Where do you think the organic components of the Terminator come from? Why do you think the Terminator has such a crotchety disposition? It's made from old people!
Combine a century or more of experience and decades of having young people mess up their lawns with power and speed and it spells trouble. Even worse than the Terminator is the next step, purely biological exoskeletons for old people. I mean, what do you think Aliens are other than bio-enhanced old people with exoskeletons and acid for blood?
Making old people weak is nature's way of protecting the young.
Ghosting would be completely intolerable if slow phosphors were used.
It's not quite that simple. Older TVs had much slower decay times and did have some ghosting. That has slowly improved over time.
Just flickering the backlight is not enough to imitate a CRT, because it would require buffering the whole frame instead of displaying it line by line
Yet, that's just what many recent LCDs do.
The correct method is to use a grid of LEDs,
There is no "correct" method; it's all tradeoffs. Using a "grid of LEDs" is much more expensive for something most people probably don't even notice.
Do you use a regular LCD? A CRT? An LCD with fancy illumination? And HDR LCD? I don't. I still use a four year old plain old LCD because it's good enough.
CRT blanking is a very good thing, because it eliminates sample and hold blur.
No, it does not. The phosphors on CRTs have persistence that is matched to the retrace interval. The effect is similar to sample-and-hold but reduced slightly, at the cost of lower display brightness.
In theory, you could build LCDs that fade exactly like CRTs. People don't because the extra brightness you get from sample and hold for static scenes is far more important than any slight increase in motion blur relative to CRTs.
Managing disks is hard and complicated; when you add and remove them, there are complicated decisions to be made. The choices ZFS makes by default are wrong for me and probably for most desktop users, and getting it to do the right thing is hard.
Sharing a folder is a simple invokation of a "share" command.
Sharing is hard and complicated because it involves security, users, name spaces, and networking. If there's a "simple command" to do it, that tells me that ZFS isn't doing it right.
No need to decide the size of each file system at creation time
Translation: ZFS takes over the whole disk; it misuses the term "file system" to mean some internal construct that is meaningless to the rest of the world. Another strike against it.
Sun wanted Apple to share development and maintenance costs. Apple wanted some long-term guarantees that Sun wouldn't stop development and would also help Apple to solve problems of ZFS under Mac OS X.
That doesn't make sense either. Apple has reasonably capable kernel engineers. Any "problems" that Apple would encounter with ZFS, their own engineers could solve themselves.
Those are big money involved in development, maintenance and support of all that stuff.
And that's probably the real reason: ZFS is a solution in search of a problem; most desktop users (and probably most server users as well) simply do not need anything as complicated as ZFS.
You apparently want a pony. Whatever the process and accountability may be with FOSS voting systems, they are almost certainly better than anything Diebold has been offering.
A "Bug" in your software means someone goes to jail for negligence, or pays for the cost of a reelection.
If that's your standard, only crooks will provide voting software.
Here in the great white North, we have a paper ballot. A simple "X" inside a circle. Human verifiable, countable, no switches, electrons, software, etc.
And yet subject to widespread abuses--historical and contemporary--as well.
Even if they weren't light years ahead in other areas of usability, Microsoft *are* ahead of Ubuntu in at least one, basic, critical area. Stable hardware support that actually works.
Now that really causes "derisive laughter to the point of choking".
Prove me wrong, Linux users.
Why don't you prove your statements on usability and compatibility? Oh, that's right, you just repeat Microsoft marketing claims.
(Your typical Joe or Jane Q. Public will give-up at this point, and buy a Windoze PC-compatible or Apple Mac instead.)
You're comparing apples and oranges. Your typical Joe and Jane Q Public couldn't figure out which version of Windows or OS X to install on their machines either, nor will they know whether to install Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate. The problem is the "having to install part", not the names.
Buy Linux preinstalled and it won't overtax your brain. People will have made reasonable choices for you.
Besides, none of those installations lock you in; it's one command to upgrade to any other one.
GNU software, free software, open source software is largely being developed by commercial and private entities, free from government interference, and usually with clear commercial and financial objectives.
