A lot of quirks in programming langauges don't show until one is actually trying to code something useful with them.
Yeah, like all those Java projects (Wordperfect? Sun's ports of the Lighthouse apps? Etc?) that were stillborn when the development teams ran into the quirk of Java that it couldn't be used for such applications.
"I know manual memory management is simple, but what I don't understand is why it must be required, especially when there are languages out there that have clearly demonstrated that it doesn't need to be that way for many projects."
On the other hand, those languages haven't been particularly successful when it comes to desktop apps, have they?
Unlike C#, it isn't a pain in the ass to go outside of Objective-C. Therefore, you aren't limited to Cocoa, and you can use whatever regex package you like, whether that is implemented in C, C++, Objective-C, or whatever else.
This is actually the most exciting time for java in a long time:
It's not possible to get excited about things called "JSR 241", "JSR 274", "JSR 223", unless you're the type to get horny when talking about TPS reports.
Those identifiers are evidence of the vast bureaucratic morass that Java has become. It's distinctly unsexy.
Which is probably part of the reason why people are seeking other platforms that are younger and haven't become weighed down by bureaucracy and committees.
The problem with the theory is that each leaf is part of a massive liquid cooling system. The heat is far more likely to be transported into the core of the tree, along with the products of photosynthesis, than it is to be reradiated.
If you roll around on a green lawn in summer, the grass is cool. Leaves on a tree are also cool, in my experience, it's just rather difficult to roll around on them because they're so spread out.
But dead grass? Not cool. No water flow, so no cooling.
"Where do you think the CO2 goes to, anyway? Most of the trees, leaves and roots rot - they are turned back into CO2 by fungi and bacteria."
The Carbon in the plant matter is also turned into fungi and bacteria and bugs, some portions of which will be relatively stable after they die. (Exoskeletons, etc).
Um, how are green corn, or green soybeans, or green cabbage, or brown dirt between the rows supposed to be an improvement over green trees? The only thing that would have an advantage would be dry, yellow grass. Which, incidentally, can get awfully warm.
Leaves aren't heat-radiating surfaces: every single leaf is liquid-cooled. Heat isn't going to be radiated to any significant extent: it'll be carried into the core of the tree, along with the products of photosynthesis.
Powerbook customers are more likely to need to run a broad range of software
Not switchers. Apple's new customers coming over from Windows or Linux won't have a significant investment. Your points are valid for Apple's longer-term customers, but not for the newer customers who have come on board since OS X came out.
Apple would probably be willing to ride on upgrades and new purchases from that portion of the market, for a few months while Intel versions of software start coming out.
Further, it's not unlikely that any Intel Powerbooks announced in January won't actually be available for a month or more, providing time for Intel port announcements and shipments.
It makes more sense to differentiate the two by giving PowerBooks the dual-core, with iBooks getting the upcoming single-core Yonah. And that'd certainly go a long ways towards keeping the iBooks cheap.
If this NEC is supposed to be $2k, that strongly suggests a dual-core mac notebook would be well out of the iBook price range, but right in line with PowerBook prices.
Powerbooks were upgraded recently, but it was a pretty meager bump.
""Somewhere beyond the pearly gates, Bob Wills is stretched out in a rocking chair, a cigar in his left hand, a glass of Jack Daniel's in the other, tapping his foot and grinnin' from ear to ear. With all the crap on the airwaves that tries to pass itself as country music these days, this new recording is blessed relief...19 songs all told, each executed with the wild abandon and excellent musicianship that characterized Wills and the Playboys." - David Bennett, San Antonio Current"
The real problem is that we're already sending obsolete computer hardware to the third world by the container load.
If someone wants to provide the developing world with computers, they should come up with a platform that can be built locally by cannibalizing the old computers piling up around them.
Negroponte should fly a team of MIT students to some old PC graveyard in India and give them a couple of weeks to come up with a platform based on the available parts on the ground.
"A billion dollars to immigrate the poor or a billion dollars to educate the poor?"
A laptop is not an education. It's a tool that may, under certain circumstances, facilitate learning, but overall it's probably a wash. In the US, laptops in curricula typically turns out to mean giving the students assignments where they, for example, do their history report as a web page. End result, they probably waste a bunch of time on HTML crap they don't really need to know, and spend less time on the history they're supposed to be learning.
Furthermore, laptop or no, it's hard to learn when you're shitting yourself to death because the water is bad and sanitation in your town is more a long-term goal than a reality. And forget about learning when you're winding a guinea worm parasite out of your leg for a few weeks.
If 3rd world laptops are going to be of any use, they should be targeted at teachers and administrators, not at the students.
Alas, targeting the teachers and administrators wouldn't get Nicholas Negroponte enough PR to garner another 60 seconds of fame.
