Other than (2) - I think you hit in on the nose. If 'sickness' such as high blood pressure, cancer, and diabetes does not decrease lifespan, then it seems those diseases are not terribly serious then are they?
In fact these diseases are serious, but in the US we have an epidemic of diagnosis. The criteria for high blood pressure and diabetes are constantly lowered - we even have 'pre-diabetes' now. Billions are spent on detection cancers early though there is no scientific proof that such detection increases life span.
This is where a good chunk of all that money we spend on healthcare is going - diagnosing diseases ever earlier, and in some cases at such a low level, you'd probably be better off not knowing (many men who die of other causes, have undiagnosed prostate cancers that never caused them a bit of trouble).
This is not a disease epidemic, it's a diagnosis epidemic. Mark my words, healthcare in the US right now is a bubble economy. More and more money is spent, with no beneficial outcome (other than an apparently excellent ability to diagnose disease). As the price of healthcare continues to outpace inflation, the gap between what we spend, and the rest of the world spends, will widen. This house of cards will come tumbling down eventually. It must. It'll be ugly. There will be a government bailout. And then we will be like the rest of the world, with nationalized health care, where treatment and diagnoses are based on scientific evidence of efficasy, not a desire to spike the 4th quarters numbers.
- Why spend 10x the water and food to raise stock, when that food could feed the rest of the world?
Because we already have enough food and money to feed the rest of the world. Why is the US government paying people to turn corn into fuel (literally, burning food)? We've got enough food.
- Why torture animals by putting them in cage and giving them a totally unnatural/undesirable life - one which if we see movies of something like this done to humans we call it "horror movie" and "bad aliens".
Humans are not animals. I simply don't care if they live 'unnatural' lives.
- Your food is what you become - both in body and mind. It is both healthier (if you have knowledge about it), gives you more energy and spiritual development. OTOH, eating meat gives you a share of bad karma and foul smell. Any foul smells;-) when you begin to eat vegetarian is actually cleansing of the body / adjustments to different metabolism.
Huh. If I ate no meat I'd have to eat so many carbs I be farting up a storm. Stalk about foul smells. Meat gives me plenty of energy. Animal protein makes me healthy. I rarely get sick. As for karma - I thought this was supposed to be a rational argument - go peddle your religion elsewhere.
- Animals are more similar to humans.
more similar than what? A caroot? Well, I guess I have to give you that one.
We wouldn't want to eat humans, but we eat animals because we think less of them. Actually, by eating them you become more "animalistic", because their energy is going through your body. I know many here think this is a far stretch, but energy is always preserved, so it makes sense that some of the animalistic mind is still left in the meat while plant-food is more "tranquil".
Don't you dare conflate conservation of energy (a scientific principle) with your fuzzy headed wacky religious believe that 'you are what you eat'. In science there is no such thing as 'mind energy', and it is most definitely not conserved.
- I don't want to participate in ignorance. Even though "everybody" does it, I prefer to do what I do based on knowledge and compassion.
Good for you, now leave me to do what everybody else does and enjoy my tasty steaks. You are simply never going to win this argument (and by win, I mean get everyone to stop eating meat). We've been eating meat for long enough that our digestive tract is thoroughly adapted to process it - that's a lot of evolution you are trying to fight. You can't win.
"especially being able to run an app in Swedish while still being able to input Japanese"
Well, in that case, I have to agree, for most people then, Java will be entirely unusable. Why just yesterday I was attempting to use a Russian keyboard, on a middle eastern version of Windows, running a Hebrew language Java application, and it just wouldn't allow me to input Chinese. Useless.
Since prequels get made with special-effects technology that has evolved much beyond when the earlier movies were made, we end up seeing special effects and the general look of the movie not being in line with what we would expect how things would look in the past. For example, some of the consoles and user interface screens used by the cast in Star Trek Enterprise looked more advanced than the ones on Star Trek : DS9. This anachronistic anomaly again leaves a bad taste in the audience's mouths.
Yeah this totally ruins it for me, because when I am watching a fictional depiction of fictional characters, in a fictional place and time, I expect everything else to be realistic. But seriously, I don't give a crap. Watching a movie or TV series is all about willful suspension of disbelief. Most people are willing to put up with minor inconsistencies. It might bother us at first, but we get over it and enjoy the characters and the plot. The special effects should never be the main even (hear that Lucas? you hack) they should merely be support for the storyline and a background for the characters.
