The advantage that a PC has over a tablet and a Sony Playstation is that you don't have to give your credit card to Sony and you don't have to suffer the deprecations of critical functions at the whim of sony. It will be quite a while before a tablet can outperform my Mac Pro 8-core 16GB-ram 4TB-hd desktop with the 42" flat pane at 1920x100.
When DOS was up against the Mac, the Mac wasn't running the unix based operating system it is today.
MSDOS was pitifully simple and functionality was barely noticeable.
Unix has been the recipient of thousands of man years of work and is a far superior platform.
If MSDOS was up against Mac OS X Lion today, there would be no competition.
For forty years I dreamed passionately of having my ultimate computer at home. The Apple ][ was my first "workstation, and I invested heavily and actually had two floppy drives. Then I wanted to wire wrap myself an 8086 multitasking computer. Then I had to have an IBM PC/AT. But I knew in my heart that there were these special "expensive" machines called "workstations" that ran on some strange OS called UNIX. I discovered the RISC philosophy, and began dreaming of owning a RISC workstation. I found out about Sun Microsystems, and SunOS 3.1. I began to dream of having one of these 68xxx based Sun workstations someday. Intel based PCs continued evolving, and every time Intel coughed, machines sped up considerably. But each time the architecture sped up, Microsoft released another version of their OS (if you can call it that) that took most of the ram, and ate most of the cycles. So no matter how fast the Intel boxes were, Windows based machines were not showing the performance I expected out of a "workstation". In the mid-nineties, I took a contract to set up a demonstration of an application running on a contemporary Intel Windows box and a contemporary Sun SparcStation. I had to open the Sun box to add memory, and I was stunned by how little electronics was on the circuit board for the ten thousand dollars they wanted for this "workstation". I just could't mortgage the house to buy something with such trivial hardware. Besides, I just hated the look and feel of OpenLook. I worked on contract at Autodesk briefly, and was exposed to a number of contemporary workstations, HP, SGI, MIPS,... But as cool as the X-Window system was, it still seemed somewhat raw, even with Motif. At the commodity level, I began to see computers with multiple CPU's, and operating system support in Windows NT and 386BSD as well as Linux. The day came that I heard about Apple bringing out a new operating system based on the Mach kernel, with 386BSD on top, and their GUI layer on top of that. I was intrigued and it didn't take me long to realize I was getting old and grey trying to compute with Microsoft software. Eventually I invested in the workstation I had been waiting for all those years. I bought a Mac Pro 8-core 3.0GHz 16GB-ram machine, and almost four years later it is still kicking ass, and I haven't seriously considered the need to upgrade to a newer Mac Pro, as my current one still has computing capacity to spare, and plenty of memory for what I do. Sure I paid a little more for an Apple branded Intel box, But almost four years later, Processors are not significantly faster (clock rate wise). The newer processors are said to be more efficient internally, but as I said, I haven't found the need. My entire suite of software I work on compiles in 58 milliseconds. What more can I say. So it never turned out to be a spare, or some HP cpu, or an IBM Power. I fell in love with an x86 workstation. To me, a supercomputer. To me a cluster (8-cores).
I don't actually know how many lines of code there are in a typical Android phone at release, but it could very easily be in the neighborhood of 250,000 lines. If true that would mean each line of code violated a patent. I find it astounding that something as small as a line of code could embody a concept worthy of patent protection. Unless Microsoft was involved, and it was something crucial like... "The use of a NOP instruction to act as a placeholder for code that will be inserted later." Or, "The use of a jmp instruction to alter the flow of execution of a program depending on a logical condition."
