really better to have eth0 and not knowning on the fly the card chipset, and wether you can enable polling, driver specific stuff, etc. What a silly idea to name all the interfaces eth0/eth1.
I don't get this. If 90% of users/apps don't care about the details of chipsets, why should they have to keep track of this trivia to know the name of their ethernet device?
If you want to know details about polling, or the driver, for some special need, you should be using an introspection mechanism to *ask* the device, or *configure* the device.
Your position is like needing to guess the waiter's name before you can order food in a restaurant. What a needless hassle.
What is it about open source that makes it equal pixie dust in the imagination of Slashdot posters?
Open Source != others magically do free "code maintenance."
That's like saying giving a teenager the keys to your car means they'll get you that oil change and take it to the car wash and return the tank full of gas. Not likely.
99% of people who see code should NOT be doing maintenance on it. They didn't spend the time to understand the design, they don't have the training to code, and they are as likely to break something as to actually do useful maintenance. MOREOVER, with a license like GPL, they *don't* have to give you back the changes unless the distribute the binary *with changes* to *YOU*.
Open Source == customer can do focussed customization if they wish. Or port it to their new Linux server. Or can get support from somebody else (like *YOU* as a contractor) if your company keels over. But giving people a.tar.gz file doesn't make them developers.
Somebody wasn't paying attention to RMS's actual ideas.
1) FREE AS IN SPEECH, NOT FREE AS IN BEER.
If you feel so strongly, the customer can be given the source along with supporting documentation, a one year contract for support, customization, or whatever, and your company still gets money. Speech can be private, and can be compensated for. The *real* point of Open Source is no secrets between developer and user. Nothing says Bob on the street corner needs to know.
Nobody says you have to put it on SourceForge. I suspect 99% of projects on SourceForge don't belong there anyway, and that about 5% of downloaders from SourceForge do something to change the source code, and less than 1% actually do any useful development to support the project. Basically, I see SourceForge as a vanity press: anyone can upload their new Java-based MP3 jukebox alpha-quality software, and feel like they are part of some cool movement, striking a blow against the man. But that's another topic.
2) Quick career hint: a company pays your salary because it thinks it is getting something *more* valuable in return, not to send you on some ego trip as an OSS missionary. Save that for when it is *your* company.
If you are known to higher-ups in the company as someone who was absolutely essential in a multi-million dollar revenue stream, and is likely to do similar things in the *future,* they might not outsource your job to India. (Unless you are already working there, in which case, they won't outsource it to China.)
And if you are tired of working for your company, that kind of dollar figure next to "head developer" will get you hired a lot more quickly than "code monkey."
You're not talking sense with your Coca-cola example.
The "secret recipe" nonsense is just marketing: something oh-so-special means "Coke is it!" "The Real Thing." Yes, effective marketing, but hardly a target for corporate espionage.
Look, analytical chemistry in the 21st century means there is no such thing as a true secret formula for soda pop. Trust me, given a modest amount of money and the right equipment, and someone can find out just what's in that bottle.
But so what. If Pepsi discovers the secret, what can they do?
1) Clone it, and announce "100% the same as the Real Thing, but 5% cheaper?" or "50% cheaper"? Who wants to admit they drink a knockoff to save a few cents?
2) Trumpet "we put more/less vanilla in our formula so it makes you cuter/more hip/more sexually attractive." No one (outside of the Slashdot fringe, perhaps) wants to base their soda drinking on specifications.
3) Claim "Coca-cola is poisoning you: we discovered super-toxic-brain-control-chemicals in there"? That's a conspiracy theory, but you can hardly expect Coke to have been knowingly shipping harmful stuff; they'd be sued beyond belief by everybody who drank a Coke in the last 100 years, and that's a lot of people.
4) Claim "look at us. We've got 1337 chemists who can find out Coke's most intimate secrets." Big deal; if I didn't drink Pepsi before, is this really going to change my mind? Do I really want a soda pop designed by folks in lab coats who have nothing better to? Plus, it as much as admits that Coke is the Real Thing that even Pepsi wants to copy.
There is no real advantage in the secret formula. Just posturing. All Pepsi or RC or whoever can do is posture in their own distinctive enough way, while pretending not to care, or sniff dismissively at, what the other guys are doing. It's all sugar water with flavors. Not some high tech contest.
And we know that all open source projects have *great* *clear*, *complete*, and *useful* documentation.
In the real world, internal documentation can be "I called the design engineer on the phone, and he told me the workaround, so I coded it that way. He didn't have time to correct the documentation, because he's working on the next product." or "I program 0x45 in that register because it was that way in the example code he gave me." or "well, the guy who wrote that code left to go work at a startup."
Bad open-source drivers can give hardware a bad reputation, even though the hardware vendor has nothing to do with the driver.
Property "rights" secured by private armies has been tried: perhaps you've heard of medieval Europe? Not too bad if you were a king, sucked if you were a serf. And if you decided to travel from the safety of one petty kingdom to another over poor roads, depend on your own resources against the depredations of highway robbery.
Forgive me if I prefer a more modern civilization, where I pay taxes to support the state's heinous apparatus of oppression, including such dastardly schemes as clean public water supplies, sanitation, and toll-free roads secured by highway patrolmen, and not just thugs hired by local strongmen.
