It's definitely cool to look at. I'll give you that. And it's cool that someone was able to take a concept involving both AI and robotics and actually build it to completion.
But from a computer science perspective, it's really not a huge deal. First off, although I personally would probably struggle a bit with the robotics because I don't do robotics, I know people who do, and they would find this robot to be mechanically rather trivial. Then the brains behind it, the algorithms to solve rubic's cubes, aren't all that tough either. Really, no one here would be all that impressed if this person solved the rubic's cube problem in simulation. Mostly because that's been done a thousand times.
So, what are we impressed by? The fact that someone put together two simple ideas? Or the fact that they had the drive to see it through and make it work and fully debug it, something that some of the rest of us probably lack?
Actually, someone will probably point out how this is not simulated annealing, but this is how I understand it. It's like a genetic algorithm, but with one population member. You start out with a "high temperature", where you try lots of random runingthings at once. Whenever some random combination makes things better, you keep it. Then you lower the temperature, which means you reduce the number that you try at once. Eventually, you're down to trying one random change at a time.
This "AI" technique is used for things like VLSI placement and routing. You have an N-dimentional circuit that you want to squeeze into basically a 2D space. (The placement is 2D, the routing is a bit more than that.) How do you find the optimal arrangement of gates and their interconnects? Well, optimal is NP-hard, so you can't do it for large circuits. So we use "randomized search". For placement, a random placement is selected, and a "fitness function" is applied. Then random swaps are performed, and when the fitness improves, keep the new placement. A similar thing is done for routing.
My specialization is low-power processor architecture, and so I quite familiar with soft errors (single event upsets). As transistors have gotten smaller, and the voltage has gone down, the probability of a soft error has gone up significantly. And as a result, error correction techniques are making their way into more commodity hardware. For instance, all flash drives now use at least SECDED, but many use BCH codes (e.g. Reed-Solomon). Still, the reason that we're paying attention to these is not that they're an every-day problem, but that the probability has gone up to the point that mean time between failures (single bit) has gone down from years to months. In your video game console, this isn't a problem, but in banking software, we need to be extra specially careful. As you add more and more bits to your DRAM, the probability of one bit being flipped doesn't go up much, but the probably of one of that huge number of bits being flipped becomes significant. (Like how evolution happens faster when you have larger populations.)
That all being said, by far and away, the more likely thing is programmer error. I can't tell you how many times I've want to blame mysterious bugs on soft errors. But so far, I've always been able to find the source of the problem as being my mistake (or someone else's). More over, even if you don't have ECC protection, soft errors are STILL no excuse, because there should be failsafes and sanity checks. Moreover, this is also true about programmer errors. Every system you deploy will have bugs, so oftentimes, you write more code to sanity-check the results of some other code, and if they disagree, you fall back to something very conservative.
I remember one time, I was writing a driver for a graphics card, and we found that every time someone would turn on this huge CRT we had, the software would crash. Basically, the EMP from the monitor degaussing would interfere with the PCI bus or something inside the chip, and we'd get back incorrect values from status registers. So we "hardened" it by triple-reading certain status registers and making sure to choose the most conservative value. Learning from that, we put in various other protections as well, whatever we could think of. After that, we were able to degauss that monitor all we wanted, and we never even saw drawing errors.
Oh, so since they screwed up, they're not going to be able to completely destroy Google, so they'll settle for even competition? It's this kind of thinking that's gotten Microsoft into trouble in the past, the philosophy that they can be the only one, so they have to destroy anything that remotely competes with them.
Many computer nerds like to tout themselves as geniuses who have flexible minds. But the truth is that we're all afraid of change. And this switch from KiB to KB is change. It's not what you're used to, so it's going to confuse you.
But as a geek myself with an obsession for clear and precise terminology, I welcome the change. No longer will I wonder if someone's talking about KB vs. KiB, because it'll be consistent and explicit, at least on the computer systems developed by flexible-enough-minded people who are both willing to change and willing to correct a long-confusing problem.
It's true that the HD makers have taken advantage of this confusion. Back in the day when people almost always said KB when they meant KiB, HD makers used KB. But the fact is, once we adapt our terminology to be less ambiguous, we really can't be mislead by them anymore, and their deceptive marketing practices will be moot (at least when it comes to bytes of storage).
So, to summarize, stop being a stick in the mud and learn to adapt to change. Computers are and always have been an aspect of change in our society. Get over it and get with the program.
It's amazing to me how every now and then, someone too clueless to just look at what's been done before redoes this same study and comes to the same conclusion. Teenagers have a shifted sleep schedule. Their internal clocks want to put them to sleep later but they need the same amount of sleep. So... if you put them in school a little later in the day, they handle it better, because they get more sleep.
I've been reading through a lot of the discussions on this article, and I see what I consider to be a blind knee-jerk reaction against the "evils" of religion. Now, probably a lot of you are in the "kill all the stupid people" camp. But for those of us who aren't in to mass murder, we believe that the world has a place for those who have lower IQs or just fundamentally must think about the world differently from those of us who understand what's going on when we compile a Linux kernel. We "rational" people are able to do things like ponder two contradictory ideas at once (well, some of us are), change our minds in the face of new evidence (ditto), and not assume that unexplained things must be driven by supernatural forces (is Linus an incarnation of Vishnu?). However, there are people who contribute meaningfully to our society that do not have the mental wetware to do these things. They may annoy you because they have to come to more primitive conclusions, but they have value like any other human being. And they have different intellectual needs. They NEED to believe that fact==truth and to have the truth handed to them by an authority. They cannot manage in the world in any other way. The effect of ripping away their religion would be to ruin their ability to function in the world. Some would just glom onto another religion. Some would go into deep depression and/or go insane. And some would just continue to believe in secret. But they will NEVER be able to grasp your world view. They simply cannot process the concepts, and you therefore cannot force them to.
If you want to have the right to believe in your "weird" way (face it, we geeks are a minority and most people don't understand us), then those "morons" should have the right to believe their weird stuff too. And frankly, your attempt to "enlighten" them is just shortsighted and unethical.
Sensationalism. This is the kind of sensationalism I used to get into, actually. OMG! GIMP antialiased lines look like ropes because they don't account for gamma properly! (I noticed that 10 years ago.)
Yeah, so what happens is that these apps scale the image with colors in luma space. In luma space, the color ramp of pixel values looks linear to the human eye. The thing is, the human eye is not linear, so it's technically incorrect to do linear math to combine pixel values in luma space.
Instead, we should be working in luminance space. Luminance is linear in terms of physical light intensity, and you can do linear math directly on luminance values and have them make physical sense.
The reason we use luma is because it's more compact to represent what you can SEE in a static image. What takes 8 bits in luma space requires 14 bits in luminance space to get the fine just noticable differences at the right end of the spectrum.
Most people who have some reasonably advanced education in graphics know ALL about this. And they also realize that it's just not worth worrying about most of the time. I've messed around with gamma-aware scaling, antialiasing, and dithering. Except for very rare circumstances, if you have fine-enough steps in your luma space, it's very difficult to tell the difference, if there even is any. Even dithering to a 6x6x6 color cube looks almost as good in luma as it does in luminance. The only situation where it's vital is if your color space is really small. For instance, if you wanted to dither a color image to a 2x2x2 color cube (8 colors), then ignoring gamma makes it look completely wrong.
I'll make a physics analogy. This guy is complaining that Newtonian mechanics is inaccurate compared to Einsteinian, except that we're dealing with speeds of 100s of miles per hour. Not going to make a noticable difference.
