The dependence on PGMs is more about politics than tactics. Iron bombs or unguided rockets could easily accomplish the same thing, but the US is always trying to hit those three guys standing in some courtyard without killing the 14 kids in the adjacent building.
Like in Viet Nam, we're trying to win at politics harder than we're trying to win at war, and using overwhelming force against a guerrilla force embedded in the civilian population results in too much collateral damage for the political leadership.
We could fight a war of conquest instead of counter-insurgency and treat civilians as enemy support resources. With enough civilian losses, they might stop providing aid and comfort to the guerrilla forces and instead resist them, further diluting the effective strength of the guerrillas if they choose to try to maintain control of a hostile population. The good news is that if the opposite occurs and the civilians join forces with the guerrillas, it doesn't really matter -- you're already willing to treat them as hostile forces.
First off, your boss thinks you're just lounging around or hung over and he's pissed that your work output isn't getting done. Your coworkers won't chip in because this is an excellent chance to withhold information and weaken your position while you are out.
And then you're scared to death that the cheap ass systems you manage to hold together will die the day you are out, validating to management and staff that you don't know what you're doing.
And then there's needing to hoard your sick days for all those days that schools are closed or your kid is sick and the school won't let him back for 24 hours, which always means missing two days of school.
At the end of it all, being sick at work is the most rational choice. You also get the opportunity to make the entire office sick, allowing you to lower the overall workload to finally get something done.
It's probably technically a "hybrid" round, more resembling a cut-down 5.56 case designed to fit/feed in a grip-magazine automatic handgun.
Saying that it's a rifle round based on it's use in the bullpup carbine P90 is like saying the.44 Special is a rifle round because you can fire it in a lever action Winchester.
Why that round? It's not a rifle round (making the "printable rifle" really a "printable carbine") and it's not even a standard AR rifle round (which is traditionally 5.56x45, but the design is flexible..).
I would think for initial builds you'd want to at least target the baseline round for an AR, 5.56x45, or if they really want to work out the bugs, 7.62x51 NATO, which is a much more powerful cartridge and thus making the design guaranteed to be backwards compatible (from a strength perspective) with 5.56x45.
If they start with the really small cartridge like 5.7x28, their design won't scale up.
And the 5.7 is a weird round to choose anyway. Apocryphally, it was designed to be some super high velocity round designed to defeat bullet resistant vests when you used the right ammo, which they stopped selling to consumers. I think it really was part of a whole paramilitary/protection system of weapons designed to replace the use of 9mm handguns and MP5 submachine guns.
Well, there's some risk, but it's pretty minimal. The upper receiver is likely metal, and the upper receiver holds the bolt and the barrel and chamber.
It's hard to see what kind of problem you would have if the lower failed -- feed problem with a dropped magazine? Broken trigger guard, or just some larger mechanical failure if the lower itself cracked or split?
None of these would result in a gun blowing up in your face as the cartridge is fired in the chamber which is an integral part of the barrel and connected mechanically to the upper receiver.
It seems like a good machinist's face shield and a pair of gloves would be more than adequate protection for the risks involved.
Around the time of the antitrust trial, there was a lot of talk of breaking up Microsoft, splitting off applications from operating systems.
Presumably this would have been Windows (all flavors) in one company and applications (Office, SQL, Exchange).
What I wonder is if maybe they would have been better off if this had happened. The OS people would have had greater flexibility, since they wouldn't have been tied as much to older applications and standards -- possibly making it easier for them to produce a more modern Windows. And possibly even a Windows desktop environment + API for Linux.
And the application people wouldn't have been limited to Windows only plus a weak Mac version; they could have been producing Exchange/SQL for Linux as well as Office for Linux.
The warm-up period is in single digit minutes, max, even in very below zero temperatures.
The only place I don't use them outside is in my motion lights. CFLs are poor applications for short-cycle lighting and they also don't come in high enough output. My garage has a 250W halogen motion light and my back door 2x75w floods.
11 years ago my wife convinced everyone on our street to put out these cheesy plastic candles at Christmas. She and a neighbor went and bought like 40 of them for the whole block. Out of the box the candles used some kind of small, 20w incandescent bulb. As luck would have it, our candle's socket was broken. I replaced it with a regular socket and put a CFL in it (15w? I forget).
