At some point in the 80s, during Reagan's SDI stuff, they did have a laser fitted in a 747 which was planned to shoot down rockets. IIRC they were just getting it sort of working (they had their first success at actually hitting a rocket) and then got funding cut. Amazing they even got it sort-of-working really, considering the electronics they were working with back then.
Running hot isn't the issue, it's running at high speed. The faster the clock, the more power it takes. So to save battery, they run it slower. They're not running it slower just to keep it cooler. The heatsink fan takes naff all power compared to a GHz processor.
This may not be much of an issue for Apple because a PowerBook only runs 800MHz. Even a "crippled" SpeedStep processor these days will likely be going faster than that. Whether you get as much processing for your clock rate is a separate argument altogether.
Are you seriously saying that most people don't look into the details of what they're spending $1000 on? (or more - the guy says "thousands") If you've got enough money that you don't have to think, get any info or shop around for better deals before you buy something that expensive, then frankly you've got enough money that you can stop complaining. If you've not got that much money but you've gone out and bought the first thing you see anyway, that's hardly the store's problem.
A more accurate comparison. You buy a car which says "diesel 2.5-litre" clearly on the badge and. You then complain about the performance not being the same as a 2.5-litre gasoline car. As ever, analogies suck. But if you've gone into a shop and said "I want that one", it's your problem. It's not the shop assistant's job to say "Are you sure?"
Of course, if you've asked the shop assistant for details and advice about that laptop, and he/she hasn't mentioned how SpeedStep works, then you have a case for taking it back because of mis-selling. You can only do this though if you've bought the PC based on the assistant's advice on what would suit you best. If you've just gone in, picked a box off the shelf and taken it to the checkout, the assistant really isn't in a position to question your choice.
You have a right to travel on the highway. However, bear in mind the often-quoted maxim of "your right to swing your fist about ends at my nose". An untrained or just plain bad driver is a hazard to everyone around them, and everyone else's right to continue living trumps your right to travel however you like. This brings up another maxim, that "the Constition is not a suicide pact".
At the time the US Constitution was written, the fastest mode of transport was a horse. It's difficult to crash two horses into each other, and it doesn't cause major problems for other road users also travelling on horses. Just because George Washington didn't foresee the possibility of 10 lanes of cars travelling at 70mph, it doesn't mean everyone forever onwards is limited by that.
This was a not uncommon problem with early anti-lock brakes. They worked fine on the test track, but occasionally they'd lock up in service. The manufacturers eventually traced it to RF problems - the driver going past an airport, radio mast or some other source of EM emissions.
In both those cases, the immediate death of the guys who thought them up would only be a good thing. Those animes sucked. Sub-South-Park animation with no plot. And don't tell me it's just the dubbing - there's only about 2-3 lines of dialogue every half-hour!
Stolen cards: In theory, eBay has the IP address of the user, which is traceable to an ISP, which is traceable to a house telephone and address. Whether they're prepared to do that is another matter.
Cancelling cards: eBay has the card number, and the bank has the name and address going with the card. The police can sort that out, no trouble at all. Again, whether eBay can be bothered to do it is anyone's guess.
So why do tennis players and football teams watch replays of how their opponents play? If you know your opponent has a weakness in a particular area, you aim in on that area and use it. If you know your opponent is particularly strong in one area, you stay the hell away from that area.
The DB team had logs of all Kasparov's matches, and so could program DB to apply extra weighting to those lines which would succeed best against Kasparov. Kasparov went in totally blind.
Excuse me?! These *are* British scientists (with the occasional exception). This is a BBC show.
The same country that made Robot Wars, Junkyard Wars (aka Scrapheap Challenge), and the Secret Life of Machines series. And of course, the late Great Egg Race - that ruled when I was a kid. Tim Hunkin and Heinz Wolff are gods...
Hell yes, it matters. If you fuck up a company's data, or possibly worse, take a company's data and sell it to their competitor, then that's a crime. The same as if I happened to leave my front door unlocked, it's still a crime for someone to come in and steal my TV. That's the difference between white and black hats.
And then there's the ultimate "black-hat" attack - the DDOS. Requires little or no skill, just the ability to use some scripts off the web. Doesn't teach you anything. Just fucks up everything for the ppl attacked and for anyone trying to use their systems, without any gains for anyone except the immature little wanker sat giggling in his bedroom.
I'm 100% anti-DMCA for its restrictions on reverse-engineering. But I'm 100% *for* fucking over the script kiddies.
