A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter.
That sounds like a much lower number than the percentage of randomly selected people who don't use Twitter. 15% of engineers use Twitter?! That sounds insanely high to me. What percentage use Blogspot? What percentage use IRC?
Tyranny always rears its head under the guise of national defense, war or some sort of civil protection from the bad, ugly guys out there. The Internet is one of the last few bastions of freedom left in the world...too bad the Statists out there cannot see the Federal Government for what it truly is.
And remember when those damned abolitionists reared their ugly heads and took slavery from the free market? They really showed how much they love freedom then, didn't they? Damn Federal government! Damn them and all those who question capitalism!
I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing.
Similarly, there's no point in having babies, going to work, reading a book, sleeping in a house, eating dinner, watching movies, or putting up wallpaper.
I'm not sold on Gates' motives. He sounds more like a lobbyist than a sage omen of caution like Einstein was.
Don't forget that Gates is one of the greatest philanthropists in history and at this stage in his life he's probably spent more time and effort on giving money and directing its use to solve world problems in which he has no stake than he has working to make and sell computer software. If prominent American should have some sort of credibility when it comes to altruism, it's Bill Gates.
On the other hand, this meeting isn't a very close parallel with Einstein's letter. That's not because Bill Gates is sinister, though.
Only a few hundred planets outside the solar system have been discovered. Some of those were found from backyards by amateurs.
Check out The Sky is Your Laboratory by Robert Buckheim. It's a ~$30 book that will show you how you can participate in meaningful astro research with no equipment beyond a stopwatch for the simplest stuff. Later chapters get increasingly complex and show you how to do things that be pretty big contributions to the field.
> Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.
What if you combine those stories with the fact that there are millions more people using Usenet groups today thanks to Google's web interface? Does it look brighter than 10 years ago?
Maybe, though, Usenet is an idea whose time has been and gone. There are other ways of sharing information now, which don't suffer the same intractable problems of spam etc.
Google simply bought Deja News, you know, which was giving us web access to newsgroups 15 years ago. Its search engine was actually a lot more powerful than that of Google Groups, too, giving you complete control over the ranking of your results.
This is one example where the Standard Model may be missing something or need tweaking.
Because good theories always make fundamental predictions that need to be contradicted by reality and then tweaked later in an ad-hoc fashion without ever revising their underlying principles. That's great science! Ah well, whatever gets you grants and funding right? In that case, status quo it is! We must always be openly hostile to all competing theories, refuse to publish them so they can be peer-reviewed, etc. That's progress.
In a generic sense it's a quite easy to publish a new, competing theory. That's the kind of thing most encouraged by the current peer review culture, as long as it's self consistent and matches observations.
A history degree doesn't provide anything past what you could get from an online, verified information source (I dare not say Wikipedia of course). If you're intelligent, you'll be able to comprehend whatever historical issue interests you, and have no need to spend 4 years on it.
As a history professor, I can safely say it's that kind of thinking that leads students to not come to lecture and instead rely on the interwebs when it comes time to study for exams.
Of course those students fail miserably, while those who attend lecture do much, much better.
And beyond middle school history isn't about simply memorizing events. It's about making arguments in an interactive environment where the teacher/professor and other students can then react and make counterarguments. A history degree is about as related to getting information on historical events "from an online, verified information source" as playing professional baseball is to watching baseball on television.
Google has built an empire on having the balls to do stuff that the industry thinks it's "way too early" to do.
Google already provides web versions of office apps, RSS readers/players, photo management, email (naturally), and a ton of other things. From my understanding, online MP3 and eBook repositories are in the works that would allow you to stream that content from centralized storage.
Search and webmail are making Google money, and they entered those markets long after other companies had mature products already serving those needs. It looks to me like Google's success is about improving on mature markets. None of its brand new ideas has been a business success. I'm not asserting that ChromeOS won't be successful, but I think that your particular argument is almost the exact opposite of the truth.
I am not saying that all other operating systems are perfectly secure by default or that they are invulnerable, but windows is absolutely insecure. We have to face that truth.
Microsoft's security record is laughable. And I'm not even talking about particular exploits, bugs can be fixed, I am talking about design. Windows is designed to be insecure. Security was never really taken seriously at microsoft. There are countless techniques to escalate permissions on just about any win platform (Including windows vista and 7). And this are not obscure and complex vulnerabilities. This are simple 50 lines executables that allow you to escalate any process you want with a few clicks.
