Low iphone sales in Japan is FUD to which the blogosphere and the WSJ caught on. In fact, Japan ranks second in iphone sales. Of course the U.S. is where the majority of sales are, but the idea that iphones aren't selling in Japan is the result of somebody trying to manipulate Apple's stock price. It's all exposed here.
Whenever they come up there's somebody who says "That's great, but why don't they make it affordable for me?" and the answer is, as you said, that right now they can't.
Remember that automobiles in general were a luxury item too until Henry Ford came along and decided that he wanted to make cars that were cheap enough that the people assembling in the factory could afford. Granted, it isn't readily apparent on how to make the batteries cheaper, but it wasn't readily apparent in 1900 how to make internal combustion engines cheaper either (it required the development of the precision machining necessary to make an assembly line style of manufacture work). So what you say is true, but the Tesla could be following in the same footsteps as the internal combustion engine.
I've had similar problems with my mother's laptop -- it randomly decides if it wants to connect wirelessly to the router or not, it's just a pain in the neck. I tried doing a few tricks I found suggested on the web but nothing really helped. I had suggested to her to buy an Apple this time but she went for the cheaper option, now she's regretting it.
My own experience with Vista is that I finally have it running acceptably on my brand new, 3.24 GHz core duo with 2 GB of ram by turning off every feature I could get my hands on, e.g., Aero, indexing, the *&^%$$ Superfetch that was causing my hard drive to thrash continuously for hours on end, and most of the dicovery options for the internet. Now does it work "okay", but I still wouldn't call it fast.
And don't forget the interaction of corporations with society:
AIG: Waaaahhh! I need to get my bonus?
Taxpayer: We gave you lots of money after you lost all your money and ours also. You don't deserve a bonus, you're too rich already.
AIG: Waaahhhh! I was promised this! Now I won't be able to attract the best talent.
These guys make forecasts based on new projects coming on-line as well as past behavior and geopolitical concerns. According to them, oil production peaked in 2008. The former peak was 2005 but due to the energy crisis, oil producers manage to squeeze a little bit more production out. Based on the number of new projects coming on-line and their projected size, they won't balance out known rates of depletion of existing fields for the foreseeable future. We're in a lull right now in the energy market because the economy is ruined (which probably was helped by high oil prices), but energy prices will come back up.
Incidentally, what we're seeing now is very similar to what happened with the price of the last portable fuel we used before petroleum oil: whale oil (which is renewable if harvested in low enough quantities). There were massive oscillations in price that started just after the production of whale oil production peaked in 1845 when the whales started being hunted faster than they could reproduce. The great-grand-parent is totally wrong about the peak being in the future, it's here now and we all have to deal with that. The real question now is how long production can be sustained at this level and how soon will it decline?
By not trying to move onto new energy sources, Shell is resigning itself to becoming a two-bit company. You'd think they would have learned their lesson in 2004 when they had to downgrade their reserve estimates, but I guess not. I wouldn't buy stock in them.
Yah that's right, whether something is a pollutant or not is not determined by if it has beneficial effects for some things, it's whether at it's present levels, whether it's harming humans, which CO2 is. If we had more oxygen in the atmosphere it would be a pollutant -- we'd all burst into flame where there's an open spark! That would be pretty toxic I would think and we would probably want to start regulating our oxygen emissions. Also, if we were spewing out massive amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere, I guess that would also be a pollutant because humidity would go up and we'd all get infected with fungi & molds, and viruses & bacteria would be harder to cure or take longer to go away -- ask anyone who smokes and lives in Portland, Oregon what that's like, it sucks.
Flippant remarks aside, the grand-parent is incorrect, legally, CO2 is considered a pollutant. Here's a copy of the supreme court decision agreeing with the stance that CO2 is a pollutant. Also, in at least one case a Superior court judge in Georgia has used the Supreme court decision to block the construction of a coal-fire power plant because the plans contained no provision for limiting CO2 emissions. The "CO2 ain't a pollutant" excuse doesn't work any more. That dog won't hunt.
