The nice thing about ethanol is that continued research is almost guaranteed to drive down the price-per-energy cost by orders of magnitudes from what it is today, whereas oil will continue to rise simply by virtue of the fact that it is a limited supply.
So while ethanol is still too expensive to be worthwhile, it's only a matter of time (IMHO a short one!) before ethanol will be as cheap as gas was in the late 90! I still remember 25c per liter (here in Canada, about $0.95/gallon). Maybe then I can afford a car! And maybe then my public transit won't have yearly price hikes on fuel price alone!
then it depends on the corporate relationship between Apple stores and Apple itself
Apple Stores are directly managed by Apple in their jurisdiction. (i.e. Apple Stores in California managed by Apple, Inc., Apple Stores in Canada managed by Apple Canada Inc.)
All Apple Store employees work for Apple, Inc., not some "third party" subsidiary that was created to handle its retail presence.
I think it's pretty safe to say that Apple can't count Apple Store inventory units as "sold".
You idiot, even the box is holy and must be protected! I filled an airtight plexiglass box with air from my local Apple Store (approved by The Jobs Himself!) and put my iPhone box in there. It must immerse in Steve's blessed air to maintain its perfection!
We don't necessarily even have to have that much RAM on board the CPU, not initially anyway. Take a look inside your RAM right now, what's in there? Program memory, stack, but the biggest parts of it is media - that snazzy shiny icon on your desktop chews up a fair bit, so do all your nice gradient title bars and windows.
If we stick program memory and stack on board the CPU, we will already be RIDICULOUSLY fast. Recursive operations, heavy math, will all explode in performance. Put actual media on on-board memory, things that are not accessed nearly as often.
So how much memory do we need for program memory and stack? 32MB? 64MB? Might be doable. I don't think we need have things on the GB scale to see major improvements.
DRM-Free music may just spell the end of the record industry as we know it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. When the loom was invented it revolutionized weaving. When the printing press was invented it revolutionized books. Did people lose their jobs? Of course. The loom eliminated a lot of manual labour, as did the press, but the displaced people found jobs in other fields. On the short term the industry will hurt, but the market and business will change with it.
You do bring up a good point, though FYI I cut my teeth in BASIC, later VB, and then Java, and was only heavy into C/C++ when I hit university. I fancied myself a capable coder in my VB/Java days, I knew the basics of how to make things work, especially considering that the "heavy duty" computation was all neatly wrapped up in libraries easily available.
Getting into C was like an entirely different world. I could no longer appreciate the computer as this infinitely powerful black box that ran my code. I had to worry about resource allocation (especially in embedded applications), the speed of various computations, etc, and honestly speaking knowing this has made me a better coder in on the higher levels. A lot of the theoretical became very real, and it gave me a much better appreciation of the real impact of my code.
IMHO not knowing your low level bits is not knowing how your tool works. Computer Science is a science, for sure, but that doesn't excuse you from knowing how the tools of your trade work. Most coders I would say will end up doing high level code, but IMHO if you start them off on lower-level languages they will not take the abstraction and niceties of high level code for granted, and we might get better code overall from everyone.
CoD4 had a great immersive *experience*, but IMHO it had no real storyline. It had some interesting locales and set piece battles tied together loosely with a very stereotypical and cliched storyline of terrorists and nuclear bombs. I would say that it was the most cinematic game all year, and really gets your adrenaline pumping, but innovative storywriting it is not - BioShock would be more along those lines.
I would also put CoD4 above BioShock as the best FPS of '07, but innovative storyline it does not have.
Well yes, that and speed of switching. Your computer is not physically connected with a single fibre to the other end, there are MANY switches in the way which add latency and impose speed limitations. A *lot* has to be done to increase the capacity of our infrastructure.
No, Mechatronics takes GENE 121, which (at least when I took it), was all C/C++. Likewise, my first year data structures and algorithms course was also exclusively C++. Heck, the second year digital logic course was done mostly in assembly (what a great time that was). Through my entire time here at Waterloo I've never touched a course with a "high level" language (to the tune of Java and C# anyway, some/.ers would argue that C++ is high).
