The PS/2 range was actually pretty revolutionary design-wise because you could open them and replace any component (including the motherboard and PSU) without tools. The fact that a quarter of a century has passed without anybody coming up with something as good (let alone better) is a testament to IBM's industrial engineering capabilities during the 1980s.
I have been subscribing to the IEEE's "Computer" magazine in vain."
Well, to be fair, the IEEE isn't a scientific organisation, but an engineering one.
"I think my entire first year's worth of issues focused on nothing but management practices for software design... It was entirely focused on the inter-personal aspects of software development without much regard to anything else."
I'm not surprised by this, because an organisation run by engineers for engineers knows that what we call "software engineering" is currently at best an oxymoron, and at worst a fraud that's been perpetrated on non-technical management types by people who charge very high prices to produce "designs" that consist of boxes with some labels in them called "variables" connected together by lines. This isn't what real engineers working in other fields would call "a design", and they certainly wouldn't tell people that the materials and construction methods being used (programming language, libraries, OS, etc., etc.) are "an implementation detail", which is something I've heard several times from people who spend their entire professional lives driving CASE tools.
"Software Engineering" is neither Science nor Engineering... Its Management!"
As things currently stand, the "software engineering" emperor has no clothes, because it has completely failed to either reduce the cost or increase the reliability of software, and the IEEE know this. They thus confine themselves to things that are actually useful such as how to manage the conflicts that inevitably arise when brilliant and often visionary people with poor social skills have to work with those of merely average or above average intellect, which is something the engineering world has been coping with for centuries. The software industry would do well to listen to the voice of experience if we want to avoid making the often vastly expensive mistakes that have occurred in the past, and are still occurring today, instead of deluding both ourselves and others that a diagram is a design rather than simply a bunch of arbitrary boxes and lines that are not provably better than some other arbitrary collection of boxes and lines (or for that matter, stuff built from Lego) that purports to represent the same thing.
So rather than the IEEE mag talking about management because it's the same as " software engineering", it's probable that they talk about management because, as engineers, they realise that "software engineering" is currently a load of baloney which currently has two main purposes: (1) it permits lecturers who can't program run courses on drawing pictures of software, thereby avoiding having to actually write any or grade the work of students who have written some; and (2) it then lets people who are graduates at drawing pictures of software make a good living doing it.
"The Apple way goes something along the lines of, "We will strictly control quality, and thus the public perception of the hardware platform in general, by limiting access to the development tools so that only approved developers who meet quality standards and requirements will be permitted to develop official software for the platform."
Which is obviously why all Apple's development tools and documentation are supplied free with every copy of OS X (including the ones that ship with Macs), can be updated for free from their web-site, and one can join their Apple Developer programme at a base level without paying anything.
"Conversely, the Microsoft way goes something along the lines of, "We will allow anyone and everyone to develop software for the platform, even though we know that some people will develop poor quality or crappy applications which may influence the public perception about the platform in general"
Hence the fact that Microsoft don't supply any development tools with their operating systems irrespective of what version you buy, want (quite a lot of) money for non-crippled versions of all their dev. tools (and charged for the crippled ones until last year), and also charge for all levels of MSDN membership.
Cost of developing professionally for Macs: $599 for a Mac Mini, or nothing if you already own a Mac. Cost of developing professionally for Windows: Visual Studio 2005 pro at $799, assuming you already have a suitable PC and Windows version (XP Pro is required) to use it with, $300 more if you have to upgrade your OS.
if you'd just done a little checking before posting, you could have avoided making yourself look like a complete wanker.
"As we all know, reptiles, unlike us mere mammals, have an unlimited potential for growth. Long life+superior health = big lizards. Maybe that's wrong, and the instant it is proven wrong, the intelligent fundamentalists will drop that idea like a rock"
How do your ideas explain the pterosaurs (winged reptiles), which don't resemble any type of reptile around today, or the ichthyosaurs, who were dolphin-like marine reptiles that were likewise completely different from any modern reptile? Ichthyosaurs spent most of their lives underwater, which would shield them from the UV rays that you claim were responsible for their growth -- they even had to evolve the ability to give birth to live young because they couldn't leave the water to lay eggs due to having no legs. Note also that such creatures wouldn't have been in the least inconvenienced by any amount of flooding, so why did they all die out, while equally big reptiles such as salt water crocodiles survived?
If they'd named it after the Saxons rather than the Angles it'd have ended up as Sexland (as was the case with Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, etc.), and both the language and people would be Sexish.
"2 & 3 can be and are taught in M.S. degrees in software engineering, like at CMU or SeattleU."
The point is that one shouldn't need an M.S. to distinguish between computer science and computer engineering, hence my division into three basic B.S. courses.
"You take someone who has a CS degree, with a M.S. in software engineering, and project management skills (e.g. like can be gained from particular MBA courses), and 15+ years of experience - there's your computer systems/software engineering guru."
From what I've seen during nearly 30 years in the software industry, degrees + experience doesn't have any greater probability of producing a guru than experience on its own.
"I even think a CS with enough industry experience (in software engineering), and an MBA is even more useful."
It's definitely useful in terms of raising one's income, because certain (but by no means all) areas of the software development world place great value on such people.
"As for just #1 - I think there is no 'blurring' between science/engineering - engineering is applying science"
Chefs also apply science -- they're just as particular about temperatures, times, mixtures, and a whole bunch of other stuff as any chemist, and much of what they do has a solid scientific foundation. This does not however mean there is a blurring between cookery and (for example) organic chemistry just because a great deal of cooking is concerned with producing controlled changes in complex organic substances, or that chefs need to know any of that science to be superb at what they do. And the same is true for engineers, who only need to know that something _has_ certain properties, not the (often complex) theories which explain them and allowed the formulae they apply to be derived in the first place. Some very effective engineering has been done by ancients who had nothing beyond heuristics derived from generations of trial and error and some very primitive instruments (e.g. aligning sticks optically to ensure that things were straight) to work with, so the only "blurring" between science and engineering is that science has managed to explain and quantify many of the things engineers were already doing, but that doesn't mean that the scientists who were investigating those things knew anything about engineering, or cared about whether engineers might find their work useful or not.
"But where did "science" come from? Probably some engineering trial that either failed or didn't work as well as it should & needed more clarification"
Science in the modern sense (i.e. in terms of the scientific method) came from Galileo, who was trying to prove his theory that all objects fall at the same speed irrespective of their mass (this was completely opposite from the accepted wisdom of the time, which stated that heavier objects fall faster than light ones). I won't go into the details here, but after dropping two objects of different weights from the top of a tower and observing that they didn't fall at the same speed (because of air resistance), Galileo produced a series of experiments using inclined slopes and water timers that proved he was right, and thus was the scientific method, and therefore modern science, born. Note though that Galileo was far from being the first true scientist -- that honour probably goes to Aristarchus of Samos (310 to 230 BC), at least in terms of published work (obviously, we don't know anything about ancient scientists who didn't write about their work, or whose writings haven't survived).
"It is not like scientists (Ph.D's) come up with problems from thin air"
They "come up with problems" by observing things (NB: a Ph. D isn't the thing that distinguishes scientists from non-scientists, because many of history's great scientists have lacked any qualifications. Faraday is an excellent example, but there are many, many others).
"The problems typically originate in engineering and are elaborated by dedicated teams of Ph.D.'s who specialize in certain areas"
I agree with most of what you've said, apart from the following sentence:
"The science part of it depends utterly on what tools are available"
I'd say that the science part should be (and indeed often is) responsible for developing those tools rather than depending on them. Much of what we think of as computer science today was originally conceived by people who were imagining what might be achievable rather than being shackled to what had already be done.
Re:Needs to evolve into Computer Sciences (plural)
on
Is Computer Science Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"I think it's more like: Mechanical Engineers and Mechanics or Electrical engineers and Electricians"
That's what it _is_ like, but it should really be like:
Physicists and Mechanical Engineers. Physicists and Electricians.