Topic Icons - So we have 150+ topic icons. Your design needs to incorporate our existing icons, and not require that we rebuild all of them. That means most likely that the icons sit on a white background.
At first I read this and thought - Icons? What Icons? I don't see any icons on slashdot. Reaching back in my memory I recalled that I disabled them the very second I was given the ability to disable the icons in my slashdot profile. Haven't seen them for years - and don't miss them.
I doubt Jobs is looking to support running every Win32 binary under the sun - for that you can dual boot. If something like what Cringely describes were to take place, OS X would implement only a subset of the win32 API, but with graphical widgets having an OS X look and feel and perhaps some win32'ish extensions that provide access to OS X specific functionality (spotlight, etc...) This 'subset' API would be different enough that there would be very little likelihood that an unmodified binary would run out of the box on top of this compatibility layer.
But with a recompile and some refactoring, I bet most windows programs could run quite will under this compatibity layer. What those would do is open up the Mac platform as a viable target for Windows software developers. Recompile under OS X, fix the few quirks, or work around the APIs that aren't present, and bingo, you've got a mac app. With a few IFDEFs you might even be able to support both Mac and Windows versions with the same code base. Software makers like Quicken might find this a very attractive option.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: 3, Informative
NT's had that for ages as well, "runas", at the command line and in the GUI.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
"Introduces the new user security model similar to Un*x, only 30 years later. But it is (so far) incredibly inane in its interaction model with the user (from the article):"
Get off of it. NT has had a fine grained, multi-user security model since it's inception, 13 years ago. In fact, until Unix got ACL's, I would say NTFS has a better file system security model.
UAP is a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator. Other than OS X, I know of no Unix-like OS that even attempts this.
I've been running Windows as an admin user every since NT4. Never had a single virus.
Most worms will infect a system regardless of the security rights of the user. Much malware will be thwarted by a limited rights user account, but I am smart enough not to download and install that sort of crap.
Re:same as hardware really, ms laziness?
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 1
What the hell are you talking about? Although my PC supports various legacy hardware, none of it is enabled by default, and absolutely none of it is used. My CPU talks to DDR memory using a dual channel interface and AMD's Hypertransport. My only expansion card is an nVidia PCI-e x16 video card. All of the built in peripherals (sound, network, USB...) use PCI or PCI-e (in the case of the gigabyte ethernet port).
BTW, the new MacBooks use an almost identical architecture, with the exception of a lack of a legacy BIOS - which after boot, does nothing to improve performance.
All of this is imminently flexible, and provides blindingly fast I/O compared to the PC architecture of 'decades ago'.
Responding to Kurzweil. Exponential growth is a mathematical concept. The rate of change of a quantity is proportional to the amount of the quantity. This presumes the ability to measure that quantity. How exactly does one measure "technology" or "progress" in sufficient detail to determine that they are increasing at an exponential rate? Sure, one can make qualitative observations. It seems that the more technology there is, the more quickly we can design new technology. But that's an awfully fuzzy concept upon which to base a mathematical claim of exponential behavior. What about lock-in? How do we know that the current (massive) installed base of IP based networks and computers hasn't prevented a new and better technology from making us all ten times as productive?
Even if things actually are exponential at the moment, there is also the issue of the time scale. Over sufficiently small time scales many growth curves can appear exponential. The most famous example being the S curve, the growth curve of bacteria in a petri dish (and humans as it is beginning to appear). I am sure railroad building looked exponential for a few decades of the 1800s, but obviously there are real limits to the miles of railroad tracks you can lay.
I think underlying all of this is the false impression of infinite capacity that has arisen out of the phenomenal increase in computer power of the last 4 or 5 decades. Sure, I can now house a terabyte of data under my desk. That certainly feels limitless. And geez, who is to say that in ten years it won't be a petabyte. The perception is one of infinite capacity, as the limits recede over the horizon as fast as we approach them. But rest assured, all physical attributes of computers are now, and forever will be finite. There are real limits to the amount of computation a particular piece of matter can accomplish, real bounds on the amount of power required for that computation, and last I checked, only a finite amount of matter available for conversion into computational devices.
The problems IBM programmers are having are emblematic of the problems that the PC industry is going to be facing in a few years. Multi-core is the future of PC performance. Increasing GHz and IPC of single processors has pretty much hit a wall. Creating Dual and multi-core CPUs is the best approach we have left for increasing performance with future increases in transistor count/density.
