I don't know about the US but I'm posting this from a 100/10 fiber optics account in #10 of the list: Portugal. Fiber optics is cheaper than cable here, but internet is generally more expensive than in other parts of Europe.
That's pretty shocking news to me as a German, because (naive as I am) I always considered the German High Court is halfway reasonable.
Could we perhaps fight software patents by getting completely ridiculous and untenable patents accepted and afterwards make this public? -- This could have the desired effect but is probably never going to happen, because the whole patenting process is a bit expensive.:(
In my opinion the whole idea that someone could dictate me what computational methods I use and sell is totally ridiculous. A lot of my work involves formal logic and methodology and I can't wait for the day when I'll publish a scientific paper that unbeknown to me infringes on some patent and then get sued for it. If this software patent idiocy continues, it will be impossible to teach any higher mathematics at university in 200 years from now without violating someone's patents, but I'm sure some companies already have licensing plans in the drawer for this scenario. Crazy...
I just don't understand why no one trusts Google when they have the cleanest track record out there.
This has nothing to do with trust and also has nothing to do with paranoia or wanting to hide something, as is sometimes suggested (not by you, to be fair). Sure, Google has a clean track record but the mere potential for abuse also counts, not just how likely you consider it or whether it has happened in the past. The more data a company has the less pleasant are the consequences when that data is abused. Google is one of the largest or perhaps even the largest data collectors in the world. (I guess the NSA tops them, but who knows.)
Therefore it's good not to give too much data to Google. This applies to any service or company, be it on the net or elsewhere. It's generally a good idea to use alternate services from time to time, use anonymizers, proxies, fake information, etc. The goal is not to have total anonymity (who cares about that) but to limit the bad consequences for you personally and for others if the company in question decides to become evil and sell your data to the highest bidder, put trojans, spyware, or riskware on your machine, or give away personal data to government agencies without a subpoena, etc. Sounds like reasonable common sense to me.
I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to put Krogans in the Supreme Court. After all, they were genetically engineered as a weapon and so it might not be safe for the other members of the court. On the other hand, it might give me and Obama Paragon points that might open interesting conversation options later. What do your think?
90% of the gamers play the games less than 4 to 5 hours, because even AAA titles nowadays are not so good. Fancy graphics and all, but stupid repetitive gameplay. It's as simple as that. Take for example Mass Effect 2. I've bought it, because it got fantastic reviews. Unfortunately, so far it has only been about shooting aliens in completely linear levels. Hopefully that changes later in the game, but I see no advancement in comparison to Mass Effect 1. Dragon Age origins is much better in that respect, but even this title seems shallow in comparison to Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2. And don't get me wrong, I'm mentioning these games as an example to show that even excellent titles have a hard time matching their predecessors and seem to get shallower (apart from fancy graphics). Don't let me go into the details what's wrong with titles like MWF2 and Battlefield 2, which are arguably complete crap in comparison to what Bioware and Bethesda produce.
Another reason for the decline of game quality are undoubtedly the consoles. Sorry, I have nothing against consoles but I have to say that. There were times where it would have been impossible to publish a game like Dragon Age orgins with loading screens instead of a vast, open landscape to explore, but with consoles apparently people got used to such backwards concepts. Anyway, it's pretty stupid to judge from the fact that most people don't play through the games that they want to have even dumber ones...
Look at the prologue they added to the video. Just what does a picture of the dead reporters son holding his fathers picture have to do with truth?
Look: If you publish a video to millions of people that shows how a reporter, a man with kids and wife, is being shot from the air, tries to escape deadly wounded by crawling away, then dies while the people who try to help him (and their children) are also getting shot, and subsequently is being overrun by a tank while his killers make jokes about it, then it is only fair to give some of his surviving family members a chance to show a picture of how he looked like when he was still happy and alive. If you think that's biased, then I can't help getting the feeling that you also might be biased a bit more than average or have lost all sense of humanity.
