Most of the comments I've seen have been on the level of "those guys want us to do their job for free. Right" or "this is stupid and will never work."
Flip it around and be selfish: The Economist has a certain set of resources: primarily access to a set of reporters around the world and some cash. If you're a reader, you know what the magazine (aka "newspaper") is like. So what would you prefer it to be? That is: what's the XXX in "gosh, if only someone would do a XXX, I'd be glad to buy it?" Tell them to make that for you!
Well, I only mentioned this example to say the one time my machine was really acting strangely the guy reading the script to me at Applecare was nevertheless able to converge quickly.
The "solution" was to replace the logic board. The main reason I went to see my friend was to get the bits off. I was worried about sending in any un-backed-up bits into apple as I've heard stories -- which I believe -- of machines with unrelated problems (e.g. power connector failures) having the disk pointlessly reformatted. Luckily this has never happened to me.
But of course everybody's MMV. But over the past 15 years I've had to call apple for support and it's always been great (note: I only buy Applecare for portables). With two exceptions, within a few minutes I've been scheduled for a box to be sent out (or a replacement part, e.g. a power adaptor). Painless. The two exceptions were, well, exceptional:
1 - I spilled tea into my 2400c while in Japan. Luckily I was in Tokyo and the machine had been built in Japan (at that time most were still built in the USA) and Applecare called over and then sent me over to somewhere in the Akihabara where someone fixed my machine as I watched.
2 - My machine went completely bonkers because the PCI bridge fried. How do I know? Err, a friend in Apple's hardware group diagnosed it for me (and cloned my disk for me!). Then I called, described only the symptoms, and politely went through the "fixit" script with the guy on the phone (try to restart, try a reset, etc etc). That was my longest call and still not incredibly long.
Enterprisesupport has been different. I've only called for support on my Xserve three or four times but each time I got a phone call (or once mail) from someone in the engineering group. In fact one time I was on hold for a while because the tech at the other end went into a machine room, reconfigured a machine and duped the problem while I was on the phone (it was a booting problem when the a homedir was on a SAN disk). Pretty good.
IBM's support has been quite good too, but they're about the only other one.
Of course ideally the machines would never break and then support could be crappy or nonexistant...but nobody would know!
Actually there was an evolution of processor design into single, monolithic processing units; until well into the '70s it was hardly uncommon that computers would have all sorts of processing units (remember the "CPU" is the "Central Processing Unit.") Of course in this case I'm primarily talking about mainframes; one of the distinctions of the minicomputer (and later microcomputer) was that "everything was together" in the CPU. But even then the systems didn't really start out monolithic: it was not uncommon to find minicomputers with separate FPUs, writable microcode and the like.
Another element of mainframes which is reappearing is I/O processors (AKA "channel controllers"); most mainframes from the 50s on had programmable I/O processors. The ARPAnet interfaces from the very earliest days were computers in their own right.
Finally, consider that there's more to the interconnect issues than low latency between processing units. For example, if you can load a coprogram into a coprocessor (be it FPU or parallel unit, graphics unit or the like) then it can crunch away and do its own DMA (perhaps to separate banks) without (for example) cache contention or the like. You can get better performance than having all these features on-chip.
By the way the unified philosophy of the microprocessor influenced Unix and the C language, which featured a monolithic kernel (and lots of stuff in userspace) in the former case and "weird" artifacts like reduced syntactical diversity and the like (remember the line in the intro to K&R: " 'You mean you have to call a function to do I/O?' " -- I found this hilarious since I was a Lisp programmer at the time and was well used to this approach). But look back at how people were thinking back then: these were small systems for small (e.g. research, instrument control, etc) applications. Nobody, or hardly anybody anyway, back then was imagining minicomputers replacing "real" computers. In a funny way they were right, since today's microcomputers look a lot like the mainframes of yore.
The California legislature has chosen to do that. For example, your PA license is valid in California only for 10 days (unless you're military personnel). In addition, the under-18 driving rules vary dramatically from state to state and generally aren't treated symmetrically by other states.
I could have used a cashier's check but if you're lazy, in no hurry, and comfortable mailing a $xxK check over and waiting a few days for it to clear then that's even less effort.
The point is: if a person uses a check -- cashier's check or not -- to buy a car in California a buch of personal information needs to pass through the dealers' hands in order for them to register the car. You can download the forms he files with the state dmv site and see for yourself.
