I'm wondering, in terms of the Supreme Court, what is it that you're seeing as your "different priorities"?
My top priority is to block creeping government powers. For example, 90 years ago everyone knew that the government didn't have the authority to ban alcohol, so they amended the Constitution; now, the government just bans things, and the courts allow it. I'm not really a fan of illegal drugs, but I don't like government just assuming powers.
Viewed in that light, the Roe vs. Wade decision is highly suspect. Just where in the Constitution does the Federal government get authority to dictate abortion laws to the states? Even if you like the result, I hope you are bothered by the way it was done. If the Supreme Court can just say what the law is, they have way too much power.
If there is any doubt at all, the Supreme Court should rule that the Federal government has no authority over any issue. This would mean that the states would have the authority, and I think that would be a good thing. At all levels, government should do less, and authority should be pushed down to lower levels where it's easier to change things.
By the way, libertarians are split on the abortion issue. Every libertarian agrees that it is okay to criminalize murder, but libertarians disagree over whether abortion is murder or not. If a fetus is a person, then abortion is murder, and it is acceptable and desirable that government prevent abortions. If a fetus is not a person, then the right of the woman to control her own body is paramount, and government should not restrict abortion.
As for the bubble collapse and 9/11, that explains drops in revenues, but it does not justify wildly fiscally irresponsible expansions of spending on top of reduced revenues on top of tax cuts further strangling revenues.
I'm not happy with either party. The Republicans promised to reduce the size of government and cut spending, and they really didn't.
But you are asking me to worry more about what McCain might fail to do, than about what Obama has announced as his plans. McCain has specifically said he wants to renew the Bush tax cuts, and Obama opposes them. Since I believe the US is over-taxed, I view the tax cuts as a good thing.
And I flatly do not believe that Obama can save a whole bunch of money from the Iraq war. He's not irresponsible enough to pull out the troops too fast, no matter what his rhetoric is on the subject. No matter who is in the White House, troops will be coming home as soon as possible without leaving a power vacuum in Iraq.
You were talking about "gridlock" to control government spending.
It's funny, I just put that in as a light throwaway, semi-tongue-in-cheek comment. Yet that got more attention than the part I thought was important, about whether the economists were objective or not. I guess I should leave the comedy to Scott Adams.
Actually, I have. The question I ask myself is: which candidate would cause less damage? Keep in mind that the candidates have to get past the Congress, so again gridlock applies. Presidents don't get to just appoint anyone they like.
Also keep in mind that I'm a libertarian. I probably have different priorities than you do.
As far as gridlocking, the last time we had both Democratic president and Democratic legislature they controlled government spending and in 8 years damn near paid off the national debt racked up under 12 years of both Reagan and Bush1.
Did you notice that the Internet bubble (and the roaring economy it brought) just happened to occur during those 8 years? And did you notice that, right after the bubble collapsed, the 9/11 attack really hammered the economy?
The Congress and the President have a role in managing the economy, but they don't have 100% total control over it. It's not fair to give the political parties all the credit, or all the blame, when considering the economy.
I think it's really cool that Scott Adams paid for this survey. And I was impressed by his analysis of the results. But I am not sure how much value there is in the result.
Democrat economists favored Obama (88%!). Republican economists favored McCain (80%!). Independents (who, as Scott Adams pointed out, are mostly in academia) favored Obama (just barely: 46% Obama to 39% McCain). Not really earthshaking results nor unexpected. Maybe he should ask for his money back.
Really, the biggest surprise to me is how solidly the recommendations aligned with the political party of the recommending economist. It makes me wonder whether economics is really that subjective, or whether ideology is trumping objectivity here.
I was amused that Scott Adams described himself as "Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff". I could say the same. My own recommendation: vote for gridlock. Since Congress is in the hands of the Democrats, vote for the Republican candidate, just to put some quicksand under the wheels of big government.
My favorite quote:
Moneywise, I can't support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket, give the windfall to a bunch of clowns with a 14 percent approval rating (Congress), and hope they spend it wisely.
Unfortunately, the alternative to the guy who promises to pillage my wallet is a lukewarm cadaver. I'm in trouble either way.
Heh. Scott Adams is a comedic genius. Actually, I think we can shorten that to: Scott Adams is a genius.
If you can't be bothered to RTFA, please read this.
Ford makes the engines in Britain. The British pound is high compared to the dollar, so the cars would cost more than a Prius; their best case is that a diesel tax credit might make the car cost only slightly more than a Prius. Their market research indicates that Americans prefer a hybrid gasoline car (such as a Prius) to a diesel, so they don't think the car would sell at the price they would have to charge. It doesn't help that diesel is taxed more than gasoline and thus costs $0.40 to $1.00 more per gallon. Ford could reduce the cost if they start building the diesel engines in Mexico, but they will lose money unless they can sell at least 350,000 diesel engines per year; given their bleak financials they are reluctant to take that risk right now.
Note that VW is selling Jettas with diesel engines, and several other auto makers are introducing diesel models. If American consumers go for these new diesels, Ford may reconsider their decision.
Here's the most memorable quote from bin Laden. I got it from the defenselink.mil transcript; the one in Wikipedia omits much (the part about the iron structure melting is replaced with an ellipsis).
...we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (...Inaudible...) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.
But wait! The 9/11 Truthers say that this was an actor doubling for bin Laden! Oh, then how about the ones broadcast by Al Jazeera, such as:
He says it was his idea to strike the towers, and this direct quote: "If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn't attack Sweden, for example."
So, unless Al Jazeera is secretly working for Bush or cannot authenticate a bin Laden tape, there you have bin Laden refuting his claim that he had nothing to do with it.