Compare driving across Europe or the U.S. or Canada to driving through Afghanistan, or the current basketcases of Africa. Funny how bands of Taliban don't set up armed checkpoints on Route 66 to collect private tolls. There are plenty of private armies in Afghanistan and Somalia; what a paradise those places must be!
Yes, but once a group of people (i.e. more than one person) has standardized on a symbol representing Anarchy, then they have set themselves up as a central authority, admittedly not one that has a headquarters, fixed membership, or corporate structure. Nonetheless, it is an authority, because if you used a different symbol, these people could point at you and say "you've got the wrong symbol if you want to be recognized as an anarchist."
At which point, all you so-called anarchists will have shown your true colors, and someone more truly anarchic will have to overthrow your authority.
Now, personally, I'm not an anarchist by any means. My personal source of amusement is how the German punkers have their own annual "Chaos" day, all nice and according to schedule. I'm always suspicious their next step will be to get recognition for a Punker union.
I think the main market in the keynote was the developers filling the seats. And for them, the two messages were
1) we are still going to sell computers after this happens---see, MS and Adobe believe it---so you will still have a reason to stay in business
2) if you guys want to sell any new software after 2007, you'd better check that damn box in Xcode to make Universal Binaries, because PPC is going buh-bye. And it isn't hard.
Dealing with the people coming into an apple store and going "Intel, no thanks." or "my goodness, this PPC architecture, while compelling, will be outmoded by 2007" is not Apple's worry, no matter how much blogs and other nerd media harp on it. People are not buying apple because of the chip inside. They buy it for any number of reasons, but the vendor of the semiconductors just isn't one.
Their worries for now is
1) developers sticking with PPC because they like Metrowerks, or think the G5 is going to be around for a long time, or that Rosetta will be good enough.
2) developers throwing up their arms, saying "screw it, Windows doesn't make me fix endianness issues, or change APIs, or all this other crap every five years." or "Apple's finally been beleagured to death."
3) deploying on Intel revealing that OS X is a dog compared to Linux or Windows on the same hardware.
You've missed the most important annoyance (or maybe you live somewhere where this sickness hasn't spread)---after paying $10 to sit in this hellhole, you STILL get bombarded by commercials. Not previews, which I like, except when they are 20dB louder than necessary, but actual "Diet Coke makes you hip, so buy more." F**k that. I could stay home and watch commercials for free, you f**kers.
And, even when they are honest and tell you when the movie *actually* starts (so you could avoid the ads), then all the nice seats are taken, and the lights are out, and you're lucky to get two seats together.
# a 1983 bombing during a South Korean state visit to Burma that killed 17 South Koreans, including several cabinet members, and narrowly missed killing then South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan;
# and a 1987 in-flight bombing of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet that killed all 115 people on board.
Of course, you can't prove any of this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
1) Mathematica has been well-tested on Intel. And UltraSPARC, and Itanium, and PowerPC. Endianess issues have almost certainly been absent for many years.
2) Most of those millions of tests are probably testing the math algorithms which are largely implemented in the Mathematica language. Given certain numerical tests, and tests of the basic language, you can extrapolate with high confidence, given that no changes were made in the high-level code, that these tests would still pass. A porting error would probably give huge cascades of errors, not just isolated test failures.
3) Obviously, the engineer had an idea of some basic tests, probably including some of the quick demos he gave on stage: as Theo said "now we know OpenGL works." These tests can quickly cover large chunks of functionality: do big integers work? Do graphics display on the screen? Do complex-valued functions still have the right branch cuts? Does the symbolic integrator work in the most-used branches of the code?
Those tests don't assure that the MacIntel port is as well debugged as the previous releases, but you can quickly build confidence that there aren't endianness issues or platform library issues that are the most likely problems in a port like this.
That said, Mathematica, while huge, is probably one of the most processor-agnostic applications around. I don't know if Steve Jobs chose it for that reason, but it was certainly a good choice for a very quick but impressive-looking port.
If Wolfram Research can port Mathematica to Mactel in a few hours, then most app makers shouldn't have a problem.
This was a red herring in the Keynote. We'll learn more as WWDC attendees hit the labs and try for themselves.
Mathematica has supported Intel for a long time, along with probably half a dozen other processor architectures over its life. It's probably one of the *most* cross-platform apps around, and therefore probably easy to port to a new processor. Endianess issues were probably designed out back when they were supporting the 68000 Macs.
Read the Universal Binary Guidelines. There are plenty of ways to get bitten. Admittedly, few APIs are going away, compared to what happened with Carbon. And it appears simpler than the 68k-->PPC transition was. But for a Mac-only app that has endianness issues hidden deep inside, those "small tweaks" could be small, but hard to find.
Chances are the Intel macs will have Open Firmware instead of a PC-style BIOS
I was counting on this too: I didn't believe Apple was going to Intel until I saw it in the press release; but I thought it would be nice to get a relatively clean architecture with Intel processors.
The universal binary guidelines, however, on p. 47, say "Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware."
No idea why, but there it is.
Also, nothing in the document mentions 64-bit computing. And G4- and G5-specific applications do not run under Rosetta.
This has got to be 90% about the laptops, maybe 10% about consumer computers. Maybe they'll progress to IA-64 at some point, but it doesn't appear to be today. In fact, I think the main moral is that Apple dropped Freescale for not having a fast bus speed on the G4 for laptops as much as dropping IBM for not having a cool G5 for laptops.