Just take a look at any of their products, either server or desktop, and their security record will be worse than any competitor. Exchange, SQL, IIS, Explorer, Windows, Office. They allow script execution in crazy places (like a simple text document or spreadsheet).
Windows is insecure for a very good reason: Because there is a huge industry that developed around fixing windows, that industry is so big that it has become the main tool of customer loyalty that microsoft has. Millions, from huge Antivirus companies, to overstuffed IT departments, to your average computer repairman base their economy on Windows flaws. Those guys love windows and all its flaws. I've actually had people telling me "Well, I know it's a piece of crap, but it's what keeps people coming to my shop again and again". Not to mention the computer retailers. Imagine the fall in Dell stock if people didn't have to buy a new computer every 2 years just to run the latest OS? A friend of mine has am iMac from 2001 running the latest OSX. And it runs amazingly well... If people knew they can run a blazingly fast 3D desktop on an 80 dollar atom-based mother+processor combo, newegg would die.
So, no, we didn't loose the security battle, Microsoft won the marketing one.
Of course, OSX falls first every single year in the pwn2own competition, where the competitors use their best tricks against default OS installs. Vista and 7 have tied with Linux in how many restrictions need to be lifted before they go down. OSX has been proven very solidly to be the inherently most vulnerable major OS, but thanks to obscurity, people don't use these same simple exploits in the wild.
The most casual of testing of Opera 10.53 on my own C2D e8400 just yielded a Sunspider result of...
"Total: 312.0ms +/- 13.9%"
If speed is such an important marketing factor then why aren't we hearing more about opera?
I don't really like Opera and don't use it because of my UI preferences, but about six months ago when I last compared html (not javascript) rendering speeds, Opera was the only browser that could smoothly scroll through the large text and image laden pages I used as benchmarks. Safari was the slowest, skipping entire screens of content as it experienced rendering hiccups, and Chrome (I tested Chrome 3) was pretty bad too. I tried Chrome 4 later and saw a lot of improvement, but it still didn't have the performance of Opera. This was all on an i7 system.
I'm hoping a newer version of Chrome will make up the difference, but then I still need it to run a real adblock, not the current "load the image and then hide it" version.
That's right wiener_dudes. No water on Mars. Ever. No life... ever. No nothing. Here, but not there. No Princess Lea no sandworms. It's empty pals... our solar-system and galaxy. All the universe is empty except earth of everything but horror. Just us. Alone. Always.
Um...this article is talking about _some_ of the evidence for _recent_liquid_ water being called into question. There's a vast amount of solid water on Mars now and there's no question at all about that.
So to rephrase for you: HUGE amounts of water on Mars. Right now. Unquestionably. Solid water plus definitely active at one time volcanoes = definite liquid water. Life? Maybe, maybe not.
Aerogel* is also only 2% silica and 98% air. Doesn’t mean it’s made out of air. This is a material out of clay, that can bind lots of water. Just like aerogel binds lots of air.
___ * Btw, my favorite of all “normal” materials on this planet.:) (The favorite abnormal is definitely a Bose-Einstein condensate!)
And as you might expect, this one is called a hydrogel. The novel part isn't that it has a lot of water in it - much more dilute hydrogels are trivially produced and have been since before I was born. I think the interesting part here, without RTFA, is that this is a ceramic instead of an elastomer.
I understand the "creative class" needs their validation because they cannot cope with the real world. But graffiti is vandalism. Deal with it. What if one of them takes a shit on your porch and calls it "art?"
If you can sell it for $500k, art or not, I don't think you'd want the cleaning crew to toss it in a dumpster.
Is HTC's UI really a plus? I didn't try it, but I think I trust google more than HTC (or motorola) to design an interface and support it for the future with updates.
HTC's interface is, surprisingly, much more fluid than Google's. A Droid Incredible (in my limited time with one) feels as smooth as an iPhone. The N1 doesn't...DROID DOES>?!
There are pleanty of other resources out there, why come all they way here to get them?
It would be like filling your car full of fuel, driving to the airport (past several orchards, forests, landfills, and supermarkets), filling up a 767, flying to Tahiti in it, then raiding a village for its produce.
Unless you assume that we're one of the several orchards. Systematic exploration or simply random placement of our system along a line of travel would make us convenient. It all depends on how common spacefaring alien life is.