The "gray hat" thing is harder. RFPolicy is a good start towards this - get a standard code of conduct and everyone knows where they are. If you're genuinely not interested in hurting the affected people, give them a chance to respond and fix it, and then take the kudos. Hell, anyone who's ever worked in software knows that you never find all the bugs - even NASA can't manage that, for all its budget and procedures! - so this in-depth testing helps everyone. And this also provides a stick with the carrot - the software company *does* have to respond in a timely manner to alerts, bcos otherwise their product will get cracked.
"Then screw them" is one argument, but it assumes you're not affected. Suppose you happen to have one of those servers? Remember, it's not really the software companies affected, it's anyone who uses that company's products. So if someone finds a vulnerability in the Apache software and then cracks your server wide open, wiping all your data in the process, it's *you* that's suffered, not the Apache team who were slow in responding to the alert.
Yeah, I mean big &£$%ing deal. "Wow, this man can use a saw and wood glue, he must be some kind of god." Yeah right...
I made my own speakers at uni - total cost around £80 for a set of kick-ass 50W/side speakers (10" woofer). I used a freeware program to work out the speaker size and the port length to get them working. I've never been able to push them up to the limit, even outdoors!:-) At the same time, my friend built a sub-woofer, including making his own power amp for it with the roll-off frequency settable. At no point did either of us think we'd done anything special, worth publicising to the world as a major achievement.
It's not illegal to moor up (or get out and hold the boat, if it's shallow enough) so long as you don't move forward along the course. IIRC from our club, you're not allowed to use forwards propulsion other than sails after the 5-minute gun - other clubs may have variations on this though.
Sailing dinghies in the Ribble estuary, with something like the third strongest tides in Britain, this sometimes came in *very* handy - it could actually be hard to get from the jetty to the start-line, never mind sailing further from there! So on a light wind day, the trick was to walk up to the line early and just camp there for the next 5 minutes. The earlier you got there, the better spot you got (out of everyone else's wind-shadow).
Of course, on two-handed dinghies it'd usually be dads helming and kids crewing, so sonny boy always went over the side to hold it. Obviously that's the best use of a child, as an anchor!;-)
If you're the interviewer, I won't be working at your company. Ever. Nor anyone else I know. Riddles demonstrate nothing beyond the fact that the interviewer wants to look like a smartass - they tell you nothing about the interviewee.
If a company asks me a Microsoft-style riddle, I'm outta there. You might as well ask a Trivial Pursuit question instead - it's just testing whether you've seen that riddle before, not testing any brain-power.
The important thing to test in an interview is *method*. Not whether the answer was right, but whether they went through the right steps to get there. If they got the right answer by some random guess, that tells you nothing, but if they went through the right steps and made a mistake, in the real world they can back-track and find the mistake.
Nah. Mountain Dew is the ninja assassin of drinks. You think you can see straight through it so you disregard its power, but it's got its own hidden agenda and it'll get you when you least expect it - like during a meeting.;-)
Partly that, but also partly bcos there's a shitload of amateur astronomers and not many serious telescopes. "Many eyes" etc...
OTOH, if an amateur astronomer can see it, and it's heading straight for us, chances are that it's too late to do much except kiss your ass goodbye.:-(
If it's going in the other direction and will continue going in the other direction, don't bust bits off it which might come round and hit us in the ass! Did you never play Asteroids?:-)
On a more serious note, we can't just blow it up anyway, bcos there's FA to blow it up *with*. Bruce Willis's space shuttles don't exist anywhere except in a DreamWorks rendering cluster. That's what the astronomers at SpaceWatch are scared of, that if something did genuinely come on round, we wouldn't be able to do anything except say "Oops".
Very few ppl, except for those who read Jane's, perhaps? The truth *was* out there, and the fact that very few ppl could be bothered to look for it doesn't mean it was totally secret.
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At some point in the 80s, during Reagan's SDI stuff, they did have a laser fitted in a 747 which was planned to shoot down rockets. IIRC they were just getting it sort of working (they had their first success at actually hitting a rocket) and then got funding cut. Amazing they even got it sort-of-working really, considering the electronics they were working with back then.
Grab.
Running hot isn't the issue, it's running at high speed. The faster the clock, the more power it takes. So to save battery, they run it slower. They're not running it slower just to keep it cooler. The heatsink fan takes naff all power compared to a GHz processor.
