Interesting. My device is from AT&T. So you're saying AT&T badly broke WM6 phones and never tried to update/fix the problem? That's horrible. I'll look at XDA forum--hopefully there's a way I can strip out AT&T's malware without having to become a mobile phone expert in the process.
I see you've never owned a cell phone before this one. Vendor-branded phones are almost always produced for the sole purpose of screwing up the originally nice OS provided by the manufacturer. AT&T does this, Verizon does this, Sprint does this, and T-Mobile does this. I can't comment on Boost Mobile:P
My Sprint phone barely lasted one day for idle, talking, and a few hours of train rides. I installed a modded OS and voila: 2 days of battery life for the same behavior, instantly functional GPS that works in my basement (it didn't before), no more UI lag, and a lot more functionality (unlimited free phone calls).
My last phone, with Verizon, crashed a lot while I was in the camera mode. The image would freeze and then the screen would go into it's stupid Verizon shutdown animation (complete with sound, even when in silent mode). I loaded up a ROM based on the manufacturer's carrier-agnostic software and never had the problem again, nor did I have the shutdown animation.
AT&T modded the OS on my previous phone to remove nice features like bluetooth/cable data transfers in order to force me to buy ringtones and pay to get photos off my phone. Fixing that only required flipping a few bits in the phone's memory - I stuck with the original OS after doing the modification. This was back before everyone loved to screw up phones though.
I think that Apple's leverage over AT&T with the iPhone is a good reason to buy from them. AT&T isn't at liberty to go reskin and break the OS.
Dictionaries are a whole excellent App category that exists on the iPhone, and can be supremely useful when traveling. Microsoft is eliminating them for no discernible reason. Yeah, the MS App store is going to be a HUGE success. Good luck with that.
MS isn't eliminating anything. There are tens of thousands of WinMo apps out there right now on the internet, and the vast majority are free. Many of the posters in this story are treating this new WinMo store like it's the Apple App Store. They're not the same. On an unbroken iPhone, you have the App Store as your single source of software. The WinMo store is more akin to NewEgg...if you don't like it, go to the larger, cheaper, better software sources out there.
Mike Judge's vision of the future in "Idiocracy" seems much more likely.
On the issue of whether computer-enhanced humans are still "human" - what does that even mean? Genetically, "Human" is 98% chimpanzee, 50% dog, 30% daffodil, etc. (I'm sure I have the numbers wrong).
I think we tend to over-rate the concept of "humanity". Every thought or emotion you've ever had is merely your impression of sodium ions moving around in your brain. We process information. Computers do it. Chimpanzees do it. Dogs do it. Even daffodils do it. It is just not that special.
"Individuality" is an illusion. You may process information differently than I do. But you also process information at time x differently than you process information at time x+1. Because the "human" self is a manifestation of the brain, the human "self" changes with each thought. Consciousness is an instantaneous phenomenon and there is no continuity of "self". In effect, we have all "died" an infinite number of times.
That's a bit overboard, I think. You're basically claiming (and I'm trying not to strawman you, here) that abstract concepts can't be used to identify patterns, but instead can only be used to identify identical things. There's plenty of reason for me to label myself at time=2009 and myself at time=2007 the same person, just as we label anything else that changes but maintains identifiable and distinct patterns.
As a scientist, individual identity seems like a common and accurate label for each person's idiosyncratic tendencies.
Textbooks are expensive only in small part due to the hardcover / high quality paper they're printed on. The IP of the authors is what costs the most money.
Most likely the Kindle + e-versions of textbooks will be only slightly cheaper than paper textbooks. To really see the savings of the kindle you have to look deeper. Pens, paper, notebooks used to write notes on will be in some large part replaced by the annotation capabilities of the Kindle. Mobile internet for life is also something that people seem to underestimate. Furthermore, reducing paper waste seems to me by far the biggest cost reduction. It's just not one that we typically factor in when we're sliding our credit card.
Here's to a better world and better Kindles to come.
You mean the IP collected by the authors but owned by the publishing company. The author seems very little money. Writing a textbook is almost entirely about prestige, unless you happen to write something that becomes unbelievably popular and then you write another popular textbook and can leverage your previous success into a better contract.
Am I the only one who is amazed at the amount of times someone sticks the boot into Google for doing something constructive?
When was the last time Microsoft (or any other large company) did anything like this? NEVER?? You'd be right.
