It's ridiculous how they're trying to force PCI express lately. When I did my last system upgrade (fall of 2004, around 1.5 years ago), you couldn't even get it yet. And all of a sudden everyone wants to pretend that AGP is dead, apparently the quickest death of a major technology ever. Come on, even PCI battled it out with VESA Local Bus for quite a while during the 486 days, and AGP didn't kill the PCI video card market overnight. I guess with the ever dropping system prices, they need us to "refresh" our systems ever more often.
Yeah, I was just thinking exactly the same thing. This guy is such an obvious scapegoat and this entire thing is such a farce that I was laughing out loud when I read about his punishments. Bad, wicked, naughty Zoot!
You're absolutely right, but unfortunately the browser is the most widely distributed application delivery platform today. XUL might be nice and all, but it is supported on very few desktops. It's actually quite amazing how closely a modern web app can be scripted and styled to behave like a traditional application. As these web applications become more and more sophisticated they are increasingly outgrowing the traditional forms-based web paradigm, and features like the Back button can indeed become quite meaningless or even counter-intuitive. Sort of the like Back button in Windows Explorer, that you somehow instinctivly hit every once in a while but inevitably doesn't do what you want.
> Just that they took a much more adversarial approach with the students.
Absolutely. While that certainly can vary from teacher to teacher--I had some great teachers over there as well--public ridicule and put-downs by teachers seem quite common. In the West schools would be deluged with lawsuits by parents. I remember in Germany the situation being particularly touchy, with teachers constantly paranoid not to offend students, which of course made even valid discipline problematic.
It does also depend on which school years you attend in any given system. Like I said, in the East they tend to hit you with the heavy stuff pretty early on, and frankly they often don't care how many students actually get it. If you don't get the material, you tend to be labeled as stupid, even by teachers. In hindsight it's amazing how frank some of the teachers were when dispensing their opinions of students. I clearly remember math teachers calling some students dumb for not getting trig in 6th grade. What that system tends to ignore is the differing developmental rates during adolescence, particularly the capacity for abstract thought. I think Western schools cope with this better by delaying some more advanced studies till later. Of course, this is painting with a very broad brush, and I'm sure there are huge variations between individual schools of each system.
What I know for certain is that most of the first and second year science and math classes (and actually also English!) at the US university I attended mostly contained material I had already learned in high shool in Australia. Things like linear algebra, advanced trig and calculus, stats, etc.
> I think they're just being polite saying "it isn't evidence of any superior schooling"
While it is true that Eastern Europeans are masters of understatement and self-deprecation, I don't think that's the whole story. There is a much stronger culture of high-profile competition in the East than in the West, probably because of a long tradition amongst old communist regimes to foster scientific competition. Kind of like the national spelling bee competition in the US, over there much more emphasis was placed on math competitions. Mind you, pretty much the same kinds of people sneered at them as do over here.
OTOH I really don't think there is that much difference between the science curriculums of the East and the West, with the singular exception of the US. I experienced three high school systems (Eastern Europe, Germany, Australia), and the only significant difference I could see was in the timing--Eastern Europe tends to drop a lot of the heavy science sh!t on unsuspecting students way too early, such as grades 5 and 6 and in general adopts a dog-eat-dog attitude towards the students, while in the West they tend to stage that later on during the senior years and also seem more concerned with not letting students fall off this speeding bus. Australia was the most pronounced in that respect, with the bulk of the advanced science and math being left for the last two years of high school. But at the end of high school I think most Western school systems have imparted about the same amoung of science and math as in the East.
I'm not sure this device knows what market it targets. It seems to me it's shooting too closely towards the notebook end, rather than the highly-mobile-but-more-capable-than-a-PDA category. Both its capabilities and its price are way too high for what it aims to do. I laughed when I saw the $800 price point. Something like $300 would be more like it. Basically, a modern PDA like the iPAQ 4700 is pretty close to a webpad-type device, it just needs a bigger and higher-rez screen, a physical keyboard, and maybe a bit more memory. Make it about the size of 2.5 iPAQs side-by-side. I definitely think a hard drive does not belong into this class of device. In order to optimize battery life, which simply HAS to be on the order of a PDA's to make the device useful, you want to allocate as much of the power budget as possible to the main power hog: the screen. A large screen is what defines this device, so there's no way around it. A hard drive, OTOH, is a fairly unnecessary luxury which adds both weight and size and saps power. Since it's a stripped down device anyway, you certainly don't need 20 GB for app storage. That leaves media, and not every user will necessarily be interested in that application. I would primarily be interested in this as an around-the-house replacemenet of the notebook or PDA for web access. You could have it sitting on the kitchen counter or a coffee table to look up something or quickly catch up with the news (slashdot!), without having to pull out the heavy guns. If I want to watch a video, that requires more time than a couple of minutes anyway, so I might as well trek to the den and fire up the home theater. I'd get a massively larger picture and very much better sound, plus more comfortable seating. Why should everyone be forced to pay for the large storage requirements of a few that might be interested in videos? Include a CF/SD slot for those users, and they can buy their own large cards to store those videos.
