with that in mind, why is it so hard to then imagine that, given that the "browser" is doing everything that you can also do with desktop widget UI toolkits, why is it so hard to appreciate that you need the full range of OS technology to support that desktop^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbrowser technology?
You do need the full range of OS technology, you just don't need to re-implement it. You don't need to reimplement it because it is the purpose of operating systems to provide this functionality to application programs and they are very good at that; that is, after all, the purpose of operating systems.
i've learned that if someone says "surely it doesn't have to be as complicated as all that", it's time to run like stink as fast as possible, out of the conversation and the room, and never look back.
That's probably because you know they are right and don't want to experience the well-deserved tongue lashing that follows next.
these aren't projects that people are (realistically) able to do in their basement.
That is exactly what these companies and projects are trying to change. They set up large libraries of genetic components with standardized "connectors". The create plasmids that "just work". Etc. People will be able to try out lots of stuff in their basement at almost no cost. nd sequences they don't have, they can simply order for a few hundred dollars.
This wasn't even hard or costly 20 years ago, and it's even easier now.
I wouldn't worry about it, though. There's no force on earth that can stop this. If it turns out to be easy to create deadly combinations, we're doomed anyway. And if not, well, then we're going to benefit.
These naysayers have been around forever. They were saying that the Internet was badly designed and didn't work when it started and they keep still saying. What did these people design? Teletext, ATM, Compuserve, ISDN, circuit-switched networks, and all that other overpriced crap.
What really makes these people unhappy is that the Internet is far less susceptible to corporate control than what they dreamed up. And that is, incidentally, why the Internet has been so successful.
Sun could have owned this market, but Java was a piece of crap for multimedia and video applications, and so people dropped it. Instead of coming up with nice looking, robust, real-world solutions, Sun was busy building a platform designed by committee and with some of the world's most bloated and least tested APIs on it.
Feinstein is essentially a moderate Republican. On several occasions, she was one of a few Democrats to break with the Democratic party and support some of Bush's so-called "anti-terror" legislation. The EFF and other organizations rank her low. Etc. California Democrats even tried to censure her, but it didn't go through. She is also the fifth richest senator, worth $50-100 million.
Unfortunately, getting rid of a senior senator is hard because they have so much power, and if you vote them out of office, your state immediately loses influence in Washington.
Still, I hope we can replace her with a socially liberal, fiscally conservative (in the traditional sense, i.e., more libertarian leaning) candidate next time around, someone who represents the people, not big business; I don't care whether the person is Democrat or Republican.
Apple is not doing research on pie in the sky pet projects
They aren't doing research at all, not even applied research.
but is rather focused on doing exactly what needs to be done to make a good user experience for the products that they sell.
Yes, and that's called design and development, not research.
So, you're agreeing with me. You just think it doesn't sound good to say that "Apple doesn't invest in research". But that's just the facts.
I hope that we see an end of these massive R&D departments, since they are simply a symptom of the very broken patent system.
The problem is the patent system, not corporate research. We need to reform the patent system, but we should hope that corporate research survives such patent reform, because corporate research has contributed a lot to the world. If you look at contributions from companies like IBM, many of them were neither motivated by patents nor are big money makers.
Basically you are proposing using the ARM chip as the C-P-U, and the other two as its slave PUs:-)
No. The proposal is to have two laptops in a single box, one ARM powered, one Intel/nVidia powered, with enough glue in between. The Intel/nVidia wouldn't really be a "slave" to the ARM; it would more be like a compute server that you can power up and down.
Most of Apple's "R&D" is spent on "D"; there is very little actual research coming out of Apple, by any objective measure. Apple just takes other people's badly packaged good ideas and sticks them into shiny white plastic packages, writing patents along the way.
Unlike other big companies, Apple doesn't even give research grants to academia in any significant quantity (they just charge an arm and a leg for their machines).
If all high tech companies were as stingy as Apple, academia and computer science research would be in big trouble.
And with this step, it *is* the de-facto standard.
No, it's not. It's only a standard for Microsoft and Apple mobile phones, and for Microsoft Exchange. There are a lot of people using those devices, but that doesn't make it a de-facto standard. For it to be a de-facto standard, there would have to be a lot of implementations of the protocol, and there aren't. SyncML may or may not have fewer users, but it has far more implementors.
