Why is it not fun or cheap? Used Thinkpads etc. can be had for reasonable prices, and their build quality still kicks the crap out of the average desktop components, especially if you're not carrying the laptop around.
Laptops work by using a battery to moderate the power consumption.
No, you're misinformed. Modern laptops don't use any power from the battery when AC power is provided. The trickling down of the battery is due to the battery's intrinsic discharge speed that is non-zero even with no load.
I don't think you understand how modern science works.
Most government investments into fundamental physics, biology, astronomy, computer science, applied math, and many other types of research would never occur, and corresponding research never made, in any private context, because private corporations can find absolutely no incentive for it (save for exceptions like IBM and Bell Labs, which are still very limited in scope and dwarfed by the US scientific establishment). Moreover, the long-term consequences of this research and the experience acquired by people who perform it are unpredictable and would be precluded in a private context, where results are not nearly as widely published and shared across the community.
The Sukhoi isn't significantly more maneuverable than the F-22. More importantly, modern air engagements are not decided at ranges where maneuverability matters. The F-22 will see the Sukhoi, while it won't see the F-22. The Su's avionics suck, because Russians have invested next to nothing into their electronics industry in the past 20 years and were behind to begin with.
I like both the Raptor and Su's, but nothing can stand up to the Raptor.
The F-22 cannot be touched by anything currently out there. In fact its biggest drawback is low range which makes it very dependent on tankers that have to stay up a few hundred miles from the battlefield. Do you understand what "stealth" means? The Eurofighter will not be able to target the F-22, because it won't be able to see it, much less get a weapons lock. The F-22 on the other hand will be able to see it beyond the horizon, pass its targeting data to everyone else, and shoot it down at any range (I don't think the Eurofighter can evade current-generation Sidewinders...) The only area where Eurofighter comes close is maneuverability, but even if it can do a tighter turn than Raptor, does it matter if it's blindfolded?
to see a plane malfunction like that on its first deployment.
They got that wrong. This is its first overseas deployment. The F-22 has already been deployed in at least two bases in the US and participated in several full-scale exercises.
I agree 100% that this should be completely unacceptable and whoever developed the software for the CIPs needs to be smacked around and made to test it more comprehensively.
I don't think the CIPs (F-22 computers which handle most of the avionics) directly control flight stability, for this exact reason - you want to isolate the most complex and upgradeable computer on board from the one whose crash will likely lead to loss of aircraft. So the other poster is probably right in that not all computers on board crashed.
Actually, as far as I can tell, CMU has a better CS program than Caltech. Their CS department is really the world leader in many areas. Pasadena is the better place to live though:)
Are you a datacenter engineer? Do you have extensive experience with component cooling in datacenters?
Your whole analysis of the Google paper relies on premises like "they cool their drives too much, so moisture must be killing them" and "they really don't know how to analyze their data, they should have done forensic analysis on their drives". Particularly ridiculous was your assertion that their data should be analyzed by people less concerned with statistical analysis. Do you realize that these people are datacenter engineers? That as part of one of the biggest custom datacenter operators on the planet, they probably are mostly concerned with the engineering and cost-effectiveness aspects of their analysis? That this data was collected using highly automated methods based on SMART readings in huge environments, and performing forensic analysis on failed parts is usually a ridiculous proposition on several grounds? That this paper's material is nothing more than an extract of their internal reliability analysis, whose sole purpose is to maximize reliability and which probably analyzes factors like cooling regimes and humidity to death?
The above mostly applies to the post you're linked. Each of your statements here has merit, and most agree with the Google paper's conclusions, but the difference is they're analyzing their massive operational data, while you seem to be drawing shaky conclusions from rationalizations.
It absolutely did not take seven years to get Japan and Germany to a stable, safe, violence-free and rebuildable if heavily damaged condition.
Occupation of Japan and Germany preserved the power structure, did not facilitate ethnic and sectarian conflict as well as unrestricted religious extremism, and was well tolerated by the occupied populations. Japan's emperor, who had massive de facto authority over his people, supported the American occupants. Germany was immediately ripped and drawn into the immense power spheres of the Cold War participants, and its population was so utterly exhausted and unused to the idea of civil war that there was no room for internal instability. Both countries had exhausted their supplies of young, active men and had massive populations of old, highly experienced workers who had the expertise to rebuild the highly industrialized infrastructure. Both countries had advanced, secular societies with few internal tensions.