My MBP was upgraded when Lion released. I have seen a handful of annoyances. I have an external monitor attached via the mini display port adapter, and I have considerable trouble dragging a window to the upper screen. Sometimes it just works, and sometimes I have to take it to the upper right corner and it slips through. I have also seen A LOT of SPINNING BALLS that last many seconds or MINUTES. This is new since LION and is very disheartening. According to resource monitors I have plenty of memory available and it is unclear what the resource issue is. I also have had problems where the machine won't come out of sleep, and needs to be hard reset and rebooted, which I have to do, and have not previously needed to do an my mbp. Living on a fixed income I am not in a position to replace my Mac hardware needlessly. On the other hand, my Mac Pro, although several years old, is a 3GHz Xeon machine with 8-cores and 16-GB of ram (although some days it reports as 14GB). I should think my MacPro still has the legs to run Apple's contemporary operating system, and although I can no longer by Apple Care (it's been three years), I shouldn't need to replace a mac of that class already.
It is one thing for a company like Microsoft to ship bad drivers, when the plethora of machine configurations they support is unimaginable. Apple on the other hand has a relatively small number of target configurations. In this case, only the Intel based machines they have shipped. And while there are dozens to be sure, Apple has the money to create a QA lab with one (or more) over every machine configuration ever shipped. I have the original 8-core 3.0GHz Xeon Mac Pro, which only has two non-Quadra video options. About two years back I upgraded to the more desirable card. Ever since I have been having intermittent trouble with my system. It has DVI out the back, which I convert with an adapter to PC-VGA and send off to my 42" Hi-def monitor (TV) at 1920x1080. Now and then when I reboot the system, it display a dialog saying the video mode is unsupported, and comes up at a lower (and distorted) resolution. Sometimes if I go into the system configuration and do the "detect" option, it realizes the better mode and things get better. Since I upgraded to Lion, it has a new and dreadful problem that it either works, or it comes up with a small band at the top of colorful multi-colored speckles, and the lower majority of the screen is filled with binding garish bands of primary colors, and the machine never achieves a stable video mode, although I can ssh into the machine from elsewhere, so it is making it into a higher run level, even though the screen is useless. Having no access to the screen, it is hard to reconfigure or diagnose the problem. As there is no convenient downgrade procedure for the OS, I am left with a very painful resolution of shelling into the machine and doing my best to save all important data, and ultimately reload the earlier OS. That will be hugely painful as I have to reload a significant number of software packages, some of which were installed on line. Running my Mac Pro in 1920x1080 with their supported video adapter and having it fail is unsatisfactory, and my applecare expired recently without an option to renew. However this gets fixed, it is a lot of trouble, and may in fact cost me a lot of money to resolve. COME ON APPLE;-|
This comment is more about apple than amazon, but something that concerns me is the issue of customer ownership. Whether the app is free or costs money, there is the issue of who gets the customer in their database. As a small developer, I sold my product and I got to know who the customer was. They went into my rolodex. Then if I had something to say to them about a new version, or a bug fix, or even to contact them and ask them if they would like to buy something else, I could. When the app store keeps the customer for themselves, all that potential for follow-on communication isn't there, and after a ton of software goes out for free, you haven't earned any money, and you customer list hasn't gotten any longer. It has to be a bitter-sweet thing to hear how many copies went out
The easier way to apply biology to this is to hire all the unemployed people in america to process pictures and categorize them And do whatever analysis is required. Since the human brain is so damn powerful and hard to replicate,, why not use some of them? Just think, if you employed 100,000 people as analysts, what a powerful decision engine that would be, and probably cost less to develop and run than some kind of blue-sky solution that DARPA might pay big bucks to some company to develop.
After microprocessors arrived and writing software for personal computers became interesting, the Internet hadn't made it bug yet, and book stores were where you went to get books abut programming. Things were still moving slowly, and there was time time write a book about a version of something, get it published, and still have a window of opportunity to sell it before the next great thing arrived. The books were selling for $35 which seemed a little expensive, but if you needed it to work, what the heck. As things sped up, that window of opportunity got much shorter and conventional publishing houses could not get the books out fast enough to address the current technology, always in motion. Hence the rise of Microsoft Publishing. As Microsoft programmers wrote the next version, their publishing arm was readying the books to go with it. Since they were the ones with the content "on-time" they could charge $50, then $75 per book and get away with it. Then they learned some new tricks, like spreading out the material across a number of titles so you had to buy an entire series of books to get critical mass on a version. Eventually, even Microsoft press could not get the books out fast enough to keep up with Microsoft's rush from one version to the next. At that point I didn't even need to buy the books because only the on-line material was up-to date enough, if even that. Now I don't even buy books any more, except books that I once loved that I want to read again, and then from Amazon at $1.99 plus shipping from the closest affiliate.
