Really? That's your first thought? You live in a very sad world if that's the first thing that leaps to mind (either that, or you're a teacher). By "style" I really meant "tone" of each piece, so I apologize if I misled. Beyond that, it would be damn difficult to "plagiarize" articles where he interviewed a dozen subjects or more in each case without someone noticing, such as the famous violinist he recruited to run the experiment for the earlier piece, or one of the numerous parents interviewed for the later piece. Plagiarizing means someone wrote it first and he copied. Precisely who would he copy from that wouldn't notice his own work?
Somewhat off-topic, but I'd like to note another first from this year's Pulitzers: Gene Weingarten became the only journalist in history to win the Pulitzer in feature writing twice. The award this year was for his piece Fatal Distraction, the previous for Pearls Before Breakfast. Both are very well done (obviously; they both won the Pulitzer), but in a completely different style each time.
I use Facebook frequently, both in FF 3.5 (work) and FF 3.6 (home). In both cases I'm running on a Vista x64 box with AdBlock, Flashblock, NoScript, ChatZilla and Greasemonkey, with Acrobat, Flash, Silverlight and Java plugins. Firefox hasn't crashed on me in months, if not years, even when running for weeks at a time, with dozens of tabs open (admittedly, I usually trigger a save session and restart every week or two to reduce memory fragmentation, but it won't crash if I don't, it just has the short freezes every few hours). Worst I've had is some short term freezes in FF when my machine is at 90+% memory usage and some complex AJAX is operating. Perhaps you need to prune your extensions, update your plugins or some combination of the two?
Something else that I've been wondering about: the vast majority of personal computers are running Windows and I really doubt that very many of their users are recompiling their TCP/IP stack or adjusting the kernel to suit their desires. Instead, the people here are touting the "new" Windows 7 as being much better - even though it's locked down even more than Vista was. What's wrong with this picture?
How is Windows 7 more locked down than Vista? To my knowledge, the only "locked down" stuff in Windows 7 was just as locked down in Vista, and all it is really locking down is the Protected Video Path, which they needed to do if they wanted permission to ship a BluRay player. They may have closed some gaps in their implementation, but I haven't heard of any new things locked down by Win7. I'd be interested to hear if you've got any info I've missed.
On locked down platforms in general: How does the TCP/IP stack and/or kernel relate to the iP* OS complete control over allowed applications? The kernel and network stack are tools provided to applications. They defined an API and allowed anyone to use it. No, you can't just replace the kernel willy-nilly, but unless it is preventing the development of specific applications, I'm not seeing how your comparison holds water.
Microsoft says: "You can develop whatever you want against these low-level APIs and you can build new APIs on top of them if you like. We won't let you copy encrypted content because we couldn't play it at all if we did, and we'll make it non-trivial to write your own networking protocol from scratch to reduce the motivation for hackers to abuse your machine for DDOS attacks. If you want to embed at the driver layer, in order to minimize stability issues and security vulnerability, you have to run in test mode or pay as a small sum (a recent quote I saw said it costs £500, which is peanuts compared to the cost of the hardware the driver is used with) for our driver test team to validate and sign it."
Apple says (for the iP*): "You can develop whatever you like, as long as you select from this list of approved languages, don't include any functionality we disapprove of for any of a dozen or more different reasons (e.g. no porn, no runtime environments, nothing too similar to anything else already in the store, etc.), provide us with a cut of your revenues, and agree that we can withdraw our approval at any time."
Yes, they're both closed source platforms, but Microsoft closed the OS, not the applications (and as noted, you can hook into the OS with drivers and services, so even the OS is partially open to third parties). Apple decided they needed to limit the applications as well. In both cases, they were trading off between control/security and openness/flexibility; in this case, Microsoft chose the more "open" path, while Apple went as far as you can go towards control without completely locking it to first party applications.
I personally would like to see Flash die, but not because another megacorp wanted to protect me from myself. The modern iP* hardware has enough power to run Flash in most scenarios, particularly if Adobe made any attempt to optimize it for the platform. If Adobe makes sure Flash doesn't cause problems for anything else (e.g. task swaps gracefully), then the only remaining reason for Apple to block it is loss of control. As long as the Flash "app" is opt-in (like all apps), then users who get it can take the risks; no need to block them because it "might be slow."
