I thought football was that game where the ball was only played with the feet. Oh that's right, you think that's called Soccer. So calling them a base ballteam doesn't seem so odd to me.:)
One has to wonder when "iPod" is going to be synonymous with "digital music player"
It already is, with some people. Last Christmas after I'd shown a friend my iPod he told me he'd bought his kids "iPods" for Christmas. Turns out they were fairly generic USB flash drives that could play music files. Maybe held about 32 of them. He knew iPod was an Apple thing, but was bandying the term around generically. I've heard others do the same since, mostly just non-computer type folk.
...I played prank on friend of mine in the early 1980s (bear with me, it's just about on topic). He was very fond of taping films off the TV, and had built up a large collection. Me and another friend composed a very official looking letter from the "department of copyright, performance rights and recovery of royalties" (or somesuch) pointing out that his collection was known to us and in breach of the copyright act and that he must pay royalties or else destroy the collection. (When I think of how life has come to imitate art, it doesn't seem so funny now!). Since he worked with my co-conspirator, we saw the results first hand - a very worried phonecall from his wife, him storming home in a rush, hastily gathering all the tapes and rushing them round to his father's house to destroy them. Only when his father read the letter did the penny drop... Big laughs all round. Ahem.
A short while later this same friend held a fancy dress party. I decided to rub it in a bit and went dressed as a "pirate video" - basically a pirate costume but a large box was made up as a VHS cassette which was worn over. The effect was pretty good, and (even if I say so myself, slightly witty). It didn't do anything - we didn't have the technology then, anyway, what would it do?
More laughs at the party, though me and the perpetrator of the copyright letter got a custard pie in the face for our trouble. Bit of a lame comeback if you ask me....;-)
This discovery is big news around here because it involves several UNE (University of New England, Australia) staff, and this is a very small and rather provincial university. So here's the press release on our own site...
http://www.une.edu.au/news/
If it turns out that the human brain does indeed have 20 petaflops (or so), what will be remarkable is its efficiency, both in terms of size, but most importantly in terms of energy consumption. A couple of thousand kCal a day for it and its support system - pretty good!
You missed the point: Lexmark is essentially dumping the printers
Yep, I get it. But if someone is buying the printers in bulk as it's cheaper than replacing the cartridges, then simply throwing them in the trash, then it's not terribly environmentally friendly is it? By the way, it wasn't an eco-rant, just pointing out that it's somewhat unsound behaviour from an environmental perspective. You might not give a shit, but sooner or later someone's gonna have to.
I went to my friends house one day and he had a *STACK* of lexmark printers new in the box. I said, "what the hell could you possibly do with 5 printers?" he replies, "I got them on sale for 19.99 each. Thats half the price of ink." He just chucked the printers in the trash after he used the ink they came with.
It's about time companies started getting charged the true cost of raw materials. A $19.99 printer couldn't exist if it weren't being subsidized by a) far poorer nations an b) the planet itself. We'll all pay for it in the end.
Xerox PARC didn't have click and drag, it had click, release, move, click, drop... It was Apple's Lisa that first had Click-drag-drop. As for Vannevar Bush, don't forget his ideas were only ever ideas on paper, as part of a dissertation. No hardware, no software, and no petty implementation details like drag n drop.
It's probably a design decision, which is a compromise because of another boneheaded design decision, and that is the poor way that the task bar deals with stuff as it gets full. Basically, it doesn't. So adding control panels to the whole mess makes a bad situation get a lot worse. For all its well-publicised faults, the OS X dock at least scales pretty well, and deals with filling up far more elegantly.
OS X is great, but it certainly isn't perfect. For one thing it is still (and was in OS
Hmmm, how hard is it to look in the same place in the menu bar which never moves and READ which app is topmost? In this respect OS X is WAY better than OS 9, where I agree your comment is valid. In fact the menubar is now very logical - system elevl stuff, then application general stuff, inclusing its name as title, then application specific menus. Really the menubar is a very stable and nice piece of interface, and XP totally fails in this respect. It's just as hard if not harder to figure out what app is "topmost" on XP, unless it's one of those nasty MDI jobs that take over the whole damn monitor and act weirdly - windows INSIDE windows? what were they thinking?