As I recall, Vista was Microsoft's first operating system with a "protected video path" (or words to that effect) wherein video card manufacturers had to sign license agreements with Microsoft indicating they were making their best effort in their drivers to keep the unencrypted video stream from being intercepted by a ripping utility or rogue viewer. In return their drivers would be signed by Microsoft...
A while back I went to Best Buy and picked up a DirecTV receiver to use at home. When I terminated my DTV service, they demanded the receiver back. I vaguely understand what they are trying to say, but I have a big problem about returning something I walked into a store and put my money on the counter for. If this was a turnkey device that took high value (a matter of opinion) content and ripped it for uploading to the Internet, that might be one thing, but we are talking about an adapter that lets you play your expensive movie on your expensive player to your expensive display. Tons of money has already changed hands.. What is the problem, really?
I don't see how they can recall the adapters, because as I understand it IANABCL it is people who sell circumvention devices that are in trouble, not the end users who happen to posses one.
If the adapter circumvents the HDMI-HDCP protection that keeps high value content from traveling over unprotected (unencrypted) paths, that would probably shift it into the illegal bucket.
Recently I bought a movie on iTunes, and decided to pay the extra few dollars to get the HD version. When I went to play the movie on my Mac Pro (which has a DMI output on the video card) The movie played perfectly on my big display using a DMI adapter (perhaps because it supported HDCP over DMI. When I went to play the same movie on my MBP, no problem. But when I tried to play the movie on my big display in my bedroom using a mini-display-port-to-VGA adapter, no luck. It was very annoying. Just a few days ago I purchased a mini-to-HDMI adapter (the apple one) because I misplaced my other adapter, and to my surprise I was allowed to watch the movie I paid for. I have literally been sitting here wondering why one is blocked and the other is not. They can pry my new adapter from my cold dead hands.
This sort of behavior accelerates the development of open source hardware and software for game-play. I am sick to death of this concept that software is not sold, but rather licensed. As a software engineer, I am sick of people pirating my software and re-selling it behind my back, and keeping the money for themselves. I sold one copy of an OS to someone who later proudly told me, "All my customers LOVE your software". The advent of the "game console" and the cartridge were a natural way to cut down on piracy, and you could sell your stuff if you became bored with it. That worked for me. Then the Other OS debacle... I bought two original PS3's and felt I had gotten a good deal because when I was done paying games, I could learn about the CELL processor programming in Linux. The advent of the Internet as a delivery system for updates and the delivery medium for the shared game experience started out well enough but started downhill when you got to the point where they wanted to have a valid credit card on file for you all the time while you were a "network member". Then they played takeaway with the Other OS option, and enforced it by making the owners choose to keep their original firmware (and the Other OS option) at the cost of not having access to their network. That was really nasty, as either way you choose, you lost something in the process. I decided that having spent over a thousand dollars acquiring my two units, I would forgo the software updates and the PSN. And to this day I still have the two lovely units, although one of them quit playing blue media for some DRM related reason and I dare not get it fixed because the first thing they do is upgrade your firmware, so another form of takeaway is the loss of my movie player. Now I am so pissed at Sony, I don't even want to fool around with the CELL processor any more and the two units sit here as a testimony to my childish wasting of money I could have donated to some village so they could buy chickens and goats. The only good thing is that I only bought four movies, and four games. When I discovered Sony wanted forty dollars for a movie, that stopped any interest I had in collecting blueray movies. I hated every game I bought, and the only part of the equation that I did get excited about which was their SL-like social network, was several years late and I lost interest in that as well. Too many broken promises... The nausea factor just got too high. Now I am mad at myself for ever having transferred my respect for their products into some kind of feeling that I liked the company, because that was misplaced. Now I just plain hate sony, and I hate Microsoft, and I dislike HP. I guess I have just become a stodgy old guy.
