The x86 move was aimed at portables, and low end desktop machines.
I don't think this is true. We'll see low-end InteliMacs first, but that is only because it will take Apple a year or so to develop Intel based systems that surpass current G5's.
As Apple announced previously, OS X for Intel will be designed to run only on Intel Macs. Ever since then, people have been speculating that Apple might use Intel's Trusted Platform Module chip to protect OSX.
It is worth noting that when Jobs dropped out was a fairly unique time. If you were good with computers, you pretty much didn't need a degree. I knew people who dropped out of college, talked themselves into a computer job, and are now well-paid computer professionals. By the time a degree started to matter, they were so experienced that nobody really cared that they didn't have one.
It's probably still true that if you can jump into a high-tech job at a startup company without finishing your degree, you may end up doing better financially than if you stayed in college, because you get an earlier start at building your career. But such opportunities aren't nearly as abundant now.
Richard Feynman is mildly famous for having said that "I love to think and I don't want to screw up the machine," electing to go with sensory deprivation instead of drugs to get a hallucinogenic experience going.
Of course, that presumes that sensory deprivation is less hazardous to the machine than psychedelics.
Imagine all the 'hard' work teachers, parents and guidance counselors put into brainwashing every kid that he/she must go to University."
So what are they going to do? Refuse to accept their diplomas? It's graduation. Pretty much the only people there are graduates, parents, and teachers.
The downside was Billy Crystal's voice that sort of took the scenes with it a little over the top and pulled the movie out of the fantasy land into our world of mundanes (similar to what happened to Shrek 2). However, the animators always pulled us back into that strange and wonderful land, but sometimes there was this tug of war. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings with Gimli having a Brooklyn accent!
I remember thinking that I wanted to see the Japanese version to see if that character was voiced as broadly as it was by Billy Crystal in the English version. I wouldn't be surprised if he is. If anything, the Japanese seem more accepting than Americans of broadly comic characters in this kind of story. And the animation seemed to fit with Crystal's voice.
find it amuzing for some reason that you didn't list Houston, which is larger than Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, or Ft Worth. Everyone forgets about Houston.
I was in Houston just after the release of Spirited Away in Boston. I wanted to take my nephews (who love Miyazaki's films) to see it, but it wasn't playing anywhere in town.
I've skimmed through it again, and I don't think he says anywhere that he doesn't like anime. He just says that he has in the past hated movies everyone else loved and loved movies everyone else hated. He doesn't seem to have any bias against the medium (or genre).
Actually, a reviewer who is always wrong can be useful. Just go to see the films he hates. Personally, I've found that the strongest indicator as to whether I will like a film is the degree of disagreement among reviewers. The films I really like are the ones that some reviewers love and others hate.
In this case, he just seems to have a rigidity of mind that makes him a poor choice for reviewing fantasy. He couldn't deal with Howl's magical teleporting door that takes you to different places depending upon how you set the dial. Considering that this is a rather mild example of the magic of Howl's Moving Castle, he just found the movie confusing.
the rapturous critical acclaim is among critics who don't know jack about Miyazaki and don't have the frame of reference to tell his good works from his bad works. Most critics are going to say it's amazing because they don't want to be seen as 'Dunb' or 'Out of it'
It's not the best thing that Miyazaki has ever done (I liked Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Nausicaa better) but it is still a wonderful movie. Miyazaki has never produced a bad movie; even his worst are competitive with Disney's best. I particularly liked having a heroine who spends most of the movie as a crone, and who seems to grow from the experience. I thought that she was deeper and more interesting than Miyazake's usual "plucky girl" protagonists.
The one complaint I've heard is that Miyazaki leaves some plot threads dangling--we never know for sure who cursed Turniphead and fomented the war or why (Sulliman, to consolidate her own power?). But that is a very realistic view of war, and helps to focus our attention on the major characters, who are not the movers of the war, but merely trying not to get sucked into it.
