It's too bad that it falls behind MATLAB for numeric data and behind Maple for symbolic mathematics but in some cases cases (many cases) it's still handy to have a single piece of software that does a decent job at both symbolic and numeric computations.
I think you may be relying on dated experience with Mathematica. Mathematica has been pretty comparable to MATLAB in terms of speed since version 6. Look up scientificweb's ncrunch comparison.
I would think the mobile phone is the most likely culprit, I have seen people in a near total daze oblivious to the rest of the world with their attention totally devoted to mindless texting, hmm, texting whilst mobile music player at full volume, for quite a few air heads, a sure recipe for disaster.
I think you're right on the money here. While we don't seem to have a lot of pedestrian research, there has been some research on driving that shows that talking on the phone raises the risk of accidents, regardless of whether the conversation was hands-free or not. Blasting your music in the car or listening to books or tape seems to cause many fewer accidents. Talking or texting occupies your attention more actively than passive listening.
Makes me hate this cult I appear to be a member of.
Sorry, you aren't a member of the cult until you have complained about someone using MAC (an acronym, most commonly for Machine Access Code) when they mean Mac (a computer).
I had made a similar comment earlier, then did a little reading. In medicine, "heavy metal" refers to any metal whose salts are fairly toxic, and this includes lithium and beryllium. The term "toxic metal" would be more appropriate, but it is not well-defined either.
Just goes to show that too many med students don't really pay much attention in their science courses.
Lithium is the third element in the periodic table, and the first metal. In other words, it is as far from being a heavy metal as it is possible to get.
That makes no sense. If a copy of Office 2008 for OSX installed Windows Media Player to fight off iTunes then slashdot would melt from the outrage.
Dammit, quite giving ideas to Microsoft's marketing department!
Besides, something close to this already happens. Microsoft's Office Updater and Adobe's Updater make offers of frivolous add-ons in addition to legitimate updates. This falls nowhere near all the bad behavior Real has committed on people trying to get the free version of Realplayer. And think of all the websites that try to gather unnecessary personal information and/or try to automatically enroll you to their email lists when you register on them? Apple is perhaps being a bit less well-behaved than they were before, but they aren't doing anything close to bad enough to provoke the level of outrage I'm seeing.
If you have the intellectual capacity to uncheck the pre-checked email subscriptions on web page registrations then you will not be "tricked" into downloading Safari. If you are so duped, then you have lost a tiny amount of bandwidth and the temporary loss of some hard disk space, but otherwise encounter no harm whatsoever.
While I do think that Apple is being a little pushy, I believe that this will have the effect of taking users from IE, and won't take users from Firefox. After all, Firefox users have already been proactive about switching their browsers, and the Safari promotion seems to be targeted at people who might switch if it is made very easy for them. At worse, this may take a fraction off the top of Firefox's future growth, but won't slow it down very much by any means.
Software Update is no more annoying than any other updater. Anyone who has used an Adobe or Microsoft Office product, for example, has already had the experience of their updaters offering frivolous add-ons in addition to security updates.
As for the Download Safari box being preselected, that is the default behavior Apple's Software Update. This is quite reasonable and expected behavior on Macs, but perhaps Apple should reconsider changing what happens on Windows, if so many users are so dimwitted as to not uncheck the download box and are so inattentive as to not interrupt the download before installation.
If they should be so dimwitted and inattentive, what do they get? A completely free, fairly speedy and highly standards-compliant web browser which will do absolutely nothing but take up hard disk space if not used.
I first saw a rant complaining of the software update behavior update at http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1567, and would have responded there, except in order to post I would have had to register with my my name, address and phone number while they tried to auto-enroll me into several of their products with preselected checkboxes. What hypocrisy!
The point is, everyone is subjected to similar behavior or worse all the time. It is quite reasonable to complain and to want to do something about it, but trying to promote the idea that Apple is a particularly egregious violator is just silly and wrong.