I've been pretty happy with Directron. I generally buy Lian Li cases there, and other stuff. I got a nice computer badge there that has the Chinese character for "silence" on it.
I want the code I write to remain free, but the code other people write around it, they can do whatever they want with.
Perhaps you should license your code under the GPL with the "Classpath" exception: a specific exception that linking your code with other code does not require releasing the source code for the combined work. Thus, your code cannot be modified and distributed without sharing the modifications, but people are free to incorporate your code into proprietary systems without releasing the proprietary source code.
James D. Johnston was working at Bell Labs when he did his groundbreaking work on perceptual audio encoding. I believe Johnston's "PAC" ("Perceptual Audio Coder") was the first ever perceptual encoder. At the time, his work was regarded as impractical; now it's universally accepted. MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, all use perceptual techniques to shrink encoded file sizes. (If you can't hear something, they throw it away to save bits. Signal/noise ratios don't matter as much as the subjective "how good does it sound to humans?")
Much of the work on MP3 and AAC was done at Bell Labs as well. See: MP3 and AAC.
I spent a year working for "JJ" Johnston. He's a nice guy and I want to see him get his props.
You have no idea when Intel began working on the classmate or if the idea was already in the works.
Actually, I do, because I have been reading the news coverage. I challenge you to present even one link to even one news story that shows the Classmate even being discussed before the OLPC project came along.
There are so many links I could give you... here's one. Be sure to read page 5.
Intel will tie itself in knots rather than admit its laptop was a response to OLPC's.
My Intel spokesperson, Agnes Kwan, seems to exist to evade the issue. I played e-mail ping-pong with her over several days. She was trying to avoid giving me any dates that would show the Classmate came after the XO. This included sending me a bizarre and barely literate "ethnographic" study of computing in the developed world. In the end, all she would say about the timeline of the Classmate was: "It's hard to pinpoint a start date with the nature of ethnographic research in which ethnographers collect data over a long period of time." Sorry?
Many in the industry says the Classmate was intended to be an XO killer and that's how Intel behaved.
Yes, they were part of OLPC- but if they had already invested serious money into their own program, can you blame them for backing out?
Yes, I can blame them, and I do. It's their right to sell their products in any market they choose. It's my right to be disgusted when they use predatory sales tactics to sabotage a non-profit that is trying to help kids learn. From page 5 again:
Their formidable global sales operation charged into any market in which OLPC might get a foothold, trashing the XO and pushing the Classmate. Nigeria, where Negroponte had one of his handshake deals with President Obasanjo, was a typical example. In August 2006, Craig Barrett, Intel chairman, wrote a hard-sell letter to Obasanjo asking for a meeting in which he could explain their World Ahead programme, "which is chartered to extend PC access to the world's next billion users". This programme had been launched in May 2006, 15 months after the OLPC announcement at Davos - bit of a dead giveaway there, Craig. Barrett's letter was backed up by documents listing "the shortcoming of the OLPC approach".
These documents having been leaked, they became a significant embarrassment to Intel. Here was a mighty company trying to crush a philanthropic project.
But then, they agreed to come on board the OLPC project. And even as they were members of OLPC, their sales people kept on undermining the OLPC. I don't like that.
They are a business, and the only reason their practice can be seen as wrong is because OLPCs were supposed to save the poor...
I have no problem with businesses making money. Heck, I like making money myself. But I have a serious problem with a business sabotaging a non-profit.
Seriously, do a few Google searches and read about this stuff before you spend any more of your time defending Intel's behavior toward OLPC. They are a big company and not everything they do is evil (the Xorg guys have good things to say about how Intel cooperates with them, for example). But their behavior towards OLPC has been contemptible.
There's no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade.
Huh?
Let's do a quick review.
0) OLPC starts working on a laptop. It has a non-Intel chip and is designed for ultra power efficiency. 1) Intel starts working on their own laptop. Intel's of course has an Intel CPU; and it is designed to run Windows. 2) Official Intel sales people start trying to sell the Classmate to countries that are considering the OLPC laptop. In at least one case, an Intel sales person went to a country that had already agreed to buy OLPC laptops, and said in effect "That thing won't even run Windows... you sure you really want it?" At the time, Intel was officially a member of OLPC. (Rogue sales people? Evil corporate double-dealing? You decide.)
Now, what's up with "no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade"? The OLPC guys are the overbearing bullies and Intel is the underdog here?
I'm sure there are markets for something like the Classmate PC. I don't think it's the best choice for places with no electric infrastructure. And it has a cooling fan, so I don't think it's the best choice for places that are really hot, humid, and/or dusty. And I'm sure it costs about twice as much as the OLPC, so I don't think it's the best choice for the truly poor markets. And it almost certainly is much harder to repair than the OLPC design.[1] Hmmm. Am I raining on Intel's parade?
All that said, the world is a large place full of lots of kids. No way can OLPC crank out enough computers to help everyone. If Intel can sell their computer into the more affluent areas, they can make money. If their sales people can leave the OLPC markets alone, maybe Intel and OLPC can just get along.
P.S. I suspect that neither OLPC nor Intel will have the last word on educational computers for the masses. I'm starting to think that the best design would be a simple tablet that actually does cost $100 or less, and probably runs an ARM chip or something for crazy long battery life.
steveha
[1] From the photos, it's a pretty conventional clamshell, which means lots of connections running through the hinge so the motherboard can be in the base and the display in the lid; the OLPC design has motherboard and display in the lid, so that all that needs to run through the hinge is basically a USB cable. Teen-aged kids, armed with simple screwdrivers, can take apart two broken OLPC laptops, swap parts, and produce a working OLPC laptop. I really doubt this will be possible with the Classmate.