How to get 64-bit support on future Macs will be an interesting question to answer.
As for "bug out", perhaps you remember a guy called Douglas Macarthur, and a place called Inchon. Who made it pretty much to the Yalu river against the DPRK. The U.S. certainly isn't going to repeat the mistake of getting China involved. Or do you think the DPRK got back to the armistice line all on its own? In any case, if it turns out the DPRK does actually have nuclear weapons, and uses them, then the gloves will be off. Kim Jong Il *might* have 10 nuclear warheads, the U.S. has thousands.
It wouldn't be quick and easy like toppling Saddam Hussein was, and thousands of American troops would die, but don't you worry, Korea would be unified, just without Kim Jong Il. As for afterward, you think there will be Koreans ready to fight against the American occupiers to restore Kim's regime when they find out that South Korea is many times richer, and that the Great Leader and Dear Leader *were* lying to them, and letting them starve all those years? They'll be running off to China or South Korea as fast as they can. There's a legitimate, stable, mature Korean regime in Seoul that can take over. Not an illegitimate U.S. puppet in Saigon.
Yes, the U.S. collapsed against the initial DPRK attack (you do believe the DPRK started the Korean War, right?), because they had left just a weak force behind after WWII, with an ill-equipped South Korean army; the South was a poor agricultural country, while the North was rich and industrialized, and had Soviet military backing. The U.S. is prepared this time, and has the advantage of strategic depth, superior technology, and 50 years of studying the situation. North Korea is strategically isolated, dirt poor, and China isn't going to save their bacon this time around.
Ho Chi Minh didn't waste his life partying and drinking expensive brandy at the expense of his people. He was leading a revolution against hated Western domination, and had been fighting for many years before the U.S. showed up. Kim Jong Il is a simple dictator, who'll either cut and run, or die in a burned-out bunker. He's not going to lead his people to victory after starving and abusing them the last 50 years.
I'm not sure, with your "in the ass" comment whether you are ultimately agreeing with my analysis. But, just in case you think you have a valid point.
Question for you: why did Bill Clinton not get Osama bin Laden when he fired off those cruise missiles? Because he's a commie pinko? No. Because Pakistani intelligence tipped OBL off.
Question number 2: have you heard the name Abdul Qader Khan? As in the Pakistani who was selling nuclear technology to whoever had ready cash. What country supported him?
Question number 3: who was the principal supporter and protector of the Taliban after the U.S. lost interest?
Question number 4: where did all the Taliban run to when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan? And who is reluctant or unable to truly crack down on them? Our good old "ally in the war on terror"
Question number 5: of the nuclear powers (besides the DPRK), whose regime is poorest, weakest, and most likely to collapse, resulting in nuclear arms in the hands of an Islamist regime? Pakistan.
Question number 6: in which country's territory do you believe Osama bin Laden is still hanging out?
All that adds up, in my view, to a grave risk to American interests.
AMD has something like 15% market share in the x86 segment.
Everyone in the industry is usually "close" to wafer capacity. Otherwise, they would have spent tons of money on extra equipment which is just sitting there depreciating. With a mature process, adding capacity is a moderate expense, and the main risk is financial: spending money on a process which will soon decline in favor of the next big thing.
The hard part is getting *device yield* up, because that is how you get from a demonstration to high volume, or from a loss-leader to a cash cow. For a market the size of the G5 desktop market, you can get by with low yields, although it makes Steve look foolish for a time. For something the size and competitiveness of the high-end x86-compatible market, AMD's yields need to be just as good as Intel's.
Improving yield *also* has the effect of increasing your capacity to produce good chips, as opposed to wafers full of useless chips.
AMD's main plan is to take market share away from Intel. If they can't expand their x86 production to actually sell those chips, this strategy can't work.
NeXTSTEP ran on four different CPUs, and all it took to build an app for all four was checking the boxes in Project Builder to say that you wanted to build a fat binary.
Right, and we know that as soon as the compiler is done, and doesn't give any error messages, that you can ship your product.
Because there is no need to do anything crazy like *test* your software on architectures you expect your customers to actually use.
And, that there isn't anything difficult about using endian-neutral routines *everywhere* they are required, and writing your code to be efficiently vectorized on totally incompatible vector units.
The 68k-PPC transition was *painful*, and only was made because the 68k was clearly a dead end. And NeXT's hardware neutrality benefited them how, exactly, in the battle against Microsoft?
Ah, but AMD can't do the quantity that Apple needs.
Jesus, this topic brings out the most idiocy of any Apple topic.
You're telling me that AMD can't handle 3% more of the overall PC market? Or that Apple will jump to 20% on the basis of this change? Give me a break.
Intel replacing Broadcom as Apple's wireless vendor of choice makes some sense. Intel making PPC processors that somehow perform better than IBM's *barely* makes sense. Apple switching processor architectures wholesale makes no sense at all---the total disruption caused would totally overwhelm the minor performance improvements that *might* be achieved, if everyone re-optimizes their apps.
In two years, the all-volunteer force will have had such a nightmare in recruiting for the festering Iraq occupation that the U.S. military will be stretched even THINNER than it is today.
Iraq was supposed to be a pushover, with terrain perfectly suited for the U.S. (see Gulf War I), had only Russia as a half-hearted partner.