When I bought my Mac Pro, the 3.0 GHz Xeon chips were not available in any other machine. I wondered how Apple got the exclusive on the new chip from Intel.
Looking at the Macbook Air though, price-wise, I could not say the portability of the Air was worth the extra money. When you compare the Air with the low-end MBP, you get a lot more computer with the MBP. Sure a little heavier, a little bigger, but a no-brainer for me. I have been looking at the iPad, and if I received one as a gift (complete with data plan), I would be very happy. But I asked myself what I would use it for, and the only answer aside from yet another device to read my email... Was to run Angry Birds on a larger screen than my iPhone 4. And sure that is an important use:-)
I have to agree. SInce I bought my 13" MBP I have been in portable computing heaven. The display is great, the keyboard is fine, the computing power is substantial, memory can be enhanced to 8GB, although 4GB has done fine for me surprisingly. When your OS is based on Unix, you just don't need tons of memory. The unit is a little larger but having a DVD reader/writer on board is great. I need the array of connections available for my daily work. Also being able to run the same OS as my desktop (a Mac Pro 8-core 16GB monster), is great. If I want something small, my iPhone does a great job. If I want to do anything real, I am very willing to carry the MBP. My older eyes need that 13" screen, and my older fingers need that real keyboard. I used to have a 17" MBP that I loved until a double-shot got dumped into the keyboard. But I have to admit it was a pain carrying around the 17" machine, where the 13" machine isn't much bigger than a book. I think Microsoft is the reason we can't have adequate netbooks. They are incapable of writing an OS that can run on something between a smartphone and a notebook. And no matter how hard they push, the industry cannot create the platform they need at a price we want to pay.
It was a good idea then, and is still a good idea now. We started out with 2400 baud leased lines. Does anyone think we didn't need more than that? Beyond the fact that existing users are learning how to use more and more data all the time, we are brining new users on board at an unbelievable rate, and they will want more as well. Don't the telecoms still have a huge amount of dark fiber waiting to get lit up?
I have a growing computer museum/collection that would be very happy to give an H11 a new home. Please get in touch with me if you are serious. Douglas Goodall douglas_goodall@mac.com http://www.goodall.com./
There it is.:-) I have been programming in C++ from the beginning. I have never had problems with heap fragmentation, probably because I make heavy use of automatic variables (and classes). When the scope closes they are gone, but I see the hinge point. Sometimes I manage my class instantiations manually by declaring a pointer to a class, then using new to instantiate it. This has the benefit of allowing me to use delete and know my destructor will be run right now, instead of in some non-determined manner at the end of the scope with other automatics as well. I just cannot swallow the concept that an interpreted language is going to run faster than a native code generating C++ compiler. Given run-time libraries of equal quality, there is no ignoring the overhead of the VM, GC notwithstanding. We all have moments when we want to hack out a quick program/script, and I think programming in Python is fun, but I don't spend a moment wondering which kind of code is faster in execution. I know the classic discussion about shorter development time inversely proportional to faster execution time. When I have to collect sensor data from rack of instruments instruments in a fraction of a second, I don't have the time to spare for garbage collection. This has always been a problem for me that I write real-time code, and you cannot write effective real-time code when you are subject to indeterminate delays at indeterminate times. The name itself, "managed code", gives me the willy nillies.
The day apple drops OS X, is the day I keep my MacBook as is for the rest of my life as my workstation.
I might buy five more to keep sealed up as backups.
Distributing the OS via the App store is disturbing. No boxes, no disks, very creepy.