The problem is that single threaded programs will run just as slowly on your quad-core 'Core-Quattro' in 2008, as they did on your old Pentium 4 - c. 2005. Great, yeah, I know, server loads parallelize very nicely (witness the miracle of Niagra), but consumer grade CPUs are where the volume is at, and people are going to have to notice a real difference in performance in order to stay on the hardware upgrade treadmill. This necessitates that Intel/AMD/IBM come up with new programming models that make it easy to parallelize existing code. Parallelized libraries and frameworks are all well and good, but it will be 20 years before everyone gets around to recoding the existing codebade to the the new platform - and most of them are probably not going to generate optimal code.
No, what we need are compilers that take programs written in a serial fashion, and emit code that scales well on multiple processors. The problems with the PS3 are only the beginning.
"It was a full-page photo for a major telecom and all I saw was pixels"
Yep, saw that one too. It looked horrible. And I am noticing more and more of this in print advertisement. Particularly obvious are digital images that are oversharpened in an attempt to compensate for low resolution or being blown up to a size the original resolution just won't support.
I imagine the compensation is that it's cheap to produce ads this way, and most people really don't notice. Unless it's an add targetted at profession photographers, most people won't care that it looks like something they took with their 5MP P&S and printed off on a $50 HP printer.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
You going into marketing? You seem to have the lingo down. That being said, you freaking don't know what you are talking about. Windows and Linux are both multi-threaded operating systems. My copy of Windows XP 'leverages' paralellism just fine, as my CPU is dual core. The OS gets both CPUs working, all the time. You want to see some real improvements, talk to the application coders and try to get them to 'leverage paralellism' in their applications by making them multi-threaded.
There are acres of room for improvement, but the current paradigms aren't keeping up. Part of the problem is the PC architecture... it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited. It's shackling the industry to a very limiting hardware model, trading innovation in effciency and effectiveness for better benchmarks at the same old stuff.
What the hell are you talking about? Care to offer some specifics? "it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited" - what exactly does that little gem mean? My latest motherboard has an extremely high bandwidth I/O architecture, built in from the ground up. I have memory bandwidth that was unheard of just 3 years ago. The damned thing burns through just about every task I throw at it.
Someone's going to need to design and market a new platform... OS and Hardware, that manages your data better with less effort across more devices, before we can get things moving again.
Wait, I thought the problem was with the PC architecture - now it's data management? Moving data between various devices is the job of applications. If the applications aren't written to interoperate and share data intelligently, there's nothing the OS can do to fix that.
Equipment snob? Hardly, I am talking about a $75 lens (50mm f1.8 II, best value for money you can find in a Canon lens). You can slap that on a Digital Rebel XT ($800 - less without the kit lens) and get effectively the same image quality I get with my 20D - and it will simply blow away anything a digicam with IS can do. Add to that the fact that the kit lens, as crappy as it is, beats the pants off of just about any built-in lens on anything but the fanciest pro-sumer digicams (which cost about the same as a Digital Rebel).
A 10x optical zoom on a consumer grade camera will be crap in anything but bright daylight. You need very high shutter speed to get a clear picture at that zoom level.
My Canon 20D goes from off, to taking a picture in about a quarter of a second. If I leave the thing on in 'sleep' mode, it will take a picture as fast as I can hit the shutter button. There is no perceptible lag. Camera speed is indeed one of the primary reasons to get a DSLR.
Actually, I regularly do this with one exposure. I take the RAW image, create two different exposures from it, one for the highlights, one for the shadows, and blend them together. It can be a very effective technique, as the RAW image has at least one extra stop of dynamic range over a jpg.
Or you get a camera with a usable 1600 ISO, and lenses that let in more light than can fit through a pinhole, and you are able to take pictures with reasonable shutter speeds in very low light. I'll pit my Canon 20D with a 50mm f/1.8 against any crappy consumer grade image stabilized camera any day.
Clean up what exactly? There is no need to 'clean up' weeds that have resistance to a particular pesticide. The problems is entirely one for the manufacturer of the pesticide, as the chemical will no longer be as effective in the areas where the 'super weed' is prevalent.
You see, it's not as if these genetic modifications make the weed species invasive. It just gives the weed the same chemical resistance as the crop. These weeds were around previous to the use of the chemical. Now with the resistance gene they can continue to be around, even when the chemical is used. Again. Nothing to clean up.