That bulb is STILL in service and lights perfectly, even on nights below -20 F.
I eventually replaced all my outdoor lighting with CFLs and haven't had any problems. Many are real dim when they first come on if it is very cold, but always warm up and provide the same light they did in warm weather.
And I'm not particular about bulbs, either --- whatever's the low cost brand at home depot.
And strangely, I've had more problems with CFLs IN my house than outside my house.
There was a great documentary on History channel or one of this similar channels about a retired machinist who made counterfeit slot machine tokens back when casinos took tokens.
He used wire EDM to make a perfect copy of a coin as a stamping die but was totally flummoxed when the slot machine spit his fakes back out. He figured out that the machine was using the electromagnetic signature of the token, not just the size and weight (which he had cloned perfectly).
As it turns out there was a fairly unusual stainless steel composition used for silverware that was about the best match. Once he got that right his counterfeits were perfect.
As is typical, guy got greedy and sloppy and ended up getting caught, but had he done it right he could have really made bank.
They already have display mirror capability, either via wireless or wired connections. The missing element is remote touch capability and that's not very hard to implement.
It'd be simplest to implement this via HDMI for the mirroring and Bluetooth for music and phone calling, but I'm sure there's some way to do it via wifi without disabling the phone's cellular data.
The people behind "Mimics" seem to be doing this, but it requires jailbreaking and apparently there are some gotchas in the video output and phone orientation.
An Apple-approved solution for touch mirroring would make this a total no-brainer.
Every time I hear a sales pitch about a data center or hear of someone wanting to add generator power to their building, they talk about diesel powered generators. Usually after they show off their huge generators they talk about how often they run them for test purposes.
When you start to ask about fuel capacity they get kind of hinky and immediately start emphasizing their multi-supplier, prepaid, penalties-for-non-delivery fuel delivery contracts.
Which is all well and good if you have a simple issue, like a down power line or some other small utility problem. But what happens when have you a significant issue, like the hurricane where there is serious demand for fuel and limited ability to delivery it? No delivery company in the world would accept a contract that held them liable when governments issue emergency edicts, rationing or just plain commandeer the fuel supply (and there may already be legal exemptions in those cases anyway that would nullify contract provisions).
So I always think "Why not natural gas?" It's less fuel efficient, but its gotten cheaper lately and in backup power applications its not meant to be a form of primary generation anyway. There's seldom a supply issue as most gas piping is done underground and is seldom affected by disasters except by earthquakes.
This means while everyone else is hoping for diesel deliveries, paying pollution surcharges and paying fees for on-premise fuel storage, you're just burning the near infinite natural gas supply.
It strikes me that the people who would have the most to lose in this would be third party mainboard makers and then closely right behind them, major PC manufacturers.
The former cater to the builder, enthusiast and whitebox market. It would be a lot harder for them to supply enough variety -- my last build I spent a lot of time figuring out which of the CPU options I wanted, and that was just sticking with Core-i5 (I've built plenty of systems, but I don't spend a lot of time monitoring the endless releases of CPUs and chipsets, so I had some catching up to do). If these vendors had to keep mainboards on hand for every possible variation that would be difficult.
I can also see major PC manufacturers disliking this, even at their level of assembly automation. Dell charges incrementally more money for better CPUs and offers a half-dozen choices on most systems. They would probably handle this at board assembly versus soldering on the CPU. And then what about warranty work? It'd be a lot more expensive for them to swap entire system boards with CPUs -- most of the time when I've dealt with this, they swap motherboards but keep the CPU.
What seems like a decent compromise would be some kind of adapter that CPUs could be soldered onto and then a companion slot for this adapter. A consortium of interested parties could make it a standard so that you'd have similar levels of portability between boards that you have now with socketed CPUs. It seems like reinventing the wheel since we're already at that point and it kind of reminds me of Slot 1 CPUs from the PII and P3 days.
I remember being kind of annoying in the early 90s when I started using Windows and had to deal with Installers; as a Mac user, I was always used to just copying applications from system to system (although IIRC, some set resource values during install or copied INITs to the System folder).
