At the risk of being modded flamebait, this puts you squarely with the group "unschooled in the English language." "Using a screen that works 90% of the time" would clearly mean:
A terrorist will be correctly identified 90% of the time (and missed 10% of the time)
A non-terrorist will be correctly identified 90% of the time (and identified as a terrorist 10% of the time)
As you can see, for each potential target, it works 90% of the time. Any other interpretation would be ambiguous.
Wow. Way to illustrate the point. Remember, terrorists are roughly zero percent of the population (at least, of the population going on plane trips in the U.S./U.K.). Odds are, at most one of those 3000 actually is a terrorist. So if it is 90% accurate in identifying terrorist vs. non-terrorist (and vice versa), then 10% of the non-terrorists will be identified as terrorists (or ~300), while the 0-1 terrorists will be missed 10% of the time. And of course, since you don't know for sure if there was a terrorist in the group, an in-depth search of the 300 will usually be a waste of time.
You're saying the Vikings managed to develop clocks that could work at sea, didn't tell anyone, and then forgot about it for 500 years? Because prior to GPS, that was *still* the only way to get an accurate reading on longitude. Yes, there are other methods, but they don't work at sea, they only work at the time of known planetary events, and they are crude even when used correctly (far too crude to provide the resolution needed for detailed coastlines).
And yet somehow, the Vikings could "probably" do it. With no supporting evidence whatsoever, you leap to "probably." Wow... Just wow...
Zoom in on the actual southern coast of England. It looks like a hastily drawn zigzag. England must be fake.
In all seriousness, if authentic, the map predates the effective computation of longitude. You notice how the East/West elements of the map are stretched and skewed, far more than the North/South elements? You try accurately illustrating a fairly complex coastline when you can't say where you are on the East/West axis except by dead reckoning.
I'd suggest limiting yourself to more established dictionaries (e.g. Merriam Webster, OED, etc.). dictionary.reference.com is multi-source and pulls in every neologism, no matter how inane, from every two bit dictionary on the planet.
Aside from being generally suspicious of a person anonymously bashing a guy on/., your inability to get even basic facts straight makes me skeptical of your arguments. The map's prominence dates to 1965, after the initial authentication work was completed; prior to that point virtually no one knew of it, so there would be no story of his fame, and definitely no nationwide headlines. Mods, please drop this guy to oblivion.
Technically, it's +8 rads base. You probably have a high enough rad resistance to lower it to +2 (Somewhere between 62.5% and 75%, given that Fallout rounds in your favor, IIRC).
That limitation is effectively irrelevant. And that article is from 2006. And it accounts for the case of constant, high speed writing; hibernating out to disk happens a few times a day, and as such is barely noticeable.
Think about it. Lets say you've got a crappy flash drive: Only 1 million writes per sector. And it's exactly the size of your main RAM, so no wear leveling algorithm will help. If woke up and hibernate that machine 100 times per day, it would still last 10,000 days, or 27.4 years. That's slightly longer than I've been alive; I think I could live with a hard drive that "only" lasted that long.
And to you I say: Perhaps everyone who pays for X Mbps should be able to obtain it 99% of the time. Minor degradation for 1% of the day is fine, but significantly overselling bandwidth when you *know* the usage patterns of your customers will require a bigger pipe for substantial portions of the day is irresponsible.
When you have unspecified traffic shaping in play, you distort the free market: How do I compare two providers of a 10 Mbps connection when they don't say what the practical speed will be (and largely can't: I've seen cable modems run reliably at 10 KB/s or less in some areas that were massively underprovisioned, while the same company provided 24/7 1 MB/s connections less than a mile away).
Aerodynamics, last I checked, is not a completely solved problem (granted, it's in better shape than the more general fluid dynamics, but still not solved), nor are a large number of other design decisions involved with producing spacecraft. I somehow doubt that aesthetics are trumping science in the look; rather, they're probably guiding the selection among a number of similarly efficient designs.
As for imperial vs. metric, I think the big hurdle isn't patriotism, it's inertia. People were born and raised on imperial, and it's hard to reprogram them later in life. And teachers start with imperial because you encounter it more often. It's Catch-22; you can't switch until people are comfortable with it, and you can't get comfortable with it until you switch. The U.S. is slowly starting to switch the teaching to metric, so I suspect we'll try the transition again in the next decade or two, once the majority of the population can deal with it. Otherwise, you get smartasses/idiots driving 100 MPH on every highway.
The construction of the ISS was pretty evenly split between the U.S. and Russia. You're probably thinking of Mir (the first space station designed for long term occupation) or Salyut 1 (the first space station, beating Skylab by two years).
The point is that competition from Chrome was *not* responsible for forcing improvements in Firefox. Moving to separate processes is arguably a result of competition from Chrome (and subsequently IE8), but the need for improved JavaScript engines was recognized without being pushed by an, at the time, unannounced browser. Wider deployment of AJAX and other JS intensive websites demanded it.