Well, it's MLC flash, so its lifespan will be shorter and its write speed will be substantially lower than an SLC flash drive. Should roughly match a high speed platter drive (slightly slower at sequential write, faster at random write), but you won't see the jaw dropping numbers that SLC drives can pull.
We don't need a virus for that. We have cyanobacteria, which have been producing oxygen via photosynthesis for 2.8 billion years or so. Plants can do it too, but cyanobacteria are small, ubiquitous and efficient, just like your hypothetical virus.
Sorry, even the most extreme projections for the Oort cloud have it within three light years, and most put it a mere light year out. No Nemesis for you.
Private companies? Really? Bullshit. Not going to happen. Private companies are just barely reaching Low Earth Orbit. They can put a satellite into orbit. That's it. They have no incentive to do anything more, and they won't unless NASA spends the money to develop the tech for them. And even with Constellation scrapped, we're not giving them enough money or enough purpose to do that. We've replaced Constellation with... nothing. Constellation was a shitty goal, but it was a goal. I'm not dreaming of the past, I'm advocating incremental steps. Everything needed to accomplish Constellation would be needed for anything grander. And we're never going to do it now, because we decided that space is only useful to make Earth better, not as a frontier in and of itself.
If that's all I can get, it's better than a perpetual backslide. I want more; I want to see a (small) Martian colony in my lifetime. Not going to happen, but I can dream. Frankly, the sheer wonder of the moon landings doesn't register with those who weren't there to see it. Recreating it is better than deciding "been there, done that, now I'm just going to stay home."
I wish that were actually the case. As is, NASA can't have any long range plans, because their budget is jerked around year after year. If we had any respect for them whatsoever we'd fund them on 10 year intervals. Constellation was never going to happen, and neither will their current PR-only plans. I'm sad Constellation is canceled, but I was also expecting it from the moment it was announced. Presidential initiatives that won't bear fruit for ten years or more aren't going to happen, period. They're scoring political points, that's all. (I'm skeptical of anything more than five years out to be honest, but those things actually happen on occasion)
I've seen nearly identical comments posted before on Sony related articles (though apparently not by you). It makes absolutely no sense. WTF are you trying to say?
Those "change at any time" clauses are illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. Contracts require mutual informed consent on a fixed wording; otherwise your agreement to purchase a console could be rewritten into a marriage contract because you agreed that the agreement "could change at any time". Yes, it's an intentionally absurd example, but legally speaking, it's effectively equivalent (aside from those pesky activist judges who might make a decision based on the real world instead of a legal fiction).
I'm guessing this came up in the interview? I watched the Report, but skipped the interview. I've held this opinion for a long time. I think the practical, direct benefits of space flight are worthwhile, but the intangibles make it priceless.
And it won't do any good if we're not inspiring future scientists and engineers. Research isn't all about money, you need people too. The manned spaceflight program provided the inspirations for thousands if not millions of scientists and engineers. I'm not looking forward to a world where all the amazing stuff is done by our robots. I'm not saying Constellation was a great program (it wasn't), but nixing manned spaceflight entirely is worse.
My work computer is still on Firefox 3.5.7. I'm getting between 40 and 60 FPS (admittedly with a minor hiccup every 5-10 seconds), while using about 80% of one core of a Core 2 E6550 (2.33 GHz). I'll admit that I'm not seeing a huge need for GPU off-loading in this circumstance.
Israel isn't suspected of stealing their initial nuclear weapon designs. France gave them nuclear weapon designs and helping them build their first nuclear reactor (Norway and the U.S. voluntarily supplied them with heavy water early on). Sure, the Israelis have spied on the U.S. (and vice versa), but acquisition of the bomb did not require espionage.
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Really? That's your first thought? You live in a very sad world if that's the first thing that leaps to mind (either that, or you're a teacher). By "style" I really meant "tone" of each piece, so I apologize if I misled. Beyond that, it would be damn difficult to "plagiarize" articles where he interviewed a dozen subjects or more in each case without someone noticing, such as the famous violinist he recruited to run the experiment for the earlier piece, or one of the numerous parents interviewed for the later piece. Plagiarizing means someone wrote it first and he copied. Precisely who would he copy from that wouldn't notice his own work?
