Eight Core Mac Pro- just so Apple can advertise the most powerful personal computer EVAR
I'd be surprised if they don't offer it. It's such an obvious step up for a high-end computer.
New Cinema Displays with built in iSight, IR sensor, HDCP. 23" becomes 24", firewire hub goes away. Maybe a smaller one
Sounds fair. I would also expect it to come in more, larger sizes; with the much-anticipated iTV just around the corner, Apple would do well to offer a high-quality display that's large enough to use as a television.
New keyboard, with USB2.0 ports built into it (three years too late)
*drool* I have to say, if I didn't use a MacBook Pro (for which this is something of a moot point), I would REALLY like to be able to plug my USB flash drive into the keyboard and have it run at full speed.
.Mac will morph into some kind of social networking thing. Myspace for Mac users. It should, but won't, be free
No comment--I don't use MySpace, I still don't really understand why so many people are so attracted to it, and Apple would have to give me a significant amount of control over my.Mac account's social networking features before I'd trust it.
Windows versions of Safari and iChat A/V, which no one will use because they both kinda suck
iChat A/V: Maybe. It would certainly be nice to be able to videoconference with Windows users reliably.
Safari: No way. There's no market incentive. The Windows version of iTunes was meant to drive iPod sales. Making a Windows version of Safari won't drive anything in Apple's favor.
Apple needs a mid-tower computer between the mini and the Pro. The iMac doesn't cut it. Steve's cube fetish will resurface here
Is there a fair-sized market for mid-tower Macs? I don't know, but I know that is the key, because Apple won't build it unless they believe there to be a large enough market for it.
A tablet Macbook would be great, as long as the voice and handwriting recognition work better than anything before
If the speech recognition on my MacBook Pro is any indication, Apple isn't even close to being able to pull this off. Furthermore, the market may be too small to attract their interest (as with the mid-tower).
Based on what I've seen of tablet PC's, they have a long way to go before they're useful enough for a company like Apple to care about them. But maybe that's because companies like Apple haven't been working on them, thus perhaps a sort of chicken-and-egg paradox.
Seems pretty obvious to me. As long as you push the same pointer to each list, but in a different order, you get EXACTLY what was described in the patent. Is the technology in the LSI patent REALLY so new and innovative in comparison?
"A bit of a blowhard?" Let's review some of the things he's said on his show over the years:
"It's hard to do it because you gotta look people in the eye and tell 'em they're irresponsible and lazy. And who's gonna wanna do that? Because that's what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen. In this country, you can succeed if you get educated and work hard. Period. Period." (16 June 2004)
"Finally, the ACLU -- we talked about this yesterday and I -- and, you know, I have to pick on the ACLU because they're the most dangerous organization in the United States of America right now. There's by far. There's nobody even close to that. They're, like, second next to Al Qaeda." (2 June 2004)
"I don't have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they're a prehistoric group." (17 June 2004) The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly
"I've been to Africa three times. All right? You can't bring Western reasoning into the culture. The same way you can't bring it into fundamental Islam" (6 May 2002)
"Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if Al-Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." (8 November 2005)
Maybe his views don't coincide perfectly with those of the "hard right", but he does seem to be living in a fantasy world largely shaped by his (mis)interpretation of Christianity. And don't forget how he seems to wish for harm to come to EVERYONE who disagrees with him.
Then you were failing at something that school is also supposed to teach you along with reading, writing, and 'rithmetic: Self-discipline. If there's one thing that school, both high school and college, taught me, it is that sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do in order to be better off later on. Hopefully you had a parent or two that drilled that into your head where your school let you down.
Perhaps that's the root of the problem right there? That the schools are not teaching self-discipline? You can't always count on the parents to teach self-discipline (you pointed out several examples of how some parents fail to support the child's education), and it's important enough that maybe the schools should make significant efforts to teach it.