Well, Castle in the Sky is one of the most boring Miyazaki movies. Even my kids don't like to watch it.
Odd. Both of my nephews counted it among their favorite movies, and have watched it many times. Although one of them complains that he doesn't like the Disney dub as much as the previous English dubbed version.
Don't get me started on the sad, sad release of Atlantis 2, or Tarzan 2, or Lion King 1 1/2, or Cinderella 2, or...
These are particularly unfortunate. Who at Disney decided that sequels had to be utter crap, released direct to video? this sort of garbage undermines Disney's reputation and the value of these properties. Burroughs wrote dozens of Tarzan novels that could be mined for top-notch material. The Lion King also seems like a movie that could support a good sequel, and probably Atlantis as well. I think that the best of Disney can stand up against Japanese theatrical anime. But Disney's sequels can't hold a candle even to Japanese animated TV shows.
Well, I don't know. "I thought it was kind of arbitrary" is as good an opinion as any; I don't think someone needs to either love or hate something in order to be qualified to review it.
However, "I don't like this kind of movie, and I don't like this one, either" is a particularly useless kind of review, because it gives prospective viewers too little information to make a decision. People who already know that they don't like Japanese animation are unlikely to see the film, anyway, so people reading a review are mostly going to be ones who at least think that they might like to see it. The best reviewer is somebody who neither loves nor hates the genre in question.
According to the NY Times article, Apple was "disappointed" with the Cell processor. It may just be too tricky to get high performance out of the Cell. Console developers are highly motivated to get maximum performance, but that is unlikely to be the case for companies developing software for what is (in numbers, at least) a minor platform.
The thesis is that hacked nonreciprocating bittorrent clients are discouraged due to group selection among swarms, because of people manually abandoning poorly performing swarms poisoned with too many nonreciprocating clients. I don't buy it. First, they don't provide evidence that parasitic clients exist "in the wild" in substantial numbers sufficient to be significantly contribute to differences in download speed among swarms. Second, nonreciprocating clients could shift swarms as well. Third, they don't establish that there is sufficient incentive to motivate users to hack or acquire parasitic clients. Given that there is a "cost" to obtaining a hacked client, if only the time of searching it out, then there needs to be an offsetting benefit or people are not going to bother to do it.
So what we need is a "honeypot browser," that represents itself to a website as an old, unpatched copy of IE--but doesn't actually install the spyware. Then we could log in over and over, costing the spyware company money each time.
Hell I've tossed results because they contradiced what I expected. Generally to come back and see I made an error in my procedure. It like doing hard math, sometimes you mess up but generally you see it when you do. Sometimes you can fix it, othertimes you just have to write it off as a fluke.
It is perfectly legitimate to toss out data in the early stages when you are working the bugs out of an experimental method. But you have to toss all of it, not just the part you don't like. But at some point, you have to decide to "go live." After that, you have to keep all of the data unless a control fails. You can't pick and choose data based on the result that bears on the question that you are asking, but you can have "quality control" measures that are independent of the main question. But the rule has to be absolute. If the control fails, you have to throw out the data whether or not the results agree with your expectations.
One often-overlooked source of bias is going back and double-checking procedures when the results turn out "wrong." It can be very tempting to throw out the data if you find a mistake. The problem is that you don't double-check when you like the results, so you miss the errors that appear to support your hypothesis.
Why does either theory have to be excluded from the curriculum in schools? Wouldn't it be better to disccuss the merits of both theories so that students can make up their own minds?
Perhaps in a graduate level biology course, with students who actually have the background to understand all of the data, much of it highly technical, that supports evolution. It could easily be the topic of a full course, and still barely scratch the surface. Introductory courses don't present a lot of information about long-discarded scientific notions because there just isn't time, and it gives the dishonest impression that there is a genuine modern scientific controversy. It would be like giving equal time to the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system, as if scientists were still debating whether the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around.
I work in science department at a large university and what srikes me is the degree to which scientists here are ethical about science, but only science.