I completely agree that the article is narrowly focused. VERY narrow. My objective was to demonstrate a problem and point out that Linux has not FULLY adapted. I didn't say Linux devs were idiots or that it would never be ready. I was trying to express the idea that Linux [distros in general but perhaps not all] is not QUITE ready for these drives, because not all the tools have fully adapted. Some tools make no mention of any problems in their man pages. Some (like parted's defaults) are even misleading if you mistakenly think that "track aligned" is a good thing.
And I was trying to do that in the very limited number of words I had available for a title.
Also, WD claimed that Linux is unaffected. Some distros probably are, but this could lead people to believe that the statement is universally true, which it isn't. Thus, my over-all objective is to educate people to the fact that if they don't know what they're doing, they can get this wrong. There are lots of mistakes I've made where I wished that someone had mentioned some critical fact on a how-to (like, don't use dmraid/fakeraid for RAID1 because reads aren't load-balanced; use mdraid instead). I've filed plenty of bug reports on such issues.
When will AI surpass human intelligence? As soon as we figure out how to do artificial intelligence the way popular culture conceives of it.
There are two main areas of AI research, as I see it:
(1) Engineered intelligence. These systems learn, but they learn in carefully controlled structures, like Markov models and mapping functions in genetic algorithms.
(2) Emergent intelligence. These are based on evolving systems of simpler structures, like neural nets, and those little cooperating robots you keep hearing about. In some ways, since the intelligent behavior evolved over time, this is more akin to natural intelligence then artificial intelligence.
Neither group has really accomplished a hell of a lot. Speech recognition and computer vision still suck ass. Group (1) has been dominant since the idea of AI was developed, and frankly, they're not a millimeter closer to understanding how to build up a system that is intelligent, where you understand all the parts you built with. Group (2) is making some progress, but then they're left with a system they don't understand because they didn't engineer it.
Dorks like Kurtzweil seem to think that as soon as we can fit as much compute power into one chip as we GUESS is in the brain, we'll magically get sentient robots. That's bullshit. We need software systems that learn and adapt, and we just haven't figured out how to make those.
Plenty of good arguments have been made about Apple wanting to keep tight control over their walled garden, those being the reasons for some missing features.
But keep in mind that this is also the first-generation of this product line. Trying to cram too many features in all at once is a recipe for disaster. It's important for engineers to set reasonable goals to strive for. Incremental development is easier to develop and most importantly easier to debug.
If Apple had tried to pack in the 10000 additional features people are demanding, the iPad would not have been out for a few more years. Instead, Apple has gotten a product to market. And plenty of people will buy it. Revenue can be reinvested into developing the second and third generation products. Just as recent flash-based iPods are more sophisticated and powerful than the very first ones based on mechanical hard drives, later generations of the iPad will be more capable and more elegant.
Perhaps in 5 or 10 years a later generation iPad will be appealing to more of us geeks. Perhaps not. I think MY next Apple purchase will be a 17" MacBook Pro. Because what I need is more like a desktop system I can carry around. YMMV.
Seriously, when I was in high school, I was THE nerd. If you asked someone who was the nerd in my school, they would tell you it was me. So I really understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of bullying.
But unlike most of you social retards (I'm trying to sound like a jerk to drive home the point emotionally as well as intellectually), I eventually developed social skills. It happened in my 20's, but it eventually happened. I learned to pay attention to people's feelings and not stomp on them. I learned to consider the consequences of my actions and not take action that bothered people.
See, the thing is, I wasn't just picked on by bullies. I was picked on by EVERYONE. Why? Because I was obnoxious. I irritated the hell out of them. I behaved strangely. I only ever talked about computers. I thought that if I didn't intend harm, then there couldn't possibly BE any harm, so anyone objection to anything I did was just being a jerk.
Growing up is hard, and it involves realizing that there are other people in the world besides yourself and that you have to take an active role in making room for those other people. If you don't, they will ostracize you. It's as simple as that. You can be yourself, you can be weird, and you can have your geeky interests. No one's saying that you have to pretend to be not a geek. They're just saying that you have to learn to treat other people with respect.
Of course, the problem with most of you people here on slashdot is that you have had it beaten into you that you're obnoxious, and you just don't CARE. And so you are the TRUE bullies. The bullies in high school are often abused kids who are acting out against a world that is hostile to them, so they pick on the weaker people to make themselves feel better. But they're usually not very self-aware. They don't have the mens rea, so to speak. They're like animals who realize only on a rudimentary level that they're hurting people. This is also true of most nerds. The bullies and the nerds share this lack of awareness of other people's space. The truly evil ones are the nerds who eventually realize why people don't like them and keep doing it anyway because it's fun to be an asshole.
People need to learn to respect others and take responsibility for their actions. Grow up and start acting like a member of the human race and not some kind of pseudo-superior schmuck with a god complex.
Ever watch "Bones"? The TV show with David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, where they're a bunch of forensic anthropologists. There was this one moment that really pissed me off, because Bones (Dr. Brennan) can be such an ass. (Occasionally, I suspend reality and get caught up in the story. I'm also married, which means I have sex and know something about compromise. It also affects what TV shows I watch.) The characters were commenting about how a bunch of the people working there were geniuses. And then Brennan says "except Angela." Now, the thing is, this was just Brennan being her usual intellectual, socially unaware self. She didn't MEAN anything mean by it. But it was a terribly mean thing to say. And it was also quite wrong. On numerous occasions, Angela had given psychologists like Sweets a run for their money. She's not trained as a psychologist. This stuff just comes naturally. She's a SOCIAL genius.
Why am I taking a tangent into prime-time TV? Because it's a good example of what happens in reality. We technical geeks think we're such hot shit because we can compile Linux kernels. Meanwhile, we alienate anyone who can't. We act like the only kind of genius is the computer nerd. We forget that there are people whose intelligence is as great as ours, just directed at other things. And I don't mean just things like math and physics. Linguists and psychologists count too. And people who know how to make a lot of friends.
Where do you think Steve Jobs' RDF comes from? He's a brilliant social manipulator. He's also very aware of what people want, what t
There are some theories that there are immune-related problems that occur in people with autism spectrum disorder, which make the symptoms worse. This is supported by the fact that some people with ASD have symtoms reduced or even eliminated by removing things like wheat and dairy from their diets. Both are common food allergens, and of course, gluten plays a major role in an auto-immune disease, celiac. People with mild food alergies sometimes have what appear to be mild symptoms, but it keeps their immune system tied up, making it difficult to fight off other infections.
So the theory goes that vaccines are fine. The problem is that if you give too many at once, the immune system and the liver (processing toxins) are overwhemled and it takes a long time to get over it. If you were to spread out the vaccines, then they'd have less trouble.
This theory seems to be held by a lot of alternative medical practioners... DO's, nutritionists, etc. I know one nutritionist who refuses to have her kids vaccinated. I'm definitely going to have mine vaccinated, but I may see about having them spread out, even if costs more. Why not be cautious?
It has to do with my particular combination of strengths and weaknesses. For the most part, I don't prefer command-line tools over _good_ GUI tools. But there are a few I know well and prefer to use simply because they're familiar. For instance, I'd rather use a GUI client for email and RSS feeds. But I'd rather use the command line to compile a C++ program I just wrote. I use graphical editors, but I'm generally not helped a lot by IDEs (except in the case of Java because its class structure for things like Swing are like 1000 levels deep).
