The "junk science" fad is actually in the attribution of the label "junk science" to topics that threaten various SIGs within the United States. Fearing a decreasing interest in adoption of tobacco products from studies implying negative health effects from "second hand smoke," Philip Morris originated a marketing campaign to discredit the general public's confidence in the scientific community. The idea evolved into a cross-industry conspiracy to undermine the work of the EPA and FDA and to discredit broad-ranging issues in scientific research that conflicted with the interests of the conspirators. This conspiracy operated under the name "The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition." The conduit of the misinformation was Steven Milloy, the owner and operator of junkscience.com who frequently posts stories calling into question the legitimacy of various scientific studies and ad hominem against specific researchers whose work conflicts with his sponsors.
The firmware and driver paths used in the Quadro line are not meant for gaming; they're optimized for CAD. The Quadro FX 4500 is simply a higher-clocked GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB that utilizes the different firmware and driver paths and costs significantly more. A Geforce 7900 GTX 512MB will work better and cost a third as much. A system with SLI will permit him to purchase two of these for less than a single Quadro FX 4500 and offering much better gaming performance. Or he could also just buy a GeForce 7950 for around $600. As for the games, there are lots of games that benefit from SLI because they're GPU-bound at higher-resolutions.
When the guy is complaining about an affordable Mac with expansions he's referring to a hypothetical 1x2 Conroe system and not the Mac Pro, so tossing in a video card that costs over a thousand dollars and telling him "SEE IT WILL PLAY GAMES" is absurd.
When Apple releases the Macbook/Macbook Pro and the iMac with Merom that will address both issues you propose: Merom is 64-bit, and it will be the second iteration of both platforms. If you are willing to wait an extended period of time, though, you might as well wait for Intel's next mobile chipset to be integrated into the Macbook line next year.
He is referring to the "quality" of the selection of limited-yield high-performance parts, such as with the Mac Pro. If you want everything in the Mac Pro it will cost you handsomely regardless of the vendor. Issues of build quality or the failure-rate of limited amount of hardware that is actually different in a Mac than the norm in a PC is a different matter. The people here are talking past each other. The original poster is suggesting that Apple would have to sell a computer in the price-range he's shopping for to obtain his business, then someone responds that they are competing on price if you're looking at the niches Apple is targeting where it does provide a good value, and you're talking about the failure rate of the hardware.
As I rambled myself there exists at least one obvious segment of the market Apple is not currently servicing with the extreme distance between its AIO solution and its Mac Pro. The value of the Mac Pro is quite good with respect to similar platforms, however the utility of such a platform appeals mostly to a high-margin low-volume userbase. Apple clearly cannot supplant Microsoft or Dell so long as it does not cater to the same markets. While I focused on the existence of a middle ground that still had significant requirements for flexibility since servicing it does not require a fixation on low margins, there are obviously those areas where "boring little boxes" at a low price-point have value in industry. It doesn't stand to reason that Apple needs to compete with Microsoft and Dell for this market, and to some extent their advertising makes this market seem too unhip for the cool kids, but without addressing the market then it's clear that no added functionality to Leopard will paint a strategy of supplanting Dell and Microsoft.
"The addition of the fore and aft wings was a sound decision that earned the kayak approximately an extra 50HP," a California Institute of Technology professor of Aerodynamical Engineering commented adding, "but I am really eager to get one of this into my lab to see how much performance I can squeeze out by adding reducing the coefficient of drag with racing stripes and aft flames as well as introducing a chrome muffler to increase performance by another 25HP."
To hear him tell it, Stephen Colbert was only attempting to increase the truthiness of children's school reports on the family Elephantidae when he was called upon by his nation to be a hero. While merrily editing the Wikipedia entry for Slashdot to inform the tykes that the elephant population had tripled after the graduation of Rob Malda, Stephen Colbert accidentally clicked on a link to Slashdot's front page only to read the terrible news: cancer cells were transmissible through sexual intercourse.