I came from a primarily VB and Java background before entering university, and C/C++ totally blew my mind. IMHO there are FAR too many things taken for granted in Java, which while useful for teaching abstract algorithms, doesn't teach anyone how your machine ACTUALLY works, something only a cursory understanding of assembly and C would give you. A proper CS education IMHO should go from the low to the high.
FYI the tron program is more mechanical than it is electrical, mostly because the head honchos are mostly out of the mech department. That being said, our programming courses are lifted out of EE, instead of SE or CS. What's odd to me is that EE's do C# for many of their foundation courses, whereas mechs do most intro courses in C/C++. It's always seemed a bit ass-backwards. Mechs just want their math to work, whereas EE's are actually concerned with optimization and whatnot, clearly one group needs to be lower level than the other.
This is especially true as most mechs do VBA and other simple scripting for mechanical calculations in the workplace, whereas EE's actually have to do embedded work!
I'm in one of Canada's biggest CS schools, and though I'm in engineering, I really do feel sorry for them. Many of the toughest courses in that program are now optional, and one can cruise by and get a degree only knowing the most basic algorithms (quick sort?) and data structures. Naturally, the only people who take the original challenging courses are the alpha geeks who live for that kind of stuff anyway.
Meanwhile people come out of the doors of this school knowing only Java and.NET, and then complain that the world of programming was not as interesting as promised. Hmm.
On the other hand, I'm in an electrical engineering-like program, and we only deal with assembly, C, and maybe C++ on the odd occasion. I love it. IMHO any self respecting programmer needs to at least KNOW how to operate close to the metal, if only so it makes them a better coder at the higher levels.
Work at it, that's all I can tell you. I started college without every having been in a real relationship, a hopeless geek in every way. Sex? Hah. But then I realized that being a "normal person" (i.e. not socially awkward, outgoing, etc) is not necessarily mutually exclusive from being an alpha geek, and so I spent a great deal of effort on it. Getting rid of my shyness, engaging in small talk (which I used to think was a waste of time), and finding some interests that DON'T involve sitting in front of a monitor all day. It paid off. My social skills have improved greatly, I have a girlfriend who's truly wonderful in every sense that matters, and even my career has been going better.
Windows succeeds for the same reasons the Xbox 360 will continue selling despite its reliability problems - software. It's the platform with the software people want to run, and nothing will change that unless the other platforms start getting killer apps.
Control bleeding yes - cleaning a wound and controlling bleeding until help arrives is often quite important, and can be useful anywhere, not only on the road but also in the office, at home, or just about and abroad. CPR though is another story. Incorrectly administered it can be more harmful than beneficial, and may in fact be deadly. IMHO it's a bit beyond what the average Joe should be expected to know about emergency aid.
There's bricked, and then there's bricked. The colloquial meaning for "bricked" simply means that the device is inoperable, and nothing that commonly available consumer tools could do can restore it to working order. Proprietary and undocumented systems can often be bricked in this sense, since the method needed to restore functionality is not known by the public. In this sense the device IS as good as an actual hardware bricking.
I'm not as tinfoil-hat as yourself, I see it this way:
1 - Selling at a loss. This prevents rich people with deep pockets from driving prices down temporarily, long enough to drive the smaller players out of the business and thus establish a monopoly.
2 - Associating free service with sale. This prevents tax dodging. Say product A is taxed at 10%, but product B is taxed only at 5%. I could sell "product B" with a "free" bundled product A, for what is essentially the price of A+B. This way I can tax it at 5%. But the catch here is that product A actually adds value to the sale, shipping does not - it is simply a delivery method.
And who the hell modded the OP overrated? The guy is offering some good info on the laws that this decision was based upon. Can we start moderating and not squelching voices we don't agree with?
And honestly, if you're looking for a $600 laptop you REALLY shouldn't be comparing with MacBook Pros, or any high-end laptop like that. Apple has never made secret that it builds only mid-high end machinery, not low-end budget computers.
