Ummm, GuruNet (the people behind Answers.com) was around well before Wikipedia even started. I used their product like five years ago under Mac OS 9 (maybe it was 8.x?). So they didn't look at Wikipedia and go, hey, let's see how we can make money off of it. They were there first and they had great information before Wikipedia.
Yes, you could scale everything up, but why, why why!?!? Its just a nuisance. This is particularly a problem for documents that "remember" their zoom level, Word documents for example. So when you take them your your UXZWGA 2800x2100 laptop screen to a desktop LCD with a normal pixel density you just have to change zoom again, and then back. Its useless and its stupid. If you really need that much resolution I find it hard to believe you are doing a ton of work on the road. More likely you do most of your work with your powerbook attached to a 30" Cinema display. Resolution for the sake of resolution is useless.
Perhaps the title should be that size does matter. Rather, being small is becoming more important. Perhaps we can think of this as Maslow's Hierarchy of Computer Needs. First we just want a machine that has enough power to do what we want. Then we want a machine that is small and unobtrusive and with enough power to do what we want.
Well, yes, the days are past when any old RAM from anyone was okay to use. RAM margins are too thin and there's a lot of junk out there. However, getting just about any name brand RAM (Micron, Viking, Crucial, Corsair, Kingmax, and some others) you are pretty much safe. I've put a lot of RAM in a lot of Macs and never had a problem with the above listed brands in anything from an iMac to the newest G5's.
The kernel panics are because Apple has, as usual, decided to pick quality over junk. They've built Macs not to deal with bad memory that some computer would accept and in the end really screw you over when it corrupts your data.
Rather then spend all this time running around securing my information, which no one really cares about now, I spend my time getting rich and powerful. That way, later on, I won't have to run around securing my information, rather my minions will run around punishing those who try to steal it. At the end of the day, its probably not worth your time, you're just not that important. And if you are that important its a better use of your time to get a real expert to do it. (Note: Some out there probably are real experts, but not many.)
The problem is that QoS-aware protocols are not universally deployed, so you can't count on them. Additionally most of the router-based QoS protocols suck. Adding "smarts" to the network infrastructure goes against the original Internet design principles, which dicatated that the network should be as dumb as possible and add the smarts to the end hosts.
Yes you could build one without supernodes, but this is a bad approach. To build the best P2P network you need to build the best overlay network (a logical network that operates on top of the physical one). The best way to do this is to assign nodes addresses based on their resource availability, primarily we're concerned with processing power and bandwidth and, depending on the application, latency to other nodes. If you properly address all nodes things turn out great. You can then use distributed routing tables to guarantee delivery within a certain number of hops, typically log n. Now, in practice developing good address is incredibly difficult because nodes may come and go and nodes may arrive that, according to your address assignment algorithm, have the same address as existing ones and their for some sort of address reassignment needs to occur.
But I'm getting too deep. Supernodes are a very simple approach at resource-based addressing. Basically nodes with good connections (fast and low latency) to many other nodes become super nodes. You want super nodes, they make the network better.
If I remember correctly part of this is because Intel's processor is not a real dual core solution. Rather it is two processor produced on the same die with communication interconnects. Its a kludge to keep up with AMD's (true) dual core designs until Intel can get its pants up from around its ankles.
I don't think you're relevant either way. Burning a CD is still very low speed thing compared to HDD transfer rates. 52X cd is 7.8MB/sec. Since most drives can manage well in excess of these, even with non-sequential files it is unlikely that it would prevent your texture from being loaded. The other problem with your argument is that it really amounts to a RAM size problem, since you don't have enough RAM to fit all the game data into. Or, perhaps, most people don't have the RAM to fit all the game data into and the developer decides not to load it as a consequence.
On the contrary I have found many x86 laptops to be as loud or louder than their desktop counterparts for two reasons
1) The smaller package means that its harder to dissapate head into the surrounding air. 2) The processor is physically closer to you, because its on your lap rather than across the desk or on your floor.
However, every mac laptop I've had (iBook 12" G3 700Mhz, Lombard 400Mhz, TiBook 15" 1Ghz, Al book 15" 1,25Ghz) rarely turns on its fan. Sometimes after playing a DVD, although the Aluminum PowerBook has yet to use its fan ever.
