1. More CPU's, more SKU's. And that means more difficulties in inventory-management and increased costs
Their laptops and the mini already use different CPUs than the iMac and the towers. (G4s instead of G5s, along with the different motherboards and support chips.)
So switching the current G4 machines to Intel wouldn't be much of a problem in this respect. It'd be different if they sold all their machines in PPC and Intel versions.
2. You expect Apple and third-party developers to support two binary-incompatible CPU's in the long run? PPC and x86 are very different, supporting both is an added hassle no-one wants to do. They can and will do it during the relatively short transition-peroid, but they would not want to do it for years to come.
NeXT, with far tinier resources than Apple has, used to support their OS on four binary incompatible CPUs, without control over the hardware. I don't think it would be a big stretch to just support x86 and PPC machines.
As it is, we know Apple is going to be selling a mix of x86 and PPC machines for 18 months or so, and releasing one major OS upgrade during this dual-architecture period.
Perhaps they could incorporate a second LCD, in front of the backlight LED array, which would be identical to the color LCD except lacking the R, G, and B bits - it'd be greyscale, but each pixel would still have three sub-pixels.
The middle LCD would help compensate for the low resolution of the backlight array, by darkening pixels and subpixels where necessary.
Exactly. The pharamaceutical companies' rhetoric sounds, to me, a little like that used by sports team owners when they're trying to extort a new tax-funded stadium out of a city.
The truth of the matter is that they exaggerate how hard it'd be on them if their enormous profits were reduced by, say, half.
Profits, after all, are profits. Not R&D expenditures, or lobbying expenditures, or marketing expenditures, or legal expenditures.
And the arguments about risk don't really hold for the big companies. The riskiest biotech ventures are the small startups without proven products. The big established firms, by contrast, have cash cow products to cover any risky work they do. And to the extent that they license drugs from the risky startups, they shield themselves from the risk of development of those products.
And regardless, Big Pharma is enormously profitable, for all their claimed "woes".
If the profit margin was slimmer, companies would still make pharmaceuticals. If nobody went into business if they weren't guaranteed pharma-class profits, there'd be a lot of industries that wouldn't exist. Grocery stores, for instance, are inherently low-margin businesses. Yet they haven't looked at their 1-2% profit margins and said, "Feh! I quit!"
"There are considerably higher priced custom cables, including a custom open busbar setup of certified monocrystalline oxygen free silver plated copper on glass standoff insulators, for around $200/foot."
My favorite are the cables you can buy which claim to use light as a special insulation. Yes, light. They're ridiculously expensive. Thousands of dollars, if I recall correctly. For speaker cables. With light-beam insulation.
"I don't understand why anyone cares about the end of Cocoa-Java support in the first place. Why was anyone using it in the first place?"
I've no idea. I think it was created because Apple was concerned that Objective-C would be too alien and would be rejected. So they created Cocoa-Java, sort of a comfy security blanket insulating the programmer from Objective-C.
Around the time of the Apple/NeXT merger, there was even some thought given to redoing Objective-C to have a Java-like syntax. Thankfully, they didn't do that.
One thing that *is* good, is the Objective-C/Java bridge, which lets Objective-C programs use Java library code.
For instance, you could use lucene from within a Cocoa app, and the bridge makes it pretty transparent to instantiate a Java object from ObjC, and use it like you would an Objective-C object.
That would be nice to keep around, as long as they can.
But maintaining Cocoa-Java means they need to create a Java facade for the Objective-C APIs, and they need to create Java equivalents for C constructs and Objective-C Categories which don't quite map cleanly onto Java. That's a fair amount of work.
It doesn't seem like a good use of resources. Cocoa Java has always been a masochistic way to build Cocoa apps.
Apple never, ever had sole use rights of the PowerPC. The PowerPC is widely used in the embedded space. I believe there were WinCE handhelds running on PowerPC.
And Apple doesn't compete with game consoles.
So, you're pulling this out of your nether regions.
Um, if I were inclined to use a cell phone as a detonator, I'd want to make sure that nobody was going to call the cellphone, except me.
A stolen cellphone would make this rather difficult. There'd be a fair chance that you'd get a call at a rather inopportune moment, from someone trying to call the phone's real owner.
Actually, the ability to import "stuff" cheap won't help you all that much. The things that keep our cost of living high are mainly things like rent, transportation, healthcare, saving for retirement, etc.