Well, perhaps you are just worried in the abstract about some artificial genes sticking around in free-growing weeds. I'm not. Once the pesticides are no longer used, the genes will no longer confer any selective advantage. They'll then be subject to random mutations and errors and become quickly non-functional.
Granted, I use the windows version, but I expect to find something similar on the mac. Select "Help | About" from the menu in IE. You will find:
- Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
- Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
- Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
- Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.
Much of the code simply cannot be open-sourced, as it is not owned by MS.
Please, point me to the criminal statute the President has violated. As far as I know, there is none. The laws involved dictate what steps are required in order that any evidence gain via a wiretap be admissable in a court of law. If the NSA, acting under this executive order, gathered evidence, without a warrant, it's simply not admissable. As far as I know there is no law that says they can't. In fact, in some situations they have up to 72 hours after performing the surveillance to *retroactively* apply for a warrant.
I am not defending the president. I don't think the NSA should be doing what it's doing. I think the president is violating the privacy of US citizens. I think Congress should pass a law to reign in the executive and his powers in this arena. But as far as I know, the president has violated no existing criminal statute. He just collected a whole bunch of inadmissable evidence.
Either you're just lazy, or you're too gutless to tell the management/customer that they're wrong.
Yes, I can see it now. "You are wrong not to waste money making sure your web application works on a cell phone. I don't care if a cell phone could only show 2 of the 50 required fields at a time. I don't care if none of your users use cell phones to access the application. You are dead wrong. You MUST spend money on this."
I make sure my web application look good at all reasonable resolutions. I specifically ask my clients what their users use and what is the minimum resolution I must support. This is typically 800x600. Wasting my time on making sure the application looks good at smaller resolutions is working on a requirement my clients didn't ask for, and don't want.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than (2) - I think you hit in on the nose. If 'sickness' such as high blood pressure, cancer, and diabetes does not decrease lifespan, then it seems those diseases are not terribly serious then are they?
In fact these diseases are serious, but in the US we have an epidemic of diagnosis. The criteria for high blood pressure and diabetes are constantly lowered - we even have 'pre-diabetes' now. Billions are spent on detection cancers early though there is no scientific proof that such detection increases life span.
This is where a good chunk of all that money we spend on healthcare is going - diagnosing diseases ever earlier, and in some cases at such a low level, you'd probably be better off not knowing (many men who die of other causes, have undiagnosed prostate cancers that never caused them a bit of trouble).
This is not a disease epidemic, it's a diagnosis epidemic. Mark my words, healthcare in the US right now is a bubble economy. More and more money is spent, with no beneficial outcome (other than an apparently excellent ability to diagnose disease). As the price of healthcare continues to outpace inflation, the gap between what we spend, and the rest of the world spends, will widen. This house of cards will come tumbling down eventually. It must. It'll be ugly. There will be a government bailout. And then we will be like the rest of the world, with nationalized health care, where treatment and diagnoses are based on scientific evidence of efficasy, not a desire to spike the 4th quarters numbers.
- Why spend 10x the water and food to raise stock, when that food could feed the rest of the world?
;-) when you begin to eat vegetarian is actually cleansing of the body / adjustments to different metabolism.
Because we already have enough food and money to feed the rest of the world. Why is the US government paying people to turn corn into fuel (literally, burning food)? We've got enough food.
- Why torture animals by putting them in cage and giving them a totally unnatural/undesirable life - one which if we see movies of something like this done to humans we call it "horror movie" and "bad aliens".
Humans are not animals. I simply don't care if they live 'unnatural' lives.
- Your food is what you become - both in body and mind. It is both healthier (if you have knowledge about it), gives you more energy and spiritual development. OTOH, eating meat gives you a share of bad karma and foul smell. Any foul smells
Huh. If I ate no meat I'd have to eat so many carbs I be farting up a storm. Stalk about foul smells. Meat gives me plenty of energy. Animal protein makes me healthy. I rarely get sick. As for karma - I thought this was supposed to be a rational argument - go peddle your religion elsewhere.
- Animals are more similar to humans.
more similar than what? A caroot? Well, I guess I have to give you that one.
We wouldn't want to eat humans, but we eat animals because we think less of them. Actually, by eating them you become more "animalistic", because their energy is going through your body. I know many here think this is a far stretch, but energy is always preserved, so it makes sense that some of the animalistic mind is still left in the meat while plant-food is more "tranquil".