Well, yesterday Bill Gates (who I think we can still equate with MS) gave away $8.1 million for medical research based on unconventional submissions (and open to the public). So the answer to your question isn't "never." It's "yesterday, and very very often." That's remarkably similar to what Google is trying to do here for the first time, but the main difference is that Bill Gates has given away something like $30 BILLION by now and he actually succeeded in finding a way to sort through submissions and get the money to the people who had ideas. If he stops now and Google hands out their prize tomorrow, and then they continue at this pace, they'll catch up to him in the year 32009. Yeah, Google is amazing and MS hates everyone.
Am I the only one that finds it a little odd that people are interested in purchasing items raided from tombs in the first place? O.o
It's how most of the artifacts in museums around the world left their home countries. Also, go to the houses of some old money types in New York and you'll find a shocking amount of looted art. Some of the looted art eventually ends up going back to museums (like the Levy-White collection now trickling toward the Met, though Shelby White still has quite a collection that might astonish you at home).
Maybe it was cheaper in the USA. I still have computer magazines which were advertising OS/2 Warp for £499 (closer to $700 at the time), and it needed at least 16MB of RAM, while Windows 3.1 ran okay in 4MB. At the time, RAM was about £30/MB.
Yes, I saw the same sorts of prices in advertisements and looking at the MSRP, but in stores (not seedy little stores, but electronics institutions like Fry's) had it for under $100. I had 8 MB of RAM when I bought it - installation failed, so I took it back rather than spending a fortune (for a teenager) on an upgrade.
"Even reasonably non-technical dumbasses could do such a thing in windows."
No they can't.
But this does not solve your problem. How have you tried to do it? Perhaps we can help.
Every single person in my dorm in college in 1998 was able to figure this out on their first day with no help from the school. They were all using Windows or Mac OS Whatever Was out Then. I can't comment on the difficulty of setting up a static IP in Ubuntu, but in windows and MacOS, even 10.5 years ago it was trivial for even first time computer owners.
I could be misremembering -- it's been so long -- but $99 for upgrades is what I recall. Once I paid full price for a standard edition because for some fool reason I didn't want to wait a month for the upgrade, but I'm pretty sure even that wasn't anywhere near $500
I got OS/2 Warp 3.0 for about $60-80 soon after it came out. I also got a full legal Vista Home Premium for $109. The GP was just making up numbers.
Excuse me but, don't goats emit carbon in the form of CO2 just by breathing - and methane by farting?
All of the carbon they emit is initially gained through eating grass. If you mow with a powered machine, all of the grass's carbon will end up back in the atmosphere through decay, and you also free carbon that was trapped in liquid form (oil) to the atmosphere. The goats are carbon neutral.
That said, I'm surprised it worked. I once got a goat to eat the grass on a hill I needed mowed, but it refused to eat the grass. It preferred pieces of metal and fence posts to grass. What it really wanted was its expensive goat chow, though. Maybe we spoiled him.
i updated IE8 manually on like 20 machines yesterday. it asked every time. it didn't kill my default browser selection.
it there something i'm overlooking, like does automatic updates apply it and not ask you? am i missing something from TFA?
I just updated to it yesterday as well. Automatic Updates most definitely asks (I had said no previously, making it show up as optional and not selectedby default in the list of available updates to be installed) and most definitely explicitly asks you whether or not you want to make it your default.
This is a silly story. Also, remember that IE8 and Firefox are both more secure than Safari, with 0 exploits found so far to get past their own security and the Vista sandbox (see pwn2own from this year and analysis by its victor), so don't include that in the list of "more secure alternate browsers" if you're using Vista.
What is this thing called 'Javascript' you people speak of?
Oh, right. The little unchecked box in my preferences.
Never mind me while I go back to loading pages in a blink.
Every time a new browser claims to be X times faster than existing browsers, I wonder why people want to get their pages loads in 0/X instead of 0 seconds. If you block ads, there are very, very few sites on the internet that have a noticeable rendering time.
This would be followed by brownouts -- a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
I consider it bad enough that I have to explain, every time I helps someone clean up their machine, that MSN loading slowly does not mean they have a slow computer.
And now we have so-called experts warning us that network lag will cause slow computers?
What next, a warning about how Windows 7 requires 16 GB of storage, causing a wave of panic among those who don't understand the difference between RAM and HDD space?