You have a few options here, all involve stopping the belief that this something you didn't bring upon yourself. If you buy a high performance machine, you're going to get a lot of heat, there's not much of a way around this.
1) Buy a cooler chip, either slower or better processing power per watt.
2) Buy quality fans, Dell don't spend a lot on fans because most years don't know you don't have to have a dustbuster fan in there.
3) Buy a computer that was designed to be nearly silent. I have one dual processor G4 and one dual processor G5 in my office. The G5, unless under heavy load is silent. For most users a computer under heavy load means one of two things a) gaming and you won't hear it over the explosions, or b) real work, in which case you're probably too concentrated to notice.
I personally welcome dual cores cause total power consumption should be lower than dual processor systems.
Not, true, not true. A Power Mac G5 2.5Ghz has a 1.25Ghz bus speed. You argument also fails because of code locality where a lot of need info is in the processor cache and prefetch algorithms that deliver info to the cache before its need. The last time that CPU and bus speeds matched was in the 486 generation, I forget, early Pentium's may have had same speed buses.
You know, there has been this concern in some previous years too and every year there has ended up being a live webcast. I suppose its possible, but I seriously doubt it. During almost every keynote, Jobs starts out with, "Welcome to MacWorld, we have XX thousand people attending, and another XXX thousand people watching this keynote throughout the world on the web."
I certainly hope there is a webcast, otherwise what will I do at work for those two hours? Actually write code? Bahhh.
Actually, using iTunes this is really easy. Organize your music into a series of playlists, each less than 80 minutes. Then burn each playlist to a CD as an audio CD. These burned CD's can then be ripped back on to your computer free of DRM. The key is audio CD. But I think what you wanted was an easy way to get around to the DRM contract restrictions that you willingly agreed to when purchasing songs from iTMS. How could you have had a portable music player and continued to listen to whatever music you wanted, regardless of who said player came from. Again, the key is audio CD's. These can be purchased at a variety of retail (Sam Goody, Wal-Mart, etc) or on-line (Amazon.com, Buy.com, etc) locations.
Although I think you're serious, I really thought your post was sarcastic at first. Access sucks, sucks, sucks. Its slow and doesn't play well with others.
PCs are in every way superior? Faster? Debateable, it seems the same chip that runs on my desktop is used to build one of the worlds more powerful clusters with one of the highest computing scores per processor. Stronger? When's the last time my OS X box was victim to a worm or virus? Oh, right, never. (If you're running Linux maybe you can say the same thing, but then I guess the machines are equally strong.) Cheaper? Some are, some aren't. Apple has a higher initial price point, but similarly configured PCs are pretty closely price to Macs.
As to the choice of UNIX, by your argument Apple could have picked any core. Picking an OS core isn't something you do for marketing reasons, you make Aqua pretty for marketing. The main reason UNIX was picked was for stability and extensibility. With a clean code base Apple has been able to rapidly pump out an array of applications because they've been able to build powerful frameworks that can be used over and over.
Well, no, not really. Then they wouldn't be Apple. Apple is about ease of use, power, and interface. Yes, Apple based Safari on KHTML, but the interface is all their own and Safari has its own unique features. OpenOffice.org, even if Aqua-ified is way too ugly and unruly for Apple to recommend people use on a Mac.
Office isn't 100% compatible with Office. By this I mean that its not uncommon for different versions of office to have trouble writing to or reading from older formats.
It is a prefectly free office suite, but not perfectly good. The X version of OpenOffice.org requires the use of Apple's implementation of XFree86, not ideal from Apple's perspective. There is a version (NeoOffice/J) that I use and does not require X, but OpenOffice.org is mostly a copy of Microsoft Office and doesn't do a lot to really give the user a better experience. Yes, OpenOffice.org has tended to behave better than MS Office, but the interface is still filed will too many menus, and worse, too many badly placed menus and menu options. The big problem with office suites is that you have so many options and no one really stopped to think how to organize them, they just threw more and more stuff on the Tools and Format and Edit menus until you couldn't find a damn think you were looking for.
