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Comment Re:but, back to root cause (Score 4, Informative) 423

It's actually the other way around: autoland is typically only used in extremely low visibility (typically bad weather) situations. In most cases, a pilot can land a plane more accurately and smoothly as the human, visually, can account for far more external variables than the autopilot computer.

Just not in this case, apparently...

Comment Copper limited bandwidth (Score 1) 359

When I was working on large farms of big iron (SGI, Sun, IBM systems) we regularly found that GigE over copper couldn't do much better than 400-500 Mbit/s. These were enterprise-class NICs, not cheap-o home gear. Switching to fiber got us much much closer to theoretical max.

When is fiber going to finally be available/affordable for the home market? I think that will make the biggest difference...

Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 241

I think this could potentially do well in schools, where Microsoft may offer good deals on large purchases. Kids don't care about the whole MS vs FOSS debate -- well, maybe then nerdy kids but they're probably doing their own Arduino development anyway. For the rest, it's a good intro to programming/developing beyond the standard web/Flash-based crap that kids learn these days.

Comment Re:Apple proves the proposition false ... (Score 1) 357

That popularity may be due to Apple's higher (perceived) build quality. If you're going to sink money into a computer or any other large purchase, would you rather buy something you think will last a few years or something cheap, built with cheap parts, that will probably break quickly and cause other headaches?

I think if/when the economy gets REALLY bad, the balance will tilt toward the cheaper end, but for now, people want the most bang for their decreasingly available buck...

Comment Re:MS hate (Score 2) 358

And by the way, IT changes fast in general, no developer can honestly expect to code in the same language from college to retirement.

You've obviously never worked in the scientific community -- where Fortran 77 is still going strong, some three+ decades later.

Comment Re:Support (Score 1) 510

Things like releasing a $3000 workstation then 3 years later releasing an OS update that doesn't support it don't fly well in enterprise environments.

Almost every business I've worked for keeps workstations around only as long as their warranties before they're surplussed. Given that AppleCare is 3 years, it might not make such a difference.

Comment GCD also replaces most synchronization / locking (Score 1) 205

The other often-overlooked advantage of GCD is that submitting work to a queue is thread-safe, queues themselves are lightweight, and queues can be made internally-serial but parallel to all other queues. Apple's documentation has a lot of good examples of how to use this structure to eliminate almost all locking code (which is usually pretty heavyweight). If you need to serialize access to a resource, just create a serial queue and any other queue can send tasks to it without worrying about any synchronization.

As someone who's struggled with performance from trying to determine how fine-grained to make locks, this seems like an awesome approach.

Music

ASCAP Says Apple Should Pay For 30-sec. Song Samples 463

CNet reports on a new money battle brewing between those who generate music and those who profit from selling it on the Net. "Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all. These groups even want compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples. ... Apparently, the music industry can't obtain the fees through negotiations. They have begun lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would require anyone who sells a download to pay a performance fee..."

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