Computer Science should be about the _science_ of computing, not the design and programming needs of the commercial software industry. If you want to get a job designing roads or mass irrigation systems, you don't spend your entire time at university studying physics or mathematics just because both are involved in becoming a civil engineer, so expecting a computer science course to turn out software engineers makes no more sense than expecting biology graduates to be vets or medical doctors.
What's killing computer science as a curriculum (rather than a field, where it's still alive) is therefore the fact that too many universities have allowed the distinction between science and engineering to become so blurred that it's ended up being something that students, potential employers, and lecturers have become disillusioned with because they all have different definitions of what it should be. The only way to alleviate this would be having three distinct computing degree courses:
1) Computer Science. A purely theoretical and heavily mathematical course that covers all aspects of general computing for those who want a career in research or academia that aims to produce people like Doug Englebart, Alan Kay, Edmund Djikstra, and Niklaus Wirth.
2) Computer Systems Engineering. Geared towards what used to be called "Systems Analysts", i.e. people who know how to define requirements, and then convert them into a working system of arbitrary complexity (i.e. from small office to world-spanning mega-corporation) that _does what the customer wants_.
3) Software Engineering. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of designing _and implementing_ software for everything from small embedded systems to vast n-tier multi-user set-ups, hugely parallel systems, etc. Also includes a module on human-computer interfaces, i.e. writing stuff that people will actually want to use instead of doing so because they.
IMO fields like artificial intelligence and robotics would do much better in terms of both their theoretical foundation and practical results if they were removed from computer science entirely, and instead became distinct fields that would therefore be freed from the current "throw a huge binary computer at every problem that nature seems to have solved with the equivalent of a four transistor analogue circuit, and then make excuses for the fact that it's still crappier at everything than an ant" syndrome.
"You forgot to mention that it's only really in North America does the concept of heavily subsidized "free" phones really exist. Go to Asia and Europe (which have way more phones in all shapes and sizes) and you'll find plenty of high end phones people actually buy."
I can't speak for Asia, but I don't know what European countries you've been to where the operators don't offer a large variety of free phones to those willing to sign up for a monthly contract. Obviously, the types of phone you get offered depend on the type of contract -- you won't get a top-end model with a minimum-cost contract for example. The only people who actually pay for phones are therefore those who want one "off contract", or people who opt for a pay-as-you-go tariff with no fixed monthly payments, because the operators make less money from that type of customer, so they don't subsidise them to the same degree (there is a subsidy, but it's much smaller). Neither of these types usually go for a high-end model because they tend to be people who are out to minimise costs, so there is a fairly lively market for second-hand phones in many European countries (some operators also offer re-conditioned models for those who want them).
"Dropping $1k on a phone isn't too unusual"
It's incredibly unusual in Europe, because you can get that $1000 phone free with a contract that'll cost you $600 over its obligatory life, and then get it "unlocked" for peanuts at one of the many establishments who offer that service for a small fee while you wait. Note that you also tend to get plenty of extra benefits with a premium contract such as unlimited free calls outside business hours, unlimited free text messages, free Internet access, and various other perks that make it a much better deal than paying $1000 for the phone and then having to pay for a service to use it with.
"The quest for "free" and "cheap" phones in North America has meant that high-end phones really don't appear very often."
We get plenty of free high-end phones here, and most operators have a pretty good range of models by a bunch of manufacturers to choose from (Motorola, Samsung, Sony / Ericsson and Nokia seem to be the most popular, so most operators offer several models from each of these. Some companies such as Orange also offer various Blackberries).
"Apple actually has guts to introduce the iPhone into the US first, where paying more than $100 for a phone is rare."
It would have taken more guts to offer it in Europe, which has various languages that MacOS X doesn't support beyond a keyboard mapping, ubiquitous 3G, and much heavier use of text messaging than the US because all operators agreed on a single standard from the outset (people naturally send these messages in their own language, which means having a "word predictor" that can work reliably with them to make up for the fact that they won't be able to do their usual fast "two thumb" text inputting without looking at the phone).
"I said they weren't interested in stopping the clones, which is a different matter entirely and which they could have done... "
There was nothing else they could have done. The IBM PC was built from off-the-shelf commodity components because the DOJ were investigating them for anti-trust violations, and they'd already agreed to let MS sell DOS to anyone. The _only_ thing IBM had that was entirely theirs was the BIOS, so the BIOS was what they defended in court.
"IBM had the resources to cause clone makers a lot more grief than it actually did (and which Apple did, and is still doing.)"
It's irrelevant what resources they had if there was nothing to defend with them. Even litigation-happy Apple didn't sue people for making similar hardware to theirs, but only for copying their ROMs. Atari STs for example were perfectly capable of running the Mac OS and software if equipped with a cheap third-party expansion box that took Apple ROMs, so Apple took action to prevent the ROMs being sold on their own -- they could not however prevent Atari from making a computer that used most of the same third-party internal hardware as a Mac, just as IBM couldn't prevent people from making computers with the same third-party internal hardware as their PC.
"Copyright infringement was only one avenue that IBM could have taken: with their patent portfolio they could have found something with which to go after Compaq and the rest, if they'd wanted to that badly."
Patents on what? There were no IBM-sourced components in the PC to patent, and nothing else in it was new or innovative in concept or technology. The Intel 8086 family was 6 years old when the IBM PC was launched, and other manufacturers had used it long before IBM; memory mapped displays were commonplace; expansion ports had existed on microcomputers since the original Altair; cassette ports and 5.25" floppy drives had been used by others, usually at much higher density in the case of floppies; dynamic RAM was standard, as was ROM, etc., etc., etc. It was a machine that used fairly old technology in a very ordinary, conservative way, so there was nothing in IBM's otherwise extensive patent portfolio that applied to anything in it. By the time they tried to fix the situation with the significantly more patent and copyright-encumbered PS/2, the clone industry was big enough to chart its own independent course, so it was IBM who eventually had to relent and release machines with a VESA bus rather than everyone having to build licensed PS/2 clones.
"Like I said, IBM wasn't that interested in stopping the clones, because if they had been... there wouldn't be any"
Just because you say something doesn't mean it's true. IBM did everything they possibly could to stop the clone makers within the law (that previously wouldn't have been a barrier, but I said before, they were undergoing a very extensive DOJ anti-trust investigation at that time, so they were anxious to keep their noses clean). It's also probable that they simply failed to see what was happening until it was too late; they'd become accustomed to owning 90% of the IT industry, leaving the usually better and cheaper competition to fight over the remaining 10%, and very likely believed that PC clones would be more of the same. And to be fair, it certainly looked that way for a few years, because the PC, XT, and AT sold very well despite their pedestrian technology and high list prices (which few of their valued corporate customers actually paid), so IBM possibly didn't really know what was happening until their corporate reps started seeing machines from the likes of Compaq on the desktops of previously IBM-exclusive customers.
"at that point in time IBM wasn't really all that interested in stopping the development of clone PCs, for a variety of reasons. Had they really chosen to throw their weight around, they most certainly could have"
This is a completely revisionist view of history, because IBM sued a number of early clone makers who directly copied their BIOS (which is exactly what Franklin did to Apple) -- one example is here (http://www.scripophily.net/eaglecomputer.html), but there are various others. Note also that oldsters like myself and Bruce Perens (http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=20 01-05-03-007-20-OP-CY-0014) remember that IBM sued Compaq for infringement, but lost because the Compaq BIOS was reverse-engineered rather than copied, and in the absence of software patents and the DMCA, writing something which did the same job as copyrighted code without copying the code itself was allowed.
At that point in time (to use your own term) IBM were notorious for throwing their weight around, and their policy with the PC was "business as usual", i.e. use the cheapest possible method of crushing competitors, which in the case of those who are much smaller and therefore lack the funds to maintain armies of lawyers, was usually the courts.
"I hear Macs still prefer AFP, and it's easier to use for them than SMB/NFS"
Modern Macs support NFS and SMB (the latter via SAMBA, which I've had very good experiences with on both Linux and OS X)). A brief "markety-blurb" item is at: http://www.apple.com/business/mac_pc/networking.ht ml
"At sea level it takes 1 calorie to raise a gram of water 1 degree C until you get to 100 degrees (etc.)"