Also, this may be more useful to you: There are lots of things that should "just work" and do 99.99% of the time. But sometimes something breaks for reasons beyond the control of the OS. For instance, I might have trouble connecting to a wireless router because the router sucks. I don't expect the graphical tools to handle every corner case. So in that case, I google what to do and have to use the command line to probe this or that.
So, when it's possible to do something automatically or through a GUI, then I prefer it that way. Doing everything by command-line is dull and requires too much memorization. But for the occasional behind-the scenes hack, I don't mind it, and there are a few cases where I do prefer it.
Why do I prefer UNIX? I'm used to it. And yes, it's not Windows. Windows does things that seem really CP/M to me, like drive letters. Just a personal preference, but they seem cheesy, because directory mount points are more general. There's also the backslash for directory separation. I don't like that either, but no huge reason. And then there's the general unix philosophy that allows connecting programs together through stdio. It's namespace collapsing, making a system simpler yet more powerful at the same time. Like "cat file | sort | uniq | something" or "cat/dev/cdrom | bzip2 > someimage.iso.bz2". I'd mention cool/proc stuff, but MacOS sadly doesn't have that. Anyhow, Windows gives a lot of that, but it all feels like an afterthought.
There's nothing that Apple Mail gives you that Thunderbird doesn't. Lots of people use Thunderbird on MacOS. The only advantage of Apple Mail is integration with the OS (like data detectors, iCal, Contacts, Spotlight). For features, it's not as good, but it's intuitive and adequate for most uses.
Another advantage to "UNIX" is under the surface. Outside of the NT kernel (which itself is really quite good), Windows' dependency graph is a huge mess with lots of cycles. UNIXes, perhaps by accident, are a lot cleaner. This makes the OS as a whole more stable and easier to secure.
One of the major conundra of Windows has been backward compatibility. When MS breaks compatibility, they get hell for it. But this also ties their hands when it comes to making certain kinds of stability and security improvements. Steve Jobs somehow uses his RDF to make his followers believe that breaking compatibility is okay. And indeed, once we get over the pain of having to wait for various programs to come out with updates (mostly hacky tools like Growl and iStat, not regular apps), things ARE better, because we were able to see some performance improvement or improved security or whatever.
Now, a lot of what I've said is rationalization. I didn't actually start using a Mac until 2007, but since then I've gotten used to it, and I like it. I'm comfortable with it. This is the same reason a lot of people stick with Windows. Familiarity. And honestly, I don't blame them. We can argue that MacOS is easier to learn, but this is true only for the complete novice. If you've spent the last 20 years using Windows, the moving from XP to 7 is probably going to be easier than moving form XP to MacOS.
Also, what you might see as potential contradictions in what I like in an OS is probably due to my background. When I finished my BS in Computer Engineering, I started out writing UNIX device drivers, followed quickly by designing chips. Now, I'm
I bought a high-end motherboard from MSI for almost $400. When I found a problem with one of their memory slots, I discovered just how terrible their customer service is.
The problem is that this model of board, MSI X48 Platinum, has a design flaw with its #2 memory slot. I tried memory from OCZ (who also has terrible customer service), Kingston (great customer service), and Crucial (fantastic customer service). All worked in slots 1, 3, and 4, but only the Crucial would work in slot 2, and only after I raised the supply voltage.
Whenever I could call for tech support, I would ALWAYS get a voice mail. There's like one guy working there. They usually would not return my calls. They had ONE other board of the same model in stock, which was WORSE and looked like it too had been a return.
So here's my take on all this. I will NEVER buy anything again from MSI. On the other hand, I have had a GREAT customer experience with Apple. Apples are NOT perfect. My wife and I have had problems with our notebook computers (although the iPods, iPhones, iMac, and AEBS have been flawless), but when you buy that AppleCare extended warranty, they REALLY take care of you. I don't care what kind of extended warranty MSI will offer. They're not going to give you good customer service.
Here's the story with my MacBook Pro. Read it how you like. I got it in January of 2007. A few months into owning it, I started having random wireless disconnects. Apple sent me a box to FedEx it, and the machine was out of my hands for maybe 36 hours. Other than that, the only problem was the issue with overheating that they all have. At the time, I didn't know about programs that will boost your fan speed. So I was using it to do SSE-heavy scientific computing for like 2 weeks straight in late 2007. I started noticing after that that after waking from suspend to RAM, there would be instability, like the memory had been corrupted. Apple and Crucial were happy to replace the RAMs, which fixed that problem. But then, it started ruining batteries. (I'm not on my 6th, and without AppleCare, they would have cost $113 each.) Instead of a graceful decline in capacity, they would suddenly lose power, shutting the machine down without warning. Every time a battery would get ruined, they would dutifully replace it for free and also suggest another way to try to narrow down the problem. Recently (Dec 2009, Jan 2010, when the thing is 3 years old), I started also experiencing kernel panics and other weird hangups. 10 days before my AppleCare is out, I get two panics within an hour, so I call them up. They send me a box the next day. When I get it back about 48 hours later, I find that they had replaced both the main board and the battery. And also, there had been a bit of floppiness in the hinge for the screen, which I didn't bother mentioning to them. They fixed that too. Now I have an extra 90 days on the warranty (at least for what they fixed anyhow), and it's in better shape than it's been in in a long time.
I like MacOS. Especially because it's UNIX. A lot of things "just work", but not everything, and at least the notebooks have some reliability problems. And the AppleCare cost like 10% on top of the base price. Although friends of mine haven't had as many problems. But when you do have the AppleCare, the customer service you get beats the hell out of what I've experienced from any other PC maker.
Arguably, Buddhism isn't a religion but a life philosophy, because it's orthogonal to religion and lots of people are Buddhists and something else at the same time. Nevertheless, many people claim it as a religion.
Hubbard was a quack, but he was (ostensibly) trying to develop psychological techniques to help people take control of their own lives. Keep in mind that lots of religion is based on junk psychology.
I've done some analysis of Scientology, and I've come to the opinion that it is indeed a religion. As long as the whole DC10 thing is taken as a metaphor, then the religion has a mythology not terribly unlike plenty of other respected religions.
That being said, Scientology is evil and causes a lot of damage. Big surprise there. Christianity did that in the middle ages, and Islam is doing it now. Religion is often an excuse to harm others. Scientology is only different in that they make more aggressive use of the court system to bury people who criticize them. Their intolerance of criticism is also not unique among religions.
All that being said, attacks against scientology may need to remain anonymous, but they should also remain LEGAL and ETHICAL. By breaking into the scientology computer system, this guy committed a CRIME and should be punished for it.
Ah, but the "victim" is evil. Does that make it okay? Well, tell me, is it okay for a vigilante to go around killing pedophiles? No. Pedophiles who molest people are sick, sick people. And if you believe in capital punishment, perhaps some of them should be sentenced to death for their crimes. But that isn't the individual's decision to make. A JURY should make that decision. The individual, however, is certainly free to FIND pedophiles and report illegal behavior to the police, community organizations, etc. This is how scientology should be treated -- they should be investigated like criminals and prosecuted by the courts.
Remember, it's possible that YOU might some day be accused of a crime. If you're innocent, then you want the system to work in your favor so that you are found not guilty. However, the risk to being cautious like this is that some guilty people will be treated with too much respect and may not be found guilty of their crimes. What's better, guilty people free, or innocent people in jail?
I had positive feelings about Anonymous at the beginning. Scientologists deserve to be intimidated. They intimidate everyone else! But I fear that Anonymous are turning out to be a bunch of disorganized quacks with questionable ethics.
