My understanding was that the apparent gap in clock speeds was due to Apple using a different clocking scheme than Intel.
I don't know about that, but a big part of the reason for the gap is fab problems at Motorola. Persistent rumour has it that IBM is making G3s and G4s just fine (can you say 750 mHz?), but Motorola (who owns the license) doesn't want to be embarassed and won't let IBM ship.
America did not fall into a moralist state. It has always been one. A few facts:
Amongst the countries founders were a great many religious absolutists -- The "pilgrims" most Americans celebrate every Thanksgiving.
The "moral right" you jeer has been a critical force (for better or worse) in every major political debate in the history of the republic: slavery, Manifest Destiny, Abortion, the Cold War, Prohibition....
Many American politicians have the balls to tell the "moral right" were to go. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barney Frank, and Jesse Ventura all come to mind as having done so in the last 6 months. In America's republican democracy, politicians are bound to their consitituents, (as opposed to the party, as in a parliamentary democracy), so many politicians are closely allied with the "moral right." But many are not. Depends on their district.
If you want to paint 300 million people with a single "you're all a bunch of hypocrites" brush, you really should at least have a factually credible post.
Interbrand's survey looks at the future earnings potential of the companies concerned and tries to assess how much of that can be attributed to the brands they own.
If I recall correctly, this process boils down to "brand equity = Market cap - everything we can attach a value to" So companies with enormous market capitalization (GE, Microsoft, Cisco) but few tangible assets (software companies) yield large brand equities.
Macjunkie blasts the whole cube concept, including claiming
In this form, the machine would be very much top-heavy. bzzzzt wrong answer.
My Cobalt Qube2 has been working wonderfully for 1 1/2 years -- and has a form factor almost identical the rumored Apple cube (7 1/2" x 7 1/2" by 7 1/2").
I suggest you do the following: ask 10 people you meet how many cylinders are in their car's engine. Then ask the next 10 people what color their car is. You will quickly find out what matters more to most people.
This is how GM overtook Ford: Henry Ford refused to make any color other than black. People bought GM instead, and Ford never recovered.
It worked beyond the author's wildest dreams - but the worm didn't do a good job "staying out of sight." Once a machine, it did *nothing* except try to infect another machine. The problem was that it was too good of a cracker: The worm spread like wildfire, spamming the network and bring many machines to a crawl by infecting them thousands of times. Read more here.
has anyone done studies to see if... electrically powered cars actually pollute less than gas.
Yes.
Toyota is trying to get its gasoiline/hybrid "primus" classified as "zero emission vehicle" in California based on precisely this argument. Efficient cars with reformulated gasoline ( RFG) still miss by an order of magnitude (older gasoline cars missed by >2 orders of magnitude). The reason is simple: pollution control technology scales, so a centralized power plant can always do a better job burning clean/scrubbing than an car engine and an itty-bitty muffler.
Cockroach theory explains why Corel's stock price is in the dumper . On Wall Street we say:
Like cockroaches, there is rarely just one adverse earnings surprise.
So a company like Corel that has let some ugly critters slip out of the cupboard and onto the quarterly statements is assumed to have more. Until Corel supplies a steady stream of rising earnings (meaning at least 3 quarters), don't expect Wall Street to embrace the stock.
A credit card is required for sellers and some buyers.
From the ebay registration FAQ:
A credit card is required if you are registering using an anonymous email address from Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. Your card will not be charged and will only be used for verification purposes as registration is free on eBay.
Suck had a great commentary on this Tuesday. Basically, as the noise on Napster goes up, people will be willing to pay for authentication. A Win-Win solution: you can download all you want, but you will pay RIAA/Courtney Love/whoever for a guaranty that the file is authentic.
I think it's great this guy has such a cool hobby, but products similar to this have been around commercially for years -- and they typcially don't need the FCC license.
Two I am familiar with are Breezecom and Aironet , just bought by Cisco. If you poke around, you'll find many of these products have Linux drivers .
Many posters, and Scott himself, agree your individual vote is mathematically meaningless . Mathematically, this proposition is hogwash . While no one individual can independently swing an election (that would be a dictatorship), if others have views correlated with yours (with or without your knowledge), your vote can matter greatly.
Let me give a grossly simplified example: consider a town of thousand people . 700 are highly intelligent, politically engaged, numerate slashdot readers. Unbeknownst to each other, each independently accepts the "mathematically meaningless" proposition and stays home voting day. Unfortunatley, the other 300 townspeople like to wear brownshirts, put on black jackboots, march down to the polls, and vote for Aryan unity. Who is in the majority? who runs the town?
