"Windows: A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen bit patch to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition."
Apple should embrace mac cloners. Having cheaper clones of mac will only help to popularize macs and the os-x operating system
The problem there is, I'm pretty sure selling Mac OS isn't anywhere near as profitable as selling their higher-end computers.
Once Mac OS comes pre-installed onto a $300 Netbook, their thin share of the laptop market will dissolve. Once Mac OS comes pre-installed on a $250 desktop available at Best Buy - their thin market share of desktops will also disappear. At this point, Apple becomes a software company. Apple also has to figure out how to 'water down' and support Mac OS X since now it would run on almost *every* consumer computer imaginable (eg. Target Firewire disk mode would probably disappear)... Apple is used to working inside of its tiny ecosystem and when it loses that control, they are going to have to lower their apparent quality standards.
I *really* want to believe this, but I think the primary rationale for the Starter Edition is the rampant piracy in countries where Windows SE is offered.
I think you have more of a point with the extension of XP, but don't forget Vista also runs like crap on many netbooks; Keeping XP around seems like a natural response, despite Linux.
I *know* Linux has had some influence concerning these things, but the amount of credit you're giving it is over zealous, IMO.
I don't understand how the comment has been construed as "racist" or even "racially biased" beyond mentioning "latina" and "white male" in the same sentence.
Let's say we leave race out of it... If I were to say "I would hope that a wise person with the richness of their experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than another person who hasn't lived that life.", would you not agree? Why does this suddenly become racist by specifying that the experienced person in this scenario is a latina and the inexperienced person is white? Are inexperienced people not allowed to be white? Are wise, experienced people not allowed to be hispanic?
Maybe she's not modest by implying she's wise and rich with experience, but she in no way said its because she's hispanic. Also, if you believe she was being racist, then she is most certainly sexist - latina is specifically female and she compares that specifically against out 'white male'... I guess no one cares about that though, eh?
I feel sorry that our officials have to walk on egg shells throughout their entire careers, instead of focusing on their jobs.
The guy forgot just one important thing: Most people don't use Firefox.
Regardless of whether or not it is not more than half of web surfers, plenty of people use it. In fact, the percentage is so large, 'most' is moot. Most surveys show at least 30% market share.
Also, the number of FF users isn't worth bringing up anyhow - This article in no way says, "Teh Interwebs as we know it are ovur!". TFA simply says that this is a good STEP toward a more democratic web, although the TFS certainly sensationalized it quite a bit.
Numbers really don't matter here. What *does* matter though, is the idea that Jetpack has indirectly brought with it -- more control over web content. This will undoubtedly spread to other browsers in the form of plugins and such, making browser market share irrelevant.
As pointed out above, not all solid state storage is 'flash'. Other technologies such as phase-change memory may have lifetime write cycles in the hundreds of millions per cell. Whether that's a viable technology... well, that's not the point.:)
Every transistor in single cell flash (Flash-based HDD replacements) can be written to hundreds of thousands of times. Firmware logic makes certain to distribute writes evenly across the device.
I'm sure there will be plenty of fallacy in my bad math and short-sighted reasoning, but let's pretend we have a flash SSD that is 64 gigabytes in size. That's about 512,000,000,000 bits (cells/transistors) total.
Also, let's say our flash has a pretty speedy 100MB/sec sustained throughput... And let's make this a perfect world where our transfer rate is always at its sustained peak. That's about 640 seconds to completely use every single transistor on our flash device.
I'd say that sounds just fine for consumer use, considering how extreme the situation is... I wouldn't even expect your average prosumer to have issues with their flash drive for at least the first decade.
where there are multiple INDEPENDANT heads reading/writing on multiple platters all at the same time
The entire idea of 'heads' should be forgotten. Mechanical drives should be sent to oblivion and we should welcome your idea of parallelism on solid state solutions.
I know people are going to argue that cellular wireless suffers from awful latency, making this completely unviable for anything but light web surfing...
I'd like to preemptively note that I've heard HSDPA has very good latency for wireless... at least on paper.
This is merely anecdotal, I also hear others talking about 60-80ms latency, which is *great* compared to other common cellular data technologies such as Edge and 3G. It might not be perfect for gaming, but it should be suitable for multimedia providing the cellular network has the balls to handle it.