I keep seeing this on the internet. Some anti-X group forms, trying to make themselves out to be fighting for the truth. But anti-X just turned out to be a vocal minority of a bunch of paranoid lunatics. It doesn't matter if X is good or bad. If you do bad things to try to TRICK everyone into thinking X is bad (because for some reason, the truth isn't enough?) then you're worse than what you're fighting against.
Up to ARM7, the multiplier was single-cycle. It was pipelined in later designs. Either way, due to the architecture, multiply and barrel shift are the same speed on ARM.
When Pystar first brought a machine on the market, it became quickly clear that their hardware was junk and they didn't know what they were doing. IIRC, one early reviewer bought a machine and found that it was unstable because they had OVERCLOCKED IT.
Having experimented (and failed) with overclocking myself, spending lots of time reading and dicussing on forums issues like Vdroop, Vgtl, Vdd, multiplier ratios, etc., etc., I can tell you that running a processor out of spec is challenging because you don't know where in that processor's performance bin you are, and your results are almost guaranteed to be different from someone else's, and Intel Quad cores are notoriously hard to overclock, and well it boils down to more of an art form of experimentation and testing than science because you can't get Intel to tell you the actual characteristics of the chip you bought. And moreover, you can run all the artificial tests you want and still end up with an unreliable system because memtest86 and prime95 don't test all the corner cases and enough combinations of scenarios. (I had run memory and processor tests for a week straight, and everything seemed fine, yet I would get kernel panics while parallel compiling Gentoo packages. I could just never manage to figure out the right combination of Vdd and Vgtl, and I could never for sure rule out the memory system being the source of the errors. So I just decided that I'd rather have a reliable system and longer life than 20% more throughput.)
It's irresponsible for vendors to sell you an overclocked system, because they can't guarantee that it's reliable. Rather, they are fooling you into thinking you're getting a better system than you are, ripping you off in the process. This is just one example of the many incompetent and/or highly questionable things that Pystar was doing that made me want to stay as far away from them as possible.
It would be one thing if this company tried to produce BETTER hardware than Apple. Trouble is, that would require intelligence and discerment, and people with that kind of smarts would also have been smart enough not to screw with Apple directly.
If I wanted to sell knock-off Apple hardware here's how I might go about it:
- Find a way to become an Apple reseller with minimal contractual obligations. This way, you can sell MacOS X discs without raising any major suspicions. - Sell and support genuine Apple hardware. - Also sell and support high quality Linux and Windows white-box PCs that just happen to have peripherals compatible with MacOS X. - Add development support to an open source EFI project - Let word of mouth get around that your systems are good for running MacOS - But publically state that you do not provide OS support in this configuration because it may violate Apple's EULA. - Get your lawyers to make sure you have plausible deniability every way you turn.
All of this requires forethought (or hindsight in my case). Pystar clearly did not have this. (I might not either. I might have just suggested a really bad plan.)
But like I say, the main thing that bothered me about them is that their hardware was crap. It's one thing to ride on Apple's shoulders. Directly supporting OSX but on GOOD hardware is arguably questionable, from a legal standpoint. It's entirely another matter to do incompetent things that could make them look bad. That'll REALLY get them chasing after you.
I've never really understood the whole hacking culture in the first place. People don't want to buy iPhones because they're not hackable enough. Ok, I support Free Software, so I can totally get on board with avoiding something that's proprietary and has DRM and all that. But even if the iPhone were 100% open source, it still would not interest me to hack it. I'm a professional chip designer. I like designing NEW hardware. I like being given an engineering challenge that requires that I create new functionality to serve a market need. I have no desire to confine myself to the spe
Ever been to a mechanic? Do you know how much they charge for hour? The one I go to charges $80/hour. Of course, they do a good job, and as far as I can tell, they don't charge me for more hours than they actually performed labor on my car. The key point is that they charge $80/hour. Why?
- Employee salaries - Management salaries - Owner's cut - Building overhead - Warranty margin (so that at an average failure rate, mistakes don't turn into a net loss) - Profit margin - "Discount" margin (for people who try to dicker the cost down) - Coupon margin - Oil change margin (they make zero profit from oil changes, so they have to make up for it elsewhere) - Oops I screwed up margin (sometimes when a customer is really unhappy, you discount at least the whole labor charge) - Insurance
They have a business to run. To do that, they have to charge you for parts and labor. Otherwise what's the point? Also, it's a needed service. People have cars that break, and not everyone knows how to fix their car.
At a repair shop, however, the technicians have to be licensed. They're professionals that went to a trade school and passed standardized tests to make sure they have at least a passing knowledge of what they're doing. Also, many mechanics I've met are enthusiasts who grew up in the field and work on their own cards on their own time.
Now, let's talk about Best Buy. They are a business. They need to make a profit. They also offer a valuable service, selling and repairing computers. As with cars, most of the customers are clueless and desperate to have their computer working again. They also expect to pay high margins for the services, because that's what they observe when they go to mechanics and have appliance repairmen come their houses. They grumble and go on with their lives. Meanwhile, Best Buy continues to make a profit and function as a business that employs people and offeres products and services that people demand.
One difference is that the technicians that Best Buy hires are not trained professionals. They're people hired off the street, and there is no training program or educational requirement. There are training materials, but they're not given time on the job to read them. The employees also make less money than mechanics, yet Best Buy charges more per hour for their services. They're also desperate to get business, so they offer gimmicks like this "tune-up service". There's also no liability, and the consumer protection laws that apply are the general ones, none specific to the field, dealing with specific problems that occur in the area. Thus, they can play on people's ignorance and get away with it. So, it is unethical and unfair, but the fact is, many people would be SoL were it not for Geek Squad.
(BTW, if you want to read about one horror story from a Geek Squad employee, check here: http://consumerist.com/2007/04/insider-secrets-5-ways-best-buy-ruined-geek-squad.html#comments-content)
Eh. I bought some Verbatim DVD-R's from Best Buy. They weren't too badly priced. Certainly better than at Staples. And I couldn't get Verbatim's from Target. And moreover, I didn't want to drive all the way to Microcenter.
Read the comments on this article. Only one article is from a prestigious, and the article is not about the obvious thing but about the physiological underpinnings of the obvious thing. It's not the obvious thing that's interesting but the mechanism behind it that was not obvious.
You know what drives me nuts about science? The scientists. And the non-scientists. In other words, people. If it weren't for the people, better science would get done. People are motivated by selfish reasons like funding, tenure, respect of peers, fame, etc. As a grad student, basically what I do is come up with ideas so I can get published. However, in order to get published, I do have to come up with something innovative and useful (which is why I got into academics in the first place). Peer review is a good filter for a lot of junk science and just plain idiots that don't know how to do science but try to publish their junk anyhow. But then you have to deal with some reviewers who have biases too.
IIRC, NTFS is a descendent of something called HPFS, which is what IBM developed for OS/2. At least as recently as Win2K, Windows would mount and use HPFS partitons, and also I recall that Linux could read/write that as well. Look into that.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about. All modern operating systems halt the CPU and generally use all of the available CPU power states. This includes Windows. In fact, Windows is pretty damn good at it. Power management is one of the few things that Windows does well, at least as far back as Windows XP, if not 2000.
If Windows didn't use the halt instruction (the most primitive form of CPU power management), then Windows running in a VM would use 100% CPU all the time. It doesn't. When my Windows guest is idle, the VM process itself uses almost zero CPU.
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It's definitely cool to look at. I'll give you that. And it's cool that someone was able to take a concept involving both AI and robotics and actually build it to completion.