North Korea has been girding for this fight ever since the Korean War armistice. They have a major Asian capital held hostage by 50 years worth of artillery emplacements. They are also right in China's backyard, and China, while completely uninterested in the North Korean regime, doesn't want some flood of hungry refugees when they are busy dealing with millions of their own rural workers looking for jobs. That's why none of this has gone to the U.N.: China has enough power to keep the U.S. from steamrolling them; Russia had no choice but to let Iraq get smacked around.
The U.S. would certainly prevail in a North Korean war, but millions of Koreans would die, with untold damage to a major economy. Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc., are real economic players [try naming an Iraqi multinational]. Now, Japan getting nuked by North Korean warheads might be equally disastrous, so there is at least one way this could spiral out of control, but this is a war that NOBODY wants.
That said, the Bush administration has been bungling the situation from day 1, particularly because the proper order of threats was 1) North Korea, 2a) Al-qaeda 2b) Pakistan 3) Iran 4) Iraq, and they started at #4, put #2b on the wrong list, and by attacking #4 managed to spook #3 and #1 enough to make the situation even trickier. Their only policy achievement in NK is a totally non-functional diplomatic arrangement that they screw up with the most childish kind of namecalling.They may very well bungle enough to get the war they don't want.
Lifetime appointments help relieve the fear that the judge might lose his job if, God forbid, he make some decision that a powerful politician somewhere could disagree with. Thereby allowing legislators to cry about "judicial activism" and "extremist judges" without (hopefully) affecting judges' ability to decide cases without outside influence.
Historically, lifetime appointments to executive power, on the other hand, have led to quite objectionable behaviors.
Sorry, I messed up the logic around the value of the droids and the specialization of the planet affecting the price of the planet. It's apparently too late in the day (and my microecon is too rusty) for me to carefully figure out what the right statement is.
Point remains: "using up a planet with no intervention" != "hey, free droids".
The cost of a droid army, even in your scenario, is the "opportunity cost" of being able to make any other kind of stuff from the material & labor that went into making the droids, except that you used it already.
In your example, you're using up a whole planet and its extractable energy. Which could make quite a bit of stuff, like the entire product of human civilization to date and then some. That's easily hundreds of trillions of dollars by now, and we aren't even close to using up our coal and nuclear resources. (Of course, the existence of von Neumann replicators may significantly alter the price you would pay for everything ever made on Earth, but there must be *some* alternative use for the planet with value in your Star Wars economy, such as pleasure palaces full of hookers and blackjack, or whatever, that would clearly be worth some amount of money.)
The way this is reflected economically is that you would be prepared to pay the owner of the planet for the right to strip-mine it down to zero usefulness. If there isn't an owner, then, assuming "rights to a planet" is an enforceable thing, you could claim the planet, then resell it to someone else, instead of using it for your own droid army. The potential revenue, again, assuming everyone has access to a similar level of technology, would be roughly equal to the value of the droids, unless there is something peculiarly specialized about this planet that makes it good for droid making but nothing else.
You might not need to come up with cash, or you might have enough political power to just take planets without paying, but there is a substantial economic cost to making a droid army, even if you don't need to get any human hands dirty to do so.
called Many-Worlds or Many-Histories model of quantum mechanics (Deutsch, Everett, Dewitt, and many others). There is no Copenhagen-style collapse; all possible futures do exist physically.
Yeah, there isn't a Copenhagen-style collapse, but there is an unimaginably complicated topology to space-time, with some vague hand-wavy idea about how we only perceive one of these surfaces, and no explanation of how the topological development is actually brought about by any kind of physical mechanism.
The Copenhangen-style "collapse" is a crude method of calculation. "Decoherence" is the more careful calculation which justifies the Copenhagen treatment, and is applicable to modern experiments on systems with "long-lived" quantum coherence.
Many-worlds is just escaping from one philosophical conundrum by postulating an even more confusing mechanism, with no detectable improvement in the physics.
"Star Wars" is a good sign for Western society....We support democracy.
Star Wars != support democracy, you dweeb. What, did you attend the George W. Bush school of political science? Where democracy = feel good, with no actual considerations for what defines a democratic society?
The whole point of the saga is that democratic institutions are weak, and we need princely heros (who have the blood of Anakin coursing through their veins) to protect us from despotism. Queen, Princess, Knight...those are the heroes. Who voted for Luke Skywalker? Who exercises civilian control over the Jedi?
The Star Wars story *might* correspond to a desire for a constitutional monarchy, respectful of basic human rights, but with a quasi-religious independent military. No democracy there, bub.
Poverty is irrelevant to the question. What I heard was "I bought an iBook, and because 90% of the work I do involves vi and programming, I installed Linux." Which, given the presence of Perl, Python, gcc, vi, with the Mac OS X *included with his iBook purchase* didn't make a lot of sense to me. I expected him to mention some limitation in the programming environment.
Then, he starts talking about the apparent real reason, which is to have a "unified" appearance with his desktop system (presumably running Linux.). Fine. Maybe he said that in some *other* AC post, so perhaps I should apologize for not more thoroughly browsing the story and doing detective work to determine which AC posts were his. Of course, he apparently misses Expose, and I don't use Linux, so I don't know what about the unifed appearance is beneficial. But God forbid I should ask him to explain further. Or ask him to get a slashdot id.
Slashdot Mirror
really better to have eth0 and not knowning on the fly the card chipset, and wether you can enable polling, driver specific stuff, etc. What a silly idea to name all the interfaces eth0/eth1.
