I remember seeing one at an exibition and I don't remember any smell coming off it. One problem that the person demonstrating it did mention was that the recording process has a tendancy of picking up ambiant sound as well as the incoming signal. Also the swarf from the cut had to be manually guided away with a brush.
My main point was that the ability to upgrade to faster graphics (though sadly there is less choice than in PC cards) was only one of many reasons to buy the mac pro over cheaper macs. You don't get the choice of having the mac pros other features without the expansion slots.
You are right, expansion cards are less important than they used to be but they still have thier uses, more monitors is one (which I mentioned), bigger storage soloutions, more gigabit ethernet ports, some professional video editing stuff.
How hard would it be to install this on a Pro? I hear that EFI makes this impossible. Afaict you can put a card with a PC bios in and it will work in windows but it won't work in the bootloader or OS-X.
why buy a desktop machine that's upgradable if you can't upgrade it?
Lets see, the mac pro is the cheapest mac (the xserve can do some of theese things too but it is even more expensive than the mac pro) that
* supports a matched pair of monitors of your choice (the mini doesn't support multiple monitors at all, the imac has one of it's two monitor outputs hardwired to the built in monitor) * supports more than two monitors * supports monitors requring dual link DVI * supports more than 4GB of ram * supports more than one internal hard drive * supports more than two cores * has expansion slots to add additional interfaces
Come on, own up: who's buying these console-priced cards, and why? People buy very high end cards either for bragging rights or because they want to have an edge in multiplayer games.
Console gaming is a whole different world to PC gaming. Console games tend to be designed arround the limitations of console controllers, often have very limited control options and are rarely moddable in any way. PC games are designed arround the keyboard and mouse and are usually very moddable.
Yes PC gaming is more expensive than console gaming but even if you look at the top end of PC gaming equipment there are far more expensive hobbies out there.
The fact that you don't have to close the text-editing window to compile is what I liked. You know you don't have to limit yourself to one terminal nowadays. you can have one xterm/vt/whatever running your editor and one to enter your compile commands.
For me the utility of a powerfull IDE depends what language I am coding in. IMO java is an overly verbose language and in my experiance a powerfull IDE goes a long way towards making that over verbosity bearable. For example in java the convention is that you make fields private and use getters and setters. Writing theese getters and setters by hand is rather tedious. In eclipse I can just declare the fields and then ask the IDE to add getters and setters for them.
It seems very odd to me that you would like autocompletion on the command line but not when editing code.
1: you can afford to pay for an unlimited data plan in every country you spend significant time in. 2: you only travel to countries where unlimited data plans are availible. 3: all the areas you travel to have good cell coverage.
the most complex IDE I like is BlueJ IMO bluej is a one trick pony. It's object bench is a very nice feature but the rest of the IDE leaves a lot to be destired (or at least it did when I last used it, it may have improved since). Little things like only reporting one error per compile, deleting the whole line if you start to type immediately after getting a compile error (i presume it was using the mechanisms intended for selected text to show the line highlight) and the complete lack of any autocompletion features made it a pretty painfull environment to code in.
Afaict most compilers don't put restrictions on the code they generate but most compilers generate code that relies on a runtime library and there are usually conditions attatched to the redistribution of that runtime library.
Language packs - yeah - dead usefu They are mostly an enterprise feature, they mean you can deploy one image to the desktops of your users in different countries.
There are a few extras for ultimate customers only but afaict the main thing with ultimate is it brings together the features from the top products in both the home and buisness lines.
There are still vendors that will sell you big brand OEM XP (dell for example), that way as long as you don't change the motherboard you don't have to worry about hardware changes.
Also its not like you have to reactivate the instant you make the hardware changes, there is a grace period.
The network speed drops were related to something the audio subsystem was doing, the MS official line was that it was to make audio playback more stable or something like that but people had hardly been complaining about the state of audio in XP. So rightly or wrongly people blamed the DRM related additions to the audio engine.
An educational establishment has lots of PCs running various versions windows and various versions of various software some MS, some none MS, some legit, some pirate. This is a management nightmare but paying regular prices to upgrade everything would be cost prohibitive. MS comes along and offers windows and office at a very steep discount and with the right to use any version you want (the windows OS part is upgrade/downgrade only but since virtually all machines come with an OEM windows license that is not really a major issue).
However to get the products at this discount they have to sign up to terms that are not very nice. The license cost is based on some factor other than the number of machines running windows (for schools I belive it is total number of PCs, for universities I think it is total students or something like that). So there is no financial incentive to move individual machines to free software. Further the deals are often subscription based so the institution has to keep paying even if they have no desire to upgrade.
Then look at the numbers themselves. If Apple is expecting this mythical $831 per phone in revenue, how expensive do you think an unlocked iPhone would be? Prohibitive is my guess a bit expensive for a phone but not exactly prohibitive if they can offer a truly better experiance than a $400 nokia some people would buy it at that price. People spend several times that on laptops.
but yes the current system does seriously distort the mobile phone market. As it is right now if you are a reasonablly heavy user you are best off on a contract plan. With most contract plans you are paying for a new phone every couple of years whether you take it or not. If it wasn't for this distortion I imagine a lot less new mobile phones are sold.