Some phones already have the HSDPA 7.2Mbps capability. AT&T has just neutered their firmware through various settings. Luckily, for some phones, you can just revert these settings, and in some places, receive 7.2Mbps today.
For example, the HTC Fuze/Touch Pro can do 7.2Mbps after some registry tweaks.
*It's probably important to note that this does not include the iPhone: For those of you who own an iPhone, read this and get the warm fuzzies in your pants...:-) It simply doesn't have the hardware for it.
"in which he likened the site 'to a hotel or motel owner that knows prostitution is going on on their premises and fails to do anything about it especially after having been told."
Yes, a hotel with 100,000,000 rooms. Brilliant analogy.
This is a perfect opportunity for law enforcement to USE CRAIGSLIST TO BUST THESE PEOPLE. Don't shut it down -- use it to your advantage! These 'criminals' will just go elsewhere and shutting down Craigslist is as effective as shutting down Pacific Blvd. after 9PM... In other words: ineffectual
He's no Bill Gates, but I'm sure he's doing pretty well.
"Last year, the company took in $25 million in revenue, but it has the page views to earn much more. Craigslist is the seventh-most-viewed site online, according to Comcscore, yet it only makes money from fees for posting some apartment listings in New York and job listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York."
Three LAws of Robotics 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The very first law listed is the reason those 'morals' won't work, since autonomous robots will be used FIRST in military... It is quite inevitable.
Tiered data plans are no surprise at all, since Apple is supposed to release tethering capabilities with the new iPhone firmware. The average net usage on an iPhone is substantially lower than that of almost any laptop user and like it or not, AT&T will charge more... a LOT more. Heh.
I agree with tiered pricing, in a sense. People who check their email 3 times a week and look for coupons occasionally shouldn't pay as much as the guy next door downloading 1080p movies from Bittorrent. However, the amount that companies WANT to charge you for REAL, UNLIMITED data is in the hundreds... For tiered pricing to make sense, we need to have reasonable prices.
How about audio applications? If you want an audio interface for your laptop, you're almost always better off buying a Firewire model than a USB one; but also for many desktop applications Firewire can fit the bill over PCI/PCI-E. Plenty of the audio gear companies (M-Audio, RME, MOTU, Tascam) of course are still putting out new models using Firewire now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I like Firewire and especially as of a few years ago, it's (finally) ubiquitously included with decent PCs/System boards and pretty much every Mac.
However, I'm concerned about the future of it. When Apple did not include FW ports on their Macbooks several months ago, I wondered what this meant for Firewire. They also didn't include them on the Air.
Firewire is Apple's brainchild and they've been pushing it for a decade, but what was the motivation for this? I like to think maybe it was to entice people to purchase the Macbook Pro (which still has FW800 ports) -- No, actually I don't like to think that -- but at least it isn't the other potential reason: The end of Firewire.
despite the fact that surviving the initial blast represents less increased risk of cancer than smoking cigarettes or having a poor diet
Cancer isn't the killer, it's acute radiation poisoning which sterilizes your gonads, destroys your digestive system and reduces or eliminates your ability to create new blood cells.
I guess all of this really depends on the size of the dirty bomb, but at the very least it doesn't take much to make people violently ill.
Vizio is not included with any version of Microsoft Office, but Draw is an alternative to MS Publisher (which DOES come with Office Professional). Sure, Draw is substantially different than Publisher IMO, but it's competing for the same mind share.
I love OO -- Writer is a fantastic word processor. There are even certain things it does better IMO (the way it handles containers/tables, built-in PDF support and support for alternative formats among other things...)
But OO just isn't suitable to compete against MSO Professional for people who actually use the extra junk that Professional comes with. There's no Outlook alternative, for example. Using Thunderbird as an IMAP alternative does *email* fine, but you can forget meeting scheduling, calendaring, sharing contacts and tons of other junk. (including a lot of proprietary MS BS) People really do use this stuff though.
While I believe Writer is the most viable alternative to anything in the MSO suite, it too, has its shortcomings. MSO takes the lead in usability and polish with things like grammar checking, being able to hold the Shift + CTRL keys and selecting separate swaths of text or cells at once, commenting is clearer and more visible and so many other 'little things'.
I think the bottom-line is though, OO does everything *most* people (Read: Home users & some businesses) need out of the box... and it's free.