Someone who plays for a couple of hours on a boring Sunday afternoon is fresh meat for seasoned veterans of a game - and there's really no way to change this other than limiting how much people can play.
Maybe, at a certain level, players should be coaxed into tasks that take them "into the west", as it were - to a remote continent of upper-level players, from whence it is difficult to return.
It's hypocritical to claim they're crackpots because they say something that runs against current scientific belief, then cry foul when they actually act like scientists and want to test their hypotheses.
Well, they really had nothing to do with "testing their hypotheses". It wasn't *their* project, was it?
Given that the experiment was going to happen, it makes little difference whether they publicize their hypothesis up front. It's not like the crackpots could stop it.
It's not like their nonsense is *new*. They've evidently talked about it before. So they'd have plenty of proof if, bizarrely, the experiment supported their theories.
The first game to sell 3.5 billion copies will be one for women in which the goal is to manipulate hapless "nice guys" into doing your bidding, without givin' it up.
In the case of the author, he expect people to pay the same $40 for something that will index their personal library (books, videos, etc). Sure it is very cool with an impressive GUI, barcode support using a video camera, and all that, but it is not something you couldn't do with a spreadsheet, at its most basic.
On the other hand, a spreadsheet is not something you couldn't do with a pencil, some lined paper and a calculator, at its most basic.
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1. More CPU's, more SKU's. And that means more difficulties in inventory-management and increased costs
Their laptops and the mini already use different CPUs than the iMac and the towers. (G4s instead of G5s, along with
the different motherboards and support chips.)
So switching the current G4 machines to Intel wouldn't be much of a problem in this respect. It'd be different
if they sold all their machines in PPC and Intel versions.
2. You expect Apple and third-party developers to support two binary-incompatible CPU's in the long run? PPC and x86 are very different, supporting both is an added hassle no-one wants to do. They can and will do it during the relatively short transition-peroid, but they would not want to do it for years to come.
NeXT, with far tinier resources than Apple has, used to support their OS on four binary incompatible CPUs, without control
over the hardware. I don't think it would be a big stretch to just support x86 and PPC machines.
As it is, we know Apple is going to be selling a mix of x86 and PPC machines for 18 months or so, and releasing one major OS upgrade
during this dual-architecture period.
Perhaps they could incorporate a second LCD, in front of the backlight LED array, which would be identical to the color LCD
except lacking the R, G, and B bits - it'd be greyscale, but each pixel would still have three sub-pixels.
The middle LCD would help compensate for the low resolution of the backlight array, by darkening pixels and
subpixels where necessary.
Exactly. The pharamaceutical companies' rhetoric sounds, to me, a little like
that used by sports team owners when they're trying to extort a new tax-funded
stadium out of a city.
The truth of the matter is that they exaggerate how hard it'd be on them if their
enormous profits were reduced by, say, half.
Profits, after all, are profits. Not R&D expenditures, or lobbying expenditures,
or marketing expenditures, or legal expenditures.
And the arguments about risk don't really hold for the big companies. The
riskiest biotech ventures are the small startups without proven products. The big
established firms, by contrast, have cash cow products to cover any risky work they do.
And to the extent that they license drugs from the risky startups, they shield
themselves from the risk of development of those products.
" you never know when software vendors will just up and decide to drop PPC support completely"
Why would they do that, when most of their hardware is PowerPC, and supporting both platforms is pretty easy?
Krispy Kreme donuts.
Hummers (the vehicles)
The bloody stupid International Harvester CXT "SUV".
Etc.
But not the marketing costs of the drug.
And regardless, Big Pharma is enormously profitable, for all their claimed "woes".
If the profit margin was slimmer, companies would still make pharmaceuticals. If nobody went into business if they weren't guaranteed pharma-class profits, there'd be a lot of industries that wouldn't exist. Grocery stores, for instance, are inherently low-margin businesses. Yet they haven't looked at their 1-2% profit margins and said, "Feh! I quit!"
"There are considerably higher priced custom cables, including a custom open busbar setup of certified monocrystalline oxygen free silver plated copper on glass standoff insulators, for around $200/foot."
My favorite are the cables you can buy which claim to use light as a special insulation. Yes, light. They're ridiculously expensive. Thousands of dollars, if I recall correctly. For speaker cables. With light-beam insulation.