Explosive bolts indoors in zero G don't seem like the best of ideas. Loose objects are enough of a PITA in orbit as it is.
Electromagnets require power. I would imagine during launch they want to have as little powered as possible in case things go wrong. They would also need to consider what would happen if the power supply to the electromagnets failed.
Of course they didn't really come into their own until brood war when someone realised medics who could deal with the damage caused by the stimpacks were a good idea.
What about other fixed folders that are tied into your windows install like "documents and settings" and "program files".
I remember in the 9x days you could install windows to a new folder on an existing partition but program files would be kept which could be a pain sometimes (broken apps from the old install mixed in with apps from the new install).
You have to be carefull with terms like OS and application, they mean different things to different people. Some older textbooks use operating system synonomously with kernel. Others use it to mean the stuff that is critical to reasonable operation of the computer. Still others use it to mean everything installed by the OS isntaller. To some people application means a program installed for a specific job that is not critical to the rest of the system, to other people it may mean any program that runs in userspace.
It looks to me like the people talking about it breaking the OS are using the term OS in the sense of "stuff that is critical to reasonable operation of the computer" while APE are using application in the sense of "any program that runs in userspace".
I think a lot of people who weren't following things carefully were caught unawares by XPSP2. OS version upgrades are normally considered risky while service pack installs are normally considered fairly safe. XPSP2 was a big exception to this.
Yeah, MS was stuck between a rock and a hard place, they really want to shake the reputation they have for crappy security but in doing so they have seriously pissed off a lot of users.
I'm not aware of any option to do a clean install moving stuff out of the way first in the windows XP or vista installers. I guess you could do it manually using a livecd or similar but thats not the same thing as the option being actually there in the installer.
Also I don't think windows has any easy way to backup/restore the users settings.
The first is that most people who vote think they are better off voting for the lesser of two evils than voting for a third party candidate who is perceived as having no chance of winning. Of course if people think someone has no chance of winning and therefore don't vote for them then they will indeed have no chance of winning.
The second problem is that most people don't know or care about most issues so on most issues the politicians go with what thier campaign contributors (read: bribers) want and they only look at what the public wants for really well known issues.
One thing to remember when buying fast food in the uk. Mcdonalds generally have consistant pricing between outlets. I don't think burger king do though I could be wrong.
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I remember seeing one at an exibition and I don't remember any smell coming off it. One problem that the person demonstrating it did mention was that the recording process has a tendancy of picking up ambiant sound as well as the incoming signal. Also the swarf from the cut had to be manually guided away with a brush.
My main point was that the ability to upgrade to faster graphics (though sadly there is less choice than in PC cards) was only one of many reasons to buy the mac pro over cheaper macs. You don't get the choice of having the mac pros other features without the expansion slots.
You are right, expansion cards are less important than they used to be but they still have thier uses, more monitors is one (which I mentioned), bigger storage soloutions, more gigabit ethernet ports, some professional video editing stuff.
How hard would it be to install this on a Pro? I hear that EFI makes this impossible.
Afaict you can put a card with a PC bios in and it will work in windows but it won't work in the bootloader or OS-X.
why buy a desktop machine that's upgradable if you can't upgrade it?
Lets see, the mac pro is the cheapest mac (the xserve can do some of theese things too but it is even more expensive than the mac pro) that
* supports a matched pair of monitors of your choice (the mini doesn't support multiple monitors at all, the imac has one of it's two monitor outputs hardwired to the built in monitor)
* supports more than two monitors
* supports monitors requring dual link DVI
* supports more than 4GB of ram
* supports more than one internal hard drive
* supports more than two cores
* has expansion slots to add additional interfaces
Come on, own up: who's buying these console-priced cards, and why?
People buy very high end cards either for bragging rights or because they want to have an edge in multiplayer games.
Console gaming is a whole different world to PC gaming. Console games tend to be designed arround the limitations of console controllers, often have very limited control options and are rarely moddable in any way. PC games are designed arround the keyboard and mouse and are usually very moddable.
Yes PC gaming is more expensive than console gaming but even if you look at the top end of PC gaming equipment there are far more expensive hobbies out there.
The fact that you don't have to close the text-editing window to compile is what I liked.
You know you don't have to limit yourself to one terminal nowadays. you can have one xterm/vt/whatever running your editor and one to enter your compile commands.
For me the utility of a powerfull IDE depends what language I am coding in. IMO java is an overly verbose language and in my experiance a powerfull IDE goes a long way towards making that over verbosity bearable. For example in java the convention is that you make fields private and use getters and setters. Writing theese getters and setters by hand is rather tedious. In eclipse I can just declare the fields and then ask the IDE to add getters and setters for them.
It seems very odd to me that you would like autocompletion on the command line but not when editing code.
A fine idea if you only work in areas where you can get reliable high bandwidth low latency connection back to your desktop PC.
right, that assumes that
1: you can afford to pay for an unlimited data plan in every country you spend significant time in.
2: you only travel to countries where unlimited data plans are availible.