Imagine the ability to make a tank look like a heavy truck at a distance(say to a drone)
While that may work really well with people and detection systems that depend on light, it's probably worth pointing out that these metamaterials will probably have little affect on other methods of detection, such as radar and infrared, for example.
Metamaterials are synthetic substances that can steer light in any way imaginable
As I understand it, Drones have do have infrared cameras (as an example). Of course, that doesn't make much difference if the ground pilot is navigating entirely by the visible light camera and has to switch modes or something, but I'm not really sure how that stuff works. I think it's worth considering, though.
Something else too, I imagine many autonomous systems we have / develop probably don't / won't depend on visible light either.
I wonder how metamaterials affect other, invisible parts of the spectrum?
Deuterium doesn't decay, at least not on any observable time scale. So "relative to deuterium", anything that does decay is much more radioactive. This includes such notable elements as Bismuth, used in Pepto-Bismol, and Tungsten, used in lightbulb filaments. Nevermind such notables as Americium in smoke detectors.
At the time of this post, the parent is rated 4, funny.
It was a pretty serious post, so I ask, was this modded funny because Pepto-Bismol is hilariously pink?
Or.. maybe it was a vaguely loose connection to the zany irony of Americium (which sounds nothing like America) being used in smoke detectors, being that the U.S. is the 4 largest tobacco producer?
Hey, perhaps it was even the bumper crop of laughs that using "Tungsten" provides since it shares the same name as a Palm PDA device? Was it really that side splitting? I just don't get it.:\
It is still difficult for me to imagine something as energetic as a lightning bolt not burning a human being to a crisp on the basis that they are reasonably conductive... But very interesting. Thank you for the gem.
Slashdot Mirror
Rare? If that's the case, then at least we know it is NOT Pb. There's plenty of that stuff to go around, apparently.
Then do it.. and offer it for free.
"Windows: A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen bit patch to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition."
Apple should embrace mac cloners. Having cheaper clones of mac will only help to popularize macs and the os-x operating system
The problem there is, I'm pretty sure selling Mac OS isn't anywhere near as profitable as selling their higher-end computers.
Once Mac OS comes pre-installed onto a $300 Netbook, their thin share of the laptop market will dissolve. Once Mac OS comes pre-installed on a $250 desktop available at Best Buy - their thin market share of desktops will also disappear. At this point, Apple becomes a software company. Apple also has to figure out how to 'water down' and support Mac OS X since now it would run on almost *every* consumer computer imaginable (eg. Target Firewire disk mode would probably disappear)... Apple is used to working inside of its tiny ecosystem and when it loses that control, they are going to have to lower their apparent quality standards.
I *really* want to believe this, but I think the primary rationale for the Starter Edition is the rampant piracy in countries where Windows SE is offered.
I think you have more of a point with the extension of XP, but don't forget Vista also runs like crap on many netbooks; Keeping XP around seems like a natural response, despite Linux.
I *know* Linux has had some influence concerning these things, but the amount of credit you're giving it is over zealous, IMO.
I don't understand how the comment has been construed as "racist" or even "racially biased" beyond mentioning "latina" and "white male" in the same sentence.
Let's say we leave race out of it... If I were to say "I would hope that a wise person with the richness of their experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than another person who hasn't lived that life.", would you not agree? Why does this suddenly become racist by specifying that the experienced person in this scenario is a latina and the inexperienced person is white? Are inexperienced people not allowed to be white? Are wise, experienced people not allowed to be hispanic?
Maybe she's not modest by implying she's wise and rich with experience, but she in no way said its because she's hispanic. Also, if you believe she was being racist, then she is most certainly sexist - latina is specifically female and she compares that specifically against out 'white male'... I guess no one cares about that though, eh?
I feel sorry that our officials have to walk on egg shells throughout their entire careers, instead of focusing on their jobs.
The guy forgot just one important thing: Most people don't use Firefox.
Regardless of whether or not it is not more than half of web surfers, plenty of people use it. In fact, the percentage is so large, 'most' is moot. Most surveys show at least 30% market share.
Also, the number of FF users isn't worth bringing up anyhow - This article in no way says, "Teh Interwebs as we know it are ovur!". TFA simply says that this is a good STEP toward a more democratic web, although the TFS certainly sensationalized it quite a bit.