Yes! After all he's not only forcing you to buy his device, but forcing you to sign a contract saying that you will use it indiscriminately at every possible opportunity! You have no free will!
Clever, but surely the reason such buffer overruns are dangerous is because RETURNS are executed out of the same stack. Keep those addresses in a separate stack and the problem goes away. I can't see why CPU manufacturers don't do this, they would have a great marketing tool too - "use our processor and stop viruses!". It's this mix of code and data on a stack that is the root cause of this type of exploit, and seems to me it could be fixed very easily.
I personally would want to use C++
Well, you can. But as a C++ guy myself, I recently had a major eye-opening experience going to Objective-C with Cocoa. It's a fraction of the size of C++, yet unquantifiably more powerful. I've seen the light, brother! I really think that the C++ language dropped the ball on this one. Do yourself a favour and spend a day or two seriously looking at Cocoa. Just the dynamic method lookup alone makes C++ look strangely inflexible in comparison.
As a Cocoa programmer, I agree with your observations, but the solution is - look it up and learn it. These tools are not aimed at end-users as such, they are aimed at tech-savvy guys like us. Objective C took me oh, about an hour to learn and use productively, moving from C++, and frankly, its simplicity was a breath of fresh air compared to all the stuff you need to do to keep C++ happy. IB is a bit weird with all those connecting lines n stuff, but again, once you "get it" (a few hours investment, tops) it makes sense and works pretty well. The real key comes with coding using the Cocoa library - it's just so incredibly productive. I don't believe I've ever seen a faster method for getting apps from concept to desktop.
Insignia was the same:
Softwindows... I did an unupublished interview with the head of FWB... he stated that they simply licensed the code rather than bought it from Insignia. The reason they never released an update after leasing the code was because they didn't see any merit at the time in releasing a new OS X version.
Insignia is supposedly shopping this around.
I have found that these two companies were essentially started up by venture capital and paid off their investors, dumped their employees, and the owners got filthy rich.
Insignia still exist, as far as I know. But they no longer work on SoftWindows, which appears to have died quietly along the way somewhere. The core of Insignia's business in the UK was sold to Citrix Systems, which used the technology as a basis for the WinFrame/Metaframe thin client for Mac and Unix (Insignia were working on this concept based on their SoftWindows code base; Citrix already had a Windows solution, so it was a natural marriage). I'm not sure they were strictly venture capital firms, Insignia was going for years before Citrix bought them up - at least ten, SoftWindows was around in the very early 90s, and they had some real technology there. I don't know the real story about 'getting filthy rich' - there may be some truth in it, but Citrix took over Insignia's premises and most of their staff in High Wycombe, and Insignia themselves moved to a far smaller building in nearby Wooburn Green. What they actually do now I don't know. I worked for Citrix shortly after all this happened, so I know some of the guys who came across from Insignia, they all seemed fairly happy with the deal, especially considering the stock options they were given;-)
If you like writing your own tools, apps, etc, then you should try to give Xcode and cocoa a genuine open-minded trial. I believe that once you see the power of Cocoa and Objective-C working together, all other programming methodologies all start to look like too much hard work. How much time do you spend genuinely coding, and how much just working around the compiler's needs or the language itself? Be honest...
Case in point - I'm working on developing a serious vector-based cartography program. Starting from scratch in Cocoa, I have a comprehensive, very powerful app almost ready for beta in just ONE MONTH, complete with a highly usable GUI (with admittedly some rough edges at the moment). I have never found anything as productive as this - it's almost a revelation. While I'm sure it's not a panacea, any programmer worth his salt should give it a serious look at.