Wow, as someone working in this domain I can say that this article is full of bold conjectures and shameless self-advertising. For a start, (1) uncertain reasoning and expert systems using it is hardly new. This is a well-established research domain and certainly not the golden grail of AI. Because, (2) all this probabilistic reasoning is nice and fine in small toy domains, but it quickly become computationally intractable in larger domains, particularly when complete independence of the random variables cannot be assured. And for this reason, (3) albeit being a useful tool and important research area, probabilistic reasoning and uncertain inference is definitely not the basis of human reasoning. The way we draw inference is much more heuristic, because we are so heavily resource-bound, and there are tons of other reasons why probabilistic inference is not cognitively adequate. (One of them, for example, is that untrained humans are incapable of making even the simplest calculations in probability theory correctly, because it is harder than it might seem at first glance.) Finally, (5) there are numerous open issues with all sorts of uncertain inference, ranging from certain impossibility results, over different choices that all seem to be rational somehow (e.g. DS-belief vs. ranking functions vs. probability vs. plausibility measures and how they are intereconnected with each other, alternative decision theories, different rules of dealing with conflicting evidence, etc.) to philosophical justifications of probability (e.g. frequentism vs. Bayesianism vs. propensity theory and their quirks, justification of inverse inference, etc).
In a nutshell, there is nothing wrong with this research in general or the Church programming language, but it is hardly a breakthrough in AI.
A Turing machine is supposed to represent what an infinitely patient mathematician with no insight can achieve when he has an infinite amount of paper and pencils. Obviously, the infinity here poses some problems, but you can build a finite Turing machine by finding a mathematician that has no insights,giving him tranquilizers to make him more patient, and locking him into your basement with some food and papers and pencils.
Are you doing something that needs to be *completely* secret? Exchange keys with the remote end manually.
That is utterly misleading. There is no such thing as complete secrecy. It is also wrong to ask yourself: Do I trust this entity unconditionally? You should only trust an institution conditionally. It all depends in what you're using the encryption for. Can you trust CAs for financial transactions? So far, apparently yes. Can you trust CAs with your international trade secrets as a non-US company? NOT a good idea. If you have a relatively secure side-channel for key exchange and are a non-US citizen with trade secrets, it's better not to rely on SSL for your communication but on your own certificates. You wouldn't trust SSL for the transmission of secret nuclear missile launch codes either, would you? The trustworthiness of institutions and protocols depends on case-by-case evaluations and the stakes at hand, and this has absolutely nothing to do with paranoia.
Let me guess, your argument is this: "Because the EU allows the UK to violate privacy so blatantly, it should also allow all other violations of privacy by any other person, company, or instituation."
Many problems cannot be parallelized at all. If a problem is sequential in nature, multiple cores cannot solve it faster.
Even when a task can be parallelized, this is at times complicated. Many developers lack the skills to implement or even invent efficient parallel algorithms. It's not just about spawing a few additional threads, there are usually complicated interprocess communication problems involved.
Since mainstream machines currently may contain everything from 1 to 8 cores (including the virtual ones created by hyperthreading), developing for n cores is always going to involve tradeoffs. The program should still run well on a single core machine.
Many game engines in use by studios are not yet updated to take full advantage of multiple cores and it is completely non-trivial or too expensive to change them accordingly.
As someone who has been using Macs since around 1990 I disagree with quite a number of points on this list. First of all, the worst Apple product ever is without any doubt the Performa 5200, but not the whole performa line. I've owned several performas that were very good and compact machines. Regarding the 5200, it is true that just about everything about this machine was wrong: its weight, its design, the built-in monitor, the speed (Powermac, but slower than most 68k Macs). The next point: OS 9 was an absolutely great OS and IMHO only OS 6 was better at its time. At least, unlike OS X, OS 9 is able to remember window sizes and positions. As for the "honorable mention" color classic, this still is a great machine. I once had one and have always regretted that I had sold it. It was completely silent and with a few modifications would be quite suitable for text processing today.