As others have noted, the classic space combat game is Star Raiders. But Star Raiders was excellent on the Atari 800 and 400 computers; the official Atari version for 2600 was, IMHO, very poor.
Happily, the Activision folks made an excellent knockoff of Star Raiders called Starmaster. The most important parts of the Star Raider experience are there: you can raise and lower shields, you have a galactic map, you have multiple star bases, the enemy will surround and destroy the star bases, you can get damaged, and you can dock with a star base to repair damage and refuel.
If you love 2600 gaming, get a copy of Starmaster and play it in your old 2600 or 7800. Once you have a legal copy, get a ROM image from somewhere and you can also play it in Stella. Starmaster and Millipede are my two favorite games to play in Stella.
If you fondly remember having an extra, weird keyboard thing for the game, you are remembering the official Atari 2600 Star Raiders. If you don't remember that, perhaps you are remembering Starmaster. (In Starmaster, the screen does turn blue when you have the shields up.)
For completeness, I'll add that Imagic sold a game called Star Voyager. It is a very simplified Star Raiders sort of game: you fight enemies, then fly through a warp gate to go to a new level and fight more enemies. There are no star bases; you cannot be damaged, but you can run out of energy. When you are out of energy, any enemy hit kills you. Warp gates refuel your energy. While it has no strategy at all, it is fun as a light shoot-em-up game.
P.S. Not every Activision game is gold. They had a game called Robot Tank, that was essentially Starmaster all over again, except that this time there was no way to repair damage. As a kid, I hated Robot Tank as much as I loved Starmaster.
There have been some great examples of sportsmanship in bike racing, including the Tour de France.
For example, when Lance Armstrong was taken down by the strap on a spectator's handbag, the other contenders held back and waited for him to get back in the race.
My favorite example of sportsmanship was a few years ago in the Tour de France. Before I explain it, let me describe a little bit about how "breakaways" work. A breakaway is a small group of riders who pulls ahead of the main pack, and tries very hard to stay ahead so that some one member of the breakaway group can get first place. They always ride in a "paceline", where one person is in the lead and all the other riders are in a row, one tucked into the draft behind another. All the riders in the draft are working about 30% less hard than the one in the lead. This cooperation is essential if the breakaway group hopes to stay ahead of the main pack. At some point, the cooperation ends and it becomes a free-for-all fight to see who can cross the finish line first. All too often, the cooperation falls apart too soon: the riders stop taking turns and start trying to shake other riders out of their draft, and meanwhile the main pack is getting closer. I have seen breakaway groups, who had been working together for hours, fall apart too far from the finish line; the main pack then blows past them and none of them wins.
Well, a few years ago there was a breakaway group of exactly two riders. They worked together beautifully, and then, about one kilometer before the finish line, they stopped the pacelining, and rode side by side for a moment. They shook hands. Then they both pulled out their best sprints to see who could cross the finish line first.
I don't even remember which of them won the race! I remember that shining moment of good sportsmanship, and it still makes me smile.
P.S. Okay, I had to look it up. It was Stage 10 of the 2003 Tour, and the riders were Jakob Piil and Fabio Sacchi.
Take a look at DSL and Puppy Linux. Both are tiny and would boot quickly from a CompactFlash. DSL is probably better for all-around appliance use; Puppy is intended for use as a desktop OS.
I thought lawyers made contradictory arguments all the time.
Here's a joke/story I heard years ago. This lawyer is in a courtroom, defending a client. The plaintiff claims the defendant borrowed a new pot and returned it in broken condition. The lawyer makes his opening statement: "There are three facts that prove my client is innocent. First, he never borrowed that pot. Second, it was already broken when he borrowed it. Third, when he returned it, it was in perfect condition."
(now I wish there was some alternative version of the LGPL that forced derivative work to REMAIN in that license so that people could use it in proprietary products - but still giving back any changes to the library itself - so we could avoid bad moves like the MySQL one. Best of both worlds, eh?)
Have you looked at the GUILE license? It's just a standard GPL, with a specific exception that says you can link GUILE with non-free code without needing to change the license of the non-free code.
It sure looks to me like they are taking all the coolest stuff from Python and grafting it onto JavaScript.[1] The result will be a language a lot like Python, but with code blocks wrapped in curly braces and no significant whitespace.
One of the biggest changes will be a class inheritance model much more like Python's. The prototype-based inheritance will still be available, but I for one will be happy to use the new model.
Already, my favorite features from Python have been grafted on to JavaScript, and are available right now in Firefox 2:
Steve Yegge has said that he thinks he knows what the "Next Big Language" will be. I think he is talking about JavaScript, and I think he may be right.
steveha
[1] If you are a fan of some other language, it may look to you like they are grabbing cool things from your language. And far be it from me to argue about which language a feature was "really" borrowed from. Python borrowed much of its cool features from other languages anyway.
I also messed up: the 8086 was made with a 20-pin address bus. I meant to say "If the 8086 had been made with a 24-pin address bus..."
The 8086 could address 1MB, and you need 20 address lines to do that.
Sorry for the mixup. The main points of what I was saying stand unchanged, though.
I just double-checked with a Google search, and the 68000 did indeed have 23 address lines: it used 24-bit addresses, but it only fetched word data (two bytes at a time) so there was no need for an address line to specify the least significant bit (because it was always 0).
The problem is that it's not a good keyboard design. If we stick to a (roughly) flat board with buttons on it, you first of all want more space between the hands, since that's how you hold them naturally.
I'll tell you up front, I think the Microsoft ergo keyboards are better than standard ones.