With a faint smile and a patriotic gleam in his eye, Stephen told me of the speed with which he realized what needed to be done: the production of Stephen Colbert's Formula 401 would need to be rapidly increased to war-time levels and a blitzkrieg campaign would need to be unleashed in order to inform everyone of the dangers of having sex. "Married couples seeking to make America great through raising families are going to need a new source of seed, and they need to know it," Stephen informed me knowingly.
When asked how urgent the problem really was Stephen curtly responded, "If couples continue to engage in monogamous sexual intercourse then all of the couples in the country will die from this terrible cancer, and then who will raise their children? Every child needs a mother and father as God intended."
I was only able to spend a few more moments with Mr. Colbert before he informed me that he needed to leave to oversee an immediate increase in production, but I was able to learn that my interview would only be the tip of the iceberg of the forthcoming media campaign. "Everyone in America will hear learn about this emerging crisis and its solution when they watch my show tonight, and like the heroes they are will jump into action by handsomely paying me for my seed."
The obvious difference between the manufacturing of alcohol and the manufacturing of processors that are comparable to the complexity of contemporary desktop processors is the substantial difference in cost to entry both in terms of the necessary natural and human resources and the capital required. It would be much easier for the government to perform surveillance and thus regulation of the sales of goods output from foreign and domestic fabs than it would be the fermentation of starches into alcohol. It is quite reasonable though to assume that any government regulations regarding the requirement of Trusted Computing for the enforcement of DRM would apply to any processors sold within the United States (or your country of choosing), so the architecture of the processor would be largely irrelevant for the purposes of "fighting the power." If anything the variety in architectures would only make the job of circumvention more difficult by potentially requiring different approaches for each architecture. Monoculture is a superior vector for the transmission of pathogens, which in this case would be the circumvention of DRM enforcement.
I am almost reluctant to dismay you so, but I must inform you that the West includes Europe. This should come as little surprise to most seeing as the term refers to the cultural tradition started in Ancient Greece, carried out through continental Europe and later brought to the Americas, but I suppose inconvenient things like reality would make your diversionary ranting even more difficult for you to relate to the substance of my comment within your own mind.
With the prevalence of malicious software on the Internet, Internet banking is inherently threatened by the limited ability for the system to secure itself from interception of various forms. Especially on Windows where the typical user still makes use of global administrator privileges for conducting day-to-day activities it is possible to modify JVMs, Flash plug-ins, JavaScript interpreters, system libraries, and web clients. It is possible to record every form of input as well as the display output of interfaces with online banking, without even having to bother doing the same to other tasks. HSBC has a difficult job well beyond simple key loggers for preventing compromised computers from betraying information to would-be thieves.
While the West maintains its position as leading the global economy and farming out labor to the inhabitants of various countries in continental Asia, and while the West remains largely in the position of mandating the usage of Microsoft Office's myriad Office formats, it will almost certainly be the case that business correspondence within these countries will remain in the various incarnations of DOC. It then will follow that as we see with Windows itself people will instinctively use the software at home that they use at work, and the employees of these businesses will spread the continued usage of DOC formats by inertia. It may frequently be the case that these people will simply be making use of Microsoft Office without proper licensing so the cost of Office or even the cost of a Microsoft stranglehold will seem like a quaint abstraction with no particular significance to their day-to-day lives. This may shift of course as Asia's economies continue to grow in prominence and they seek to change the power-dynamic with the West, but it does not mean that they will be susceptible to the idea of adopting a mostly Western-proposed standard like ODF when this occurs.
If the inhabitants of Western countries wish for pressure to influence the decisions of their own businesses or governments away from DOC to ODF, they cannot rely upon Asia to provide that for them. So while "we" may have reason to care about the policies of various Asia countries with respect to the adoption of ODF, we cannot rely upon it to change anything for "us."
In some ways the current growth of Ruby outside of Japan parallels the growth process that Python went through during the later part of the '90s: making the transformation from obscurity to garnering the widespread attention of various nebulous Internet luminaries who step forward to profess its superiority to mainstream business languages in terms of flexibility and rapid deployment. Like early Python growth much of the exultation stems from the perceptions of a web framework, with even Apple Computer coming forth to associate its brand with Rails and high-traffic sites like Penny Arcade transitioning to the framework.