Intersting thought, that the only thing being left of MSFT in a couple of years is a protocol to sync wireless clients to a server...
If Exchange goes away, ActiveSync becomes meaningless.
Buildings don't start falling down because they're based on Newtonian physics and Newton's theory has had centuries of refinement. Likewise, Darwinism is well understood in the sciences and there is nothing wrong with associating his name with the theory.
We won't get "creationists" to see reason by changing the name. If we called it something else, they'd find something wrong with that term as well. You simply cannot expect a single word to be an intrinsically accurate representation of an entire theory.
Creationists fall into the categories of people too stupid to understand the science and people who deliberately misunderstand in order to win rhetorical arguments. Both kinds of people are a lost cause. We should let them all move into a bunch of religious states and nations and stop sending them technology; everybody would be happier that way.
When traveling, most of the time, I really do want a long battery life and don't need much compute power. But when I arrive at my destination, give a presentation, and demo some software, then I want compute power.
So, as far as I'm concerned, having a high power and a low power CPU sharing the same keyboard, screen, drive, and power supply is actually very much what I want. I hope it becomes standard.
The thing with the kindle is that it includes "free" online access to locate and deliver books. so you can be anywhere and look for and purchase a new book. the book is then delivered to your kindle.
You can get cell phones, Internet tablets, and media players with 640x360, 800x480 or higher resolutions; those make excellent eBook readers, with a whole range of connectivity options. For reading and downloading on the go, go to Google or Mobipocket (Mobipocket is owned by Amazon, you if you're worried about Jeff Bezos starving if you don't buy his Kindle, don't).
Want to be in court trying to prove that? With an army of Intel lawyers on the other side?
nVidia has enough money to have a competent law team, and that's all they need. Beyond that point, adding more lawyers doesn't increase the chances of winning on either side.
Much more difficult would be building an x86 clone that achieved decent performance without infringing any of those patents.
I don't think it's a big problem. The x86 instruction set is such a poor match to modern hardware anyway that any efficient execution requires a lot of translation in between, and there is an awful lot of room for different designs there.
There is already this database. We just copied you. (maybe not the year count, i'm not sure what it is in America)
That's a bit simplistic. It's not like you could ever come and go as you please; there has always been a record of entries and exits. The change is in what is collected, how it is stored, and how it is shared.
Your view that the US is pushing the envelope and everybody else is following is wrong. The UK's effort seems to go quite a bit further because it appears to aim at correlating travel data routinely with other data.
I am sure this was brought up a few months back at least, someone actually requested that he see his own "travel records" because he was routinely pulled over on his travels. It took him around a year to actually get it. And if i remember correct, it had blacked-out sections, as well as opinions on "him", in relation to safety.
Yes, post 9/11, the US started making this info part of border controls, even for US citizens. And because of FOIA legislation, Americans can access it. The UK copied the US FOIA law; give it a try and see whether you can get your travel information in the UK.
name a country which requires you to: fill in a visa application...
The US doesn't require me to do that, it only requires non-citizens to do that. So, that doesn't affect the privacy of US citizens.
Furthermore, the only reason you don't have to jump through such hoops in some other countries is because Europeans get special treatment. Try traveling as someone from a developing nation. Even as a European, several Asian countries require extensive pre-registration.
Yes europe has less laws regualting government intervention than the USA but we know what data is held about us.
There are three kinds of data governments keep: the kind that is part of public laws and regulations, the kind that is kept secretly but legally under national security and intelligence rules, and the kind that is kept in violation of the law.
You know only about the first kind, and in that area, the US government keeps less data than most European governments.
As for the second and third kind of data, you have no idea of knowing what governments keep or don't keep, and your assertion is wishful thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
And Java is as far from dead as possible. Sun won the lawsuit against MS, and Java is one of the most used server languages.
Java is dead on the client.
On the server, it's increasingly turning into a niche and legacy language, kind of like COBOL
with that in mind, why is it so hard to then imagine that, given that the "browser" is doing everything that you can also do with desktop widget UI toolkits, why is it so hard to appreciate that you need the full range of OS technology to support that desktop^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbrowser technology?