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The advantage that a PC has over a tablet and a Sony Playstation is that you don't have to give your credit card to Sony and you don't have to suffer the deprecations of critical functions at the whim of sony. It will be quite a while before a tablet can outperform my Mac Pro 8-core 16GB-ram 4TB-hd desktop with the 42" flat pane at 1920x100.
When DOS was up against the Mac, the Mac wasn't running the unix based operating system it is today. MSDOS was pitifully simple and functionality was barely noticeable. Unix has been the recipient of thousands of man years of work and is a far superior platform. If MSDOS was up against Mac OS X Lion today, there would be no competition.
Now that is funny :-)
For forty years I dreamed passionately of having my ultimate computer at home. The Apple ][ was my first "workstation, and I invested heavily and actually had two floppy drives. Then I wanted to wire wrap myself an 8086 multitasking computer. Then I had to have an IBM PC/AT. But I knew in my heart that there were these special "expensive" machines called "workstations" that ran on some strange OS called UNIX. I discovered the RISC philosophy, and began dreaming of owning a RISC workstation. I found out about Sun Microsystems, and SunOS 3.1. I began to dream of having one of these 68xxx based Sun workstations someday. Intel based PCs continued evolving, and every time Intel coughed, machines sped up considerably. But each time the architecture sped up, Microsoft released another version of their OS (if you can call it that) that took most of the ram, and ate most of the cycles. So no matter how fast the Intel boxes were, Windows based machines were not showing the performance I expected out of a "workstation". In the mid-nineties, I took a contract to set up a demonstration of an application running on a contemporary Intel Windows box and a contemporary Sun SparcStation. I had to open the Sun box to add memory, and I was stunned by how little electronics was on the circuit board for the ten thousand dollars they wanted for this "workstation". I just could't mortgage the house to buy something with such trivial hardware. Besides, I just hated the look and feel of OpenLook. I worked on contract at Autodesk briefly, and was exposed to a number of contemporary workstations, HP, SGI, MIPS,... But as cool as the X-Window system was, it still seemed somewhat raw, even with Motif. At the commodity level, I began to see computers with multiple CPU's, and operating system support in Windows NT and 386BSD as well as Linux. The day came that I heard about Apple bringing out a new operating system based on the Mach kernel, with 386BSD on top, and their GUI layer on top of that. I was intrigued and it didn't take me long to realize I was getting old and grey trying to compute with Microsoft software. Eventually I invested in the workstation I had been waiting for all those years. I bought a Mac Pro 8-core 3.0GHz 16GB-ram machine, and almost four years later it is still kicking ass, and I haven't seriously considered the need to upgrade to a newer Mac Pro, as my current one still has computing capacity to spare, and plenty of memory for what I do. Sure I paid a little more for an Apple branded Intel box, But almost four years later, Processors are not significantly faster (clock rate wise). The newer processors are said to be more efficient internally, but as I said, I haven't found the need. My entire suite of software I work on compiles in 58 milliseconds. What more can I say. So it never turned out to be a spare, or some HP cpu, or an IBM Power. I fell in love with an x86 workstation. To me, a supercomputer. To me a cluster (8-cores).
I don't actually know how many lines of code there are in a typical Android phone at release, but it could very easily be in the neighborhood of 250,000 lines. If true that would mean each line of code violated a patent. I find it astounding that something as small as a line of code could embody a concept worthy of patent protection. Unless Microsoft was involved, and it was something crucial like... "The use of a NOP instruction to act as a placeholder for code that will be inserted later." Or, "The use of a jmp instruction to alter the flow of execution of a program depending on a logical condition."