The idea here is that cell phone have a much wider access than wireless networks. At any given location, there's a much greater probability that you will have a cell signal than a wireless signal. Thus, by tethering you can have internet access for your computer wherever. Having the computer on the internet is important because it has a much wider feature set than your phone.
I never bought an iphone because of the monthly rates, but if you're already paying AT&T 70 bucks a month for data service, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to tether it. Heck, if I traveled a little more and tethering was easy I would actually consider getting one.
I can't watch the commercials because the site is slashdotted, but here's what I think: Instead of doing the I'm a mac, I'm a PC exchange commercials, they should get Stallman and Torvalds to do the commercial, each one playing "linux". I think it would emphasize the tension the linux community has regarding the priority of freedom:
Torvalds: "Hello, I'm linux."
Stallman: "You should really refer to him as GNU/linux, and me too."
Torvalds: "We reliably operate huge numbers of servers, embedded devices and personal computers and have support for a a huge array of hardware devices."
Stallman: "But most importantly, we allow you to have the freedom share your ideas with others and be able to use other's ideas enriching all of us simultaneously."
Torvalds: "...and making big bank."
Stallman: "uhh, what?"
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll have to try Crysis. I don't play games so much that I have time to try out every single different game. E.g., I only recently gave up medieval total war1.
I've found FC2 to be spotty in regards to the x-ray vision thing. If you're in cover (bushes, tall grass, behind tree) and haven't started shooting, there's a good chance you won't be seen, even up close unless they walk straight over you. However, once the shooting starts, you might as well be walking around with a giant flashing neon arrow floating over your head, especially if the NPC is in a car. Even if you use the bloody silencer pistol they still know precisely where you are the millisecond you pull the trigger. It's a pity, FC2 is so gorgeous and the setting and mood are just incredible -- it could have been a totally awesome game, but they messed up a few major things like that so it'll never be more than a might have been I guess.
Incidentally, my list of annoyances besides the AI once the shooting starts includes the asthmatic main character who can't run more than about 25 yards without keeling over, no way to abort reloading weapons or healing yourself once you initiate the action, and to cap it off, the moronic respawn at the check stations the second you leave that map. The respawn should have been time based, or better yet, they should have scripted the replacement soldiers driving up and manning the post after cleaning up what's left of their buddies if you're on that map or near it.
I ran into that problem just a few days ago playing Far Cry 2. I was sneaking into the airport to assassinate a character who was in a hanger... As I'm walking around the outside of the hanger towards the entrance, I hear pistol shots at the wall to my left. The AI detected me walked around outside the hanger while he was inside and with perfect accuracy, started trying to shoot through the wall at me. That's the sort of problem this article was about:
In pool and in shooters, the computer AI is blessed with an omniscient accuracy. The shooter AI knows down to the billionth of an inch exactly where you are, and could shoot your hat off your head from five miles away. Similarly in pool, the AI knows the position of every ball and can calculate where every ball will end up before it takes a shot.
The solution I found fascinating:
The programmers of Fritz [a chess program] hit upon a solution that involved the AI deliberately setting up situations that the human player could exploit (with some thought) that would allow the human to gain a positional or piece advantage. Once the human player gained the advantage, the AI would resume trying to win. At no point here is the AI actually dumbed down. If anything, there is actually quite a bit more computation going on, and certainly more complexity.
So the idea is that the AI needs to calculate precisely where you are, and then rather than hit you if the preferences are set to "hard" or miss you on the "easy" setting, probabilistically make a decision based on what a weaker or stronger human player would do. It's was a great read!
Yeah, that's true. But I usually consider them to be inseparable with Apple: they do seem to achieved a pretty good union of quality products and excellent marketing/aesthetic design. For the record though, I used the hockey-puck mouse for about a year and it didn't mangle my hand or anything, but I switched to a logitech as soon as they announced scroll wheel support.