The slight angle of the two halves lets the two halves line up more naturally with the way I want to hold my hands. And they do have some space between the hands.
Once I stressed my shoulder, and I found that typing on a standard keyboard gave me searing pain after a few minutes. I tried the (very first model of) Microsoft ergo keyboard and found that I could type for hours without the searing pain. This made an immediate believer out of me.
Not all their keyboards are good, but the basic design of their ergo keyboards is sound. Maybe there is something even better out there, but nothing I have tried seems like a real improvement.
The paragraph size of the 8086 was 16 bytes; that is, the segment registers were essentially multiplied by 16, giving an address range of 1MB, which resulted in extreme memory pressure (that 640K limit) starting in the mid 80s.
0) 64KB was a lot of RAM back in those days. The 8086 could address an entire MB of RAM, which was huge back in those days. Don't forget that the original IBM PC was sold with 16KB of RAM as the lowest-cost option, and IIRC 64KB of RAM was the top option at launch. Years later, in 1984, Apple introduced the Mac with 128K, and later sold it with an amazing 512K (the "Fat Mac"). There is no way that, in 1980, 1MB of address space seemed small.
1) The real reason for the 640KB limit in DOS was that the IBM PC had a poorly designed BIOS. See, you were supposed to use BIOS services for things like writing to the screen, but the original BIOS made you write one character at a time, issuing one interrupt per character, which was just insane. So everyone started just writing strings to the display buffer directly; so there were a bunch of programs that would break if the display buffer was moved away from the 640K address. Had the BIOS offered a service you could call that would return the address of the display buffer, people could have written portable yet fast DOS programs, and people could have had something like 800K or more of contiguous address space.
If the paragraph size had been 256 bytes, that would have resulted in a 24MB address space.
And that would mean four extra pins on the address bus, a larger (more pins) Dual Inline Package for the chip, extra support hardware, extra address lines on the motherboards... everything more expensive, at a time when everything was really expensive anyway.
Had Intel made the x86 a 20-bit address space part, the extra cost might have made the x86 lose out to the Motorola 68000, which had 32-bit address registers and 20 address lines to the chip. I've always preferred the 68K to the x86 anyway (so I would regard that as a win for the world) but my point is that Intel wasn't wrong to ship the x86 as they did.
Things might look profoundly different now, if only the 8086 had had four more address pins, and someone at Intel hadn't thought, "Well, 1MB is enough for anyone..."
No one imagined the long run the 8086 would have. They were more likely thinking "1MB is more than enough for this product", not "1MB is enough for everyone forever."
This web site is full of cool stuff you can build. Available in dead-trees versions if you prefer. Seriously, check this out; this site makes me want to start building things.
Example: build a home-made radio. He starts with a trivial radio with only two parts, then adds another part to improve it, then improves it again... eventually he has you rolling your own capacitors! Each step illustrates something cool. By the end you are building a crystal radio like the ones soldiers used to build during World War I.
My major objection to DRM on music I buy is simple: if there is DRM on it, I don't really own it.
If I am renting the music in the first place, DRM doesn't bother me so much. Exhibit A is the Rhapsody online music service, which is essentially a flat-rate music rental service. I have discovered that I like Rhapsody very much. I am finding new bands that I like, bands I had never heard of before, much faster than before I had Rhapsody.
Depending on what you get, Rhapsody is $12 to $15 per month. If this plan really is a dime per track, that's a cheaper rental than Rhapsody. The big question is coverage. If the new plan only lets me rent the latest pop acts, I'm just not interested. (Rhapsody has over 4 million tracks, including all sorts of cool things: Herbie Mann flute albums, Bill Cosby comedy albums, progressive rock, etc.)
When Rhapsody helps me music I really like, I then go and buy the music on CD, so that I will really own it. I'd be happy to do the same thing with this new service.
Will the service succeed? I'd say that depends very much on the specifics. How do you pay them that dime per track? If they have a convenient way to add dimes to your account, such as selling gift cards in Best Buy, it might become wildly popular; if you have to jump through a bunch of hoops (agree to a 20-page EULA, pre-register, enter a valid credit card number, pre-pay in $30 chunks, etc.) most people will just say no.
Assuming it's convenient, would I "rent" a song for ten cents? Sure. Why not?
steveha
Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns Rhapsody, but it's not my job to sell it to you or anyone else.
I agree that's poorly phrased. He means, even if your genes predispose you towards storing fat. In other words, your ability to lose fat is less than average.
My genes are superbly optimized for survival under stone-age conditions. Any spare calories I eat get stored as fat to keep me alive. But since I live in modern civilization, I'd be happier if my body wasted calories a bit!
It tells me that don't know WTF they are talking about.
He has a Masters degree in sports nutrition stuff, he is a pro bodybuilder, and he has coached hundreds of people in their efforts to lose fat. These qualifications argue that he does in fact know WTF he is talking about.
You may decide for yourself whether the breathless ad copy on his web site counts more heavily against him than his qualifications count in his favor.
Of course the bottom line for me is that his advice actually worked for me, so I'm inclined to think he knows what he's talking about.
So you are leaner, why do you think that makes you more healthy?
I think I'm more healthy because my blood cholesterol and triglycerides numbers improved, and because I have noticed that I have more energy when bicycling long distances. I was bicycling for years before I found the book, and my cholesterol numbers were creeping up each year; changing my diet according to his advice made a difference for me. (In other words, before I read the book I biked a lot; after I read the book I biked a lot. The major change was to improve the quality of food I was eating.)