Funny, I have the opposite experience. One of the reason why I enjoy working in science is that I find that scientists tend to follow a high ethical standard, not merely in science, but in general. I've run into a few cut-throat types, but they seem to be pretty rare.
If somebody ever asked if I ever changed a study under pressure from a funding source, I'd have to answer "Yes"
I've submitted proposals to NIH, which came back unfunded with study section critiques asking for additional controls, and I've done those controls and gotten funded. Is that misconduct? No, because what they wanted was reasonable, and the work that resulted was better, or at least more convincing, as a result. I've never changed a result due to pressure from a funding source, but that wasn't what was asked.
I agree that Apple is going to lose a lot of sales from this. I've definitely put my own Mac purchasing plans on hold until the dust settles a bit. I was thinking of buying a G5 PowerMac or two; now I think I'll stick with the existing G4's. (Might still buy an iMac or two, though).
What makes Apple's preannouncement of InteliMacs different from Osborne's error is that Apple has the iPod revenue to carry them through. I think this may have a lot to do with Job's decision to make this jump at this time. There is no guarantee that Apple's dominance of the music player business will continue indefinitely, so if a jump is to be made, this is the time to do it. That cushion also probably fueled Jobs's decision to spill the beans so early. Given that Apple can afford to take the hit, leveling with the user and developer communities may well pay off in better goodwill down the line. How would you feel if you had just spent 2 years optimizing your program for Altivec, only to have Steve announce that the Intel machines would be on sale tomorrow? And I'd certainly be upset if I'd just bought a G5 tower. This way, I'll at least get 2 good years of use out of that tower. That's still a bit short--I expect Macs to be useful for at least 5 years--but I won't feel blindsided.
I like the PowerPC chip. I'm disappointed to see Apple abandoning the platform when multicore PowerPCs are starting to come out. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to the day when I'll be able to switch to Windows for the rare application I need that doesn't have an OS X counterpart without taking a big speed hit.
But it's probably OK. In the meantime, I'll let Eddie Bauer shoppers be the test subjects and get my stain-free paints in a couple of decades, after the effects are better understood.
And while you are at it, I'd be surprised if the effects are really all that well understood of low levels of the various proteins and processing chemicals found in "natural" fibers, never mind synthetics that have been around for just a few decades, far too short for some kinds of toxic effects to show up. Maybe to be absolutely safe, it would be a good idea to go naked for the next few decades.
They claim that the pants contain teflon, which is in a family of chemicals that can be absorbed through the skin. It is known that this same family of chemicals accumulates in the body, that most Americans have some level of this in their bodies, and that there is research to show that it damages immune systems in other animals.
"Some level" is pretty much meaningless. Aside from a few mutagens, most toxins do no damage on a single-molecule basis--it takes a bunch of them working together to hurt you. (And even the ones that can hurt you on a single molecule basis often don't do much harm until they are present in quantity). As assay methods become more sensitive, we inevitably find that every molecule in the environment exists in the body at some level. But most toxins have a threshold dose below which they don't do much of anything.
How about you are born with a liver that's only half the size, but that could process blood in a different/more efficient manner that compensated for this and also aided in immuno-response. This would be a defect, in that your liver is malformed from the norm, however a result of whatever caused the defect makes your liver still function like a normal one, and has an added benefit.
I would class this as a genetic variation rather than a defect, because there is no pathological consequence.
The point is just that you are born with some mutation, but there is a positive side-effect to the mutation. This effect must happen for evolution to take place.
All differences are the result of mutation at some point in evolution. So I suppose that one could regard a human being as a "defective ape," but that is not how the term is commonly employed. The term "defect" is used for a variation that has some kind of significant pathological consequence.
Slashdot Mirror
The x86 move was aimed at portables, and low end desktop machines.
I don't think this is true. We'll see low-end InteliMacs first, but that is only because it will take Apple a year or so to develop Intel based systems that surpass current G5's.