The most amazing thing is that they did it all in Interface Builder without any code.
"I don't understand why anyone cares about the end of Cocoa-Java support in the first place. Why was anyone using it in the first place?"
I've no idea. I think it was created because Apple was concerned that Objective-C would be too alien and would be rejected. So they created Cocoa-Java, sort of a comfy security blanket insulating the programmer from Objective-C.
Around the time of the Apple/NeXT merger, there was even some thought given to redoing Objective-C to have a Java-like syntax. Thankfully, they didn't do that.
One thing that *is* good, is the Objective-C/Java bridge, which lets Objective-C programs use Java library code.
For instance, you could use lucene from within a Cocoa app, and the bridge makes it pretty transparent to instantiate a Java object from ObjC, and use it like you would an Objective-C object.
That would be nice to keep around, as long as they can.
But maintaining Cocoa-Java means they need to create a Java facade for the Objective-C APIs, and they need to create Java equivalents for C constructs and Objective-C Categories which don't quite map cleanly onto Java. That's a fair amount of work.
It doesn't seem like a good use of resources. Cocoa Java has always been a masochistic way to build Cocoa apps.
It's just because maintaining it is too much work considering how few people use Cocoa-Java.
Java itself will still be available.
Apple never, ever had sole use rights of the PowerPC. The PowerPC is widely used in the embedded space. I believe there were WinCE handhelds running on PowerPC.
And Apple doesn't compete with game consoles.
So, you're pulling this out of your nether regions.
That'd make it truly unique.
It really isn't a big deal. Few people use Cocoa-Java to build apps, and it hasn't ever been very well supported or documented.
It doesn't effect cross-platform Java, won't effect WebObjects (which is 100% Java).
Yes, IBM's new CPUs seem adequate. But what about next year? And the year after that? And the year after that?
Given their history, I don't think they can be depended on to keep revving the line quickly enough.
To get the latest G5's out, Apple probably had to shovel truckloads of prunes into the goddam fab.
Um, if I were inclined to use a cell phone as a detonator, I'd want to make sure that nobody was going to call the cellphone, except me.
A stolen cellphone would make this rather difficult. There'd be a fair chance that you'd get a call at a rather inopportune moment, from someone trying to call the phone's real owner.
Actually, the ability to import "stuff" cheap won't help you all that much. The things that keep our cost of living high are mainly things like rent, transportation, healthcare, saving for retirement, etc.
Not free as in beer.
Ah, good point.
How much of the lactose would be converted in the few days allowed in the production of kumiss?
Except Europeans aren't alone in drinking milk.
For example, Central Asians drink kumiss: mare's milk allowed to ferment.
We are the only species on the planet to do so, and to our detriment.
Sure other species do, it's just rare.
It's not unheard of for a female animal of one species to nurse babies of a different species.
I'm sure it happens more frequently in domesticated animals than in wild animals, but it does happen.
It could be a big hit.
Someone who plays for a couple of hours on a boring Sunday afternoon is fresh meat for seasoned veterans of a game - and there's really no way to change this other than limiting how much people can play.
Maybe, at a certain level, players should be coaxed into tasks that take them "into the west", as it were - to a remote continent of upper-level players, from whence it is difficult to return.
Maybe they could be press-ganged...
It's hypocritical to claim they're crackpots because they say something that runs against current scientific belief, then cry foul when they actually act like scientists and want to test their hypotheses.
Well, they really had nothing to do with "testing their hypotheses". It wasn't *their* project, was it?
Given that the experiment was going to happen, it makes little difference whether they publicize their hypothesis up front. It's not like the crackpots could stop it.
It's not like their nonsense is *new*. They've evidently talked about it before. So they'd have plenty of proof if, bizarrely, the experiment supported their theories.
The first game to sell 3.5 billion copies will be one for women in which the goal is to manipulate hapless "nice guys" into doing your bidding, without givin' it up.
In the case of the author, he expect people to pay the same $40 for something that will index their personal library (books, videos, etc). Sure it is very cool with an impressive GUI, barcode support using a video camera, and all that, but it is not something you couldn't do with a spreadsheet, at its most basic.
On the other hand, a spreadsheet is not something you couldn't do with a pencil, some lined paper and a calculator, at its most basic.