You do need the full range of OS technology, you just don't need to re-implement it. You don't need to reimplement it because it is the purpose of operating systems to provide this functionality to application programs and they are very good at that; that is, after all, the purpose of operating systems.
i've learned that if someone says "surely it doesn't have to be as complicated as all that", it's time to run like stink as fast as possible, out of the conversation and the room, and never look back.
That's probably because you know they are right and don't want to experience the well-deserved tongue lashing that follows next.
Thread creation in Linux is not expensive.
If you want to know what the next Microsoft phone looks like, just have a look at the shipping versions of Android, iPhone, and Symbian...
it was because [the battery] was visibly swelling in it case
You're looking at too much battery porn!
$20 of CAT5, $10 of jacks, and a $20 fish-tape isn't fiscally feasible, but these gizmos are?
Not everybody lives in flimsy wooden boxes. I live in a large building with thick brick walls.
Yes, there are road warriors out there that do buy 2 or 3 batteries and rotate them daily. They aren't most people, they are a niche.
So are people who pay $2800 for a laptop.
That's my experience as well: the iPhone accelerometer is useless and a nuisance.
these aren't projects that people are (realistically) able to do in their basement.
That is exactly what these companies and projects are trying to change. They set up large libraries of genetic components with standardized "connectors". The create plasmids that "just work". Etc. People will be able to try out lots of stuff in their basement at almost no cost. nd sequences they don't have, they can simply order for a few hundred dollars.
This wasn't even hard or costly 20 years ago, and it's even easier now.
I wouldn't worry about it, though. There's no force on earth that can stop this. If it turns out to be easy to create deadly combinations, we're doomed anyway. And if not, well, then we're going to benefit.
These naysayers have been around forever. They were saying that the Internet was badly designed and didn't work when it started and they keep still saying. What did these people design? Teletext, ATM, Compuserve, ISDN, circuit-switched networks, and all that other overpriced crap.
What really makes these people unhappy is that the Internet is far less susceptible to corporate control than what they dreamed up. And that is, incidentally, why the Internet has been so successful.
but sometimes they hit Georgia.
Sun could have owned this market, but Java was a piece of crap for multimedia and video applications, and so people dropped it. Instead of coming up with nice looking, robust, real-world solutions, Sun was busy building a platform designed by committee and with some of the world's most bloated and least tested APIs on it.
Feinstein is essentially a moderate Republican. On several occasions, she was one of a few Democrats to break with the Democratic party and support some of Bush's so-called "anti-terror" legislation. The EFF and other organizations rank her low. Etc. California Democrats even tried to censure her, but it didn't go through. She is also the fifth richest senator, worth $50-100 million.
Unfortunately, getting rid of a senior senator is hard because they have so much power, and if you vote them out of office, your state immediately loses influence in Washington.
Still, I hope we can replace her with a socially liberal, fiscally conservative (in the traditional sense, i.e., more libertarian leaning) candidate next time around, someone who represents the people, not big business; I don't care whether the person is Democrat or Republican.
Apple is not doing research on pie in the sky pet projects
They aren't doing research at all, not even applied research.
but is rather focused on doing exactly what needs to be done to make a good user experience for the products that they sell.
Yes, and that's called design and development, not research.
So, you're agreeing with me. You just think it doesn't sound good to say that "Apple doesn't invest in research". But that's just the facts.
I hope that we see an end of these massive R&D departments, since they are simply a symptom of the very broken patent system.
The problem is the patent system, not corporate research. We need to reform the patent system, but we should hope that corporate research survives such patent reform, because corporate research has contributed a lot to the world. If you look at contributions from companies like IBM, many of them were neither motivated by patents nor are big money makers.
Closed source: Hey, I wanna buy your car. Here's a gift card. Yeah, it still contains $20k! Trust me!
Open source: Hey, I wanna buy your car. Here's $20k in cold, hard cash. Yeah, sure, use your pen and UV light on it if you like.
Basically you are proposing using the ARM chip as the C-P-U, and the other two as its slave PUs :-)
No. The proposal is to have two laptops in a single box, one ARM powered, one Intel/nVidia powered, with enough glue in between. The Intel/nVidia wouldn't really be a "slave" to the ARM; it would more be like a compute server that you can power up and down.
Most of Apple's "R&D" is spent on "D"; there is very little actual research coming out of Apple, by any objective measure. Apple just takes other people's badly packaged good ideas and sticks them into shiny white plastic packages, writing patents along the way.