As Apple announced previously, OS X for Intel will be designed to run only on Intel Macs. Ever since then, people have been speculating that Apple might use Intel's Trusted Platform Module chip to protect OSX.
They still are.
Apple still isn't saying
My major concern would be whether the off-brand inks increased the risk of head clogging.
It is worth noting that when Jobs dropped out was a fairly unique time. If you were good with computers, you pretty much didn't need a degree. I knew people who dropped out of college, talked themselves into a computer job, and are now well-paid computer professionals. By the time a degree started to matter, they were so experienced that nobody really cared that they didn't have one.
It's probably still true that if you can jump into a high-tech job at a startup company without finishing your degree, you may end up doing better financially than if you stayed in college, because you get an earlier start at building your career. But such opportunities aren't nearly as abundant now.
Richard Feynman is mildly famous for having said that "I love to think and I don't want to screw up the machine," electing to go with sensory deprivation instead of drugs to get a hallucinogenic experience going.
Of course, that presumes that sensory deprivation is less hazardous to the machine than psychedelics.
Imagine all the 'hard' work teachers, parents and guidance counselors put into brainwashing every kid that he/she must go to University."
So what are they going to do? Refuse to accept their diplomas? It's graduation. Pretty much the only people there are graduates, parents, and teachers.
The downside was Billy Crystal's voice that sort of took the scenes with it a little over the top and pulled the movie out of the fantasy land into our world of mundanes (similar to what happened to Shrek 2). However, the animators always pulled us back into that strange and wonderful land, but sometimes there was this tug of war. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings with Gimli having a Brooklyn accent!
I remember thinking that I wanted to see the Japanese version to see if that character was voiced as broadly as it was by Billy Crystal in the English version. I wouldn't be surprised if he is. If anything, the Japanese seem more accepting than Americans of broadly comic characters in this kind of story. And the animation seemed to fit with Crystal's voice.
find it amuzing for some reason that you didn't list Houston, which is larger than Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, or Ft Worth. Everyone forgets about Houston.
I was in Houston just after the release of Spirited Away in Boston. I wanted to take my nephews (who love Miyazaki's films) to see it, but it wasn't playing anywhere in town.
I've skimmed through it again, and I don't think he says anywhere that he doesn't like anime. He just says that he has in the past hated movies everyone else loved and loved movies everyone else hated. He doesn't seem to have any bias against the medium (or genre).
Actually, a reviewer who is always wrong can be useful. Just go to see the films he hates. Personally, I've found that the strongest indicator as to whether I will like a film is the degree of disagreement among reviewers. The films I really like are the ones that some reviewers love and others hate.
In this case, he just seems to have a rigidity of mind that makes him a poor choice for reviewing fantasy. He couldn't deal with Howl's magical teleporting door that takes you to different places depending upon how you set the dial. Considering that this is a rather mild example of the magic of Howl's Moving Castle, he just found the movie confusing.
the rapturous critical acclaim is among critics who don't know jack about Miyazaki and don't have the frame of reference to tell his good works from his bad works. Most critics are going to say it's amazing because they don't want to be seen as 'Dunb' or 'Out of it'
It's not the best thing that Miyazaki has ever done (I liked Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Nausicaa better) but it is still a wonderful movie. Miyazaki has never produced a bad movie; even his worst are competitive with Disney's best. I particularly liked having a heroine who spends most of the movie as a crone, and who seems to grow from the experience. I thought that she was deeper and more interesting than Miyazake's usual "plucky girl" protagonists.
The one complaint I've heard is that Miyazaki leaves some plot threads dangling--we never know for sure who cursed Turniphead and fomented the war or why (Sulliman, to consolidate her own power?). But that is a very realistic view of war, and helps to focus our attention on the major characters, who are not the movers of the war, but merely trying not to get sucked into it.
Actually, aside from limited promotion, Disney has been treating Miyazaki's work with respect, producing English dubs with topnotch voice acting.