What is confusing the "meaningless" crowd is that the effect of one's vote is strongly non-linear. In particular, one vote's effect depends on (1) how one's view correlate with others and (2) the particularly non-linearity employed in a given election.
To return to my example, if there are 600 brownshirts and simple majority rules, then the slashdotters are indeed doomed to the tyrrany of the majority. But if there are 501 slash dotters, each and every vote makes all the difference.
A more mathematically defensive viewpoint woud be "If you views are exceptional, then you're probably electorally doomed. But if others may hold similar views, your are only certainly doomed if you don't vote"
P.S. My contrived example is not entirely facetious. This kind of happened in Germany: Hitler never came close to winning an election, but the majority failed to coalesce to defend democracy. Myabe they too thought their votes were "meaningless."
What do people in the villages need with the Internet anyway?
Rural India is primarily agrarian. Historically, urban grain merchants knew current market prices, rural farmers did not. The internet could give farmers a more equal bargaining position, hopefully raising rural incomes and alleviating rural poverty.
maybe somebody wants to auction off a used water buffalo on eBay
Being able to this would be huge economic boon for rural villages: it would allow more efficient allocation of scarce resources. Think of it as a stock market for stock.
You appear to have some major misconceptions about sexual development and sexaul predations. Your post is full of misunderstandings, but to keep matters short I will focus on one statement:
I tend to think that by the time a person is physically capable of sexual activity, they should be able to decide for themselves what they wish to do
This is seriously out of step with reality. My mother achieved menarch ( a commonly used physical marker for physical sexual maturity) at age 11. This is not exceptional. Do you honestly believe that 11 years olds are mature enough to evaluate the risks and responsibilities of parenthood?
While one can argue with the arbitrariness of the 16 year old designation, the statutory rape laws exist for sound reasons well-supported by extensive clinical data: the vast majority of people who have sex with underage children (1) were abused themselves as children, (2) have a high recidivism rate and (3) cause long-term emotional damage to their "partners". Your "pedophiles aren't sick" is so completely out of step with clinical reality that I'll just assume you have the same cluelessness about this topic that many Windows users have about OS's.
Here is a first account of these technologies in action under trying battlefield conditions: blackhawk down.
This is an account of the Delta Force and Army Rangers in Mogadishu, Somalia on the day a dozen Americans and perhaps 500 Somalis died. The "D-boys," basically Navy Seals with JEDI-like technology, consistently and vastly outperform the more numerous but conventionally armed Rangers. Adimittedly, the Delta Force is an elite unit, but Army Rangers are no slouches. The communications/computing technology, in the hands of properly trained troops, made a huge difference on the battlefield. Had they had the GPS techonlogy integrated into individual soldiers gear, several American (and many Somali) lives would have been saved.
Read it for yourself: http://www.philly.com/packages/somalia/nov16/defau lt16.asp
Extensive studies have been done in the past 20 years on the effect of computers in education. The results are clear, if not surprising:
Deploying computers in classrooms with teachers who aren't trained on how do use computers accomplishes nothing.
Deploying computers in classrooms with teachers who do know how to use them helps only marginally.
Only a subset of kids are typcially affected: kids who are just a little behind.
The current guess as to why this is so is that these children can build up their skills/confidence on "drill and kill" excercises, thereby allowing them to keep up with the main class instead of being left behind. In short, nothing has really changed since at least the time of Socrates: education is about people, the technology is just a detail.
Sadly, my source for references just hopped on a plane to South Africa. 8-( Those interested should please email me and I'll give out references when I can.
Whereever you take your idea, I suggest you start with the lecture commonly regarded as the founding of the field: Dick Feynman's "There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom." (1960) Here is a link: http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
The first nanotech prize winner, a really small motor, is still on display at Caltech's phsyics building.
Seeagate didn't exist until the 80's ( founded 1979, IPO ?1985?), so I presume you mean the toxic dumping done by Ceridian, but paid for by Seagate. Assuming we are discussing the same matter, let me explain.
Ceridian was the the disk-drive subsidiary of Control Data Corp - the place where Seymour Cray got rolling( I still remember working on the 6 bit byte, 10 byte word of the CDC cyber ) Eventually, Ceridian got bought by Seagate, making Seagate liable (under Superfund laws) for Ceridian's pollution. Thus Seagate got the cleanup tab and the publicity, even though most (or all) of the dumping occurred before Seagate even existed.