Somewhat off-topic, but I'd like to note another first from this year's Pulitzers: Gene Weingarten became the only journalist in history to win the Pulitzer in feature writing twice. The award this year was for his piece Fatal Distraction, the previous for Pearls Before Breakfast. Both are very well done (obviously; they both won the Pulitzer), but in a completely different style each time.
I use Facebook frequently, both in FF 3.5 (work) and FF 3.6 (home). In both cases I'm running on a Vista x64 box with AdBlock, Flashblock, NoScript, ChatZilla and Greasemonkey, with Acrobat, Flash, Silverlight and Java plugins. Firefox hasn't crashed on me in months, if not years, even when running for weeks at a time, with dozens of tabs open (admittedly, I usually trigger a save session and restart every week or two to reduce memory fragmentation, but it won't crash if I don't, it just has the short freezes every few hours). Worst I've had is some short term freezes in FF when my machine is at 90+% memory usage and some complex AJAX is operating. Perhaps you need to prune your extensions, update your plugins or some combination of the two?
Something else that I've been wondering about: the vast majority of personal computers are running Windows and I really doubt that very many of their users are recompiling their TCP/IP stack or adjusting the kernel to suit their desires. Instead, the people here are touting the "new" Windows 7 as being much better - even though it's locked down even more than Vista was. What's wrong with this picture?
How is Windows 7 more locked down than Vista? To my knowledge, the only "locked down" stuff in Windows 7 was just as locked down in Vista, and all it is really locking down is the Protected Video Path, which they needed to do if they wanted permission to ship a BluRay player. They may have closed some gaps in their implementation, but I haven't heard of any new things locked down by Win7. I'd be interested to hear if you've got any info I've missed.
On locked down platforms in general: How does the TCP/IP stack and/or kernel relate to the iP* OS complete control over allowed applications? The kernel and network stack are tools provided to applications. They defined an API and allowed anyone to use it. No, you can't just replace the kernel willy-nilly, but unless it is preventing the development of specific applications, I'm not seeing how your comparison holds water.
Microsoft says: "You can develop whatever you want against these low-level APIs and you can build new APIs on top of them if you like. We won't let you copy encrypted content because we couldn't play it at all if we did, and we'll make it non-trivial to write your own networking protocol from scratch to reduce the motivation for hackers to abuse your machine for DDOS attacks. If you want to embed at the driver layer, in order to minimize stability issues and security vulnerability, you have to run in test mode or pay as a small sum (a recent quote I saw said it costs £500, which is peanuts compared to the cost of the hardware the driver is used with) for our driver test team to validate and sign it."
Apple says (for the iP*): "You can develop whatever you like, as long as you select from this list of approved languages, don't include any functionality we disapprove of for any of a dozen or more different reasons (e.g. no porn, no runtime environments, nothing too similar to anything else already in the store, etc.), provide us with a cut of your revenues, and agree that we can withdraw our approval at any time."
Yes, they're both closed source platforms, but Microsoft closed the OS, not the applications (and as noted, you can hook into the OS with drivers and services, so even the OS is partially open to third parties). Apple decided they needed to limit the applications as well. In both cases, they were trading off between control/security and openness/flexibility; in this case, Microsoft chose the more "open" path, while Apple went as far as you can go towards control without completely locking it to first party applications.
I personally would like to see Flash die, but not because another megacorp wanted to protect me from myself. The modern iP* hardware has enough power to run Flash in most scenarios, particularly if Adobe made any attempt to optimize it for the platform. If Adobe makes sure Flash doesn't cause problems for anything else (e.g. task swaps gracefully), then the only remaining reason for Apple to block it is loss of control. As long as the Flash "app" is opt-in (like all apps), then users who get it can take the risks; no need to block them because it "might be slow."
In a battle between two vendors, one with a closed source, insecurt framework and the other with a closed platform, which side do I root for?
Well, it's MLC flash, so its lifespan will be shorter and its write speed will be substantially lower than an SLC flash drive. Should roughly match a high speed platter drive (slightly slower at sequential write, faster at random write), but you won't see the jaw dropping numbers that SLC drives can pull.