All true.
"That's why a steamer cooks faster than placing your food in boiling water, steam has more calories to give up to the food."
Again true, except that I didn't mention steamers, but pressure cookers, which don't actually cook with steam, but use it to raise the internal pressure, which also raises the boiling point of the water (or other primarily water-based liquid) so the food inside can be cooked at above 100C (or whatever its ambient boiling point is where one happens to live). They're actually required cooking items for people who live at high altitudes because water doesn't boil at a high enough temperature to kill certain types of harmful bacteria and fungi.
"It takes the same number of calories to boil a gram of water at any temperature"
Where did I say otherwise? My contention is that the _boiling point_ of water (which I correctly expressed in terms of temperature) changes with pressure. The number of calories required to boil water thus depends on _the temperature_ it was at before one began to boil it, and _the temperature_ at which it boils, because you need a lot more calories to raise a gram of water from freezing point to its boiling point of 400C in the deep oceans than to raise it from freezing point to 0C in deep space.
"Ice doesn't boil technically, but it does turn into water vapor, a process called sublimation"
This is true.
"The heat required to sublimated a gram of water ice is the same as it would take to boil it as water"
But this isn't. Sublimation is surface effect like evapouration in liquid water, and therefore happens at all temperatures above absolute zero (when by definition all particulate motion ceases). Freeze-drying for example is based upon sublimation even though the temperature is being lowered rather than raised.
"Put some ice cubes off to the side in the freezer for a few months, they will have shrunk noticeably due to sublimation."
And they'll shrink a lot faster in a "no frost" freezer at an identical temperature for the same reason clothes on a clothesline dry faster on a cold windy day than a hot still one. Just because boiling water also evapourates doesn't mean that evapouration or sublimation effects that occur below boiling point are the same phenomenon, or are equivalent in energy terms.
They weren't my references, they were yours. I merely used the link you provided to demonstrate that you were talking rubbish.
"Note the explicit mention of the low pressure states (q.v. "vacuum pump") leading to boiling."
That's precisely what I said in my post, i.e. that the heat of vapourisation in water (and indeed most liquids) is the same as their melting point in a vacuum. Why are you repeating the very points I made?
"So if you can generalize your knowledge at all, you now know that sweat will "boil" off your skin in a vacuum".
If you had any actual knowledge of what you're talking about instead of posting your complete misunderstandings of a Wikipedia article, you'd know that sweat is a thin film with a large surface area, so it will evapourate _before_ it boils. And that's assuming there's any sweat to evapourate in the first place, which is far from certain, because sweating is a response to certain conditions, not something we just happen to do for the sake of it.
"and you will freeze"
Evapourating (or for that matter boiling) 2 or 3 grams of sweat in vacuum doesn't require enough energy to freeze the water content in a relatively massive object like a human, even if we didn't have our mammalian temperature regulation systems which constantly convert a proportion of the energy derived from food into heat. This is why "warm blooded" animals such as mammals and birds require far more food per Kg of body mass than reptiles, amphibians, and fish.
"In all cases the change of state requires energy"
It does indeed, but the energy required to evapourate a couple grams of sweat in a vacuum is far less than the heat output of the 80Kg person it's spread over. Note though that evapourating such a small volume would also have a negligible effect on (for example) an 80Kg reptile due to the fact that it has the same initial thermal energy as the 2g water film, but 40,000 times the mass, especially when the surface area to volume ration of that 2g is very much higher than that of an 80Kg mass with exactly the same surface area!
"So for a living mammal, or a big blob of water, or any number of "relatively volatile" objects, vacuum would be indistinguishable from cold."
Living animals aren't volatile objects though, because they have an organ called "skin" (or in some, a chitin exoskeleton) that effectively means all water is enclosed in a pressure vessel which has proven itself to be easily capable of withstanding a vacuum. Mammals will thus eventually freeze due to black body emission after death (and may well suffer from "frostbite" in their extremities due to poorer temperature regulation in those regions together with an evolutionary response to extreme cold that pools blood in the trunk because it's the area with the lowest surface area to volume ratio), while "cold blooded" animals will lose heat in line with their black body emission characteristics, and therefore can freeze while living. Note that certain cold blooded creatures have evolved mechanisms that allow them to survive being frozen and thawed without any apparent ill effects, whereas mammals tend to succumb to hypothermia when their body temperatures drop below a certain (species-dependent) level for extended periods.
"The kinderschool version:"
Is that people out of kinderschool would, unlike you, know that changing the temperature of 80Kg requires 80,000 times more energy than changing the temperature of 1g, and in fact a lot more than that given the difference in their surface area to volume ratios.
"When the astronauts take a leak while on a mission and expel the result into space, it boils violently. The vapor then passes immediately into the solid state (a process known as desublimation), and you end up with a cloud of very fine crystals of frozen urine."
Oh dear, you really don't understand any of this, do you? The reason the urine freezes so quickly is the same one you've been arguing would freeze a human, i.
"I can't speak to the no vapor, but craft that make urine dumps in space produce, well, urine crystals"
This can happen in space on the sunward side of orbiting structures where the temperatures aren't particularly low because surface evapouration happens very quickly in vacuums, which cools the liquid globules.
"The other thing that nobody seems to be addressing here is the Heat of Vaporization."
That's because most of us know that it has no relevance to anything being discussed.
"More explicitly (though I don't have the math here, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_vaporization [wikipedia.org] does) as pressure decreases, the boiling temperature of water (etc) drops. But regardless of the boiling temperature, the total amount of energy it takes for the liquid to become a gas is fixed by volume. "
That's not what the Wikipedia article says at at all. If you check the to link to boiling point in the second sentence of the first paragraph (the bit starting with "It is measured at the boiling point of the liquid") you will find that it says the following:
"The boiling point of a substance is the temperature at which it can change its state from a liquid to a gas throughout the bulk of the liquid _at a given pressure_". (emphasis mine).
A little further down it also says: "A somewhat clearer (and perhaps more useful) definition of boiling point is "the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid equals the pressure of the surroundings.""
Why is the above important? Because the atmospheric pressure of space is zero, so the temperature at which a substance reaches boiling point is the same as the temperature at which it changes from being a solid to a liquid, in water's case 0C (actually nearer to 0F for human sweat because it contains various dissolved salts that lower its freezing point). This is known as "sublimation".
"This is why sweat can "keep you cool" when the ambient temperature is higher than your body temperature"
Latent heat of vapourisation has nothing to do with the reason sweat keeps you cool, because humans aren't hot enough to raise water to its boiling point, and we can't survive in environments that are hot enough to boil water for long periods. If you must quote Wikipedia, then the article on "evaporation" (American spelling) is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation
The third sentence of the first paragraph says this:
"Evaporation is exclusively a surface phenomena and should not be confused with boiling."
Read the rest of it to find out why everything you wrote is rubbish.
"but we're talking about no protection at all and explosive decompression"
The dangers of explosive decompression are greatly exaggerated, at least for pressure drops of one atmosphere, which the human body has been demonstrated both in controlled laboratory tests and actual high altitude accidents to handle with ease. Lung damage is the only real danger if they happened to be fairly full at the time, but even this is rarely severe enough to be fatal, or even have any permanent effects.
NB: the only known accident with explosive decompression from pressures much higher than 1 atmosphere (8 atmospheres in a diving decompression chamber) was very nasty indeed for all involved, including those who had to clean up the aftermath.
"it takes 510 calories to boil a gram of water so you would get cold pretty quickly"
At sea level. The temperature at which water boils depends on pressure: in a vacuum, it boils at at any temperature above 0C (ice doesn't boil) without the need for any external energy input, whereas deep under the sea around the "blue smokers", it boils at around 400C. Pressure cookers are an example of a simple piece of technology that allow food to be cooked more quickly by using increased pressure to raise water's boiling point.
"But if you look at the consumer market, where everybody buys their own office suite (through retail or bundled with the machine), Apple is doing very well."
Apple is doing well in their traditional core markets of creative professionals, domestic users, and education _in certain countries_. However, I would argue that MS Office doesn't sell in large numbers to either domestic users or creative professionals -- it's far too expensive for the former (in some countries it costs as much as a Mac Mini), and in general isn't required by the latter.