This rumor seems to make a lot of sense. If Apple were building a new office suite from the ground up it would take a while to do and would explain why AppleWorks say there and played dead for years. Most of the AppleWorks team has probably been working on writing the new office suite and a few people left working on AppleWorks updates and fixes. Also I can see this suite taking a while as Apple would want it to work very intuitively, something that Office frequently fails at and AppleWorks rarely shines at. There are so many formatting options and other tools that to build a really good word processor a complete re-think needs to be done on how the interface is organized. Right now its a nearly endless array of menus and sub-menus. Let's hope Apple does a good job of cleaning up the mess.
My experience is very far different. Being at a large university (Boston University) it was easy to forget that the outside world existed, because I might not leave campus for days at a time. Additionally, Boston tends to be "a terribly over-educated city" (to quote one of my professors). However, returning home to Iowa was a culture shock, as I encountered so many people I thought were complete idiots.
The bottom line is that I am an elitist, and I think its a good idea. Shouldn't the smartest people be in charge? Wasn't America founded a meritocracy?
Many associate elitism with getting rid of the un-elite. I put forth that most intellectual elite do not see the "average" man as something to be gotten rid of, but rather something to learn to live with and to take care of. The interests of the intellectual elite and the average need not be in conflict. If you think they are, you misunderstand the problems faced by both groups.
This is kind of the "who's watching the watchers" question, except, who's editing the writers (and editors).
You need a peer rating system where authors and editors can be given points as to the quality of their material and corrections. I think Experts Exchange and probably others offer something of this kind. This, as always, required community participation to work effectively. But beyond that, for an encyclopedia people should have an overall rating and a rating for subcategories, for example a lot of./er's can tell you a ton about Star Wars, but probably very little about the Easter Island heads.
I worked on something similar as well. What I always found funny was reading the papers that said they had solved the problem by using hashing techniques to assign IDs and data to nodes. Of course, while it was easy to see that the number of hops was low, the node IDs had little or no relation to "closeness" between nodes in either a latency or bandwidth sense. The great trick that no one has really figured out is how to make the node IDs (a the overlay network) build itself in a way that accounts for resource availability between nodes AND deal with nodes coming and going. Its cool stuff to think about, particularly because it always seems like the idea is just around the corner.
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Ummm, GuruNet (the people behind Answers.com) was around well before Wikipedia even started. I used their product like five years ago under Mac OS 9 (maybe it was 8.x?). So they didn't look at Wikipedia and go, hey, let's see how we can make money off of it. They were there first and they had great information before Wikipedia.
Actually, now we can say,
"My dad ate my homework as a late night snack"
OR
"I ate my homework, it tasted like an A-."
Yes, you could scale everything up, but why, why why!?!? Its just a nuisance. This is particularly a problem for documents that "remember" their zoom level, Word documents for example. So when you take them your your UXZWGA 2800x2100 laptop screen to a desktop LCD with a normal pixel density you just have to change zoom again, and then back. Its useless and its stupid. If you really need that much resolution I find it hard to believe you are doing a ton of work on the road. More likely you do most of your work with your powerbook attached to a 30" Cinema display. Resolution for the sake of resolution is useless.
Perhaps the title should be that size does matter. Rather, being small is becoming more important. Perhaps we can think of this as Maslow's Hierarchy of Computer Needs. First we just want a machine that has enough power to do what we want. Then we want a machine that is small and unobtrusive and with enough power to do what we want.
Well, yes, the days are past when any old RAM from anyone was okay to use. RAM margins are too thin and there's a lot of junk out there. However, getting just about any name brand RAM (Micron, Viking, Crucial, Corsair, Kingmax, and some others) you are pretty much safe. I've put a lot of RAM in a lot of Macs and never had a problem with the above listed brands in anything from an iMac to the newest G5's.
The kernel panics are because Apple has, as usual, decided to pick quality over junk. They've built Macs not to deal with bad memory that some computer would accept and in the end really screw you over when it corrupts your data.
Rather then spend all this time running around securing my information, which no one really cares about now, I spend my time getting rich and powerful. That way, later on, I won't have to run around securing my information, rather my minions will run around punishing those who try to steal it. At the end of the day, its probably not worth your time, you're just not that important. And if you are that important its a better use of your time to get a real expert to do it. (Note: Some out there probably are real experts, but not many.)
The problem is that QoS-aware protocols are not universally deployed, so you can't count on them. Additionally most of the router-based QoS protocols suck. Adding "smarts" to the network infrastructure goes against the original Internet design principles, which dicatated that the network should be as dumb as possible and add the smarts to the end hosts.