Re:Am I the only one concerned about lack of speed
on
The Ultimate MacDate
·
· Score: 1
Let me get this straight. You have a DUAL 2.5 GZ system with half a gig of memory, and running office is sluggish? Dragging and dropping pictures taxes the system???
I think you just fed the troll... of course Office isn't sluggish. I use it on a 600MHz iBook and it's perfectly fine (though its interface quirks are irritating, but that's another story). I can drag and drop pictures all day long, rarely have I ever seen less than snappy response. I use a 1GHz G4 quicksilver at work and it just ain't slow. I haven't used a G5, this is an education establishment for god's sake - but I would not expect it to feel slow!! If that user's experiences are genuine (which I doubt), there must be something seriously wrong with his setup.
Kudos to Anand for capturing the newness of it all.
Is that the same newness that LisaOS had in 1981, or Mac OS 1.0 had in 1984, by any chance? The fixed menubar isn't just an Apple quirk, but a deliberate design decision based on some hard theory about user interface design - that of perceived stability. If you get lost, you can rely on that menu bar to be there to get you found again. While in some ways the "menubar in a window" approach of windows makes sense, it does mean that menus move around a lot, and so it's much harder to reorientate yourself if you get stuck. These things don't matter once you're familiar with either, but the stable menubar is a boon for new users.
Brakes of a car can always overpower an engine, even at full throttle.
Very Very wrong.
breaking prolonged and at high speed will cause severe reduction in breaking power and even a LOSS of breaking power.
By the way, it's "braking", not "breaking".
But you're correct, brakes will not stop a runaway engine unless you basically jam them on hard and stall. If you're trying to keep going, they'll overheat and do nothing. Which reminds me of an amusing incident...! I used to do a lot of car rallying in the 1980s of the rather peculiar UK motorsport variety called "road rallying", which is exactly what it says: high speed against the clock rallying on the public, unclosed roads (though I hasten to add late at night in remote areas - all perfectly legal). On one event our throttle cable snapped at the top of a very remote and lonely mountain, with at least 20 miles left of the stage. After rooting around in our rather sorry collection of parts we unearthed a wire coat-hanger, which was straightened, one end twisted around the throttle pedal, fed through the bulkhead and connected to the stub end of the snapped cable using an electrical terminal block. Needless to say it didn't function too well, with an idle speed of about 3-4000rpm, and an unsmooth action up to full throttle. Coming down that mountain was exciting!!! Trying to hold the car back on the brakes basically induced total heat fade within minutes, though with holding off braking as much as possible, and using gargantuan foot pressure when we had to, it was just about controllable. The car was a Mini, so it cornered very well, so we got away with taking some bends at very hairy speeds. Struggling to the end of the section, our brakes were gone, there was smoke pouring out of them (and on later dismantling we found that all the rubber seals had vapourised, most of the fluid had boiled away, the discs warped and blued). Luckily it was the last stage, and it was no surprise that we'd set one of the fastest times for that section! We just got away with it, but learned our lesson, next upgrade apart from a complete new set of brakes was a proper competition throttle linkage.
Well -- I have had several Fiats in my days. One of which the front half of the car was held to the back half basically by the fenders, because the frame was broken, so yes they did have...curious...failure modes.
Was it a 128, maybe a 3p? We used to rally one. Up to a point it was a great car, until a hard day's yumping over Eppynt led to the exact same failure you describe - there was a noticable bend in the body just ahead of the windscreen, which MOVED as you leaned on it. We still finished though;-) Tremendous handling and great engine nevertheless. On the other hand, there was a period in the 50s and 60s where Italian sports cars ruled the roost. And they were well engineered.
Yep, but by and large never that well built. Always been the Italians' achilles heel, productionisation.
As for French Quality Engineering - the new Peugeot 407 coupe you Americans... look upon it and weep.
