You think they're too afraid of retaliation to do something like that?
Yes. Iran is doing fairly well as a regional major power. For all the rethoric towards Israel and hatred towards jews, if Israel was obliterated and Iran was obliterated, how would Ahmadinejad be able to continue to gain influence in Iraq and Lebanon?
Keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has one Sunni nuclear power is surrounded by Sunni nuclear power, and two countries holding a serious number of US soldiers and firepower (Iraq and Afghanistan). He definitely would not want to appear weak.
Of course, he may find he has no other choice than to suffer the fate of Saddam: Pretending to be more dangerous than he really is to deter regional enemies, and then attract even more dangerous enemies. Iran is a proud country with few good options. Ideally, they'll change their priorities, but until then we cannot expect Iran to be subtle and feeble.
There's competition to keep Apple in line. Windows 7 is not that bad (this is written on an iMac running Snow Leopard). And Linux also holds potential if a vendor was to scrap most of the apps, build their own, make an app store (to attract pro developers) and tailor-make a development environment including libraries that made things a bit more standardised. It can be done. Apple did much of the same when they created OSX.
But until Apple gets its act together and produces some acceptable terms on their app store, I'm staying with Android. I want quality control, not arbitrary censorship in an app store. And since Android became mainstream, you have no doubt noticed that Apple is a bit less restrictive in their policies. Apple will not admit this, of course, but the fact remains: Whenever there is competition in their half in the playing field, Apple will adapt to the situation.
I've been using Linux as my primary desktop environment since '97, and I agree with you.
I think too many the people who bother to involve themselves in coding for Linux (and particularly towards the end-users) are lacking in.. well.. empathy: They are simply not able to reset their mindset such that they can see how your application will be perceived from a first-time user. I know the tricks, how to google effectively, the knowledge base in my head is sufficient etc etc so I'm happy using Linux. But if I was a less curious and stubborn person, I'd given up a good while ago.
Linux is overall also far too anarchistic in its nature to produce a good Desktop OS. It will remain as a superior server platform, a good development platform, a breeding ground for new stuff, but it won't ever gain end-user traction. KDE and Gnome will continue to live side-by-side, Ubuntu dares not be controversial enough to completely drop either. And the desktop will therefore be both slower and more confusing than it should be. We make stuff work, but we rarely make them shine.
The Linux desktop even missed the netbook wave, which was almost custom-made for it to shine. XP on my HP Mini 311c is good, solid and misses fewer frames (especially in Flash) than Ubuntu running the official nvidia ION driver. What a missed opportunity! (I realize M$ used dirty tricks to lock Linux out, but those frames don't drop themselves - Ubuntu is slower than XP)
Linux is adequate for almost anything, but good at only a few select things, forever trapped in the 80/20 rule. That's the curse.
Coal is relatively plentiful. An estimated 56 years is a long time to our current system.
I doubt we'll be forced out of our hydrocarbon dependency in a long time. By then, it'll be too late. Depending upon natural limits is a poor strategy anyhow - once we hit those limits, it may be too late because hitting the limit may limit the overall production (by humans or by nature, that devil is hiding in the details, sniggering).
I don't watch TV (aaarhhh!), I use adblock, and most of the stuff I subsribe to comes with only a few ads. My phone is not listed for telemarketers. And on my mailbox, there's a "no advertising, please" sticker.
Life is good. At least in that respect.
(I still get hassled a bit by pushy salespeople in the streets, though. I'm just waiting for the Norwegian law enforcement to become so inefficent that I can punch them without risking getting hassled by the Man. And the public space is filled with advertising.)
Good point about the startup cost. However, if you download the files in parallel rather than in order as we do today, the start-up issue will be mitigated. Also, most people have spare upload bandwidth. Most dedicated file-sharers don't. And anyhow, most update services will download in the background anyhow and then notify the user when the update is ready. The end-user will not notice the increased lag.
And maintaining the cache is really simple: Seed until ratio hits.. say.. five or there has not been any access to that file for five days. Then remove the.torrent from the bittorrent client and delete the file.