If a corporation does it, less information is passed because it doesn't exist (e.g. companies don't get drivers' licenses).
Car dealers ask for tons of unnecessary info (a copy of your DL when you take a car for a test drive, SSN when buying a car for cash etc) which they don't need. And so the point is (and what makes this relevant to the topic at hand): a standardised national ID makes this data collection easier to do, harder to resist (because it's "routine"), more widespread and more damaging in its scope. And it's all unnecessary.
Car dealers are hardly alone in this regard. I tried to fill a prescription at Long's and they said they couldn't do it without my SSN...so I picked up the prescription slip and walked out (I didn't hassle the clerks as they don't make the policy anyway). The small pharmacy a few blocks away, where I should have gone anyway, doesn't care about that useless crap. Again, if they needed to see my standard ID, they'd get address, biometric, and all sorts of other crap.
PS: for a fun time try buying a car with a credit card. Freaks out dealers no end.
My PA carry permit is, in fact, useless in another state unless they have a reciprocity agreement.
I am sure the state of California would be happy to acknowledge that you have the demonstrated right to carry a firearm in Pennsylvania, and furthermore would be happy to enforce that right (to carry one in Pennsylvania) to the full extent of its ability within the borders of California.
It is not their problem that those states do not happen to overlap.
What about purchasing items like automobiles? Those who can afford to pay cash for an automobile in its entirety would be able to do so while those who have to take out a loan are again restricted to using a bank and thus the National ID card again.
Oddly enough, I just bought a new car from a dealer today in cash (in California). Rather, I didn't use cash cash, because had I tried to use banknotes I would have had to supply a lot of ID and attention. Even had I wanted to use a personal check and take the car with me the dealer would have run a credit check because they'd be "lending me" the money (in case the check didn't clear). I could have used a personal check and waited, but then the dealer would get my DL (bizarrely, it's required for the dealer to register the vehicle).
Instead, the private way is to use a corporate check, and agree to pick up the car once the check has cleared. But even having a company do it...it's hard to have a California company without the officers' personal info being public information. Plus not everybody starts and maintains a corporation for this purpose.
Actually I can live with the state having that info; what I object here is the "feature creep" that has the dealer get its hands on my address and credit data, none of which is its business. I still get junk mail about cars I haven't owned in years. And this is a serious, serious problem with such a national I.D. system.
Something like "ban smoking in all public places" is no longer seen as a bit of an extremist infringement on someones freedom - it's something thats necessary to protect all of our health - govt knows best.
Arguably it's the "public nuisance" law justification. Banning smoking in your own house -- that would be beyond the pale.
How about they have an option to blur unsightly buildings? For example I'd love to see a forest where Washington, DC is! And think of the ugly architecture of certain Paris Banlieux?
IANAD, but it seems like you'd have better luck just letting the body's digestive and circulatory systems do the work for you.
Actually, getting drugs past the body's first-pass metabolism is quite a big deal. The stomach, kidneys et al are pretty good at trying to keep toxins/undesirables out of the bloodstream. Getting this stuff into aqueous environments elsewhere in the body helps you skip that step.
As a side-effect, you can administer less drug. For biologics (basically: proteins) this is a big deal for stability, cost of manufacturing, and difficulty of oral administration. For small-molecule drugs those issues don't matter much, but what happens to the stuff that doesn't end up in the bloodstream? Some of it accumulates in the liver or kidneys and a lot ends up back in the water supply (there are plenty of reports now of antidepressents and hormones from contraceptives ending up in the water supply, though a few scary reports notwithstanding it's not clear if they have reached therapeutic levels yet, at least for humans).
Non-disclaimer: I've never heard of these guys and have no idea if they're brilliant, clowns, or something inbetween, nor would you want my judgement on that issue. But I am interested/working on local drug delivery.
(although in my case my memories from those years of classical languages are long since gone....but the modern spoken languages I have to use every day are easily at hand. I guess the same could be said for my memories PL/1 though...long since evaporated).
Err, there's a a whole school of humanities (alongside science, engineering and architecture; the departments are aggregated into schools). All MIT students take a bunch of humanities; it's just that MIT humanities majors also take Mechanics, E&M, diffeq, etc. After all, even unemployed English majors need might need to machine a replacement part for their car, you know!