I've been moving my family, friends, and gf to Macs for a while now, and they're much happier than they've ever been. Between $1100 and $600 you get a heck of a lot more performance (not always relevant to them), but the peace of mind of not being subject to malware, trojans, and not having to buy an AV kit, that's worth the price tag difference alone - all that extra hardware is just icing on the cake.
Agreed fully. Leopard, while not as big a disaster as Vista, was not a solid release - not in the same way that Tiger was largely problem-free. I'm still getting MANY network driver problems (refusing to talk to my router's DNS, but only when looking up CERTAIN entries), some BSODs were eliminated with 10.5.1, but IMHO some of them were so serious and easily encountered that it should never have been in any shipping version.
Feature-wise I'm liking Leopard, the unification of the UI is definitely a step forward, and the only problem I have with the OS is its bugginess, and given how I'm used to the rock solid reliability of Tiger, I sometimes contemplate downgrade.
Documentation from Amazon will easily prove claim #1 to be false (there's no way they're selling at a loss), and IMHO only someone out to get the company would claim #2, since shipping is OBVIOUSLY an ancillary service that adds no value to the product besides what consumers ALREADY expect from the sales contract. This is a good example of gross judicial abuse, takes the law where it was never meant to be applied, and amounts to legislating via judiciary.
Except these look like they're just the core classes - which have ALREADY been implemented in Mono. We know that Mono team didn't have access to the source, so merely a timestamp on the source files will prove non infringement.
Furthermore, if you ABSOLUTELY must touch something with your bare hand without insulation that you suspect may be electrified, DO IT with the BACK of your hand. This way should your muscles contract, at least you won't have made a death grip on the wire.
That being said... Just don't touch stuff you think is electrified.
I've got a 360, and it really doesn't do it for me, the movie and messaging components that is. Movie selection is piss poor, the device is hellishly loud, and messaging is buggy and crashy. Just signing into Messenger causes my device to hang for up to a minute! Ludicrous. The movie and messaging components of Xbox 360 are merely functional, they are not easy to use.
Slashdot Mirror
The nice thing about ethanol is that continued research is almost guaranteed to drive down the price-per-energy cost by orders of magnitudes from what it is today, whereas oil will continue to rise simply by virtue of the fact that it is a limited supply.
So while ethanol is still too expensive to be worthwhile, it's only a matter of time (IMHO a short one!) before ethanol will be as cheap as gas was in the late 90! I still remember 25c per liter (here in Canada, about $0.95/gallon). Maybe then I can afford a car! And maybe then my public transit won't have yearly price hikes on fuel price alone!
Apple Stores are directly managed by Apple in their jurisdiction. (i.e. Apple Stores in California managed by Apple, Inc., Apple Stores in Canada managed by Apple Canada Inc.)
All Apple Store employees work for Apple, Inc., not some "third party" subsidiary that was created to handle its retail presence.
I think it's pretty safe to say that Apple can't count Apple Store inventory units as "sold".
You idiot, even the box is holy and must be protected! I filled an airtight plexiglass box with air from my local Apple Store (approved by The Jobs Himself!) and put my iPhone box in there. It must immerse in Steve's blessed air to maintain its perfection!
We don't necessarily even have to have that much RAM on board the CPU, not initially anyway. Take a look inside your RAM right now, what's in there? Program memory, stack, but the biggest parts of it is media - that snazzy shiny icon on your desktop chews up a fair bit, so do all your nice gradient title bars and windows.
If we stick program memory and stack on board the CPU, we will already be RIDICULOUSLY fast. Recursive operations, heavy math, will all explode in performance. Put actual media on on-board memory, things that are not accessed nearly as often.
So how much memory do we need for program memory and stack? 32MB? 64MB? Might be doable. I don't think we need have things on the GB scale to see major improvements.
DRM-Free music may just spell the end of the record industry as we know it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. When the loom was invented it revolutionized weaving. When the printing press was invented it revolutionized books. Did people lose their jobs? Of course. The loom eliminated a lot of manual labour, as did the press, but the displaced people found jobs in other fields. On the short term the industry will hurt, but the market and business will change with it.