Seriously, I used to hunt for pixels too, but after about 1280x1024 I stopped caring.
I don't like my desktop at much higher resolution than that, it becomes uncomfortable. I know gamers and drafters really want giant screens at massive resolutions, but besides them who else really wants it? 2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better - in fact it can make them downright hard to see, so why do I need it?
Unfortunately for Pete Brown, I think more people fall into my category than do his, or he wouldn't have anything to complain about.
At least 1920x1200 on a 26" or larger display and the snap to edges thing in Windows 7 can seriously improve productivity for just about anyone who has to write reports. Suddenly you can very comfortably, very legibly handle the document you're writing and the one you're commenting on/criticizing/whatever at the same time. Of course you can do that without the snap thing, but that's one example of a UI element that really helps you to take advantage of your pixels. Windows 7 also handles large fonts better than previous Windows OSs, which helps.
Top Gear tends to be better at busting car myths than Mythbusters...
Take the driving-behind-a-jumbo-flips-your-car myth for example...
Mythbusters couldn't find a jumbo jet, so they used a much less powerful jet turbine. Then, the had to rig a complicated remote control system to the car so they could drive it...
Top Gear got a jumbo, put a steeringwheel lock on the car, tossed a large brick on the accelerator, and presto, the car flipped behind the jumbo jet!
I saw that episode of MB, and it bugged me like almost every episode does. MB is a nice concept but they tend to simplify their problems poorly, keeping superficial elements the same and approximating away some of the key factors they should be testing. As an experimentalist, watching MB is often painful.
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A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter.
That sounds like a much lower number than the percentage of randomly selected people who don't use Twitter. 15% of engineers use Twitter?! That sounds insanely high to me. What percentage use Blogspot? What percentage use IRC?
Tyranny always rears its head under the guise of national defense, war or some sort of civil protection from the bad, ugly guys out there. The Internet is one of the last few bastions of freedom left in the world...too bad the Statists out there cannot see the Federal Government for what it truly is.
And remember when those damned abolitionists reared their ugly heads and took slavery from the free market? They really showed how much they love freedom then, didn't they? Damn Federal government! Damn them and all those who question capitalism!
I'm not entirely sure what significance this has on us. I guess it might make establishing a moon base a little more feasible, but there really isn't any point of doing such a thing.
Similarly, there's no point in having babies, going to work, reading a book, sleeping in a house, eating dinner, watching movies, or putting up wallpaper.
I'm not sold on Gates' motives. He sounds more like a lobbyist than a sage omen of caution like Einstein was.
Don't forget that Gates is one of the greatest philanthropists in history and at this stage in his life he's probably spent more time and effort on giving money and directing its use to solve world problems in which he has no stake than he has working to make and sell computer software. If prominent American should have some sort of credibility when it comes to altruism, it's Bill Gates.
On the other hand, this meeting isn't a very close parallel with Einstein's letter. That's not because Bill Gates is sinister, though.
Ever load up a completely random webpage to see an advertisement
Not in many years.
Only a few hundred planets outside the solar system have been discovered. Some of those were found from backyards by amateurs.
Check out The Sky is Your Laboratory by Robert Buckheim. It's a ~$30 book that will show you how you can participate in meaningful astro research with no equipment beyond a stopwatch for the simplest stuff. Later chapters get increasingly complex and show you how to do things that be pretty big contributions to the field.
> Combine these stories with the recent news of Microsoft shuttering its newsgroups, along with other recent stories, and the picture does not look bright for Usenet.
What if you combine those stories with the fact that there are millions more people using Usenet groups today thanks to Google's web interface? Does it look brighter than 10 years ago?
Maybe, though, Usenet is an idea whose time has been and gone. There are other ways of sharing information now, which don't suffer the same intractable problems of spam etc.
Google simply bought Deja News, you know, which was giving us web access to newsgroups 15 years ago. Its search engine was actually a lot more powerful than that of Google Groups, too, giving you complete control over the ranking of your results.
Neopolitan gravediggers accused of burying corpses wrapped in stale pizza.
Because good theories always make fundamental predictions that need to be contradicted by reality and then tweaked later in an ad-hoc fashion without ever revising their underlying principles. That's great science! Ah well, whatever gets you grants and funding right? In that case, status quo it is! We must always be openly hostile to all competing theories, refuse to publish them so they can be peer-reviewed, etc. That's progress.