Yes you could build one without supernodes, but this is a bad approach. To build the best P2P network you need to build the best overlay network (a logical network that operates on top of the physical one). The best way to do this is to assign nodes addresses based on their resource availability, primarily we're concerned with processing power and bandwidth and, depending on the application, latency to other nodes. If you properly address all nodes things turn out great. You can then use distributed routing tables to guarantee delivery within a certain number of hops, typically log n. Now, in practice developing good address is incredibly difficult because nodes may come and go and nodes may arrive that, according to your address assignment algorithm, have the same address as existing ones and their for some sort of address reassignment needs to occur.
But I'm getting too deep. Supernodes are a very simple approach at resource-based addressing. Basically nodes with good connections (fast and low latency) to many other nodes become super nodes. You want super nodes, they make the network better.
If I remember correctly part of this is because Intel's processor is not a real dual core solution. Rather it is two processor produced on the same die with communication interconnects. Its a kludge to keep up with AMD's (true) dual core designs until Intel can get its pants up from around its ankles.
I don't think you're relevant either way. Burning a CD is still very low speed thing compared to HDD transfer rates. 52X cd is 7.8MB/sec. Since most drives can manage well in excess of these, even with non-sequential files it is unlikely that it would prevent your texture from being loaded. The other problem with your argument is that it really amounts to a RAM size problem, since you don't have enough RAM to fit all the game data into. Or, perhaps, most people don't have the RAM to fit all the game data into and the developer decides not to load it as a consequence.
On the contrary I have found many x86 laptops to be as loud or louder than their desktop counterparts for two reasons
1) The smaller package means that its harder to dissapate head into the surrounding air.
2) The processor is physically closer to you, because its on your lap rather than across the desk or on your floor.
However, every mac laptop I've had (iBook 12" G3 700Mhz, Lombard 400Mhz, TiBook 15" 1Ghz, Al book 15" 1,25Ghz) rarely turns on its fan. Sometimes after playing a DVD, although the Aluminum PowerBook has yet to use its fan ever.
You have a few options here, all involve stopping the belief that this something you didn't bring upon yourself. If you buy a high performance machine, you're going to get a lot of heat, there's not much of a way around this.
1) Buy a cooler chip, either slower or better processing power per watt.
2) Buy quality fans, Dell don't spend a lot on fans because most years don't know you don't have to have a dustbuster fan in there.
3) Buy a computer that was designed to be nearly silent. I have one dual processor G4 and one dual processor G5 in my office. The G5, unless under heavy load is silent. For most users a computer under heavy load means one of two things a) gaming and you won't hear it over the explosions, or b) real work, in which case you're probably too concentrated to notice.
I personally welcome dual cores cause total power consumption should be lower than dual processor systems.
Thankfully for me I am more self-aware than a toad.
Not, true, not true. A Power Mac G5 2.5Ghz has a 1.25Ghz bus speed. You argument also fails because of code locality where a lot of need info is in the processor cache and prefetch algorithms that deliver info to the cache before its need. The last time that CPU and bus speeds matched was in the 486 generation, I forget, early Pentium's may have had same speed buses.
You know, there has been this concern in some previous years too and every year there has ended up being a live webcast. I suppose its possible, but I seriously doubt it. During almost every keynote, Jobs starts out with, "Welcome to MacWorld, we have XX thousand people attending, and another XXX thousand people watching this keynote throughout the world on the web."
I certainly hope there is a webcast, otherwise what will I do at work for those two hours? Actually write code? Bahhh.
Actually, using iTunes this is really easy. Organize your music into a series of playlists, each less than 80 minutes. Then burn each playlist to a CD as an audio CD. These burned CD's can then be ripped back on to your computer free of DRM. The key is audio CD. But I think what you wanted was an easy way to get around to the DRM contract restrictions that you willingly agreed to when purchasing songs from iTMS. How could you have had a portable music player and continued to listen to whatever music you wanted, regardless of who said player came from. Again, the key is audio CD's. These can be purchased at a variety of retail (Sam Goody, Wal-Mart, etc) or on-line (Amazon.com, Buy.com, etc) locations.