Don't you dare conflate conservation of energy (a scientific principle) with your fuzzy headed wacky religious believe that 'you are what you eat'. In science there is no such thing as 'mind energy', and it is most definitely not conserved.
- I don't want to participate in ignorance. Even though "everybody" does it, I prefer to do what I do based on knowledge and compassion.
Good for you, now leave me to do what everybody else does and enjoy my tasty steaks. You are simply never going to win this argument (and by win, I mean get everyone to stop eating meat). We've been eating meat for long enough that our digestive tract is thoroughly adapted to process it - that's a lot of evolution you are trying to fight. You can't win.
"especially being able to run an app in Swedish while still being able to input Japanese"
Well, in that case, I have to agree, for most people then, Java will be entirely unusable. Why just yesterday I was attempting to use a Russian keyboard, on a middle eastern version of Windows, running a Hebrew language Java application, and it just wouldn't allow me to input Chinese. Useless.
Since prequels get made with special-effects technology that has evolved much beyond when the earlier movies were made, we end up seeing special effects and the general look of the movie not being in line with what we would expect how things would look in the past. For example, some of the consoles and user interface screens used by the cast in Star Trek Enterprise looked more advanced than the ones on Star Trek : DS9. This anachronistic anomaly again leaves a bad taste in the audience's mouths.
Yeah this totally ruins it for me, because when I am watching a fictional depiction of fictional characters, in a fictional place and time, I expect everything else to be realistic. But seriously, I don't give a crap. Watching a movie or TV series is all about willful suspension of disbelief. Most people are willing to put up with minor inconsistencies. It might bother us at first, but we get over it and enjoy the characters and the plot. The special effects should never be the main even (hear that Lucas? you hack) they should merely be support for the storyline and a background for the characters.
Topic Icons - So we have 150+ topic icons. Your design needs to incorporate our existing icons, and not require that we rebuild all of them. That means most likely that the icons sit on a white background.
At first I read this and thought - Icons? What Icons? I don't see any icons on slashdot. Reaching back in my memory I recalled that I disabled them the very second I was given the ability to disable the icons in my slashdot profile. Haven't seen them for years - and don't miss them.
There is a simple answer to that problem. Taxes! Add a VAT tax an all their funding problems are solved.
I doubt Jobs is looking to support running every Win32 binary under the sun - for that you can dual boot. If something like what Cringely describes were to take place, OS X would implement only a subset of the win32 API, but with graphical widgets having an OS X look and feel and perhaps some win32'ish extensions that provide access to OS X specific functionality (spotlight, etc...) This 'subset' API would be different enough that there would be very little likelihood that an unmodified binary would run out of the box on top of this compatibility layer.
But with a recompile and some refactoring, I bet most windows programs could run quite will under this compatibity layer. What those would do is open up the Mac platform as a viable target for Windows software developers. Recompile under OS X, fix the few quirks, or work around the APIs that aren't present, and bingo, you've got a mac app. With a few IFDEFs you might even be able to support both Mac and Windows versions with the same code base. Software makers like Quicken might find this a very attractive option.
NT's had that for ages as well, "runas", at the command line and in the GUI.
"Introduces the new user security model similar to Un*x, only 30 years later. But it is (so far) incredibly inane in its interaction model with the user (from the article):"
Get off of it. NT has had a fine grained, multi-user security model since it's inception, 13 years ago. In fact, until Unix got ACL's, I would say NTFS has a better file system security model.
UAP is a means of managing access to administrative rights without forcing the user to always operate as Administrator. Other than OS X, I know of no Unix-like OS that even attempts this.
I've been running Windows as an admin user every since NT4. Never had a single virus.
Most worms will infect a system regardless of the security rights of the user. Much malware will be thwarted by a limited rights user account, but I am smart enough not to download and install that sort of crap.
What the hell are you talking about? Although my PC supports various legacy hardware, none of it is enabled by default, and absolutely none of it is used. My CPU talks to DDR memory using a dual channel interface and AMD's Hypertransport. My only expansion card is an nVidia PCI-e x16 video card. All of the built in peripherals (sound, network, USB...) use PCI or PCI-e (in the case of the gigabyte ethernet port).