In a generic sense it's a quite easy to publish a new, competing theory. That's the kind of thing most encouraged by the current peer review culture, as long as it's self consistent and matches observations.
A history degree doesn't provide anything past what you could get from an online, verified information source (I dare not say Wikipedia of course). If you're intelligent, you'll be able to comprehend whatever historical issue interests you, and have no need to spend 4 years on it.
As a history professor, I can safely say it's that kind of thinking that leads students to not come to lecture and instead rely on the interwebs when it comes time to study for exams.
Of course those students fail miserably, while those who attend lecture do much, much better.
And beyond middle school history isn't about simply memorizing events. It's about making arguments in an interactive environment where the teacher/professor and other students can then react and make counterarguments. A history degree is about as related to getting information on historical events "from an online, verified information source" as playing professional baseball is to watching baseball on television.
Google has built an empire on having the balls to do stuff that the industry thinks it's "way too early" to do.
Google already provides web versions of office apps, RSS readers/players, photo management, email (naturally), and a ton of other things. From my understanding, online MP3 and eBook repositories are in the works that would allow you to stream that content from centralized storage.
Search and webmail are making Google money, and they entered those markets long after other companies had mature products already serving those needs. It looks to me like Google's success is about improving on mature markets. None of its brand new ideas has been a business success. I'm not asserting that ChromeOS won't be successful, but I think that your particular argument is almost the exact opposite of the truth.
Don't use Windows. Was that so hard?
I am not saying that all other operating systems are perfectly secure by default or that they are invulnerable, but windows is absolutely insecure. We have to face that truth.
Microsoft's security record is laughable. And I'm not even talking about particular exploits, bugs can be fixed, I am talking about design. Windows is designed to be insecure. Security was never really taken seriously at microsoft. There are countless techniques to escalate permissions on just about any win platform (Including windows vista and 7). And this are not obscure and complex vulnerabilities. This are simple 50 lines executables that allow you to escalate any process you want with a few clicks.
Just take a look at any of their products, either server or desktop, and their security record will be worse than any competitor. Exchange, SQL, IIS, Explorer, Windows, Office. They allow script execution in crazy places (like a simple text document or spreadsheet).
Windows is insecure for a very good reason: Because there is a huge industry that developed around fixing windows, that industry is so big that it has become the main tool of customer loyalty that microsoft has. Millions, from huge Antivirus companies, to overstuffed IT departments, to your average computer repairman base their economy on Windows flaws. Those guys love windows and all its flaws. I've actually had people telling me "Well, I know it's a piece of crap, but it's what keeps people coming to my shop again and again". Not to mention the computer retailers. Imagine the fall in Dell stock if people didn't have to buy a new computer every 2 years just to run the latest OS? A friend of mine has am iMac from 2001 running the latest OSX. And it runs amazingly well ... If people knew they can run a blazingly fast 3D desktop on an 80 dollar atom-based mother+processor combo, newegg would die.
So, no, we didn't loose the security battle, Microsoft won the marketing one.
Of course, OSX falls first every single year in the pwn2own competition, where the competitors use their best tricks against default OS installs. Vista and 7 have tied with Linux in how many restrictions need to be lifted before they go down. OSX has been proven very solidly to be the inherently most vulnerable major OS, but thanks to obscurity, people don't use these same simple exploits in the wild.
So much flakiness in the WebKit support of CSS multi-column layout... don't even know where to begin. Firefox is much farther ahead in this case.
Eventually DIVs are going to have to go away completely, so that all HTML is semantic.
Silence! Real web users spend all day continually refreshing the ACID3 test. Nothing else matters.
The most casual of testing of Opera 10.53 on my own C2D e8400 just yielded a Sunspider result of...
"Total: 312.0ms +/- 13.9%"
If speed is such an important marketing factor then why aren't we hearing more about opera?
I don't really like Opera and don't use it because of my UI preferences, but about six months ago when I last compared html (not javascript) rendering speeds, Opera was the only browser that could smoothly scroll through the large text and image laden pages I used as benchmarks. Safari was the slowest, skipping entire screens of content as it experienced rendering hiccups, and Chrome (I tested Chrome 3) was pretty bad too. I tried Chrome 4 later and saw a lot of improvement, but it still didn't have the performance of Opera. This was all on an i7 system.
I'm hoping a newer version of Chrome will make up the difference, but then I still need it to run a real adblock, not the current "load the image and then hide it" version.