Although I think you're serious, I really thought your post was sarcastic at first. Access sucks, sucks, sucks. Its slow and doesn't play well with others.
PCs are in every way superior? Faster? Debateable, it seems the same chip that runs on my desktop is used to build one of the worlds more powerful clusters with one of the highest computing scores per processor. Stronger? When's the last time my OS X box was victim to a worm or virus? Oh, right, never. (If you're running Linux maybe you can say the same thing, but then I guess the machines are equally strong.) Cheaper? Some are, some aren't. Apple has a higher initial price point, but similarly configured PCs are pretty closely price to Macs.
As to the choice of UNIX, by your argument Apple could have picked any core. Picking an OS core isn't something you do for marketing reasons, you make Aqua pretty for marketing. The main reason UNIX was picked was for stability and extensibility. With a clean code base Apple has been able to rapidly pump out an array of applications because they've been able to build powerful frameworks that can be used over and over.
Well, no, not really. Then they wouldn't be Apple. Apple is about ease of use, power, and interface. Yes, Apple based Safari on KHTML, but the interface is all their own and Safari has its own unique features. OpenOffice.org, even if Aqua-ified is way too ugly and unruly for Apple to recommend people use on a Mac.
Office isn't 100% compatible with Office. By this I mean that its not uncommon for different versions of office to have trouble writing to or reading from older formats.
It is a prefectly free office suite, but not perfectly good. The X version of OpenOffice.org requires the use of Apple's implementation of XFree86, not ideal from Apple's perspective. There is a version (NeoOffice/J) that I use and does not require X, but OpenOffice.org is mostly a copy of Microsoft Office and doesn't do a lot to really give the user a better experience. Yes, OpenOffice.org has tended to behave better than MS Office, but the interface is still filed will too many menus, and worse, too many badly placed menus and menu options. The big problem with office suites is that you have so many options and no one really stopped to think how to organize them, they just threw more and more stuff on the Tools and Format and Edit menus until you couldn't find a damn think you were looking for.
This rumor seems to make a lot of sense. If Apple were building a new office suite from the ground up it would take a while to do and would explain why AppleWorks say there and played dead for years. Most of the AppleWorks team has probably been working on writing the new office suite and a few people left working on AppleWorks updates and fixes. Also I can see this suite taking a while as Apple would want it to work very intuitively, something that Office frequently fails at and AppleWorks rarely shines at. There are so many formatting options and other tools that to build a really good word processor a complete re-think needs to be done on how the interface is organized. Right now its a nearly endless array of menus and sub-menus. Let's hope Apple does a good job of cleaning up the mess.
My experience is very far different. Being at a large university (Boston University) it was easy to forget that the outside world existed, because I might not leave campus for days at a time. Additionally, Boston tends to be "a terribly over-educated city" (to quote one of my professors). However, returning home to Iowa was a culture shock, as I encountered so many people I thought were complete idiots.
The bottom line is that I am an elitist, and I think its a good idea. Shouldn't the smartest people be in charge? Wasn't America founded a meritocracy?
Many associate elitism with getting rid of the un-elite. I put forth that most intellectual elite do not see the "average" man as something to be gotten rid of, but rather something to learn to live with and to take care of. The interests of the intellectual elite and the average need not be in conflict. If you think they are, you misunderstand the problems faced by both groups.
Of course, ./ offers its own version of this with scores, and karma, and mod points.
This is kind of the "who's watching the watchers" question, except, who's editing the writers (and editors).
./er's can tell you a ton about Star Wars, but probably very little about the Easter Island heads.
You need a peer rating system where authors and editors can be given points as to the quality of their material and corrections. I think Experts Exchange and probably others offer something of this kind. This, as always, required community participation to work effectively. But beyond that, for an encyclopedia people should have an overall rating and a rating for subcategories, for example a lot of
I worked on something similar as well. What I always found funny was reading the papers that said they had solved the problem by using hashing techniques to assign IDs and data to nodes. Of course, while it was easy to see that the number of hops was low, the node IDs had little or no relation to "closeness" between nodes in either a latency or bandwidth sense. The great trick that no one has really figured out is how to make the node IDs (a the overlay network) build itself in a way that accounts for resource availability between nodes AND deal with nodes coming and going. Its cool stuff to think about, particularly because it always seems like the idea is just around the corner.