"3Q 2006, Apple was the number 4 computer maker, with 6% market share. And in the more profitable laptop market, Apple has close to 15% market share."
You are giving US figures, while (as my post said) I was giving world figures. Apple have around 3% of the world desktop market, up from 2.5% a couple of years ago, which is significant in terms of growth for Apple, but not as a percentage of overall desktop computer sales. Microsoft on the other hand rake in money from 95% of those sales, with either pre-installed OEM versions (domestic, small business, education) or annual corporate licenses (medium and large businesses).
"Microsoft's install base is not growing. Apple's is exploding."
Because it's far easier to grow a 3% market share than a 95% one.
"Pretty much nobody switches from Apple to Wintel."
A lot of people do however run both out of necessity. Not all people who use Macs are "switchers" that throw away what they already have just because they buy a machine from Apple.
"You also claim that BootCamp is responsible for the growth in sales of Macs. This is a half-truth at best."
Why then was there so much excitement in the Mac community when BootCamp was announced? Why did so many existing Mac users buy Intel-based machines even though they had perfectly serviceable G5 systems that could actually run most existing Mac software faster than Intel ones via Rosetta (if indeed such software _would_ run under Rosetta, which wasn't the case for everything)?
" Anybody who will buy a Mac and then run windows can be counted on to purchase the Mac version of whichever piece of software forced them to install Windows"
And you know this because you have evidence from where precisely? I haven't seen any figures to indicate this (or for that matter the opposite), so all we have to go on are opinions, and there is a significant body of those which seem to believe that the opposite will happen, i.e. that the presence of easy Windows compatibility via BootCamp / Parallels / whatever will prompt some companies who currently produce software for both platforms to abandon OS X entirely.
" People who buy Macs want to switch "
Again, your opinion stated as if its a fact, with no evidence to back it up. Do the people who bought Macs because of the "iPod halo effect" that Apple themselves acknowledge do so because the want to "switch", or because Apple stuff is currently "cool", or their iPod will work with it better? If Apple's ads are anything to go by, the company itself seems to believe that most of their potential customers will have no idea what an operating system is, because they never mention OS X, or that Macs can't run Windows software out of the box, so if you actually have some hard statistical evidence for your assertion, I suggest you send it to Apple's market research people.
"Already, pretty much the only apps that people use bootcamp for are games"
Most of which run like crap on the Mac Mini and MacBook, which are two of Apple's biggest sellers. So again, please provide some evidence for your assertion that people are spending hundreds of dollars for retail copy of Windows to play games on hardware that's not up to the job. And by evidence, I mean hard statistics, not some posts from Slashdot, Digg, and equivalent fora, or anecdotes.
"2d apps run just fine with crossover or parallels"
Both of which cost extra money, and in the case of Parallels, also require more m
"Why anyone smart enough to buy a Mac and avoid Windows would then want to buy Office, especially when they can download OpenOffice for free."
Because "nearly as good but free" is seen by many, many people as synonyms for "crap they have to give away because nobody is stupid enough to pay for it". The free software movement fails to understand that most Western adult humans have been taught by experience to treat things which either claim to be "free" or are much cheaper than well known equivalents with suspicion because they've learned there's usually a catch: get three free books by agreeing to buy one a month for eternity; get a free frozen lasagne if you buy two others; get a free cup worth $1 by providing proof that they've bought $700 worth of goods from a company; get a free toy worth 15c by paying $3 for child's meal which would cost under $2 if they bought the food that's in the box from the same vendor as separate items; buy a cola that's much cheaper than Coke or Pepsi, and use it for cleaning coins because it's too horrid to drink; etc., etc., etc.
There was an experiment performed a few years back where several people stood in busy commercial areas with trays full of bank notes and a sign saying "Free Money: take as much as you want", and nobody showed any interest because someone actually giving away free money for the sake of it is completely outside of their experience. This same mentality is at work with free (as in beer) software: how, both the public and corporate bods ask themselves, can Microsoft continue to charge lots of money for operating systems and other software if there are free items that people claim are either nearly as good, or in some cases better? If that was really true, then everyone would be using them, and Bill Gates wouldn't still be the richest man in the world, so it's obvious that they can't actually be as good as what Microsoft are selling, irrespective of what the neighbour's kid says.
"I suspect that many people on the MS campus worry that Steve Jobs & co might make a son-of-iWork that's so good that OSX users won't miss Microsoft"
They don't give two hoots about that, because they already have Office users locked in by undocumented and patent-encumbered proprietary formats, hence the fact that none of the competing office suites has managed to gain any notable traction.
"I think that if gloves come off, Apple can do more damage to MS than vice versa"
How, precisely? Apple have (being generous) 3% of the world desktop PC market, and 1% of servers. What "harm" could they do to a company with 95% of desktops, and 40% of servers?
"Another thing they could do: leak out an OSX-86 that runs well on normal PCs"
Which would damage sales of Macs, not Microsoft's stuff. Perhaps you haven't noticed that there have been various free operating systems out there for at least a decade without significantly damaging Microsoft's desktop market share, and their noticeable success in the server arena has mostly been at the expense of proprietary UNIX systems rather than Windows servers. Note also that sales of Macs have actually picked up since the Intel switch, not because of OS X or Apple's ads, but due to the fact that people can run Windows on them now, so having a Mac doesn't mean being either locked out of must-have applications anymore. And every Mac that runs Windows is a boxed retail version of Windows sold, each of which makes MS a _lot_ more money than an OEM license.
"It wouldn't be perfect, I'm sure there would be driver issues with some hardware, but if the standard pirates of the world start passing around OSX, who would be left to care about Vista?"
1) Very few of the people who will end up using Vista will "care about it" -- they'll receive it with their computer, just like they did with XP. Microsoft have already been paid for those pre-installed versions, so they aren't financially damaged if somebody installs a different OS afterwards.
2) People don't install operating systems "because they're better" -- they install them because there's a "killer" application they want to run. OS X doesn't have any "killer applications" that the average Joe cares about, and actually lacks some of the "killers" that corporates need, so why would anyone bother installing OS X on a PC that already came with a "free OS" which can run 99% of the software out there?
"Not enough people to keep the giant Microsoft beast fed."
Like many fanboys, you are failing to see the cold, hard financial facts of the situation. Virtually every one of those PCs that a free version of OSX gets installed on will come with a Windows license that MS have been paid for, while Apple won't receive a single penny. The same situation will exist in corporates, who have annual site licenses that they pay MS for. So the party who will be losing money is Apple, who will sell far fewer Macs than now and make nothing from the free OS X, while MS will still be raking in billions every month from OEM and coprorate licenses.
NB: I am writing this on a Mac, and like them _a lot_, but I have that doesn't mean I live in a silly fantasy world where Apple is some sort of all-powerful IT god that can do what giants like IBM couldn't. OS/2 was a much better piece of software than Windows, and unlike OS X, was being sold by a company that (at the time) was (a) much bigger and richer than MS, and (b) had a massive international presence in corporate IT departments, yet Windows absolutely trounced it in both the domestic and corporate arenas despite being a piece of crap by comparison. Why? Because _there were no killer apps for OS/2_, and people don't install different operating systems for the sake of it, even if they're demonstrably more wonderful than what they've already got.
"On the other hand, that has never hurt Microsoft when they felt that losses in revenue in one area would be made up for in another area if they cancelled development for a competing platform. Just look to the cancellation of Halo development for Macintosh and Linux after they bought Bungie."
Apple have done exactly the same thing. The Logic DAW for example was originally written and marketed by eMagic, and was by far the most popular program of its type on both Windows and the Mac (it was originally written for the Atari ST). Apple bought eMagic in July 2002, and by September of the same year, announced that the Windows version would no longer be developed, even though it sold more copies than the Mac one (it held a commanding position in the Windows mind-range DAW market).