Well, Castle in the Sky is one of the most boring Miyazaki movies. Even my kids don't like to watch it.
Odd. Both of my nephews counted it among their favorite movies, and have watched it many times. Although one of them complains that he doesn't like the Disney dub as much as the previous English dubbed version.
Don't get me started on the sad, sad release of Atlantis 2, or Tarzan 2, or Lion King 1 1/2, or Cinderella 2, or...
These are particularly unfortunate. Who at Disney decided that sequels had to be utter crap, released direct to video? this sort of garbage undermines Disney's reputation and the value of these properties. Burroughs wrote dozens of Tarzan novels that could be mined for top-notch material. The Lion King also seems like a movie that could support a good sequel, and probably Atlantis as well. I think that the best of Disney can stand up against Japanese theatrical anime. But Disney's sequels can't hold a candle even to Japanese animated TV shows.
Well, I don't know. "I thought it was kind of arbitrary" is as good an opinion as any; I don't think someone needs to either love or hate something in order to be qualified to review it.
However, "I don't like this kind of movie, and I don't like this one, either" is a particularly useless kind of review, because it gives prospective viewers too little information to make a decision. People who already know that they don't like Japanese animation are unlikely to see the film, anyway, so people reading a review are mostly going to be ones who at least think that they might like to see it. The best reviewer is somebody who neither loves nor hates the genre in question.
According to the NY Times article, Apple was "disappointed" with the Cell processor. It may just be too tricky to get high performance out of the Cell. Console developers are highly motivated to get maximum performance, but that is unlikely to be the case for companies developing software for what is (in numbers, at least) a minor platform.
The thesis is that hacked nonreciprocating bittorrent clients are discouraged due to group selection among swarms, because of people manually abandoning poorly performing swarms poisoned with too many nonreciprocating clients. I don't buy it. First, they don't provide evidence that parasitic clients exist "in the wild" in substantial numbers sufficient to be significantly contribute to differences in download speed among swarms. Second, nonreciprocating clients could shift swarms as well. Third, they don't establish that there is sufficient incentive to motivate users to hack or acquire parasitic clients. Given that there is a "cost" to obtaining a hacked client, if only the time of searching it out, then there needs to be an offsetting benefit or people are not going to bother to do it.
So what we need is a "honeypot browser," that represents itself to a website as an old, unpatched copy of IE--but doesn't actually install the spyware. Then we could log in over and over, costing the spyware company money each time.
People may think that the review process is double-blind. Yes, that's true.
No, it isn't. Generally reviewers get the manuscript with names attached. I don't know of any journal that does "blind" reviews.
Hell I've tossed results because they contradiced what I expected. Generally to come back and see I made an error in my procedure. It like doing hard math, sometimes you mess up but generally you see it when you do. Sometimes you can fix it, othertimes you just have to write it off as a fluke.
It is perfectly legitimate to toss out data in the early stages when you are working the bugs out of an experimental method. But you have to toss all of it, not just the part you don't like. But at some point, you have to decide to "go live." After that, you have to keep all of the data unless a control fails. You can't pick and choose data based on the result that bears on the question that you are asking, but you can have "quality control" measures that are independent of the main question. But the rule has to be absolute. If the control fails, you have to throw out the data whether or not the results agree with your expectations.
One often-overlooked source of bias is going back and double-checking procedures when the results turn out "wrong." It can be very tempting to throw out the data if you find a mistake. The problem is that you don't double-check when you like the results, so you miss the errors that appear to support your hypothesis.
Why does either theory have to be excluded from the curriculum in schools? Wouldn't it be better to disccuss the merits of both theories so that students can make up their own minds?
Perhaps in a graduate level biology course, with students who actually have the background to understand all of the data, much of it highly technical, that supports evolution. It could easily be the topic of a full course, and still barely scratch the surface. Introductory courses don't present a lot of information about long-discarded scientific notions because there just isn't time, and it gives the dishonest impression that there is a genuine modern scientific controversy. It would be like giving equal time to the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system, as if scientists were still debating whether the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around.