You do bring up a good point, though FYI I cut my teeth in BASIC, later VB, and then Java, and was only heavy into C/C++ when I hit university. I fancied myself a capable coder in my VB/Java days, I knew the basics of how to make things work, especially considering that the "heavy duty" computation was all neatly wrapped up in libraries easily available.
Getting into C was like an entirely different world. I could no longer appreciate the computer as this infinitely powerful black box that ran my code. I had to worry about resource allocation (especially in embedded applications), the speed of various computations, etc, and honestly speaking knowing this has made me a better coder in on the higher levels. A lot of the theoretical became very real, and it gave me a much better appreciation of the real impact of my code.
IMHO not knowing your low level bits is not knowing how your tool works. Computer Science is a science, for sure, but that doesn't excuse you from knowing how the tools of your trade work. Most coders I would say will end up doing high level code, but IMHO if you start them off on lower-level languages they will not take the abstraction and niceties of high level code for granted, and we might get better code overall from everyone.
CoD4 had a great immersive *experience*, but IMHO it had no real storyline. It had some interesting locales and set piece battles tied together loosely with a very stereotypical and cliched storyline of terrorists and nuclear bombs. I would say that it was the most cinematic game all year, and really gets your adrenaline pumping, but innovative storywriting it is not - BioShock would be more along those lines.
I would also put CoD4 above BioShock as the best FPS of '07, but innovative storyline it does not have.
Well yes, that and speed of switching. Your computer is not physically connected with a single fibre to the other end, there are MANY switches in the way which add latency and impose speed limitations. A *lot* has to be done to increase the capacity of our infrastructure.
No, Mechatronics takes GENE 121, which (at least when I took it), was all C/C++. Likewise, my first year data structures and algorithms course was also exclusively C++. Heck, the second year digital logic course was done mostly in assembly (what a great time that was). Through my entire time here at Waterloo I've never touched a course with a "high level" language (to the tune of Java and C# anyway, some /.ers would argue that C++ is high).
I came from a primarily VB and Java background before entering university, and C/C++ totally blew my mind. IMHO there are FAR too many things taken for granted in Java, which while useful for teaching abstract algorithms, doesn't teach anyone how your machine ACTUALLY works, something only a cursory understanding of assembly and C would give you. A proper CS education IMHO should go from the low to the high.
Hallelujah! That's great news :) IMHO the move to Java as an intro language was a horrible one, and a move to C (and Scheme! w00t) is great :)
FYI the tron program is more mechanical than it is electrical, mostly because the head honchos are mostly out of the mech department. That being said, our programming courses are lifted out of EE, instead of SE or CS. What's odd to me is that EE's do C# for many of their foundation courses, whereas mechs do most intro courses in C/C++. It's always seemed a bit ass-backwards. Mechs just want their math to work, whereas EE's are actually concerned with optimization and whatnot, clearly one group needs to be lower level than the other.
This is especially true as most mechs do VBA and other simple scripting for mechanical calculations in the workplace, whereas EE's actually have to do embedded work!
I'm in one of Canada's biggest CS schools, and though I'm in engineering, I really do feel sorry for them. Many of the toughest courses in that program are now optional, and one can cruise by and get a degree only knowing the most basic algorithms (quick sort?) and data structures. Naturally, the only people who take the original challenging courses are the alpha geeks who live for that kind of stuff anyway.
Meanwhile people come out of the doors of this school knowing only Java and .NET, and then complain that the world of programming was not as interesting as promised. Hmm.
On the other hand, I'm in an electrical engineering-like program, and we only deal with assembly, C, and maybe C++ on the odd occasion. I love it. IMHO any self respecting programmer needs to at least KNOW how to operate close to the metal, if only so it makes them a better coder at the higher levels.
Work at it, that's all I can tell you. I started college without every having been in a real relationship, a hopeless geek in every way. Sex? Hah. But then I realized that being a "normal person" (i.e. not socially awkward, outgoing, etc) is not necessarily mutually exclusive from being an alpha geek, and so I spent a great deal of effort on it. Getting rid of my shyness, engaging in small talk (which I used to think was a waste of time), and finding some interests that DON'T involve sitting in front of a monitor all day. It paid off. My social skills have improved greatly, I have a girlfriend who's truly wonderful in every sense that matters, and even my career has been going better.
