I've always taken it as the power of your point of view to color how you perceive your own reality. We're caught up in what we see as the "modern world" to the degree that we cannot understand the fact that the dolphins, who, to us, seemingly waste all their time frolicking in the oceans and eating our free fish offerings, are in fact a deeply evolved and space-faring race, sitting there right in front of our eyes (and, not coincidentally, similarly judging us for how we go about our lives).
I'd say the problem is an outdated method of judging a hardware design's "age." Saying the iMac Pro is "neutral" in terms of modern-ness 6 months out from introduction strikes me as particularly nonsensical. Exactly what should have been updated there? I don't see any advance in Intel's relevant line of Xeons in the interim (and AFAIK Xeon development is itself measured in years).
Obviously, the Macbook Air and Mini are extreme (and genuinely embarrassing) examples, but generally speaking a ~1yr update cycle (everything else on that page) seems entirely reasonable, especially given Intel's more, uh, deliberate pace in recent years.
NONE of the systems have been updated in 365 days other than the hideously expensive iMac Pro. None.
And with no announcement at WWDC, odds are we won't see updates til 1st Q 2019. The next big hardware announcement will be the iPhone in the Fall. They won't mix iPhone with Mac.
It's also important to look at the averages for the upgrades. It's not consistent at all, except the MBP. All the other Macs, it's on a whimsical schedule.
And the updates, when they've happened have been poorly thought out. Castrating the mac mini, foolishly recreating the Cube as the new Mac Pro. Adding the touchbar, while removing ports. The list goes on.
Apple has lost their way with the Mac. Clear as day. They're doing great with the iPhone/iOS, but they're only paying lip service to the Mac and macOS.
Also seems to hinge on whether the participants "consider themselves" to be a night-owl. If the effect is there, you should be able to stratify by, say, regularly going to bed after 1am (or whatever). This doesn't seem to be that.
Exactly. I think people categorize themselves relative to those around them.
At the beginning of the study period, participants were asked whether they considered themselves to be morning people or evening people, or whether they felt they fell somewhere in between those two groups.
I see Animoji as a fun thing you can do that also demonstrates all the face recognition hardware in there that's present for FaceID, which to me, is the real killer feature of the X (and, presumably, future iPhones). Really is so much more convenient; like the good old days of using a phone that has no passcode at all.
Geneticist in a large academic lab here, I'd say 99% of all computers in use are Macs. Some instrument-tied PCs, a couple of Windows laptops, and that's it. Any data analysis (and these are predominantly sequencing scale datasets) that isn't running on the institutionally provided cluster is also being done on Macs.
In my ~20 years on the job in various places, OSX really changed everything; labs used to have a few Macs around for non-analytic tasks where the old MacOS was just easier. Post OSX, it's nearly all Macs unless it ships with an instrument of some kind (and then it's likely Windows). The analytic tool chain is/was massively unix based, so adapting to OSX was easy and came with a very nice GUI that also did the aforementioned easy non-analytic tasks.
The high-tide of Apple machines in genetic research actually has nothing to do with what most people might presume and has a very specific, very technical reason.
The AltiVec (“Velocity Engine”) present in G4 and even more so in 64-bit G5 machines was discovered to be extraordinarily efficient at performing the calculations required for the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (commonly known as BLAST). At the time, the G4/G5 architectures had a massive lead on other chips present on the market at the time (i80x86-derived machines such as Pentium III, Pentium 4, and Pendium M; but also other exotic architectures such as MIPS, SPARC, and DEC’s Alpha.
Eventually other architectures caught up by adding vector units or vector instructions of their own, and Apple stripped any basis of fact out of this when they switched to Intel, but by a form of institutional inertia, Macs still rule in the genetics segment.
No I would think the minimum requirement would be 20 years of experience with the same factory dog with the sort of requirements that go on these days with businesses -- it's only going to get worse.
This article from 2011 (http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2011/more-b...) makes a compelling case that, after decades of cutting government jobs and creeping privatization, we simply don't have enough bureaucrats to organize and run large, complex projects anymore. These other countries having success with infra projects still do. Thus the issue.
I've been following and advocating for the Green Line Extension, a major transit expansion in the Boston area. I've been working on this for about 7 years now, through three different project teams, and I can say for certain that lack of effective management is a HUGE issue with the repeated failure of this project.
(This is the third reboot of this project... or maybe fourth. I've lost count.)
Not only does the local transit agency have _nobody_ who can manage the project, but the government doesn't even have the capability to assess contractors who might do that job. So they are totally at the mercy of commercial firms, who get paid whether they deliver or not.
The latest move is to hire a project manager for about $400k/yr (on a contract basis, naturally) to try to "save" the project, which has already spent $1 billion, yet has not put a shovel in the ground. (Ok they did fix up one bridge, woo hoo.)
Unfortunately, this PM is only one guy, and he's being assisted mostly by (you guessed it) more contractors. Even more comically, the contractors who are assisting him are the exact same ones who blew the first billion dollars.
Needless to say I don't have a lot of confidence that the incentives are aligned with me ever riding on this line.