Slashdot Mirror
some filler here to make this stick, since the title is all I wanted to say :)
I thought football was that game where the ball was only played with the feet. Oh that's right, you think that's called Soccer. So calling them a base ballteam doesn't seem so odd to me. :)
One has to wonder when "iPod" is going to be synonymous with "digital music player"
It already is, with some people. Last Christmas after I'd shown a friend my iPod he told me he'd bought his kids "iPods" for Christmas. Turns out they were fairly generic USB flash drives that could play music files. Maybe held about 32 of them. He knew iPod was an Apple thing, but was bandying the term around generically. I've heard others do the same since, mostly just non-computer type folk.
...I played prank on friend of mine in the early 1980s (bear with me, it's just about on topic). He was very fond of taping films off the TV, and had built up a large collection. Me and another friend composed a very official looking letter from the "department of copyright, performance rights and recovery of royalties" (or somesuch) pointing out that his collection was known to us and in breach of the copyright act and that he must pay royalties or else destroy the collection. (When I think of how life has come to imitate art, it doesn't seem so funny now!). Since he worked with my co-conspirator, we saw the results first hand - a very worried phonecall from his wife, him storming home in a rush, hastily gathering all the tapes and rushing them round to his father's house to destroy them. Only when his father read the letter did the penny drop... Big laughs all round. Ahem. ;-)
A short while later this same friend held a fancy dress party. I decided to rub it in a bit and went dressed as a "pirate video" - basically a pirate costume but a large box was made up as a VHS cassette which was worn over. The effect was pretty good, and (even if I say so myself, slightly witty). It didn't do anything - we didn't have the technology then, anyway, what would it do?
More laughs at the party, though me and the perpetrator of the copyright letter got a custard pie in the face for our trouble. Bit of a lame comeback if you ask me....
This discovery is big news around here because it involves several UNE (University of New England, Australia) staff, and this is a very small and rather provincial university. So here's the press release on our own site... http://www.une.edu.au/news/
If it turns out that the human brain does indeed have 20 petaflops (or so), what will be remarkable is its efficiency, both in terms of size, but most importantly in terms of energy consumption. A couple of thousand kCal a day for it and its support system - pretty good!
You missed the point: Lexmark is essentially dumping the printers
Yep, I get it. But if someone is buying the printers in bulk as it's cheaper than replacing the cartridges, then simply throwing them in the trash, then it's not terribly environmentally friendly is it? By the way, it wasn't an eco-rant, just pointing out that it's somewhat unsound behaviour from an environmental perspective. You might not give a shit, but sooner or later someone's gonna have to.
I went to my friends house one day and he had a *STACK* of lexmark printers new in the box. I said, "what the hell could you possibly do with 5 printers?" he replies, "I got them on sale for 19.99 each. Thats half the price of ink." He just chucked the printers in the trash after he used the ink they came with.
It's about time companies started getting charged the true cost of raw materials. A $19.99 printer couldn't exist if it weren't being subsidized by a) far poorer nations an b) the planet itself. We'll all pay for it in the end.
or maybe "The Earth". Oh. What a dull name.
Xerox PARC didn't have click and drag, it had click, release, move, click, drop... It was Apple's Lisa that first had Click-drag-drop. As for Vannevar Bush, don't forget his ideas were only ever ideas on paper, as part of a dissertation. No hardware, no software, and no petty implementation details like drag n drop.
It's probably a design decision, which is a compromise because of another boneheaded design decision, and that is the poor way that the task bar deals with stuff as it gets full. Basically, it doesn't. So adding control panels to the whole mess makes a bad situation get a lot worse. For all its well-publicised faults, the OS X dock at least scales pretty well, and deals with filling up far more elegantly.
