Duo 280c. Bought in 1996, used lightly until 2003 as a living room computer, no problems. The thing was as solid as a brick. Finally had to get rid of it because neither the maximum 56MB of RAM nor the maximum OS 8.6 were good enough even for basic web surfing. Still worked great.
(And, yes, I'll confirm that OS <X were unstable if you did more than one thing at once. They were easy to use, maintain, and understand, but not very reliable and very memory-hungry.)
1GHz TiBook, owned by ex-housemate. Bought in early 2003, still running (Tiger, 512MB RAM). This was one of the good ones -- never had a problem despite everyday use. Not everyone was so lucky with the TiBook; they often had hinge and case problems. (The owner is super-careful with it, so that helps.)
1.25GHz 15" AlBook. Bought in early 2004, still running (now in Mom's hands). No problems except two power-brick failures, probably caused by very sketchy power in Mom's condo.
1.5GHZ 12" AlBook. Bought in April, still running fine despite a 4' drop onto pavement in July (ouch!) This 'Book gets abused: dragged with me virtually everywhere and used under all conditions ~8 hours a day. The case is easy to scratch but other than that it's indestructible. The 12" model is a little thicker than the others; that and the lesser width give it a very sturdy feel. This is the 'Book I'd recommend to anyone who will use a laptop hard.
On the desktop side, I've owned 5 Power Macs, from 7100 to my current dual G5. The only problem I ever had was a hard drive failure in the 7100. One of the Macs, a beige G3, stood up to 24/7 use for four years with no failures of any sort (and still works today).
Needless to say I've been happy with my Apple experience.
Anyone using it to try and turn a profit is just a talentless hack who thinks of a PC as a money making machine.
Way to be supportive of creative folks...
..."if artists try to eat, they are talentless hacks."
IT departments, like programmers, artists, small businesspeople, and consumers, are out to fulfill their own goals. There is no reason earning money is not a legitimate goal, and no reason it can't be totally compatible with enjoying your work and doing original things. Illogically vilifying people trying to make a living accomplishes nothing.
Of course, the practices of a lot of IT departments, often mandated by nonsensical regulations and/or invented by idiots, are a separate issue. But it's not "improper use" of a tool to use it to earn money, especially when money is necessary to survive in our world.
I have a set of the 71's. They do block out sound pretty well, so I take them with me when I'm traveling on airplanes, trains, etc.
But they don't sound very good. The highs are dull and the bass is rather boomy... almost as if you were listening through a rubber diaphragm, which you basically are.
My best-sounding headphones ever? Sony MDR-855 non-canal earbuds. I got one pair way back in 1989 when I bought a WM-DD9. I bought another pair a couple years later. I still use them, and they still sound terrific. Even a stopped Sony is right twice a day.
Both types of earbuds are much easier on my ears than Sony and Koss over-ear headphones I've owned in the past. My uninformed theory is that since I don't have to drive them as hard, and therefore the sound is cleaner, my ears fatigue much less quickly.
has the light rail laid one section of track, yet? Both the monorail and the light rail projects for the region have been in development hell for at least 10 years, with seemingly no progress made.
The light rail is well on its way (at least the initial downtown-to-airport segment). Track has been laid through Sodo and a bridge has been built to the edge of Beacon Hill, the bus tunnel is closing starting tomorrow for the installation of updated track and safety systems, the tunnel-boring machine for Beacon Hill is sitting in pieces ready for assembly in a Port of Seattle yard, and MLK Way is a war zone as 100 years of underground utilities have been moved in preparation for the rebuilding of the street with track in the middle. They are saying it's on time for completion in 2009; the only thing that could go wrong at this point is unexpected soil conditions under Beacon Hill.
For people with transit experience it was easy to see that the monorail project, from the very beginning, was doomed by the same insular mentality and hubris that has infected every other Seattle project until Joni Earl arrived to shake up ST. They were determined, regardless of data, to stick to their artificial goals of self-sufficiency in 2020 and opening in 2009 (only 7 years after the last vote). The collapse has been utterly predictable.
I hope that Joni Earl sticks around for awhile. Her Sound Transit can actually get projects built; if we stick with it, we'll have LRT from Sea-Tac to Northgate and across the lake, and working commuter rail in the south end and to the ferry terminals up north. A monorail line would work better, as there's absolutely no room to build surface LRT, in the Ballard-to-West Seattle corridor, but someone other than Joel Horn needs to build it.