The US occupation of Iraq went terribly wrong because it did not account for a huge set of very important factors contrary to the above. The power vacuum after the invasion very quickly set off a chain reaction which will now be resolved in a bloody civil war.
CFQ was committed relatively recently and there was discussion for a while as to whether and when to make it default. I think 2.6.19 uses Anticipatory by default, but 2.6.20 will use CFQ by default (not 100% sure though).
d) obfuscated code in the kernel tree (with original kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
Probably a license violation (google for "gpl perferred form obfuscate")
The relevant part of the GPL defines the source code for a work as "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
I've read a couple of opinions that mildly obfuscated code fails to fit this definition. I call bullshit on that. This definition is way too vague to account for code that doesn't carry sufficient documentation, either because it was external to it to begin with or because it was ripped out.
Although it facilitates the open development model, the requirement not to maintain a development source tree and remove extra information from it for release treads dangerously close to thought police.
What they offer is a panel of scientists to whom your article is sent before it appears in their journal. These people then get to review it prior to publishing. This is unnecessary today; you just publish your paper on the internet, and then people review it.
I just about fell over laughing.
Have you actually worked in scientific research in an active field with rigorous journals before? My field only appeared 15 years ago and has been exploding for the past 10. It would be absolutely impossible to keep up with research using the model you propose.
Peer review is the one biggest service a scientific journal can provide. The AAP is not attacking self-publishing; it's not a threat to them. They are attacking open access journals which minimize their operating costs and charge authors for the peer review and administrative expenditures. These journals are gaining massive momentum and are starting to make numerous commercial scientific journals irrelevant. The guy across the hall from me was a co-founder of PLoS, the most important and most visible such effort so far. Suggest a peer-review-free model to him and you'll get laughed off the campus.
Looks like publications in your field aren't competitive or rigorous enough.
Publication in top journals in my field (let alone Science and Nature) is subject to extremely critical peer review, often a grueling fight with people who know a lot more about the subject matter than you do.
Racism and class segregationism is not just fear, there's more to it. And urban sprawl is driven by more than just these two factors, there's much more to it. Having lived in a variety of urban, suburban and rural environments in my life, I can say for certain that a properly planned suburban environment offers WAY more opportunities to most of its inhabitants to conduct the lifestyle of their choice. (How many of them use those opportunities is a different matter.)
Yeah, and GPL 2 did not end closed source software any more than closed source software borrowed from GPL 2 programs.
Ending DRM is not the practical point. Taking a stand against its use to interfere with software engineering abilities people have taken for granted for decades is.
I don't see how GPL 3 can hurt anyone whose motives I can sympathize with, and given how GPL 2 has turned out, I'd say we should give it a try.
As much as I dislike Elsevier for their access policy, and as much as I'm aware of their propensity for publishing math that takes hours per page to understand, I've never seen an unprofessional article from them. Your hubris in insulting this journal's board and reviewers and the authors is astounding.
Do you think these people are amateurs, or dumb? Do you think they don't know how to de-bias medical surveys, both methodologically and statistically? Do you think they're prone to putting their names and their institutions' names (UToronto, Mt. Sinai) on bad research? Do you even knowany of the statistical techniques used to remove confounding factors from surveys and tests?
Have you even read the abstract, let alone the article? If not, how the hell can you level an accusation like this against professional scientists? If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd see that they devote a total of about 3 pages, including most of the discussion, to addressing confounding factors. They present some pretty strong arguments that there are none that are statistically significant, including covariance analyses on MMSE scores, gender, education, employment, immigration data, nationality, cultural differences, and a bunch of others. Even after doing all this, they still give this disclaimer:
the present report should be treated as suggestive rather than as definitive
and the rest of the hype is the usual journalism.
These people have put hard work into making this good science, and you dismiss them and the editors as incompetents with a single sentence. What a fucktard. Who the fuck do you think you are?
Yes, a portable computer with a full-blown modern OS that doesn't run code I want it to run is moronically shackled.
Not that this won't be circumvented. It just demonstrates a stupefyingly limited level of thinking for a company which seems to at least partially appreciate the benefits of open platforms.