I don't get this. If 90% of users/apps don't care about the details of chipsets, why should they have to keep track of this trivia to know the name of their ethernet device?
If you want to know details about polling, or the driver, for some special need, you should be using an introspection mechanism to *ask* the device, or *configure* the device.
Your position is like needing to guess the waiter's name before you can order food in a restaurant. What a needless hassle.
What is it about open source that makes it equal pixie dust in the imagination of Slashdot posters?
.tar.gz file doesn't make them developers.
Open Source != others magically do free "code maintenance."
That's like saying giving a teenager the keys to your car means they'll get you that oil change and take it to the car wash and return the tank full of gas. Not likely.
99% of people who see code should NOT be doing maintenance on it. They didn't spend the time to understand the design, they don't have the training to code, and they are as likely to break something as to actually do useful maintenance. MOREOVER, with a license like GPL, they *don't* have to give you back the changes unless the distribute the binary *with changes* to *YOU*.
Open Source == customer can do focussed customization if they wish. Or port it to their new Linux server. Or can get support from somebody else (like *YOU* as a contractor) if your company keels over. But giving people a
Somebody wasn't paying attention to RMS's actual ideas.
1) FREE AS IN SPEECH, NOT FREE AS IN BEER.
If you feel so strongly, the customer can be given the source along with supporting documentation, a one year contract for support, customization, or whatever, and your company still gets money. Speech can be private, and can be compensated for.
The *real* point of Open Source is no secrets between developer and user. Nothing says Bob on the street corner needs to know.
Nobody says you have to put it on SourceForge. I suspect 99% of projects on SourceForge don't belong there anyway, and that about 5% of downloaders from SourceForge do something to change the source code, and less than 1% actually do any useful development to support the project. Basically, I see SourceForge as a vanity press: anyone can upload their new Java-based MP3 jukebox alpha-quality software, and feel like they are part of some cool movement, striking a blow against the man. But that's another topic.
2) Quick career hint: a company pays your salary because it thinks it is getting something *more* valuable in return, not to send you on some ego trip as an OSS missionary. Save that for when it is *your* company.
If you are known to higher-ups in the company as someone who was absolutely essential in a multi-million dollar revenue stream, and is likely to do similar things in the *future,* they might not outsource your job to India. (Unless you are already working there, in which case, they won't outsource it to China.)
And if you are tired of working for your company, that kind of dollar figure next to "head developer" will get you hired a lot more quickly than "code monkey."
You're not talking sense with your Coca-cola example.
The "secret recipe" nonsense is just marketing: something oh-so-special means "Coke is it!" "The Real Thing." Yes, effective marketing, but hardly a target for corporate espionage.
Look, analytical chemistry in the 21st century means there is no such thing as a true secret formula for soda pop. Trust me, given a modest amount of money and the right equipment, and someone can find out just what's in that bottle.
But so what. If Pepsi discovers the secret, what can they do?
1) Clone it, and announce "100% the same as the Real Thing, but 5% cheaper?" or "50% cheaper"? Who wants to admit they drink a knockoff to save a few cents?
2) Trumpet "we put more/less vanilla in our formula so it makes you cuter/more hip/more sexually attractive." No one (outside of the Slashdot fringe, perhaps) wants to base their soda drinking on specifications.
3) Claim "Coca-cola is poisoning you: we discovered super-toxic-brain-control-chemicals in there"? That's a conspiracy theory, but you can hardly expect Coke to have been knowingly shipping harmful stuff; they'd be sued beyond belief by everybody who drank a Coke in the last 100 years, and that's a lot of people.
4) Claim "look at us. We've got 1337 chemists who can find out Coke's most intimate secrets." Big deal; if I didn't drink Pepsi before, is this really going to change my mind? Do I really want a soda pop designed by folks in lab coats who have nothing better to? Plus, it as much as admits that Coke is the Real Thing that even Pepsi wants to copy.
There is no real advantage in the secret formula. Just posturing. All Pepsi or RC or whoever can do is posture in their own distinctive enough way, while pretending not to care, or sniff dismissively at, what the other guys are doing. It's all sugar water with flavors. Not some high tech contest.
And we know that all open source projects have *great* *clear*, *complete*, and *useful* documentation.
In the real world, internal documentation can be "I called the design engineer on the phone, and he told me the workaround, so I coded it that way. He didn't have time to correct the documentation, because he's working on the next product." or "I program 0x45 in that register because it was that way in the example code he gave me." or "well, the guy who wrote that code left to go work at a startup."
Bad open-source drivers can give hardware a bad reputation, even though the hardware vendor has nothing to do with the driver.
What a crock.
Property "rights" secured by private armies has been tried: perhaps you've heard of medieval Europe? Not too bad if you were a king, sucked if you were a serf. And if you decided to travel from the safety of one petty kingdom to another over poor roads, depend on your own resources against the depredations of highway robbery.
Forgive me if I prefer a more modern civilization, where I pay taxes to support the state's heinous apparatus of oppression, including such dastardly schemes as clean public water supplies, sanitation, and toll-free roads secured by highway patrolmen, and not just thugs hired by local strongmen.
Compare driving across Europe or the U.S. or Canada to driving through Afghanistan, or the current basketcases of Africa. Funny how bands of Taliban don't set up armed checkpoints on Route 66 to collect private tolls. There are plenty of private armies in Afghanistan and Somalia; what a paradise those places must be!