> The key is to make sure that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in EITHER direction.
As the previous poster wrote, neutral reporting doesn't imply any sort of balance. Just do a quick sanity check at the extremes: how would you keep the Wikipedia page on the Nazi regime balanced--by giving equal coverage to their progressive stance on animal rights or their smart fashion sense? Neutral reporting means listing all known and provable facts, and if the final tally of "good" and "bad" doesn't balance, well, that's real life.
> About the chip, you can use cheap p2 chips that take 10 watts. It's actually not completely stupid.
Yes it is. Even if you were to connect this thing to the net and perform real-time pricing analysis, you would still not neet a 1GHz CPU. A 16-bit micro would be ample for that and it would only pull milliamps. The only reason to have a P3 in there would be to have a large touchscreen with overlapping windows which would also let you play online multimedia content and Doom3.
> i still think its something people could get used to just as people get used to being on ships and similar.
Yeah, but ships don't experience high frequency oscillations as in running, something like two beats per second. You still have the issue of stabilizing the passenger during such constant motion, and of what type of controls would allow precision steering. Joysticks obviously would not work, since they would instinctively also be used as handholds in this contraption, which removes any capacity for fine control. Ok, I have to admit, as a recreational vehicle such as running machine could certainly be a bucketful of fun, but only for reasonably fit and mobile people.
I'm not sure true running will ever be practical for such applications. The constant up-and-down motion of the passenger can be very uncomfortable, especially for someone with limited mobility and and/or potentially overweight from lack of motion. The person would have to either hold on for dear life (in which case two axis joysticks would be all but useless for control), or be strapped in, or most likely both. Besides, a machine doesn't have the same motion limitations as a human: artifical legs can have multiple axes of articulation and can potentially move much faster, removing the need for inverted pendulum motion for high speed. In an ideal case the servos would have so much precision and high resolution feedback that the passenger "compartment" would only experience linear forward motion without any vertical or lateral components.
> The problem here is the sheer size of the damn thing. Win32 is huge. Doing the implementation, > and more importantly the QA, is an incredible task.
Precisely, and that's why I find all this talk of WINE-vs-the-OSX-Way ridiculous. If Apple are to have any chance of pulling this of, and if their past cannibalizing of existing code for OS X is any indication, they will most likely USE large portions of WINE. Perhaps SCO can help us find WINE in OS X later on?
One service I would love would be a hack to SMB to bypass the idiotic Master Browser peer discovery mechanism in Windows workgroups so it can use ZeroConf instead. In a domain-less Windows network browsing across machines is always a PITA, especially for machines with intermittend connectivity (i.e. notebooks). Alternatively, a complete replacement of SMB that dropped in neatly into Windows Explorer would work too.
> How many lights do you need to turn on at once? sheesh.
I don't think there's any convincing you, but here goes. One of the greatest benefits of HA switches like these are that they allow you to create virtual wiring, to retrofit connections that don't exist for various reasons. Say you bought an existing house with a garage in the back, and you would like to be able to turn the outside garage lights on and off from the front door. Those lights were only wired at the garage itself, and you'd have to run a new circuit through your backyard to the house and somehow run the wires into the wall with the switch. This can all be done by any electrician for the right amount, and by tearing out some sheetrock etc. Or, you could replace the switch in the garage and the one at the front door with HA switches and gang them together to achieve exactly the same effect, for less money and without touching any walls in the house or garage.
Another nice benefit--particularly with the Insteon system--are status feedback switches. One of the switches has up to eight illuminated buttons on it that can control eight other switches throughout the house. Each button's light indicates whether the remote switch is on or off. This comes in very handy with lights that are not visible from the central switching location. For example, our house has four outside lighting locations around the house--at the front door, the side door, the back door, and the garage. They were not all wired to one central location, but with HA I can control them all from the switch at the front door, or any other location I desire. At night I can turn them all on without having to walk throughout the house to each light's inside switch.