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever you may think about software patents, the fact is that Canonical only has three choices here:
0) Not offer this software
1) Include the software for free, and break the law in some countries
2) Offer legal software, and pay the licensing fees
Ubuntu is my favorite distribution, and I'm happy to see legal, supported DVD playback.
I'm really tired of reading reviews that say "Great distribution, but it can't play back any of my media."
Now let's get Dell, Gateway, etc. to start pre-installing Ubuntu with the extra media options. It will be a better out-of-box experience than Vista.
steveha
I'm wondering, in terms of the Supreme Court, what is it that you're seeing as your "different priorities"?
My top priority is to block creeping government powers. For example, 90 years ago everyone knew that the government didn't have the authority to ban alcohol, so they amended the Constitution; now, the government just bans things, and the courts allow it. I'm not really a fan of illegal drugs, but I don't like government just assuming powers.
Viewed in that light, the Roe vs. Wade decision is highly suspect. Just where in the Constitution does the Federal government get authority to dictate abortion laws to the states? Even if you like the result, I hope you are bothered by the way it was done. If the Supreme Court can just say what the law is, they have way too much power.
If there is any doubt at all, the Supreme Court should rule that the Federal government has no authority over any issue. This would mean that the states would have the authority, and I think that would be a good thing. At all levels, government should do less, and authority should be pushed down to lower levels where it's easier to change things.
By the way, libertarians are split on the abortion issue. Every libertarian agrees that it is okay to criminalize murder, but libertarians disagree over whether abortion is murder or not. If a fetus is a person, then abortion is murder, and it is acceptable and desirable that government prevent abortions. If a fetus is not a person, then the right of the woman to control her own body is paramount, and government should not restrict abortion.
As for the bubble collapse and 9/11, that explains drops in revenues, but it does not justify wildly fiscally irresponsible expansions of spending on top of reduced revenues on top of tax cuts further strangling revenues.
I'm not happy with either party. The Republicans promised to reduce the size of government and cut spending, and they really didn't.
But you are asking me to worry more about what McCain might fail to do, than about what Obama has announced as his plans. McCain has specifically said he wants to renew the Bush tax cuts, and Obama opposes them. Since I believe the US is over-taxed, I view the tax cuts as a good thing.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/09/17/obama-tax-cutter-or-tax-hiker/
And I flatly do not believe that Obama can save a whole bunch of money from the Iraq war. He's not irresponsible enough to pull out the troops too fast, no matter what his rhetoric is on the subject. No matter who is in the White House, troops will be coming home as soon as possible without leaving a power vacuum in Iraq.
You were talking about "gridlock" to control government spending.
It's funny, I just put that in as a light throwaway, semi-tongue-in-cheek comment. Yet that got more attention than the part I thought was important, about whether the economists were objective or not. I guess I should leave the comedy to Scott Adams.
steveha
Question: Have you considered the Supreme Court?
Actually, I have. The question I ask myself is: which candidate would cause less damage? Keep in mind that the candidates have to get past the Congress, so again gridlock applies. Presidents don't get to just appoint anyone they like.
Also keep in mind that I'm a libertarian. I probably have different priorities than you do.
As far as gridlocking, the last time we had both Democratic president and Democratic legislature they controlled government spending and in 8 years damn near paid off the national debt racked up under 12 years of both Reagan and Bush1.
Did you notice that the Internet bubble (and the roaring economy it brought) just happened to occur during those 8 years? And did you notice that, right after the bubble collapsed, the 9/11 attack really hammered the economy?
The Congress and the President have a role in managing the economy, but they don't have 100% total control over it. It's not fair to give the political parties all the credit, or all the blame, when considering the economy.
steveha
I think it's really cool that Scott Adams paid for this survey. And I was impressed by his analysis of the results. But I am not sure how much value there is in the result.
Democrat economists favored Obama (88%!). Republican economists favored McCain (80%!). Independents (who, as Scott Adams pointed out, are mostly in academia) favored Obama (just barely: 46% Obama to 39% McCain). Not really earthshaking results nor unexpected. Maybe he should ask for his money back.
Really, the biggest surprise to me is how solidly the recommendations aligned with the political party of the recommending economist. It makes me wonder whether economics is really that subjective, or whether ideology is trumping objectivity here.
I was amused that Scott Adams described himself as "Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff". I could say the same. My own recommendation: vote for gridlock. Since Congress is in the hands of the Democrats, vote for the Republican candidate, just to put some quicksand under the wheels of big government.
My favorite quote:
Heh. Scott Adams is a comedic genius. Actually, I think we can shorten that to: Scott Adams is a genius.
steveha
If you can't be bothered to RTFA, please read this.
Ford makes the engines in Britain. The British pound is high compared to the dollar, so the cars would cost more than a Prius; their best case is that a diesel tax credit might make the car cost only slightly more than a Prius. Their market research indicates that Americans prefer a hybrid gasoline car (such as a Prius) to a diesel, so they don't think the car would sell at the price they would have to charge. It doesn't help that diesel is taxed more than gasoline and thus costs $0.40 to $1.00 more per gallon. Ford could reduce the cost if they start building the diesel engines in Mexico, but they will lose money unless they can sell at least 350,000 diesel engines per year; given their bleak financials they are reluctant to take that risk right now.
Note that VW is selling Jettas with diesel engines, and several other auto makers are introducing diesel models. If American consumers go for these new diesels, Ford may reconsider their decision.
steveha
Yeah, in September 2001 maybe he said he didn't do it. But check this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videos_of_Osama_bin_Laden#December_13.2C_2001
Here's the most memorable quote from bin Laden. I got it from the defenselink.mil transcript; the one in Wikipedia omits much (the part about the iron structure melting is replaced with an ellipsis).