I'd also add that critical thinking skill should be required of ALL high-school graduates; in fact, the earlier it can be taught, the better. Accusations of liberal bias be damned; the fact that there are idiots out there who actually LISTEN to the zealots who want to teach intelligent design (a.k.a. Creationism), et al. in public schools is dependent on the inability of a large number of people to think critically.
If you look back at my original message, I never said anything about TERRORISTS using radioactive waste to make weapons; I know that the terrorist threat has been way overhyped. But I do think that as long as the potential exists for radioactive waste to be misused, someone will be tempted to misuse it.
My concern about nuclear energy is the possibility (I'm not yet convinced one way or the other) that it will ultimately land us in a difficult situation similar to the one that fossil fuels have landed us in now. Perhaps you're right that radioactive waste will become a valuable resource in the near future, as has happened with other materials in the past. However, your assessment depends on technology that (as far as I can tell) have not yet been invented, and history has also shown that it's incredibly difficult to predict technology more than a few years into the future (whatever happened to the flying cars, jet packs, moon bases, et al. we were supposed to have by now?).
As long as the risks are accounted for, I wouldn't be opposed to the use of nuclear power as a temporary measure to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, as long as once the technology is in place to move to 100% renewable energy, we actually move to renewable energy.
Nuclear waste is not only managable but can be rendered inert and safely stored for tens of thousands of years.
Look at world history. Has any civilization managed to exist without the occasional upheaval for tens of thousands of years? The Roman Empire barely lasted over 1,000 years, and even China has been subject to more than a few major upheavals in its 6,000-year history. You can't count on nuclear waste sites being overseen properly in the middle of any sort of political upheaval. Unless you can guarantee that the nuclear waste will require NO OVERSIGHT WHATSOEVER during the tens of thousands of years you intend to store it, and you can eliminate the risk of it being used for nuclear weapons (e.g. dirty bombs), I think you're going to have to drastically reduce the time it needs to be stored for nuclear power to be a safe option.
Still, if it turns out that it's impossible to power the world with other renewable energy sources (e.g. solar, wind), I suppose that maybe nuclear power has reached a point where it's ultimately less risky than oil. But maybe that has more to do with politics; I'm not sure.
I see two simple options. First: 1. Build each computer with 1GB of RAM and no hard drive. A fast CPU is not needed, but the ability to net-boot is required. 2. Set up a Knoppix image on a net-boot server, which the workstations can net-boot from. (The Knoppix image might need to be customized for this purpose, but even if no modified Knoppix image already exists with this feature, it shouldn't be overwhelmingly hard to make one.)
Thus, everything runs off a read-only NFS filesystem, and is impossible to vandalize a workstation on a software level (a reboot undoes any vandalism). Furthermore, Knoppix has proved itself to be very good at autoconfiguring itself on a wide range of hardware. And I don't know ANYONE who couldn't figure out how to use Knoppix if they tried.
Another option: 1. Build each computer with 512MB+ of RAM and at least a 5GB hard drive. The ability to net-boot is not needed. 2. Install Knoppix on one computer's hard drive, and copy the disk image to all other computers. Many tools exist for this, of which Norton Ghost is merely the best-known (open-source alternatives do exist).
Thus, you get the same advantages of the first solution, but with a local hard disk. The first solution would offer easier clean-up on workstations, while the second would result in higher performance. Of course, you could get even higher performance by configuring a net-booting Knoppix to load to RAM, but you'd need more RAM (I'd guess at least 2GB) on each workstation.
Why is it so hard for them? Did they get brainwashed by Microsoft's P.R. trolls, or am I way smarter than than Birmingham's IT staff?
Nice ideas, but I've been in a few situations where that was not possible. In one case, the drive had failed but was still under warranty. If I had done ANY of the things you describe, I'm sure they would have rejected my warranty claim. I can't afford that (college student, shoestring budget, et al.)