But from a computer science perspective, it's really not a huge deal. First off, although I personally would probably struggle a bit with the robotics because I don't do robotics, I know people who do, and they would find this robot to be mechanically rather trivial. Then the brains behind it, the algorithms to solve rubic's cubes, aren't all that tough either. Really, no one here would be all that impressed if this person solved the rubic's cube problem in simulation. Mostly because that's been done a thousand times.
So, what are we impressed by? The fact that someone put together two simple ideas? Or the fact that they had the drive to see it through and make it work and fully debug it, something that some of the rest of us probably lack?
Actually, someone will probably point out how this is not simulated annealing, but this is how I understand it. It's like a genetic algorithm, but with one population member. You start out with a "high temperature", where you try lots of random runingthings at once. Whenever some random combination makes things better, you keep it. Then you lower the temperature, which means you reduce the number that you try at once. Eventually, you're down to trying one random change at a time.
This "AI" technique is used for things like VLSI placement and routing. You have an N-dimentional circuit that you want to squeeze into basically a 2D space. (The placement is 2D, the routing is a bit more than that.) How do you find the optimal arrangement of gates and their interconnects? Well, optimal is NP-hard, so you can't do it for large circuits. So we use "randomized search". For placement, a random placement is selected, and a "fitness function" is applied. Then random swaps are performed, and when the fitness improves, keep the new placement. A similar thing is done for routing.
My specialization is low-power processor architecture, and so I quite familiar with soft errors (single event upsets). As transistors have gotten smaller, and the voltage has gone down, the probability of a soft error has gone up significantly. And as a result, error correction techniques are making their way into more commodity hardware. For instance, all flash drives now use at least SECDED, but many use BCH codes (e.g. Reed-Solomon). Still, the reason that we're paying attention to these is not that they're an every-day problem, but that the probability has gone up to the point that mean time between failures (single bit) has gone down from years to months. In your video game console, this isn't a problem, but in banking software, we need to be extra specially careful. As you add more and more bits to your DRAM, the probability of one bit being flipped doesn't go up much, but the probably of one of that huge number of bits being flipped becomes significant. (Like how evolution happens faster when you have larger populations.)
That all being said, by far and away, the more likely thing is programmer error. I can't tell you how many times I've want to blame mysterious bugs on soft errors. But so far, I've always been able to find the source of the problem as being my mistake (or someone else's). More over, even if you don't have ECC protection, soft errors are STILL no excuse, because there should be failsafes and sanity checks. Moreover, this is also true about programmer errors. Every system you deploy will have bugs, so oftentimes, you write more code to sanity-check the results of some other code, and if they disagree, you fall back to something very conservative.
I remember one time, I was writing a driver for a graphics card, and we found that every time someone would turn on this huge CRT we had, the software would crash. Basically, the EMP from the monitor degaussing would interfere with the PCI bus or something inside the chip, and we'd get back incorrect values from status registers. So we "hardened" it by triple-reading certain status registers and making sure to choose the most conservative value. Learning from that, we put in various other protections as well, whatever we could think of. After that, we were able to degauss that monitor all we wanted, and we never even saw drawing errors.
Oh, so since they screwed up, they're not going to be able to completely destroy Google, so they'll settle for even competition? It's this kind of thinking that's gotten Microsoft into trouble in the past, the philosophy that they can be the only one, so they have to destroy anything that remotely competes with them.
Many computer nerds like to tout themselves as geniuses who have flexible minds. But the truth is that we're all afraid of change. And this switch from KiB to KB is change. It's not what you're used to, so it's going to confuse you.
But as a geek myself with an obsession for clear and precise terminology, I welcome the change. No longer will I wonder if someone's talking about KB vs. KiB, because it'll be consistent and explicit, at least on the computer systems developed by flexible-enough-minded people who are both willing to change and willing to correct a long-confusing problem.
It's true that the HD makers have taken advantage of this confusion. Back in the day when people almost always said KB when they meant KiB, HD makers used KB. But the fact is, once we adapt our terminology to be less ambiguous, we really can't be mislead by them anymore, and their deceptive marketing practices will be moot (at least when it comes to bytes of storage).
So, to summarize, stop being a stick in the mud and learn to adapt to change. Computers are and always have been an aspect of change in our society. Get over it and get with the program.
It's amazing to me how every now and then, someone too clueless to just look at what's been done before redoes this same study and comes to the same conclusion. Teenagers have a shifted sleep schedule. Their internal clocks want to put them to sleep later but they need the same amount of sleep. So... if you put them in school a little later in the day, they handle it better, because they get more sleep.
I've been reading through a lot of the discussions on this article, and I see what I consider to be a blind knee-jerk reaction against the "evils" of religion. Now, probably a lot of you are in the "kill all the stupid people" camp. But for those of us who aren't in to mass murder, we believe that the world has a place for those who have lower IQs or just fundamentally must think about the world differently from those of us who understand what's going on when we compile a Linux kernel. We "rational" people are able to do things like ponder two contradictory ideas at once (well, some of us are), change our minds in the face of new evidence (ditto), and not assume that unexplained things must be driven by supernatural forces (is Linus an incarnation of Vishnu?). However, there are people who contribute meaningfully to our society that do not have the mental wetware to do these things. They may annoy you because they have to come to more primitive conclusions, but they have value like any other human being. And they have different intellectual needs. They NEED to believe that fact==truth and to have the truth handed to them by an authority. They cannot manage in the world in any other way. The effect of ripping away their religion would be to ruin their ability to function in the world. Some would just glom onto another religion. Some would go into deep depression and/or go insane. And some would just continue to believe in secret. But they will NEVER be able to grasp your world view. They simply cannot process the concepts, and you therefore cannot force them to.
If you want to have the right to believe in your "weird" way (face it, we geeks are a minority and most people don't understand us), then those "morons" should have the right to believe their weird stuff too. And frankly, your attempt to "enlighten" them is just shortsighted and unethical.
Sensationalism. This is the kind of sensationalism I used to get into, actually. OMG! GIMP antialiased lines look like ropes because they don't account for gamma properly! (I noticed that 10 years ago.)
Yeah, so what happens is that these apps scale the image with colors in luma space. In luma space, the color ramp of pixel values looks linear to the human eye. The thing is, the human eye is not linear, so it's technically incorrect to do linear math to combine pixel values in luma space.
Instead, we should be working in luminance space. Luminance is linear in terms of physical light intensity, and you can do linear math directly on luminance values and have them make physical sense.
The reason we use luma is because it's more compact to represent what you can SEE in a static image. What takes 8 bits in luma space requires 14 bits in luminance space to get the fine just noticable differences at the right end of the spectrum.
Most people who have some reasonably advanced education in graphics know ALL about this. And they also realize that it's just not worth worrying about most of the time. I've messed around with gamma-aware scaling, antialiasing, and dithering. Except for very rare circumstances, if you have fine-enough steps in your luma space, it's very difficult to tell the difference, if there even is any. Even dithering to a 6x6x6 color cube looks almost as good in luma as it does in luminance. The only situation where it's vital is if your color space is really small. For instance, if you wanted to dither a color image to a 2x2x2 color cube (8 colors), then ignoring gamma makes it look completely wrong.
I'll make a physics analogy. This guy is complaining that Newtonian mechanics is inaccurate compared to Einsteinian, except that we're dealing with speeds of 100s of miles per hour. Not going to make a noticable difference.
I wrote the linked article.