Some part of the growth of Ruby's recognition may be explainable in terms of the protracted development of Perl 6 and its ever-more baroque syntax, dissatisfaction with the Java-like direction the PHP language has been taking, and some waning interest with the cost of developing Java solutions to problems that are not compute-bound. I suspect that it is the dissatisfaction of web developers with the direction of their tools that makes them most susceptible to the siren call of new languages, especially those professing the ability to write the same programs in a much shorter period of time with more clarity. Application developers are slower to adopt the use of new languages outside of the domains of scripting and plug-in development, with the majority of desktop software meant for the home user still being developed in C, C++, and in the case of the growing Apple market: Objective-C.
It is because of this obstinacy that application developers have that much of the early successes of languages like Python and Ruby rise upward by following Java's path into the back-end with what become flagship projects that come to represent the language to adopters and spectators in its early form. Python had its Zope and now Ruby has its Rails.
Unfortunately this monocular fixation is a double-edged sword, and just as the successes of Rails can raise Ruby itself upward and spark new interest in developers that will branch out the competency of the available libraries, bad publicity for Rails could mute continued interest in Ruby, and losing the favor of its current famous advocates could spell the death of its potential to breach outward into a larger audience. It is for this reason that it is important for Ruby developers to ardently diversify the public successes of Ruby so that the sensational headlines of the Internet news cycle and the fickle nature of developer fashion do not spell an end to a promising beginning.
Flaws in software are inevitable, but when the spotlight is shining down upon you it is the spectacle of these flaws that will be remembered by the over-sensitive minds of managers when the time comes to decide what architecture to use for new developments. Diversifying the splotlight of Ruby will make it less susceptible to such damage.
Slashdot Mirror
I see no reason for Jack's family to be punished for his desire to be an infamous public figure.
The "junk science" fad is actually in the attribution of the label "junk science" to topics that threaten various SIGs within the United States. Fearing a decreasing interest in adoption of tobacco products from studies implying negative health effects from "second hand smoke," Philip Morris originated a marketing campaign to discredit the general public's confidence in the scientific community. The idea evolved into a cross-industry conspiracy to undermine the work of the EPA and FDA and to discredit broad-ranging issues in scientific research that conflicted with the interests of the conspirators. This conspiracy operated under the name "The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition." The conduit of the misinformation was Steven Milloy, the owner and operator of junkscience.com who frequently posts stories calling into question the legitimacy of various scientific studies and ad hominem against specific researchers whose work conflicts with his sponsors.
t ml
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2000Q3/junkman.h
http://timlambert.org/category/science/milloy/
http://info-pollution.com/milloy.htm
The firmware and driver paths used in the Quadro line are not meant for gaming; they're optimized for CAD. The Quadro FX 4500 is simply a higher-clocked GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB that utilizes the different firmware and driver paths and costs significantly more. A Geforce 7900 GTX 512MB will work better and cost a third as much. A system with SLI will permit him to purchase two of these for less than a single Quadro FX 4500 and offering much better gaming performance. Or he could also just buy a GeForce 7950 for around $600. As for the games, there are lots of games that benefit from SLI because they're GPU-bound at higher-resolutions. When the guy is complaining about an affordable Mac with expansions he's referring to a hypothetical 1x2 Conroe system and not the Mac Pro, so tossing in a video card that costs over a thousand dollars and telling him "SEE IT WILL PLAY GAMES" is absurd.
When Apple releases the Macbook/Macbook Pro and the iMac with Merom that will address both issues you propose: Merom is 64-bit, and it will be the second iteration of both platforms. If you are willing to wait an extended period of time, though, you might as well wait for Intel's next mobile chipset to be integrated into the Macbook line next year.