Personally, I run the "shred" utility on any hard disk before letting it go, with the standard 26 passes. It may take several days to complete (depending on the size of the disk), and the data might still be recoverable using specialized (and really expensive) hardware, but I have had no problems thus far. And even if one could recover the contents of the disk, it's likely part of a RAID-5 array (thus incomplete data) that is scrambled with dm-crypt (thus incomplete AND incomprehensible data). Yes, I suppose someone with the time and resources might still get something of value off the drive; I'll consider a more thorough approach (such as disintegrating the drive) if and when I have enemies that would actually be able and inclined to do so.
You're missing something very important: the survival of the human species is completely dependent on the survival of nature. We can sustain humanity on a green, leafy planet; we don't have the technology to sustain humanity in a radioactive wasteland.
I am not a patent attorney, but I remember reading an article about Intermezzo a few years ago in Linux Magazine. And I did read the patent abstract (the actual claims sound like weasel-speak designed to trick inattentive USPTO officers into thinking that it is a novel idea).
My point was that replicating data across multiple filesystems is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, so even if the patent discusses a specific application thereof, Apple should not be able to get a patent on it. But as long as one can get a patent on the comb-over hairstyle, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple could get this patent anyway.
I think the idea here is that the home directory is mirrored on the internal hard disk AND an external device of some kind. Then again, I think InterMezzo has prior art on that. So this may seem like a novel idea for your average PC user, but it's not novel enough to warrant a patent.
Of course, it's not like the USPTO hasn't ever issued a patent on something that should never have been patentable...
My university doesn't teach Lisp (actually Scheme, a dialect of Lisp) until near the end of the computer science curriculum, in the "Programming Languages" class. I'm taking it now, and I don't appreciate Lisp.
Perhaps my opinion of Lisp/Scheme will change by the end of the semester, but I doubt it.
It's a shame a company like Microsoft has so many reservations about pushing technology in the direction they want to go, instead of letting the entertainment schmucks steer them into a corner.
Are you sure this isn't the direction Microsoft wanted to go? Microsoft is all about control, and there is no better way to exercise control over something than DRM.
I don't think Microsoft would agree to this unless they were sure that the RIAA wouldn't usurp control of the system from them.
"We trust you to not steal our stuff, but Microsoft and Apple think you're thieves."
I thought Apple only included DRM in the iTunes Music Store because content-makers (like Sony) refused to let them sell their content without DRM. Considering how lenient FairPlay is compared to other DRM systems, I think Apple understands that DRM is not something that customers are interested in (athough I'd much prefer if customers were actively disinterested in DRM).
Change "you feel like you should be able to do" to "you should be able to do". There is no reason the technology should prevent you from doing any of those things. Thus, the sentence becomes:
"DRM is a complicated bunch of technical crap that might be tacked on to music, videos, etc., which is designed to keep you from doing what you should be able to do."
It might be worth mentioning that it allows producers to get higher profits by selling an inferior product, if the person you're explaining it to asks why producers would want such a thing.
Critics continue to argue that paper should be banned from schools, as it has been used by students to read "Playboy" magazine, pass notes to each other during class, and read forbidden Gnostic writings. Some parents, however, argue that paper helps their kids to learn essential skills, such as how to use neon colors to make class presentations less boring.
They can't penetrate into animal (or plant) cells because they are too large for it, and they can't use their injection system because animal cell walls are dense as bacterial cell walls.
Animal cells don't have cell walls. Or were you thinking of cell membranes?
According to the Wikipedia article on heroin, a withdrawal of as little as six hours can cause extreme pain due to the body's reduced production of endorphins (as well as a few neurotransmitters I'm not familiar with), even if the addict is otherwise healthy. So unless Prozac has side-effects that are equally severe, I would expect that it could compete just fine against heroin on an open market.
Reality may vastly differ from my predictions, though--my knowledge of illegal drugs is basically limited to anti-drug education (propaganda?) in grade school, the aforementioned Wikipedia article, and the movie "A Scanner Darkly".
Funny you should mention the Native American use of peyote. Native Americans are the only ones that need "permission" from the Federal Government to practice their religion. What part of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" is so hard to understand? What you purpose would only create a massive bureaucracy with further control over our lives.