Both of these uses have nothing to do with geeky over-engineering and gratuitous automation. They are addressing real needs because of design oversights or pre-existing conditions in older homes. Of course, if you see no benefit in this sort of flexibility, then HA is certainly not for you. Move along, nothing to see.
> I hate the guy as much as anybody but get fucking real. > They get all the blame for this and no credit at all
Then you don't hate the guy enough, I'm afraid. If you hate someone--truly hate them--you don't look for reasons to give them any credit at all. And you'd most definitely listen to any potential explanation for why he doesn't deserve any, no matter how tenuous.
> There are lots of conditions where people are "born that way". For example, > Science makes a claim that some people are "born" to be alchoholics.
That's a strawman argument. A person predesposed to alcoholism does not feel a strong urge to drink before ever touching alcohol. The need for sex is very different and arises with puberty whether you give it any thought or not, and whether you ever indulge it or not. Any religion or morality system that seeks to suppress human sexuality is bound to produce deeply frustrated people filled with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. Asking a gay person to stop being attracted to people of the same gender IS asking them to suppress their sexuality, and would indeed be the cruelest joke a god could play on them. And please don't try making the distinction between attraction and acting upon it. The Bible has a lot to say regarding coveting, in fact it made it into one of the ten commandmends.
> Homophobia are not exclusive to religous people.
Certainly not, I merely responded to the OP in his chosen subject area. In fact, part of my point was that this discrepancy between biblical morality and current scientific understanding tends to undermine the credibility of the Bible as divinely inspired. While there are many ideas in the Bible that could be argued and interpreted many different ways, or understood merely as metaphors, there's not much splitting hairs over its stance WRT sexuality.
> That's why I don't follow the world's standards. I follow God's.
That whole Us-vs-The-World thing is bogus hate-inducing paranoia. You ARE of "this world", and according to the Bible you are no better than anyone else in this world. The less worthy and worthwhile to be spat upon you consider yourself, the more you become what the Bible talks about, which you seem to so strive towards.
Ah, the self-righteousness of youth. Don't worry, statistically speaking it is quite likely to go away, although if you continue down that particular religious path, somewhat less likely so.
> This is one reason why I have no pity for %90 of AIDS patients. [...]
Quite regardless of the true statistics involved, that's a very cynical and heartless attitute to take. Do you feel the same towards people with lung cancer or adult onset diabetes or obesity-related hypertension, or any one of a myriad other lifestyle-induced health problems? What's so special about sex that its health consequences must be categorized separately and hated in a very special way? If this particular (lack of) love for your fellow man was instilled by the Bible, perhaps you're reading it wrong, or else it's not all it's cracked up to be.
Using the Bible as a basis for sexual ethics and morality is problematic anyway. While most of its advice is commendable, there are a couple of references to homosexuality as an abomination. With the ever growing scientific evidence that homosexuality is not a personal choice (and I mean this strictly from the perspective of outsiders, because those involved certainly have always known that), it puts God at odds with his creation: how can he allow some people to be born in a way that he quite clearly disapproves of and which they can't help? He might as well be racist and vilify black people for all they can do about it.
Now, while some people take this paradox as proof that homosexuals are not born that way and that it is instead a personal choice, others take it as more proof of the fallibility and human origin of the Bible. Of course I'm not expecting to convince you or anyone else one way or the other in this respect, but in the end facts are facts, and the way you wish to view the world doesn't make it any more or less so.
> A second CPU core allows the main decoding task to be handled by one CPU
A well designed media extender architecture will decode as much as possible on the extender itself, relegating the media server essentially to the role of a file server. Decoding--or rather, transcoding--would only need to be done for formats that the extender can't handle. But judging by Intel's past strategies, the more processing is done on the CPU itself, the more chips they think they can sell, so I wouldn't be surprised if they heavily and critically involve the server CPU into their extender scheme.
Same here, except more like 5-10 years. At the leading edge of technology book pickings tend to be slim anyway, with most of the new knowledge being still somewhat experimental and seat-of-the-pants, and any book you would buy would be obsolete within a few weeks. Most of the useful knowledge resides on Usenet and various web sites and blogs. Usenet is particularly useful as a reference, because even though the signal to noise ratio may be low, the typically vigorous discourse (ahem, to put it politely) taking place can be very valuable in exposing various aspects of the topic in a most speedy fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
> Who do Americans makes jokes about?
Brazilians mostly.