That's a fair cop, mate...too obvious a joke And in fact at my company (where I make all the computing decisions) all the desktops are Windows, all the laptops (except mine) are windows, all the instruments run windows, though for simplicity none of the servers are.
So I'll do penance with a story, though not as funny as the U-bend.
Part 1: Cygnus was founded in an apartment complex, specifically in my apartment. We grew by renting more apartments, and ran thinnet (no 10BaseT in those days) between them. Initially we ran the thinnet through an expansion seam in the concrete driveway (you know, the seams the guy who pours it drags in the concrete before it sets). Anyway, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the lanlord had to repour the driveway...and kindly offered to let us run the thinnet through it. I'm sure it's still there.
Part 2: Back in 1989 there weren't ISPs you could sign up with (at least in the bay area). BARRnet wasn't technically available for commercial traffic. So John and I (and a couple of other folks) started The Little Garden which is one of the first "consumer" ISPs. I was originally intended as a cooperative, so when I say "consumer" you had to be able to build your own router, which was mostly done via running KA9Q on a junker PC (286 perhaps? I can't remember). Our backbone was some leased lines running 56K connections, and most people just dialed up and never hung up (free residential calls at both ends, remember...technically we weren't a business) . The main POP was my spare bedroom...full of telebit trailblazers (ran their own variant of the Bell protocol).
Joke #3: since we were a residence whenever we wanted a new pair the phone company would have to give it to us. Since arond '88 Palo Alto buried our utilities, when we filled up the conduit they'd have to dig another. Years later one of those apartments became available (both organizations, and I, had long since moved) and I suggested to a friend who was looking for a place that he move in. "Oh, not there," he said. "I knew someone who lived there once and when he tried to get phone service the phone company took forever to get him one. They said some guy had used all the lines up. Can you believe that stupid story?"
Actually in the thicknet days many people did build their own xcvrs (and admittedly their own protocols too, e.g. Chaosnet, PUP, . Certainly every place I worked did....but if my creaky memory is correct all the ones I used the same layer 0 protocol as PUP originally did (i.e. "ethernet").
I have a vampire tap and thicknet transceiver in a box someplace, and it was definitely handmade and clearly not a prototype.
If it was your thesis advisor you made the right choice. After all you'll depend on him not only for the 3-5 years in getting your PhD but also after you leave for recommendations and the like.
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Most of the comments I've seen have been on the level of "those guys want us to do their job for free. Right" or "this is stupid and will never work."
Flip it around and be selfish: The Economist has a certain set of resources: primarily access to a set of reporters around the world and some cash. If you're a reader, you know what the magazine (aka "newspaper") is like. So what would you prefer it to be? That is: what's the XXX in "gosh, if only someone would do a XXX, I'd be glad to buy it?" Tell them to make that for you!
Well, I only mentioned this example to say the one time my machine was really acting strangely the guy reading the script to me at Applecare was nevertheless able to converge quickly.
The "solution" was to replace the logic board. The main reason I went to see my friend was to get the bits off. I was worried about sending in any un-backed-up bits into apple as I've heard stories -- which I believe -- of machines with unrelated problems (e.g. power connector failures) having the disk pointlessly reformatted. Luckily this has never happened to me.
But of course everybody's MMV. But over the past 15 years I've had to call apple for support and it's always been great (note: I only buy Applecare for portables). With two exceptions, within a few minutes I've been scheduled for a box to be sent out (or a replacement part, e.g. a power adaptor). Painless. The two exceptions were, well, exceptional:
1 - I spilled tea into my 2400c while in Japan. Luckily I was in Tokyo and the machine had been built in Japan (at that time most were still built in the USA) and Applecare called over and then sent me over to somewhere in the Akihabara where someone fixed my machine as I watched.
2 - My machine went completely bonkers because the PCI bridge fried. How do I know? Err, a friend in Apple's hardware group diagnosed it for me (and cloned my disk for me!). Then I called, described only the symptoms, and politely went through the "fixit" script with the guy on the phone (try to restart, try a reset, etc etc). That was my longest call and still not incredibly long.
Enterprisesupport has been different. I've only called for support on my Xserve three or four times but each time I got a phone call (or once mail) from someone in the engineering group. In fact one time I was on hold for a while because the tech at the other end went into a machine room, reconfigured a machine and duped the problem while I was on the phone (it was a booting problem when the a homedir was on a SAN disk). Pretty good.