I despise the pigopolist US carriers as much as you do. At this point, the US cellular carrier industry is one of the most abusive and harmful oligopolies on the planet (well on its way to resurrecting an AT&T monopoly - and look, they're not even bothering to change the name). The cell phone market in the US is stagnant, because customer expectations are very low. This is why the iPhone has a potential to bring serious change. I know its shortcomings as well as you do - my beefs are sealed battery, no microSD slot or such, and the biggest one is of course what's being discussed. But its technological leadership is unquestionable, and if you think it's an evolutionary design, you need to think again. No one - not even the Japanese market - has done many of the things Apple has done with the iPhone before, and certainly no one has come close to doing so many new things at once.
Which is why, once the price falls, this just might be able to reset the US users' expectations from their cell phones to something more reasonable and kick the cell phone market into not sucking as much - just as the iPod, for all its shortcomings, has kicked the music player market in the ass, although the competitors are still trying to figure out how not to suck as much.
Which is why it's a damn shame and a monumental hypocrisy for Apple to close the system to unrestricted software. I'm certainly not buying an iPhone until this restriction gets hacked and Apple gives up on countering the hack.
Wow. Yours is certainly the most absurd statement I've read this week.
I mean, FFS. This is Slashdot, and you're glad that the most revolutionary electronic device in years is moronically shackled, and you get modded up? What is this, is your brain terminally fried by the reality distortion field?
Do you by any chance also believe Vista's DRM stack is good for everyone because it allows us to watch movies in an orderly manner?
even a place like Japan, which has embraced Apple's design ethos and which places so much importance on industrial design, continues down the clamshell/button road even in their ultra-high end stuff. There are reasons for this.
Really? What are they, aside from conformism? Can you list the technical reasons why the clamshell design is superior? I personally consider it far inferior to the candybar design.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it not fun or cheap? Used Thinkpads etc. can be had for reasonable prices, and their build quality still kicks the crap out of the average desktop components, especially if you're not carrying the laptop around.
Laptops work by using a battery to moderate the power consumption.
No, you're misinformed. Modern laptops don't use any power from the battery when AC power is provided. The trickling down of the battery is due to the battery's intrinsic discharge speed that is non-zero even with no load.
it's not as simple as it sounds, which is why it hasn't happened.
It really is as simple as it sounds. It's called PLoS, and it's happening.
I don't think you understand how modern science works.
Most government investments into fundamental physics, biology, astronomy, computer science, applied math, and many other types of research would never occur, and corresponding research never made, in any private context, because private corporations can find absolutely no incentive for it (save for exceptions like IBM and Bell Labs, which are still very limited in scope and dwarfed by the US scientific establishment). Moreover, the long-term consequences of this research and the experience acquired by people who perform it are unpredictable and would be precluded in a private context, where results are not nearly as widely published and shared across the community.
The Sukhoi isn't significantly more maneuverable than the F-22. More importantly, modern air engagements are not decided at ranges where maneuverability matters. The F-22 will see the Sukhoi, while it won't see the F-22. The Su's avionics suck, because Russians have invested next to nothing into their electronics industry in the past 20 years and were behind to begin with.
I like both the Raptor and Su's, but nothing can stand up to the Raptor.
You don't seem to understand.
The F-22 cannot be touched by anything currently out there. In fact its biggest drawback is low range which makes it very dependent on tankers that have to stay up a few hundred miles from the battlefield. Do you understand what "stealth" means? The Eurofighter will not be able to target the F-22, because it won't be able to see it, much less get a weapons lock. The F-22 on the other hand will be able to see it beyond the horizon, pass its targeting data to everyone else, and shoot it down at any range (I don't think the Eurofighter can evade current-generation Sidewinders...) The only area where Eurofighter comes close is maneuverability, but even if it can do a tighter turn than Raptor, does it matter if it's blindfolded?
to see a plane malfunction like that on its first deployment.
They got that wrong. This is its first overseas deployment. The F-22 has already been deployed in at least two bases in the US and participated in several full-scale exercises.
I agree 100% that this should be completely unacceptable and whoever developed the software for the CIPs needs to be smacked around and made to test it more comprehensively.
I don't think the CIPs (F-22 computers which handle most of the avionics) directly control flight stability, for this exact reason - you want to isolate the most complex and upgradeable computer on board from the one whose crash will likely lead to loss of aircraft. So the other poster is probably right in that not all computers on board crashed.