Incidentally, I wonder who actually has the longest average useful lifetime for their laptops? My guess is probably either apple or lenovo, probably lenovo.
Oh I wouldn't say that's entirely true. Remember the fruit imacs? They were good machines to work on, and they were functional but they were marketed as "fun", there's a commercial here. The ibook commercial is only slightly better as it flashed some adjectives for desirable qualities up on the screen. Fortunately for Apple, their marketing department was a little smarter and didn't feel the need to state that their product was sexy, they just relied on old-fashioned association of their product with good music and pretty colors.
If we assume that Dell isn't completely insane, we're forced to conclude that perhaps there is a market of people out there who want a thin, expensive laptop, but refuse to buy an Apple and perhaps have no personal taste so need to be told what's fashionable. Or perhaps Dell fucked up and the girlfriend/mistress of one of the top executives run the marketing campaign instead of somebody competent.
Sorry to respond to myself, but I just learned about a power architecture chip being made by PA Semi. Apparently, it IS a low power consumption 64 bit chip that could be put into a laptop and it already runs at 2 GHz (or did two years ago). It consumes 7 watts whereas the core duo consumed 21-25 watts. According to this, PA Semi thought it was all but in the bag for apple to use their chips to replace the G5, but apple switched to intel for some unknown reasons.
I think a switch from the x86 would be pretty minimal in the long run, there's plenty of alternative chips out there, they just don't have the resources put into them like the x86 and x86_64.
Actually, they're not bad for just clock speed. The quote you gave was for a quad-core 2.66 GHz chip. My dual G5 has 2.7 GHz chips in it and it's 3.5 years old, I'm sure you could cram four G5s onto a motherboard and compete with a quad-core chip just fine. 2.7 GHz is still a relatively fast chip, just a quick cursory glance at newegg shows that there's not much over 3.33 GHz for sale right now.
Granted, nobody has made a multi-core powerPC chip as far as I know, but I argue that's not the issue, nor is the clock speed though, it's the power consumption. You just can't put a 2.7 GHz G5 in a laptop and expect it to not melt the thing into a gooey flaming mess, or even if you did manage to cool it, you'd never get any kind of decent battery life. I suspect that the laptop problem more than anything caused apple to switch to intel, but the fan noise necessary to keep the G5s cool even on the desktop was becoming an issue as well. However, power consumption and heat have nothing to do with the architecture of the chip, even making x86 chips AMD has been running into problems trying to make them low power and cool.
And the answer is... powerPC! But only if someone takes an interest in working on the chip to lower power consumption and heat output. My dual G5 runs great but the sucker sounds like a jet engine taking off when it starts doing something computationally intensive.
Precisely. It's the same thing with contrast ratios on monitors, they're relatively meaningless because they advertise them in completely different ways. Dell or LG might advertise the best contrast ratio possible, whereas Apple is usually more conservative about their estimates. Apple gets slammed because their prices are higher and the contrast ratio stats look worse unless you read on how the contrast ratios are calculated. Yet, having used equivalent Dell and Apple monitors on the same computer, I've found the Apple ones are actually the better display (in part because there were some of the first ones to use S-IPS panels).
What's needed is are some regulations regarding how computer parts are advertised, but that would require a federal government that takes an interest in protecting the consumer, not protecting corporate profit.
Actually, I was thinking that for four quad cores, i.e. 16 cores, and 2 GB memory per core, $16k is pretty damn cheap. Consider that 5 years ago if you wanted that kind of computing power you had to buy dual opteron boards and have eight of them communicate over gigabit ethernet (cheap but slow) or infiniband (fast but ~$1k per node, so add $8k to the price, that's half the price of this cluster just for the interconnects). I use a cluster of similar configuration and it sure cost more than $16k when it was new. Granted, with separate cores you get to bypass the interconnects but you have to use a shared memory bus which can saturate and form a bottleneck. As far as I know, whether you want a separate core or multi-core system depends on your application, but shit, $16k for what amounts to a small cluster is still a great deal especially since they preassembled it.