If I can do it, anyone can.
Windows succeeds for the same reasons the Xbox 360 will continue selling despite its reliability problems - software. It's the platform with the software people want to run, and nothing will change that unless the other platforms start getting killer apps.
I was under the impression it was the other way around - i.e. letting the feds suck on your very rich tit.
Control bleeding yes - cleaning a wound and controlling bleeding until help arrives is often quite important, and can be useful anywhere, not only on the road but also in the office, at home, or just about and abroad. CPR though is another story. Incorrectly administered it can be more harmful than beneficial, and may in fact be deadly. IMHO it's a bit beyond what the average Joe should be expected to know about emergency aid.
There's bricked, and then there's bricked. The colloquial meaning for "bricked" simply means that the device is inoperable, and nothing that commonly available consumer tools could do can restore it to working order. Proprietary and undocumented systems can often be bricked in this sense, since the method needed to restore functionality is not known by the public. In this sense the device IS as good as an actual hardware bricking.
Actually, 38,000 Canadians is, as of right now, is approx. 38,950 Americans. Enjoy our plummeting currency! :)
I'm not as tinfoil-hat as yourself, I see it this way:
1 - Selling at a loss. This prevents rich people with deep pockets from driving prices down temporarily, long enough to drive the smaller players out of the business and thus establish a monopoly.
2 - Associating free service with sale. This prevents tax dodging. Say product A is taxed at 10%, but product B is taxed only at 5%. I could sell "product B" with a "free" bundled product A, for what is essentially the price of A+B. This way I can tax it at 5%. But the catch here is that product A actually adds value to the sale, shipping does not - it is simply a delivery method.
And who the hell modded the OP overrated? The guy is offering some good info on the laws that this decision was based upon. Can we start moderating and not squelching voices we don't agree with?
And honestly, if you're looking for a $600 laptop you REALLY shouldn't be comparing with MacBook Pros, or any high-end laptop like that. Apple has never made secret that it builds only mid-high end machinery, not low-end budget computers.
I've been moving my family, friends, and gf to Macs for a while now, and they're much happier than they've ever been. Between $1100 and $600 you get a heck of a lot more performance (not always relevant to them), but the peace of mind of not being subject to malware, trojans, and not having to buy an AV kit, that's worth the price tag difference alone - all that extra hardware is just icing on the cake.
Agreed fully. Leopard, while not as big a disaster as Vista, was not a solid release - not in the same way that Tiger was largely problem-free. I'm still getting MANY network driver problems (refusing to talk to my router's DNS, but only when looking up CERTAIN entries), some BSODs were eliminated with 10.5.1, but IMHO some of them were so serious and easily encountered that it should never have been in any shipping version.
Feature-wise I'm liking Leopard, the unification of the UI is definitely a step forward, and the only problem I have with the OS is its bugginess, and given how I'm used to the rock solid reliability of Tiger, I sometimes contemplate downgrade.
Documentation from Amazon will easily prove claim #1 to be false (there's no way they're selling at a loss), and IMHO only someone out to get the company would claim #2, since shipping is OBVIOUSLY an ancillary service that adds no value to the product besides what consumers ALREADY expect from the sales contract. This is a good example of gross judicial abuse, takes the law where it was never meant to be applied, and amounts to legislating via judiciary.
Except these look like they're just the core classes - which have ALREADY been implemented in Mono. We know that Mono team didn't have access to the source, so merely a timestamp on the source files will prove non infringement.
Furthermore, if you ABSOLUTELY must touch something with your bare hand without insulation that you suspect may be electrified, DO IT with the BACK of your hand. This way should your muscles contract, at least you won't have made a death grip on the wire.
That being said... Just don't touch stuff you think is electrified.
I've got a 360, and it really doesn't do it for me, the movie and messaging components that is. Movie selection is piss poor, the device is hellishly loud, and messaging is buggy and crashy. Just signing into Messenger causes my device to hang for up to a minute! Ludicrous. The movie and messaging components of Xbox 360 are merely functional, they are not easy to use.