I work in science department at a large university and what srikes me is the degree to which scientists here are ethical about science, but only science.
Funny, I have the opposite experience. One of the reason why I enjoy working in science is that I find that scientists tend to follow a high ethical standard, not merely in science, but in general. I've run into a few cut-throat types, but they seem to be pretty rare.
If somebody ever asked if I ever changed a study under pressure from a funding source, I'd have to answer "Yes"
I've submitted proposals to NIH, which came back unfunded with study section critiques asking for additional controls, and I've done those controls and gotten funded. Is that misconduct? No, because what they wanted was reasonable, and the work that resulted was better, or at least more convincing, as a result. I've never changed a result due to pressure from a funding source, but that wasn't what was asked.
I agree that Apple is going to lose a lot of sales from this. I've definitely put my own Mac purchasing plans on hold until the dust settles a bit. I was thinking of buying a G5 PowerMac or two; now I think I'll stick with the existing G4's. (Might still buy an iMac or two, though).
What makes Apple's preannouncement of InteliMacs different from Osborne's error is that Apple has the iPod revenue to carry them through. I think this may have a lot to do with Job's decision to make this jump at this time. There is no guarantee that Apple's dominance of the music player business will continue indefinitely, so if a jump is to be made, this is the time to do it. That cushion also probably fueled Jobs's decision to spill the beans so early. Given that Apple can afford to take the hit, leveling with the user and developer communities may well pay off in better goodwill down the line. How would you feel if you had just spent 2 years optimizing your program for Altivec, only to have Steve announce that the Intel machines would be on sale tomorrow? And I'd certainly be upset if I'd just bought a G5 tower. This way, I'll at least get 2 good years of use out of that tower. That's still a bit short--I expect Macs to be useful for at least 5 years--but I won't feel blindsided.
I like the PowerPC chip. I'm disappointed to see Apple abandoning the platform when multicore PowerPCs are starting to come out. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to the day when I'll be able to switch to Windows for the rare application I need that doesn't have an OS X counterpart without taking a big speed hit.
But it's probably OK. In the meantime, I'll let Eddie Bauer shoppers be the test subjects and get my stain-free paints in a couple of decades, after the effects are better understood.
And while you are at it, I'd be surprised if the effects are really all that well understood of low levels of the various proteins and processing chemicals found in "natural" fibers, never mind synthetics that have been around for just a few decades, far too short for some kinds of toxic effects to show up. Maybe to be absolutely safe, it would be a good idea to go naked for the next few decades.
They claim that the pants contain teflon, which is in a family of chemicals that can be absorbed through the skin. It is known that this same family of chemicals accumulates in the body, that most Americans have some level of this in their bodies, and that there is research to show that it damages immune systems in other animals.
"Some level" is pretty much meaningless. Aside from a few mutagens, most toxins do no damage on a single-molecule basis--it takes a bunch of them working together to hurt you. (And even the ones that can hurt you on a single molecule basis often don't do much harm until they are present in quantity). As assay methods become more sensitive, we inevitably find that every molecule in the environment exists in the body at some level. But most toxins have a threshold dose below which they don't do much of anything.
How about you are born with a liver that's only half the size, but that could process blood in a different/more efficient manner that compensated for this and also aided in immuno-response. This would be a defect, in that your liver is malformed from the norm, however a result of whatever caused the defect makes your liver still function like a normal one, and has an added benefit.
I would class this as a genetic variation rather than a defect, because there is no pathological consequence.
The point is just that you are born with some mutation, but there is a positive side-effect to the mutation. This effect must happen for evolution to take place.
All differences are the result of mutation at some point in evolution. So I suppose that one could regard a human being as a "defective ape," but that is not how the term is commonly employed. The term "defect" is used for a variation that has some kind of significant pathological consequence.