"This pathetic damage control story from Microsoft doesn't even specify which chip or chips in the troubled 360 is the problem. "
As far as I'm aware the only chip that is particularly unusual is the 3-core PPC CPU from IBM, a company known for having performance problems with the PPC line.
The rest of the chips aren't all that different from their peers, so are unlikely to pose much of a manufacturing challenge.
"A key problem is American K-12 education is so bad, and American young people have so many problems with discipline and motivation the U.S. just doesn't turn out many native top flight students any more. "
Er, no.
The problem is that very few Americans see graduate school as being worthwhile, professionally. I mean, look at our role models: Steve Jobs? college dropout. Bill Gates? college dropout. The simple fact is, you don't *need* a PhD, or even a Masters' Degree, to achieve in the US.
Why, exactly, should people bother spending years as virtual indentured servants when they could be pursuing a career?
Furthermore, I would guess that foreign PhD students aren't carrying massive debt taken on to pay for their education.
For students in the US, it is far more rational to get out of school and start working ASAP, rather than taking on more debt by pursuing a graduate degree.
" That claim may not be true, but simply saying "well, per-capita..." does nothing to lessen the ramifications if it is."
It's absolutely unrealistic to expect much more of the population to go into science and engineering. What do you want to do, force people into careers they don't want? Force so many people into it that wages plummet, making people even less happy about being in the field?
Look, the US is a tiny portion of the world's population. We're going to be outnumbered whether you like it or not, so there's no real point getting your knickers in a twist.
It's a bullshit complaint. The US isn't making good use of the PhDs it already *has*. The companies just want a bigger supply so they can cherry-pick and pay lower salaries.
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A lot of quirks in programming langauges don't show until one is actually trying to code something useful with them.
Yeah, like all those Java projects (Wordperfect? Sun's ports of the Lighthouse apps? Etc?) that were stillborn when the development teams ran into the quirk of Java that it couldn't be used for such applications.
C# is actually the demonic hellspawn of Delphi and Java.
"I know manual memory management is simple, but what I don't understand is why it must be required, especially when there are languages out there that have clearly demonstrated that it doesn't need to be that way for many projects."
On the other hand, those languages haven't been particularly successful when it comes to desktop apps, have they?
Unlike C#, it isn't a pain in the ass to go outside of Objective-C. Therefore, you aren't limited to Cocoa, and you can use whatever regex package you like, whether that is implemented in C, C++, Objective-C, or whatever else.
The Java territory is pretty much tapped out in terms of publishing and expensive developer conferences.
The people leaving Java are just headed for new wide-open territory, where they can write the books, become big names, and make loads of money.
This is actually the most exciting time for java in a long time:
It's not possible to get excited about things called "JSR 241", "JSR 274", "JSR 223", unless you're the type to get horny when talking about TPS reports.
Those identifiers are evidence of the vast bureaucratic morass that Java has become. It's distinctly unsexy.
Which is probably part of the reason why people are seeking other platforms that are younger and haven't become weighed down by bureaucracy and committees.
No he'll accuse Mauritius of harboring a dodo-based WMD program, and launch a war.
The problem with the theory is that each leaf is part of a massive liquid cooling system. The heat is far more likely to be transported into the core of the tree, along with the products of photosynthesis, than it is to be reradiated.
If you roll around on a green lawn in summer, the grass is cool. Leaves on a tree are also cool, in my experience, it's just rather difficult to roll around on them because they're so spread out.
But dead grass? Not cool. No water flow, so no cooling.
Oh, and if trees and biomass weren't pretty good at holding onto carbon, long term, we wouldn't have oil and coal to burn, would we?
What do you think oil and coal are made of?
"Where do you think the CO2 goes to, anyway? Most of the trees, leaves and roots rot - they are turned back into CO2 by fungi and bacteria."
The Carbon in the plant matter is also turned into fungi and bacteria and bugs, some portions of which will be relatively stable after they die. (Exoskeletons, etc).
Um, how are green corn, or green soybeans, or green cabbage, or brown dirt between the rows supposed to be an improvement over green trees? The only thing that would have an advantage would be dry, yellow grass. Which, incidentally, can get awfully warm.
Leaves aren't heat-radiating surfaces: every single leaf is liquid-cooled. Heat isn't going to be radiated to any significant extent: it'll be carried into the core of the tree, along with the products of photosynthesis.
I kinda suspect their calculations were done with respect to a spherical conifer forest of uniform density. So to speak.
Did they take into account the fact that many trees in temperate forests don't actually have leaves for a significant portion of the year?
It's about as juvenile and tired as "We're FBI: Female Body Inspectors".
Get a new joke, kids.
Powerbook customers are more likely to need to run a broad range of software
Not switchers. Apple's new customers coming over from Windows or Linux won't have a significant investment. Your points are valid for Apple's longer-term customers, but not for the newer customers who have come on board since OS X came out.