They're not experts- it's a think tank. Think tank means a bunch of people with no background in the field they're studying giving an outsider's perspective on an issue. If you think this sounds useless, you're right. It's just a way to get funding from gullible companies and government entities.
two news organizations to be involved will be The New York Times and The Washington Post. 'Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google's page.
If it comes from The New York Times or The Washington Post, then it is extremely unlikely that it will contain anything that interests me.
I see very little long-term benefit to Google from this, and I see a lot of potentially pissed off users who do not want to be spoon fed NYT or WP crap. Seriously, anyone can find whatever news sources one wants today on the net. Why the hell would I want to have that crap shoved into my face every time I want to do a search?
I will bet you within weeks of Google launching this idiocy, someone will write an add-on for Firefox to block it.
Adblock will probably kill it like it kills all the other Google ads. I'm happy to read from a wide range of news sources, but when I want to do so I already can. I have RSS feeds to show me very types of breaking or important news, and while I may search for WoW info a lot each week, I never ever want to see some news story on WoW when I'm searching for someone else. I spend a lot of the day searching for work related stuff, but I don't want to see news related to it at night (or during the day for that matter). I know what I want. Google never has.
I like that you recommend the very worst wireless mouse because it's the one you've used. The right click problem makes it unuseable for anyone used to full mouse functionality, and the poor precision and lag are very noticeable for someone sensitive to such things. I'd suggest a Logitech G7 if there is an interest in getting a mouse that tracks quickly and accurately. In my experience, it's slightly slower than a wired mouse, but faster than other options from Logitech, Apple, and tied with the best MS options.
There's a lot of concern from everyone about "peak oil".
Why is there not just as much of a concern about "peak lithium". If we really make a push to convert all cars to being electric, that's a ton of lithium required - and it's used in a lot of other applications too.
That's why solutions like hydrogen as truly alternative fuels make more sense to me that rushing to consume a metal which is truly a non-renewable resource, unlike even coal and oil (which are simply slow to produce but are produced over time).
Yes, lithium may be scarce, but you've got a deep misconception that may be coloring your view and comparison with oil. Oil is a fuel. Allowing it to burn produces energy. Lithium in car batteries is not a fuel. It's a storage device.
Comparing it to a gasoline system, you should think of it like the steel that makes up your gas tank. It stores energy, which must be produced elsewhere (like through burning oil or coal, for example). If we run out of oil, we need a new energy source. If we look to be running out of lithium, we can take worn out batteries and pull the lithium out of them to make new batteries.
Hydrogen, as you point out, is plentiful. However, it is also just another gas tank, not a fuel. Hydrogen is produced by cracking methane. Two years ago I interviewed with the company that does 90% of the hydrogen production in the world. They pointed out that per mile on the road, more CO2 is produced by hydrogen production than gasoline consumption.
Both hydrogen and lithium will be used as STORAGE for energy. Both can be reused basically unlimited times - managed well, we should never run out of either. Oil and coal, on the other hand, generate the power we can then store in lithium batteries or hydrogen, but that generation breaks the oil and coal permanently.
The argument for opt-in/opt-out in this particular case basically boils down to whose side of the coin you want to favor when it comes to preserving access to works. If you believe in the Disney model where it's perfectly alright to remove your works from the public, till they become public domain, either because you don't want people to see them any more or to ensure the next time you publish the work (and thus renew the copyright because you remastered it and thus created a 'new' work) you'll have a high demand, then you want an opt-in system.
If you believe in the public good argument which points out the only reason you were given copyrights in the first place was so you could make money from your works in a set amount of time before they became public domain, then the entire concept of "orphaned works" is blasphemous from the start. Remember, the idea of copyright isn't "You control the idea" it's "You control the means to reproduction so everyone has to pay you to get a hold of the idea". In this case, you are for opt-out because while it's still against your beliefs that a book can be purposefully kept out of publication, it's at least the option that allows you to republish those works where the author didn't care enough either way to indicate their desire.
I think though, reading the above, you know my bias on the issue. To me, anything that is copyrighted can be considered a 'derivative work' based on the entire culture you were brought up in. You would not have been able to make it without that, and thus you shouldn't have sole right to control it forever. However, these days, that is what is going on, since many things that have been copyrighted will never physically last long enough to fall into public domain. How many movies and shows from the 1900's to the 1950's have been lost because the film they were printed on crumbled into dust a long time ago. How many books have been lost because they are no longer published and the pulp they were printed on has disintegrated by now.