For my 170GB of losslessly compressed, mostly classical music, I bought the CDs because no significant amount of classical music is available online, and if it were, the codec would suck.
Out of that 170GB, I'd say maybe 10GB is crap, and even that I keep for a reason. The rest is either good or essential -- my "essentials" playlist, which I use compressed on my 60GB iPod, is around 90GB. (A 100GB iPod would fit my collection comfortably if it were compressed to 256k AAC.)
When you're not dealing with the artificial 4-minute song format collections grow quickly.
What song do you have the most versions of and what are the differences?
I have five recordings of Bruckner's 7th: Chailly, Harnoncourt, Szell, and two by Masur (with Leipzig and the NY Phil). I have some specific reason, usually a great reading of a particular moment, for keeping each in the collection. Other than that, I don't have more than three versions of any work, and even duplicates are kind of rare.
Of course, what I said was 1 lane of highway handles as much traffic as 5 rail lines. Not "can handle" but "handles."
I don't think you can make a generalization like this in any case. Here in Seattle, where the rail lines are basically toys at this point, I'm sure 1 lane of highway handles way more than 5x the number of people on the train. In New York City, where the highways are gridlocked and there are a bajillion packed trains coming from every direction, I would expect the trains to carry many times the number of people that the highway system does, even with buses factored in. And in other metropolitan areas, the ratio will be different.
But you have to consider capacity because you have to plan for future growth. Absent a one-child law or draconian (and economically suicidal) immigration policies, we's just gettin' bigger. And when it comes to planning for growth, in addition to their limited capacity, highways have the disadvantages of city traffic and parking. Highway bottlenecks are often actually caused by choked local roads, and $20/day parking somehow inspires people to want to not drive.
Local-road congestion is also the problem with huge expansions of the bus system. Buses cannot physically move faster than traffic (unless you build rail-like dedicated rights-of-way), where trains can. And when you get too many buses in a downtown or employment area, they can create gridlock by themselves (ever been around the Port Authority bus terminal in NYC at 5:30 pm?) In general, in areas where public transport will work at all to move significant numbers of people, rail will work better on the high-usage corridors.
We want elbow room. That means low density suburban areas and rail simply can't serve that type of population economically.
Well... it does a pretty good job in Connecticut and New Jersey (at least for commutes).
In any case, I think we need to recognize the economic and environmental costs of low-density suburban living and stop subsidizing it. If people want *their own* pool (as opposed to a community pool), *their own* yard (as opposed to a bigger and more beautiful park) and total deathly quiet, they need to pay the energy taxes to help defray their increased contribution to global warming through both driving and increased household energy usage, the water taxes to help with the treatment of the polluted runoff from their lawns, and the increased costs of policing areas where there are a million places for the bad guys to hide.
I'm all for people being able to make whatever lifestyle choices they want, but I don't want to subsidize their redundant extravagances.
A hybrid system that incorporated a different propulsion and suspension system when traveling on high speed long distance runs would be a nice optimization
The starry-eyed geek in me is imagining a system where big highways use a computer-controlled maglev-type system to whisk cars along, nearly frictionless, close together, at speeds of 300mph or more. My complaint about your other post about the capacity of highways would probably be mooted by such an invention.:)
In the near term, computer control could help by itself. The computer could drive the car on major roads (and with current cars, you could probably set speeds to 110-120 mph reasonably) and also make sure of things like correct tire pressure and alignment that can kill energy efficiency.
since 1 lane of highway handles as much traffic as 5 rail lines
WTF??!!OMG!@#!1 [spits out innocent drink]
If you're going to state "facts" obtained through rectal extraction, at least find somewhat plausible ones.
Assuming people are driving in accordance with the rules, and that an (optimistic) average of 1.3 ppl/vehicle is maintained, 1 lane of traffic can handle 1.3 ppl/2 sec = 39 ppl/min = 2340 ppl/hr. Note that this is the most optimistic possible assumption, requiring perfect traffic flow with no backups despite a capacity load. Any traffic engineer will tell you that no real general-purpose lane actually carries this many people during rush hour.