I didn't believe you, so I tried googling Richard Armitage "registered democrat" , and I didn't see any references to him being a democrat on the first page of searches. Surprisingly, Robert Novak is a registered democrat, so it still a true statement to say that a registered democrat holds some blame for outing a covert operative.
I seriously doubt that Armitage is a declared democrat. He was an aide to Bob Dole, then foreign policy advisor to president-elect Reagan, served in several pentagon and ambassadorial posts under Reagan and Bush senior, and was foreign policy advisor to W. in the 2000 election before serving under Bush as deputy secretary of state, until he resigned with Colin Powell. Bush's record is to not appointing anyone to even the lowliest position unless they are strongly partisan republican. If you have credible contrary evidence, I'd be glad to see it.
Owners of first-generation Intel Macs that used (32-bit only) Core Duo CPUs may not be so happy knowing that Vista will be the last Windows they will be able to run.
I wouldn't worry about that. When the next version of Windows comes out 5 to 10 years from now, those macs will be nearly out of date anyway.
Indeed, I can see how making it difficult to dial while driving could be turned into a selling point.
Eventually somebody will get hurt because someone was texting or dialing with the company phone while driving, and the company will also get sued for "enabling" the bad behavior. This could push companies to provide buttonless phones as a way to limit their liability.
"If you come up with a good software development tool, that makes life easier for the developers and they can get their job done quicker, then the first thing the manager says is 'oh you've got free time on your hands. Do this extra thing'.
Reminds me of somethng Winston Churchill supposedly said: "If you every day do a little more than is expected from you, it doesn't take long before people expect even more from you."
Either great minds think alike or he is stealing from the best.
"You see, most blokes will be playing at 10. You're on 10, all the way up, all the way up...Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff...Eleven. One more."
10:06AM - "You might be listening to Abbey Road or Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, and one track doesn't flow seamlessly into the next. We are going to put this back together as it was intended and offer Gapless Playback for songs encoded with MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless."
It is multi-platform, fairly fast and has a number of plugins and macros.
If you find a combination of operations that work well, you can save it as
a macro that a kid could probably handle on their own.
Actually, if you look at that page, the word "climate" shows up exactly once, and that is in reference to "millennial-scale southern climate change since 3.9 Ma." as determined by marine sediments (his actual area of expertise), and the word "climatic" shows up twice in similar contexts.
This suggests that he might have some idea what the weather was like in the Pleistocene, but there isn't anything in his publications list that would indicate he knows why the weather was that way then, much less the factors that are shaping is the way it is now.
I agree with your overall statement that.wma is more locked down than.aac, but while it is true that "MS doesn't make an updated version of WMP for OSX", it is because they are outsourcing Windows Media support on OS X. The free Flip4Mac player is a QuickTime Player plugin that enables it to play Windows Media files. It works fine on every standalone.wma,.wmv file I've seen, but it occasionally has trouble with content integrated into a web page.
This doesn't really look like a "hate campaign" to me. The ads give an affectionate look at what people commonly believe are Windows failings while strongly promoting what Macs can do. As played in the commercials, you don't hate the PC, he even has his strengths ("The things this guy can do with a spreadsheet"), but he isn't cool and competent like the Mac is.
As to whether they work, advertisers do comparison ads all the time, so someone thinks that they work.
It depends on how the file-sharing will be implemented. If the sharing is restricted to the local network, then the ISP's have nothing to complain about and in fact this will save them some bandwidth.
Consider the case of A, B, C, D, E on a local network. As it stands now if they all use Software Update, then they all go outside their local network to get it from Apple. Under file-sharing, if A gets the update from Apple first, then B, C, D, E get the update from A or from each other, so Apple and the ISP only have to supply bandwidth for one update + a small reward to the sharers instead of 5 updates. The ISP can't complain because it is perfectly OK to share files inside your local network.
The local network administrators have little to complain about either, since these are things that would be downloaded anyway, so it is the same number of bits being exchanged, only now the bandwidth is mostly distributed across local computers instead of coming entirely from the gateway server.