Unlike other big companies, Apple doesn't even give research grants to academia in any significant quantity (they just charge an arm and a leg for their machines).
If all high tech companies were as stingy as Apple, academia and computer science research would be in big trouble.
And with this step, it *is* the de-facto standard.
No, it's not. It's only a standard for Microsoft and Apple mobile phones, and for Microsoft Exchange. There are a lot of people using those devices, but that doesn't make it a de-facto standard. For it to be a de-facto standard, there would have to be a lot of implementations of the protocol, and there aren't. SyncML may or may not have fewer users, but it has far more implementors.
Intersting thought, that the only thing being left of MSFT in a couple of years is a protocol to sync wireless clients to a server...
If Exchange goes away, ActiveSync becomes meaningless.
Buildings don't start falling down because they're based on Newtonian physics and Newton's theory has had centuries of refinement. Likewise, Darwinism is well understood in the sciences and there is nothing wrong with associating his name with the theory.
We won't get "creationists" to see reason by changing the name. If we called it something else, they'd find something wrong with that term as well. You simply cannot expect a single word to be an intrinsically accurate representation of an entire theory.
Creationists fall into the categories of people too stupid to understand the science and people who deliberately misunderstand in order to win rhetorical arguments. Both kinds of people are a lost cause. We should let them all move into a bunch of religious states and nations and stop sending them technology; everybody would be happier that way.
When traveling, most of the time, I really do want a long battery life and don't need much compute power. But when I arrive at my destination, give a presentation, and demo some software, then I want compute power.
So, as far as I'm concerned, having a high power and a low power CPU sharing the same keyboard, screen, drive, and power supply is actually very much what I want. I hope it becomes standard.
The thing with the kindle is that it includes "free" online access to locate and deliver books. so you can be anywhere and look for and purchase a new book. the book is then delivered to your kindle.
You can get cell phones, Internet tablets, and media players with 640x360, 800x480 or higher resolutions; those make excellent eBook readers, with a whole range of connectivity options. For reading and downloading on the go, go to Google or Mobipocket (Mobipocket is owned by Amazon, you if you're worried about Jeff Bezos starving if you don't buy his Kindle, don't).
Want to be in court trying to prove that? With an army of Intel lawyers on the other side?
nVidia has enough money to have a competent law team, and that's all they need. Beyond that point, adding more lawyers doesn't increase the chances of winning on either side.
Much more difficult would be building an x86 clone that achieved decent performance without infringing any of those patents.
I don't think it's a big problem. The x86 instruction set is such a poor match to modern hardware anyway that any efficient execution requires a lot of translation in between, and there is an awful lot of room for different designs there.
There is already this database. We just copied you. (maybe not the year count, i'm not sure what it is in America)
That's a bit simplistic. It's not like you could ever come and go as you please; there has always been a record of entries and exits. The change is in what is collected, how it is stored, and how it is shared.
Your view that the US is pushing the envelope and everybody else is following is wrong. The UK's effort seems to go quite a bit further because it appears to aim at correlating travel data routinely with other data.
I am sure this was brought up a few months back at least, someone actually requested that he see his own "travel records" because he was routinely pulled over on his travels. It took him around a year to actually get it. And if i remember correct, it had blacked-out sections, as well as opinions on "him", in relation to safety.
Yes, post 9/11, the US started making this info part of border controls, even for US citizens. And because of FOIA legislation, Americans can access it. The UK copied the US FOIA law; give it a try and see whether you can get your travel information in the UK.
name a country which requires you to: fill in a visa application ...
The US doesn't require me to do that, it only requires non-citizens to do that. So, that doesn't affect the privacy of US citizens.
Furthermore, the only reason you don't have to jump through such hoops in some other countries is because Europeans get special treatment. Try traveling as someone from a developing nation. Even as a European, several Asian countries require extensive pre-registration.
Yes europe has less laws regualting government intervention than the USA but we know what data is held about us.
There are three kinds of data governments keep: the kind that is part of public laws and regulations, the kind that is kept secretly but legally under national security and intelligence rules, and the kind that is kept in violation of the law.
You know only about the first kind, and in that area, the US government keeps less data than most European governments.
As for the second and third kind of data, you have no idea of knowing what governments keep or don't keep, and your assertion is wishful thinking.