DKC FOREVER
Actually, as far as I can tell, CMU has a better CS program than Caltech. Their CS department is really the world leader in many areas. Pasadena is the better place to live though :)
Looks like tr block-buffers the stream, perl line-buffers it. Turn off line buffering and it's nearly identical:
>time cat U00096.gb|perl -e'undef $/;while(){s/\r$//go;print}'>/dev/null
real 0m0.064s
user 0m0.011s
sys 0m0.022s
>time cat U00096.gb|tr -d '\015'>/dev/null
real 0m0.057s
user 0m0.014s
sys 0m0.007s
>time cat U00096.gb|perl -ne's/\r$//go;print'>/dev/null
real 0m0.175s
user 0m0.126s
sys 0m0.009s
Perl is usually dramatically faster than sed and awk. Most importantly, it's usually a lot easier to write.
That said, they really need to hurry up on Perl 6, otherwise they'll bleed most of their userbase to python and ruby.
Are you a datacenter engineer? Do you have extensive experience with component cooling in datacenters?
Your whole analysis of the Google paper relies on premises like "they cool their drives too much, so moisture must be killing them" and "they really don't know how to analyze their data, they should have done forensic analysis on their drives". Particularly ridiculous was your assertion that their data should be analyzed by people less concerned with statistical analysis. Do you realize that these people are datacenter engineers? That as part of one of the biggest custom datacenter operators on the planet, they probably are mostly concerned with the engineering and cost-effectiveness aspects of their analysis? That this data was collected using highly automated methods based on SMART readings in huge environments, and performing forensic analysis on failed parts is usually a ridiculous proposition on several grounds? That this paper's material is nothing more than an extract of their internal reliability analysis, whose sole purpose is to maximize reliability and which probably analyzes factors like cooling regimes and humidity to death?
The above mostly applies to the post you're linked. Each of your statements here has merit, and most agree with the Google paper's conclusions, but the difference is they're analyzing their massive operational data, while you seem to be drawing shaky conclusions from rationalizations.
It absolutely did not take seven years to get Japan and Germany to a stable, safe, violence-free and rebuildable if heavily damaged condition.
Occupation of Japan and Germany preserved the power structure, did not facilitate ethnic and sectarian conflict as well as unrestricted religious extremism, and was well tolerated by the occupied populations. Japan's emperor, who had massive de facto authority over his people, supported the American occupants. Germany was immediately ripped and drawn into the immense power spheres of the Cold War participants, and its population was so utterly exhausted and unused to the idea of civil war that there was no room for internal instability. Both countries had exhausted their supplies of young, active men and had massive populations of old, highly experienced workers who had the expertise to rebuild the highly industrialized infrastructure. Both countries had advanced, secular societies with few internal tensions.
The US occupation of Iraq went terribly wrong because it did not account for a huge set of very important factors contrary to the above. The power vacuum after the invasion very quickly set off a chain reaction which will now be resolved in a bloody civil war.
CFQ was committed relatively recently and there was discussion for a while as to whether and when to make it default. I think 2.6.19 uses Anticipatory by default, but 2.6.20 will use CFQ by default (not 100% sure though).
d) obfuscated code in the kernel tree (with original kept private to those kernel devs that have signed the NDA)
Probably a license violation (google for "gpl perferred form obfuscate")
The relevant part of the GPL defines the source code for a work as "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
I've read a couple of opinions that mildly obfuscated code fails to fit this definition. I call bullshit on that. This definition is way too vague to account for code that doesn't carry sufficient documentation, either because it was external to it to begin with or because it was ripped out.
Although it facilitates the open development model, the requirement not to maintain a development source tree and remove extra information from it for release treads dangerously close to thought police.
What they offer is a panel of scientists to whom your article is sent before it appears in their journal. These people then get to review it prior to publishing. This is unnecessary today; you just publish your paper on the internet, and then people review it.
I just about fell over laughing.
Have you actually worked in scientific research in an active field with rigorous journals before? My field only appeared 15 years ago and has been exploding for the past 10. It would be absolutely impossible to keep up with research using the model you propose.
Peer review is the one biggest service a scientific journal can provide. The AAP is not attacking self-publishing; it's not a threat to them. They are attacking open access journals which minimize their operating costs and charge authors for the peer review and administrative expenditures. These journals are gaining massive momentum and are starting to make numerous commercial scientific journals irrelevant. The guy across the hall from me was a co-founder of PLoS, the most important and most visible such effort so far. Suggest a peer-review-free model to him and you'll get laughed off the campus.
Looks like publications in your field aren't competitive or rigorous enough.