What if I want to jack all of them up? Oh can't do that, not in the script.
Fooie.
Yes you can. None of those people were invulnerable. You just didn't make a good attempt.
Seems like they have been reading Cory Doctorow`s little brother and got loads of great ideas from it.
Seems like the students should read the same book and get some ideas of their own.
That's right wiener_dudes. No water on Mars. Ever. No life ... ever. No nothing. Here, but not there. No Princess Lea no sandworms. It's empty pals ... our solar-system and galaxy. All the universe is empty except earth of everything but horror. Just us. Alone. Always.
Um...this article is talking about _some_ of the evidence for _recent_liquid_ water being called into question. There's a vast amount of solid water on Mars now and there's no question at all about that.
So to rephrase for you: HUGE amounts of water on Mars. Right now. Unquestionably. Solid water plus definitely active at one time volcanoes = definite liquid water. Life? Maybe, maybe not.
If you watch all the scenes they cut from the movie, you learn how he was able to do this.
The aliens used a linksys router and left the login info as admin/admin.
Aerogel* is also only 2% silica and 98% air. Doesn’t mean it’s made out of air.
This is a material out of clay, that can bind lots of water. Just like aerogel binds lots of air.
___ :) (The favorite abnormal is definitely a Bose-Einstein condensate!)
* Btw, my favorite of all “normal” materials on this planet.
And as you might expect, this one is called a hydrogel. The novel part isn't that it has a lot of water in it - much more dilute hydrogels are trivially produced and have been since before I was born. I think the interesting part here, without RTFA, is that this is a ceramic instead of an elastomer.
We "invented" this a couple of hundred years ago. We call it "jelly" in civilised lands, or "jello" in the colonies. kthxbye.
Sure, but it's a whole class of materials called gels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel
"Gels are defined as a substantially dilute crosslinked system, which exhibits no flow when in the steady-state."
I understand the "creative class" needs their validation because they cannot cope with the real world. But graffiti is vandalism. Deal with it.
What if one of them takes a shit on your porch and calls it "art?"
If you can sell it for $500k, art or not, I don't think you'd want the cleaning crew to toss it in a dumpster.
Is HTC's UI really a plus? I didn't try it, but I think I trust google more than HTC (or motorola) to design an interface and support it for the future with updates.
HTC's interface is, surprisingly, much more fluid than Google's. A Droid Incredible (in my limited time with one) feels as smooth as an iPhone. The N1 doesn't...DROID DOES>?!
There are pleanty of other resources out there, why come all they way here to get them?
It would be like filling your car full of fuel, driving to the airport (past several orchards, forests, landfills, and supermarkets), filling up a 767, flying to Tahiti in it, then raiding a village for its produce.
Unless you assume that we're one of the several orchards. Systematic exploration or simply random placement of our system along a line of travel would make us convenient. It all depends on how common spacefaring alien life is.
Seriously, I used to hunt for pixels too, but after about 1280x1024 I stopped caring.
I don't like my desktop at much higher resolution than that, it becomes uncomfortable. I know gamers and drafters really want giant screens at massive resolutions, but besides them who else really wants it? 2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better - in fact it can make them downright hard to see, so why do I need it?
Unfortunately for Pete Brown, I think more people fall into my category than do his, or he wouldn't have anything to complain about.
At least 1920x1200 on a 26" or larger display and the snap to edges thing in Windows 7 can seriously improve productivity for just about anyone who has to write reports. Suddenly you can very comfortably, very legibly handle the document you're writing and the one you're commenting on/criticizing/whatever at the same time. Of course you can do that without the snap thing, but that's one example of a UI element that really helps you to take advantage of your pixels. Windows 7 also handles large fonts better than previous Windows OSs, which helps.
Top Gear tends to be better at busting car myths than Mythbusters...
Take the driving-behind-a-jumbo-flips-your-car myth for example...
Mythbusters couldn't find a jumbo jet, so they used a much less powerful jet turbine. Then, the had to rig a complicated remote control system to the car so they could drive it...
Top Gear got a jumbo, put a steeringwheel lock on the car, tossed a large brick on the accelerator, and presto, the car flipped behind the jumbo jet!
I saw that episode of MB, and it bugged me like almost every episode does. MB is a nice concept but they tend to simplify their problems poorly, keeping superficial elements the same and approximating away some of the key factors they should be testing. As an experimentalist, watching MB is often painful.