IBM's support has been quite good too, but they're about the only other one.
Of course ideally the machines would never break and then support could be crappy or nonexistant...but nobody would know!
I believe the proper response to Spector is:
"Ignorance of the law is no defense."
Another element of mainframes which is reappearing is I/O processors (AKA "channel controllers"); most mainframes from the 50s on had programmable I/O processors. The ARPAnet interfaces from the very earliest days were computers in their own right.
Finally, consider that there's more to the interconnect issues than low latency between processing units. For example, if you can load a coprogram into a coprocessor (be it FPU or parallel unit, graphics unit or the like) then it can crunch away and do its own DMA (perhaps to separate banks) without (for example) cache contention or the like. You can get better performance than having all these features on-chip.
By the way the unified philosophy of the microprocessor influenced Unix and the C language, which featured a monolithic kernel (and lots of stuff in userspace) in the former case and "weird" artifacts like reduced syntactical diversity and the like (remember the line in the intro to K&R: " 'You mean you have to call a function to do I/O?' " -- I found this hilarious since I was a Lisp programmer at the time and was well used to this approach). But look back at how people were thinking back then: these were small systems for small (e.g. research, instrument control, etc) applications. Nobody, or hardly anybody anyway, back then was imagining minicomputers replacing "real" computers. In a funny way they were right, since today's microcomputers look a lot like the mainframes of yore.
Sounds like you wish to follow in the footsteps of a legendary hacker (whom I see most days in downtown Palo Alto). His recipe:
Just do it and grow a moustache.
iLingo....sounds like a particular stimulative act shown on Internet porn.....
I don't agree with the folks who say he should have sued. He's just a nice guy.
He should have filed a DMCA "Takedown" notice and then sued.
Sauce for the gander and all that....
Ozzy-who?
(yeah yeah, I've read plenty of Shelley...just couldn't resist).
The California legislature has chosen to do that. For example, your PA license is valid in California only for 10 days (unless you're military personnel). In addition, the under-18 driving rules vary dramatically from state to state and generally aren't treated symmetrically by other states.
I could have used a cashier's check but if you're lazy, in no hurry, and comfortable mailing a $xxK check over and waiting a few days for it to clear then that's even less effort.
The point is: if a person uses a check -- cashier's check or not -- to buy a car in California a buch of personal information needs to pass through the dealers' hands in order for them to register the car. You can download the forms he files with the state dmv site and see for yourself.
If a corporation does it, less information is passed because it doesn't exist (e.g. companies don't get drivers' licenses).
Car dealers ask for tons of unnecessary info (a copy of your DL when you take a car for a test drive, SSN when buying a car for cash etc) which they don't need. And so the point is (and what makes this relevant to the topic at hand): a standardised national ID makes this data collection easier to do, harder to resist (because it's "routine"), more widespread and more damaging in its scope. And it's all unnecessary.
Car dealers are hardly alone in this regard. I tried to fill a prescription at Long's and they said they couldn't do it without my SSN...so I picked up the prescription slip and walked out (I didn't hassle the clerks as they don't make the policy anyway). The small pharmacy a few blocks away, where I should have gone anyway, doesn't care about that useless crap. Again, if they needed to see my standard ID, they'd get address, biometric, and all sorts of other crap.
PS: for a fun time try buying a car with a credit card. Freaks out dealers no end.
It is not their problem that those states do not happen to overlap.
Oddly enough, I just bought a new car from a dealer today in cash (in California). Rather, I didn't use cash cash, because had I tried to use banknotes I would have had to supply a lot of ID and attention. Even had I wanted to use a personal check and take the car with me the dealer would have run a credit check because they'd be "lending me" the money (in case the check didn't clear). I could have used a personal check and waited, but then the dealer would get my DL (bizarrely, it's required for the dealer to register the vehicle).
Instead, the private way is to use a corporate check, and agree to pick up the car once the check has cleared. But even having a company do it...it's hard to have a California company without the officers' personal info being public information. Plus not everybody starts and maintains a corporation for this purpose.
Actually I can live with the state having that info; what I object here is the "feature creep" that has the dealer get its hands on my address and credit data, none of which is its business. I still get junk mail about cars I haven't owned in years. And this is a serious, serious problem with such a national I.D. system.
Ahh, so as an alternative to the Heinlein reference made by an earlier poster you're more inclined to the E. E. "Doc" Smith style?