Capacity of a rail line varies wildly according to train frequency and length, but let's assume a typical peak-hour (in big cities) frequency of 5 trains/hour, each with 10 cars capable of carrying 72 people each. The capacity of this (by no means optimized) scenario is 5*10*72 = 3600 ppl/hr. Now be aware that passenger trains can be as long as 16 cars when the stations can handle it, that the biggest rail lines have way more than 5 trains/hour at peak times, and that in a tight squeeze way more than 72 people can squeeze into a car. It's easy to imagine a scenario where one rail line can carry more people than an entire L.A. interstate.
Incidentally, the whole density={crime,pollution} thing is a red herring from the bad old days of white flight. It's been known for at least two decades now that properly planned (i.e. not in huge, anarchic projects) density reduces crime because of the extra eyeballs always around. And, while the environment in a city may be slightly more polluted than the suburbs, the city has several times less environmental impact in terms of both pollution and resource use per capita. If everyone were able to live as frugally as those in the big city, the world's pollution and energy problems would be much more tractable.
I tried to explain this to my boss when I showed up for work at 10:30 today. But he's such a moron, he didn't understand it. Instead of being impressed by my knowledge and intelligence, he fired me. Dammit!
To be honest, there's really no real difference between having [newspaper-style comics] in print on the newspaper or having them online
There are big differences here. The print format has the giant advantage that you tend to see comics other than your "favorites," because you can't help but read those nearby; you may get exposed to lots of artists including a great one or two. I would never have known a damn thing about newspaper comics if I had started reading them online.
But for each individual artist the online format is much more liberating. All of a sudden restrictions on size are completely gone; much more detail can be stuffed into each frame without it being reduced into illegibility. Color can be used every day, not just Sunday, and even the format can be changed in whatever way the artist likes (assuming he is willing to do separate versions of the comic for print and online).
Of course, the online "liberation" requires a new level of discipline from the artist. The truly great newspaper cartoonists were/are great because they can convey either jokes, an entire world, or both through a necessarily very simple and limited medium. Great online cartoonists will have a different set of skills, more akin to those of comic-book creators or even visual artists.
All this leaves aside the question of how much computer assistance is valuable in the daily-comic medium. Most artists use computers extensively these days; to my eye, the most successful are those such as Tom Tomorrow and Aaron McGruder whose styles deliberately showcase electronic techniques and are unafraid to admit it.
Smart... but I want 120GB the size of a *matchbook*!!!! Waaaah!!! Incompetent engineers!!!
Seriously, I want my capacity, but not *that* much. The compressed version of my collection is about 85GB; until there's an iPod-or-smaller machine that big I'll just make do with my 60GB iPod.
I agree with you that, in general, too many people are in jail.
But in cases of very costly (to the rest of us) and profitable (to the perp) white-collar crime, there is very little else that can serve as a deterrent. White-collar criminals tend to have a different attitude from low-level drug offenders: they aren't desperate or sick, and don't even recognize that what they're doing is wrong. Instead, they feel no guilt about gaming the system in any way possible (speaking in generalities, of course).
If you fine them, they'll hide their money (as another poster said). If you try to leverage their knowledge, they'll fail to cooperate. As long as you let them have their freedom, they'll find a way to beat you. The way to make them think twice is to take away their freedom.
If we put one white-collar perp in jail for every five low-level drug offenders we let out and put into intensive treatment programs, we'd make the market a more honest place and solve a lot of social problems at the same time.
I guess I should have clarified that I'm not really thinking of ordinary streaming, but future audio applications... specifically, I'm imagining "bands" playing in real time over the Internet. Ideally, you'd have many more than 2 channels of sound (think 4+ tracks, 2 channels each) at much higher fidelity than 192k MP3 (think FLAC or ALAC).
In any case, the mass-market, passive-consumer application for Big Bandwith will be streaming HD video. Imagine a client that prevents Joe User from saving the content... the studios will be (misguidedly, of course) ecstatic.
And I expect net gaming will bloat further as worlds get more complex and play gets more fine-grained... although I'm sure MS can help, and probably has a few engineers on the case.:)
I guess this depends on what the definition of "works" is... (apologies to Slick Willie)
2Mb (that's bits, not Bytes) may work fine for checking email and reading/. , but it definitely doesn't "work" for video applications, the games of the future, or real-time high-quality audio.
Once there is fiber or some other high-speed (>50Mbps) technology to the doorstep we will start to see those next-generation applications. At that point we'll feel about 2Mbps the same way we feel about dialup today.
Continuing the theme of rampant speculation established by TFA...