Moreover, given that the author of this article claims that Power PC (especially the B/W Macs) were a failure, I doubt whether he has ever owned a Mac at all. I bought a b/w Power PC Mac just when it came out, it absolutely rocked, and was usable for around 10 years. Generally speaking, the built quality of Power PC Macs was much better (except for the Performa 5200) than today's Macs. (To be fair, the b/w Mac keyboard really sucked.) In fact, the built quality of Macs has declined constantly since the Mac Plus (I have one standing on my shelf, it still boots without problems) and is worse than ever now with the exception of that of the overprized Mac Pro.
To cut a long story short, some of the items in the list are fairly incomprehensible and I suspect the author of the article has never owned or used them.
Perhaps this has changed by now, but when I was studying in Europe during the 90ies I have never heard about a single actual case of a student cheating, and if it had occurred this student would have faced severe consequences up to being thrown off University by an honor committee. I'm working at University now and should I ever catch a student cheating I'll personally do my best to get rid of him. Such a student will NEVER pass an exam in my class, especially if it's a case of plagiarism. When I first heard how lax some people seem to think about cheating in the US, I was quite astonished. There seems to be a difference in cultures across continents regarding this matter. Perhaps cheating is more acceptable in the US because people have to pay much more for studying, examinations are tougher and there is generally a higher pressure and denser curriculum than in Europe.
You're right, there is not only the minor problem that it can't be implemented. The utility function is the another big issue. Programs like this theoretical Gödel machine or working machines like neural networks and kernel method implementations depend on a utility function that can tell you whether you're getting closer to a solution or not (notwithstanding misleading local maxima and minima), and in order to have such a function you already need to have an intimate understanding of the problem at hand. Unfortunately, there is no good, computable theory for what "understanding a problem" might mean.
I'm a big fan of (pseudo-) "realistic" FPS like OFP, ArmA, OFP2, and Arma2. Many people claim they want realism, but for most gamers these simulations are too boring or too hard. Personally, I'm missing real realism as opposed to the fake realism of ArmA 2. I might be mistaken but as far as I know in a real war wounded soldiers sometimes scream like crazy without stopping, and I've also read accounts of WW2 where soldiers were walking around with their guts (literally) in their hands. For real realism my "special forces" team mates should occasionally go nuts (if they aren't already). There should also be trigger-happy soldiers that mess up missions, accidentally shoot pregnant women and kids at checkpoints, etc. Very rarely, a civilian could be raped by your fellow teammates and it would be up to you whether you want to participate or inform your CO. In both cases, you'd have to face the consequences. And, of course, don't forget friendly fire and jobs like cleaning the latrines.
If you think I'm being sarcastic, you misunderstand me. I really want this kind of realism in my FPS. But I guess this will never happen, because people would fear that depicting real violence might disturb the emotional balance of some American kids and lead to a lawsuit against the game company. For a start, I'd already be fine if they'd come up with a good story instead of the usual black and white "good vs. evil" bullshit.
Rather than looking at documents, I'd personally be much more interested in where exactly all of the cables lead that come out of Google's datacenters.
Google and privacy. You might want to check out this, this, this, or this. People also forget that the majority of the world population is not living in the USA. US agencies are allowed to spy on non-US citizens as they like, although this is usually not emphasized for diplomatic reasons. Thus, not only terrorists and wrongdoers should be concerned about their privacy...unless Schmidt thinks that all non-US citizens are terrorists. Foreign governments should actually be much more concerned about Google than they seem to be, but as far as I know only former French president Chirac was concerned about Google and as a politician he turned out to be a wrongdoer, of course. LOL
You can make scroogle your search engine of choice although we all know that it helps less than some people might expect, because normally configured browsers leak a lot of information.
The Federal President is also ideologically associated to the CDU (although he is not allowed to be part any party), and he would be part of it, if he hadn't been elected as President.
Uhm, last time I checked President Köhler was a member of CDU and there is no law or rule that prohibits this. Actually, all German Federal Presidents so far have been members of political parties (CDU, FDP, and SPD so far). What you probably meant to say is that traditionally the Federal President acts as if he was relatively neutral, because his primary role is not political but to represent Germany as a head of state with (almost) no power.