I was a Seagate shareholder at the time, and I still remember the pain 8)
This stuff is hard to keep in perspective. Yes, high-tech manufacturing involves some truly nasty stuff, and it isn't always properly handled. But for the most part, it isn't in large volumes.
In the early 90's concern of this nature prompted a survery of the San Jose CA area for toxic waste hotspots. And indeed, numerous localized toxic spots were found. Turns out, the old orchard farmers weren't so careful about diesel storage and their groundwater wells, so there was (and I believe still is) broad (but localzied) groundwater contamination in the area from old diesel storage container leaks. High-tech manufacturing was, outside of a few well-identifies "hot spots," a small issue.
Beating up on small farmers isn't fashionable, so most people remember the high-tech incidents and forget that Uncle Earl's farm including having the chicken coop, water well, the diesel tank behind the house.
Is Representation or Behavior the mark of Intelligence?
Dynamical systems have two principal descriptions. The "state" viewpoint focuses on the internal respresentation, ie " how it thinks", while the "input/output" perspective focuses on "what it does". Although formally equivalent, the viewpoint one adopts prefaces how one attcks the problem, and even shapes what one considers the problem to be.
Which viewpoint do you believe is more central for comprehending the "I" in AI?
Yes, this really is a good thing
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
This scares me. The whole tech industry has flourished (in the US) partly because no one government paid attention to us at all and pretty much let all problems be solved by technical means and by market forces
I applaud your instincts, but you seem to misunderstand what is going on here. Two key points:
1. No new law is involved
2. The Judge and the government are bending over backwards to avoid regulation.
Point 1. The judge and the goverment don't need any new law, or any particularly deep grasp of technology, to prosecute this case. By way of analogy, murder is murder whether I use a club or an excimer laswer. Likewise, the rule by which we Americans decide if something is a monopoly, and how monopolies should be treated, have been around largely unchanged for decades.
Point 2. At every step of the way, Judge Jackson has tried to force a settlement. The one thing everyone in the case has publicly agreed on is that layers of bureuacratic oversight for Microsoft would be Bad (TM). Judge Jackson even arranged a high profile mediator (Judge Posner) before the case was decided! Many of state attorney generals have been pushing for a "structural remedy" (eg a breakup) becuase a "procedural remeby" (eg. an oversight board, like IBM had) is agreed to be hard to implement and detrimental to both Microsoft and the country as a whole.
Excellent point - but I think you just agreed with me. With regards to windy Space Shuttle landings, Nasa doesn't hand the landing back over to the highly-trained human: they move the landing. Your point about variables beyond the control of the software being crucial is right-on-the-money. This is true whether the "driver" is a human, a computer, or ouija board.
No one said this technology would make insurance companies obsolete!
Slashdot Mirror
I always wanted a mirror in which I'd look perfect!
My understanding was that the apparent gap in clock speeds was due to Apple using a different clocking scheme than Intel.
I don't know about that, but a big part of the reason for the gap is fab problems at Motorola. Persistent rumour has it that IBM is making G3s and G4s just fine (can you say 750 mHz?), but Motorola (who owns the license) doesn't want to be embarassed and won't let IBM ship.
Mac Discussions sites have been full of speculation that the missing square is the fabled Rosetta Stone project:
An ultra-thin sub notebook with the Newton handwriting recognition software -- and maybe no keyboard.
Amongst the countries founders were a great many religious absolutists -- The "pilgrims" most Americans celebrate every Thanksgiving.
The "moral right" you jeer has been a critical force (for better or worse) in every major political debate in the history of the republic: slavery, Manifest Destiny, Abortion, the Cold War, Prohibition....
Many American politicians have the balls to tell the "moral right" were to go. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barney Frank, and Jesse Ventura all come to mind as having done so in the last 6 months. In America's republican democracy, politicians are bound to their consitituents, (as opposed to the party, as in a parliamentary democracy), so many politicians are closely allied with the "moral right." But many are not. Depends on their district.
If you want to paint 300 million people with a single "you're all a bunch of hypocrites" brush, you really should at least have a factually credible post.
From the BBC article:
Interbrand's survey looks at the future earnings potential of the companies concerned and tries to assess how much of that can be attributed to the brands they own.
If I recall correctly, this process boils down to "brand equity = Market cap - everything we can attach a value to" So companies with enormous market capitalization (GE, Microsoft, Cisco) but few tangible assets (software companies) yield large brand equities.