Yes, but once a group of people (i.e. more than one person) has standardized on a symbol representing Anarchy, then they have set themselves up as a central authority, admittedly not one that has a headquarters, fixed membership, or corporate structure. Nonetheless, it is an authority, because if you used a different symbol, these people could point at you and say "you've got the wrong symbol if you want to be recognized as an anarchist."
At which point, all you so-called anarchists will have shown your true colors, and someone more truly anarchic will have to overthrow your authority.
Now, personally, I'm not an anarchist by any means. My personal source of amusement is how the German punkers have their own annual "Chaos" day, all nice and according to schedule. I'm always suspicious their next step will be to get recognition for a Punker union.
I think the main market in the keynote was the developers filling the seats. And for them, the two messages were
1) we are still going to sell computers after this happens---see, MS and Adobe believe it---so you will still have a reason to stay in business
2) if you guys want to sell any new software after 2007, you'd better check that damn box in Xcode to make Universal Binaries, because PPC is going buh-bye. And it isn't hard.
Dealing with the people coming into an apple store and going "Intel, no thanks." or "my goodness, this PPC architecture, while compelling, will be outmoded by 2007" is not Apple's worry, no matter how much blogs and other nerd media harp on it. People are not buying apple because of the chip inside. They buy it for any number of reasons, but the vendor of the semiconductors just isn't one.
Their worries for now is
1) developers sticking with PPC because they like Metrowerks, or think the G5 is going to be around for a long time, or that Rosetta will be good enough.
2) developers throwing up their arms, saying "screw it, Windows doesn't make me fix endianness issues, or change APIs, or all this other crap every five years." or "Apple's finally been beleagured to death."
3) deploying on Intel revealing that OS X is a dog compared to Linux or Windows on the same hardware.
You've missed the most important annoyance (or maybe you live somewhere where this sickness hasn't spread)---after paying $10 to sit in this hellhole, you STILL get bombarded by commercials. Not previews, which I like, except when they are 20dB louder than necessary, but actual "Diet Coke makes you hip, so buy more." F**k that. I could stay home and watch commercials for free, you f**kers.
And, even when they are honest and tell you when the movie *actually* starts (so you could avoid the ads), then all the nice seats are taken, and the lights are out, and you're lucky to get two seats together.
According to http://cfrterrorism.org/sponsors/northkorea2.html
# a 1983 bombing during a South Korean state visit to Burma that killed 17 South Koreans, including several cabinet members, and narrowly missed killing then South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan;
# and a 1987 in-flight bombing of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet that killed all 115 people on board.
Of course, you can't prove any of this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
1) Mathematica has been well-tested on Intel. And UltraSPARC, and Itanium, and PowerPC. Endianess issues have almost certainly been absent for many years.
2) Most of those millions of tests are probably testing the math algorithms which are largely implemented in the Mathematica language. Given certain numerical tests, and tests of the basic language, you can extrapolate with high confidence, given that no changes were made in the high-level code, that these tests would still pass. A porting error would probably give huge cascades of errors, not just isolated test failures.
3) Obviously, the engineer had an idea of some basic tests, probably including some of the quick demos he gave on stage: as Theo said "now we know OpenGL works." These tests can quickly cover large chunks of functionality: do big integers work? Do graphics display on the screen? Do complex-valued functions still have the right branch cuts? Does the symbolic integrator work in the most-used branches of the code?
Those tests don't assure that the MacIntel port is as well debugged as the previous releases, but you can quickly build confidence that there aren't endianness issues or platform library issues that are the most likely problems in a port like this.
That said, Mathematica, while huge, is probably one of the most processor-agnostic applications around. I don't know if Steve Jobs chose it for that reason, but it was certainly a good choice for a very quick but impressive-looking port.
If Wolfram Research can port Mathematica to Mactel in a few hours, then most app makers shouldn't have a problem.
This was a red herring in the Keynote. We'll learn more as WWDC attendees hit the labs and try for themselves.
Mathematica has supported Intel for a long time, along with probably half a dozen other processor architectures over its life. It's probably one of the *most* cross-platform apps around, and therefore probably easy to port to a new processor. Endianess issues were probably designed out back when they were supporting the 68000 Macs.
Read the Universal Binary Guidelines. There are plenty of ways to get bitten. Admittedly, few APIs are going away, compared to what happened with Carbon. And it appears simpler than the 68k-->PPC transition was. But for a Mac-only app that has endianness issues hidden deep inside, those "small tweaks" could be small, but hard to find.
Chances are the Intel macs will have Open Firmware instead of a PC-style BIOS
I was counting on this too: I didn't believe Apple was going to Intel until I saw it in the press release; but I thought it would be nice to get a relatively clean architecture with Intel processors.
The universal binary guidelines, however, on p. 47, say "Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware."
No idea why, but there it is.
Also, nothing in the document mentions 64-bit computing. And G4- and G5-specific applications do not run under Rosetta.
This has got to be 90% about the laptops, maybe 10% about consumer computers. Maybe they'll progress to IA-64 at some point, but it doesn't appear to be today. In fact, I think the main moral is that Apple dropped Freescale for not having a fast bus speed on the G4 for laptops as much as dropping IBM for not having a cool G5 for laptops.