Well, yes, you've got some good points there. In restrospective my post sounded a bit too negative. However, the problem is that most people that don't do graphics/audio processing really just need a powerful computer for gaming. For ordinary text and email processing work, even a netbook suffices. From a gaming perspective, the graphic cards in the Macs you've mentioned are indeed outdated already now. I don't even want an all-in-one, but Apple gives me no choice (except if you think the prohibitively expensive MacPros are a real choice). That's the problem. As you said, there should be an upgradable mid-range Mac.
I'd still recommend iMacs to anyone who needs a nice working machine with good design, but to be honest regarding the pure functionality Ubuntu does just as well.
Apple is disappointing me more and more. I've been a Mac user for more than 15 years, but this month I'll be switching to an ordinary PC with Ubuntu on it. The new machine is already ordered. It is as powerful as a MacPro and costs half of it. (One thing that annoys me is that I need to keep my old Mac to be able to compile software for OS X, but perhaps the Hackintosh solution will help me get rid of this piece of junk.) The main reasons:
Apple has always made sure to lock you you in to their platform, but recently they have been getting more and more aggressive. The Psystar case, iPhone locking, and the total control of the iPhone app store are just the tip of the iceberg.
By sneaking downwards incompatibility into their developer tools and making it very hard to develop without them (with the exception of Qt, perhaps), Apple ensures that you will not be able to run new software on old computers.
You cannot upgrade the graphics card on iMacs. Not only that, Apple only sells new iMacs with old and already outdated graphics cards, just to make sure that you will *have* to buy a new machine after 2-3 years.
It started with those annoying and extremely unfunny Mac vs. PC ads that I asked myself: Why I should stick to a Mac? I use Linux for work anyway.And since iPods and iPhones apparently became Apple's main source of income, Apple is just not what it was before. Apple used to be for people that want to get things done, but now the company seems to be more interested in mentally retarded Twitter users as customers, a clientel to which I don't belong because I don't have or need a cell phone.
Yeah, because what Joe Sixpack needs is Antivirus, endless straem of updates, burning backups of mail and documents and restoring it later, and rest of that shit.
You're so right. Chrome OS will never need to get updated (because it is perfect from start) and it will never need any anti-virus, because it runs on hardware and viruses only run on software. Chrome OS is the perfect OS for Joe Sixpacks internet banking needs, because the only one who will ever see his personal data is some senior sysadmin and some viral marketing salespeople at Google, and you can totally trust those guys. Then again, who wants to be Joe Sixpack?
Let's face it, if you trust Google to store and maintain all your data, your data must be really really really unimportant to you and everyone else. And by the way, no, Google is NOT your friend.
Of course, "eating pussy" must be taken metaphorically here, otherwise it WOULD be strange to say the least. But how can anyone be "forced to resign" (which is what happened) for such a comment? Americans always mention how proud they are for the freedom of speech in the US. Well, freedom of speech my ass! You pussies!
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I don't know about the US but I'm posting this from a 100/10 fiber optics account in #10 of the list: Portugal. Fiber optics is cheaper than cable here, but internet is generally more expensive than in other parts of Europe.
That's pretty shocking news to me as a German, because (naive as I am) I always considered the German High Court is halfway reasonable.
Could we perhaps fight software patents by getting completely ridiculous and untenable patents accepted and afterwards make this public? -- This could have the desired effect but is probably never going to happen, because the whole patenting process is a bit expensive. :(
In my opinion the whole idea that someone could dictate me what computational methods I use and sell is totally ridiculous. A lot of my work involves formal logic and methodology and I can't wait for the day when I'll publish a scientific paper that unbeknown to me infringes on some patent and then get sued for it. If this software patent idiocy continues, it will be impossible to teach any higher mathematics at university in 200 years from now without violating someone's patents, but I'm sure some companies already have licensing plans in the drawer for this scenario. Crazy...
I just don't understand why no one trusts Google when they have the cleanest track record out there.
This has nothing to do with trust and also has nothing to do with paranoia or wanting to hide something, as is sometimes suggested (not by you, to be fair). Sure, Google has a clean track record but the mere potential for abuse also counts, not just how likely you consider it or whether it has happened in the past. The more data a company has the less pleasant are the consequences when that data is abused. Google is one of the largest or perhaps even the largest data collectors in the world. (I guess the NSA tops them, but who knows.)