All the rumors I have heard seem to suggest that the high-end desktop hardware (PowerMac, XServe, high-end iMac configs) will be the last to switch to Intel.
If Apple uses Pentium M and its successors to solve its laptop/Mac Mini problem, it can probably afford to wait on the high-end hardware. IBM has already announced dual-core G5s which should be good for another PowerMac revision or two.
By that time, if there is a mythical Intel 64-bit magic chip, it will be on or close to market.
It didn't have (full) memory protection but this somehow made Mac apps more stable in the first place. When developers get called because their app takes down the whole system, they dont make the same mistake twice.
My house doesn't have circuit breakers and somehow this makes me more careful with electrical appliances. When a shorted toaster burns down the house, I don't make the same mistake twice.
I mean, I'm as much of an Apple fan as anyone, but really...
Yes, classic MacOS had advantages, especially in ease of use and support. Yes, it had limited multithreading. But, yes, it was both buggy (what isn't? that's what protected memory is *for*) and unstable: I don't think it ever lasted through more than a couple days of hard use for me.
There is a lot to be said for the idea that OS X, especially with iLife for the consumer, is more of a value-add than Apple had before. But the reason for the switch to Intel is notebooks: there simply isn't a viable PPC pro-notebook solution.
Okay, I don't usually respond to trolls, but tonight I'm bored.
1. Too many left-wing activists have been put on the no-fly lists for it to be accidental. I've seen reports of a baby or two, and never of a right-wing activist, but there have been at least 20 cases of left-wing activists on the no-fly lists.
2. I cited John Ashcroft because, in 2001 when he was Attorney General (did you forget?) he dramatically and famously equated dissent with terrorism. But the right-wing media that echoed his posture did not stop when he left office.
3. Sure I cited an obscenity case. The hallmark of both the Ashcroft and Gonzalez Justice Departments' approaches to porn has been to systematically attempt to expand the obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment until it covers Janet Jackson's nipple. "Obscenity" should refer only to that material (such as child and snuff porn) that constitutes evidence of a crime.
And, no, I don't want to take away your gun./rolls eyes I'm more libertarian than leftist reactionary.
What is the detriment, in real, measurable terms, of not having as rapid broadband penetration as countries a fraction of our size? If I go from 2 Mbps to 10 Mbps, what wonderful things happen?
0mG f4$+ pR0n!!1
Seriously, there are quite a few economically meaningful applications that it's possible to imagine for connections that are capable of carrying real video signals full-duplex, which we do not have. Think of a conference call with high-resolution video of all participants, either for business or to allow loved ones to see each other. Or maybe movie production across the net, either by studios or independents. Live music across a continent. And I'm only scratching the tip of the iceberg. People would think of many more ways to use the connectivity just as they have with existing "broadband."
High-resolution video is currently the "last frontier" of computing power. It pushes CPUs, disks, and networks to their limits, and has many easy-to-imagine applications. When computers and networks are powerful enough to work with it easily, we will cross a techological bright line. And, to keep our economic position (which you have to admit brings us manifold benefits), we should try to get there first.
As other posters have noted, there are really two separate issues here: the difficulty of getting broadband to isolated locations, and the inferior broadband that we have even in the cities. It's vastly more important from an economic point of view to get actual two-way broadband to as many users as possible. Work with cheap WiMax to get rural areas connected, but get the bulk of the users in the cities and high-tech areas sped up ASAP. For me, real broadband would begin at 50Mbps both ways sustained transfer speed -- that is where real-time NTSC video begins to look easy.
Yes, it's better here than it is in, oh, say, Zimbabwe.
But, by our traditional and very libertarian American standards, it's getting worse. The most dramatic example is the arbitrary placing of left-wing activists, including a nun, who have nothing to do with terrorism on no-fly lists. There is also good old Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act (the infamous "library clause"), which despite reports otherwise has been used. There have been the expected right-wing media attempts, aided by John Ashcroft, to equate dissent with terrorism. And, finally, there is the renewed effort by Bush's Justice Department to crack down on anything it deems pornographic using whatever means occur to it.
I would not be surprised if Cindy Sheehan is never able to get on an airplane again.
Widgets use a ton of memory, even when Dashboard is inactive. (I've never seen one that uses CPU time, but other posters have claimed that some do.) Activity Monitor claims my 5 widgets use ~20MB physical/~140MB virtual each. Why?/bangs head
But if you never launch Dashboard, the widgets don't load.