I completely agree that the article is narrowly focused. VERY narrow. My objective was to demonstrate a problem and point out that Linux has not FULLY adapted. I didn't say Linux devs were idiots or that it would never be ready. I was trying to express the idea that Linux [distros in general but perhaps not all] is not QUITE ready for these drives, because not all the tools have fully adapted. Some tools make no mention of any problems in their man pages. Some (like parted's defaults) are even misleading if you mistakenly think that "track aligned" is a good thing.
And I was trying to do that in the very limited number of words I had available for a title.
Also, WD claimed that Linux is unaffected. Some distros probably are, but this could lead people to believe that the statement is universally true, which it isn't. Thus, my over-all objective is to educate people to the fact that if they don't know what they're doing, they can get this wrong. There are lots of mistakes I've made where I wished that someone had mentioned some critical fact on a how-to (like, don't use dmraid/fakeraid for RAID1 because reads aren't load-balanced; use mdraid instead). I've filed plenty of bug reports on such issues.
When will AI surpass human intelligence? As soon as we figure out how to do artificial intelligence the way popular culture conceives of it.
There are two main areas of AI research, as I see it:
(1) Engineered intelligence. These systems learn, but they learn in carefully controlled structures, like Markov models and mapping functions in genetic algorithms.
(2) Emergent intelligence. These are based on evolving systems of simpler structures, like neural nets, and those little cooperating robots you keep hearing about. In some ways, since the intelligent behavior evolved over time, this is more akin to natural intelligence then artificial intelligence.
Neither group has really accomplished a hell of a lot. Speech recognition and computer vision still suck ass. Group (1) has been dominant since the idea of AI was developed, and frankly, they're not a millimeter closer to understanding how to build up a system that is intelligent, where you understand all the parts you built with. Group (2) is making some progress, but then they're left with a system they don't understand because they didn't engineer it.
Dorks like Kurtzweil seem to think that as soon as we can fit as much compute power into one chip as we GUESS is in the brain, we'll magically get sentient robots. That's bullshit. We need software systems that learn and adapt, and we just haven't figured out how to make those.
Plenty of good arguments have been made about Apple wanting to keep tight control over their walled garden, those being the reasons for some missing features.
But keep in mind that this is also the first-generation of this product line. Trying to cram too many features in all at once is a recipe for disaster. It's important for engineers to set reasonable goals to strive for. Incremental development is easier to develop and most importantly easier to debug.
If Apple had tried to pack in the 10000 additional features people are demanding, the iPad would not have been out for a few more years. Instead, Apple has gotten a product to market. And plenty of people will buy it. Revenue can be reinvested into developing the second and third generation products. Just as recent flash-based iPods are more sophisticated and powerful than the very first ones based on mechanical hard drives, later generations of the iPad will be more capable and more elegant.
Perhaps in 5 or 10 years a later generation iPad will be appealing to more of us geeks. Perhaps not. I think MY next Apple purchase will be a 17" MacBook Pro. Because what I need is more like a desktop system I can carry around. YMMV.
Wow. Just. Wow. You completely missed the whole point.
I was TRYING to be an ass. To emphasize my point. And apparently, it worked.
Seriously, when I was in high school, I was THE nerd. If you asked someone who was the nerd in my school, they would tell you it was me. So I really understand what it's like to be on the receiving end of bullying.
But unlike most of you social retards (I'm trying to sound like a jerk to drive home the point emotionally as well as intellectually), I eventually developed social skills. It happened in my 20's, but it eventually happened. I learned to pay attention to people's feelings and not stomp on them. I learned to consider the consequences of my actions and not take action that bothered people.
See, the thing is, I wasn't just picked on by bullies. I was picked on by EVERYONE. Why? Because I was obnoxious. I irritated the hell out of them. I behaved strangely. I only ever talked about computers. I thought that if I didn't intend harm, then there couldn't possibly BE any harm, so anyone objection to anything I did was just being a jerk.
Growing up is hard, and it involves realizing that there are other people in the world besides yourself and that you have to take an active role in making room for those other people. If you don't, they will ostracize you. It's as simple as that. You can be yourself, you can be weird, and you can have your geeky interests. No one's saying that you have to pretend to be not a geek. They're just saying that you have to learn to treat other people with respect.
Of course, the problem with most of you people here on slashdot is that you have had it beaten into you that you're obnoxious, and you just don't CARE. And so you are the TRUE bullies. The bullies in high school are often abused kids who are acting out against a world that is hostile to them, so they pick on the weaker people to make themselves feel better. But they're usually not very self-aware. They don't have the mens rea, so to speak. They're like animals who realize only on a rudimentary level that they're hurting people. This is also true of most nerds. The bullies and the nerds share this lack of awareness of other people's space. The truly evil ones are the nerds who eventually realize why people don't like them and keep doing it anyway because it's fun to be an asshole.
People need to learn to respect others and take responsibility for their actions. Grow up and start acting like a member of the human race and not some kind of pseudo-superior schmuck with a god complex.
Ever watch "Bones"? The TV show with David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, where they're a bunch of forensic anthropologists. There was this one moment that really pissed me off, because Bones (Dr. Brennan) can be such an ass. (Occasionally, I suspend reality and get caught up in the story. I'm also married, which means I have sex and know something about compromise. It also affects what TV shows I watch.) The characters were commenting about how a bunch of the people working there were geniuses. And then Brennan says "except Angela." Now, the thing is, this was just Brennan being her usual intellectual, socially unaware self. She didn't MEAN anything mean by it. But it was a terribly mean thing to say. And it was also quite wrong. On numerous occasions, Angela had given psychologists like Sweets a run for their money. She's not trained as a psychologist. This stuff just comes naturally. She's a SOCIAL genius.
Why am I taking a tangent into prime-time TV? Because it's a good example of what happens in reality. We technical geeks think we're such hot shit because we can compile Linux kernels. Meanwhile, we alienate anyone who can't. We act like the only kind of genius is the computer nerd. We forget that there are people whose intelligence is as great as ours, just directed at other things. And I don't mean just things like math and physics. Linguists and psychologists count too. And people who know how to make a lot of friends.
Where do you think Steve Jobs' RDF comes from? He's a brilliant social manipulator. He's also very aware of what people want, what t
There are some theories that there are immune-related problems that occur in people with autism spectrum disorder, which make the symptoms worse. This is supported by the fact that some people with ASD have symtoms reduced or even eliminated by removing things like wheat and dairy from their diets. Both are common food allergens, and of course, gluten plays a major role in an auto-immune disease, celiac. People with mild food alergies sometimes have what appear to be mild symptoms, but it keeps their immune system tied up, making it difficult to fight off other infections.
So the theory goes that vaccines are fine. The problem is that if you give too many at once, the immune system and the liver (processing toxins) are overwhemled and it takes a long time to get over it. If you were to spread out the vaccines, then they'd have less trouble.
This theory seems to be held by a lot of alternative medical practioners... DO's, nutritionists, etc. I know one nutritionist who refuses to have her kids vaccinated. I'm definitely going to have mine vaccinated, but I may see about having them spread out, even if costs more. Why not be cautious?
It has to do with my particular combination of strengths and weaknesses. For the most part, I don't prefer command-line tools over _good_ GUI tools. But there are a few I know well and prefer to use simply because they're familiar. For instance, I'd rather use a GUI client for email and RSS feeds. But I'd rather use the command line to compile a C++ program I just wrote. I use graphical editors, but I'm generally not helped a lot by IDEs (except in the case of Java because its class structure for things like Swing are like 1000 levels deep).