But wait! The 9/11 Truthers say that this was an actor doubling for bin Laden! Oh, then how about the ones broadcast by Al Jazeera, such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videos_of_Osama_bin_Laden#October_29.2C_2004
He says it was his idea to strike the towers, and this direct quote: "If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn't attack Sweden, for example."
So, unless Al Jazeera is secretly working for Bush or cannot authenticate a bin Laden tape, there you have bin Laden refuting his claim that he had nothing to do with it.
steveha
I've been pretty happy with Directron. I generally buy Lian Li cases there, and other stuff. I got a nice computer badge there that has the Chinese character for "silence" on it.
steveha
I want the code I write to remain free, but the code other people write around it, they can do whatever they want with.
Perhaps you should license your code under the GPL with the "Classpath" exception: a specific exception that linking your code with other code does not require releasing the source code for the combined work. Thus, your code cannot be modified and distributed without sharing the modifications, but people are free to incorporate your code into proprietary systems without releasing the proprietary source code.
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html
steveha
James D. Johnston was working at Bell Labs when he did his groundbreaking work on perceptual audio encoding. I believe Johnston's "PAC" ("Perceptual Audio Coder") was the first ever perceptual encoder. At the time, his work was regarded as impractical; now it's universally accepted. MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, all use perceptual techniques to shrink encoded file sizes. (If you can't hear something, they throw it away to save bits. Signal/noise ratios don't matter as much as the subjective "how good does it sound to humans?")
Much of the work on MP3 and AAC was done at Bell Labs as well. See: MP3 and AAC.
I spent a year working for "JJ" Johnston. He's a nice guy and I want to see him get his props.
steveha
You have no idea when Intel began working on the classmate or if the idea was already in the works.
Actually, I do, because I have been reading the news coverage. I challenge you to present even one link to even one news story that shows the Classmate even being discussed before the OLPC project came along.
There are so many links I could give you... here's one. Be sure to read page 5.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4472654.ece
From page 5:
Yes, they were part of OLPC- but if they had already invested serious money into their own program, can you blame them for backing out?
Yes, I can blame them, and I do. It's their right to sell their products in any market they choose. It's my right to be disgusted when they use predatory sales tactics to sabotage a non-profit that is trying to help kids learn. From page 5 again:
But then, they agreed to come on board the OLPC project. And even as they were members of OLPC, their sales people kept on undermining the OLPC. I don't like that.
They are a business, and the only reason their practice can be seen as wrong is because OLPCs were supposed to save the poor...
I have no problem with businesses making money. Heck, I like making money myself. But I have a serious problem with a business sabotaging a non-profit.
Seriously, do a few Google searches and read about this stuff before you spend any more of your time defending Intel's behavior toward OLPC. They are a big company and not everything they do is evil (the Xorg guys have good things to say about how Intel cooperates with them, for example). But their behavior towards OLPC has been contemptible.
steveha
There's no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade.
Huh?
Let's do a quick review.
0) OLPC starts working on a laptop. It has a non-Intel chip and is designed for ultra power efficiency.
1) Intel starts working on their own laptop. Intel's of course has an Intel CPU; and it is designed to run Windows.
2) Official Intel sales people start trying to sell the Classmate to countries that are considering the OLPC laptop. In at least one case, an Intel sales person went to a country that had already agreed to buy OLPC laptops, and said in effect "That thing won't even run Windows... you sure you really want it?" At the time, Intel was officially a member of OLPC. (Rogue sales people? Evil corporate double-dealing? You decide.)
Now, what's up with "no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade"? The OLPC guys are the overbearing bullies and Intel is the underdog here?
I'm sure there are markets for something like the Classmate PC. I don't think it's the best choice for places with no electric infrastructure. And it has a cooling fan, so I don't think it's the best choice for places that are really hot, humid, and/or dusty. And I'm sure it costs about twice as much as the OLPC, so I don't think it's the best choice for the truly poor markets. And it almost certainly is much harder to repair than the OLPC design.[1] Hmmm. Am I raining on Intel's parade?
All that said, the world is a large place full of lots of kids. No way can OLPC crank out enough computers to help everyone. If Intel can sell their computer into the more affluent areas, they can make money. If their sales people can leave the OLPC markets alone, maybe Intel and OLPC can just get along.
P.S. I suspect that neither OLPC nor Intel will have the last word on educational computers for the masses. I'm starting to think that the best design would be a simple tablet that actually does cost $100 or less, and probably runs an ARM chip or something for crazy long battery life.
steveha
[1] From the photos, it's a pretty conventional clamshell, which means lots of connections running through the hinge so the motherboard can be in the base and the display in the lid; the OLPC design has motherboard and display in the lid, so that all that needs to run through the hinge is basically a USB cable. Teen-aged kids, armed with simple screwdrivers, can take apart two broken OLPC laptops, swap parts, and produce a working OLPC laptop. I really doubt this will be possible with the Classmate.
As others have noted, the classic space combat game is Star Raiders. But Star Raiders was excellent on the Atari 800 and 400 computers; the official Atari version for 2600 was, IMHO, very poor.
Happily, the Activision folks made an excellent knockoff of Star Raiders called Starmaster. The most important parts of the Star Raider experience are there: you can raise and lower shields, you have a galactic map, you have multiple star bases, the enemy will surround and destroy the star bases, you can get damaged, and you can dock with a star base to repair damage and refuel.
If you love 2600 gaming, get a copy of Starmaster and play it in your old 2600 or 7800. Once you have a legal copy, get a ROM image from somewhere and you can also play it in Stella. Starmaster and Millipede are my two favorite games to play in Stella.