Ok, so to summarize a good, working architecture:
The current mirrors will also run bittorrent clients and will act as primary seeders for the torrent server.
The torrent server will only provide peers that have pinged back to verify they are indeed patched.
The torrent server will list non-mirrors first when listing peers. But only those who are patched.
The servers themselves will run a bittorrent client that is transparent and will seed until the ratio hits x or there has not been access to that package for x days. It will then clean its cache.
That's interesting. Seriously. I thought the machines were able to distinguish between living matter and printouts (like looking for signs of movement, adding an IR channel). If the iris scanners can't do that, the product is DOA.
No need to shoot the account owner. It will actually become easier to rob someone. Now you gotta threaten them to give up their PIN. With iris scanning, the robber will only need to drag your ass to the ATM and hold your head in front of the iris scanner.
Not that I like the technology, but your example seems wrong. Also the other assertions about the risks of shared authentication may be misguided. Those who hold your iris info will not necessarily be able to use this to authenticate themselves as you. Manufacturing an iris is considered difficult. And the iris scanning may be digitally signed when authenticating yourself online to get around the problem of using the same authentication to several accounts.
Well duh. Or the web site you link to re-engineers its layout without providing back-compatible redirection...
Anyhow - I store bookmarks in my bookmark collection. Twitter is mostly a way of quickly sharing and discovering ephemeral information, anyways: If I want to keep stuff, I export it from the cloud.
Multifunction office printers/fax machines/scanners have horrible, horrible UIs with lots and lots of buttons. And they must - because they are multifunction, and the buttons are function-specific. Hopefully, we'll start to see such machines that can be used be mere mortals and not specially trained secretaries.
methinks you suffer from an acute lack of imagination and inspiration if you can't do something useful with your iPad. That said, I have a Galaxy S (which shares a lot with the Galaxy Tab) and it's a nice little piece of hardware with a few flaws:
Not as responsive as the specs indicate - I eventually rooted my Galaxy S in order to reduce the lagging to a tolerable level.
GPS falls out after some uptime. This is supposedly fixed in the Froyo update.
That said, the Android platform is coming along nicely and I much prefer the Android openness to Apple's strategically founded App Store policies. I just wish you had more imagination.:)
It would be useful if the phone informed the caller that you were angry and offered the caller to go straight to the answerphone. I'm not envisioning this to be mandatory functionality, but I'd prefer getting such a message upon calling someone rather than being barked at. In real life, you can look at a person and observe their mood before engaging them in conversation. This sort of technology could/should be a matter of lowering the threshold for giving someone a call. After all, most of us prefer not to inconvenience someone, so there is a reluctance to call someone in case they're busy. Or in a bad mood.
Anyways: Application of technology matters. After all, Windows Mobile and Palm were around for a decade and got nowhere serious until Apple entered the arena and applied the existing technology in a better way. Good technology engineers is not sufficient - you also need good product engineers.
You are right regarding video playback. However, if the CPU is set to do "real work" for 1080p displays, then adding a core is a good thing.
Also, this trend of ever faster ARM platforms is interesting for the netbook market. Intel Atom is probably consciously crippled in order to avoid it eating market share from their more profitable "upmarket" processors. However, these ARM producers are indeed competing to make their processors ever faster. On a two-year perspective, Intel may find it's lowend offerings being threatened by new platforms. The iPad is just the beginning.
Thank you, dear Cuban! I was gonna say pretty much the same: Castro is not particularly murderous, but he certainly does not believe that people should have the freedom to do or say whatever they want to (within the constraints of democratically founded laws).
G.W. Bush was quite murderous, and well - he did his best to be oppressive to those who stood in his way: The US Constitution, evil-doers and those who were not with him. Whoever disagreed with him were aiding terrorists and/or being unpatriotic. And his actions show he does not care about non-American civilian deaths - Blackwater/Xe were allowed to run amok and were not stopped until the Iraq gov't rebelled etc etc etc. He also had a bloody record when he was Guv'nor in Texas.