Tiger has slightly shortened battery life on my 1.5GHz 12" 'Book (from 3:30 or so to 3:10 or so in my usual use). I haven't gone digging to find out why, but I'm suspicious of changes at a deeper level than Spotlight - mdimport is relatively quiet, but kernel_task is consistently about 8% CPU usage. People have blamed the trackpad driver, but these 'Books can run 10.3.7 and have scrolling trackpad functionality, and at least for me kernel_task was much less busy under Panther.
I still use Tiger, though. I like Mail 2 and I can't live without an AirPort Dashboard widget.
Slashdot Mirror
My Mac OS 9 box had no trouble acting drunk.
Duo 280c. Bought in 1996, used lightly until 2003 as a living room computer, no problems. The thing was as solid as a brick. Finally had to get rid of it because neither the maximum 56MB of RAM nor the maximum OS 8.6 were good enough even for basic web surfing. Still worked great.
(And, yes, I'll confirm that OS <X were unstable if you did more than one thing at once. They were easy to use, maintain, and understand, but not very reliable and very memory-hungry.)
1GHz TiBook, owned by ex-housemate. Bought in early 2003, still running (Tiger, 512MB RAM). This was one of the good ones -- never had a problem despite everyday use. Not everyone was so lucky with the TiBook; they often had hinge and case problems. (The owner is super-careful with it, so that helps.)
1.25GHz 15" AlBook. Bought in early 2004, still running (now in Mom's hands). No problems except two power-brick failures, probably caused by very sketchy power in Mom's condo.
1.5GHZ 12" AlBook. Bought in April, still running fine despite a 4' drop onto pavement in July (ouch!) This 'Book gets abused: dragged with me virtually everywhere and used under all conditions ~8 hours a day. The case is easy to scratch but other than that it's indestructible. The 12" model is a little thicker than the others; that and the lesser width give it a very sturdy feel. This is the 'Book I'd recommend to anyone who will use a laptop hard.
On the desktop side, I've owned 5 Power Macs, from 7100 to my current dual G5. The only problem I ever had was a hard drive failure in the 7100. One of the Macs, a beige G3, stood up to 24/7 use for four years with no failures of any sort (and still works today).
Needless to say I've been happy with my Apple experience.
Way to be supportive of creative folks...
..."if artists try to eat, they are talentless hacks."
IT departments, like programmers, artists, small businesspeople, and consumers, are out to fulfill their own goals. There is no reason earning money is not a legitimate goal, and no reason it can't be totally compatible with enjoying your work and doing original things. Illogically vilifying people trying to make a living accomplishes nothing.
Of course, the practices of a lot of IT departments, often mandated by nonsensical regulations and/or invented by idiots, are a separate issue. But it's not "improper use" of a tool to use it to earn money, especially when money is necessary to survive in our world.
But they don't sound very good. The highs are dull and the bass is rather boomy... almost as if you were listening through a rubber diaphragm, which you basically are.
My best-sounding headphones ever? Sony MDR-855 non-canal earbuds. I got one pair way back in 1989 when I bought a WM-DD9. I bought another pair a couple years later. I still use them, and they still sound terrific. Even a stopped Sony is right twice a day.
Both types of earbuds are much easier on my ears than Sony and Koss over-ear headphones I've owned in the past. My uninformed theory is that since I don't have to drive them as hard, and therefore the sound is cleaner, my ears fatigue much less quickly.
The light rail is well on its way (at least the initial downtown-to-airport segment). Track has been laid through Sodo and a bridge has been built to the edge of Beacon Hill, the bus tunnel is closing starting tomorrow for the installation of updated track and safety systems, the tunnel-boring machine for Beacon Hill is sitting in pieces ready for assembly in a Port of Seattle yard, and MLK Way is a war zone as 100 years of underground utilities have been moved in preparation for the rebuilding of the street with track in the middle. They are saying it's on time for completion in 2009; the only thing that could go wrong at this point is unexpected soil conditions under Beacon Hill.
For people with transit experience it was easy to see that the monorail project, from the very beginning, was doomed by the same insular mentality and hubris that has infected every other Seattle project until Joni Earl arrived to shake up ST. They were determined, regardless of data, to stick to their artificial goals of self-sufficiency in 2020 and opening in 2009 (only 7 years after the last vote). The collapse has been utterly predictable.