Slashdot Mirror
The PS/2 range was actually pretty revolutionary design-wise because you could open them and replace any component (including the motherboard and PSU) without tools. The fact that a quarter of a century has passed without anybody coming up with something as good (let alone better) is a testament to IBM's industrial engineering capabilities during the 1980s.
"That's what I thought too....
I have been subscribing to the IEEE's "Computer" magazine in vain."
Well, to be fair, the IEEE isn't a scientific organisation, but an engineering one.
"I think my entire first year's worth of issues focused on nothing but management practices for software design... It was entirely focused on the inter-personal aspects of software development without much regard to anything else."
I'm not surprised by this, because an organisation run by engineers for engineers knows that what we call "software engineering" is currently at best an oxymoron, and at worst a fraud that's been perpetrated on non-technical management types by people who charge very high prices to produce "designs" that consist of boxes with some labels in them called "variables" connected together by lines. This isn't what real engineers working in other fields would call "a design", and they certainly wouldn't tell people that the materials and construction methods being used (programming language, libraries, OS, etc., etc.) are "an implementation detail", which is something I've heard several times from people who spend their entire professional lives driving CASE tools.
"Software Engineering" is neither Science nor Engineering... Its Management!"
As things currently stand, the "software engineering" emperor has no clothes, because it has completely failed to either reduce the cost or increase the reliability of software, and the IEEE know this. They thus confine themselves to things that are actually useful such as how to manage the conflicts that inevitably arise when brilliant and often visionary people with poor social skills have to work with those of merely average or above average intellect, which is something the engineering world has been coping with for centuries. The software industry would do well to listen to the voice of experience if we want to avoid making the often vastly expensive mistakes that have occurred in the past, and are still occurring today, instead of deluding both ourselves and others that a diagram is a design rather than simply a bunch of arbitrary boxes and lines that are not provably better than some other arbitrary collection of boxes and lines (or for that matter, stuff built from Lego) that purports to represent the same thing.
So rather than the IEEE mag talking about management because it's the same as " software engineering", it's probable that they talk about management because, as engineers, they realise that "software engineering" is currently a load of baloney which currently has two main purposes: (1) it permits lecturers who can't program run courses on drawing pictures of software, thereby avoiding having to actually write any or grade the work of students who have written some; and (2) it then lets people who are graduates at drawing pictures of software make a good living doing it.
"The Apple way goes something along the lines of, "We will strictly control quality, and thus the public perception of the hardware platform in general, by limiting access to the development tools so that only approved developers who meet quality standards and requirements will be permitted to develop official software for the platform."
Which is obviously why all Apple's development tools and documentation are supplied free with every copy of OS X (including the ones that ship with Macs), can be updated for free from their web-site, and one can join their Apple Developer programme at a base level without paying anything.
"Conversely, the Microsoft way goes something along the lines of, "We will allow anyone and everyone to develop software for the platform, even though we know that some people will develop poor quality or crappy applications which may influence the public perception about the platform in general"
Hence the fact that Microsoft don't supply any development tools with their operating systems irrespective of what version you buy, want (quite a lot of) money for non-crippled versions of all their dev. tools (and charged for the crippled ones until last year), and also charge for all levels of MSDN membership.
Cost of developing professionally for Macs: $599 for a Mac Mini, or nothing if you already own a Mac.
Cost of developing professionally for Windows: Visual Studio 2005 pro at $799, assuming you already have a suitable PC and Windows version (XP Pro is required) to use it with, $300 more if you have to upgrade your OS.
if you'd just done a little checking before posting, you could have avoided making yourself look like a complete wanker.
"As we all know, reptiles, unlike us mere mammals, have an unlimited potential for growth. Long life+superior health = big lizards. Maybe that's wrong, and the instant it is proven wrong, the intelligent fundamentalists will drop that idea like a rock"
How do your ideas explain the pterosaurs (winged reptiles), which don't resemble any type of reptile around today, or the ichthyosaurs, who were dolphin-like marine reptiles that were likewise completely different from any modern reptile? Ichthyosaurs spent most of their lives underwater, which would shield them from the UV rays that you claim were responsible for their growth -- they even had to evolve the ability to give birth to live young because they couldn't leave the water to lay eggs due to having no legs. Note also that such creatures wouldn't have been in the least inconvenienced by any amount of flooding, so why did they all die out, while equally big reptiles such as salt water crocodiles survived?
If they'd named it after the Saxons rather than the Angles it'd have ended up as Sexland (as was the case with Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, etc.), and both the language and people would be Sexish.
"2 & 3 can be and are taught in M.S. degrees in software engineering, like at CMU or SeattleU."
The point is that one shouldn't need an M.S. to distinguish between computer science and computer engineering, hence my division into three basic B.S. courses.
"You take someone who has a CS degree, with a M.S. in software engineering, and project management skills (e.g. like can be gained from particular MBA courses), and 15+ years of experience - there's your computer systems/software engineering guru."
From what I've seen during nearly 30 years in the software industry, degrees + experience doesn't have any greater probability of producing a guru than experience on its own.
"I even think a CS with enough industry experience (in software engineering), and an MBA is even more useful."
It's definitely useful in terms of raising one's income, because certain (but by no means all) areas of the software development world place great value on such people.
"As for just #1 - I think there is no 'blurring' between science/engineering - engineering is applying science"
Chefs also apply science -- they're just as particular about temperatures, times, mixtures, and a whole bunch of other stuff as any chemist, and much of what they do has a solid scientific foundation. This does not however mean there is a blurring between cookery and (for example) organic chemistry just because a great deal of cooking is concerned with producing controlled changes in complex organic substances, or that chefs need to know any of that science to be superb at what they do. And the same is true for engineers, who only need to know that something _has_ certain properties, not the (often complex) theories which explain them and allowed the formulae they apply to be derived in the first place. Some very effective engineering has been done by ancients who had nothing beyond heuristics derived from generations of trial and error and some very primitive instruments (e.g. aligning sticks optically to ensure that things were straight) to work with, so the only "blurring" between science and engineering is that science has managed to explain and quantify many of the things engineers were already doing, but that doesn't mean that the scientists who were investigating those things knew anything about engineering, or cared about whether engineers might find their work useful or not.
"But where did "science" come from? Probably some engineering trial that either failed or didn't work as well as it should & needed more clarification"
Science in the modern sense (i.e. in terms of the scientific method) came from Galileo, who was trying to prove his theory that all objects fall at the same speed irrespective of their mass (this was completely opposite from the accepted wisdom of the time, which stated that heavier objects fall faster than light ones). I won't go into the details here, but after dropping two objects of different weights from the top of a tower and observing that they didn't fall at the same speed (because of air resistance), Galileo produced a series of experiments using inclined slopes and water timers that proved he was right, and thus was the scientific method, and therefore modern science, born. Note though that Galileo was far from being the first true scientist -- that honour probably goes to Aristarchus of Samos (310 to 230 BC), at least in terms of published work (obviously, we don't know anything about ancient scientists who didn't write about their work, or whose writings haven't survived).
"It is not like scientists (Ph.D's) come up with problems from thin air"
They "come up with problems" by observing things (NB: a Ph. D isn't the thing that distinguishes scientists from non-scientists, because many of history's great scientists have lacked any qualifications. Faraday is an excellent example, but there are many, many others).
"The problems typically originate in engineering and are elaborated by dedicated teams of Ph.D.'s who specialize in certain areas"
I agree with most of what you've said, apart from the following sentence:
"The science part of it depends utterly on what tools are available"
I'd say that the science part should be (and indeed often is) responsible for developing those tools rather than depending on them. Much of what we think of as computer science today was originally conceived by people who were imagining what might be achievable rather than being shackled to what had already be done.
"I think it's more like:
Mechanical Engineers and Mechanics
or
Electrical engineers and Electricians"
That's what it _is_ like, but it should really be like:
Physicists and Mechanical Engineers.
Physicists and Electricians.
Computer Science should be about the _science_ of computing, not the design and programming needs of the commercial software industry. If you want to get a job designing roads or mass irrigation systems, you don't spend your entire time at university studying physics or mathematics just because both are involved in becoming a civil engineer, so expecting a computer science course to turn out software engineers makes no more sense than expecting biology graduates to be vets or medical doctors.