We are all speculating at the moment, but think how well this would work on a college network, where multiple labs are updated regularly and there are many students listening to the same few popular songs.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you may be relying on dated experience with Mathematica. Mathematica has been pretty comparable to MATLAB in terms of speed since version 6. Look up scientificweb's ncrunch comparison.
I think you're right on the money here. While we don't seem to have a lot of pedestrian research, there has been some research on driving that shows that talking on the phone raises the risk of accidents, regardless of whether the conversation was hands-free or not. Blasting your music in the car or listening to books or tape seems to cause many fewer accidents. Talking or texting occupies your attention more actively than passive listening.
Sorry, you aren't a member of the cult until you have complained about someone using MAC (an acronym, most commonly for Machine Access Code) when they mean Mac (a computer).
Hey! I'm in!
I had made a similar comment earlier, then did a little reading. In medicine, "heavy metal" refers to any metal whose salts are fairly toxic, and this includes lithium and beryllium. The term "toxic metal" would be more appropriate, but it is not well-defined either.
Just goes to show that too many med students don't really pay much attention in their science courses.
Lithium is the third element in the periodic table, and the first metal. In other words, it is as far from being a heavy metal as it is possible to get.
Dammit, quite giving ideas to Microsoft's marketing department!
Besides, something close to this already happens. Microsoft's Office Updater and Adobe's Updater make offers of frivolous add-ons in addition to legitimate updates. This falls nowhere near all the bad behavior Real has committed on people trying to get the free version of Realplayer. And think of all the websites that try to gather unnecessary personal information and/or try to automatically enroll you to their email lists when you register on them? Apple is perhaps being a bit less well-behaved than they were before, but they aren't doing anything close to bad enough to provoke the level of outrage I'm seeing.
If you have the intellectual capacity to uncheck the pre-checked email subscriptions on web page registrations then you will not be "tricked" into downloading Safari. If you are so duped, then you have lost a tiny amount of bandwidth and the temporary loss of some hard disk space, but otherwise encounter no harm whatsoever.
While I do think that Apple is being a little pushy, I believe that this will have the effect of taking users from IE, and won't take users from Firefox. After all, Firefox users have already been proactive about switching their browsers, and the Safari promotion seems to be targeted at people who might switch if it is made very easy for them. At worse, this may take a fraction off the top of Firefox's future growth, but won't slow it down very much by any means.
Software Update is no more annoying than any other updater. Anyone who has used an Adobe or Microsoft Office product, for example, has already had the experience of their updaters offering frivolous add-ons in addition to security updates.
As for the Download Safari box being preselected, that is the default behavior Apple's Software Update. This is quite reasonable and expected behavior on Macs, but perhaps Apple should reconsider changing what happens on Windows, if so many users are so dimwitted as to not uncheck the download box and are so inattentive as to not interrupt the download before installation.
If they should be so dimwitted and inattentive, what do they get? A completely free, fairly speedy and highly standards-compliant web browser which will do absolutely nothing but take up hard disk space if not used.
I first saw a rant complaining of the software update behavior update at http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1567, and would have responded there, except in order to post I would have had to register with my my name, address and phone number while they tried to auto-enroll me into several of their products with preselected checkboxes. What hypocrisy!
The point is, everyone is subjected to similar behavior or worse all the time. It is quite reasonable to complain and to want to do something about it, but trying to promote the idea that Apple is a particularly egregious violator is just silly and wrong.
I didn't believe you, so I tried googling Richard Armitage "registered democrat" , and I didn't see any references to him being a democrat on the first page of searches. Surprisingly, Robert Novak is a registered democrat, so it still a true statement to say that a registered democrat holds some blame for outing a covert operative.