Therefore it's good not to give too much data to Google. This applies to any service or company, be it on the net or elsewhere. It's generally a good idea to use alternate services from time to time, use anonymizers, proxies, fake information, etc. The goal is not to have total anonymity (who cares about that) but to limit the bad consequences for you personally and for others if the company in question decides to become evil and sell your data to the highest bidder, put trojans, spyware, or riskware on your machine, or give away personal data to government agencies without a subpoena, etc. Sounds like reasonable common sense to me.
I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to put Krogans in the Supreme Court. After all, they were genetically engineered as a weapon and so it might not be safe for the other members of the court. On the other hand, it might give me and Obama Paragon points that might open interesting conversation options later. What do your think?
90% of the gamers play the games less than 4 to 5 hours, because even AAA titles nowadays are not so good. Fancy graphics and all, but stupid repetitive gameplay. It's as simple as that. Take for example Mass Effect 2. I've bought it, because it got fantastic reviews. Unfortunately, so far it has only been about shooting aliens in completely linear levels. Hopefully that changes later in the game, but I see no advancement in comparison to Mass Effect 1. Dragon Age origins is much better in that respect, but even this title seems shallow in comparison to Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2. And don't get me wrong, I'm mentioning these games as an example to show that even excellent titles have a hard time matching their predecessors and seem to get shallower (apart from fancy graphics). Don't let me go into the details what's wrong with titles like MWF2 and Battlefield 2, which are arguably complete crap in comparison to what Bioware and Bethesda produce.
Another reason for the decline of game quality are undoubtedly the consoles. Sorry, I have nothing against consoles but I have to say that. There were times where it would have been impossible to publish a game like Dragon Age orgins with loading screens instead of a vast, open landscape to explore, but with consoles apparently people got used to such backwards concepts. Anyway, it's pretty stupid to judge from the fact that most people don't play through the games that they want to have even dumber ones...
Look at the prologue they added to the video. Just what does a picture of the dead reporters son holding his fathers picture have to do with truth?
Look: If you publish a video to millions of people that shows how a reporter, a man with kids and wife, is being shot from the air, tries to escape deadly wounded by crawling away, then dies while the people who try to help him (and their children) are also getting shot, and subsequently is being overrun by a tank while his killers make jokes about it, then it is only fair to give some of his surviving family members a chance to show a picture of how he looked like when he was still happy and alive. If you think that's biased, then I can't help getting the feeling that you also might be biased a bit more than average or have lost all sense of humanity.
Wow, as someone working in this domain I can say that this article is full of bold conjectures and shameless self-advertising. For a start, (1) uncertain reasoning and expert systems using it is hardly new. This is a well-established research domain and certainly not the golden grail of AI. Because, (2) all this probabilistic reasoning is nice and fine in small toy domains, but it quickly become computationally intractable in larger domains, particularly when complete independence of the random variables cannot be assured. And for this reason, (3) albeit being a useful tool and important research area, probabilistic reasoning and uncertain inference is definitely not the basis of human reasoning. The way we draw inference is much more heuristic, because we are so heavily resource-bound, and there are tons of other reasons why probabilistic inference is not cognitively adequate. (One of them, for example, is that untrained humans are incapable of making even the simplest calculations in probability theory correctly, because it is harder than it might seem at first glance.) Finally, (5) there are numerous open issues with all sorts of uncertain inference, ranging from certain impossibility results, over different choices that all seem to be rational somehow (e.g. DS-belief vs. ranking functions vs. probability vs. plausibility measures and how they are intereconnected with each other, alternative decision theories, different rules of dealing with conflicting evidence, etc.) to philosophical justifications of probability (e.g. frequentism vs. Bayesianism vs. propensity theory and their quirks, justification of inverse inference, etc).
In a nutshell, there is nothing wrong with this research in general or the Church programming language, but it is hardly a breakthrough in AI.