Anybody who objects to that is an enemy of the free market, and most certainly not a libertarian.
Has Schneier run out of real security problems? Yeah, people with physical access to your hardware can break your encryption. They can put a key logger in your machine. They can bug your keyboard or your hotel room. They can even spread LSD or strychnine on your keyboard. Imagine that!
Two conference publications by Apple employee is a joke for a company the size of Apple. Apple doesn't even have a site where they show their research.
(Apple used to have a research lab with real researchers and publications in the 1990's, but they closed it.)
And the poster session is not the output of R&D by Apple, it's people talking about using Apple products in their work.
Show me significant, peer-reviewed research coming out of Apple, and citations thereof. It's almost non-existent. Microsoft, IBM, Google--they all have it--just not Apple.
With all due respect, your statistic does not support your claim. "R&D to sales" is a measure of the effectiveness of a company's effort to convert R&D into sales.... That claim has been refuted in the grandparent to this post
Oh, stop drinking the magic cool-aid and distorting reality. Apple's R&D investment is low in absolute numbers, relative to sales, and relative to company size. And Apple's research output is essentially non-existent by any objective measure.
Now you want to divorce the "R" from the "D"
I have consistently pointed out that Apple invests in "D" but almost nothing in "R".
Need I remind you that Apple basically invented the home computer, basically invented the PDA, and has recently completely re-energized the smartphone industry? Those accomplishments have had obvious penumbral effects.
Apple did none of those things. All their major products were copies of technologies and devices invented elsewhere, and Apple has gotten into trouble and disrepute over that more than once.
If you want to argue that Apple is doing a disservice to the world of technology, you need a better yardstick than "papers published".
I'm only pointing out that Nokia's lawsuit is consistent and plausible with what we know about Apple's actual R&D strategy.
And almost all of that "R&D" spending is "D", not "R".
Where do you think the new products they produce in a steady stream come from, a nearby magic forest?
Yes: the "nearby magic forest" is called "Silicon Valley". Apple takes the best ideas from the Valley and turns them into products. They leave the research to others.
Unlike Apple, Nokia, IBM, Microsoft etc. actually do good research, they just can't figure out how to turn them into decent products.
Apple's R&D to sales ratio is 5.9%, computer industry average is 7.6%.
Apple is no lightweight in the R&D department and NONE of those other companies are expanding their R&D spending as fast as Apple.
Apple spends money development, but not much on research; Apple's research output according to the usual objective measures (publications and citations) is non-existent.
Apple's R&D investment is far below industry average, and most of that is "D", not "R". Apple essentially doesn't publish and doesn't support university research. If all companies were as stingy as Apple when it comes to R&D, computer science research would be in deep trouble. Nokia, on the other hand, has the largest R&D investment in Europe, many times that of Apple.
Apple can only make nice products because other companies and universities have invested a hell of a lot of money and time inventing the things that Apple then assembles into products. That model is not sustainable, and I can see why companies like Nokia are getting litigious over it.
They 5th and 14th ammendments are laws, which were passed by votes of congress and then votes in the sates.
No, they are not "laws" in the usual sense, they are amendments to the Constitution. There's a difference between a law and the Constitution. And the 5th and 14th amendment don't grant you those rights, they merely affirm and clarify that you already have those rights. If those amendments were repealed, you'd still have those rights and SCOTUS would still enforce those rights, since the are the underlying basis for the Constitution and assumed to be self-evident and inalienable.
You are acting as though the Constitution isn't law. You are listing as though it were special, that laws have heiarchies. A county law would also be tossed for conflicting with a state law.
The Constitution is "law" in the sense that it is legal language, but it isn't "laws" in the sense in which laws that Congress passes during its normal operation. And there is a definite hierarchy: constitutional law is much harder to change than (regular) laws. Constitutional law is also referred to as "supreme law". It overrides any laws passed by Congress.
Furthermore, when voting on constitutional law, people don't vote on their preferences, the vote on conformance with the self-evident and inalienable rights.
Of course they can. Simply vote away your right to vote. That would take a 2/3rd majority and radification by the states here.