Also, this may be more useful to you: There are lots of things that should "just work" and do 99.99% of the time. But sometimes something breaks for reasons beyond the control of the OS. For instance, I might have trouble connecting to a wireless router because the router sucks. I don't expect the graphical tools to handle every corner case. So in that case, I google what to do and have to use the command line to probe this or that.
So, when it's possible to do something automatically or through a GUI, then I prefer it that way. Doing everything by command-line is dull and requires too much memorization. But for the occasional behind-the scenes hack, I don't mind it, and there are a few cases where I do prefer it.
Why do I prefer UNIX? I'm used to it. And yes, it's not Windows. Windows does things that seem really CP/M to me, like drive letters. Just a personal preference, but they seem cheesy, because directory mount points are more general. There's also the backslash for directory separation. I don't like that either, but no huge reason. And then there's the general unix philosophy that allows connecting programs together through stdio. It's namespace collapsing, making a system simpler yet more powerful at the same time. Like "cat file | sort | uniq | something" or "cat /dev/cdrom | bzip2 > someimage.iso.bz2". I'd mention cool /proc stuff, but MacOS sadly doesn't have that. Anyhow, Windows gives a lot of that, but it all feels like an afterthought.
There's nothing that Apple Mail gives you that Thunderbird doesn't. Lots of people use Thunderbird on MacOS. The only advantage of Apple Mail is integration with the OS (like data detectors, iCal, Contacts, Spotlight). For features, it's not as good, but it's intuitive and adequate for most uses.
Another advantage to "UNIX" is under the surface. Outside of the NT kernel (which itself is really quite good), Windows' dependency graph is a huge mess with lots of cycles. UNIXes, perhaps by accident, are a lot cleaner. This makes the OS as a whole more stable and easier to secure.
One of the major conundra of Windows has been backward compatibility. When MS breaks compatibility, they get hell for it. But this also ties their hands when it comes to making certain kinds of stability and security improvements. Steve Jobs somehow uses his RDF to make his followers believe that breaking compatibility is okay. And indeed, once we get over the pain of having to wait for various programs to come out with updates (mostly hacky tools like Growl and iStat, not regular apps), things ARE better, because we were able to see some performance improvement or improved security or whatever.
Now, a lot of what I've said is rationalization. I didn't actually start using a Mac until 2007, but since then I've gotten used to it, and I like it. I'm comfortable with it. This is the same reason a lot of people stick with Windows. Familiarity. And honestly, I don't blame them. We can argue that MacOS is easier to learn, but this is true only for the complete novice. If you've spent the last 20 years using Windows, the moving from XP to 7 is probably going to be easier than moving form XP to MacOS.
Also, what you might see as potential contradictions in what I like in an OS is probably due to my background. When I finished my BS in Computer Engineering, I started out writing UNIX device drivers, followed quickly by designing chips. Now, I'm
I bought a high-end motherboard from MSI for almost $400. When I found a problem with one of their memory slots, I discovered just how terrible their customer service is.
The problem is that this model of board, MSI X48 Platinum, has a design flaw with its #2 memory slot. I tried memory from OCZ (who also has terrible customer service), Kingston (great customer service), and Crucial (fantastic customer service). All worked in slots 1, 3, and 4, but only the Crucial would work in slot 2, and only after I raised the supply voltage.
Whenever I could call for tech support, I would ALWAYS get a voice mail. There's like one guy working there. They usually would not return my calls. They had ONE other board of the same model in stock, which was WORSE and looked like it too had been a return.
So here's my take on all this. I will NEVER buy anything again from MSI. On the other hand, I have had a GREAT customer experience with Apple. Apples are NOT perfect. My wife and I have had problems with our notebook computers (although the iPods, iPhones, iMac, and AEBS have been flawless), but when you buy that AppleCare extended warranty, they REALLY take care of you. I don't care what kind of extended warranty MSI will offer. They're not going to give you good customer service.
Here's the story with my MacBook Pro. Read it how you like. I got it in January of 2007. A few months into owning it, I started having random wireless disconnects. Apple sent me a box to FedEx it, and the machine was out of my hands for maybe 36 hours. Other than that, the only problem was the issue with overheating that they all have. At the time, I didn't know about programs that will boost your fan speed. So I was using it to do SSE-heavy scientific computing for like 2 weeks straight in late 2007. I started noticing after that that after waking from suspend to RAM, there would be instability, like the memory had been corrupted. Apple and Crucial were happy to replace the RAMs, which fixed that problem. But then, it started ruining batteries. (I'm not on my 6th, and without AppleCare, they would have cost $113 each.) Instead of a graceful decline in capacity, they would suddenly lose power, shutting the machine down without warning. Every time a battery would get ruined, they would dutifully replace it for free and also suggest another way to try to narrow down the problem. Recently (Dec 2009, Jan 2010, when the thing is 3 years old), I started also experiencing kernel panics and other weird hangups. 10 days before my AppleCare is out, I get two panics within an hour, so I call them up. They send me a box the next day. When I get it back about 48 hours later, I find that they had replaced both the main board and the battery. And also, there had been a bit of floppiness in the hinge for the screen, which I didn't bother mentioning to them. They fixed that too. Now I have an extra 90 days on the warranty (at least for what they fixed anyhow), and it's in better shape than it's been in in a long time.
I like MacOS. Especially because it's UNIX. A lot of things "just work", but not everything, and at least the notebooks have some reliability problems. And the AppleCare cost like 10% on top of the base price. Although friends of mine haven't had as many problems. But when you do have the AppleCare, the customer service you get beats the hell out of what I've experienced from any other PC maker.
Arguably, Buddhism isn't a religion but a life philosophy, because it's orthogonal to religion and lots of people are Buddhists and something else at the same time. Nevertheless, many people claim it as a religion.
Hubbard was a quack, but he was (ostensibly) trying to develop psychological techniques to help people take control of their own lives. Keep in mind that lots of religion is based on junk psychology.
I've done some analysis of Scientology, and I've come to the opinion that it is indeed a religion. As long as the whole DC10 thing is taken as a metaphor, then the religion has a mythology not terribly unlike plenty of other respected religions.
That being said, Scientology is evil and causes a lot of damage. Big surprise there. Christianity did that in the middle ages, and Islam is doing it now. Religion is often an excuse to harm others. Scientology is only different in that they make more aggressive use of the court system to bury people who criticize them. Their intolerance of criticism is also not unique among religions.
All that being said, attacks against scientology may need to remain anonymous, but they should also remain LEGAL and ETHICAL. By breaking into the scientology computer system, this guy committed a CRIME and should be punished for it.
Ah, but the "victim" is evil. Does that make it okay? Well, tell me, is it okay for a vigilante to go around killing pedophiles? No. Pedophiles who molest people are sick, sick people. And if you believe in capital punishment, perhaps some of them should be sentenced to death for their crimes. But that isn't the individual's decision to make. A JURY should make that decision. The individual, however, is certainly free to FIND pedophiles and report illegal behavior to the police, community organizations, etc. This is how scientology should be treated -- they should be investigated like criminals and prosecuted by the courts.
Remember, it's possible that YOU might some day be accused of a crime. If you're innocent, then you want the system to work in your favor so that you are found not guilty. However, the risk to being cautious like this is that some guilty people will be treated with too much respect and may not be found guilty of their crimes. What's better, guilty people free, or innocent people in jail?
I had positive feelings about Anonymous at the beginning. Scientologists deserve to be intimidated. They intimidate everyone else! But I fear that Anonymous are turning out to be a bunch of disorganized quacks with questionable ethics.