The question is then if there is a higher dose of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease than those who died from accidents and violence. If there is a higher concentration of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease, then this suggests they knew about the healing properties of their beer. After all, the body is better at defeating infections when sober than when you're hammered so not drinking beer while being ill would be a better choice had they not known of the medicinal properties of the beer.
3) They deliver better products than their competition, and their customers are too ignorant, uncaring or too trusting in anti-trust legislation to care about their actions.
While I agree on all the things you said, I believe a flash implementation would make Joe Average like his iPad more and not less. It's a slick pice of technology: Install it, and without further involvement from your part you will be able to stream video from all over the web, play small games and do other fun stuff. For free!
Unless he's a raging alcoholic, I don't think Assange is so stupid to rape twice in a week, while the US government is looking for him and he has the attention of the world. Of course, there is a slight chance the allegations are real, but I find it very peculiar that no such charges has been made earlier. I'm with the conspiracy theorists on this one. I was fairly trusting in the 90's, but after the 00's I don't trust the industrial-military complex nor the US Government to play by the rules.
I agree about how people are usually more complex than hero/villain, though. Assange may very well have other skeletons in his closet, but - well - I think "they" picked the crime to be rape simply because it's a "he said, she said" kind of crime unless there was a huge scuffle. As such, it's perfect for character assassination - charges of rape sows the seeds of doubt in the heads of those who are not firmly behind Assange (and don't think this through).
Nah. One has primary focus on customer satisfaction. The other must have primary focus elsewhere.
Sorry for being a bit snide. If it helps, this message was typed on an Android phone.
Anyhow, Ballmer had been falling behind on the arguably most important new market: The smartphone market. Windows Mobile 7 better be great, otherwise Microsoft may be in real trouble on the medium term.
I was surprised by these numbers. Anyhow, they are positive in the sense that Facebook is indeed vulnerable to competition. As you state, the tricky part of any competitor is to gain enough momentum to get Joe Average to try it out. I guess if Diaspora or something along those lines has sufficient quality and capacity upon launch, and they get positive press, enough people might be swayed to try it out that they gain critical mass. We'll see. Giants fall.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Each of those phenomena will have to be explained separately.
Yes. Iran is doing fairly well as a regional major power. For all the rethoric towards Israel and hatred towards jews, if Israel was obliterated and Iran was obliterated, how would Ahmadinejad be able to continue to gain influence in Iraq and Lebanon?
Keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has one Sunni nuclear power is surrounded by Sunni nuclear power, and two countries holding a serious number of US soldiers and firepower (Iraq and Afghanistan). He definitely would not want to appear weak.
Of course, he may find he has no other choice than to suffer the fate of Saddam: Pretending to be more dangerous than he really is to deter regional enemies, and then attract even more dangerous enemies. Iran is a proud country with few good options. Ideally, they'll change their priorities, but until then we cannot expect Iran to be subtle and feeble.
There's competition to keep Apple in line. Windows 7 is not that bad (this is written on an iMac running Snow Leopard). And Linux also holds potential if a vendor was to scrap most of the apps, build their own, make an app store (to attract pro developers) and tailor-make a development environment including libraries that made things a bit more standardised. It can be done. Apple did much of the same when they created OSX.
But until Apple gets its act together and produces some acceptable terms on their app store, I'm staying with Android. I want quality control, not arbitrary censorship in an app store. And since Android became mainstream, you have no doubt noticed that Apple is a bit less restrictive in their policies. Apple will not admit this, of course, but the fact remains: Whenever there is competition in their half in the playing field, Apple will adapt to the situation.
I've been using Linux as my primary desktop environment since '97, and I agree with you.
I think too many the people who bother to involve themselves in coding for Linux (and particularly towards the end-users) are lacking in .. well .. empathy: They are simply not able to reset their mindset such that they can see how your application will be perceived from a first-time user. I know the tricks, how to google effectively, the knowledge base in my head is sufficient etc etc so I'm happy using Linux. But if I was a less curious and stubborn person, I'd given up a good while ago.