Great that we agree on something. What that shows is that the outcome of a democratic vote is not necessarily a democracy. And just like you can turn a democracy into a non-democracy by voting away your own right to vote, you can also turn a democracy into a non-democracy by voting away the self-evident and inalienable rights of others.
Therefore, a democracy gives you the ability to vote away the rights of others, but since it ceases to be a democracy at that point, you cannot vote away the rights of others in a democracy.
Your dismissal of a simple fact as "tired argument" is irellevent.
It's relevant, because (1) it shows you're not along in making that mistake--it's a common mistake, usually linked to some political positions--and (2) you can find plenty of explanations why you're wrong.
The other countries you mentioned use various parlimentary systems, [etc]
Yes, and none of that changes the fact that the US is a representative democracy, just like all other modern democracies.
The term "republic" has two usages, one being the American one ("representative democracy") and the European one ("not a monarchy"). All modern democracies are "republics" according to either usage. And all western republics (including the US) are democracies.
Slashdot Mirror
Where do you think the organic components of the Terminator come from? Why do you think the Terminator has such a crotchety disposition? It's made from old people!
Combine a century or more of experience and decades of having young people mess up their lawns with power and speed and it spells trouble. Even worse than the Terminator is the next step, purely biological exoskeletons for old people. I mean, what do you think Aliens are other than bio-enhanced old people with exoskeletons and acid for blood?
Making old people weak is nature's way of protecting the young.
Don't mess with mother nature.
(For the humor impaired: :-)
You're talking about mini USB That's a different standard.
The UN standard is for micro USB. The micro USB standard was adopted in 2008. It's a different connector.
Oh, don't get me wrong: I think it's a good thing, and I hope this will accelerate adoption. It is, after all, the new USB standard.
I'm just saying that most people don't have micro-USB cables lying around just yet.
CRT phosphors fade with exponential decay,
Yup, they have to.
Ghosting would be completely intolerable if slow phosphors were used.
It's not quite that simple. Older TVs had much slower decay times and did have some ghosting. That has slowly improved over time.
Just flickering the backlight is not enough to imitate a CRT, because it would require buffering the whole frame instead of displaying it line by line
Yet, that's just what many recent LCDs do.
The correct method is to use a grid of LEDs,
There is no "correct" method; it's all tradeoffs. Using a "grid of LEDs" is much more expensive for something most people probably don't even notice.
Do you use a regular LCD? A CRT? An LCD with fancy illumination? And HDR LCD? I don't. I still use a four year old plain old LCD because it's good enough.
I doubt you have a lot of micro USB connectors around either; currently, they are mostly used by Nokia phones and little else.
It's not just NIH, ZFS is simply a poor match to Apple's needs.
(I'd argue it's a poor match to anybody's needs. Parts of it are useful, parts of it are a nuisance.)
People don't because
Turns out, recently, you have been able to get such LCDs:
http://www.hometheatermag.com/gearworks/707gear/
So, if you want to, you can get an LCD that flashes the image and then turns dark until the next frame.
CRT blanking is a very good thing, because it eliminates sample and hold blur.
No, it does not. The phosphors on CRTs have persistence that is matched to the retrace interval. The effect is similar to sample-and-hold but reduced slightly, at the cost of lower display brightness.
In theory, you could build LCDs that fade exactly like CRTs. People don't because the extra brightness you get from sample and hold for static scenes is far more important than any slight increase in motion blur relative to CRTs.
It actually combines both volume management and filesystem layers to achieve unique levels of performance, manageability, and data protection
That's the theory. You can even concoct benchmarks. But there's not a shred of evidence that in real world scenarios it actually does this.
Do you get paid by Sun for doing their marketing?
No need to manage individual disks.
Managing disks is hard and complicated; when you add and remove them, there are complicated decisions to be made. The choices ZFS makes by default are wrong for me and probably for most desktop users, and getting it to do the right thing is hard.
Sharing a folder is a simple invokation of a "share" command.
Sharing is hard and complicated because it involves security, users, name spaces, and networking. If there's a "simple command" to do it, that tells me that ZFS isn't doing it right.