This may not be much of an issue for Apple because a PowerBook only runs 800MHz. Even a "crippled" SpeedStep processor these days will likely be going faster than that. Whether you get as much processing for your clock rate is a separate argument altogether.
Grab.
Are you seriously saying that most people don't look into the details of what they're spending $1000 on? (or more - the guy says "thousands") If you've got enough money that you don't have to think, get any info or shop around for better deals before you buy something that expensive, then frankly you've got enough money that you can stop complaining. If you've not got that much money but you've gone out and bought the first thing you see anyway, that's hardly the store's problem.
A more accurate comparison. You buy a car which says "diesel 2.5-litre" clearly on the badge and. You then complain about the performance not being the same as a 2.5-litre gasoline car. As ever, analogies suck. But if you've gone into a shop and said "I want that one", it's your problem. It's not the shop assistant's job to say "Are you sure?"
Of course, if you've asked the shop assistant for details and advice about that laptop, and he/she hasn't mentioned how SpeedStep works, then you have a case for taking it back because of mis-selling. You can only do this though if you've bought the PC based on the assistant's advice on what would suit you best. If you've just gone in, picked a box off the shelf and taken it to the checkout, the assistant really isn't in a position to question your choice.
Grab.
"Derivative"?
Remember Wizball? Good game. *Good* game...
Grab.
Bad example, man - Ford *owns* Volvo... :-)
Grab.
(off-topic, so sue me...)
Fraid not.
You have a right to travel on the highway. However, bear in mind the often-quoted maxim of "your right to swing your fist about ends at my nose". An untrained or just plain bad driver is a hazard to everyone around them, and everyone else's right to continue living trumps your right to travel however you like. This brings up another maxim, that "the Constition is not a suicide pact".
At the time the US Constitution was written, the fastest mode of transport was a horse. It's difficult to crash two horses into each other, and it doesn't cause major problems for other road users also travelling on horses. Just because George Washington didn't foresee the possibility of 10 lanes of cars travelling at 70mph, it doesn't mean everyone forever onwards is limited by that.
Grab.
The only worrying thing about this is that fibre is significantly more fragile than wire. Wonder how much of a fender-bender it'll take to shatter it?
Grab.
If a robot is more suitable as a date than you are, I think your chances of getting a date are pretty minimal anyway...
Grab.
This was a not uncommon problem with early anti-lock brakes. They worked fine on the test track, but occasionally they'd lock up in service. The manufacturers eventually traced it to RF problems - the driver going past an airport, radio mast or some other source of EM emissions.
Grab.
In both those cases, the immediate death of the guys who thought them up would only be a good thing. Those animes sucked. Sub-South-Park animation with no plot. And don't tell me it's just the dubbing - there's only about 2-3 lines of dialogue every half-hour!
Grab.
Stolen cards: In theory, eBay has the IP address of the user, which is traceable to an ISP, which is traceable to a house telephone and address. Whether they're prepared to do that is another matter.
Cancelling cards: eBay has the card number, and the bank has the name and address going with the card. The police can sort that out, no trouble at all. Again, whether eBay can be bothered to do it is anyone's guess.
Grab.
"This is a local film, for local people. There's nothing for you here!"
Oh, sorry, that was just the League of Gentlemen, not the other one...
Grab.
(PS. If you live in the US, you may not know the show. Get the videos, *now*. I guarantee there's no wierder TV show than League of Gentlemen.)
So why do tennis players and football teams watch replays of how their opponents play? If you know your opponent has a weakness in a particular area, you aim in on that area and use it. If you know your opponent is particularly strong in one area, you stay the hell away from that area.
The DB team had logs of all Kasparov's matches, and so could program DB to apply extra weighting to those lines which would succeed best against Kasparov. Kasparov went in totally blind.
Grab.
Excuse me?! These *are* British scientists (with the occasional exception). This is a BBC show.
The same country that made Robot Wars, Junkyard Wars (aka Scrapheap Challenge), and the Secret Life of Machines series. And of course, the late Great Egg Race - that ruled when I was a kid. Tim Hunkin and Heinz Wolff are gods...
Grab.
You reckon?
The guy at the corner of the street sells fake Rolexes. But there's a reason why ppl still buy the real ones.
Grab.
Hell yes, it matters. If you fuck up a company's data, or possibly worse, take a company's data and sell it to their competitor, then that's a crime. The same as if I happened to leave my front door unlocked, it's still a crime for someone to come in and steal my TV. That's the difference between white and black hats.