I seriously doubt that Armitage is a declared democrat. He was an aide to Bob Dole, then foreign policy advisor to president-elect Reagan, served in several pentagon and ambassadorial posts under Reagan and Bush senior, and was foreign policy advisor to W. in the 2000 election before serving under Bush as deputy secretary of state, until he resigned with Colin Powell. Bush's record is to not appointing anyone to even the lowliest position unless they are strongly partisan republican. If you have credible contrary evidence, I'd be glad to see it.
I wouldn't worry about that. When the next version of Windows comes out 5 to 10 years from now, those macs will be nearly out of date anyway.
Indeed, I can see how making it difficult to dial while driving could be turned into a selling point.
Eventually somebody will get hurt because someone was texting or dialing with the company phone while driving, and the company will also get sued for "enabling" the bad behavior. This could push companies to provide buttonless phones as a way to limit their liability.
Either great minds think alike or he is stealing from the best.
My bad. I did proofread my submission several times and even saw the error once but somehow neglected to correct it.
Damn my tired bloodshot eyes!
My favorite bit of Zune astroturfing was a review that tried to spin how heavy it was by talking about its "satisfying heft".
C'mon, it's just begging for an allusion to This is Spinal Tap.
While viewing the article, my wife overheard me saying, "Ooh, nice rack on that one.
Does this mean that Apple is beleaguered again?
I would bet that ImageJ would do the job for you.
It is multi-platform, fairly fast and has a number of plugins and macros. If you find a combination of operations that work well, you can save it as a macro that a kid could probably handle on their own.
It is available at http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/index.html.
The website is rudimentary, but the program itself is fun to mess with.
Actually, if you look at that page, the word "climate" shows up exactly once, and that is in reference to "millennial-scale southern climate change since 3.9 Ma." as determined by marine sediments (his actual area of expertise), and the word "climatic" shows up twice in similar contexts. This suggests that he might have some idea what the weather was like in the Pleistocene, but there isn't anything in his publications list that would indicate he knows why the weather was that way then, much less the factors that are shaping is the way it is now.
I agree with your overall statement that .wma is more locked down than .aac, but while it is true that "MS doesn't make an updated version of WMP for OSX", it is because they are outsourcing Windows Media support on OS X. The free Flip4Mac player is a QuickTime Player plugin that enables it to play Windows Media files. It works fine on every standalone .wma, .wmv file I've seen, but it occasionally has trouble with content integrated into a web page.
They've really got the competition running scared now!
This doesn't really look like a "hate campaign" to me. The ads give an affectionate look at what people commonly believe are Windows failings while strongly promoting what Macs can do. As played in the commercials, you don't hate the PC, he even has his strengths ("The things this guy can do with a spreadsheet"), but he isn't cool and competent like the Mac is. As to whether they work, advertisers do comparison ads all the time, so someone thinks that they work.
. . . about how the "Nerds" remake should be followed up with a "Porky's" remake, until I discovered it is in the works, too.
Now I am very afraid to make any more jokes.
It depends on how the file-sharing will be implemented. If the sharing is restricted to the local network, then the ISP's have nothing to complain about and in fact this will save them some bandwidth.
Consider the case of A, B, C, D, E on a local network. As it stands now if they all use Software Update, then they all go outside their local network to get it from Apple. Under file-sharing, if A gets the update from Apple first, then B, C, D, E get the update from A or from each other, so Apple and the ISP only have to supply bandwidth for one update + a small reward to the sharers instead of 5 updates. The ISP can't complain because it is perfectly OK to share files inside your local network.
The local network administrators have little to complain about either, since these are things that would be downloaded anyway, so it is the same number of bits being exchanged, only now the bandwidth is mostly distributed across local computers instead of coming entirely from the gateway server.
We are all speculating at the moment, but think how well this would work on a college network, where multiple labs are updated regularly and there are many students listening to the same few popular songs.
Why are these powered with methanol rather than ethanol?
I'd think a booze-powered computer would be every geek's dream.
(Cue Futurama jokes here... )
In fact, I'd pay lots more for a computer that I could keep going by giving it a shot of Everclear every so often.