Of course, the fact that Google was contributing to the trend (GMail, Google Docs) and aiding others by making it easier to deploy lots of JS-based pages (Google Web Toolkit) means that Google did direct some of Firefox's ambitions. It just didn't do it with Chrome.
I should point out, in the past decade or so, and accelerating into the present, MS has been pursuing the strategy you ascribe to Google and IBM, namely, looking at startups with interesting tech and buying them out if it looks promising. It's not innovative in itself, but like you said, it drives innovation through the profit incentive. For example, SoftGrid was bought out to add application virtualization to the suite of terminal server features.
I'd argue that the substantially lower hardware costs were at least as much to "blame" for adding Linux to lineups. If the OS costs x, and the hardware costs 10x, then people don't notice the OS cost. When the hardware gets down to 2x, the OS becomes a much larger part of the cost, and "free" looks more attractive.
No offense (really), but this sounds like projecting a whole lot of your own biases on to the population at large. The iPhone found a base in the consumer market, where smartphones hadn't been strong to begin with. To my knowledge, it's stayed there. iPhone won, but Windows Mobile didn't exactly lose either (except in *potential* profit, which no one but the RIAA considers legitimate).
The 360 is doing substantially better than the PS3 (which is the closest direct competition), while trying to lure in a few Wii enthusiasts. Until Natal launches, we have no idea how it will do. I'm a semi-hardcore gamer who owns both a Wii and a 360, and while I like the Wii's controls (when well executed) and low power draw, the games available fall into roughly three categories:
First party releases
Okami (okay, and maybe 3 others)
Crap
The 360 has far more variety of games available, a much better online multiplayer experience, etc. The attach rate is also higher: Fewer 360 consoles are sold, but the players buy more games (and given the thin margins on consoles, attach rate is much more important in measuring success).
Vista, while admittedly a resource hog, is not nearly the dog of an OS people make it out to be. It's not the best thing since sliced bread, but it's not the worst thing since Hitler either. They rewrote the core of the OS, and that caused a lot of problems (poorly tested drivers causing blue screens and the like), but with the drivers now stable, and the new focus on speed, Windows 7 may be received far more readily; again, don't (dis)count chickens before they hatch. They actually listened to consumer customer complaints and acted on them, which is fairly new to them.
As for the ribbon UI, it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. It's new, and people need to relearn their habits, and it even provides a window where people might switch from Office to Office 2003-esque clones, but that doesn't seem to be happening at present. People complained about the endlessly cascading menus, and MS came up with a way to reduce the problem. There's a short learning curve, that's all.
In summary: The world != you, so don't assume that your disagreements mean that MS is ignoring changes in "the world."
Granted, not much. Though the new FF 3.5 approach of loading them piecemeal annoys me, mostly because the tabs reorganize as they load, and it's quite easy to click the wrong tab because it got shunted out of place by the new tabs. I'd rather wait a quarter second to get them all established, then update the UI in bulk.
On *Nix systems, process creation overhead is low enough, and thread cost high enough, that the perf hit will probably be negligible. Problem is, Windows tends to do poorly on process creation, while handling multi-threading fairly well.
In both cases, the costs are seen at creation time (I haven't looked into whether the scheduler for each is optimized for one or the other). This does mean that a multi-tab bookmark (like my 30 webcomic bookmark at home) may start taking noticeably longer to load on Windows machines. Then again, it seems to have slowed down slightly in FF 3.5 anyway (that may be just a UI change though, it's not like I read them all inside of five seconds).
Of course, I'd also like to see browsers and plugins go 64 bit; the built-in nulls in memory addresses make buffer overruns much harder to exploit, and I'd prefer they work on security for a little.
Alternatively, they use pre-paids, pay with cash, and discard the phone every few weeks/months. Hard to track call records if there's no proof you ever owned the phone.
Like the WiiMote, Natal will probably be horribly misused early on. Watching competitors releases and looking for lessons is a good way to approach this. Let the smaller (and sometimes larger) companies flame out on ill-conceived uses of Natal, then avoid the same mistakes.
The higher it is (in either latitude or altitude) the longer it could receive/beam energy. Even if it's not 24/7, it's substantially better than ground based solar power.
Immaculate conception has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus (it's supposed to be how Mary was conceived, because only someone free of original sin could birth Jesus). Also, "relatively new" and "Council of Nicea" don't go together; 99% of what people consider Christianity was nailed down at Nicea, and that was over 1500 years ago, so "new" is really pushing it.
BTW, one additional bit of info from your own link: Even after the 5 year/100,000 mile period, they expect the batteries to work, they'll just have a capacity of around 70% of their "brand new" capacity. You can still use them, you'll just have the range drop from around 220 miles to around 150 miles.