A couple of software developers told me DLLs were better technically due to resource usage, but to me it just seemed like a clunky form of copy protection.
I kind of felt the same way on Linux/BSD platforms -- why couldn't everything be compiled statically? How much more disk space would it REALLY take to have an entire system statically linked?
I still think this would be a good idea on Windows, even though DLL conflicts seem to not occur that often.
I would think at some point that someone in whatever amounts to leadership of Gaza would wake up and realize that they are in possession of a 150 square miles of land on the Mediterranean, with only open ocean separating them from Europe.
To me this sounds like a great economic opportunity.
Step 1 -- announce you still disagree with the Israeli government on a broad array of issues involving the Palestinian people, but that you are renouncing all violent means and accept Israel's right to exist.
Step 2 -- announce your desire to improve the lives of Palestinians by developing the economy of Gaza. Given step 1 being done sincerely (and with the acceptance of some kind of third party oversight, at least initially), I would expect a lot of money to roll in.
Step 3 -- Profit. By and large the Palestinian people are educated people and could offer a kind of Singapore/Hong Kong kind of economic opportunity -- no tariffs, low cost labor, close access to European markets & global shipping, etc.
Sure, the Israelis might make it difficult at first but if you have an open and sincere renunciation of violence and a willingness to accept Israel's right to exist, the Israelis will have a hard time maintaining a blockade, etc, especially if some third party agrees to supervise imports/exports to prevent weapons from being imported/exported.
Tough shit, they had their chance for the zero regulation solution but their greed and willful ignorance is putting and end to that.
It was just easy money for them -- the toothless loser driving the '98 Grand Am turning in a few hundred feet of brand-new 00 wire was perfectly willing to accept 30% below melt value for the wire and the owner was happy to resell it as new to the "ask no questions" contractor at a 15% discount below new retail.
If you want it no regulation, that's fine, but let's make the punishments if you get caught:
1) Accepting stolen merchandise -- clerk goes to jail 2) Business is fined 3x the metal value and the metal or its on-site equivilent is confiscated 3) Three violations in a 12 month period and you lose your recycling license for six months 4) Two loss of license violations? Company, its owners and officers are barred from engaging in commercial metal recycling for 10 years.
I think thats the goal of the system to make sure they have something on everyone and then keep everyone in their places and no one gets above their station.
I think that's both the unintended consequence AND the desired state of affairs for the cops.
It's an unintended consequence of there being too many laws -- we tend to outlaw the same kinds of things, over and over in different ways, and at least in the US, at different levels of government, too. Not even freedom from double-jeapordy can help, as you can always be tried again for a different legal violation for the same act.
And generally speaking, I think the cops like the "extra" laws as it gives them the freedom to enforce as they see fit, picking and choosing what they'll enforce depending on whether or not they want at somebody.
I think it's why they want pot kept illegal; not because they care if people smoke pot (certainly pot smokers are a hell of lot less work for them than drinkers), but because it gives them a reason and justification to be intrusive and bullying or go on other fishing expeditions. Legalizing it would make investigations into other drug activity actually harder because they would need to work at it a lot more to credibly suspect someone.
Automobile law enforcement is another area where they love a lot of excess laws and ambiguity because it gives them nearly infinite freedom to pull you over. There was a recent dustup over a local women's pro basketball player being pulled over; she's African-American and the reason was she had something dangling from her mirror -- yet you can't even count fast enough to count the number of cars you see with shit hanging from their rear view mirrors, it's just not a law the police bother enforcing.
The same is true with window tint; I had my windows tinted when I bought the car and the installer was real careful to make sure I didn't tint too dark due to state law, yet every day I see several cars with obviously illegal window tint. Again, you *could* get pulled over, but they don't bother unless they want to fish for something else.
It struck and still strikes me that the Apple "apology" was as much a result of the hype and publicity than significant problems. I think the biggest significant "problem" was that it wasn't Google maps, and that's what people expected and/or wanted.
I still don't get the transit POI complaints -- most cities with significant transit infrastructure (NYC, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, Bay Area) have either custom apps or sophisticated enough existing info (ie, mobile-enabled web sites from the transit authority) that makes Google Maps transit info look weak (which in practice it is).