By the time these works become public domain, how many of them will even be understandable given the inevitable drift in language?
A large number of new or only moderately popular authors can only get limited publication runs of their materials and then have to lobby the publisher if they want another run. I'm not aware of the specifics of this case, but if those works count as orphaned during the typical 1-5 years it takes for new authors to get a second set of books produced, this settlement may make it impossible for new authors to make a living with writing unless they opt out. I think in that case, an opt-in requirement would be much better.
Anyone have some magical fell-off-the-truck source for the sub-$100 price quoted in the article?
The MSRP is $110, and that's the price most everywhere. As Anand stated, $99 was the expected price. The summary is a lie. Most likely, it was based off info in TFA, which came from Pcper. Pcper probably wrote their article before the release and forgot to change the price from the rumored to announced value when ATI revealed it.
Also, why do/. stories about graphics cards always link to laughable sites like Pcper? Not only is Anand's site a lot better in its testing, but it also offers truly insightful discussion concerning the technology or metanarrative behind a new release.
That's the sort of thing that makes me believe that this team may be able to succeed.
When Deep Blue went up against Kasperov, who could it practice against? Nobody.
There are tens of thousands of Jeopardy! questions to go through before they start making up their own.
Well it did practice against other grandmasters, and it analyzed every game Kasparov had every played, where Kasparov went into the match blind.
Indeed. And Kasparov insisted that in violation of the rules that the programmers tweaked Deep Blue during the match in a way that they were not allowed to do. IBM refused all of Kasparov's requests to see games Deep Blue played prior to the match (although Deep Blue's programmers had access to games that Kasparov played) and to see the computer's log files. Further, IBM dismantled Deep Blue when Kasparov asked for a rematch. How convenient.
Having said the above, I do believe that computers are now superior to humans at playing chess and the only hope for a level playing field between humans and computers is to use Bobby Fischer's Random Chess proposal.
I agree on all points. I think that Kasparov's narrow loss would have been a very convincing victory had the rules been followed and had access to previous games been allowed for both parties. I also think that today, no preparation would allow a human player to beat the top computer.
Plagiarism is a symptom of professors only being involved in the last step: reviewing the final product.
Require the students to submit multiple drafts. Meet with them for 15 minutes each and discuss their thought processes on the ongoing paper. You'll get better final products, teach people not to procrastinate, and smoke-out people who have no involvement in their "own work."
What, can't do that because you have 60 students in a class? Well, there's part of the problem too.
We're trying to find a technology solution to a problem with less student-teacher interaction. Typical!
I never taught a class involving humanities paper writing (in the science classes I taught, I could detect borrowed work by asking our kids to explain the calculations in their presentations and reports), but my wife meets with students several at least once after they turn in a required outline and bibliography to her. The bibliography, meeting, and my wife's extensive knowledge of scholarship in her field have made plagiarism rare and very obvious. Also, they make the students write vastly better papers and learn a lot more. Even having students meet with a TA to discuss paper ideas and progress is a huge help, and required outlines, drafts, and (especially) bibliographies should be part of the writing process in every lower level undergrad class. In upper level classes, the meeting is sufficient.
Why the hell is this modded troll? It's the fucking truth. A low-flying plane is not a problem, it happens all the time. A low-flying plane, escorted by a fighter, is not one either.
And for those who panic at the sight of a low-flying jet - I suggest moving out of a major city into the boonies. Otherwise, you're not going to lead anything remotely resembling a productive life.
Except this is the first time this has happened in the designated no-fly zone in New York City since at least 9/11/01, and possibly the first time ever with a jumbo jet and a fighter escort. Even if everyone in the city skipped work every time this happened, they'd have missed, at most, one day per ten years.
Had the VCR been invented in a copyright climate like today's, would it ever have survived the legal attack against it?
I'm trying to figure out what's different, other than the fact we now have the DMCA.
The same could be said of the automobile, the airplane, and the internet. Imagine carriage, railroad, and telephone industries with today's level of lobbying and corruption opposing these industry-wrecking technologies.
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Interesting. My device is from AT&T. So you're saying AT&T badly broke WM6 phones and never tried to update/fix the problem? That's horrible. I'll look at XDA forum--hopefully there's a way I can strip out AT&T's malware without having to become a mobile phone expert in the process.