What's killing computer science as a curriculum (rather than a field, where it's still alive) is therefore the fact that too many universities have allowed the distinction between science and engineering to become so blurred that it's ended up being something that students, potential employers, and lecturers have become disillusioned with because they all have different definitions of what it should be. The only way to alleviate this would be having three distinct computing degree courses:
1) Computer Science. A purely theoretical and heavily mathematical course that covers all aspects of general computing for those who want a career in research or academia that aims to produce people like Doug Englebart, Alan Kay, Edmund Djikstra, and Niklaus Wirth.
2) Computer Systems Engineering. Geared towards what used to be called "Systems Analysts", i.e. people who know how to define requirements, and then convert them into a working system of arbitrary complexity (i.e. from small office to world-spanning mega-corporation) that _does what the customer wants_.
3) Software Engineering. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of designing _and implementing_ software for everything from small embedded systems to vast n-tier multi-user set-ups, hugely parallel systems, etc. Also includes a module on human-computer interfaces, i.e. writing stuff that people will actually want to use instead of doing so because they.
IMO fields like artificial intelligence and robotics would do much better in terms of both their theoretical foundation and practical results if they were removed from computer science entirely, and instead became distinct fields that would therefore be freed from the current "throw a huge binary computer at every problem that nature seems to have solved with the equivalent of a four transistor analogue circuit, and then make excuses for the fact that it's still crappier at everything than an ant" syndrome.
"You forgot to mention that it's only really in North America does the concept of heavily subsidized "free" phones really exist. Go to Asia and Europe (which have way more phones in all shapes and sizes) and you'll find plenty of high end phones people actually buy."
I can't speak for Asia, but I don't know what European countries you've been to where the operators don't offer a large variety of free phones to those willing to sign up for a monthly contract. Obviously, the types of phone you get offered depend on the type of contract -- you won't get a top-end model with a minimum-cost contract for example. The only people who actually pay for phones are therefore those who want one "off contract", or people who opt for a pay-as-you-go tariff with no fixed monthly payments, because the operators make less money from that type of customer, so they don't subsidise them to the same degree (there is a subsidy, but it's much smaller). Neither of these types usually go for a high-end model because they tend to be people who are out to minimise costs, so there is a fairly lively market for second-hand phones in many European countries (some operators also offer re-conditioned models for those who want them).
"Dropping $1k on a phone isn't too unusual"
It's incredibly unusual in Europe, because you can get that $1000 phone free with a contract that'll cost you $600 over its obligatory life, and then get it "unlocked" for peanuts at one of the many establishments who offer that service for a small fee while you wait. Note that you also tend to get plenty of extra benefits with a premium contract such as unlimited free calls outside business hours, unlimited free text messages, free Internet access, and various other perks that make it a much better deal than paying $1000 for the phone and then having to pay for a service to use it with.
"The quest for "free" and "cheap" phones in North America has meant that high-end phones really don't appear very often."
We get plenty of free high-end phones here, and most operators have a pretty good range of models by a bunch of manufacturers to choose from (Motorola, Samsung, Sony / Ericsson and Nokia seem to be the most popular, so most operators offer several models from each of these. Some companies such as Orange also offer various Blackberries).
"Apple actually has guts to introduce the iPhone into the US first, where paying more than $100 for a phone is rare."
It would have taken more guts to offer it in Europe, which has various languages that MacOS X doesn't support beyond a keyboard mapping, ubiquitous 3G, and much heavier use of text messaging than the US because all operators agreed on a single standard from the outset (people naturally send these messages in their own language, which means having a "word predictor" that can work reliably with them to make up for the fact that they won't be able to do their usual fast "two thumb" text inputting without looking at the phone).
"I said they weren't interested in stopping the clones, which is a different matter entirely and which they could have done ... "
... there wouldn't be any"
There was nothing else they could have done. The IBM PC was built from off-the-shelf commodity components because the DOJ were investigating them for anti-trust violations, and they'd already agreed to let MS sell DOS to anyone. The _only_ thing IBM had that was entirely theirs was the BIOS, so the BIOS was what they defended in court.
"IBM had the resources to cause clone makers a lot more grief than it actually did (and which Apple did, and is still doing.)"
It's irrelevant what resources they had if there was nothing to defend with them. Even litigation-happy Apple didn't sue people for making similar hardware to theirs, but only for copying their ROMs. Atari STs for example were perfectly capable of running the Mac OS and software if equipped with a cheap third-party expansion box that took Apple ROMs, so Apple took action to prevent the ROMs being sold on their own -- they could not however prevent Atari from making a computer that used most of the same third-party internal hardware as a Mac, just as IBM couldn't prevent people from making computers with the same third-party internal hardware as their PC.
"Copyright infringement was only one avenue that IBM could have taken: with their patent portfolio they could have found something with which to go after Compaq and the rest, if they'd wanted to that badly."
Patents on what? There were no IBM-sourced components in the PC to patent, and nothing else in it was new or innovative in concept or technology. The Intel 8086 family was 6 years old when the IBM PC was launched, and other manufacturers had used it long before IBM; memory mapped displays were commonplace; expansion ports had existed on microcomputers since the original Altair; cassette ports and 5.25" floppy drives had been used by others, usually at much higher density in the case of floppies; dynamic RAM was standard, as was ROM, etc., etc., etc. It was a machine that used fairly old technology in a very ordinary, conservative way, so there was nothing in IBM's otherwise extensive patent portfolio that applied to anything in it. By the time they tried to fix the situation with the significantly more patent and copyright-encumbered PS/2, the clone industry was big enough to chart its own independent course, so it was IBM who eventually had to relent and release machines with a VESA bus rather than everyone having to build licensed PS/2 clones.
"Like I said, IBM wasn't that interested in stopping the clones, because if they had been
Just because you say something doesn't mean it's true. IBM did everything they possibly could to stop the clone makers within the law (that previously wouldn't have been a barrier, but I said before, they were undergoing a very extensive DOJ anti-trust investigation at that time, so they were anxious to keep their noses clean). It's also probable that they simply failed to see what was happening until it was too late; they'd become accustomed to owning 90% of the IT industry, leaving the usually better and cheaper competition to fight over the remaining 10%, and very likely believed that PC clones would be more of the same. And to be fair, it certainly looked that way for a few years, because the PC, XT, and AT sold very well despite their pedestrian technology and high list prices (which few of their valued corporate customers actually paid), so IBM possibly didn't really know what was happening until their corporate reps started seeing machines from the likes of Compaq on the desktops of previously IBM-exclusive customers.
"at that point in time IBM wasn't really all that interested in stopping the development of clone PCs, for a variety of reasons. Had they really chosen to throw their weight around, they most certainly could have"
0 01-05-03-007-20-OP-CY-0014) remember that IBM sued Compaq for infringement, but lost because the Compaq BIOS was reverse-engineered rather than copied, and in the absence of software patents and the DMCA, writing something which did the same job as copyrighted code without copying the code itself was allowed.
This is a completely revisionist view of history, because IBM sued a number of early clone makers who directly copied their BIOS (which is exactly what Franklin did to Apple) -- one example is here (http://www.scripophily.net/eaglecomputer.html), but there are various others. Note also that oldsters like myself and Bruce Perens (http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2
At that point in time (to use your own term) IBM were notorious for throwing their weight around, and their policy with the PC was "business as usual", i.e. use the cheapest possible method of crushing competitors, which in the case of those who are much smaller and therefore lack the funds to maintain armies of lawyers, was usually the courts.
You are of course correct. I believe the NFS layer is also either the BSD one, or heavily based thereon.
No.
"I hear Macs still prefer AFP, and it's easier to use for them than SMB/NFS"
t ml
Modern Macs support NFS and SMB (the latter via SAMBA, which I've had very good experiences with on both Linux and OS X)). A brief "markety-blurb" item is at: http://www.apple.com/business/mac_pc/networking.h
"Calories are a measure of heat"
They are indeed.
"At sea level it takes 1 calorie to raise a gram of water 1 degree C until you get to 100 degrees (etc.)"