Slashdot Mirror
As you can see, for each potential target, it works 90% of the time. Any other interpretation would be ambiguous.
Wow. Way to illustrate the point. Remember, terrorists are roughly zero percent of the population (at least, of the population going on plane trips in the U.S./U.K.). Odds are, at most one of those 3000 actually is a terrorist. So if it is 90% accurate in identifying terrorist vs. non-terrorist (and vice versa), then 10% of the non-terrorists will be identified as terrorists (or ~300), while the 0-1 terrorists will be missed 10% of the time. And of course, since you don't know for sure if there was a terrorist in the group, an in-depth search of the 300 will usually be a waste of time.
You're saying the Vikings managed to develop clocks that could work at sea, didn't tell anyone, and then forgot about it for 500 years? Because prior to GPS, that was *still* the only way to get an accurate reading on longitude. Yes, there are other methods, but they don't work at sea, they only work at the time of known planetary events, and they are crude even when used correctly (far too crude to provide the resolution needed for detailed coastlines).
And yet somehow, the Vikings could "probably" do it. With no supporting evidence whatsoever, you leap to "probably." Wow... Just wow...
Zoom in on the actual southern coast of England. It looks like a hastily drawn zigzag. England must be fake.
In all seriousness, if authentic, the map predates the effective computation of longitude. You notice how the East/West elements of the map are stretched and skewed, far more than the North/South elements? You try accurately illustrating a fairly complex coastline when you can't say where you are on the East/West axis except by dead reckoning.
I'd suggest limiting yourself to more established dictionaries (e.g. Merriam Webster, OED, etc.). dictionary.reference.com is multi-source and pulls in every neologism, no matter how inane, from every two bit dictionary on the planet.
Aside from being generally suspicious of a person anonymously bashing a guy on /., your inability to get even basic facts straight makes me skeptical of your arguments. The map's prominence dates to 1965, after the initial authentication work was completed; prior to that point virtually no one knew of it, so there would be no story of his fame, and definitely no nationwide headlines. Mods, please drop this guy to oblivion.
Maybe not.... See the Inconsistencies section. Just because he invented it once doesn't mean it wasn't invented before.
Technically, it's +8 rads base. You probably have a high enough rad resistance to lower it to +2 (Somewhere between 62.5% and 75%, given that Fallout rounds in your favor, IIRC).
That limitation is effectively irrelevant. And that article is from 2006. And it accounts for the case of constant, high speed writing; hibernating out to disk happens a few times a day, and as such is barely noticeable.
Think about it. Lets say you've got a crappy flash drive: Only 1 million writes per sector. And it's exactly the size of your main RAM, so no wear leveling algorithm will help. If woke up and hibernate that machine 100 times per day, it would still last 10,000 days, or 27.4 years. That's slightly longer than I've been alive; I think I could live with a hard drive that "only" lasted that long.
And to you I say: Perhaps everyone who pays for X Mbps should be able to obtain it 99% of the time. Minor degradation for 1% of the day is fine, but significantly overselling bandwidth when you *know* the usage patterns of your customers will require a bigger pipe for substantial portions of the day is irresponsible.
When you have unspecified traffic shaping in play, you distort the free market: How do I compare two providers of a 10 Mbps connection when they don't say what the practical speed will be (and largely can't: I've seen cable modems run reliably at 10 KB/s or less in some areas that were massively underprovisioned, while the same company provided 24/7 1 MB/s connections less than a mile away).
Aerodynamics, last I checked, is not a completely solved problem (granted, it's in better shape than the more general fluid dynamics, but still not solved), nor are a large number of other design decisions involved with producing spacecraft. I somehow doubt that aesthetics are trumping science in the look; rather, they're probably guiding the selection among a number of similarly efficient designs.
As for imperial vs. metric, I think the big hurdle isn't patriotism, it's inertia. People were born and raised on imperial, and it's hard to reprogram them later in life. And teachers start with imperial because you encounter it more often. It's Catch-22; you can't switch until people are comfortable with it, and you can't get comfortable with it until you switch. The U.S. is slowly starting to switch the teaching to metric, so I suspect we'll try the transition again in the next decade or two, once the majority of the population can deal with it. Otherwise, you get smartasses/idiots driving 100 MPH on every highway.
The construction of the ISS was pretty evenly split between the U.S. and Russia. You're probably thinking of Mir (the first space station designed for long term occupation) or Salyut 1 (the first space station, beating Skylab by two years).
The point is that competition from Chrome was *not* responsible for forcing improvements in Firefox. Moving to separate processes is arguably a result of competition from Chrome (and subsequently IE8), but the need for improved JavaScript engines was recognized without being pushed by an, at the time, unannounced browser. Wider deployment of AJAX and other JS intensive websites demanded it.