I hope that Joni Earl sticks around for awhile. Her Sound Transit can actually get projects built; if we stick with it, we'll have LRT from Sea-Tac to Northgate and across the lake, and working commuter rail in the south end and to the ferry terminals up north. A monorail line would work better, as there's absolutely no room to build surface LRT, in the Ballard-to-West Seattle corridor, but someone other than Joel Horn needs to build it.
For my 170GB of losslessly compressed, mostly classical music, I bought the CDs because no significant amount of classical music is available online, and if it were, the codec would suck.
Out of that 170GB, I'd say maybe 10GB is crap, and even that I keep for a reason. The rest is either good or essential -- my "essentials" playlist, which I use compressed on my 60GB iPod, is around 90GB. (A 100GB iPod would fit my collection comfortably if it were compressed to 256k AAC.)
When you're not dealing with the artificial 4-minute song format collections grow quickly.
What song do you have the most versions of and what are the differences?
I have five recordings of Bruckner's 7th: Chailly, Harnoncourt, Szell, and two by Masur (with Leipzig and the NY Phil). I have some specific reason, usually a great reading of a particular moment, for keeping each in the collection. Other than that, I don't have more than three versions of any work, and even duplicates are kind of rare.
...a render farm made up of cellphones.
I don't think you can make a generalization like this in any case. Here in Seattle, where the rail lines are basically toys at this point, I'm sure 1 lane of highway handles way more than 5x the number of people on the train. In New York City, where the highways are gridlocked and there are a bajillion packed trains coming from every direction, I would expect the trains to carry many times the number of people that the highway system does, even with buses factored in. And in other metropolitan areas, the ratio will be different.
But you have to consider capacity because you have to plan for future growth. Absent a one-child law or draconian (and economically suicidal) immigration policies, we's just gettin' bigger. And when it comes to planning for growth, in addition to their limited capacity, highways have the disadvantages of city traffic and parking. Highway bottlenecks are often actually caused by choked local roads, and $20/day parking somehow inspires people to want to not drive.
Local-road congestion is also the problem with huge expansions of the bus system. Buses cannot physically move faster than traffic (unless you build rail-like dedicated rights-of-way), where trains can. And when you get too many buses in a downtown or employment area, they can create gridlock by themselves (ever been around the Port Authority bus terminal in NYC at 5:30 pm?) In general, in areas where public transport will work at all to move significant numbers of people, rail will work better on the high-usage corridors.
We want elbow room. That means low density suburban areas and rail simply can't serve that type of population economically.
Well... it does a pretty good job in Connecticut and New Jersey (at least for commutes).
In any case, I think we need to recognize the economic and environmental costs of low-density suburban living and stop subsidizing it. If people want *their own* pool (as opposed to a community pool), *their own* yard (as opposed to a bigger and more beautiful park) and total deathly quiet, they need to pay the energy taxes to help defray their increased contribution to global warming through both driving and increased household energy usage, the water taxes to help with the treatment of the polluted runoff from their lawns, and the increased costs of policing areas where there are a million places for the bad guys to hide.
I'm all for people being able to make whatever lifestyle choices they want, but I don't want to subsidize their redundant extravagances.
The starry-eyed geek in me is imagining a system where big highways use a computer-controlled maglev-type system to whisk cars along, nearly frictionless, close together, at speeds of 300mph or more. My complaint about your other post about the capacity of highways would probably be mooted by such an invention. :)
In the near term, computer control could help by itself. The computer could drive the car on major roads (and with current cars, you could probably set speeds to 110-120 mph reasonably) and also make sure of things like correct tire pressure and alignment that can kill energy efficiency.
WTF??!!OMG!@#!1 [spits out innocent drink]
If you're going to state "facts" obtained through rectal extraction, at least find somewhat plausible ones.
Assuming people are driving in accordance with the rules, and that an (optimistic) average of 1.3 ppl/vehicle is maintained, 1 lane of traffic can handle 1.3 ppl/2 sec = 39 ppl/min = 2340 ppl/hr. Note that this is the most optimistic possible assumption, requiring perfect traffic flow with no backups despite a capacity load. Any traffic engineer will tell you that no real general-purpose lane actually carries this many people during rush hour.