Pres. Obama thinks merit pay for teachers makes sense. Yes, it will enrage the teachers' union, but it might inspire better people to go into science teaching. It's either that or accept that almost 50% of Americans won't know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun."
That's a false dichotomy. Merit pay is not the only solution to our science education troubles and presenting it as that is not necessarily a good way to go about it. However, merit pay may be the best solution given the situation.
I'm not sure how we can fix the education system at a national level when school boards or states control curriculum at the local level, because some of those are well funded and well run and will be good and some are poorly funded and/or poorly run and will be bad. You can mandate that a state's schools teach something or have a certain level of proficiency in something, or else lose federal money (like highway money), but I'm not entirely sure even that will work. E.g., when the "No child left behind" forced schools to have certain standards, the schools just taught what would be on the exams and nothing else, along with woefully inadequate funding and no positive incentives for teaching better, only negative ones. I personally don't think you can fix this without a national set of standards, curriculum and organizational structure for public education, but increasing the federal government's role in anything releases a huge amount of political protest by the "conservatives" who will protest if the federal government does anything that isn't on the "conservative" agenda.
Meh. I'm not too concerned: the BBC creating a botnet is like the BBC going out and speeding or driving aggressively during rush hour. Sure, it's illegal and unsafe, but when everybody is doing so why single out the BBC for their activity? In fact, maybe if the BBC can demonstrate just how trivially easy it is to create and use a botnet, people will wake up and start taking security more seriously because them doing it calls attention to the problem. Actually if everyone did this and started creating their own botnets, sure it might bring down the internet for awhile, at least those machines that are pwned, but you can bet that software and router companies would start patching their software more quickly and more efficiently. In any case, how do you know that the BBC didn't infect their own computers?
But never mind me...all you people on the righteous indignation bandwagon just mod me troll already and be done with it. Grab your pitchforks! Burn down the BBC! They're breaking the law!
Well, wouldn't a former Microsoft executive be in the best position to know how fucked up Microsoft security really is? You'd think this would be a case of the burned hand learning best, in this case, the burned hand is also the one who turned on the fire.
Well, alright, I'm blowing smoke and I know it.:) Odds are this guy has so much stock in Microsoft and their affiliates that it doesn't matter what he personally believes, his wallet will be speaking for him. Obama is turning out to be fairly disappointing in some respects. In other's he's doing alright, at least he had the decency to turn back a lot of the more idiotic Bush rules, like those signing statements. I suppose it's too much to ask for a president to both have common sense AND principles.
Submitter here. I noticed that too, between today and yesterday apple stock is up about $7.50. It's a good bet that somebody is making some cash today on apple stock with this rumor. On the other hand, there was a big rally yesterday in the dow so who knows. I kept it out of the summary though because Taco cut most of the story out of the last one I submitted so this time I was keeping it short.
Mod parent up! The grand parent is mistaken. Studying fusion is the secondary mission for the NIF, the primary mission is to aid in the design of better nuclear weapons. From the NIF facts document on this page:
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will use the
world's largest laser to compress and heat BB-sized
capsules of fusion fuel to thermonuclear ignition. NIF
experiments will produce temperatures and densities
like those in the Sun or in a nuclear weapon. The
experiments will help scientists sustain confidence in
the nuclear weapon stockpile without nuclear tests as
a unique element of the National Nuclear Security
Administration's Stockpile Stewardship Program and
will produce additional benefits in basic science and
fusion energy.
Thanks for the response. Yeah, I expect it will take a while for the changes to trickle down to the media players, i.e. some of them (VLC IIRC) use their own version of ffmpeg. I am compiling my mplayer from source, because of the VDPAU support.:) In any case, I find it's usually better to get the bleeding edge version with audio and video software since codecs, etc. seem to change much more rapidly than most software.