I see you've never owned a cell phone before this one. Vendor-branded phones are almost always produced for the sole purpose of screwing up the originally nice OS provided by the manufacturer. AT&T does this, Verizon does this, Sprint does this, and T-Mobile does this. I can't comment on Boost Mobile :P
My Sprint phone barely lasted one day for idle, talking, and a few hours of train rides. I installed a modded OS and voila: 2 days of battery life for the same behavior, instantly functional GPS that works in my basement (it didn't before), no more UI lag, and a lot more functionality (unlimited free phone calls).
My last phone, with Verizon, crashed a lot while I was in the camera mode. The image would freeze and then the screen would go into it's stupid Verizon shutdown animation (complete with sound, even when in silent mode). I loaded up a ROM based on the manufacturer's carrier-agnostic software and never had the problem again, nor did I have the shutdown animation.
AT&T modded the OS on my previous phone to remove nice features like bluetooth/cable data transfers in order to force me to buy ringtones and pay to get photos off my phone. Fixing that only required flipping a few bits in the phone's memory - I stuck with the original OS after doing the modification. This was back before everyone loved to screw up phones though.
I think that Apple's leverage over AT&T with the iPhone is a good reason to buy from them. AT&T isn't at liberty to go reskin and break the OS.
Dictionaries are a whole excellent App category that exists on the iPhone, and can be supremely useful when traveling. Microsoft is eliminating them for no discernible reason. Yeah, the MS App store is going to be a HUGE success. Good luck with that.
MS isn't eliminating anything. There are tens of thousands of WinMo apps out there right now on the internet, and the vast majority are free. Many of the posters in this story are treating this new WinMo store like it's the Apple App Store. They're not the same. On an unbroken iPhone, you have the App Store as your single source of software. The WinMo store is more akin to NewEgg...if you don't like it, go to the larger, cheaper, better software sources out there.
Mike Judge's vision of the future in "Idiocracy" seems much more likely.
On the issue of whether computer-enhanced humans are still "human" - what does that even mean? Genetically, "Human" is 98% chimpanzee, 50% dog, 30% daffodil, etc. (I'm sure I have the numbers wrong).
I think we tend to over-rate the concept of "humanity". Every thought or emotion you've ever had is merely your impression of sodium ions moving around in your brain. We process information. Computers do it. Chimpanzees do it. Dogs do it. Even daffodils do it. It is just not that special.
"Individuality" is an illusion. You may process information differently than I do. But you also process information at time x differently than you process information at time x+1. Because the "human" self is a manifestation of the brain, the human "self" changes with each thought. Consciousness is an instantaneous phenomenon and there is no continuity of "self". In effect, we have all "died" an infinite number of times.
That's a bit overboard, I think. You're basically claiming (and I'm trying not to strawman you, here) that abstract concepts can't be used to identify patterns, but instead can only be used to identify identical things. There's plenty of reason for me to label myself at time=2009 and myself at time=2007 the same person, just as we label anything else that changes but maintains identifiable and distinct patterns.
As a scientist, individual identity seems like a common and accurate label for each person's idiosyncratic tendencies.
Textbooks are expensive only in small part due to the hardcover / high quality paper they're printed on. The IP of the authors is what costs the most money.
Most likely the Kindle + e-versions of textbooks will be only slightly cheaper than paper textbooks. To really see the savings of the kindle you have to look deeper. Pens, paper, notebooks used to write notes on will be in some large part replaced by the annotation capabilities of the Kindle. Mobile internet for life is also something that people seem to underestimate. Furthermore, reducing paper waste seems to me by far the biggest cost reduction. It's just not one that we typically factor in when we're sliding our credit card.
Here's to a better world and better Kindles to come.
You mean the IP collected by the authors but owned by the publishing company. The author seems very little money. Writing a textbook is almost entirely about prestige, unless you happen to write something that becomes unbelievably popular and then you write another popular textbook and can leverage your previous success into a better contract.
Am I the only one who is amazed at the amount of times someone sticks the boot into Google for doing something constructive?
When was the last time Microsoft (or any other large company) did anything like this? NEVER?? You'd be right.