No need to decide the size of each file system at creation time
Translation: ZFS takes over the whole disk; it misuses the term "file system" to mean some internal construct that is meaningless to the rest of the world. Another strike against it.
Of course licensing issues would necessitate a clean-room implementation, likely.
Why can't Oracle just change the ZFS license? They will own the code.
Once it is ready, I expect and hope a windows driver will surface, allowing it to be a more universal file format.
Linux file systems have always been superior to Windows file systems, yet they have never been adopted on Windows. Why should that change now.
Sun wanted Apple to share development and maintenance costs. Apple wanted some long-term guarantees that Sun wouldn't stop development and would also help Apple to solve problems of ZFS under Mac OS X.
That doesn't make sense either. Apple has reasonably capable kernel engineers. Any "problems" that Apple would encounter with ZFS, their own engineers could solve themselves.
Those are big money involved in development, maintenance and support of all that stuff.
And that's probably the real reason: ZFS is a solution in search of a problem; most desktop users (and probably most server users as well) simply do not need anything as complicated as ZFS.
I want an PROCESS that has ACCOUNTABILITY.
You apparently want a pony. Whatever the process and accountability may be with FOSS voting systems, they are almost certainly better than anything Diebold has been offering.
A "Bug" in your software means someone goes to jail for negligence, or pays for the cost of a reelection.
If that's your standard, only crooks will provide voting software.
Here in the great white North, we have a paper ballot. A simple "X" inside a circle. Human verifiable, countable, no switches, electrons, software, etc.
And yet subject to widespread abuses--historical and contemporary--as well.
Even if they weren't light years ahead in other areas of usability, Microsoft *are* ahead of Ubuntu in at least one, basic, critical area. Stable hardware support that actually works.
Now that really causes "derisive laughter to the point of choking".
Prove me wrong, Linux users.
Why don't you prove your statements on usability and compatibility? Oh, that's right, you just repeat Microsoft marketing claims.
(Your typical Joe or Jane Q. Public will give-up at this point, and buy a Windoze PC-compatible or Apple Mac instead.)
You're comparing apples and oranges. Your typical Joe and Jane Q Public couldn't figure out which version of Windows or OS X to install on their machines either, nor will they know whether to install Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate. The problem is the "having to install part", not the names.
Buy Linux preinstalled and it won't overtax your brain. People will have made reasonable choices for you.
Besides, none of those installations lock you in; it's one command to upgrade to any other one.
GNU software, free software, open source software is largely being developed by commercial and private entities, free from government interference, and usually with clear commercial and financial objectives.
Anybody who objects to that is an enemy of the free market, and most certainly not a libertarian.
Has Schneier run out of real security problems? Yeah, people with physical access to your hardware can break your encryption. They can put a key logger in your machine. They can bug your keyboard or your hotel room. They can even spread LSD or strychnine on your keyboard. Imagine that!
Now compare that with some other companies:
http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pu/publications.aspx#p=1&ps=36&so=0&sb=d&fr=&to=&fd=&td=&rt=&f=ms&a=&pn=&pa=&pd=
http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/recent (last 30 days!)
http://www.parc.com/publications/
http://research.nokia.com/
Two conference publications by Apple employee is a joke for a company the size of Apple. Apple doesn't even have a site where they show their research.
(Apple used to have a research lab with real researchers and publications in the 1990's, but they closed it.)
And the poster session is not the output of R&D by Apple, it's people talking about using Apple products in their work.
Show me significant, peer-reviewed research coming out of Apple, and citations thereof. It's almost non-existent. Microsoft, IBM, Google--they all have it--just not Apple.
With all due respect, your statistic does not support your claim. "R&D to sales" is a measure of the effectiveness of a company's effort to convert R&D into sales. ... That claim has been refuted in the grandparent to this post
Oh, stop drinking the magic cool-aid and distorting reality. Apple's R&D investment is low in absolute numbers, relative to sales, and relative to company size. And Apple's research output is essentially non-existent by any objective measure.
Now you want to divorce the "R" from the "D"
I have consistently pointed out that Apple invests in "D" but almost nothing in "R".