BTW, the new MacBooks use an almost identical architecture, with the exception of a lack of a legacy BIOS - which after boot, does nothing to improve performance.
All of this is imminently flexible, and provides blindingly fast I/O compared to the PC architecture of 'decades ago'.
-josh
Responding to Kurzweil. Exponential growth is a mathematical concept. The rate of change of a quantity is proportional to the amount of the quantity. This presumes the ability to measure that quantity. How exactly does one measure "technology" or "progress" in sufficient detail to determine that they are increasing at an exponential rate? Sure, one can make qualitative observations. It seems that the more technology there is, the more quickly we can design new technology. But that's an awfully fuzzy concept upon which to base a mathematical claim of exponential behavior. What about lock-in? How do we know that the current (massive) installed base of IP based networks and computers hasn't prevented a new and better technology from making us all ten times as productive?
Even if things actually are exponential at the moment, there is also the issue of the time scale. Over sufficiently small time scales many growth curves can appear exponential. The most famous example being the S curve, the growth curve of bacteria in a petri dish (and humans as it is beginning to appear). I am sure railroad building looked exponential for a few decades of the 1800s, but obviously there are real limits to the miles of railroad tracks you can lay.
I think underlying all of this is the false impression of infinite capacity that has arisen out of the phenomenal increase in computer power of the last 4 or 5 decades. Sure, I can now house a terabyte of data under my desk. That certainly feels limitless. And geez, who is to say that in ten years it won't be a petabyte. The perception is one of infinite capacity, as the limits recede over the horizon as fast as we approach them. But rest assured, all physical attributes of computers are now, and forever will be finite. There are real limits to the amount of computation a particular piece of matter can accomplish, real bounds on the amount of power required for that computation, and last I checked, only a finite amount of matter available for conversion into computational devices.
The problems IBM programmers are having are emblematic of the problems that the PC industry is going to be facing in a few years. Multi-core is the future of PC performance. Increasing GHz and IPC of single processors has pretty much hit a wall. Creating Dual and multi-core CPUs is the best approach we have left for increasing performance with future increases in transistor count/density.
The problem is that single threaded programs will run just as slowly on your quad-core 'Core-Quattro' in 2008, as they did on your old Pentium 4 - c. 2005. Great, yeah, I know, server loads parallelize very nicely (witness the miracle of Niagra), but consumer grade CPUs are where the volume is at, and people are going to have to notice a real difference in performance in order to stay on the hardware upgrade treadmill. This necessitates that Intel/AMD/IBM come up with new programming models that make it easy to parallelize existing code. Parallelized libraries and frameworks are all well and good, but it will be 20 years before everyone gets around to recoding the existing codebade to the the new platform - and most of them are probably not going to generate optimal code.
No, what we need are compilers that take programs written in a serial fashion, and emit code that scales well on multiple processors. The problems with the PS3 are only the beginning.
"It was a full-page photo for a major telecom and all I saw was pixels"
Yep, saw that one too. It looked horrible. And I am noticing more and more of this in print advertisement. Particularly obvious are digital images that are oversharpened in an attempt to compensate for low resolution or being blown up to a size the original resolution just won't support.
I imagine the compensation is that it's cheap to produce ads this way, and most people really don't notice. Unless it's an add targetted at profession photographers, most people won't care that it looks like something they took with their 5MP P&S and printed off on a $50 HP printer.
Really, I thought it was a very cynical trick played on Disney by David Lynch. I think Lynch laughed himself to sleep every night while filming it.
Innovation in operating systems is pretty much at a standstill outside the academic environment. Current operating systems cannot leverage parralelism very well for anything but hyper-specialized applications. Current operating systems have user environments that are crummy at managing massive amounts of data crammed into cavernous storage systems. Current operating systems are rotten at deploying your data across networked devices like cell phones and MP3 players and DVRs without a crapload of work.
You going into marketing? You seem to have the lingo down. That being said, you freaking don't know what you are talking about. Windows and Linux are both multi-threaded operating systems. My copy of Windows XP 'leverages' paralellism just fine, as my CPU is dual core. The OS gets both CPUs working, all the time. You want to see some real improvements, talk to the application coders and try to get them to 'leverage paralellism' in their applications by making them multi-threaded.
There are acres of room for improvement, but the current paradigms aren't keeping up. Part of the problem is the PC architecture... it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited. It's shackling the industry to a very limiting hardware model, trading innovation in effciency and effectiveness for better benchmarks at the same old stuff.