Numbers really don't matter here. What *does* matter though, is the idea that Jetpack has indirectly brought with it -- more control over web content. This will undoubtedly spread to other browsers in the form of plugins and such, making browser market share irrelevant.
As pointed out above, not all solid state storage is 'flash'. Other technologies such as phase-change memory may have lifetime write cycles in the hundreds of millions per cell. Whether that's a viable technology... well, that's not the point. :)
.
Every transistor in single cell flash (Flash-based HDD replacements) can be written to hundreds of thousands of times. Firmware logic makes certain to distribute writes evenly across the device.
I'm sure there will be plenty of fallacy in my bad math and short-sighted reasoning, but let's pretend we have a flash SSD that is 64 gigabytes in size. That's about 512,000,000,000 bits (cells/transistors) total.
Also, let's say our flash has a pretty speedy 100MB/sec sustained throughput... And let's make this a perfect world where our transfer rate is always at its sustained peak. That's about 640 seconds to completely use every single transistor on our flash device.
Now, we have to consider that each sector can handle 100,000 writes. 640 seconds x 100,000 times = About 2 years of constant writing at maximum write throughput
I'd say that sounds just fine for consumer use, considering how extreme the situation is... I wouldn't even expect your average prosumer to have issues with their flash drive for at least the first decade.
where there are multiple INDEPENDANT heads reading/writing on multiple platters all at the same time
The entire idea of 'heads' should be forgotten. Mechanical drives should be sent to oblivion and we should welcome your idea of parallelism on solid state solutions.
I know people are going to argue that cellular wireless suffers from awful latency, making this completely unviable for anything but light web surfing...
I'd like to preemptively note that I've heard HSDPA has very good latency for wireless... at least on paper.
This is merely anecdotal, I also hear others talking about 60-80ms latency, which is *great* compared to other common cellular data technologies such as Edge and 3G. It might not be perfect for gaming, but it should be suitable for multimedia providing the cellular network has the balls to handle it.
Some phones already have the HSDPA 7.2Mbps capability. AT&T has just neutered their firmware through various settings. Luckily, for some phones, you can just revert these settings, and in some places, receive 7.2Mbps today. For example, the HTC Fuze/Touch Pro can do 7.2Mbps after some registry tweaks.
*It's probably important to note that this does not include the iPhone: For those of you who own an iPhone, read this and get the warm fuzzies in your pants... :-) It simply doesn't have the hardware for it.
Their taste for another rewarding beverage -- sugar water -- was unaffected.
research sponsored by coke?
If this were done in the US, it would have been modified high fructose corn syrup water.
I wonder if that would have skewed the results at all?
"in which he likened the site 'to a hotel or motel owner that knows prostitution is going on on their premises and fails to do anything about it especially after having been told."
Yes, a hotel with 100,000,000 rooms. Brilliant analogy.
This is a perfect opportunity for law enforcement to USE CRAIGSLIST TO BUST THESE PEOPLE. Don't shut it down -- use it to your advantage! These 'criminals' will just go elsewhere and shutting down Craigslist is as effective as shutting down Pacific Blvd. after 9PM... In other words: ineffectual
"Last year, the company took in $25 million in revenue, but it has the page views to earn much more. Craigslist is the seventh-most-viewed site online, according to Comcscore, yet it only makes money from fees for posting some apartment listings in New York and job listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York."
Wrong. Columbia Records is not part of CBS any more: they are owned by Sony.
Sony, well that fixes everything. ;)
Three LAws of Robotics
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The very first law listed is the reason those 'morals' won't work, since autonomous robots will be used FIRST in military... It is quite inevitable.
Tiered data plans are no surprise at all, since Apple is supposed to release tethering capabilities with the new iPhone firmware. The average net usage on an iPhone is substantially lower than that of almost any laptop user and like it or not, AT&T will charge more... a LOT more. Heh.
I agree with tiered pricing, in a sense. People who check their email 3 times a week and look for coupons occasionally shouldn't pay as much as the guy next door downloading 1080p movies from Bittorrent. However, the amount that companies WANT to charge you for REAL, UNLIMITED data is in the hundreds... For tiered pricing to make sense, we need to have reasonable prices.
What's reasonable? Well, that's subjective, apparently.