If you fondly remember having an extra, weird keyboard thing for the game, you are remembering the official Atari 2600 Star Raiders. If you don't remember that, perhaps you are remembering Starmaster. (In Starmaster, the screen does turn blue when you have the shields up.)
For completeness, I'll add that Imagic sold a game called Star Voyager. It is a very simplified Star Raiders sort of game: you fight enemies, then fly through a warp gate to go to a new level and fight more enemies. There are no star bases; you cannot be damaged, but you can run out of energy. When you are out of energy, any enemy hit kills you. Warp gates refuel your energy. While it has no strategy at all, it is fun as a light shoot-em-up game.
P.S. Not every Activision game is gold. They had a game called Robot Tank, that was essentially Starmaster all over again, except that this time there was no way to repair damage. As a kid, I hated Robot Tank as much as I loved Starmaster.
steveha
There have been some great examples of sportsmanship in bike racing, including the Tour de France.
For example, when Lance Armstrong was taken down by the strap on a spectator's handbag, the other contenders held back and waited for him to get back in the race.
My favorite example of sportsmanship was a few years ago in the Tour de France. Before I explain it, let me describe a little bit about how "breakaways" work. A breakaway is a small group of riders who pulls ahead of the main pack, and tries very hard to stay ahead so that some one member of the breakaway group can get first place. They always ride in a "paceline", where one person is in the lead and all the other riders are in a row, one tucked into the draft behind another. All the riders in the draft are working about 30% less hard than the one in the lead. This cooperation is essential if the breakaway group hopes to stay ahead of the main pack. At some point, the cooperation ends and it becomes a free-for-all fight to see who can cross the finish line first. All too often, the cooperation falls apart too soon: the riders stop taking turns and start trying to shake other riders out of their draft, and meanwhile the main pack is getting closer. I have seen breakaway groups, who had been working together for hours, fall apart too far from the finish line; the main pack then blows past them and none of them wins.
Well, a few years ago there was a breakaway group of exactly two riders. They worked together beautifully, and then, about one kilometer before the finish line, they stopped the pacelining, and rode side by side for a moment. They shook hands. Then they both pulled out their best sprints to see who could cross the finish line first.
I don't even remember which of them won the race! I remember that shining moment of good sportsmanship, and it still makes me smile.
P.S. Okay, I had to look it up. It was Stage 10 of the 2003 Tour, and the riders were Jakob Piil and Fabio Sacchi.
steveha
Take a look at DSL and Puppy Linux. Both are tiny and would boot quickly from a CompactFlash. DSL is probably better for all-around appliance use; Puppy is intended for use as a desktop OS.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.puppylinux.org/
steveha
I thought lawyers made contradictory arguments all the time.
Here's a joke/story I heard years ago. This lawyer is in a courtroom, defending a client. The plaintiff claims the defendant borrowed a new pot and returned it in broken condition. The lawyer makes his opening statement: "There are three facts that prove my client is innocent. First, he never borrowed that pot. Second, it was already broken when he borrowed it. Third, when he returned it, it was in perfect condition."
steveha
(now I wish there was some alternative version of the LGPL that forced derivative work to REMAIN in that license so that people could use it in proprietary products - but still giving back any changes to the library itself - so we could avoid bad moves like the MySQL one. Best of both worlds, eh?)
Have you looked at the GUILE license? It's just a standard GPL, with a specific exception that says you can link GUILE with non-free code without needing to change the license of the non-free code.
http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-1.6/guile-ref/Guile-License.html
So, any changes you make to GUILE, you need to give back under GPL. But you are free to embed GUILE in anything.
The LGPL has some strange clauses (counting how many lines you may include from a header file!?). I kind of like the GUILE license.
steveha
Here's an overview of ECMAScript 4, the new version of JavaScript:
http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/overview.pdf
It sure looks to me like they are taking all the coolest stuff from Python and grafting it onto JavaScript.[1] The result will be a language a lot like Python, but with code blocks wrapped in curly braces and no significant whitespace.
One of the biggest changes will be a class inheritance model much more like Python's. The prototype-based inheritance will still be available, but I for one will be happy to use the new model.
Already, my favorite features from Python have been grafted on to JavaScript, and are available right now in Firefox 2:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/New_in_JavaScript_1.7
Steve Yegge has said that he thinks he knows what the "Next Big Language" will be. I think he is talking about JavaScript, and I think he may be right.
steveha
[1] If you are a fan of some other language, it may look to you like they are grabbing cool things from your language. And far be it from me to argue about which language a feature was "really" borrowed from. Python borrowed much of its cool features from other languages anyway.
Er, yes. My mistake.
I also messed up: the 8086 was made with a 20-pin address bus. I meant to say "If the 8086 had been made with a 24-pin address bus..."
The 8086 could address 1MB, and you need 20 address lines to do that.
Sorry for the mixup. The main points of what I was saying stand unchanged, though.
I just double-checked with a Google search, and the 68000 did indeed have 23 address lines: it used 24-bit addresses, but it only fetched word data (two bytes at a time) so there was no need for an address line to specify the least significant bit (because it was always 0).
steveha
This one really wasn't the IT staff's fault, so this is slightly off topic, but this is my all time favorite Daily WTF story.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx
steveha
The problem is that it's not a good keyboard design. If we stick to a (roughly) flat board with buttons on it, you first of all want more space between the hands, since that's how you hold them naturally.
I'll tell you up front, I think the Microsoft ergo keyboards are better than standard ones.
The slight angle of the two halves lets the two halves line up more naturally with the way I want to hold my hands. And they do have some space between the hands.