Well, yesterday Bill Gates (who I think we can still equate with MS) gave away $8.1 million for medical research based on unconventional submissions (and open to the public). So the answer to your question isn't "never." It's "yesterday, and very very often." That's remarkably similar to what Google is trying to do here for the first time, but the main difference is that Bill Gates has given away something like $30 BILLION by now and he actually succeeded in finding a way to sort through submissions and get the money to the people who had ideas. If he stops now and Google hands out their prize tomorrow, and then they continue at this pace, they'll catch up to him in the year 32009. Yeah, Google is amazing and MS hates everyone.
Am I the only one that finds it a little odd that people are interested in purchasing items raided from tombs in the first place? O.o
It's how most of the artifacts in museums around the world left their home countries. Also, go to the houses of some old money types in New York and you'll find a shocking amount of looted art. Some of the looted art eventually ends up going back to museums (like the Levy-White collection now trickling toward the Met, though Shelby White still has quite a collection that might astonish you at home).
Maybe it was cheaper in the USA. I still have computer magazines which were advertising OS/2 Warp for £499 (closer to $700 at the time), and it needed at least 16MB of RAM, while Windows 3.1 ran okay in 4MB. At the time, RAM was about £30/MB.
Yes, I saw the same sorts of prices in advertisements and looking at the MSRP, but in stores (not seedy little stores, but electronics institutions like Fry's) had it for under $100. I had 8 MB of RAM when I bought it - installation failed, so I took it back rather than spending a fortune (for a teenager) on an upgrade.
"Even reasonably non-technical dumbasses could do such a thing in windows."
No they can't.
But this does not solve your problem. How have you tried to do it? Perhaps we can help.
Every single person in my dorm in college in 1998 was able to figure this out on their first day with no help from the school. They were all using Windows or Mac OS Whatever Was out Then. I can't comment on the difficulty of setting up a static IP in Ubuntu, but in windows and MacOS, even 10.5 years ago it was trivial for even first time computer owners.
I never paid anywhere near $500 for OS/2.
I could be misremembering -- it's been so long -- but $99 for upgrades is what I recall. Once I paid full price for a standard edition because for some fool reason I didn't want to wait a month for the upgrade, but I'm pretty sure even that wasn't anywhere near $500
I got OS/2 Warp 3.0 for about $60-80 soon after it came out. I also got a full legal Vista Home Premium for $109. The GP was just making up numbers.
Excuse me but, don't goats emit carbon in the form of CO2 just by breathing - and methane by farting?
All of the carbon they emit is initially gained through eating grass. If you mow with a powered machine, all of the grass's carbon will end up back in the atmosphere through decay, and you also free carbon that was trapped in liquid form (oil) to the atmosphere. The goats are carbon neutral.
That said, I'm surprised it worked. I once got a goat to eat the grass on a hill I needed mowed, but it refused to eat the grass. It preferred pieces of metal and fence posts to grass. What it really wanted was its expensive goat chow, though. Maybe we spoiled him.
So long as the end result is not selling the servers for less than the production cost, it should be perfectly legal.
Unless Microsoft were doing it, of course.
i updated IE8 manually on like 20 machines yesterday. it asked every time. it didn't kill my default browser selection.
it there something i'm overlooking, like does automatic updates apply it and not ask you? am i missing something from TFA?
I just updated to it yesterday as well. Automatic Updates most definitely asks (I had said no previously, making it show up as optional and not selectedby default in the list of available updates to be installed) and most definitely explicitly asks you whether or not you want to make it your default.
This is a silly story. Also, remember that IE8 and Firefox are both more secure than Safari, with 0 exploits found so far to get past their own security and the Vista sandbox (see pwn2own from this year and analysis by its victor), so don't include that in the list of "more secure alternate browsers" if you're using Vista.
What is this thing called 'Javascript' you people speak of?
Oh, right. The little unchecked box in my preferences.
Never mind me while I go back to loading pages in a blink.
Every time a new browser claims to be X times faster than existing browsers, I wonder why people want to get their pages loads in 0/X instead of 0 seconds. If you block ads, there are very, very few sites on the internet that have a noticeable rendering time.
This would be followed by brownouts -- a combination of temporary
freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.
I consider it bad enough that I have to explain, every time I helps someone clean
up their machine, that MSN loading slowly does not mean they have a slow computer.
And now we have so-called experts warning us that network lag will cause slow computers?
What next, a warning about how Windows 7 requires 16 GB of storage, causing a wave of
panic among those who don't understand the difference between RAM and HDD space?
They're not experts- it's a think tank. Think tank means a bunch of people with no background in the field they're studying giving an outsider's perspective on an issue. If you think this sounds useless, you're right. It's just a way to get funding from gullible companies and government entities.