How to get 64-bit support on future Macs will be an interesting question to answer.
Vietnam was a totally different situation.
As for "bug out", perhaps you remember a guy called Douglas Macarthur, and a place called Inchon. Who made it pretty much to the Yalu river against the DPRK. The U.S. certainly isn't going to repeat the mistake of getting China involved. Or do you think the DPRK got back to the armistice line all on its own? In any case, if it turns out the DPRK does actually have nuclear weapons, and uses them, then the gloves will be off. Kim Jong Il *might* have 10 nuclear warheads, the U.S. has thousands.
It wouldn't be quick and easy like toppling Saddam Hussein was, and thousands of American troops would die, but don't you worry, Korea would be unified, just without Kim Jong Il. As for afterward, you think there will be Koreans ready to fight against the American occupiers to restore Kim's regime when they find out that South Korea is many times richer, and that the Great Leader and Dear Leader *were* lying to them, and letting them starve all those years? They'll be running off to China or South Korea as fast as they can. There's a legitimate, stable, mature Korean regime in Seoul that can take over. Not an illegitimate U.S. puppet in Saigon.
Yes, the U.S. collapsed against the initial DPRK attack (you do believe the DPRK started the Korean War, right?), because they had left just a weak force behind after WWII, with an ill-equipped South Korean army; the South was a poor agricultural country, while the North was rich and industrialized, and had Soviet military backing. The U.S. is prepared this time, and has the advantage of strategic depth, superior technology, and 50 years of studying the situation. North Korea is strategically isolated, dirt poor, and China isn't going to save their bacon this time around.
Ho Chi Minh didn't waste his life partying and drinking expensive brandy at the expense of his people. He was leading a revolution against hated Western domination, and had been fighting for many years before the U.S. showed up. Kim Jong Il is a simple dictator, who'll either cut and run, or die in a burned-out bunker. He's not going to lead his people to victory after starving and abusing them the last 50 years.
I'm not sure, with your "in the ass" comment whether you are ultimately agreeing with my analysis. But, just in case you think you have a valid point.
Question for you: why did Bill Clinton not get Osama bin Laden when he fired off those cruise missiles? Because he's a commie pinko? No. Because Pakistani intelligence tipped OBL off.
Question number 2: have you heard the name Abdul Qader Khan? As in the Pakistani who was selling nuclear technology to whoever had ready cash. What country supported him?
Question number 3: who was the principal supporter and protector of the Taliban after the U.S. lost interest?
Question number 4: where did all the Taliban run to when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan? And who is reluctant or unable to truly crack down on them? Our good old "ally in the war on terror"
Question number 5: of the nuclear powers (besides the DPRK), whose regime is poorest, weakest, and most likely to collapse, resulting in nuclear arms in the hands of an Islamist regime?
Pakistan.
Question number 6: in which country's territory do you believe Osama bin Laden is still hanging out?
All that adds up, in my view, to a grave risk to American interests.
AMD has something like 15% market share in the x86 segment.
Everyone in the industry is usually "close" to wafer capacity. Otherwise, they would have spent tons of money on extra equipment which is just sitting there depreciating. With a mature process, adding capacity is a moderate expense, and the main risk is financial: spending money on a process which will soon decline in favor of the next big thing.
The hard part is getting *device yield* up, because that is how you get from a demonstration to high volume, or from a loss-leader to a cash cow. For a market the size of the G5 desktop market, you can get by with low yields, although it makes Steve look foolish for a time. For something the size and competitiveness of the high-end x86-compatible market, AMD's yields need to be just as good as Intel's.
Improving yield *also* has the effect of increasing your capacity to produce good chips, as opposed to wafers full of useless chips.
AMD's main plan is to take market share away from Intel. If they can't expand their x86 production to actually sell those chips, this strategy can't work.
NeXTSTEP ran on four different CPUs, and all it took to build an app for all four was checking the boxes in Project Builder to say that you wanted to build a fat binary.
Right, and we know that as soon as the compiler is done, and doesn't give any error messages, that you can ship your product.
Because there is no need to do anything crazy like *test* your software on architectures you expect your customers to actually use.
And, that there isn't anything difficult about using endian-neutral routines *everywhere* they are required, and writing your code to be efficiently vectorized on totally incompatible vector units.
The 68k-PPC transition was *painful*, and only was made because the 68k was clearly a dead end. And NeXT's hardware neutrality benefited them how, exactly, in the battle against Microsoft?
Ah, but AMD can't do the quantity that Apple needs.
Jesus, this topic brings out the most idiocy of any Apple topic.
You're telling me that AMD can't handle 3% more of the overall PC market? Or that Apple will jump to 20% on the basis of this change? Give me a break.
Intel replacing Broadcom as Apple's wireless vendor of choice makes some sense. Intel making PPC processors that somehow perform better than IBM's *barely* makes sense. Apple switching processor architectures wholesale makes no sense at all---the total disruption caused would totally overwhelm the minor performance improvements that *might* be achieved, if everyone re-optimizes their apps.
In two years, the all-volunteer force will have had such a nightmare in recruiting for the festering Iraq occupation that the U.S. military will be stretched even THINNER than it is today.
Iraq was supposed to be a pushover, with terrain perfectly suited for the U.S. (see Gulf War I), had only Russia as a half-hearted partner.