Once I stressed my shoulder, and I found that typing on a standard keyboard gave me searing pain after a few minutes. I tried the (very first model of) Microsoft ergo keyboard and found that I could type for hours without the searing pain. This made an immediate believer out of me.
Not all their keyboards are good, but the basic design of their ergo keyboards is sound. Maybe there is something even better out there, but nothing I have tried seems like a real improvement.
steveha
The paragraph size of the 8086 was 16 bytes; that is, the segment registers were essentially multiplied by 16, giving an address range of 1MB, which resulted in extreme memory pressure (that 640K limit) starting in the mid 80s.
0) 64KB was a lot of RAM back in those days. The 8086 could address an entire MB of RAM, which was huge back in those days. Don't forget that the original IBM PC was sold with 16KB of RAM as the lowest-cost option, and IIRC 64KB of RAM was the top option at launch. Years later, in 1984, Apple introduced the Mac with 128K, and later sold it with an amazing 512K (the "Fat Mac"). There is no way that, in 1980, 1MB of address space seemed small.
1) The real reason for the 640KB limit in DOS was that the IBM PC had a poorly designed BIOS. See, you were supposed to use BIOS services for things like writing to the screen, but the original BIOS made you write one character at a time, issuing one interrupt per character, which was just insane. So everyone started just writing strings to the display buffer directly; so there were a bunch of programs that would break if the display buffer was moved away from the 640K address. Had the BIOS offered a service you could call that would return the address of the display buffer, people could have written portable yet fast DOS programs, and people could have had something like 800K or more of contiguous address space.
If the paragraph size had been 256 bytes, that would have resulted in a 24MB address space.
And that would mean four extra pins on the address bus, a larger (more pins) Dual Inline Package for the chip, extra support hardware, extra address lines on the motherboards... everything more expensive, at a time when everything was really expensive anyway.
Had Intel made the x86 a 20-bit address space part, the extra cost might have made the x86 lose out to the Motorola 68000, which had 32-bit address registers and 20 address lines to the chip. I've always preferred the 68K to the x86 anyway (so I would regard that as a win for the world) but my point is that Intel wasn't wrong to ship the x86 as they did.
Things might look profoundly different now, if only the 8086 had had four more address pins, and someone at Intel hadn't thought, "Well, 1MB is enough for anyone..."
No one imagined the long run the 8086 would have. They were more likely thinking "1MB is more than enough for this product", not "1MB is enough for everyone forever."
steveha
http://scitoys.com/
This web site is full of cool stuff you can build. Available in dead-trees versions if you prefer. Seriously, check this out; this site makes me want to start building things.
Example: build a home-made radio. He starts with a trivial radio with only two parts, then adds another part to improve it, then improves it again... eventually he has you rolling your own capacitors! Each step illustrates something cool. By the end you are building a crystal radio like the ones soldiers used to build during World War I.
steveha
My major objection to DRM on music I buy is simple: if there is DRM on it, I don't really own it.
If I am renting the music in the first place, DRM doesn't bother me so much. Exhibit A is the Rhapsody online music service, which is essentially a flat-rate music rental service. I have discovered that I like Rhapsody very much. I am finding new bands that I like, bands I had never heard of before, much faster than before I had Rhapsody.
Depending on what you get, Rhapsody is $12 to $15 per month. If this plan really is a dime per track, that's a cheaper rental than Rhapsody. The big question is coverage. If the new plan only lets me rent the latest pop acts, I'm just not interested. (Rhapsody has over 4 million tracks, including all sorts of cool things: Herbie Mann flute albums, Bill Cosby comedy albums, progressive rock, etc.)
When Rhapsody helps me music I really like, I then go and buy the music on CD, so that I will really own it. I'd be happy to do the same thing with this new service.
Will the service succeed? I'd say that depends very much on the specifics. How do you pay them that dime per track? If they have a convenient way to add dimes to your account, such as selling gift cards in Best Buy, it might become wildly popular; if you have to jump through a bunch of hoops (agree to a 20-page EULA, pre-register, enter a valid credit card number, pre-pay in $30 chunks, etc.) most people will just say no.
Assuming it's convenient, would I "rent" a song for ten cents? Sure. Why not?
steveha
Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns Rhapsody, but it's not my job to sell it to you or anyone else.
"Even if You Have Less-than Average Genetics."
I agree that's poorly phrased. He means, even if your genes predispose you towards storing fat. In other words, your ability to lose fat is less than average.
My genes are superbly optimized for survival under stone-age conditions. Any spare calories I eat get stored as fat to keep me alive. But since I live in modern civilization, I'd be happier if my body wasted calories a bit!
It tells me that don't know WTF they are talking about.
He has a Masters degree in sports nutrition stuff, he is a pro bodybuilder, and he has coached hundreds of people in their efforts to lose fat. These qualifications argue that he does in fact know WTF he is talking about.
You may decide for yourself whether the breathless ad copy on his web site counts more heavily against him than his qualifications count in his favor.
Of course the bottom line for me is that his advice actually worked for me, so I'm inclined to think he knows what he's talking about.
So you are leaner, why do you think that makes you more healthy?
I think I'm more healthy because my blood cholesterol and triglycerides numbers improved, and because I have noticed that I have more energy when bicycling long distances. I was bicycling for years before I found the book, and my cholesterol numbers were creeping up each year; changing my diet according to his advice made a difference for me. (In other words, before I read the book I biked a lot; after I read the book I biked a lot. The major change was to improve the quality of food I was eating.)
steveha
Not enough emphasis on fiber and micronutrients you get from whole grains, fruit and vegetables
Well, it was just a terse summary of an entire book. If you actually read the book I think you will find more emphasis on that stuff.
steveha