Macjunkie blasts the whole cube concept, including claiming
In this form, the machine would be very much top-heavy. bzzzzt wrong answer.
My Cobalt Qube2 has been working wonderfully for 1 1/2 years -- and has a form factor almost identical the rumored Apple cube (7 1/2" x 7 1/2" by 7 1/2").
For 98% of the population, color matters
I suggest you do the following: ask 10 people you meet how many cylinders are in their car's engine. Then ask the next 10 people what color their car is. You will quickly find out what matters more to most people.
This is how GM overtook Ford: Henry Ford refused to make any color other than black. People bought GM instead, and Ford never recovered.
For large ticket consumser goods, color matters
The famous Robert Morris Internet worm of 1988 did precisely this.
It worked beyond the author's wildest dreams - but the worm didn't do a good job "staying out of sight." Once a machine, it did *nothing* except try to infect another machine. The problem was that it was too good of a cracker: The worm spread like wildfire, spamming the network and bring many machines to a crawl by infecting them thousands of times. Read more here.
has anyone done studies to see if... electrically powered cars actually pollute less than gas.
Yes.
Toyota is trying to get its gasoiline/hybrid "primus" classified as "zero emission vehicle" in California based on precisely this argument. Efficient cars with reformulated gasoline ( RFG) still miss by an order of magnitude (older gasoline cars missed by >2 orders of magnitude). The reason is simple: pollution control technology scales, so a centralized power plant can always do a better job burning clean/scrubbing than an car engine and an itty-bitty muffler.
Cockroach theory explains why Corel's stock price is in the dumper . On Wall Street we say:
Like cockroaches, there is rarely just one adverse earnings surprise.
So a company like Corel that has let some ugly critters slip out of the cupboard and onto the quarterly statements is assumed to have more. Until Corel supplies a steady stream of rising earnings (meaning at least 3 quarters), don't expect Wall Street to embrace the stock.
A credit card is required for sellers and some buyers.
From the ebay registration FAQ:
A credit card is required if you are registering using an anonymous email address from Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. Your card will not be charged and will only be used for verification purposes as registration is free on eBay.
Suck had a great commentary on this Tuesday. Basically, as the noise on Napster goes up, people will be willing to pay for authentication. A Win-Win solution: you can download all you want, but you will pay RIAA/Courtney Love/whoever for a guaranty that the file is authentic.
The commentary goes into more detail.
Two I am familiar with are Breezecom and Aironet , just bought by Cisco. If you poke around, you'll find many of these products have Linux drivers .
Let me give a grossly simplified example: consider a town of thousand people . 700 are highly intelligent, politically engaged, numerate slashdot readers. Unbeknownst to each other, each independently accepts the "mathematically meaningless" proposition and stays home voting day. Unfortunatley, the other 300 townspeople like to wear brownshirts, put on black jackboots, march down to the polls, and vote for Aryan unity. Who is in the majority? who runs the town?
What is confusing the "meaningless" crowd is that the effect of one's vote is strongly non-linear. In particular, one vote's effect depends on (1) how one's view correlate with others and (2) the particularly non-linearity employed in a given election.
To return to my example, if there are 600 brownshirts and simple majority rules, then the slashdotters are indeed doomed to the tyrrany of the majority. But if there are 501 slash dotters, each and every vote makes all the difference.
A more mathematically defensive viewpoint woud be "If you views are exceptional, then you're probably electorally doomed. But if others may hold similar views, your are only certainly doomed if you don't vote"
P.S. My contrived example is not entirely facetious. This kind of happened in Germany: Hitler never came close to winning an election, but the majority failed to coalesce to defend democracy. Myabe they too thought their votes were "meaningless."
Rural India is primarily agrarian. Historically, urban grain merchants knew current market prices, rural farmers did not. The internet could give farmers a more equal bargaining position, hopefully raising rural incomes and alleviating rural poverty.
maybe somebody wants to auction off a used water buffalo on eBay
Being able to this would be huge economic boon for rural villages: it would allow more efficient allocation of scarce resources. Think of it as a stock market for stock.
If you need to report possible cases of misuse on eBay, you can email safeharbor@ebay.com.
that says it all. Email them and report this abuse.
You appear to have some major misconceptions about sexual development and sexaul predations. Your post is full of misunderstandings, but to keep matters short I will focus on one statement:
I tend to think that by the time a person is physically capable of sexual activity, they should be able to decide for themselves what they wish to do
This is seriously out of step with reality. My mother achieved menarch ( a commonly used physical marker for physical sexual maturity) at age 11. This is not exceptional. Do you honestly believe that 11 years olds are mature enough to evaluate the risks and responsibilities of parenthood?