We don't need a virus for that. We have cyanobacteria, which have been producing oxygen via photosynthesis for 2.8 billion years or so. Plants can do it too, but cyanobacteria are small, ubiquitous and efficient, just like your hypothetical virus.
Or because the console manufacturers take a cut of every game sold on the console, but not for the PC. It's not a piracy competition.
I hate you, and wish to burn your newsletter.
Sorry, even the most extreme projections for the Oort cloud have it within three light years, and most put it a mere light year out. No Nemesis for you.
That was my guess. I'm trying to figure out why the same gibberish has been posted multiple times in different articles.
Private companies? Really? Bullshit. Not going to happen. Private companies are just barely reaching Low Earth Orbit. They can put a satellite into orbit. That's it. They have no incentive to do anything more, and they won't unless NASA spends the money to develop the tech for them. And even with Constellation scrapped, we're not giving them enough money or enough purpose to do that. We've replaced Constellation with... nothing. Constellation was a shitty goal, but it was a goal. I'm not dreaming of the past, I'm advocating incremental steps. Everything needed to accomplish Constellation would be needed for anything grander. And we're never going to do it now, because we decided that space is only useful to make Earth better, not as a frontier in and of itself.
If that's all I can get, it's better than a perpetual backslide. I want more; I want to see a (small) Martian colony in my lifetime. Not going to happen, but I can dream. Frankly, the sheer wonder of the moon landings doesn't register with those who weren't there to see it. Recreating it is better than deciding "been there, done that, now I'm just going to stay home."
I wish that were actually the case. As is, NASA can't have any long range plans, because their budget is jerked around year after year. If we had any respect for them whatsoever we'd fund them on 10 year intervals. Constellation was never going to happen, and neither will their current PR-only plans. I'm sad Constellation is canceled, but I was also expecting it from the moment it was announced. Presidential initiatives that won't bear fruit for ten years or more aren't going to happen, period. They're scoring political points, that's all. (I'm skeptical of anything more than five years out to be honest, but those things actually happen on occasion)
If you had any idea what the Great Depression was, you wouldn't make such a laughable claim. Let me know when you see Hoovervilles in Central Park.
Yeah, we are. Low Earth orbit isn't manned space flight.
I've seen nearly identical comments posted before on Sony related articles (though apparently not by you). It makes absolutely no sense. WTF are you trying to say?
Those "change at any time" clauses are illegal in a lot of jurisdictions. Contracts require mutual informed consent on a fixed wording; otherwise your agreement to purchase a console could be rewritten into a marriage contract because you agreed that the agreement "could change at any time". Yes, it's an intentionally absurd example, but legally speaking, it's effectively equivalent (aside from those pesky activist judges who might make a decision based on the real world instead of a legal fiction).
Well yes, you do need government regulation if the government intentionally prevents the next Great Depression.
Fixed that for you.
I'm guessing this came up in the interview? I watched the Report, but skipped the interview. I've held this opinion for a long time. I think the practical, direct benefits of space flight are worthwhile, but the intangibles make it priceless.
And it won't do any good if we're not inspiring future scientists and engineers. Research isn't all about money, you need people too. The manned spaceflight program provided the inspirations for thousands if not millions of scientists and engineers. I'm not looking forward to a world where all the amazing stuff is done by our robots. I'm not saying Constellation was a great program (it wasn't), but nixing manned spaceflight entirely is worse.
My work computer is still on Firefox 3.5.7. I'm getting between 40 and 60 FPS (admittedly with a minor hiccup every 5-10 seconds), while using about 80% of one core of a Core 2 E6550 (2.33 GHz). I'll admit that I'm not seeing a huge need for GPU off-loading in this circumstance.
You posted two minutes too late.
"Nucular" isn't an accent.
Israel isn't suspected of stealing their initial nuclear weapon designs. France gave them nuclear weapon designs and helping them build their first nuclear reactor (Norway and the U.S. voluntarily supplied them with heavy water early on). Sure, the Israelis have spied on the U.S. (and vice versa), but acquisition of the bomb did not require espionage.