Linux is overall also far too anarchistic in its nature to produce a good Desktop OS. It will remain as a superior server platform, a good development platform, a breeding ground for new stuff, but it won't ever gain end-user traction. KDE and Gnome will continue to live side-by-side, Ubuntu dares not be controversial enough to completely drop either. And the desktop will therefore be both slower and more confusing than it should be. We make stuff work, but we rarely make them shine.
The Linux desktop even missed the netbook wave, which was almost custom-made for it to shine. XP on my HP Mini 311c is good, solid and misses fewer frames (especially in Flash) than Ubuntu running the official nvidia ION driver. What a missed opportunity! (I realize M$ used dirty tricks to lock Linux out, but those frames don't drop themselves - Ubuntu is slower than XP)
Linux is adequate for almost anything, but good at only a few select things, forever trapped in the 80/20 rule. That's the curse.
Coal is relatively plentiful. An estimated 56 years is a long time to our current system.
I doubt we'll be forced out of our hydrocarbon dependency in a long time. By then, it'll be too late. Depending upon natural limits is a poor strategy anyhow - once we hit those limits, it may be too late because hitting the limit may limit the overall production (by humans or by nature, that devil is hiding in the details, sniggering).
I don't watch TV (aaarhhh!), I use adblock, and most of the stuff I subsribe to comes with only a few ads. My phone is not listed for telemarketers. And on my mailbox, there's a "no advertising, please" sticker.
Life is good. At least in that respect.
(I still get hassled a bit by pushy salespeople in the streets, though. I'm just waiting for the Norwegian law enforcement to become so inefficent that I can punch them without risking getting hassled by the Man. And the public space is filled with advertising.)
Good point about the startup cost. However, if you download the files in parallel rather than in order as we do today, the start-up issue will be mitigated. Also, most people have spare upload bandwidth. Most dedicated file-sharers don't. And anyhow, most update services will download in the background anyhow and then notify the user when the update is ready. The end-user will not notice the increased lag.
And maintaining the cache is really simple: Seed until ratio hits .. say .. five or there has not been any access to that file for five days. Then remove the .torrent from the bittorrent client and delete the file.
Ok, so to summarize a good, working architecture:
Who's up for the task?
(I got max karma already, so I'm not whoring)
Another global problem in a nation-based world.
That's interesting. Seriously. I thought the machines were able to distinguish between living matter and printouts (like looking for signs of movement, adding an IR channel). If the iris scanners can't do that, the product is DOA.
No need to shoot the account owner. It will actually become easier to rob someone. Now you gotta threaten them to give up their PIN. With iris scanning, the robber will only need to drag your ass to the ATM and hold your head in front of the iris scanner.
Not that I like the technology, but your example seems wrong. Also the other assertions about the risks of shared authentication may be misguided. Those who hold your iris info will not necessarily be able to use this to authenticate themselves as you. Manufacturing an iris is considered difficult. And the iris scanning may be digitally signed when authenticating yourself online to get around the problem of using the same authentication to several accounts.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers"
But who said it? Not Thomas Watson
Well duh. Or the web site you link to re-engineers its layout without providing back-compatible redirection...
Anyhow - I store bookmarks in my bookmark collection. Twitter is mostly a way of quickly sharing and discovering ephemeral information, anyways: If I want to keep stuff, I export it from the cloud.
Multifunction office printers/fax machines/scanners have horrible, horrible UIs with lots and lots of buttons. And they must - because they are multifunction, and the buttons are function-specific. Hopefully, we'll start to see such machines that can be used be mere mortals and not specially trained secretaries.
Come to think of it - WHAT A HORRIBLE IDEA!
methinks you suffer from an acute lack of imagination and inspiration if you can't do something useful with your iPad. That said, I have a Galaxy S (which shares a lot with the Galaxy Tab) and it's a nice little piece of hardware with a few flaws:
That said, the Android platform is coming along nicely and I much prefer the Android openness to Apple's strategically founded App Store policies. I just wish you had more imagination. :)
He did not do much damage to the economy - he just scammed a lot of folks out of tens of billions over 30 years.
But to scam the public of trillions in 5 years, that takes CEOs in Wall Street and The City.