Publication in top journals in my field (let alone Science and Nature) is subject to extremely critical peer review, often a grueling fight with people who know a lot more about the subject matter than you do.
You sound like Jim Cunningham from Donnie Darko.
Racism and class segregationism is not just fear, there's more to it. And urban sprawl is driven by more than just these two factors, there's much more to it. Having lived in a variety of urban, suburban and rural environments in my life, I can say for certain that a properly planned suburban environment offers WAY more opportunities to most of its inhabitants to conduct the lifestyle of their choice. (How many of them use those opportunities is a different matter.)
Yeah, and GPL 2 did not end closed source software any more than closed source software borrowed from GPL 2 programs.
Ending DRM is not the practical point. Taking a stand against its use to interfere with software engineering abilities people have taken for granted for decades is.
I don't see how GPL 3 can hurt anyone whose motives I can sympathize with, and given how GPL 2 has turned out, I'd say we should give it a try.
Oh, damn! Should have read the parent for context.
:)
Got so annoyed by the posters above you suggesting that the authors don't know their science, that I managed to miss your sarcasm.
Sorry about the misdirected wrath
Wow. Just wow.
As much as I dislike Elsevier for their access policy, and as much as I'm aware of their propensity for publishing math that takes hours per page to understand, I've never seen an unprofessional article from them. Your hubris in insulting this journal's board and reviewers and the authors is astounding.
Do you think these people are amateurs, or dumb? Do you think they don't know how to de-bias medical surveys, both methodologically and statistically? Do you think they're prone to putting their names and their institutions' names (UToronto, Mt. Sinai) on bad research? Do you even know any of the statistical techniques used to remove confounding factors from surveys and tests?
Have you even read the abstract, let alone the article? If not, how the hell can you level an accusation like this against professional scientists? If you'd bothered to read the article, you'd see that they devote a total of about 3 pages, including most of the discussion, to addressing confounding factors. They present some pretty strong arguments that there are none that are statistically significant, including covariance analyses on MMSE scores, gender, education, employment, immigration data, nationality, cultural differences, and a bunch of others. Even after doing all this, they still give this disclaimer:
the present report should be treated as suggestive rather than as definitive
and the rest of the hype is the usual journalism.
These people have put hard work into making this good science, and you dismiss them and the editors as incompetents with a single sentence. What a fucktard. Who the fuck do you think you are?
Yes, a portable computer with a full-blown modern OS that doesn't run code I want it to run is moronically shackled.
Not that this won't be circumvented. It just demonstrates a stupefyingly limited level of thinking for a company which seems to at least partially appreciate the benefits of open platforms.
I despise the pigopolist US carriers as much as you do. At this point, the US cellular carrier industry is one of the most abusive and harmful oligopolies on the planet (well on its way to resurrecting an AT&T monopoly - and look, they're not even bothering to change the name). The cell phone market in the US is stagnant, because customer expectations are very low. This is why the iPhone has a potential to bring serious change. I know its shortcomings as well as you do - my beefs are sealed battery, no microSD slot or such, and the biggest one is of course what's being discussed. But its technological leadership is unquestionable, and if you think it's an evolutionary design, you need to think again. No one - not even the Japanese market - has done many of the things Apple has done with the iPhone before, and certainly no one has come close to doing so many new things at once.
Which is why, once the price falls, this just might be able to reset the US users' expectations from their cell phones to something more reasonable and kick the cell phone market into not sucking as much - just as the iPod, for all its shortcomings, has kicked the music player market in the ass, although the competitors are still trying to figure out how not to suck as much.
Which is why it's a damn shame and a monumental hypocrisy for Apple to close the system to unrestricted software. I'm certainly not buying an iPhone until this restriction gets hacked and Apple gives up on countering the hack.
Wow. Yours is certainly the most absurd statement I've read this week.
I mean, FFS. This is Slashdot, and you're glad that the most revolutionary electronic device in years is moronically shackled, and you get modded up? What is this, is your brain terminally fried by the reality distortion field?
Do you by any chance also believe Vista's DRM stack is good for everyone because it allows us to watch movies in an orderly manner?
even a place like Japan, which has embraced Apple's design ethos and which places so much importance on industrial design, continues down the clamshell/button road even in their ultra-high end stuff. There are reasons for this.
Really? What are they, aside from conformism? Can you list the technical reasons why the clamshell design is superior? I personally consider it far inferior to the candybar design.