I noticed on the release notes that ffmpeg now supports TrueHD as well as the VC-1 for video, these are both commonly used on blu-ray discs. Maybe we'll get lucky and at least now we'll be able to play our blu-ray disc tracks on linux after we remove all the DRM, & HDCP nonsense. We could sort of do it before but it's a royal pain in the ass: just last night I had to go through about four different media players to blue-ray tracks in trueHD audio and some other weird video format before I found one that could actually play my disc without spewing out error messages every frame. Even then it seemed like the dolby 5.1 sound was messed up -- the voices were coming from behind us and the music from the front.
NASA was still flying them, as they were, and still are as far as I know, the highest flying and fastest aircraft available. That article I linked to says the last flight was in 1999.
Incidentally, regarding lost war tech., I had always heard that the U.S. no longer has the ability to cast the shells for the large 16" guns on the iowa class battleships, I have no idea if it's true though.
Slashdot Mirror
Low iphone sales in Japan is FUD to which the blogosphere and the WSJ caught on. In fact, Japan ranks second in iphone sales. Of course the U.S. is where the majority of sales are, but the idea that iphones aren't selling in Japan is the result of somebody trying to manipulate Apple's stock price. It's all exposed here.
Remember that automobiles in general were a luxury item too until Henry Ford came along and decided that he wanted to make cars that were cheap enough that the people assembling in the factory could afford. Granted, it isn't readily apparent on how to make the batteries cheaper, but it wasn't readily apparent in 1900 how to make internal combustion engines cheaper either (it required the development of the precision machining necessary to make an assembly line style of manufacture work). So what you say is true, but the Tesla could be following in the same footsteps as the internal combustion engine.
I've had similar problems with my mother's laptop -- it randomly decides if it wants to connect wirelessly to the router or not, it's just a pain in the neck. I tried doing a few tricks I found suggested on the web but nothing really helped. I had suggested to her to buy an Apple this time but she went for the cheaper option, now she's regretting it.
My own experience with Vista is that I finally have it running acceptably on my brand new, 3.24 GHz core duo with 2 GB of ram by turning off every feature I could get my hands on, e.g., Aero, indexing, the *&^%$$ Superfetch that was causing my hard drive to thrash continuously for hours on end, and most of the dicovery options for the internet. Now does it work "okay", but I still wouldn't call it fast.
And don't forget the interaction of corporations with society:
AIG: Waaaahhh! I need to get my bonus?
Taxpayer: We gave you lots of money after you lost all your money and ours also. You don't deserve a bonus, you're too rich already.
AIG: Waaahhhh! I was promised this! Now I won't be able to attract the best talent.
These guys make forecasts based on new projects coming on-line as well as past behavior and geopolitical concerns. According to them, oil production peaked in 2008. The former peak was 2005 but due to the energy crisis, oil producers manage to squeeze a little bit more production out. Based on the number of new projects coming on-line and their projected size, they won't balance out known rates of depletion of existing fields for the foreseeable future. We're in a lull right now in the energy market because the economy is ruined (which probably was helped by high oil prices), but energy prices will come back up.
Incidentally, what we're seeing now is very similar to what happened with the price of the last portable fuel we used before petroleum oil: whale oil (which is renewable if harvested in low enough quantities). There were massive oscillations in price that started just after the production of whale oil production peaked in 1845 when the whales started being hunted faster than they could reproduce. The great-grand-parent is totally wrong about the peak being in the future, it's here now and we all have to deal with that. The real question now is how long production can be sustained at this level and how soon will it decline?
By not trying to move onto new energy sources, Shell is resigning itself to becoming a two-bit company. You'd think they would have learned their lesson in 2004 when they had to downgrade their reserve estimates, but I guess not. I wouldn't buy stock in them.