My MBP was upgraded when Lion released. I have seen a handful of annoyances. I have an external monitor attached via the mini display port adapter, and I have considerable trouble dragging a window to the upper screen. Sometimes it just works, and sometimes I have to take it to the upper right corner and it slips through. I have also seen A LOT of SPINNING BALLS that last many seconds or MINUTES. This is new since LION and is very disheartening. According to resource monitors I have plenty of memory available and it is unclear what the resource issue is. I also have had problems where the machine won't come out of sleep, and needs to be hard reset and rebooted, which I have to do, and have not previously needed to do an my mbp. Living on a fixed income I am not in a position to replace my Mac hardware needlessly. On the other hand, my Mac Pro, although several years old, is a 3GHz Xeon machine with 8-cores and 16-GB of ram (although some days it reports as 14GB). I should think my MacPro still has the legs to run Apple's contemporary operating system, and although I can no longer by Apple Care (it's been three years), I shouldn't need to replace a mac of that class already.
It is one thing for a company like Microsoft to ship bad drivers, when the plethora of machine configurations they support is unimaginable. Apple on the other hand has a relatively small number of target configurations. In this case, only the Intel based machines they have shipped. And while there are dozens to be sure, Apple has the money to create a QA lab with one (or more) over every machine configuration ever shipped. I have the original 8-core 3.0GHz Xeon Mac Pro, which only has two non-Quadra video options. About two years back I upgraded to the more desirable card. Ever since I have been having intermittent trouble with my system. It has DVI out the back, which I convert with an adapter to PC-VGA and send off to my 42" Hi-def monitor (TV) at 1920x1080. Now and then when I reboot the system, it display a dialog saying the video mode is unsupported, and comes up at a lower (and distorted) resolution. Sometimes if I go into the system configuration and do the "detect" option, it realizes the better mode and things get better. Since I upgraded to Lion, it has a new and dreadful problem that it either works, or it comes up with a small band at the top of colorful multi-colored speckles, and the lower majority of the screen is filled with binding garish bands of primary colors, and the machine never achieves a stable video mode, although I can ssh into the machine from elsewhere, so it is making it into a higher run level, even though the screen is useless. Having no access to the screen, it is hard to reconfigure or diagnose the problem. As there is no convenient downgrade procedure for the OS, I am left with a very painful resolution of shelling into the machine and doing my best to save all important data, and ultimately reload the earlier OS. That will be hugely painful as I have to reload a significant number of software packages, some of which were installed on line. Running my Mac Pro in 1920x1080 with their supported video adapter and having it fail is unsatisfactory, and my applecare expired recently without an option to renew. However this gets fixed, it is a lot of trouble, and may in fact cost me a lot of money to resolve. COME ON APPLE ;-|
This comment is more about apple than amazon, but something that concerns me is the issue of customer ownership. Whether the app is free or costs money, there is the issue of who gets the customer in their database. As a small developer, I sold my product and I got to know who the customer was. They went into my rolodex. Then if I had something to say to them about a new version, or a bug fix, or even to contact them and ask them if they would like to buy something else, I could. When the app store keeps the customer for themselves, all that potential for follow-on communication isn't there, and after a ton of software goes out for free, you haven't earned any money, and you customer list hasn't gotten any longer. It has to be a bitter-sweet thing to hear how many copies went out
The easier way to apply biology to this is to hire all the unemployed people in america to process pictures and categorize them And do whatever analysis is required. Since the human brain is so damn powerful and hard to replicate,, why not use some of them? Just think, if you employed 100,000 people as analysts, what a powerful decision engine that would be, and probably cost less to develop and run than some kind of blue-sky solution that DARPA might pay big bucks to some company to develop.
After microprocessors arrived and writing software for personal computers became interesting, the Internet hadn't made it bug yet, and book stores were where you went to get books abut programming. Things were still moving slowly, and there was time time write a book about a version of something, get it published, and still have a window of opportunity to sell it before the next great thing arrived. The books were selling for $35 which seemed a little expensive, but if you needed it to work, what the heck. As things sped up, that window of opportunity got much shorter and conventional publishing houses could not get the books out fast enough to address the current technology, always in motion. Hence the rise of Microsoft Publishing. As Microsoft programmers wrote the next version, their publishing arm was readying the books to go with it. Since they were the ones with the content "on-time" they could charge $50, then $75 per book and get away with it. Then they learned some new tricks, like spreading out the material across a number of titles so you had to buy an entire series of books to get critical mass on a version. Eventually, even Microsoft press could not get the books out fast enough to keep up with Microsoft's rush from one version to the next. At that point I didn't even need to buy the books because only the on-line material was up-to date enough, if even that. Now I don't even buy books any more, except books that I once loved that I want to read again, and then from Amazon at $1.99 plus shipping from the closest affiliate.