All true.
"That's why a steamer cooks faster than placing your food in boiling water, steam has more calories to give up to the food."
Again true, except that I didn't mention steamers, but pressure cookers, which don't actually cook with steam, but use it to raise the internal pressure, which also raises the boiling point of the water (or other primarily water-based liquid) so the food inside can be cooked at above 100C (or whatever its ambient boiling point is where one happens to live). They're actually required cooking items for people who live at high altitudes because water doesn't boil at a high enough temperature to kill certain types of harmful bacteria and fungi.
"It takes the same number of calories to boil a gram of water at any temperature"
Where did I say otherwise? My contention is that the _boiling point_ of water (which I correctly expressed in terms of temperature) changes with pressure. The number of calories required to boil water thus depends on _the temperature_ it was at before one began to boil it, and _the temperature_ at which it boils, because you need a lot more calories to raise a gram of water from freezing point to its boiling point of 400C in the deep oceans than to raise it from freezing point to 0C in deep space.
"Ice doesn't boil technically, but it does turn into water vapor, a process called sublimation"
This is true.
"The heat required to sublimated a gram of water ice is the same as it would take to boil it as water"
But this isn't. Sublimation is surface effect like evapouration in liquid water, and therefore happens at all temperatures above absolute zero (when by definition all particulate motion ceases). Freeze-drying for example is based upon sublimation even though the temperature is being lowered rather than raised.
"Put some ice cubes off to the side in the freezer for a few months, they will have shrunk noticeably due to sublimation."
And they'll shrink a lot faster in a "no frost" freezer at an identical temperature for the same reason clothes on a clothesline dry faster on a cold windy day than a hot still one. Just because boiling water also evapourates doesn't mean that evapouration or sublimation effects that occur below boiling point are the same phenomenon, or are equivalent in energy terms.
"Now if we follow your references:"
They weren't my references, they were yours. I merely used the link you provided to demonstrate that you were talking rubbish.
"Note the explicit mention of the low pressure states (q.v. "vacuum pump") leading to boiling."
That's precisely what I said in my post, i.e. that the heat of vapourisation in water (and indeed most liquids) is the same as their melting point in a vacuum. Why are you repeating the very points I made?
"So if you can generalize your knowledge at all, you now know that sweat will "boil" off your skin in a vacuum".
If you had any actual knowledge of what you're talking about instead of posting your complete misunderstandings of a Wikipedia article, you'd know that sweat is a thin film with a large surface area, so it will evapourate _before_ it boils. And that's assuming there's any sweat to evapourate in the first place, which is far from certain, because sweating is a response to certain conditions, not something we just happen to do for the sake of it.
"and you will freeze"
Evapourating (or for that matter boiling) 2 or 3 grams of sweat in vacuum doesn't require enough energy to freeze the water content in a relatively massive object like a human, even if we didn't have our mammalian temperature regulation systems which constantly convert a proportion of the energy derived from food into heat. This is why "warm blooded" animals such as mammals and birds require far more food per Kg of body mass than reptiles, amphibians, and fish.
"In all cases the change of state requires energy"
It does indeed, but the energy required to evapourate a couple grams of sweat in a vacuum is far less than the heat output of the 80Kg person it's spread over. Note though that
evapourating such a small volume would also have a negligible effect on (for example) an 80Kg reptile due to the fact that it has the same initial thermal energy as the 2g water film, but 40,000 times the mass, especially when the surface area to volume ration of that 2g is very much higher than that of an 80Kg mass with exactly the same surface area!
"So for a living mammal, or a big blob of water, or any number of "relatively volatile" objects, vacuum would be indistinguishable from cold."
Living animals aren't volatile objects though, because they have an organ called "skin" (or in some, a chitin exoskeleton) that effectively means all water is enclosed in a pressure vessel which has proven itself to be easily capable of withstanding a vacuum. Mammals will thus eventually freeze due to black body emission after death (and may well suffer from "frostbite" in their extremities due to poorer temperature regulation in those regions together with an evolutionary response to extreme cold that pools blood in the trunk because it's the area with the lowest surface area to volume ratio), while "cold blooded" animals will lose heat in line with their black body emission characteristics, and therefore can freeze while living. Note that certain cold blooded creatures have evolved mechanisms that allow them to survive being frozen and thawed without any apparent ill effects, whereas mammals tend to succumb to hypothermia when their body temperatures drop below a certain (species-dependent) level for extended periods.
"The kinderschool version:"
Is that people out of kinderschool would, unlike you, know that changing the temperature of 80Kg requires 80,000 times more energy than changing the temperature of 1g, and in fact a lot more than that given the difference in their surface area to volume ratios.
"When the astronauts take a leak while on a mission and expel the result into space, it boils violently. The vapor then passes immediately into the solid state (a process known as desublimation), and you end up with a cloud of very fine crystals of frozen urine."
Oh dear, you really don't understand any of this, do you? The reason the urine freezes so quickly is the same one you've been arguing would freeze a human, i.
"I can't speak to the no vapor, but craft that make urine dumps in space produce, well, urine crystals"
This can happen in space on the sunward side of orbiting structures where the temperatures aren't particularly low because surface evapouration happens very quickly in vacuums, which cools the liquid globules.
"The other thing that nobody seems to be addressing here is the Heat of Vaporization."
That's because most of us know that it has no relevance to anything being discussed.
"More explicitly (though I don't have the math here, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_of_vaporization [wikipedia.org] does) as pressure decreases, the boiling temperature of water (etc) drops. But regardless of the boiling temperature, the total amount of energy it takes for the liquid to become a gas is fixed by volume. "
That's not what the Wikipedia article says at at all. If you check the to link to boiling point in the second sentence of the first paragraph (the bit starting with "It is measured at the boiling point of the liquid") you will find that it says the following:
"The boiling point of a substance is the temperature at which it can change its state from a liquid to a gas throughout the bulk of the liquid _at a given pressure_". (emphasis mine).
A little further down it also says: "A somewhat clearer (and perhaps more useful) definition of boiling point is "the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the liquid equals the pressure of the surroundings.""
Why is the above important? Because the atmospheric pressure of space is zero, so the temperature at which a substance reaches boiling point is the same as the temperature at which it changes from being a solid to a liquid, in water's case 0C (actually nearer to 0F for human sweat because it contains various dissolved salts that lower its freezing point). This is known as "sublimation".
"This is why sweat can "keep you cool" when the ambient temperature is higher than your body temperature"
Latent heat of vapourisation has nothing to do with the reason sweat keeps you cool, because humans aren't hot enough to raise water to its boiling point, and we can't survive in environments that are hot enough to boil water for long periods. If you must quote Wikipedia, then the article on "evaporation" (American spelling) is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation
The third sentence of the first paragraph says this:
"Evaporation is exclusively a surface phenomena and should not be confused with boiling."
Read the rest of it to find out why everything you wrote is rubbish.
"but we're talking about no protection at all and explosive decompression"
The dangers of explosive decompression are greatly exaggerated, at least for pressure drops of one atmosphere, which the human body has been demonstrated both in controlled laboratory tests and actual high altitude accidents to handle with ease. Lung damage is the only real danger if they happened to be fairly full at the time, but even this is rarely severe enough to be fatal, or even have any permanent effects.
NB: the only known accident with explosive decompression from pressures much higher than 1 atmosphere (8 atmospheres in a diving decompression chamber) was very nasty indeed for all involved, including those who had to clean up the aftermath.
"What type of compound is made from Phosphorus and Uranium?"
Uranium phosphate.
"it takes 510 calories to boil a gram of water so you would get cold pretty quickly"
At sea level. The temperature at which water boils depends on pressure: in a vacuum, it boils at at any temperature above 0C (ice doesn't boil) without the need for any external energy input, whereas deep under the sea around the "blue smokers", it boils at around 400C. Pressure cookers are an example of a simple piece of technology that allow food to be cooked more quickly by using increased pressure to raise water's boiling point.
"But if you look at the consumer market, where everybody buys their own office suite (through retail or bundled with the machine), Apple is doing very well."