While one can argue with the arbitrariness of the 16 year old designation, the statutory rape laws exist for sound reasons well-supported by extensive clinical data: the vast majority of people who have sex with underage children (1) were abused themselves as children, (2) have a high recidivism rate and (3) cause long-term emotional damage to their "partners". Your "pedophiles aren't sick" is so completely out of step with clinical reality that I'll just assume you have the same cluelessness about this topic that many Windows users have about OS's.
This is an account of the Delta Force and Army Rangers in Mogadishu, Somalia on the day a dozen Americans and perhaps 500 Somalis died. The "D-boys," basically Navy Seals with JEDI-like technology, consistently and vastly outperform the more numerous but conventionally armed Rangers. Adimittedly, the Delta Force is an elite unit, but Army Rangers are no slouches. The communications/computing technology, in the hands of properly trained troops, made a huge difference on the battlefield. Had they had the GPS techonlogy integrated into individual soldiers gear, several American (and many Somali) lives would have been saved.
Read it for yourself: http://www.philly.com/packages/somalia/nov16/defau lt16.asp
Deploying computers in classrooms with teachers who aren't trained on how do use computers accomplishes nothing.
Deploying computers in classrooms with teachers who do know how to use them helps only marginally.
Only a subset of kids are typcially affected: kids who are just a little behind.
The current guess as to why this is so is that these children can build up their skills/confidence on "drill and kill" excercises, thereby allowing them to keep up with the main class instead of being left behind. In short, nothing has really changed since at least the time of Socrates: education is about people, the technology is just a detail.
Sadly, my source for references just hopped on a plane to South Africa. 8-( Those interested should please email me and I'll give out references when I can.
The first nanotech prize winner, a really small motor, is still on display at Caltech's phsyics building.
Ceridian was the the disk-drive subsidiary of Control Data Corp - the place where Seymour Cray got rolling( I still remember working on the 6 bit byte, 10 byte word of the CDC cyber ) Eventually, Ceridian got bought by Seagate, making Seagate liable (under Superfund laws) for Ceridian's pollution. Thus Seagate got the cleanup tab and the publicity, even though most (or all) of the dumping occurred before Seagate even existed.
I was a Seagate shareholder at the time, and I still remember the pain 8)
In the early 90's concern of this nature prompted a survery of the San Jose CA area for toxic waste hotspots. And indeed, numerous localized toxic spots were found. Turns out, the old orchard farmers weren't so careful about diesel storage and their groundwater wells, so there was (and I believe still is) broad (but localzied) groundwater contamination in the area from old diesel storage container leaks. High-tech manufacturing was, outside of a few well-identifies "hot spots," a small issue.
Beating up on small farmers isn't fashionable, so most people remember the high-tech incidents and forget that Uncle Earl's farm including having the chicken coop, water well, the diesel tank behind the house.
Is Representation or Behavior the mark of Intelligence?
Dynamical systems have two principal descriptions. The "state" viewpoint focuses on the internal respresentation, ie " how it thinks", while the "input/output" perspective focuses on "what it does". Although formally equivalent, the viewpoint one adopts prefaces how one attcks the problem, and even shapes what one considers the problem to be.
Which viewpoint do you believe is more central for comprehending the "I" in AI?
I applaud your instincts, but you seem to misunderstand what is going on here. Two key points:
1. No new law is involved
2. The Judge and the government are bending over backwards to avoid regulation.
Point 1. The judge and the goverment don't need any new law, or any particularly deep grasp of technology, to prosecute this case. By way of analogy, murder is murder whether I use a club or an excimer laswer. Likewise, the rule by which we Americans decide if something is a monopoly, and how monopolies should be treated, have been around largely unchanged for decades.
Point 2. At every step of the way, Judge Jackson has tried to force a settlement. The one thing everyone in the case has publicly agreed on is that layers of bureuacratic oversight for Microsoft would be Bad (TM). Judge Jackson even arranged a high profile mediator (Judge Posner) before the case was decided! Many of state attorney generals have been pushing for a "structural remedy" (eg a breakup) becuase a "procedural remeby" (eg. an oversight board, like IBM had) is agreed to be hard to implement and detrimental to both Microsoft and the country as a whole.
No one said this technology would make insurance companies obsolete!