If it comes from The New York Times or The Washington Post, then it is extremely unlikely that it will contain anything that interests me.
I see very little long-term benefit to Google from this, and I see a lot of potentially pissed off users who do not want to be spoon fed NYT or WP crap. Seriously, anyone can find whatever news sources one wants today on the net. Why the hell would I want to have that crap shoved into my face every time I want to do a search?
I will bet you within weeks of Google launching this idiocy, someone will write an add-on for Firefox to block it.
Adblock will probably kill it like it kills all the other Google ads. I'm happy to read from a wide range of news sources, but when I want to do so I already can. I have RSS feeds to show me very types of breaking or important news, and while I may search for WoW info a lot each week, I never ever want to see some news story on WoW when I'm searching for someone else. I spend a lot of the day searching for work related stuff, but I don't want to see news related to it at night (or during the day for that matter). I know what I want. Google never has.
I like that you recommend the very worst wireless mouse because it's the one you've used. The right click problem makes it unuseable for anyone used to full mouse functionality, and the poor precision and lag are very noticeable for someone sensitive to such things. I'd suggest a Logitech G7 if there is an interest in getting a mouse that tracks quickly and accurately. In my experience, it's slightly slower than a wired mouse, but faster than other options from Logitech, Apple, and tied with the best MS options.
There's a lot of concern from everyone about "peak oil".
Why is there not just as much of a concern about "peak lithium". If we really make a push to convert all cars to being electric, that's a ton of lithium required - and it's used in a lot of other applications too.
That's why solutions like hydrogen as truly alternative fuels make more sense to me that rushing to consume a metal which is truly a non-renewable resource, unlike even coal and oil (which are simply slow to produce but are produced over time).
Yes, lithium may be scarce, but you've got a deep misconception that may be coloring your view and comparison with oil. Oil is a fuel. Allowing it to burn produces energy. Lithium in car batteries is not a fuel. It's a storage device.
Comparing it to a gasoline system, you should think of it like the steel that makes up your gas tank. It stores energy, which must be produced elsewhere (like through burning oil or coal, for example). If we run out of oil, we need a new energy source. If we look to be running out of lithium, we can take worn out batteries and pull the lithium out of them to make new batteries.
Hydrogen, as you point out, is plentiful. However, it is also just another gas tank, not a fuel. Hydrogen is produced by cracking methane. Two years ago I interviewed with the company that does 90% of the hydrogen production in the world. They pointed out that per mile on the road, more CO2 is produced by hydrogen production than gasoline consumption.
Both hydrogen and lithium will be used as STORAGE for energy. Both can be reused basically unlimited times - managed well, we should never run out of either. Oil and coal, on the other hand, generate the power we can then store in lithium batteries or hydrogen, but that generation breaks the oil and coal permanently.
The argument for opt-in/opt-out in this particular case basically boils down to whose side of the coin you want to favor when it comes to preserving access to works. If you believe in the Disney model where it's perfectly alright to remove your works from the public, till they become public domain, either because you don't want people to see them any more or to ensure the next time you publish the work (and thus renew the copyright because you remastered it and thus created a 'new' work) you'll have a high demand, then you want an opt-in system.
If you believe in the public good argument which points out the only reason you were given copyrights in the first place was so you could make money from your works in a set amount of time before they became public domain, then the entire concept of "orphaned works" is blasphemous from the start. Remember, the idea of copyright isn't "You control the idea" it's "You control the means to reproduction so everyone has to pay you to get a hold of the idea". In this case, you are for opt-out because while it's still against your beliefs that a book can be purposefully kept out of publication, it's at least the option that allows you to republish those works where the author didn't care enough either way to indicate their desire.
I think though, reading the above, you know my bias on the issue. To me, anything that is copyrighted can be considered a 'derivative work' based on the entire culture you were brought up in. You would not have been able to make it without that, and thus you shouldn't have sole right to control it forever. However, these days, that is what is going on, since many things that have been copyrighted will never physically last long enough to fall into public domain. How many movies and shows from the 1900's to the 1950's have been lost because the film they were printed on crumbled into dust a long time ago. How many books have been lost because they are no longer published and the pulp they were printed on has disintegrated by now.
By the time these works become public domain, how many of them will even be understandable given the inevitable drift in language?