Actually, that argument could be a slippery slope. Consider this: there are at least a few religions that demand human sacrifice (Aztec religion comes to mind, though I'm sure there are others, and I'm pretty sure that sacrifice of at least a few types of living creatures is condoned by the Bible). Are you prepared to strike down laws against murder, on the grounds that they prohibit the free exercise of one's religion? It might even become possible to get any law stricken down by inventing a new religion that demands actions prohibited by said law (which should be a lot easier than deliberately misinterpreting an existing religion)!
I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but considering some of the braindead legislation that has been passed by Congress over the last few years, I don't think I'd be too surprised if something like this were to happen.
And just to be clear, I am not trying to say that Native Americans should or should not need government permission to use drugs as part of their religious practices. I'd rather leave that debate to those who understand it better than I do.
There was a comment the other day related to making legislators take lie detector tests monthly.
The problem with all lie detectors is that they assume that there is some consistent physiological response to telling a lie. There isn't. With a certain amount of self-discipline, it is apparently possible for ANYONE to make the lie detector return a false reading.
Slashdot Mirror
iww!
I'd be surprised if they don't offer it. It's such an obvious step up for a high-end computer.
Sounds fair. I would also expect it to come in more, larger sizes; with the much-anticipated iTV just around the corner, Apple would do well to offer a high-quality display that's large enough to use as a television.
*drool* I have to say, if I didn't use a MacBook Pro (for which this is something of a moot point), I would REALLY like to be able to plug my USB flash drive into the keyboard and have it run at full speed.
No comment--I don't use MySpace, I still don't really understand why so many people are so attracted to it, and Apple would have to give me a significant amount of control over my .Mac account's social networking features before I'd trust it.
iChat A/V: Maybe. It would certainly be nice to be able to videoconference with Windows users reliably.
Safari: No way. There's no market incentive. The Windows version of iTunes was meant to drive iPod sales. Making a Windows version of Safari won't drive anything in Apple's favor.
Is there a fair-sized market for mid-tower Macs? I don't know, but I know that is the key, because Apple won't build it unless they believe there to be a large enough market for it.
If the speech recognition on my MacBook Pro is any indication, Apple isn't even close to being able to pull this off. Furthermore, the market may be too small to attract their interest (as with the mid-tower).
Based on what I've seen of tablet PC's, they have a long way to go before they're useful enough for a company like Apple to care about them. But maybe that's because companies like Apple haven't been working on them, thus perhaps a sort of chicken-and-egg paradox.
What about this use of multiple singly-linked lists of pointers in C++?
#include <list>list<someType*> order1;
list<someType*> order2;
Seems pretty obvious to me. As long as you push the same pointer to each list, but in a different order, you get EXACTLY what was described in the patent. Is the technology in the LSI patent REALLY so new and innovative in comparison?
"A bit of a blowhard?" Let's review some of the things he's said on his show over the years:
(Quotes courtesy Wikiquote)
Maybe his views don't coincide perfectly with those of the "hard right", but he does seem to be living in a fantasy world largely shaped by his (mis)interpretation of Christianity. And don't forget how he seems to wish for harm to come to EVERYONE who disagrees with him.
Perhaps that's the root of the problem right there? That the schools are not teaching self-discipline? You can't always count on the parents to teach self-discipline (you pointed out several examples of how some parents fail to support the child's education), and it's important enough that maybe the schools should make significant efforts to teach it.
I'd also add that critical thinking skill should be required of ALL high-school graduates; in fact, the earlier it can be taught, the better. Accusations of liberal bias be damned; the fact that there are idiots out there who actually LISTEN to the zealots who want to teach intelligent design (a.k.a. Creationism), et al. in public schools is dependent on the inability of a large number of people to think critically.
But was the grandparent post talking about Christianity, or the interpretation thereof that comes from its loudest faction?
Frankly, I think Bill O'Reilly is a Christian in the same way that ketchup is a vegetable.