It would be useful if the phone informed the caller that you were angry and offered the caller to go straight to the answerphone. I'm not envisioning this to be mandatory functionality, but I'd prefer getting such a message upon calling someone rather than being barked at. In real life, you can look at a person and observe their mood before engaging them in conversation. This sort of technology could/should be a matter of lowering the threshold for giving someone a call. After all, most of us prefer not to inconvenience someone, so there is a reluctance to call someone in case they're busy. Or in a bad mood.
Anyways: Application of technology matters. After all, Windows Mobile and Palm were around for a decade and got nowhere serious until Apple entered the arena and applied the existing technology in a better way. Good technology engineers is not sufficient - you also need good product engineers.
I'm thinking the lists should be called "reasons why people of different cultures remain single".
Unfortunately, I'm wrong.
You are right regarding video playback. However, if the CPU is set to do "real work" for 1080p displays, then adding a core is a good thing.
Also, this trend of ever faster ARM platforms is interesting for the netbook market. Intel Atom is probably consciously crippled in order to avoid it eating market share from their more profitable "upmarket" processors. However, these ARM producers are indeed competing to make their processors ever faster. On a two-year perspective, Intel may find it's lowend offerings being threatened by new platforms. The iPad is just the beginning.
Thank you, dear Cuban! I was gonna say pretty much the same: Castro is not particularly murderous, but he certainly does not believe that people should have the freedom to do or say whatever they want to (within the constraints of democratically founded laws).
G.W. Bush was quite murderous, and well - he did his best to be oppressive to those who stood in his way: The US Constitution, evil-doers and those who were not with him. Whoever disagreed with him were aiding terrorists and/or being unpatriotic. And his actions show he does not care about non-American civilian deaths - Blackwater/Xe were allowed to run amok and were not stopped until the Iraq gov't rebelled etc etc etc. He also had a bloody record when he was Guv'nor in Texas.
The question is then if there is a higher dose of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease than those who died from accidents and violence. If there is a higher concentration of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease, then this suggests they knew about the healing properties of their beer. After all, the body is better at defeating infections when sober than when you're hammered so not drinking beer while being ill would be a better choice had they not known of the medicinal properties of the beer.
3) They deliver better products than their competition, and their customers are too ignorant, uncaring or too trusting in anti-trust legislation to care about their actions.
While I agree on all the things you said, I believe a flash implementation would make Joe Average like his iPad more and not less. It's a slick pice of technology: Install it, and without further involvement from your part you will be able to stream video from all over the web, play small games and do other fun stuff. For free!
Unless he's a raging alcoholic, I don't think Assange is so stupid to rape twice in a week, while the US government is looking for him and he has the attention of the world. Of course, there is a slight chance the allegations are real, but I find it very peculiar that no such charges has been made earlier. I'm with the conspiracy theorists on this one. I was fairly trusting in the 90's, but after the 00's I don't trust the industrial-military complex nor the US Government to play by the rules.
I agree about how people are usually more complex than hero/villain, though. Assange may very well have other skeletons in his closet, but - well - I think "they" picked the crime to be rape simply because it's a "he said, she said" kind of crime unless there was a huge scuffle. As such, it's perfect for character assassination - charges of rape sows the seeds of doubt in the heads of those who are not firmly behind Assange (and don't think this through).
Nah. One has primary focus on customer
satisfaction. The other must have primary focus elsewhere.
Sorry for being a bit snide. If it helps, this message was typed on an Android phone.
Anyhow, Ballmer had been falling behind on the arguably most important new market: The smartphone market. Windows Mobile 7 better be great, otherwise Microsoft may be in real trouble on the medium term.
I was surprised by these numbers. Anyhow, they are positive in the sense that Facebook is indeed vulnerable to competition. As you state, the tricky part of any competitor is to gain enough momentum to get Joe Average to try it out. I guess if Diaspora or something along those lines has sufficient quality and capacity upon launch, and they get positive press, enough people might be swayed to try it out that they gain critical mass. We'll see. Giants fall.