He is referring to the "quality" of the selection of limited-yield high-performance parts, such as with the Mac Pro. If you want everything in the Mac Pro it will cost you handsomely regardless of the vendor. Issues of build quality or the failure-rate of limited amount of hardware that is actually different in a Mac than the norm in a PC is a different matter. The people here are talking past each other. The original poster is suggesting that Apple would have to sell a computer in the price-range he's shopping for to obtain his business, then someone responds that they are competing on price if you're looking at the niches Apple is targeting where it does provide a good value, and you're talking about the failure rate of the hardware.
As I rambled myself there exists at least one obvious segment of the market Apple is not currently servicing with the extreme distance between its AIO solution and its Mac Pro. The value of the Mac Pro is quite good with respect to similar platforms, however the utility of such a platform appeals mostly to a high-margin low-volume userbase. Apple clearly cannot supplant Microsoft or Dell so long as it does not cater to the same markets. While I focused on the existence of a middle ground that still had significant requirements for flexibility since servicing it does not require a fixation on low margins, there are obviously those areas where "boring little boxes" at a low price-point have value in industry. It doesn't stand to reason that Apple needs to compete with Microsoft and Dell for this market, and to some extent their advertising makes this market seem too unhip for the cool kids, but without addressing the market then it's clear that no added functionality to Leopard will paint a strategy of supplanting Dell and Microsoft.
"The addition of the fore and aft wings was a sound decision that earned the kayak approximately an extra 50HP," a California Institute of Technology professor of Aerodynamical Engineering commented adding, "but I am really eager to get one of this into my lab to see how much performance I can squeeze out by adding reducing the coefficient of drag with racing stripes and aft flames as well as introducing a chrome muffler to increase performance by another 25HP."
To hear him tell it, Stephen Colbert was only attempting to increase the truthiness of children's school reports on the family Elephantidae when he was called upon by his nation to be a hero. While merrily editing the Wikipedia entry for Slashdot to inform the tykes that the elephant population had tripled after the graduation of Rob Malda, Stephen Colbert accidentally clicked on a link to Slashdot's front page only to read the terrible news: cancer cells were transmissible through sexual intercourse.
With a faint smile and a patriotic gleam in his eye, Stephen told me of the speed with which he realized what needed to be done: the production of Stephen Colbert's Formula 401 would need to be rapidly increased to war-time levels and a blitzkrieg campaign would need to be unleashed in order to inform everyone of the dangers of having sex. "Married couples seeking to make America great through raising families are going to need a new source of seed, and they need to know it," Stephen informed me knowingly.
When asked how urgent the problem really was Stephen curtly responded, "If couples continue to engage in monogamous sexual intercourse then all of the couples in the country will die from this terrible cancer, and then who will raise their children? Every child needs a mother and father as God intended."
I was only able to spend a few more moments with Mr. Colbert before he informed me that he needed to leave to oversee an immediate increase in production, but I was able to learn that my interview would only be the tip of the iceberg of the forthcoming media campaign. "Everyone in America will hear learn about this emerging crisis and its solution when they watch my show tonight, and like the heroes they are will jump into action by handsomely paying me for my seed."
The obvious difference between the manufacturing of alcohol and the manufacturing of processors that are comparable to the complexity of contemporary desktop processors is the substantial difference in cost to entry both in terms of the necessary natural and human resources and the capital required. It would be much easier for the government to perform surveillance and thus regulation of the sales of goods output from foreign and domestic fabs than it would be the fermentation of starches into alcohol. It is quite reasonable though to assume that any government regulations regarding the requirement of Trusted Computing for the enforcement of DRM would apply to any processors sold within the United States (or your country of choosing), so the architecture of the processor would be largely irrelevant for the purposes of "fighting the power." If anything the variety in architectures would only make the job of circumvention more difficult by potentially requiring different approaches for each architecture. Monoculture is a superior vector for the transmission of pathogens, which in this case would be the circumvention of DRM enforcement.