A large number of new or only moderately popular authors can only get limited publication runs of their materials and then have to lobby the publisher if they want another run. I'm not aware of the specifics of this case, but if those works count as orphaned during the typical 1-5 years it takes for new authors to get a second set of books produced, this settlement may make it impossible for new authors to make a living with writing unless they opt out. I think in that case, an opt-in requirement would be much better.
A quick google search reveals nothing under $104.99.
Anyone have some magical fell-off-the-truck source for the sub-$100 price quoted in the article?
The MSRP is $110, and that's the price most everywhere. As Anand stated, $99 was the expected price. The summary is a lie. Most likely, it was based off info in TFA, which came from Pcper. Pcper probably wrote their article before the release and forgot to change the price from the rumored to announced value when ATI revealed it.
Also, why do /. stories about graphics cards always link to laughable sites like Pcper? Not only is Anand's site a lot better in its testing, but it also offers truly insightful discussion concerning the technology or metanarrative behind a new release.
This makes me feel sick. If only more Sue Millers were elected...
That's the sort of thing that makes me believe that this team may be able to succeed.
When Deep Blue went up against Kasperov, who could it practice against? Nobody.
There are tens of thousands of Jeopardy! questions to go through before they start making up their own.
Well it did practice against other grandmasters, and it analyzed every game Kasparov had every played, where Kasparov went into the match blind.
Indeed. And Kasparov insisted that in violation of the rules that the programmers tweaked Deep Blue during the match in a way that they were not allowed to do. IBM refused all of Kasparov's requests to see games Deep Blue played prior to the match (although Deep Blue's programmers had access to games that Kasparov played) and to see the computer's log files. Further, IBM dismantled Deep Blue when Kasparov asked for a rematch. How convenient.
Having said the above, I do believe that computers are now superior to humans at playing chess and the only hope for a level playing field between humans and computers is to use Bobby Fischer's Random Chess proposal.
I agree on all points. I think that Kasparov's narrow loss would have been a very convincing victory had the rules been followed and had access to previous games been allowed for both parties. I also think that today, no preparation would allow a human player to beat the top computer.
Plagiarism is a symptom of professors only being involved in the last step: reviewing the final product.
Require the students to submit multiple drafts. Meet with them for 15 minutes each and discuss their thought processes on the ongoing paper. You'll get better final products, teach people not to procrastinate, and smoke-out people who have no involvement in their "own work."
What, can't do that because you have 60 students in a class? Well, there's part of the problem too.
We're trying to find a technology solution to a problem with less student-teacher interaction. Typical!
I never taught a class involving humanities paper writing (in the science classes I taught, I could detect borrowed work by asking our kids to explain the calculations in their presentations and reports), but my wife meets with students several at least once after they turn in a required outline and bibliography to her. The bibliography, meeting, and my wife's extensive knowledge of scholarship in her field have made plagiarism rare and very obvious. Also, they make the students write vastly better papers and learn a lot more. Even having students meet with a TA to discuss paper ideas and progress is a huge help, and required outlines, drafts, and (especially) bibliographies should be part of the writing process in every lower level undergrad class. In upper level classes, the meeting is sufficient.
Why the hell is this modded troll? It's the fucking truth. A low-flying plane is not a problem, it happens all the time. A low-flying plane, escorted by a fighter, is not one either.
And for those who panic at the sight of a low-flying jet - I suggest moving out of a major city into the boonies. Otherwise, you're not going to lead anything remotely resembling a productive life.
Except this is the first time this has happened in the designated no-fly zone in New York City since at least 9/11/01, and possibly the first time ever with a jumbo jet and a fighter escort. Even if everyone in the city skipped work every time this happened, they'd have missed, at most, one day per ten years.
That's the sort of thing that makes me believe that this team may be able to succeed.
When Deep Blue went up against Kasperov, who could it practice against? Nobody.
There are tens of thousands of Jeopardy! questions to go through before they start making up their own.
Well it did practice against other grandmasters, and it analyzed every game Kasparov had every played, where Kasparov went into the match blind.
Had the VCR been invented in a copyright climate like today's, would it ever have survived the legal attack against it?
I'm trying to figure out what's different, other than the fact we now have the DMCA.
The same could be said of the automobile, the airplane, and the internet. Imagine carriage, railroad, and telephone industries with today's level of lobbying and corruption opposing these industry-wrecking technologies.