Capacity of a rail line varies wildly according to train frequency and length, but let's assume a typical peak-hour (in big cities) frequency of 5 trains/hour, each with 10 cars capable of carrying 72 people each. The capacity of this (by no means optimized) scenario is 5*10*72 = 3600 ppl/hr. Now be aware that passenger trains can be as long as 16 cars when the stations can handle it, that the biggest rail lines have way more than 5 trains/hour at peak times, and that in a tight squeeze way more than 72 people can squeeze into a car. It's easy to imagine a scenario where one rail line can carry more people than an entire L.A. interstate.
Incidentally, the whole density={crime,pollution} thing is a red herring from the bad old days of white flight. It's been known for at least two decades now that properly planned (i.e. not in huge, anarchic projects) density reduces crime because of the extra eyeballs always around. And, while the environment in a city may be slightly more polluted than the suburbs, the city has several times less environmental impact in terms of both pollution and resource use per capita. If everyone were able to live as frugally as those in the big city, the world's pollution and energy problems would be much more tractable.
...how many months until a RCMP identity-theft ring gets uncovered?
Whatever happened to those plans to colonize Mars?
I tried to explain this to my boss when I showed up for work at 10:30 today. But he's such a moron, he didn't understand it. Instead of being impressed by my knowledge and intelligence, he fired me. Dammit!
There are big differences here. The print format has the giant advantage that you tend to see comics other than your "favorites," because you can't help but read those nearby; you may get exposed to lots of artists including a great one or two. I would never have known a damn thing about newspaper comics if I had started reading them online.
But for each individual artist the online format is much more liberating. All of a sudden restrictions on size are completely gone; much more detail can be stuffed into each frame without it being reduced into illegibility. Color can be used every day, not just Sunday, and even the format can be changed in whatever way the artist likes (assuming he is willing to do separate versions of the comic for print and online).
Of course, the online "liberation" requires a new level of discipline from the artist. The truly great newspaper cartoonists were/are great because they can convey either jokes, an entire world, or both through a necessarily very simple and limited medium. Great online cartoonists will have a different set of skills, more akin to those of comic-book creators or even visual artists.
All this leaves aside the question of how much computer assistance is valuable in the daily-comic medium. Most artists use computers extensively these days; to my eye, the most successful are those such as Tom Tomorrow and Aaron McGruder whose styles deliberately showcase electronic techniques and are unafraid to admit it.
Seriously, I want my capacity, but not *that* much. The compressed version of my collection is about 85GB; until there's an iPod-or-smaller machine that big I'll just make do with my 60GB iPod.
But in cases of very costly (to the rest of us) and profitable (to the perp) white-collar crime, there is very little else that can serve as a deterrent. White-collar criminals tend to have a different attitude from low-level drug offenders: they aren't desperate or sick, and don't even recognize that what they're doing is wrong. Instead, they feel no guilt about gaming the system in any way possible (speaking in generalities, of course).
If you fine them, they'll hide their money (as another poster said). If you try to leverage their knowledge, they'll fail to cooperate. As long as you let them have their freedom, they'll find a way to beat you. The way to make them think twice is to take away their freedom.
If we put one white-collar perp in jail for every five low-level drug offenders we let out and put into intensive treatment programs, we'd make the market a more honest place and solve a lot of social problems at the same time.
I guess I should have clarified that I'm not really thinking of ordinary streaming, but future audio applications... specifically, I'm imagining "bands" playing in real time over the Internet. Ideally, you'd have many more than 2 channels of sound (think 4+ tracks, 2 channels each) at much higher fidelity than 192k MP3 (think FLAC or ALAC).
In any case, the mass-market, passive-consumer application for Big Bandwith will be streaming HD video. Imagine a client that prevents Joe User from saving the content... the studios will be (misguidedly, of course) ecstatic.
And I expect net gaming will bloat further as worlds get more complex and play gets more fine-grained... although I'm sure MS can help, and probably has a few engineers on the case. :)
But I know we'll be hearing about it here on /. when we get perpendicular 3.5" drives. OMG 1.5TB pr0n!!1
I guess this depends on what the definition of "works" is... (apologies to Slick Willie)
2Mb (that's bits, not Bytes) may work fine for checking email and reading /. , but it definitely doesn't "work" for video applications, the games of the future, or real-time high-quality audio.
Once there is fiber or some other high-speed (>50Mbps) technology to the doorstep we will start to see those next-generation applications. At that point we'll feel about 2Mbps the same way we feel about dialup today.