What the hell are you talking about? Care to offer some specifics? "it's not well suited for anything but a workstation or server, and even then, it's not all that well suited" - what exactly does that little gem mean? My latest motherboard has an extremely high bandwidth I/O architecture, built in from the ground up. I have memory bandwidth that was unheard of just 3 years ago. The damned thing burns through just about every task I throw at it.
Someone's going to need to design and market a new platform... OS and Hardware, that manages your data better with less effort across more devices, before we can get things moving again.
Wait, I thought the problem was with the PC architecture - now it's data management? Moving data between various devices is the job of applications. If the applications aren't written to interoperate and share data intelligently, there's nothing the OS can do to fix that.
Equipment snob? Hardly, I am talking about a $75 lens (50mm f1.8 II, best value for money you can find in a Canon lens). You can slap that on a Digital Rebel XT ($800 - less without the kit lens) and get effectively the same image quality I get with my 20D - and it will simply blow away anything a digicam with IS can do. Add to that the fact that the kit lens, as crappy as it is, beats the pants off of just about any built-in lens on anything but the fanciest pro-sumer digicams (which cost about the same as a Digital Rebel).
A 10x optical zoom on a consumer grade camera will be crap in anything but bright daylight. You need very high shutter speed to get a clear picture at that zoom level.
My Canon 20D goes from off, to taking a picture in about a quarter of a second. If I leave the thing on in 'sleep' mode, it will take a picture as fast as I can hit the shutter button. There is no perceptible lag. Camera speed is indeed one of the primary reasons to get a DSLR.
Actually, I regularly do this with one exposure. I take the RAW image, create two different exposures from it, one for the highlights, one for the shadows, and blend them together. It can be a very effective technique, as the RAW image has at least one extra stop of dynamic range over a jpg.
Or you get a camera with a usable 1600 ISO, and lenses that let in more light than can fit through a pinhole, and you are able to take pictures with reasonable shutter speeds in very low light. I'll pit my Canon 20D with a 50mm f/1.8 against any crappy consumer grade image stabilized camera any day.
Clean up what exactly? There is no need to 'clean up' weeds that have resistance to a particular pesticide. The problems is entirely one for the manufacturer of the pesticide, as the chemical will no longer be as effective in the areas where the 'super weed' is prevalent.
You see, it's not as if these genetic modifications make the weed species invasive. It just gives the weed the same chemical resistance as the crop. These weeds were around previous to the use of the chemical. Now with the resistance gene they can continue to be around, even when the chemical is used. Again. Nothing to clean up.
Well, perhaps you are just worried in the abstract about some artificial genes sticking around in free-growing weeds. I'm not. Once the pesticides are no longer used, the genes will no longer confer any selective advantage. They'll then be subject to random mutations and errors and become quickly non-functional.
Granted, I use the windows version, but I expect to find something similar on the mac. Select "Help | About" from the menu in IE. You will find:
- Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
- Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
- Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
- Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.
Much of the code simply cannot be open-sourced, as it is not owned by MS.
-josh
Please, point me to the criminal statute the President has violated. As far as I know, there is none. The laws involved dictate what steps are required in order that any evidence gain via a wiretap be admissable in a court of law. If the NSA, acting under this executive order, gathered evidence, without a warrant, it's simply not admissable. As far as I know there is no law that says they can't. In fact, in some situations they have up to 72 hours after performing the surveillance to *retroactively* apply for a warrant.
I am not defending the president. I don't think the NSA should be doing what it's doing. I think the president is violating the privacy of US citizens. I think Congress should pass a law to reign in the executive and his powers in this arena. But as far as I know, the president has violated no existing criminal statute. He just collected a whole bunch of inadmissable evidence.
Either you're just lazy, or you're too gutless to tell the management/customer that they're wrong.
Yes, I can see it now. "You are wrong not to waste money making sure your web application works on a cell phone. I don't care if a cell phone could only show 2 of the 50 required fields at a time. I don't care if none of your users use cell phones to access the application. You are dead wrong. You MUST spend money on this."
I make sure my web application look good at all reasonable resolutions. I specifically ask my clients what their users use and what is the minimum resolution I must support. This is typically 800x600. Wasting my time on making sure the application looks good at smaller resolutions is working on a requirement my clients didn't ask for, and don't want.
Your bridge analogy is false - obviously so.