Yah that's right, whether something is a pollutant or not is not determined by if it has beneficial effects for some things, it's whether at it's present levels, whether it's harming humans, which CO2 is. If we had more oxygen in the atmosphere it would be a pollutant -- we'd all burst into flame where there's an open spark! That would be pretty toxic I would think and we would probably want to start regulating our oxygen emissions. Also, if we were spewing out massive amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere, I guess that would also be a pollutant because humidity would go up and we'd all get infected with fungi & molds, and viruses & bacteria would be harder to cure or take longer to go away -- ask anyone who smokes and lives in Portland, Oregon what that's like, it sucks.
Flippant remarks aside, the grand-parent is incorrect, legally, CO2 is considered a pollutant. Here's a copy of the supreme court decision agreeing with the stance that CO2 is a pollutant. Also, in at least one case a Superior court judge in Georgia has used the Supreme court decision to block the construction of a coal-fire power plant because the plans contained no provision for limiting CO2 emissions. The "CO2 ain't a pollutant" excuse doesn't work any more. That dog won't hunt.
The idea here is that cell phone have a much wider access than wireless networks. At any given location, there's a much greater probability that you will have a cell signal than a wireless signal. Thus, by tethering you can have internet access for your computer wherever. Having the computer on the internet is important because it has a much wider feature set than your phone.
I never bought an iphone because of the monthly rates, but if you're already paying AT&T 70 bucks a month for data service, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to tether it. Heck, if I traveled a little more and tethering was easy I would actually consider getting one.
I can't watch the commercials because the site is slashdotted, but here's what I think: Instead of doing the I'm a mac, I'm a PC exchange commercials, they should get Stallman and Torvalds to do the commercial, each one playing "linux". I think it would emphasize the tension the linux community has regarding the priority of freedom:
Torvalds: "Hello, I'm linux."
Stallman: "You should really refer to him as GNU/linux, and me too."
Torvalds: "We reliably operate huge numbers of servers, embedded devices and personal computers and have support for a a huge array of hardware devices."
Stallman: "But most importantly, we allow you to have the freedom share your ideas with others and be able to use other's ideas enriching all of us simultaneously."
Torvalds: "...and making big bank."
Stallman: "uhh, what?"
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll have to try Crysis. I don't play games so much that I have time to try out every single different game. E.g., I only recently gave up medieval total war1.
I've found FC2 to be spotty in regards to the x-ray vision thing. If you're in cover (bushes, tall grass, behind tree) and haven't started shooting, there's a good chance you won't be seen, even up close unless they walk straight over you. However, once the shooting starts, you might as well be walking around with a giant flashing neon arrow floating over your head, especially if the NPC is in a car. Even if you use the bloody silencer pistol they still know precisely where you are the millisecond you pull the trigger. It's a pity, FC2 is so gorgeous and the setting and mood are just incredible -- it could have been a totally awesome game, but they messed up a few major things like that so it'll never be more than a might have been I guess.
Incidentally, my list of annoyances besides the AI once the shooting starts includes the asthmatic main character who can't run more than about 25 yards without keeling over, no way to abort reloading weapons or healing yourself once you initiate the action, and to cap it off, the moronic respawn at the check stations the second you leave that map. The respawn should have been time based, or better yet, they should have scripted the replacement soldiers driving up and manning the post after cleaning up what's left of their buddies if you're on that map or near it.
The solution I found fascinating:
So the idea is that the AI needs to calculate precisely where you are, and then rather than hit you if the preferences are set to "hard" or miss you on the "easy" setting, probabilistically make a decision based on what a weaker or stronger human player would do. It's was a great read!
Yeah, that's true. But I usually consider them to be inseparable with Apple: they do seem to achieved a pretty good union of quality products and excellent marketing/aesthetic design. For the record though, I used the hockey-puck mouse for about a year and it didn't mangle my hand or anything, but I switched to a logitech as soon as they announced scroll wheel support.
Incidentally, I wonder who actually has the longest average useful lifetime for their laptops? My guess is probably either apple or lenovo, probably lenovo.
