The (excellent) Megan Greenwell wrote Bad Company, all about private equity; I'd recommend it. It does a good job of telling the story through a few specific and illustrative examples of people/industries[1], while still explaining everything in detail. Greenwell has a perspective, to be sure, but she's not wrong.
1: IIRC, it's a Toys 'R Us employee, a nurse at a rural hospital, a journalist at local newspaper, and a resident in a PE-owned apartment.
Siracusa—probably best known here for doing fabulous OS X reviews for Ars—is a co-host of ATP. He is also known is such circles for having Mac Pros, and using them for a long time (sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance). He thinks Apple should make a Mac Pro, not necessarily because it's a big seller, but because he thinks Apple should make a "best computer," much in the same way car companies might make a car that will never sell but pushes engineers, etc.
Ages ago, when new Mac hardware came out, I'd amuse myself by putting together an "ultimate Mac workstation" in the configurator --- once upon a time, one could hit 6 figures pretty easily --- these days, well I panic bought a duplicate computer because I was worried a chipped/cracked display was going to make it unusable (turns out a screen protector has worked thus far).
I agree with the reasoning, and would like to see Apple continue to make aspirational hardware, but maybe the mainstream stuff is good enough?
Even Siracusa admits that - he's found it hard to articulate what a true "Mac Pro" would do that you can't do with other things.
Back in the heyday of the $100k Mac Pro you could certainly imagine it doing things that wouldn't be easily done by anything under $50k, and it would look good doing it.
Whenever this comes up, someone chimes in to say they’re working a some big Hollywood blockbuster, and the production company bought maxed out Max Pros because they are better and faster than anything else.
>Ê with the circumflex accent marks an “e” after which originally some other letter was written (usually an S), but this letter is no longer present in its modern spelling.
[snip]
>By imagining “es” instead of “ê”, we can often deduce the meaning of unknown words; for example, forêt = forest, fête = “feste” = fest(ival); intérêt = interest and many others. The circumflex accent is used in the very same sense also for other vowels, for example île = isle, hôte = “hoste” = host, hâte = haste.
I will always remember this, thanks to my high school French teacher who, knowing her audience, gave us a few examples like "hôpital," and then said "So you can probably guess was 'bâtard' means..."
It comes from Latin fenestra. People are throwing around lots of languages in this subthread, but it needs to be said that the circonflex indicates an omitted s from the Latin original.
Maybe there are cases where the original isn't Latin, but I've never noticed one, and French does not have many words of non-Latin origin. I'm not sure if English speakers commonly know that, but English is a rare case of thoroughly mixed origins.
For anyone vaguely familiar with ffmpeg, don't sleep on this video. Quite funny, and everything from `yadif` (which I dealt with today!) to mkvtoolnix to "But then it will explode if you have an apostrophe in your file name. Because it doesn't understand that."
I'm in the middle of reading Peter Brannen's The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything—it's excellent and goes deep into the (bio)geochemistry of Earth—and he presents a good case for a metabolism-first development of life, taking advantage of "a disequilibrium that needed to be relieved at the vents, an unending stream d free energy to dissipate," rather than the RNA information-first theories.
It fits his overall narrative but it was an interesting way to think about life "as a thermodynamically necessary mechanism to relieve the continuous production of free geochemical energy on Earth... more efficiently than abiotic processes could." (Brannen quoting complex-systems scientist Anne-Marie Grisogono) I highly recommend the book.
This is similar to Nick Lane's books, and the research he references as well. The necessity for disequilibrium, the emphasis on life as the movement of energy across a barrier, etc.
I'm no expert but it seems most reasonable to me. The continual talk about pre-biotic soups of ingredients seems profoundly misplaced.
Indeed! He specifically cites Yanis Varoufakiss, dubbing this technofeudalism. If I may quote Doctorow a bit:
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
Which of the parts you mentioned are by definition more expensive? A modem? FaceID is 10 y/o now btw. You're just speculating and selling this as facts. Meanwhile actual material like aluminum, copper, lithium and others are genuinely expensive and the difference in weight of the precious metals and alloys used is obvious.
Well, the Library of Congress entry notes him as "Gugusse the clown" and the Wikipedia entry[2] has a few citations (to books, I can't verify) that support it, but more to the point, "Pierrot" is a classic[3] stock character in e.g. commedia dell'arte. It says clown but I think our modern meaning of that word is a bit removed, and perhaps "harlequin" (another character[4]) is more what we'd say these days.
For that in particular, I use delta (<https://github.com/dandavison/delta>) with `side-by-side = true` enabled. I find I use both icdiff and delta side-by-side on a regular basis.
This reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube series, Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong. They were short little videos where a guy had a toy dinosaur and he would explain why the toy was incorrect. Short, easy to understand, fun, and I learned a lot. Highly recommend to anyone of any age.
1: IIRC, it's a Toys 'R Us employee, a nurse at a rural hospital, a journalist at local newspaper, and a resident in a PE-owned apartment.
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