It's ridiculous how they're trying to force PCI express lately. When I did my last system upgrade (fall of 2004, around 1.5 years ago), you couldn't even get it yet. And all of a sudden everyone wants to pretend that AGP is dead, apparently the quickest death of a major technology ever. Come on, even PCI battled it out with VESA Local Bus for quite a while during the 486 days, and AGP didn't kill the PCI video card market overnight. I guess with the ever dropping system prices, they need us to "refresh" our systems ever more often.
Yeah, I was just thinking exactly the same thing. This guy is such an obvious scapegoat and this entire thing is such a farce that I was laughing out loud when I read about his punishments. Bad, wicked, naughty Zoot!
You're absolutely right, but unfortunately the browser is the most widely distributed application delivery platform today. XUL might be nice and all, but it is supported on very few desktops. It's actually quite amazing how closely a modern web app can be scripted and styled to behave like a traditional application. As these web applications become more and more sophisticated they are increasingly outgrowing the traditional forms-based web paradigm, and features like the Back button can indeed become quite meaningless or even counter-intuitive. Sort of the like Back button in Windows Explorer, that you somehow instinctivly hit every once in a while but inevitably doesn't do what you want.
> Just that they took a much more adversarial approach with the students.
Absolutely. While that certainly can vary from teacher to teacher--I had some great teachers over there as well--public ridicule and put-downs by teachers seem quite common. In the West schools would be deluged with lawsuits by parents. I remember in Germany the situation being particularly touchy, with teachers constantly paranoid not to offend students, which of course made even valid discipline problematic.
It does also depend on which school years you attend in any given system. Like I said, in the East they tend to hit you with the heavy stuff pretty early on, and frankly they often don't care how many students actually get it. If you don't get the material, you tend to be labeled as stupid, even by teachers. In hindsight it's amazing how frank some of the teachers were when dispensing their opinions of students. I clearly remember math teachers calling some students dumb for not getting trig in 6th grade. What that system tends to ignore is the differing developmental rates during adolescence, particularly the capacity for abstract thought. I think Western schools cope with this better by delaying some more advanced studies till later. Of course, this is painting with a very broad brush, and I'm sure there are huge variations between individual schools of each system.
What I know for certain is that most of the first and second year science and math classes (and actually also English!) at the US university I attended mostly contained material I had already learned in high shool in Australia. Things like linear algebra, advanced trig and calculus, stats, etc.
> I think they're just being polite saying "it isn't evidence of any superior schooling"
While it is true that Eastern Europeans are masters of understatement and self-deprecation, I don't think that's the whole story. There is a much stronger culture of high-profile competition in the East than in the West, probably because of a long tradition amongst old communist regimes to foster scientific competition. Kind of like the national spelling bee competition in the US, over there much more emphasis was placed on math competitions. Mind you, pretty much the same kinds of people sneered at them as do over here.
OTOH I really don't think there is that much difference between the science curriculums of the East and the West, with the singular exception of the US. I experienced three high school systems (Eastern Europe, Germany, Australia), and the only significant difference I could see was in the timing--Eastern Europe tends to drop a lot of the heavy science sh!t on unsuspecting students way too early, such as grades 5 and 6 and in general adopts a dog-eat-dog attitude towards the students, while in the West they tend to stage that later on during the senior years and also seem more concerned with not letting students fall off this speeding bus. Australia was the most pronounced in that respect, with the bulk of the advanced science and math being left for the last two years of high school. But at the end of high school I think most Western school systems have imparted about the same amoung of science and math as in the East.
"it's capable of both education and entertainment functions"
Hmm, I wonder which one of these two functions will be more popular once you can mail-order it.
I'm not sure this device knows what market it targets. It seems to me it's shooting too closely towards the notebook end, rather than the highly-mobile-but-more-capable-than-a-PDA category. Both its capabilities and its price are way too high for what it aims to do. I laughed when I saw the $800 price point. Something like $300 would be more like it. Basically, a modern PDA like the iPAQ 4700 is pretty close to a webpad-type device, it just needs a bigger and higher-rez screen, a physical keyboard, and maybe a bit more memory. Make it about the size of 2.5 iPAQs side-by-side. I definitely think a hard drive does not belong into this class of device. In order to optimize battery life, which simply HAS to be on the order of a PDA's to make the device useful, you want to allocate as much of the power budget as possible to the main power hog: the screen. A large screen is what defines this device, so there's no way around it. A hard drive, OTOH, is a fairly unnecessary luxury which adds both weight and size and saps power. Since it's a stripped down device anyway, you certainly don't need 20 GB for app storage. That leaves media, and not every user will necessarily be interested in that application. I would primarily be interested in this as an around-the-house replacemenet of the notebook or PDA for web access. You could have it sitting on the kitchen counter or a coffee table to look up something or quickly catch up with the news (slashdot!), without having to pull out the heavy guns. If I want to watch a video, that requires more time than a couple of minutes anyway, so I might as well trek to the den and fire up the home theater. I'd get a massively larger picture and very much better sound, plus more comfortable seating. Why should everyone be forced to pay for the large storage requirements of a few that might be interested in videos? Include a CF/SD slot for those users, and they can buy their own large cards to store those videos.