Oh I wouldn't say that's entirely true. Remember the fruit imacs? They were good machines to work on, and they were functional but they were marketed as "fun", there's a commercial here. The ibook commercial is only slightly better as it flashed some adjectives for desirable qualities up on the screen. Fortunately for Apple, their marketing department was a little smarter and didn't feel the need to state that their product was sexy, they just relied on old-fashioned association of their product with good music and pretty colors.
If we assume that Dell isn't completely insane, we're forced to conclude that perhaps there is a market of people out there who want a thin, expensive laptop, but refuse to buy an Apple and perhaps have no personal taste so need to be told what's fashionable. Or perhaps Dell fucked up and the girlfriend/mistress of one of the top executives run the marketing campaign instead of somebody competent.
Sorry to respond to myself, but I just learned about a power architecture chip being made by PA Semi. Apparently, it IS a low power consumption 64 bit chip that could be put into a laptop and it already runs at 2 GHz (or did two years ago). It consumes 7 watts whereas the core duo consumed 21-25 watts. According to this, PA Semi thought it was all but in the bag for apple to use their chips to replace the G5, but apple switched to intel for some unknown reasons.
I think a switch from the x86 would be pretty minimal in the long run, there's plenty of alternative chips out there, they just don't have the resources put into them like the x86 and x86_64.
Actually, they're not bad for just clock speed. The quote you gave was for a quad-core 2.66 GHz chip. My dual G5 has 2.7 GHz chips in it and it's 3.5 years old, I'm sure you could cram four G5s onto a motherboard and compete with a quad-core chip just fine. 2.7 GHz is still a relatively fast chip, just a quick cursory glance at newegg shows that there's not much over 3.33 GHz for sale right now.
Granted, nobody has made a multi-core powerPC chip as far as I know, but I argue that's not the issue, nor is the clock speed though, it's the power consumption. You just can't put a 2.7 GHz G5 in a laptop and expect it to not melt the thing into a gooey flaming mess, or even if you did manage to cool it, you'd never get any kind of decent battery life. I suspect that the laptop problem more than anything caused apple to switch to intel, but the fan noise necessary to keep the G5s cool even on the desktop was becoming an issue as well. However, power consumption and heat have nothing to do with the architecture of the chip, even making x86 chips AMD has been running into problems trying to make them low power and cool.
And the answer is... powerPC! But only if someone takes an interest in working on the chip to lower power consumption and heat output. My dual G5 runs great but the sucker sounds like a jet engine taking off when it starts doing something computationally intensive.
Precisely. It's the same thing with contrast ratios on monitors, they're relatively meaningless because they advertise them in completely different ways. Dell or LG might advertise the best contrast ratio possible, whereas Apple is usually more conservative about their estimates. Apple gets slammed because their prices are higher and the contrast ratio stats look worse unless you read on how the contrast ratios are calculated. Yet, having used equivalent Dell and Apple monitors on the same computer, I've found the Apple ones are actually the better display (in part because there were some of the first ones to use S-IPS panels).
What's needed is are some regulations regarding how computer parts are advertised, but that would require a federal government that takes an interest in protecting the consumer, not protecting corporate profit.
Actually, I was thinking that for four quad cores, i.e. 16 cores, and 2 GB memory per core, $16k is pretty damn cheap. Consider that 5 years ago if you wanted that kind of computing power you had to buy dual opteron boards and have eight of them communicate over gigabit ethernet (cheap but slow) or infiniband (fast but ~$1k per node, so add $8k to the price, that's half the price of this cluster just for the interconnects). I use a cluster of similar configuration and it sure cost more than $16k when it was new. Granted, with separate cores you get to bypass the interconnects but you have to use a shared memory bus which can saturate and form a bottleneck. As far as I know, whether you want a separate core or multi-core system depends on your application, but shit, $16k for what amounts to a small cluster is still a great deal especially since they preassembled it.