I keep seeing this on the internet. Some anti-X group forms, trying to make themselves out to be fighting for the truth. But anti-X just turned out to be a vocal minority of a bunch of paranoid lunatics. It doesn't matter if X is good or bad. If you do bad things to try to TRICK everyone into thinking X is bad (because for some reason, the truth isn't enough?) then you're worse than what you're fighting against.
Up to ARM7, the multiplier was single-cycle. It was pipelined in later designs. Either way, due to the architecture, multiply and barrel shift are the same speed on ARM.
When Pystar first brought a machine on the market, it became quickly clear that their hardware was junk and they didn't know what they were doing. IIRC, one early reviewer bought a machine and found that it was unstable because they had OVERCLOCKED IT.
Having experimented (and failed) with overclocking myself, spending lots of time reading and dicussing on forums issues like Vdroop, Vgtl, Vdd, multiplier ratios, etc., etc., I can tell you that running a processor out of spec is challenging because you don't know where in that processor's performance bin you are, and your results are almost guaranteed to be different from someone else's, and Intel Quad cores are notoriously hard to overclock, and well it boils down to more of an art form of experimentation and testing than science because you can't get Intel to tell you the actual characteristics of the chip you bought. And moreover, you can run all the artificial tests you want and still end up with an unreliable system because memtest86 and prime95 don't test all the corner cases and enough combinations of scenarios. (I had run memory and processor tests for a week straight, and everything seemed fine, yet I would get kernel panics while parallel compiling Gentoo packages. I could just never manage to figure out the right combination of Vdd and Vgtl, and I could never for sure rule out the memory system being the source of the errors. So I just decided that I'd rather have a reliable system and longer life than 20% more throughput.)
It's irresponsible for vendors to sell you an overclocked system, because they can't guarantee that it's reliable. Rather, they are fooling you into thinking you're getting a better system than you are, ripping you off in the process. This is just one example of the many incompetent and/or highly questionable things that Pystar was doing that made me want to stay as far away from them as possible.
It would be one thing if this company tried to produce BETTER hardware than Apple. Trouble is, that would require intelligence and discerment, and people with that kind of smarts would also have been smart enough not to screw with Apple directly.
If I wanted to sell knock-off Apple hardware here's how I might go about it:
- Find a way to become an Apple reseller with minimal contractual obligations. This way, you can sell MacOS X discs without raising any major suspicions.
- Sell and support genuine Apple hardware.
- Also sell and support high quality Linux and Windows white-box PCs that just happen to have peripherals compatible with MacOS X.
- Add development support to an open source EFI project
- Let word of mouth get around that your systems are good for running MacOS
- But publically state that you do not provide OS support in this configuration because it may violate Apple's EULA.
- Get your lawyers to make sure you have plausible deniability every way you turn.
All of this requires forethought (or hindsight in my case). Pystar clearly did not have this. (I might not either. I might have just suggested a really bad plan.)
But like I say, the main thing that bothered me about them is that their hardware was crap. It's one thing to ride on Apple's shoulders. Directly supporting OSX but on GOOD hardware is arguably questionable, from a legal standpoint. It's entirely another matter to do incompetent things that could make them look bad. That'll REALLY get them chasing after you.
I've never really understood the whole hacking culture in the first place. People don't want to buy iPhones because they're not hackable enough. Ok, I support Free Software, so I can totally get on board with avoiding something that's proprietary and has DRM and all that. But even if the iPhone were 100% open source, it still would not interest me to hack it. I'm a professional chip designer. I like designing NEW hardware. I like being given an engineering challenge that requires that I create new functionality to serve a market need. I have no desire to confine myself to the spe
Ever been to a mechanic? Do you know how much they charge for hour? The one I go to charges $80/hour. Of course, they do a good job, and as far as I can tell, they don't charge me for more hours than they actually performed labor on my car. The key point is that they charge $80/hour. Why?
- Employee salaries
- Management salaries
- Owner's cut
- Building overhead
- Warranty margin (so that at an average failure rate, mistakes don't turn into a net loss)
- Profit margin
- "Discount" margin (for people who try to dicker the cost down)
- Coupon margin
- Oil change margin (they make zero profit from oil changes, so they have to make up for it elsewhere)
- Oops I screwed up margin (sometimes when a customer is really unhappy, you discount at least the whole labor charge)
- Insurance
They have a business to run. To do that, they have to charge you for parts and labor. Otherwise what's the point? Also, it's a needed service. People have cars that break, and not everyone knows how to fix their car.
At a repair shop, however, the technicians have to be licensed. They're professionals that went to a trade school and passed standardized tests to make sure they have at least a passing knowledge of what they're doing. Also, many mechanics I've met are enthusiasts who grew up in the field and work on their own cards on their own time.
Now, let's talk about Best Buy. They are a business. They need to make a profit. They also offer a valuable service, selling and repairing computers. As with cars, most of the customers are clueless and desperate to have their computer working again. They also expect to pay high margins for the services, because that's what they observe when they go to mechanics and have appliance repairmen come their houses. They grumble and go on with their lives. Meanwhile, Best Buy continues to make a profit and function as a business that employs people and offeres products and services that people demand.
One difference is that the technicians that Best Buy hires are not trained professionals. They're people hired off the street, and there is no training program or educational requirement. There are training materials, but they're not given time on the job to read them. The employees also make less money than mechanics, yet Best Buy charges more per hour for their services. They're also desperate to get business, so they offer gimmicks like this "tune-up service". There's also no liability, and the consumer protection laws that apply are the general ones, none specific to the field, dealing with specific problems that occur in the area. Thus, they can play on people's ignorance and get away with it. So, it is unethical and unfair, but the fact is, many people would be SoL were it not for Geek Squad.
(BTW, if you want to read about one horror story from a Geek Squad employee, check here: http://consumerist.com/2007/04/insider-secrets-5-ways-best-buy-ruined-geek-squad.html#comments-content)
Eh. I bought some Verbatim DVD-R's from Best Buy. They weren't too badly priced. Certainly better than at Staples. And I couldn't get Verbatim's from Target. And moreover, I didn't want to drive all the way to Microcenter.
Read the comments on this article. Only one article is from a prestigious, and the article is not about the obvious thing but about the physiological underpinnings of the obvious thing. It's not the obvious thing that's interesting but the mechanism behind it that was not obvious.
You know what drives me nuts about science? The scientists. And the non-scientists. In other words, people. If it weren't for the people, better science would get done. People are motivated by selfish reasons like funding, tenure, respect of peers, fame, etc. As a grad student, basically what I do is come up with ideas so I can get published. However, in order to get published, I do have to come up with something innovative and useful (which is why I got into academics in the first place). Peer review is a good filter for a lot of junk science and just plain idiots that don't know how to do science but try to publish their junk anyhow. But then you have to deal with some reviewers who have biases too.
IIRC, NTFS is a descendent of something called HPFS, which is what IBM developed for OS/2. At least as recently as Win2K, Windows would mount and use HPFS partitons, and also I recall that Linux could read/write that as well. Look into that.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about. All modern operating systems halt the CPU and generally use all of the available CPU power states. This includes Windows. In fact, Windows is pretty damn good at it. Power management is one of the few things that Windows does well, at least as far back as Windows XP, if not 2000.
If Windows didn't use the halt instruction (the most primitive form of CPU power management), then Windows running in a VM would use 100% CPU all the time. It doesn't. When my Windows guest is idle, the VM process itself uses almost zero CPU.
Where do you get your information from!?