North Korea has been girding for this fight ever since the Korean War armistice. They have a major Asian capital held hostage by 50 years worth of artillery emplacements. They are also right in China's backyard, and China, while completely uninterested in the North Korean regime, doesn't want some flood of hungry refugees when they are busy dealing with millions of their own rural workers looking for jobs. That's why none of this has gone to the U.N.: China has enough power to keep the U.S. from steamrolling them; Russia had no choice but to let Iraq get smacked around.
The U.S. would certainly prevail in a North Korean war, but millions of Koreans would die, with untold damage to a major economy. Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc., are real economic players [try naming an Iraqi multinational]. Now, Japan getting nuked by North Korean warheads might be equally disastrous, so there is at least one way this could spiral out of control, but this is a war that NOBODY wants.
That said, the Bush administration has been bungling the situation from day 1, particularly because the proper order of threats was 1) North Korea, 2a) Al-qaeda 2b) Pakistan 3) Iran 4) Iraq, and they started at #4, put #2b on the wrong list, and by attacking #4 managed to spook #3 and #1 enough to make the situation even trickier. Their only policy achievement in NK is a totally non-functional diplomatic arrangement that they screw up with the most childish kind of namecalling.They may very well bungle enough to get the war they don't want.
Judges exert judicial power, not executive power. Kings potentially exert both.
Lifetime appointments help relieve the fear that the judge might lose his job if, God forbid, he make some decision that a powerful politician somewhere could disagree with. Thereby allowing legislators to cry about "judicial activism" and "extremist judges" without (hopefully) affecting judges' ability to decide cases without outside influence.
Historically, lifetime appointments to executive power, on the other hand, have led to quite objectionable behaviors.
Sorry, I messed up the logic around the value of the droids and the specialization of the planet affecting the price of the planet. It's apparently too late in the day (and my microecon is too rusty) for me to carefully figure out what the right statement is.
Point remains: "using up a planet with no intervention" != "hey, free droids".
The cost of a droid army, even in your scenario, is the "opportunity cost" of being able to make any other kind of stuff from the material & labor that went into making the droids, except that you used it already.
In your example, you're using up a whole planet and its extractable energy. Which could make quite a bit of stuff, like the entire product of human civilization to date and then some. That's easily hundreds of trillions of dollars by now, and we aren't even close to using up our coal and nuclear resources. (Of course, the existence of von Neumann replicators may significantly alter the price you would pay for everything ever made on Earth, but there must be *some* alternative use for the planet with value in your Star Wars economy, such as pleasure palaces full of hookers and blackjack, or whatever, that would clearly be worth some amount of money.)
The way this is reflected economically is that you would be prepared to pay the owner of the planet for the right to strip-mine it down to zero usefulness. If there isn't an owner, then, assuming "rights to a planet" is an enforceable thing, you could claim the planet, then resell it to someone else, instead of using it for your own droid army. The potential revenue, again, assuming everyone has access to a similar level of technology, would be roughly equal to the value of the droids, unless there is something peculiarly specialized about this planet that makes it good for droid making but nothing else.
You might not need to come up with cash, or you might have enough political power to just take planets without paying, but there is a substantial economic cost to making a droid army, even if you don't need to get any human hands dirty to do so.
called Many-Worlds or Many-Histories model of quantum mechanics (Deutsch, Everett, Dewitt, and many others). There is no Copenhagen-style collapse; all possible futures do exist physically.
Yeah, there isn't a Copenhagen-style collapse, but there is an unimaginably complicated topology to space-time, with some vague hand-wavy idea about how we only perceive one of these surfaces, and no explanation of how the topological development is actually brought about by any kind of physical mechanism.
The Copenhangen-style "collapse" is a crude method of calculation. "Decoherence" is the more careful calculation which justifies the Copenhagen treatment, and is applicable to modern experiments on systems with "long-lived" quantum coherence.
Many-worlds is just escaping from one philosophical conundrum by postulating an even more confusing mechanism, with no detectable improvement in the physics.
"Star Wars" is a good sign for Western society....We support democracy.
Star Wars != support democracy, you dweeb. What, did you attend the George W. Bush school of political science? Where democracy = feel good, with no actual considerations for what defines a democratic society?
The whole point of the saga is that democratic institutions are weak, and we need princely heros (who have the blood of Anakin coursing through their veins) to protect us from despotism. Queen, Princess, Knight...those are the heroes. Who voted for Luke Skywalker? Who exercises civilian control over the Jedi?
The Star Wars story *might* correspond to a desire for a constitutional monarchy, respectful of basic human rights, but with a quasi-religious independent military. No democracy there, bub.
Poverty is irrelevant to the question. What I heard was "I bought an iBook, and because 90% of the work I do involves vi and programming, I installed Linux." Which, given the presence of Perl, Python, gcc, vi, with the Mac OS X *included with his iBook purchase* didn't make a lot of sense to me. I expected him to mention some limitation in the programming environment.
Then, he starts talking about the apparent real reason, which is to have a "unified" appearance with his desktop system (presumably running Linux.). Fine. Maybe he said that in some *other* AC post, so perhaps I should apologize for not more thoroughly browsing the story and doing detective work to determine which AC posts were his. Of course, he apparently misses Expose, and I don't use Linux, so I don't know what about the unifed appearance is beneficial. But God forbid I should ask him to explain further. Or ask him to get a slashdot id.