If you look back at my original message, I never said anything about TERRORISTS using radioactive waste to make weapons; I know that the terrorist threat has been way overhyped. But I do think that as long as the potential exists for radioactive waste to be misused, someone will be tempted to misuse it.
My concern about nuclear energy is the possibility (I'm not yet convinced one way or the other) that it will ultimately land us in a difficult situation similar to the one that fossil fuels have landed us in now. Perhaps you're right that radioactive waste will become a valuable resource in the near future, as has happened with other materials in the past. However, your assessment depends on technology that (as far as I can tell) have not yet been invented, and history has also shown that it's incredibly difficult to predict technology more than a few years into the future (whatever happened to the flying cars, jet packs, moon bases, et al. we were supposed to have by now?).
As long as the risks are accounted for, I wouldn't be opposed to the use of nuclear power as a temporary measure to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, as long as once the technology is in place to move to 100% renewable energy, we actually move to renewable energy.
Look at world history. Has any civilization managed to exist without the occasional upheaval for tens of thousands of years? The Roman Empire barely lasted over 1,000 years, and even China has been subject to more than a few major upheavals in its 6,000-year history. You can't count on nuclear waste sites being overseen properly in the middle of any sort of political upheaval. Unless you can guarantee that the nuclear waste will require NO OVERSIGHT WHATSOEVER during the tens of thousands of years you intend to store it, and you can eliminate the risk of it being used for nuclear weapons (e.g. dirty bombs), I think you're going to have to drastically reduce the time it needs to be stored for nuclear power to be a safe option.
Still, if it turns out that it's impossible to power the world with other renewable energy sources (e.g. solar, wind), I suppose that maybe nuclear power has reached a point where it's ultimately less risky than oil. But maybe that has more to do with politics; I'm not sure.
I see two simple options. First:
1. Build each computer with 1GB of RAM and no hard drive. A fast CPU is not needed, but the ability to net-boot is required.
2. Set up a Knoppix image on a net-boot server, which the workstations can net-boot from. (The Knoppix image might need to be customized for this purpose, but even if no modified Knoppix image already exists with this feature, it shouldn't be overwhelmingly hard to make one.)
Thus, everything runs off a read-only NFS filesystem, and is impossible to vandalize a workstation on a software level (a reboot undoes any vandalism). Furthermore, Knoppix has proved itself to be very good at autoconfiguring itself on a wide range of hardware. And I don't know ANYONE who couldn't figure out how to use Knoppix if they tried.
Another option:
1. Build each computer with 512MB+ of RAM and at least a 5GB hard drive. The ability to net-boot is not needed.
2. Install Knoppix on one computer's hard drive, and copy the disk image to all other computers. Many tools exist for this, of which Norton Ghost is merely the best-known (open-source alternatives do exist).
Thus, you get the same advantages of the first solution, but with a local hard disk. The first solution would offer easier clean-up on workstations, while the second would result in higher performance. Of course, you could get even higher performance by configuring a net-booting Knoppix to load to RAM, but you'd need more RAM (I'd guess at least 2GB) on each workstation.
Why is it so hard for them? Did they get brainwashed by Microsoft's P.R. trolls, or am I way smarter than than Birmingham's IT staff?
Nice ideas, but I've been in a few situations where that was not possible. In one case, the drive had failed but was still under warranty. If I had done ANY of the things you describe, I'm sure they would have rejected my warranty claim. I can't afford that (college student, shoestring budget, et al.)
Personally, I run the "shred" utility on any hard disk before letting it go, with the standard 26 passes. It may take several days to complete (depending on the size of the disk), and the data might still be recoverable using specialized (and really expensive) hardware, but I have had no problems thus far. And even if one could recover the contents of the disk, it's likely part of a RAID-5 array (thus incomplete data) that is scrambled with dm-crypt (thus incomplete AND incomprehensible data). Yes, I suppose someone with the time and resources might still get something of value off the drive; I'll consider a more thorough approach (such as disintegrating the drive) if and when I have enemies that would actually be able and inclined to do so.
You must be new to fundamentalism.
