Seems to me this rather fundamental bit of parenting is missing from large swathes of our supposedly great and good these days. Bush is another one. Just tell a lie with enough confidence and conviction and repetition and people will HAVE to believe it. Seems to me that's the way it's all going. Maybe these people don't even know they're telling great big fat whopping porkies, but in that case that points to a whole series of additional failings.