As I recall, Vista was Microsoft's first operating system with a "protected video path" (or words to that effect) wherein video card manufacturers had to sign license agreements with Microsoft indicating they were making their best effort in their drivers to keep the unencrypted video stream from being intercepted by a ripping utility or rogue viewer. In return their drivers would be signed by Microsoft...
I think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) might apply, but since IANABCL I don't know the repercussions. I could be way off about this.
A while back I went to Best Buy and picked up a DirecTV receiver to use at home. When I terminated my DTV service, they demanded the receiver back. I vaguely understand what they are trying to say, but I have a big problem about returning something I walked into a store and put my money on the counter for. If this was a turnkey device that took high value (a matter of opinion) content and ripped it for uploading to the Internet, that might be one thing, but we are talking about an adapter that lets you play your expensive movie on your expensive player to your expensive display. Tons of money has already changed hands.. What is the problem, really?
I don't see how they can recall the adapters, because as I understand it IANABCL it is people who sell circumvention devices that are in trouble, not the end users who happen to posses one.
If the adapter circumvents the HDMI-HDCP protection that keeps high value content from traveling over unprotected (unencrypted) paths, that would probably shift it into the illegal bucket.
Recently I bought a movie on iTunes, and decided to pay the extra few dollars to get the HD version. When I went to play the movie on my Mac Pro (which has a DMI output on the video card) The movie played perfectly on my big display using a DMI adapter (perhaps because it supported HDCP over DMI. When I went to play the same movie on my MBP, no problem. But when I tried to play the movie on my big display in my bedroom using a mini-display-port-to-VGA adapter, no luck. It was very annoying. Just a few days ago I purchased a mini-to-HDMI adapter (the apple one) because I misplaced my other adapter, and to my surprise I was allowed to watch the movie I paid for. I have literally been sitting here wondering why one is blocked and the other is not. They can pry my new adapter from my cold dead hands.
But her son survived because he was wearing his tinfoil hat to prevent alien mind control rays from taking over his higher functions.
This sort of behavior accelerates the development of open source hardware and software for game-play. I am sick to death of this concept that software is not sold, but rather licensed. As a software engineer, I am sick of people pirating my software and re-selling it behind my back, and keeping the money for themselves. I sold one copy of an OS to someone who later proudly told me, "All my customers LOVE your software". The advent of the "game console" and the cartridge were a natural way to cut down on piracy, and you could sell your stuff if you became bored with it. That worked for me. Then the Other OS debacle... I bought two original PS3's and felt I had gotten a good deal because when I was done paying games, I could learn about the CELL processor programming in Linux. The advent of the Internet as a delivery system for updates and the delivery medium for the shared game experience started out well enough but started downhill when you got to the point where they wanted to have a valid credit card on file for you all the time while you were a "network member". Then they played takeaway with the Other OS option, and enforced it by making the owners choose to keep their original firmware (and the Other OS option) at the cost of not having access to their network. That was really nasty, as either way you choose, you lost something in the process. I decided that having spent over a thousand dollars acquiring my two units, I would forgo the software updates and the PSN. And to this day I still have the two lovely units, although one of them quit playing blue media for some DRM related reason and I dare not get it fixed because the first thing they do is upgrade your firmware, so another form of takeaway is the loss of my movie player. Now I am so pissed at Sony, I don't even want to fool around with the CELL processor any more and the two units sit here as a testimony to my childish wasting of money I could have donated to some village so they could buy chickens and goats. The only good thing is that I only bought four movies, and four games. When I discovered Sony wanted forty dollars for a movie, that stopped any interest I had in collecting blueray movies. I hated every game I bought, and the only part of the equation that I did get excited about which was their SL-like social network, was several years late and I lost interest in that as well. Too many broken promises... The nausea factor just got too high. Now I am mad at myself for ever having transferred my respect for their products into some kind of feeling that I liked the company, because that was misplaced. Now I just plain hate sony, and I hate Microsoft, and I dislike HP. I guess I have just become a stodgy old guy.