You're missing something very important: the survival of the human species is completely dependent on the survival of nature. We can sustain humanity on a green, leafy planet; we don't have the technology to sustain humanity in a radioactive wasteland.
Project Censored, anyone? They are headquartered at Sonoma State University, in Northern California.
I am not a patent attorney, but I remember reading an article about Intermezzo a few years ago in Linux Magazine. And I did read the patent abstract (the actual claims sound like weasel-speak designed to trick inattentive USPTO officers into thinking that it is a novel idea).
My point was that replicating data across multiple filesystems is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, so even if the patent discusses a specific application thereof, Apple should not be able to get a patent on it. But as long as one can get a patent on the comb-over hairstyle, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple could get this patent anyway.
I think the idea here is that the home directory is mirrored on the internal hard disk AND an external device of some kind. Then again, I think InterMezzo has prior art on that. So this may seem like a novel idea for your average PC user, but it's not novel enough to warrant a patent.
Of course, it's not like the USPTO hasn't ever issued a patent on something that should never have been patentable...
My university doesn't teach Lisp (actually Scheme, a dialect of Lisp) until near the end of the computer science curriculum, in the "Programming Languages" class. I'm taking it now, and I don't appreciate Lisp.
Perhaps my opinion of Lisp/Scheme will change by the end of the semester, but I doubt it.
Are you sure this isn't the direction Microsoft wanted to go? Microsoft is all about control, and there is no better way to exercise control over something than DRM.
I don't think Microsoft would agree to this unless they were sure that the RIAA wouldn't usurp control of the system from them.
I thought Apple only included DRM in the iTunes Music Store because content-makers (like Sony) refused to let them sell their content without DRM. Considering how lenient FairPlay is compared to other DRM systems, I think Apple understands that DRM is not something that customers are interested in (athough I'd much prefer if customers were actively disinterested in DRM).
Change "you feel like you should be able to do" to "you should be able to do". There is no reason the technology should prevent you from doing any of those things. Thus, the sentence becomes:
It might be worth mentioning that it allows producers to get higher profits by selling an inferior product, if the person you're explaining it to asks why producers would want such a thing.
Critics continue to argue that paper should be banned from schools, as it has been used by students to read "Playboy" magazine, pass notes to each other during class, and read forbidden Gnostic writings. Some parents, however, argue that paper helps their kids to learn essential skills, such as how to use neon colors to make class presentations less boring.
How about this?
Animal cells don't have cell walls. Or were you thinking of cell membranes?
According to the Wikipedia article on heroin, a withdrawal of as little as six hours can cause extreme pain due to the body's reduced production of endorphins (as well as a few neurotransmitters I'm not familiar with), even if the addict is otherwise healthy. So unless Prozac has side-effects that are equally severe, I would expect that it could compete just fine against heroin on an open market.
Reality may vastly differ from my predictions, though--my knowledge of illegal drugs is basically limited to anti-drug education (propaganda?) in grade school, the aforementioned Wikipedia article, and the movie "A Scanner Darkly".
Actually, that argument could be a slippery slope. Consider this: there are at least a few religions that demand human sacrifice (Aztec religion comes to mind, though I'm sure there are others, and I'm pretty sure that sacrifice of at least a few types of living creatures is condoned by the Bible). Are you prepared to strike down laws against murder, on the grounds that they prohibit the free exercise of one's religion? It might even become possible to get any law stricken down by inventing a new religion that demands actions prohibited by said law (which should be a lot easier than deliberately misinterpreting an existing religion)!
I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but considering some of the braindead legislation that has been passed by Congress over the last few years, I don't think I'd be too surprised if something like this were to happen.
And just to be clear, I am not trying to say that Native Americans should or should not need government permission to use drugs as part of their religious practices. I'd rather leave that debate to those who understand it better than I do.
The problem with all lie detectors is that they assume that there is some consistent physiological response to telling a lie. There isn't. With a certain amount of self-discipline, it is apparently possible for ANYONE to make the lie detector return a false reading.