How about they have an option to blur unsightly buildings? For example I'd love to see a forest where Washington, DC is! And think of the ugly architecture of certain Paris Banlieux?
Sounds like Google is onto something!
As a side-effect, you can administer less drug. For biologics (basically: proteins) this is a big deal for stability, cost of manufacturing, and difficulty of oral administration. For small-molecule drugs those issues don't matter much, but what happens to the stuff that doesn't end up in the bloodstream? Some of it accumulates in the liver or kidneys and a lot ends up back in the water supply (there are plenty of reports now of antidepressents and hormones from contraceptives ending up in the water supply, though a few scary reports notwithstanding it's not clear if they have reached therapeutic levels yet, at least for humans).
Non-disclaimer: I've never heard of these guys and have no idea if they're brilliant, clowns, or something inbetween, nor would you want my judgement on that issue. But I am interested/working on local drug delivery.
First it was SCSI.
Then it was the consumer GUI OS.
Then the 3.5" "floppy" disk.
Then Firewire.
Then USB.
With the deniable "pay-per-patch" Apple introduces to the industry a new standard that soon all will follow!
Oh I don't know; Latin has a famous role in computing as well...
(although in my case my memories from those years of classical languages are long since gone....but the modern spoken languages I have to use every day are easily at hand. I guess the same could be said for my memories PL/1 though...long since evaporated).
Err, there's a a whole school of humanities (alongside science, engineering and architecture; the departments are aggregated into schools). All MIT students take a bunch of humanities; it's just that MIT humanities majors also take Mechanics, E&M, diffeq, etc. After all, even unemployed English majors need might need to machine a replacement part for their car, you know!
It just means even more losers will send you megabyte emails containing no text -- only an MS Word attachment containing a meeting time and date.
Of course if your office is like mine you already get plenty of those.
That's a fair cop, mate...too obvious a joke And in fact at my company (where I make all the computing decisions) all the desktops are Windows, all the laptops (except mine) are windows, all the instruments run windows, though for simplicity none of the servers are.
So I'll do penance with a story, though not as funny as the U-bend.
Part 1: Cygnus was founded in an apartment complex, specifically in my apartment. We grew by renting more apartments, and ran thinnet (no 10BaseT in those days) between them. Initially we ran the thinnet through an expansion seam in the concrete driveway (you know, the seams the guy who pours it drags in the concrete before it sets). Anyway, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the lanlord had to repour the driveway...and kindly offered to let us run the thinnet through it. I'm sure it's still there.
Part 2: Back in 1989 there weren't ISPs you could sign up with (at least in the bay area). BARRnet wasn't technically available for commercial traffic. So John and I (and a couple of other folks) started The Little Garden which is one of the first "consumer" ISPs. I was originally intended as a cooperative, so when I say "consumer" you had to be able to build your own router, which was mostly done via running KA9Q on a junker PC (286 perhaps? I can't remember). Our backbone was some leased lines running 56K connections, and most people just dialed up and never hung up (free residential calls at both ends, remember...technically we weren't a business) . The main POP was my spare bedroom...full of telebit trailblazers (ran their own variant of the Bell protocol).
Joke #3: since we were a residence whenever we wanted a new pair the phone company would have to give it to us. Since arond '88 Palo Alto buried our utilities, when we filled up the conduit they'd have to dig another. Years later one of those apartments became available (both organizations, and I, had long since moved) and I suggested to a friend who was looking for a place that he move in. "Oh, not there," he said. "I knew someone who lived there once and when he tried to get phone service the phone company took forever to get him one. They said some guy had used all the lines up. Can you believe that stupid story?"
OK, bizarre enough for you?
Actually in the thicknet days many people did build their own xcvrs (and admittedly their own protocols too, e.g. Chaosnet, PUP, . Certainly every place I worked did....but if my creaky memory is correct all the ones I used the same layer 0 protocol as PUP originally did (i.e. "ethernet").
I have a vampire tap and thicknet transceiver in a box someplace, and it was definitely handmade and clearly not a prototype.
I once visited a company that used Microsoft Windows on every computer in the company!
I know it's hard to believe it but i saw it with my own eyes!
If it was your thesis advisor you made the right choice. After all you'll depend on him not only for the 3-5 years in getting your PhD but also after you leave for recommendations and the like.