All the rumors I have heard seem to suggest that the high-end desktop hardware (PowerMac, XServe, high-end iMac configs) will be the last to switch to Intel.
If Apple uses Pentium M and its successors to solve its laptop/Mac Mini problem, it can probably afford to wait on the high-end hardware. IBM has already announced dual-core G5s which should be good for another PowerMac revision or two.
By that time, if there is a mythical Intel 64-bit magic chip, it will be on or close to market.
My house doesn't have circuit breakers and somehow this makes me more careful with electrical appliances. When a shorted toaster burns down the house, I don't make the same mistake twice.
I mean, I'm as much of an Apple fan as anyone, but really...
Yes, classic MacOS had advantages, especially in ease of use and support. Yes, it had limited multithreading. But, yes, it was both buggy (what isn't? that's what protected memory is *for*) and unstable: I don't think it ever lasted through more than a couple days of hard use for me.
There is a lot to be said for the idea that OS X, especially with iLife for the consumer, is more of a value-add than Apple had before. But the reason for the switch to Intel is notebooks: there simply isn't a viable PPC pro-notebook solution.
1. Too many left-wing activists have been put on the no-fly lists for it to be accidental. I've seen reports of a baby or two, and never of a right-wing activist, but there have been at least 20 cases of left-wing activists on the no-fly lists.
2. I cited John Ashcroft because, in 2001 when he was Attorney General (did you forget?) he dramatically and famously equated dissent with terrorism. But the right-wing media that echoed his posture did not stop when he left office.
3. Sure I cited an obscenity case. The hallmark of both the Ashcroft and Gonzalez Justice Departments' approaches to porn has been to systematically attempt to expand the obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment until it covers Janet Jackson's nipple. "Obscenity" should refer only to that material (such as child and snuff porn) that constitutes evidence of a crime.
And, no, I don't want to take away your gun. /rolls eyes
I'm more libertarian than leftist reactionary.
0mG f4$+ pR0n!!1
Seriously, there are quite a few economically meaningful applications that it's possible to imagine for connections that are capable of carrying real video signals full-duplex, which we do not have. Think of a conference call with high-resolution video of all participants, either for business or to allow loved ones to see each other. Or maybe movie production across the net, either by studios or independents. Live music across a continent. And I'm only scratching the tip of the iceberg. People would think of many more ways to use the connectivity just as they have with existing "broadband."
High-resolution video is currently the "last frontier" of computing power. It pushes CPUs, disks, and networks to their limits, and has many easy-to-imagine applications. When computers and networks are powerful enough to work with it easily, we will cross a techological bright line. And, to keep our economic position (which you have to admit brings us manifold benefits), we should try to get there first.
As other posters have noted, there are really two separate issues here: the difficulty of getting broadband to isolated locations, and the inferior broadband that we have even in the cities. It's vastly more important from an economic point of view to get actual two-way broadband to as many users as possible. Work with cheap WiMax to get rural areas connected, but get the bulk of the users in the cities and high-tech areas sped up ASAP. For me, real broadband would begin at 50Mbps both ways sustained transfer speed -- that is where real-time NTSC video begins to look easy.
But, by our traditional and very libertarian American standards, it's getting worse. The most dramatic example is the arbitrary placing of left-wing activists, including a nun, who have nothing to do with terrorism on no-fly lists. There is also good old Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act (the infamous "library clause"), which despite reports otherwise has been used. There have been the expected right-wing media attempts, aided by John Ashcroft, to equate dissent with terrorism. And, finally, there is the renewed effort by Bush's Justice Department to crack down on anything it deems pornographic using whatever means occur to it.
I would not be surprised if Cindy Sheehan is never able to get on an airplane again.
But if you never launch Dashboard, the widgets don't load.
Tiger has slightly shortened battery life on my 1.5GHz 12" 'Book (from 3:30 or so to 3:10 or so in my usual use). I haven't gone digging to find out why, but I'm suspicious of changes at a deeper level than Spotlight - mdimport is relatively quiet, but kernel_task is consistently about 8% CPU usage. People have blamed the trackpad driver, but these 'Books can run 10.3.7 and have scrolling trackpad functionality, and at least for me kernel_task was much less busy under Panther.
I still use Tiger, though. I like Mail 2 and I can't live without an AirPort Dashboard widget.