Apple is doing well in their traditional core markets of creative professionals, domestic users, and education _in certain countries_. However, I would argue that MS Office doesn't sell in large numbers to either domestic users or creative professionals -- it's far too expensive for the former (in some countries it costs as much as a Mac Mini), and in general isn't required by the latter.
"3Q 2006, Apple was the number 4 computer maker, with 6% market share. And in the more profitable laptop market, Apple has close to 15% market share."
You are giving US figures, while (as my post said) I was giving world figures. Apple have around 3% of the world desktop market, up from 2.5% a couple of years ago, which is significant in terms of growth for Apple, but not as a percentage of overall desktop computer sales. Microsoft on the other hand rake in money from 95% of those sales, with either pre-installed OEM versions (domestic, small business, education) or annual corporate licenses (medium and large businesses).
"Microsoft's install base is not growing. Apple's is exploding."
Because it's far easier to grow a 3% market share than a 95% one.
"Pretty much nobody switches from Apple to Wintel."
A lot of people do however run both out of necessity. Not all people who use Macs are "switchers" that throw away what they already have just because they buy a machine from Apple.
"You also claim that BootCamp is responsible for the growth in sales of Macs. This is a half-truth at best."
Why then was there so much excitement in the Mac community when BootCamp was announced? Why did so many existing Mac users buy Intel-based machines even though they had perfectly serviceable G5 systems that could actually run most existing Mac software faster than Intel ones via Rosetta (if indeed such software _would_ run under Rosetta, which wasn't the case for everything)?
" Anybody who will buy a Mac and then run windows can be counted on to purchase the Mac version of whichever piece of software forced them to install Windows"
And you know this because you have evidence from where precisely? I haven't seen any figures to indicate this (or for that matter the opposite), so all we have to go on are opinions, and there is a significant body of those which seem to believe that the opposite will happen, i.e. that the presence of easy Windows compatibility via BootCamp / Parallels / whatever will prompt some companies who currently produce software for both platforms to abandon OS X entirely.
" People who buy Macs want to switch "
Again, your opinion stated as if its a fact, with no evidence to back it up. Do the people who bought Macs because of the "iPod halo effect" that Apple themselves acknowledge do so because the want to "switch", or because Apple stuff is currently "cool", or their iPod will work with it better? If Apple's ads are anything to go by, the company itself seems to believe that most of their potential customers will have no idea what an operating system is, because they never mention OS X, or that Macs can't run Windows software out of the box, so if you actually have some hard statistical evidence for your assertion, I suggest you send it to Apple's market research people.
"Already, pretty much the only apps that people use bootcamp for are games"
Most of which run like crap on the Mac Mini and MacBook, which are two of Apple's biggest sellers. So again, please provide some evidence for your assertion that people are spending hundreds of dollars for retail copy of Windows to play games on hardware that's not up to the job. And by evidence, I mean hard statistics, not some posts from Slashdot, Digg, and equivalent fora, or anecdotes.
"2d apps run just fine with crossover or parallels"
Both of which cost extra money, and in the case of Parallels, also require more m
"Why anyone smart enough to buy a Mac and avoid Windows would then want to buy Office, especially when they can download OpenOffice for free."
Because "nearly as good but free" is seen by many, many people as synonyms for "crap they have to give away because nobody is stupid enough to pay for it". The free software movement fails to understand that most Western adult humans have been taught by experience to treat things which either claim to be "free" or are much cheaper than well known equivalents with suspicion because they've learned there's usually a catch: get three free books by agreeing to buy one a month for eternity; get a free frozen lasagne if you buy two others; get a free cup worth $1 by providing proof that they've bought $700 worth of goods from a company; get a free toy worth 15c by paying $3 for child's meal which would cost under $2 if they bought the food that's in the box from the same vendor as separate items; buy a cola that's much cheaper than Coke or Pepsi, and use it for cleaning coins because it's too horrid to drink; etc., etc., etc.
There was an experiment performed a few years back where several people stood in busy commercial areas with trays full of bank notes and a sign saying "Free Money: take as much as you want", and nobody showed any interest because someone actually giving away free money for the sake of it is completely outside of their experience. This same mentality is at work with free (as in beer) software: how, both the public and corporate bods ask themselves, can Microsoft continue to charge lots of money for operating systems and other software if there are free items that people claim are either nearly as good, or in some cases better? If that was really true, then everyone would be using them, and Bill Gates wouldn't still be the richest man in the world, so it's obvious that they can't actually be as good as what Microsoft are selling, irrespective of what the neighbour's kid says.
"I suspect that many people on the MS campus worry that Steve Jobs & co might make a son-of-iWork that's so good that OSX users won't miss Microsoft"
They don't give two hoots about that, because they already have Office users locked in by undocumented and patent-encumbered proprietary formats, hence the fact that none of the competing office suites has managed to gain any notable traction.
"I think that if gloves come off, Apple can do more damage to MS than vice versa"
How, precisely? Apple have (being generous) 3% of the world desktop PC market, and 1% of servers. What "harm" could they do to a company with 95% of desktops, and 40% of servers?
"Another thing they could do: leak out an OSX-86 that runs well on normal PCs"
Which would damage sales of Macs, not Microsoft's stuff. Perhaps you haven't noticed that there have been various free operating systems out there for at least a decade without significantly damaging Microsoft's desktop market share, and their noticeable success in the server arena has mostly been at the expense of proprietary UNIX systems rather than Windows servers. Note also that sales of Macs have actually picked up since the Intel switch, not because of OS X or Apple's ads, but due to the fact that people can run Windows on them now, so having a Mac doesn't mean being either locked out of must-have applications anymore. And every Mac that runs Windows is a boxed retail version of Windows sold, each of which makes MS a _lot_ more money than an OEM license.
"It wouldn't be perfect, I'm sure there would be driver issues with some hardware, but if the standard pirates of the world start passing around OSX, who would be left to care about Vista?"
1) Very few of the people who will end up using Vista will "care about it" -- they'll receive it with their computer, just like they did with XP. Microsoft have already been paid for those pre-installed versions, so they aren't financially damaged if somebody installs a different OS afterwards.
2) People don't install operating systems "because they're better" -- they install them because there's a "killer" application they want to run. OS X doesn't have any "killer applications" that the average Joe cares about, and actually lacks some of the "killers" that corporates need, so why would anyone bother installing OS X on a PC that already came with a "free OS" which can run 99% of the software out there?
"Not enough people to keep the giant Microsoft beast fed."
Like many fanboys, you are failing to see the cold, hard financial facts of the situation. Virtually every one of those PCs that a free version of OSX gets installed on will come with a Windows license that MS have been paid for, while Apple won't receive a single penny. The same situation will exist in corporates, who have annual site licenses that they pay MS for. So the party who will be losing money is Apple, who will sell far fewer Macs than now and make nothing from the free OS X, while MS will still be raking in billions every month from OEM and coprorate licenses.
NB: I am writing this on a Mac, and like them _a lot_, but I have that doesn't mean I live in a silly fantasy world where Apple is some sort of all-powerful IT god that can do what giants like IBM couldn't. OS/2 was a much better piece of software than Windows, and unlike OS X, was being sold by a company that (at the time) was (a) much bigger and richer than MS, and (b) had a massive international presence in corporate IT departments, yet Windows absolutely trounced it in both the domestic and corporate arenas despite being a piece of crap by comparison. Why? Because _there were no killer apps for OS/2_, and people don't install different operating systems for the sake of it, even if they're demonstrably more wonderful than what they've already got.
"On the other hand, that has never hurt Microsoft when they felt that losses in revenue in one area would be made up for in another area if they cancelled development for a competing platform. Just look to the cancellation of Halo development for Macintosh and Linux after they bought Bungie."
Apple have done exactly the same thing. The Logic DAW for example was originally written and marketed by eMagic, and was by far the most popular program of its type on both Windows and the Mac (it was originally written for the Atari ST). Apple bought eMagic in July 2002, and by September of the same year, announced that the Windows version would no longer be developed, even though it sold more copies than the Mac one (it held a commanding position in the Windows mind-range DAW market).