That's a false dichotomy. Merit pay is not the only solution to our science education troubles and presenting it as that is not necessarily a good way to go about it. However, merit pay may be the best solution given the situation.
I'm not sure how we can fix the education system at a national level when school boards or states control curriculum at the local level, because some of those are well funded and well run and will be good and some are poorly funded and/or poorly run and will be bad. You can mandate that a state's schools teach something or have a certain level of proficiency in something, or else lose federal money (like highway money), but I'm not entirely sure even that will work. E.g., when the "No child left behind" forced schools to have certain standards, the schools just taught what would be on the exams and nothing else, along with woefully inadequate funding and no positive incentives for teaching better, only negative ones. I personally don't think you can fix this without a national set of standards, curriculum and organizational structure for public education, but increasing the federal government's role in anything releases a huge amount of political protest by the "conservatives" who will protest if the federal government does anything that isn't on the "conservative" agenda.
Meh. I'm not too concerned: the BBC creating a botnet is like the BBC going out and speeding or driving aggressively during rush hour. Sure, it's illegal and unsafe, but when everybody is doing so why single out the BBC for their activity? In fact, maybe if the BBC can demonstrate just how trivially easy it is to create and use a botnet, people will wake up and start taking security more seriously because them doing it calls attention to the problem. Actually if everyone did this and started creating their own botnets, sure it might bring down the internet for awhile, at least those machines that are pwned, but you can bet that software and router companies would start patching their software more quickly and more efficiently. In any case, how do you know that the BBC didn't infect their own computers?
But never mind me...all you people on the righteous indignation bandwagon just mod me troll already and be done with it. Grab your pitchforks! Burn down the BBC! They're breaking the law!
Well, wouldn't a former Microsoft executive be in the best position to know how fucked up Microsoft security really is? You'd think this would be a case of the burned hand learning best, in this case, the burned hand is also the one who turned on the fire.
:) Odds are this guy has so much stock in Microsoft and their affiliates that it doesn't matter what he personally believes, his wallet will be speaking for him. Obama is turning out to be fairly disappointing in some respects. In other's he's doing alright, at least he had the decency to turn back a lot of the more idiotic Bush rules, like those signing statements. I suppose it's too much to ask for a president to both have common sense AND principles.
Well, alright, I'm blowing smoke and I know it.
Submitter here. I noticed that too, between today and yesterday apple stock is up about $7.50. It's a good bet that somebody is making some cash today on apple stock with this rumor. On the other hand, there was a big rally yesterday in the dow so who knows. I kept it out of the summary though because Taco cut most of the story out of the last one I submitted so this time I was keeping it short.
Thanks for the response. Yeah, I expect it will take a while for the changes to trickle down to the media players, i.e. some of them (VLC IIRC) use their own version of ffmpeg. I am compiling my mplayer from source, because of the VDPAU support. :) In any case, I find it's usually better to get the bleeding edge version with audio and video software since codecs, etc. seem to change much more rapidly than most software.
I noticed on the release notes that ffmpeg now supports TrueHD as well as the VC-1 for video, these are both commonly used on blu-ray discs. Maybe we'll get lucky and at least now we'll be able to play our blu-ray disc tracks on linux after we remove all the DRM, & HDCP nonsense. We could sort of do it before but it's a royal pain in the ass: just last night I had to go through about four different media players to blue-ray tracks in trueHD audio and some other weird video format before I found one that could actually play my disc without spewing out error messages every frame. Even then it seemed like the dolby 5.1 sound was messed up -- the voices were coming from behind us and the music from the front.
NASA was still flying them, as they were, and still are as far as I know, the highest flying and fastest aircraft available. That article I linked to says the last flight was in 1999.
Incidentally, regarding lost war tech., I had always heard that the U.S. no longer has the ability to cast the shells for the large 16" guns on the iowa class battleships, I have no idea if it's true though.