Of course, the fact that Google was contributing to the trend (GMail, Google Docs) and aiding others by making it easier to deploy lots of JS-based pages (Google Web Toolkit) means that Google did direct some of Firefox's ambitions. It just didn't do it with Chrome.
I should point out, in the past decade or so, and accelerating into the present, MS has been pursuing the strategy you ascribe to Google and IBM, namely, looking at startups with interesting tech and buying them out if it looks promising. It's not innovative in itself, but like you said, it drives innovation through the profit incentive. For example, SoftGrid was bought out to add application virtualization to the suite of terminal server features.
I'd argue that the substantially lower hardware costs were at least as much to "blame" for adding Linux to lineups. If the OS costs x, and the hardware costs 10x, then people don't notice the OS cost. When the hardware gets down to 2x, the OS becomes a much larger part of the cost, and "free" looks more attractive.
No offense (really), but this sounds like projecting a whole lot of your own biases on to the population at large. The iPhone found a base in the consumer market, where smartphones hadn't been strong to begin with. To my knowledge, it's stayed there. iPhone won, but Windows Mobile didn't exactly lose either (except in *potential* profit, which no one but the RIAA considers legitimate).
The 360 is doing substantially better than the PS3 (which is the closest direct competition), while trying to lure in a few Wii enthusiasts. Until Natal launches, we have no idea how it will do. I'm a semi-hardcore gamer who owns both a Wii and a 360, and while I like the Wii's controls (when well executed) and low power draw, the games available fall into roughly three categories:
The 360 has far more variety of games available, a much better online multiplayer experience, etc. The attach rate is also higher: Fewer 360 consoles are sold, but the players buy more games (and given the thin margins on consoles, attach rate is much more important in measuring success).
Vista, while admittedly a resource hog, is not nearly the dog of an OS people make it out to be. It's not the best thing since sliced bread, but it's not the worst thing since Hitler either. They rewrote the core of the OS, and that caused a lot of problems (poorly tested drivers causing blue screens and the like), but with the drivers now stable, and the new focus on speed, Windows 7 may be received far more readily; again, don't (dis)count chickens before they hatch. They actually listened to consumer customer complaints and acted on them, which is fairly new to them.
As for the ribbon UI, it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. It's new, and people need to relearn their habits, and it even provides a window where people might switch from Office to Office 2003-esque clones, but that doesn't seem to be happening at present. People complained about the endlessly cascading menus, and MS came up with a way to reduce the problem. There's a short learning curve, that's all.
In summary: The world != you, so don't assume that your disagreements mean that MS is ignoring changes in "the world."
Granted, not much. Though the new FF 3.5 approach of loading them piecemeal annoys me, mostly because the tabs reorganize as they load, and it's quite easy to click the wrong tab because it got shunted out of place by the new tabs. I'd rather wait a quarter second to get them all established, then update the UI in bulk.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Firefox working on JS speed before Chrome was announced?
On *Nix systems, process creation overhead is low enough, and thread cost high enough, that the perf hit will probably be negligible. Problem is, Windows tends to do poorly on process creation, while handling multi-threading fairly well.
In both cases, the costs are seen at creation time (I haven't looked into whether the scheduler for each is optimized for one or the other). This does mean that a multi-tab bookmark (like my 30 webcomic bookmark at home) may start taking noticeably longer to load on Windows machines. Then again, it seems to have slowed down slightly in FF 3.5 anyway (that may be just a UI change though, it's not like I read them all inside of five seconds).
Of course, I'd also like to see browsers and plugins go 64 bit; the built-in nulls in memory addresses make buffer overruns much harder to exploit, and I'd prefer they work on security for a little.
Alternatively, they use pre-paids, pay with cash, and discard the phone every few weeks/months. Hard to track call records if there's no proof you ever owned the phone.
We do, on the "ignorance is bliss" principle. It's the same principle that says calories consumed between Christmas and New Year's don't count.
*cue fat Americans joke*
Like the WiiMote, Natal will probably be horribly misused early on. Watching competitors releases and looking for lessons is a good way to approach this. Let the smaller (and sometimes larger) companies flame out on ill-conceived uses of Natal, then avoid the same mistakes.
The higher it is (in either latitude or altitude) the longer it could receive/beam energy. Even if it's not 24/7, it's substantially better than ground based solar power.
Immaculate conception has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus (it's supposed to be how Mary was conceived, because only someone free of original sin could birth Jesus). Also, "relatively new" and "Council of Nicea" don't go together; 99% of what people consider Christianity was nailed down at Nicea, and that was over 1500 years ago, so "new" is really pushing it.
BTW, one additional bit of info from your own link: Even after the 5 year/100,000 mile period, they expect the batteries to work, they'll just have a capacity of around 70% of their "brand new" capacity. You can still use them, you'll just have the range drop from around 220 miles to around 150 miles.