3: all the areas you travel to have good cell coverage.
the most complex IDE I like is BlueJ
IMO bluej is a one trick pony. It's object bench is a very nice feature but the rest of the IDE leaves a lot to be destired (or at least it did when I last used it, it may have improved since). Little things like only reporting one error per compile, deleting the whole line if you start to type immediately after getting a compile error (i presume it was using the mechanisms intended for selected text to show the line highlight) and the complete lack of any autocompletion features made it a pretty painfull environment to code in.
Afaict most compilers don't put restrictions on the code they generate but most compilers generate code that relies on a runtime library and there are usually conditions attatched to the redistribution of that runtime library.
Language packs - yeah - dead usefu
They are mostly an enterprise feature, they mean you can deploy one image to the desktops of your users in different countries.
There are a few extras for ultimate customers only but afaict the main thing with ultimate is it brings together the features from the top products in both the home and buisness lines.
On the lower editions you can type in multiple langauges but you have to have the UI in the version you installed.
There are still vendors that will sell you big brand OEM XP (dell for example), that way as long as you don't change the motherboard you don't have to worry about hardware changes.
Also its not like you have to reactivate the instant you make the hardware changes, there is a grace period.
I thought hotplugging support was optional for the ordinary slot form factor.
The network speed drops were related to something the audio subsystem was doing, the MS official line was that it was to make audio playback more stable or something like that but people had hardly been complaining about the state of audio in XP. So rightly or wrongly people blamed the DRM related additions to the audio engine.
Afaict the situation goes something like.
An educational establishment has lots of PCs running various versions windows and various versions of various software some MS, some none MS, some legit, some pirate. This is a management nightmare but paying regular prices to upgrade everything would be cost prohibitive. MS comes along and offers windows and office at a very steep discount and with the right to use any version you want (the windows OS part is upgrade/downgrade only but since virtually all machines come with an OEM windows license that is not really a major issue).
However to get the products at this discount they have to sign up to terms that are not very nice. The license cost is based on some factor other than the number of machines running windows (for schools I belive it is total number of PCs, for universities I think it is total students or something like that). So there is no financial incentive to move individual machines to free software. Further the deals are often subscription based so the institution has to keep paying even if they have no desire to upgrade.
Then look at the numbers themselves. If Apple is expecting this mythical $831 per phone in revenue, how expensive do you think an unlocked iPhone would be? Prohibitive is my guess
a bit expensive for a phone but not exactly prohibitive if they can offer a truly better experiance than a $400 nokia some people would buy it at that price. People spend several times that on laptops.
but yes the current system does seriously distort the mobile phone market. As it is right now if you are a reasonablly heavy user you are best off on a contract plan. With most contract plans you are paying for a new phone every couple of years whether you take it or not. If it wasn't for this distortion I imagine a lot less new mobile phones are sold.
Explosive bolts indoors in zero G don't seem like the best of ideas. Loose objects are enough of a PITA in orbit as it is.
Electromagnets require power. I would imagine during launch they want to have as little powered as possible in case things go wrong. They would also need to consider what would happen if the power supply to the electromagnets failed.
Of course they didn't really come into their own until brood war when someone realised medics who could deal with the damage caused by the stimpacks were a good idea.
What about other fixed folders that are tied into your windows install like "documents and settings" and "program files".
I remember in the 9x days you could install windows to a new folder on an existing partition but program files would be kept which could be a pain sometimes (broken apps from the old install mixed in with apps from the new install).
You have to be carefull with terms like OS and application, they mean different things to different people. Some older textbooks use operating system synonomously with kernel. Others use it to mean the stuff that is critical to reasonable operation of the computer. Still others use it to mean everything installed by the OS isntaller. To some people application means a program installed for a specific job that is not critical to the rest of the system, to other people it may mean any program that runs in userspace.
It looks to me like the people talking about it breaking the OS are using the term OS in the sense of "stuff that is critical to reasonable operation of the computer" while APE are using application in the sense of "any program that runs in userspace".
I think a lot of people who weren't following things carefully were caught unawares by XPSP2. OS version upgrades are normally considered risky while service pack installs are normally considered fairly safe. XPSP2 was a big exception to this.
Yeah, MS was stuck between a rock and a hard place, they really want to shake the reputation they have for crappy security but in doing so they have seriously pissed off a lot of users.
I'm not aware of any option to do a clean install moving stuff out of the way first in the windows XP or vista installers. I guess you could do it manually using a livecd or similar but thats not the same thing as the option being actually there in the installer.
Also I don't think windows has any easy way to backup/restore the users settings.
There are two big problems.
The first is that most people who vote think they are better off voting for the lesser of two evils than voting for a third party candidate who is perceived as having no chance of winning. Of course if people think someone has no chance of winning and therefore don't vote for them then they will indeed have no chance of winning.
The second problem is that most people don't know or care about most issues so on most issues the politicians go with what thier campaign contributors (read: bribers) want and they only look at what the public wants for really well known issues.
One thing to remember when buying fast food in the uk. Mcdonalds generally have consistant pricing between outlets. I don't think burger king do though I could be wrong.