Apple would probably be willing to ride on upgrades and new purchases from that portion of the market, for a few months while Intel versions of software start coming out.
Further, it's not unlikely that any Intel Powerbooks announced in January won't actually be available for a month or more, providing time for Intel port announcements and shipments.
Not a problem. They figured out a way to use the heat to power the backlight.
Works pretty well, if you don't mind a reddish-orange tint. It only goes white when you're really hammering the CPU.
It makes more sense to differentiate the two by giving PowerBooks the dual-core, with iBooks getting the upcoming single-core Yonah. And that'd certainly go a long ways towards keeping the iBooks cheap.
If this NEC is supposed to be $2k, that strongly suggests a dual-core mac notebook would be well out of the iBook price range, but right in line with PowerBook prices.
Powerbooks were upgraded recently, but it was a pretty meager bump.
He might like "The Pine Valley Cosmonauts Salute The Majesty Of Bob Wills" from Bloodshot Records.
""Somewhere beyond the pearly gates, Bob Wills is stretched out in a rocking chair, a cigar in his left hand, a glass of Jack Daniel's in the other, tapping his foot and grinnin' from ear to ear. With all the crap on the airwaves that tries to pass itself as country music these days, this new recording is blessed relief...19 songs all told, each executed with the wild abandon and excellent musicianship that characterized Wills and the Playboys." - David Bennett, San Antonio Current"
The real problem is that we're already sending obsolete computer hardware to the third world by the container load.
If someone wants to provide the developing world with computers, they should come up with a platform that can be built locally by cannibalizing the old computers piling up around them.
Negroponte should fly a team of MIT students to some old PC graveyard in India and give them a couple of weeks to come up with a platform based on the available parts on the ground.
"A billion dollars to immigrate the poor or a billion dollars to educate the poor?"
A laptop is not an education. It's a tool that may, under certain circumstances, facilitate learning, but overall it's probably a wash. In the US, laptops in curricula typically turns out to mean giving the students assignments where they, for example, do their history report as a web page. End result, they probably waste a bunch of time on HTML crap they don't really need to know, and spend less time on the history they're supposed to be learning.
Furthermore, laptop or no, it's hard to learn when you're shitting yourself to death because the water is bad and sanitation in your town is more a long-term goal than a reality. And forget about learning when you're winding a guinea worm parasite out of your leg for a few weeks.
If 3rd world laptops are going to be of any use, they should be targeted at teachers and administrators, not at the students.
Alas, targeting the teachers and administrators wouldn't get Nicholas Negroponte enough PR to garner another 60 seconds of fame.
"! But we all know the RIAA is there to make their customers as unhappy as possible, so indeed, they are trying to fix what is not broken"
You may have a mistaken idea of who the RIAA thinks are their customers.
"This pathetic damage control story from Microsoft doesn't even specify which chip or chips in the troubled 360 is the problem. "
As far as I'm aware the only chip that is particularly unusual is the 3-core PPC CPU from IBM, a company known for having performance problems with the PPC line.
The rest of the chips aren't all that different from their peers, so are unlikely to pose much of a manufacturing challenge.
Not albums put out by Bloodshot Records, I don't think.
It would be nice if the store let you search by label, at least.
"It was when I signed up and will continue to be through the end of November "
Great. So what happens on December 1st?
I can tell you how much my iTunes-bought songs are going to cost me a year from now ($0). Can you say the same?
"A key problem is American K-12 education is so bad, and American young people have so many problems with discipline and motivation the U.S. just doesn't turn out many native top flight students any more. "
Er, no.
The problem is that very few Americans see graduate school as being worthwhile, professionally. I mean, look at our role models: Steve Jobs? college dropout. Bill Gates? college dropout. The simple fact is, you don't *need* a PhD, or even a Masters' Degree, to achieve in the US.
Why, exactly, should people bother spending years as virtual indentured servants when they could be pursuing a career?
Furthermore, I would guess that foreign PhD students aren't carrying massive debt taken on to pay for their education.
For students in the US, it is far more rational to get out of school and start working ASAP, rather than taking on more debt by pursuing a graduate degree.
" That claim may not be true, but simply saying "well, per-capita..." does nothing to lessen the ramifications if it is."
It's absolutely unrealistic to expect much more of the population to go into science and engineering. What do you want to do, force people into careers they don't want? Force so many people into it that wages plummet, making people even less happy about being in the field?
Look, the US is a tiny portion of the world's population. We're going to be outnumbered whether you like it or not, so there's no real point getting your knickers in a twist.
It's a bullshit complaint. The US isn't making good use of the PhDs it already *has*. The companies just want a bigger supply so they can cherry-pick and pay lower salaries.