OS X is great, but it certainly isn't perfect. For one thing it is still (and was in OS
Hmmm, how hard is it to look in the same place in the menu bar which never moves and READ which app is topmost? In this respect OS X is WAY better than OS 9, where I agree your comment is valid. In fact the menubar is now very logical - system elevl stuff, then application general stuff, inclusing its name as title, then application specific menus. Really the menubar is a very stable and nice piece of interface, and XP totally fails in this respect. It's just as hard if not harder to figure out what app is "topmost" on XP, unless it's one of those nasty MDI jobs that take over the whole damn monitor and act weirdly - windows INSIDE windows? what were they thinking?
Yes! After all he's not only forcing you to buy his device, but forcing you to sign a contract saying that you will use it indiscriminately at every possible opportunity! You have no free will!
Clever, but surely the reason such buffer overruns are dangerous is because RETURNS are executed out of the same stack. Keep those addresses in a separate stack and the problem goes away. I can't see why CPU manufacturers don't do this, they would have a great marketing tool too - "use our processor and stop viruses!". It's this mix of code and data on a stack that is the root cause of this type of exploit, and seems to me it could be fixed very easily.
I personally would want to use C++
Well, you can. But as a C++ guy myself, I recently had a major eye-opening experience going to Objective-C with Cocoa. It's a fraction of the size of C++, yet unquantifiably more powerful. I've seen the light, brother! I really think that the C++ language dropped the ball on this one. Do yourself a favour and spend a day or two seriously looking at Cocoa. Just the dynamic method lookup alone makes C++ look strangely inflexible in comparison.
As a Cocoa programmer, I agree with your observations, but the solution is - look it up and learn it. These tools are not aimed at end-users as such, they are aimed at tech-savvy guys like us. Objective C took me oh, about an hour to learn and use productively, moving from C++, and frankly, its simplicity was a breath of fresh air compared to all the stuff you need to do to keep C++ happy. IB is a bit weird with all those connecting lines n stuff, but again, once you "get it" (a few hours investment, tops) it makes sense and works pretty well. The real key comes with coding using the Cocoa library - it's just so incredibly productive. I don't believe I've ever seen a faster method for getting apps from concept to desktop.
Except that is does have stereo speakers, anyway.
Ha ha!
(Nelson uses a Mac).
Insignia was the same: Softwindows ... I did an unupublished interview with the head of FWB ... he stated that they simply licensed the code rather than bought it from Insignia. The reason they never released an update after leasing the code was because they didn't see any merit at the time in releasing a new OS X version.
Insignia is supposedly shopping this around.
I have found that these two companies were essentially started up by venture capital and paid off their investors, dumped their employees, and the owners got filthy rich.
;-)
Insignia still exist, as far as I know. But they no longer work on SoftWindows, which appears to have died quietly along the way somewhere. The core of Insignia's business in the UK was sold to Citrix Systems, which used the technology as a basis for the WinFrame/Metaframe thin client for Mac and Unix (Insignia were working on this concept based on their SoftWindows code base; Citrix already had a Windows solution, so it was a natural marriage). I'm not sure they were strictly venture capital firms, Insignia was going for years before Citrix bought them up - at least ten, SoftWindows was around in the very early 90s, and they had some real technology there. I don't know the real story about 'getting filthy rich' - there may be some truth in it, but Citrix took over Insignia's premises and most of their staff in High Wycombe, and Insignia themselves moved to a far smaller building in nearby Wooburn Green. What they actually do now I don't know. I worked for Citrix shortly after all this happened, so I know some of the guys who came across from Insignia, they all seemed fairly happy with the deal, especially considering the stock options they were given
If you like writing your own tools, apps, etc, then you should try to give Xcode and cocoa a genuine open-minded trial. I believe that once you see the power of Cocoa and Objective-C working together, all other programming methodologies all start to look like too much hard work. How much time do you spend genuinely coding, and how much just working around the compiler's needs or the language itself? Be honest...
Case in point - I'm working on developing a serious vector-based cartography program. Starting from scratch in Cocoa, I have a comprehensive, very powerful app almost ready for beta in just ONE MONTH, complete with a highly usable GUI (with admittedly some rough edges at the moment). I have never found anything as productive as this - it's almost a revelation. While I'm sure it's not a panacea, any programmer worth his salt should give it a serious look at.