When I bought my Mac Pro, the 3.0 GHz Xeon chips were not available in any other machine. I wondered how Apple got the exclusive on the new chip from Intel.
Looking at the Macbook Air though, price-wise, I could not say the portability of the Air was worth the extra money. When you compare the Air with the low-end MBP, you get a lot more computer with the MBP. Sure a little heavier, a little bigger, but a no-brainer for me. I have been looking at the iPad, and if I received one as a gift (complete with data plan), I would be very happy. But I asked myself what I would use it for, and the only answer aside from yet another device to read my email... Was to run Angry Birds on a larger screen than my iPhone 4. And sure that is an important use :-)
I have to agree. SInce I bought my 13" MBP I have been in portable computing heaven. The display is great, the keyboard is fine, the computing power is substantial, memory can be enhanced to 8GB, although 4GB has done fine for me surprisingly. When your OS is based on Unix, you just don't need tons of memory. The unit is a little larger but having a DVD reader/writer on board is great. I need the array of connections available for my daily work. Also being able to run the same OS as my desktop (a Mac Pro 8-core 16GB monster), is great. If I want something small, my iPhone does a great job. If I want to do anything real, I am very willing to carry the MBP. My older eyes need that 13" screen, and my older fingers need that real keyboard. I used to have a 17" MBP that I loved until a double-shot got dumped into the keyboard. But I have to admit it was a pain carrying around the 17" machine, where the 13" machine isn't much bigger than a book. I think Microsoft is the reason we can't have adequate netbooks. They are incapable of writing an OS that can run on something between a smartphone and a notebook. And no matter how hard they push, the industry cannot create the platform they need at a price we want to pay.
It was a good idea then, and is still a good idea now. We started out with 2400 baud leased lines. Does anyone think we didn't need more than that? Beyond the fact that existing users are learning how to use more and more data all the time, we are brining new users on board at an unbelievable rate, and they will want more as well. Don't the telecoms still have a huge amount of dark fiber waiting to get lit up?
I have a growing computer museum/collection that would be very happy to give an H11 a new home. Please get in touch with me if you are serious. Douglas Goodall douglas_goodall@mac.com http://www.goodall.com./
There it is. :-) I have been programming in C++ from the beginning. I have never had problems with heap fragmentation, probably because I make heavy use of automatic variables (and classes). When the scope closes they are gone, but I see the hinge point. Sometimes I manage my class instantiations manually by declaring a pointer to a class, then using new to instantiate it. This has the benefit of allowing me to use delete and know my destructor will be run right now, instead of in some non-determined manner at the end of the scope with other automatics as well. I just cannot swallow the concept that an interpreted language is going to run faster than a native code generating C++ compiler. Given run-time libraries of equal quality, there is no ignoring the overhead of the VM, GC notwithstanding. We all have moments when we want to hack out a quick program/script, and I think programming in Python is fun, but I don't spend a moment wondering which kind of code is faster in execution. I know the classic discussion about shorter development time inversely proportional to faster execution time. When I have to collect sensor data from rack of instruments instruments in a fraction of a second, I don't have the time to spare for garbage collection. This has always been a problem for me that I write real-time code, and you cannot write effective real-time code when you are subject to indeterminate delays at indeterminate times. The name itself, "managed code", gives me the willy nillies.
The day apple drops OS X, is the day I keep my MacBook as is for the rest of my life as my workstation. I might buy five more to keep sealed up as backups. Distributing the OS via the App store is disturbing. No boxes, no disks, very creepy.