How about audio applications? If you want an audio interface for your laptop, you're almost always better off buying a Firewire model than a USB one; but also for many desktop applications Firewire can fit the bill over PCI/PCI-E. Plenty of the audio gear companies (M-Audio, RME, MOTU, Tascam) of course are still putting out new models using Firewire now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I like Firewire and especially as of a few years ago, it's (finally) ubiquitously included with decent PCs/System boards and pretty much every Mac.
However, I'm concerned about the future of it. When Apple did not include FW ports on their Macbooks several months ago, I wondered what this meant for Firewire. They also didn't include them on the Air.
Firewire is Apple's brainchild and they've been pushing it for a decade, but what was the motivation for this? I like to think maybe it was to entice people to purchase the Macbook Pro (which still has FW800 ports) -- No, actually I don't like to think that -- but at least it isn't the other potential reason: The end of Firewire.
despite the fact that surviving the initial blast represents less increased risk of cancer than smoking cigarettes or having a poor diet
Cancer isn't the killer, it's acute radiation poisoning which sterilizes your gonads, destroys your digestive system and reduces or eliminates your ability to create new blood cells.
I guess all of this really depends on the size of the dirty bomb, but at the very least it doesn't take much to make people violently ill.
Vizio is not included with any version of Microsoft Office, but Draw is an alternative to MS Publisher (which DOES come with Office Professional). Sure, Draw is substantially different than Publisher IMO, but it's competing for the same mind share.
I love OO -- Writer is a fantastic word processor. There are even certain things it does better IMO (the way it handles containers/tables, built-in PDF support and support for alternative formats among other things...)
But OO just isn't suitable to compete against MSO Professional for people who actually use the extra junk that Professional comes with. There's no Outlook alternative, for example. Using Thunderbird as an IMAP alternative does *email* fine, but you can forget meeting scheduling, calendaring, sharing contacts and tons of other junk. (including a lot of proprietary MS BS) People really do use this stuff though.
While I believe Writer is the most viable alternative to anything in the MSO suite, it too, has its shortcomings. MSO takes the lead in usability and polish with things like grammar checking, being able to hold the Shift + CTRL keys and selecting separate swaths of text or cells at once, commenting is clearer and more visible and so many other 'little things'.
I think the bottom-line is though, OO does everything *most* people (Read: Home users & some businesses) need out of the box... and it's free.
"What about Goecaching!?"
Every nerds favorite hobby could be in jeopardy!
"Everyone" is subjective, "hobby" is misleading and "favorite" is relative... very relative. ;)
Best not to rely entirely on one system anyway.
Okay, so I'll just use that other GPS system.
Oh, wait a second...
Imagine the ability to make a tank look like a heavy truck at a distance(say to a drone)
While that may work really well with people and detection systems that depend on light, it's probably worth pointing out that these metamaterials will probably have little affect on other methods of detection, such as radar and infrared, for example.
Metamaterials are synthetic substances that can steer light in any way imaginable
As I understand it, Drones have do have infrared cameras (as an example). Of course, that doesn't make much difference if the ground pilot is navigating entirely by the visible light camera and has to switch modes or something, but I'm not really sure how that stuff works. I think it's worth considering, though.
Something else too, I imagine many autonomous systems we have / develop probably don't / won't depend on visible light either.
I wonder how metamaterials affect other, invisible parts of the spectrum?
Deuterium doesn't decay, at least not on any observable time scale. So "relative to deuterium", anything that does decay is much more radioactive. This includes such notable elements as Bismuth, used in Pepto-Bismol, and Tungsten, used in lightbulb filaments. Nevermind such notables as Americium in smoke detectors.
At the time of this post, the parent is rated 4, funny.
:\
It was a pretty serious post, so I ask, was this modded funny because Pepto-Bismol is hilariously pink?
Or.. maybe it was a vaguely loose connection to the zany irony of Americium (which sounds nothing like America) being used in smoke detectors, being that the U.S. is the 4 largest tobacco producer?
Hey, perhaps it was even the bumper crop of laughs that using "Tungsten" provides since it shares the same name as a Palm PDA device? Was it really that side splitting? I just don't get it.
It is still difficult for me to imagine something as energetic as a lightning bolt not burning a human being to a crisp on the basis that they are reasonably conductive... But very interesting. Thank you for the gem.