Furthermore, are there people outside of 2-3 metro areas who have been using the bus/subway all this time who are suddenly in the dark about how to get where they usually go? And in many places with subway service, who cares what the schedule is outside of a handful of express routes or at extreme ends of the day (ie, when some lines become express only or quit stopping at some stations)? In my experience, the wait is in single digit minutes.
Outside of those cities, most people are drivers, not bus riders, and these people don't care about transit POIs because they're not using transit at all or they're only consistent commuters who already know the schedule, and that represents a lot of the US.
At the end of the day, the people who might had a legitimate gripe about transit POIs seems like a really small set of people.
Had Google made a map application available on day 1, I don't think anyone would have cared. And in fact, it seems like Google's failure to provide an iOS maps application becomes a bigger and bigger problem for them as time goes on. Apple Maps backend data gets better and better as more and more people use it and the bugs get worked out. By the time Google actually gets their maps app out for iOS, there will be a lot of inertia to overcome as people are already used to Apple maps and/or find it superior (ie, spoken nav).
To me that seems like the Holy Grail of storage, a universal high capacity, high speed storage medium that is disk AND RAM in the conventional model at the same time.
Even if it was slower than current RAM (up to a point, at least), eliminating paging as an entire concept and eliminating disk/ram/cpu/ram/disk cycle ought to make it overall faster.
And it would be really cool if it was as modular as storage is now, allowing you to tack on an additional "disk drive" whenever you wanted, although it would require some kind of high speed interconnect.
I find the Apple Maps hullabaloo greatly overblown. No problem with finding POIs, turn-by-turn navigation has been perfect, including navigating idiotic suburban mall streets (the kind with dumb names that only run 500 yards and are hard to divorce from the surrounding mall parking).
I can't comment on public transit where I live, but I do know that the subway info on Google Maps was borderline unreliable when I was in NYC last spring. Subway entrances in many cases weren't where they were marked on the map. I gave up after that.
I ended up using iTransNYC on my iPhone and found it orders of magnitude better than Google maps -- directions from one street address to another street address with every practical train combination imaginable. It made the subway so easy to use that it became a game of figuring out how to ride the subway places when it was actually faster to walk. I think we drained $35 off our metro cards in less than 5 days.
Not every area has a custom transit app I know, but in a place like Minneapolis where I live I can't imagine that anyone riding the bus depends on Google maps for directions or schedules.
I read somewhere that the Sunday NY Times contains more information than the typical EDUCATED person of the 17th century would have known.
I'm not sure if this was limited to what an educated person would have been taught, or if it included "natural" knowledge that a person might have learned as they lived -- for example, I would assume that most 17th century people (and earlier) would have been naturalists relative to most modern city dwellers given the rural lifestyles and the greater abundance of nature in a less populated, more "wild" era.
I'd like to see a system where you file for and receive a "provisional" patent. From the date of issue you have 5 years to go back to the patent office and demonstrate a salable product using this patent. If you fail to do so, the patent becomes null and void and the subject of the patent is considered in the public domain and unpatentable.
5 years would protect any reasonable product development (even the little guys) while preventing large entities from patenting stuff they never use just to build a war chest of patents. IMHO, the patent should provide protection from the marketplace for an item actively part of your product portfolio, it shouldn't be part of a larger legal strategy to stifle competition or engage in brinksmanship with other corporations.
I'd also like to see strict limits on patent claims made for patents which were "validated" with salable products but where the company has no products using the patent. In theory, voided provisional patents should eliminate most of the patent trolling, but I think this would eliminate nearly all of it by preventing "patent houses" who merely buy patents and attempt to enforce them, since there are no salable products made by these entities using the patents.
The patent system really shouldn't allow the defense of unused patents, as all that does is stifle useful technology.
I don't know if it was my age (late 20s) or what, but I found that my best programming was when I smoked (hand-rolled cigarettes, usually Drum).
There was something about smoking and staring at code or errors or whatever that really enabled me to focus. Maybe nicotine has a similar effect to Aderall or other stimulant-based ADHD drugs?
I quit smoking years ago and quit smoking in the house years before that; now I find that my best focus is early morning after drinking about 6-8 standard cups of coffee (about two travel mugs). Coffee isn't as effective as nicotine, but then again, I'm nearly 20 years older, too.