> The key is to make sure that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in EITHER direction.
As the previous poster wrote, neutral reporting doesn't imply any sort of balance. Just do a quick sanity check at the extremes: how would you keep the Wikipedia page on the Nazi regime balanced--by giving equal coverage to their progressive stance on animal rights or their smart fashion sense? Neutral reporting means listing all known and provable facts, and if the final tally of "good" and "bad" doesn't balance, well, that's real life.
> About the chip, you can use cheap p2 chips that take 10 watts. It's actually not completely stupid.
Yes it is. Even if you were to connect this thing to the net and perform real-time pricing analysis, you would still not neet a 1GHz CPU. A 16-bit micro would be ample for that and it would only pull milliamps. The only reason to have a P3 in there would be to have a large touchscreen with overlapping windows which would also let you play online multimedia content and Doom3.
> i still think its something people could get used to just as people get used to being on ships and similar.
Yeah, but ships don't experience high frequency oscillations as in running, something like two beats per second. You still have the issue of stabilizing the passenger during such constant motion, and of what type of controls would allow precision steering. Joysticks obviously would not work, since they would instinctively also be used as handholds in this contraption, which removes any capacity for fine control. Ok, I have to admit, as a recreational vehicle such as running machine could certainly be a bucketful of fun, but only for reasonably fit and mobile people.
Or preferably on the Taj Mahal.
I'm not sure true running will ever be practical for such applications. The constant up-and-down motion of the passenger can be very uncomfortable, especially for someone with limited mobility and and/or potentially overweight from lack of motion. The person would have to either hold on for dear life (in which case two axis joysticks would be all but useless for control), or be strapped in, or most likely both. Besides, a machine doesn't have the same motion limitations as a human: artifical legs can have multiple axes of articulation and can potentially move much faster, removing the need for inverted pendulum motion for high speed. In an ideal case the servos would have so much precision and high resolution feedback that the passenger "compartment" would only experience linear forward motion without any vertical or lateral components.
> The problem here is the sheer size of the damn thing. Win32 is huge. Doing the implementation,
> and more importantly the QA, is an incredible task.
Precisely, and that's why I find all this talk of WINE-vs-the-OSX-Way ridiculous. If Apple are to have any chance of pulling this of, and if their past cannibalizing of existing code for OS X is any indication, they will most likely USE large portions of WINE. Perhaps SCO can help us find WINE in OS X later on?
One service I would love would be a hack to SMB to bypass the idiotic Master Browser peer discovery mechanism in Windows workgroups so it can use ZeroConf instead. In a domain-less Windows network browsing across machines is always a PITA, especially for machines with intermittend connectivity (i.e. notebooks). Alternatively, a complete replacement of SMB that dropped in neatly into Windows Explorer would work too.
It's different because the people at Ford--I mean Jaguar--just discovered it.
> How many lights do you need to turn on at once? sheesh.
I don't think there's any convincing you, but here goes. One of the greatest benefits of HA switches like these are that they allow you to create virtual wiring, to retrofit connections that don't exist for various reasons. Say you bought an existing house with a garage in the back, and you would like to be able to turn the outside garage lights on and off from the front door. Those lights were only wired at the garage itself, and you'd have to run a new circuit through your backyard to the house and somehow run the wires into the wall with the switch. This can all be done by any electrician for the right amount, and by tearing out some sheetrock etc. Or, you could replace the switch in the garage and the one at the front door with HA switches and gang them together to achieve exactly the same effect, for less money and without touching any walls in the house or garage.
Another nice benefit--particularly with the Insteon system--are status feedback switches. One of the switches has up to eight illuminated buttons on it that can control eight other switches throughout the house. Each button's light indicates whether the remote switch is on or off. This comes in very handy with lights that are not visible from the central switching location. For example, our house has four outside lighting locations around the house--at the front door, the side door, the back door, and the garage. They were not all wired to one central location, but with HA I can control them all from the switch at the front door, or any other location I desire. At night I can turn them all on without having to walk throughout the house to each light's inside switch.