A Turing machine is supposed to represent what an infinitely patient mathematician with no insight can achieve when he has an infinite amount of paper and pencils. Obviously, the infinity here poses some problems, but you can build a finite Turing machine by finding a mathematician that has no insights,giving him tranquilizers to make him more patient, and locking him into your basement with some food and papers and pencils.
That is utterly misleading. There is no such thing as complete secrecy. It is also wrong to ask yourself: Do I trust this entity unconditionally? You should only trust an institution conditionally. It all depends in what you're using the encryption for. Can you trust CAs for financial transactions? So far, apparently yes. Can you trust CAs with your international trade secrets as a non-US company? NOT a good idea. If you have a relatively secure side-channel for key exchange and are a non-US citizen with trade secrets, it's better not to rely on SSL for your communication but on your own certificates. You wouldn't trust SSL for the transmission of secret nuclear missile launch codes either, would you? The trustworthiness of institutions and protocols depends on case-by-case evaluations and the stakes at hand, and this has absolutely nothing to do with paranoia.
Let me guess, your argument is this: "Because the EU allows the UK to violate privacy so blatantly, it should also allow all other violations of privacy by any other person, company, or instituation."
As someone who has been using Macs since around 1990 I disagree with quite a number of points on this list. First of all, the worst Apple product ever is without any doubt the Performa 5200, but not the whole performa line. I've owned several performas that were very good and compact machines. Regarding the 5200, it is true that just about everything about this machine was wrong: its weight, its design, the built-in monitor, the speed (Powermac, but slower than most 68k Macs). The next point: OS 9 was an absolutely great OS and IMHO only OS 6 was better at its time. At least, unlike OS X, OS 9 is able to remember window sizes and positions. As for the "honorable mention" color classic, this still is a great machine. I once had one and have always regretted that I had sold it. It was completely silent and with a few modifications would be quite suitable for text processing today.
Moreover, given that the author of this article claims that Power PC (especially the B/W Macs) were a failure, I doubt whether he has ever owned a Mac at all. I bought a b/w Power PC Mac just when it came out, it absolutely rocked, and was usable for around 10 years. Generally speaking, the built quality of Power PC Macs was much better (except for the Performa 5200) than today's Macs. (To be fair, the b/w Mac keyboard really sucked.) In fact, the built quality of Macs has declined constantly since the Mac Plus (I have one standing on my shelf, it still boots without problems) and is worse than ever now with the exception of that of the overprized Mac Pro.
To cut a long story short, some of the items in the list are fairly incomprehensible and I suspect the author of the article has never owned or used them.
Perhaps this has changed by now, but when I was studying in Europe during the 90ies I have never heard about a single actual case of a student cheating, and if it had occurred this student would have faced severe consequences up to being thrown off University by an honor committee. I'm working at University now and should I ever catch a student cheating I'll personally do my best to get rid of him. Such a student will NEVER pass an exam in my class, especially if it's a case of plagiarism. When I first heard how lax some people seem to think about cheating in the US, I was quite astonished. There seems to be a difference in cultures across continents regarding this matter. Perhaps cheating is more acceptable in the US because people have to pay much more for studying, examinations are tougher and there is generally a higher pressure and denser curriculum than in Europe.
You're right, there is not only the minor problem that it can't be implemented. The utility function is the another big issue. Programs like this theoretical Gödel machine or working machines like neural networks and kernel method implementations depend on a utility function that can tell you whether you're getting closer to a solution or not (notwithstanding misleading local maxima and minima), and in order to have such a function you already need to have an intimate understanding of the problem at hand. Unfortunately, there is no good, computable theory for what "understanding a problem" might mean.
I'm a big fan of (pseudo-) "realistic" FPS like OFP, ArmA, OFP2, and Arma2. Many people claim they want realism, but for most gamers these simulations are too boring or too hard. Personally, I'm missing real realism as opposed to the fake realism of ArmA 2. I might be mistaken but as far as I know in a real war wounded soldiers sometimes scream like crazy without stopping, and I've also read accounts of WW2 where soldiers were walking around with their guts (literally) in their hands. For real realism my "special forces" team mates should occasionally go nuts (if they aren't already). There should also be trigger-happy soldiers that mess up missions, accidentally shoot pregnant women and kids at checkpoints, etc. Very rarely, a civilian could be raped by your fellow teammates and it would be up to you whether you want to participate or inform your CO. In both cases, you'd have to face the consequences. And, of course, don't forget friendly fire and jobs like cleaning the latrines.