Let me get this straight. You have a DUAL 2.5 GZ system with half a gig of memory, and running office is sluggish? Dragging and dropping pictures taxes the system???
I think you just fed the troll... of course Office isn't sluggish. I use it on a 600MHz iBook and it's perfectly fine (though its interface quirks are irritating, but that's another story). I can drag and drop pictures all day long, rarely have I ever seen less than snappy response. I use a 1GHz G4 quicksilver at work and it just ain't slow. I haven't used a G5, this is an education establishment for god's sake - but I would not expect it to feel slow!! If that user's experiences are genuine (which I doubt), there must be something seriously wrong with his setup.
Kudos to Anand for capturing the newness of it all.
Is that the same newness that LisaOS had in 1981, or Mac OS 1.0 had in 1984, by any chance? The fixed menubar isn't just an Apple quirk, but a deliberate design decision based on some hard theory about user interface design - that of perceived stability. If you get lost, you can rely on that menu bar to be there to get you found again. While in some ways the "menubar in a window" approach of windows makes sense, it does mean that menus move around a lot, and so it's much harder to reorientate yourself if you get stuck. These things don't matter once you're familiar with either, but the stable menubar is a boon for new users.
...or will they just become fastest googler contests?
Brakes of a car can always overpower an engine, even at full throttle. Very Very wrong. breaking prolonged and at high speed will cause severe reduction in breaking power and even a LOSS of breaking power.
By the way, it's "braking", not "breaking".
But you're correct, brakes will not stop a runaway engine unless you basically jam them on hard and stall. If you're trying to keep going, they'll overheat and do nothing. Which reminds me of an amusing incident...! I used to do a lot of car rallying in the 1980s of the rather peculiar UK motorsport variety called "road rallying", which is exactly what it says: high speed against the clock rallying on the public, unclosed roads (though I hasten to add late at night in remote areas - all perfectly legal). On one event our throttle cable snapped at the top of a very remote and lonely mountain, with at least 20 miles left of the stage. After rooting around in our rather sorry collection of parts we unearthed a wire coat-hanger, which was straightened, one end twisted around the throttle pedal, fed through the bulkhead and connected to the stub end of the snapped cable using an electrical terminal block. Needless to say it didn't function too well, with an idle speed of about 3-4000rpm, and an unsmooth action up to full throttle. Coming down that mountain was exciting!!! Trying to hold the car back on the brakes basically induced total heat fade within minutes, though with holding off braking as much as possible, and using gargantuan foot pressure when we had to, it was just about controllable. The car was a Mini, so it cornered very well, so we got away with taking some bends at very hairy speeds. Struggling to the end of the section, our brakes were gone, there was smoke pouring out of them (and on later dismantling we found that all the rubber seals had vapourised, most of the fluid had boiled away, the discs warped and blued). Luckily it was the last stage, and it was no surprise that we'd set one of the fastest times for that section! We just got away with it, but learned our lesson, next upgrade apart from a complete new set of brakes was a proper competition throttle linkage.
Well -- I have had several Fiats in my days. One of which the front half of the car was held to the back half basically by the fenders, because the frame was broken, so yes they did have ...curious...failure modes. ;-) Tremendous handling and great engine nevertheless.
Was it a 128, maybe a 3p? We used to rally one. Up to a point it was a great car, until a hard day's yumping over Eppynt led to the exact same failure you describe - there was a noticable bend in the body just ahead of the windscreen, which MOVED as you leaned on it. We still finished though
On the other hand, there was a period in the 50s and 60s where Italian sports cars ruled the roost. And they were well engineered.
Yep, but by and large never that well built. Always been the Italians' achilles heel, productionisation.
As for French Quality Engineering - the new Peugeot 407 coupe you Americans... look upon it and weep.