Need I remind you that Apple basically invented the home computer, basically invented the PDA, and has recently completely re-energized the smartphone industry? Those accomplishments have had obvious penumbral effects.
Apple did none of those things. All their major products were copies of technologies and devices invented elsewhere, and Apple has gotten into trouble and disrepute over that more than once.
If you want to argue that Apple is doing a disservice to the world of technology, you need a better yardstick than "papers published".
I'm only pointing out that Nokia's lawsuit is consistent and plausible with what we know about Apple's actual R&D strategy.
Doesn't sound below average to me, at all.
Well, nevertheless it is:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/10/does_rd_spendin.html
And almost all of that "R&D" spending is "D", not "R".
Where do you think the new products they produce in a steady stream come from, a nearby magic forest?
Yes: the "nearby magic forest" is called "Silicon Valley". Apple takes the best ideas from the Valley and turns them into products. They leave the research to others.
Unlike Apple, Nokia, IBM, Microsoft etc. actually do good research, they just can't figure out how to turn them into decent products.
where are you getting your "industry average" numbers?
The numbers come from Booz Allen Hamilton and Business Week:
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/10/does_rd_spendin.html
Apple's R&D to sales ratio is 5.9%, computer industry average is 7.6%.
Apple is no lightweight in the R&D department and NONE of those other companies are expanding their R&D spending as fast as Apple.
Apple spends money development, but not much on research; Apple's research output according to the usual objective measures (publications and citations) is non-existent.
Apple's R&D investment is far below industry average, and most of that is "D", not "R". Apple essentially doesn't publish and doesn't support university research. If all companies were as stingy as Apple when it comes to R&D, computer science research would be in deep trouble. Nokia, on the other hand, has the largest R&D investment in Europe, many times that of Apple.
Apple can only make nice products because other companies and universities have invested a hell of a lot of money and time inventing the things that Apple then assembles into products. That model is not sustainable, and I can see why companies like Nokia are getting litigious over it.
Government: magically transforming self-righteous assholes into civil servants.
Think positively: it's one of the few skills that government is really good at :-)
They 5th and 14th ammendments are laws, which were passed by votes of congress and then votes in the sates.
No, they are not "laws" in the usual sense, they are amendments to the Constitution. There's a difference between a law and the Constitution. And the 5th and 14th amendment don't grant you those rights, they merely affirm and clarify that you already have those rights. If those amendments were repealed, you'd still have those rights and SCOTUS would still enforce those rights, since the are the underlying basis for the Constitution and assumed to be self-evident and inalienable.
You are acting as though the Constitution isn't law. You are listing as though it were special, that laws have heiarchies. A county law would also be tossed for conflicting with a state law.
The Constitution is "law" in the sense that it is legal language, but it isn't "laws" in the sense in which laws that Congress passes during its normal operation. And there is a definite hierarchy: constitutional law is much harder to change than (regular) laws. Constitutional law is also referred to as "supreme law". It overrides any laws passed by Congress.
Furthermore, when voting on constitutional law, people don't vote on their preferences, the vote on conformance with the self-evident and inalienable rights.
Of course they can. Simply vote away your right to vote. That would take a 2/3rd majority and radification by the states here.
Great that we agree on something. What that shows is that the outcome of a democratic vote is not necessarily a democracy. And just like you can turn a democracy into a non-democracy by voting away your own right to vote, you can also turn a democracy into a non-democracy by voting away the self-evident and inalienable rights of others.
Therefore, a democracy gives you the ability to vote away the rights of others, but since it ceases to be a democracy at that point, you cannot vote away the rights of others in a democracy.
Your dismissal of a simple fact as "tired argument" is irellevent.
It's relevant, because (1) it shows you're not along in making that mistake--it's a common mistake, usually linked to some political positions--and (2) you can find plenty of explanations why you're wrong.
The other countries you mentioned use various parlimentary systems, [etc]
Yes, and none of that changes the fact that the US is a representative democracy, just like all other modern democracies.
The term "republic" has two usages, one being the American one ("representative democracy") and the European one ("not a monarchy"). All modern democracies are "republics" according to either usage. And all western republics (including the US) are democracies.