If you think I'm being sarcastic, you misunderstand me. I really want this kind of realism in my FPS. But I guess this will never happen, because people would fear that depicting real violence might disturb the emotional balance of some American kids and lead to a lawsuit against the game company. For a start, I'd already be fine if they'd come up with a good story instead of the usual black and white "good vs. evil" bullshit.
Rather than looking at documents, I'd personally be much more interested in where exactly all of the cables lead that come out of Google's datacenters.
Google and privacy. You might want to check out this, this, this, or this. People also forget that the majority of the world population is not living in the USA. US agencies are allowed to spy on non-US citizens as they like, although this is usually not emphasized for diplomatic reasons. Thus, not only terrorists and wrongdoers should be concerned about their privacy...unless Schmidt thinks that all non-US citizens are terrorists. Foreign governments should actually be much more concerned about Google than they seem to be, but as far as I know only former French president Chirac was concerned about Google and as a politician he turned out to be a wrongdoer, of course. LOL
You can make scroogle your search engine of choice although we all know that it helps less than some people might expect, because normally configured browsers leak a lot of information.
The Federal President is also ideologically associated to the CDU (although he is not allowed to be part any party), and he would be part of it, if he hadn't been elected as President.
Uhm, last time I checked President Köhler was a member of CDU and there is no law or rule that prohibits this. Actually, all German Federal Presidents so far have been members of political parties (CDU, FDP, and SPD so far). What you probably meant to say is that traditionally the Federal President acts as if he was relatively neutral, because his primary role is not political but to represent Germany as a head of state with (almost) no power.
Well, yes, you've got some good points there. In restrospective my post sounded a bit too negative. However, the problem is that most people that don't do graphics/audio processing really just need a powerful computer for gaming. For ordinary text and email processing work, even a netbook suffices. From a gaming perspective, the graphic cards in the Macs you've mentioned are indeed outdated already now. I don't even want an all-in-one, but Apple gives me no choice (except if you think the prohibitively expensive MacPros are a real choice). That's the problem. As you said, there should be an upgradable mid-range Mac.
I'd still recommend iMacs to anyone who needs a nice working machine with good design, but to be honest regarding the pure functionality Ubuntu does just as well.
Apple is disappointing me more and more. I've been a Mac user for more than 15 years, but this month I'll be switching to an ordinary PC with Ubuntu on it. The new machine is already ordered. It is as powerful as a MacPro and costs half of it. (One thing that annoys me is that I need to keep my old Mac to be able to compile software for OS X, but perhaps the Hackintosh solution will help me get rid of this piece of junk.) The main reasons:
Goodbye Apple!
Yeah, because what Joe Sixpack needs is Antivirus, endless straem of updates, burning backups of mail and documents and restoring it later, and rest of that shit.
You're so right. Chrome OS will never need to get updated (because it is perfect from start) and it will never need any anti-virus, because it runs on hardware and viruses only run on software. Chrome OS is the perfect OS for Joe Sixpacks internet banking needs, because the only one who will ever see his personal data is some senior sysadmin and some viral marketing salespeople at Google, and you can totally trust those guys. Then again, who wants to be Joe Sixpack?
It takes user-friendly to an extreme and makes everything just part of the web browser experience.
The problem is that the web browser experience is the least user-friendly experience you can have on a computer.
Let's face it, if you trust Google to store and maintain all your data, your data must be really really really unimportant to you and everyone else. And by the way, no, Google is NOT your friend.
No. My grandparents and children in the third world deserve something better. Google is getting more and more stupid.
Of course, "eating pussy" must be taken metaphorically here, otherwise it WOULD be strange to say the least. But how can anyone be "forced to resign" (which is what happened) for such a comment? Americans always mention how proud they are for the freedom of speech in the US. Well, freedom of speech my ass! You pussies!