Both of these uses have nothing to do with geeky over-engineering and gratuitous automation. They are addressing real needs because of design oversights or pre-existing conditions in older homes. Of course, if you see no benefit in this sort of flexibility, then HA is certainly not for you. Move along, nothing to see.
> I hate the guy as much as anybody but get fucking real.
> They get all the blame for this and no credit at all
Then you don't hate the guy enough, I'm afraid. If you hate someone--truly hate them--you don't look for reasons to give them any credit at all. And you'd most definitely listen to any potential explanation for why he doesn't deserve any, no matter how tenuous.
> There are lots of conditions where people are "born that way". For example,
> Science makes a claim that some people are "born" to be alchoholics.
That's a strawman argument. A person predesposed to alcoholism does not feel a strong urge to drink before ever touching alcohol. The need for sex is very different and arises with puberty whether you give it any thought or not, and whether you ever indulge it or not. Any religion or morality system that seeks to suppress human sexuality is bound to produce deeply frustrated people filled with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. Asking a gay person to stop being attracted to people of the same gender IS asking them to suppress their sexuality, and would indeed be the cruelest joke a god could play on them. And please don't try making the distinction between attraction and acting upon it. The Bible has a lot to say regarding coveting, in fact it made it into one of the ten commandmends.
> Homophobia are not exclusive to religous people.
Certainly not, I merely responded to the OP in his chosen subject area. In fact, part of my point was that this discrepancy between biblical morality and current scientific understanding tends to undermine the credibility of the Bible as divinely inspired. While there are many ideas in the Bible that could be argued and interpreted many different ways, or understood merely as metaphors, there's not much splitting hairs over its stance WRT sexuality.
> That's why I don't follow the world's standards. I follow God's.
That whole Us-vs-The-World thing is bogus hate-inducing paranoia. You ARE of "this world", and according to the Bible you are no better than anyone else in this world. The less worthy and worthwhile to be spat upon you consider yourself, the more you become what the Bible talks about, which you seem to so strive towards.
Ah, the self-righteousness of youth. Don't worry, statistically speaking it is quite likely to go away, although if you continue down that particular religious path, somewhat less likely so.
> This is one reason why I have no pity for %90 of AIDS patients. [...]
Quite regardless of the true statistics involved, that's a very cynical and heartless attitute to take. Do you feel the same towards people with lung cancer or adult onset diabetes or obesity-related hypertension, or any one of a myriad other lifestyle-induced health problems? What's so special about sex that its health consequences must be categorized separately and hated in a very special way? If this particular (lack of) love for your fellow man was instilled by the Bible, perhaps you're reading it wrong, or else it's not all it's cracked up to be.
Using the Bible as a basis for sexual ethics and morality is problematic anyway. While most of its advice is commendable, there are a couple of references to homosexuality as an abomination. With the ever growing scientific evidence that homosexuality is not a personal choice (and I mean this strictly from the perspective of outsiders, because those involved certainly have always known that), it puts God at odds with his creation: how can he allow some people to be born in a way that he quite clearly disapproves of and which they can't help? He might as well be racist and vilify black people for all they can do about it.
Now, while some people take this paradox as proof that homosexuals are not born that way and that it is instead a personal choice, others take it as more proof of the fallibility and human origin of the Bible. Of course I'm not expecting to convince you or anyone else one way or the other in this respect, but in the end facts are facts, and the way you wish to view the world doesn't make it any more or less so.
> A second CPU core allows the main decoding task to be handled by one CPU
A well designed media extender architecture will decode as much as possible on the extender itself, relegating the media server essentially to the role of a file server. Decoding--or rather, transcoding--would only need to be done for formats that the extender can't handle. But judging by Intel's past strategies, the more processing is done on the CPU itself, the more chips they think they can sell, so I wouldn't be surprised if they heavily and critically involve the server CPU into their extender scheme.
Same here, except more like 5-10 years. At the leading edge of technology book pickings tend to be slim anyway, with most of the new knowledge being still somewhat experimental and seat-of-the-pants, and any book you would buy would be obsolete within a few weeks. Most of the useful knowledge resides on Usenet and various web sites and blogs. Usenet is particularly useful as a reference, because even though the signal to noise ratio may be low, the typically vigorous discourse (ahem, to put it politely) taking place can be very valuable in exposing various aspects of the topic in a most speedy fashion.