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

by QuantumFlux (#44226735) Attached to: Malcolm Gladwell On Culture and Airplane Crashes

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

by QuantumFlux (#37377216) Attached to: Why We Don't Need Gigabit Networks (Yet)

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

by QuantumFlux (#36974392) Attached to: .NET Gadgeteer &mdash; Microsoft's Arduino Killer?

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

by QuantumFlux (#36974332) Attached to: Are Bad Economic Times Good for Free Software?

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:Support (Score 1) 510

by QuantumFlux (#31105726) Attached to: Why Apple Doesn't Market Squarely To Businesses


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

by QuantumFlux (#29773991) Attached to: Apple's Grand Central Dispatch Ported To FreeBSD

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.

Comment: Slashdot Hypocrisy (Score 1, Interesting) 92

by QuantumFlux (#27677439) Attached to: CSIRO Settles With Tech Giants Over WiFi Patent Spat

If this were a private, for-profit company that was fighting for IP rights, Slashdotters would be up in arms defending those wanting to use the tech with arguments of Free-as-in-Speech, good-of-humanity, etc. But when it's a non-profit research organization doing exactly the same thing, Slashdotters rush to defend them.

Are the ideals here really about freedom and liberty or just thinly-veiled anti-corporatism?