I am almost reluctant to dismay you so, but I must inform you that the West includes Europe. This should come as little surprise to most seeing as the term refers to the cultural tradition started in Ancient Greece, carried out through continental Europe and later brought to the Americas, but I suppose inconvenient things like reality would make your diversionary ranting even more difficult for you to relate to the substance of my comment within your own mind.
With the prevalence of malicious software on the Internet, Internet banking is inherently threatened by the limited ability for the system to secure itself from interception of various forms. Especially on Windows where the typical user still makes use of global administrator privileges for conducting day-to-day activities it is possible to modify JVMs, Flash plug-ins, JavaScript interpreters, system libraries, and web clients. It is possible to record every form of input as well as the display output of interfaces with online banking, without even having to bother doing the same to other tasks. HSBC has a difficult job well beyond simple key loggers for preventing compromised computers from betraying information to would-be thieves.
While the West maintains its position as leading the global economy and farming out labor to the inhabitants of various countries in continental Asia, and while the West remains largely in the position of mandating the usage of Microsoft Office's myriad Office formats, it will almost certainly be the case that business correspondence within these countries will remain in the various incarnations of DOC. It then will follow that as we see with Windows itself people will instinctively use the software at home that they use at work, and the employees of these businesses will spread the continued usage of DOC formats by inertia. It may frequently be the case that these people will simply be making use of Microsoft Office without proper licensing so the cost of Office or even the cost of a Microsoft stranglehold will seem like a quaint abstraction with no particular significance to their day-to-day lives. This may shift of course as Asia's economies continue to grow in prominence and they seek to change the power-dynamic with the West, but it does not mean that they will be susceptible to the idea of adopting a mostly Western-proposed standard like ODF when this occurs.
If the inhabitants of Western countries wish for pressure to influence the decisions of their own businesses or governments away from DOC to ODF, they cannot rely upon Asia to provide that for them. So while "we" may have reason to care about the policies of various Asia countries with respect to the adoption of ODF, we cannot rely upon it to change anything for "us."
In some ways the current growth of Ruby outside of Japan parallels the growth process that Python went through during the later part of the '90s: making the transformation from obscurity to garnering the widespread attention of various nebulous Internet luminaries who step forward to profess its superiority to mainstream business languages in terms of flexibility and rapid deployment. Like early Python growth much of the exultation stems from the perceptions of a web framework, with even Apple Computer coming forth to associate its brand with Rails and high-traffic sites like Penny Arcade transitioning to the framework.
Some part of the growth of Ruby's recognition may be explainable in terms of the protracted development of Perl 6 and its ever-more baroque syntax, dissatisfaction with the Java-like direction the PHP language has been taking, and some waning interest with the cost of developing Java solutions to problems that are not compute-bound. I suspect that it is the dissatisfaction of web developers with the direction of their tools that makes them most susceptible to the siren call of new languages, especially those professing the ability to write the same programs in a much shorter period of time with more clarity. Application developers are slower to adopt the use of new languages outside of the domains of scripting and plug-in development, with the majority of desktop software meant for the home user still being developed in C, C++, and in the case of the growing Apple market: Objective-C.
It is because of this obstinacy that application developers have that much of the early successes of languages like Python and Ruby rise upward by following Java's path into the back-end with what become flagship projects that come to represent the language to adopters and spectators in its early form. Python had its Zope and now Ruby has its Rails.
Unfortunately this monocular fixation is a double-edged sword, and just as the successes of Rails can raise Ruby itself upward and spark new interest in developers that will branch out the competency of the available libraries, bad publicity for Rails could mute continued interest in Ruby, and losing the favor of its current famous advocates could spell the death of its potential to breach outward into a larger audience. It is for this reason that it is important for Ruby developers to ardently diversify the public successes of Ruby so that the sensational headlines of the Internet news cycle and the fickle nature of developer fashion do not spell an end to a promising beginning.
Flaws in software are inevitable, but when the spotlight is shining down upon you it is the spectacle of these flaws that will be remembered by the over-sensitive minds of managers when the time comes to decide what architecture to use for new developments. Diversifying the splotlight of Ruby will make it less susceptible to such damage.