And then there's the ultimate "black-hat" attack - the DDOS. Requires little or no skill, just the ability to use some scripts off the web. Doesn't teach you anything. Just fucks up everything for the ppl attacked and for anyone trying to use their systems, without any gains for anyone except the immature little wanker sat giggling in his bedroom.
I'm 100% anti-DMCA for its restrictions on reverse-engineering. But I'm 100% *for* fucking over the script kiddies.
The "gray hat" thing is harder. RFPolicy is a good start towards this - get a standard code of conduct and everyone knows where they are. If you're genuinely not interested in hurting the affected people, give them a chance to respond and fix it, and then take the kudos. Hell, anyone who's ever worked in software knows that you never find all the bugs - even NASA can't manage that, for all its budget and procedures! - so this in-depth testing helps everyone. And this also provides a stick with the carrot - the software company *does* have to respond in a timely manner to alerts, bcos otherwise their product will get cracked.
"Then screw them" is one argument, but it assumes you're not affected. Suppose you happen to have one of those servers? Remember, it's not really the software companies affected, it's anyone who uses that company's products. So if someone finds a vulnerability in the Apache software and then cracks your server wide open, wiping all your data in the process, it's *you* that's suffered, not the Apache team who were slow in responding to the alert.
Grab.
Yeah, I mean big &£$%ing deal. "Wow, this man can use a saw and wood glue, he must be some kind of god." Yeah right...
:-) At the same time, my friend built a sub-woofer, including making his own power amp for it with the roll-off frequency settable. At no point did either of us think we'd done anything special, worth publicising to the world as a major achievement.
I made my own speakers at uni - total cost around £80 for a set of kick-ass 50W/side speakers (10" woofer). I used a freeware program to work out the speaker size and the port length to get them working. I've never been able to push them up to the limit, even outdoors!
Grab.
It's not illegal to moor up (or get out and hold the boat, if it's shallow enough) so long as you don't move forward along the course. IIRC from our club, you're not allowed to use forwards propulsion other than sails after the 5-minute gun - other clubs may have variations on this though.
;-)
Sailing dinghies in the Ribble estuary, with something like the third strongest tides in Britain, this sometimes came in *very* handy - it could actually be hard to get from the jetty to the start-line, never mind sailing further from there! So on a light wind day, the trick was to walk up to the line early and just camp there for the next 5 minutes. The earlier you got there, the better spot you got (out of everyone else's wind-shadow).
Of course, on two-handed dinghies it'd usually be dads helming and kids crewing, so sonny boy always went over the side to hold it. Obviously that's the best use of a child, as an anchor!
Grab.
Not quite. Make it 1), 2), 3), 5), 3), 4) and you've got it.
Grab.
If you're the interviewer, I won't be working at your company. Ever. Nor anyone else I know. Riddles demonstrate nothing beyond the fact that the interviewer wants to look like a smartass - they tell you nothing about the interviewee.
Grab.
If a company asks me a Microsoft-style riddle, I'm outta there. You might as well ask a Trivial Pursuit question instead - it's just testing whether you've seen that riddle before, not testing any brain-power.
The important thing to test in an interview is *method*. Not whether the answer was right, but whether they went through the right steps to get there. If they got the right answer by some random guess, that tells you nothing, but if they went through the right steps and made a mistake, in the real world they can back-track and find the mistake.
Grab.
Nah. Mountain Dew is the ninja assassin of drinks. You think you can see straight through it so you disregard its power, but it's got its own hidden agenda and it'll get you when you least expect it - like during a meeting. ;-)
Grab.
Partly that, but also partly bcos there's a shitload of amateur astronomers and not many serious telescopes. "Many eyes" etc...
:-(
OTOH, if an amateur astronomer can see it, and it's heading straight for us, chances are that it's too late to do much except kiss your ass goodbye.
Grab.
If it's going in the other direction and will continue going in the other direction, don't bust bits off it which might come round and hit us in the ass! Did you never play Asteroids? :-)
On a more serious note, we can't just blow it up anyway, bcos there's FA to blow it up *with*. Bruce Willis's space shuttles don't exist anywhere except in a DreamWorks rendering cluster. That's what the astronomers at SpaceWatch are scared of, that if something did genuinely come on round, we wouldn't be able to do anything except say "Oops".
Grab.
Very few ppl, except for those who read Jane's, perhaps? The truth *was* out there, and the fact that very few ppl could be bothered to look for it doesn't mean it was totally secret.
Grab.