Coincidentally, I was also using a DEC VT320 at this same time as my terminal (via dial-up) to a Slackware system. Added focus may have come from fewer distractions, too, like not being able to click into other Windows or whatever. Although trn was always a window away via screen.
....that candidates are winning elections via data mining versus appealing to people with ideas?
It seems like Wall Street's version of capitalism -- just focus on the numbers, not on making a newer widget, and we can manipulate our way to victory.
I know, you can make the argument that sending the right message to the people receptive that message will get you money, votes, whatever, but at the same time it seems cynical and manipulative. It doesn't seem like it's about developing leadership ideas that appeal to people generally and winning them over with charisma and the strength of your arguments.
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I think you give OPFOR too much credit.
The dependence on PGMs is more about politics than tactics. Iron bombs or unguided rockets could easily accomplish the same thing, but the US is always trying to hit those three guys standing in some courtyard without killing the 14 kids in the adjacent building.
Like in Viet Nam, we're trying to win at politics harder than we're trying to win at war, and using overwhelming force against a guerrilla force embedded in the civilian population results in too much collateral damage for the political leadership.
We could fight a war of conquest instead of counter-insurgency and treat civilians as enemy support resources. With enough civilian losses, they might stop providing aid and comfort to the guerrilla forces and instead resist them, further diluting the effective strength of the guerrillas if they choose to try to maintain control of a hostile population. The good news is that if the opposite occurs and the civilians join forces with the guerrillas, it doesn't really matter -- you're already willing to treat them as hostile forces.
At least the tranny is hot and knows how to please you.
First off, your boss thinks you're just lounging around or hung over and he's pissed that your work output isn't getting done. Your coworkers won't chip in because this is an excellent chance to withhold information and weaken your position while you are out.
And then you're scared to death that the cheap ass systems you manage to hold together will die the day you are out, validating to management and staff that you don't know what you're doing.
And then there's needing to hoard your sick days for all those days that schools are closed or your kid is sick and the school won't let him back for 24 hours, which always means missing two days of school.
At the end of it all, being sick at work is the most rational choice. You also get the opportunity to make the entire office sick, allowing you to lower the overall workload to finally get something done.
It's probably technically a "hybrid" round, more resembling a cut-down 5.56 case designed to fit/feed in a grip-magazine automatic handgun.
Saying that it's a rifle round based on it's use in the bullpup carbine P90 is like saying the .44 Special is a rifle round because you can fire it in a lever action Winchester.
Why that round? It's not a rifle round (making the "printable rifle" really a "printable carbine") and it's not even a standard AR rifle round (which is traditionally 5.56x45, but the design is flexible..).
I would think for initial builds you'd want to at least target the baseline round for an AR, 5.56x45, or if they really want to work out the bugs, 7.62x51 NATO, which is a much more powerful cartridge and thus making the design guaranteed to be backwards compatible (from a strength perspective) with 5.56x45.
If they start with the really small cartridge like 5.7x28, their design won't scale up.
And the 5.7 is a weird round to choose anyway. Apocryphally, it was designed to be some super high velocity round designed to defeat bullet resistant vests when you used the right ammo, which they stopped selling to consumers. I think it really was part of a whole paramilitary/protection system of weapons designed to replace the use of 9mm handguns and MP5 submachine guns.
Well, there's some risk, but it's pretty minimal. The upper receiver is likely metal, and the upper receiver holds the bolt and the barrel and chamber.
It's hard to see what kind of problem you would have if the lower failed -- feed problem with a dropped magazine? Broken trigger guard, or just some larger mechanical failure if the lower itself cracked or split?
None of these would result in a gun blowing up in your face as the cartridge is fired in the chamber which is an integral part of the barrel and connected mechanically to the upper receiver.
It seems like a good machinist's face shield and a pair of gloves would be more than adequate protection for the risks involved.
Around the time of the antitrust trial, there was a lot of talk of breaking up Microsoft, splitting off applications from operating systems.
Presumably this would have been Windows (all flavors) in one company and applications (Office, SQL, Exchange).
What I wonder is if maybe they would have been better off if this had happened. The OS people would have had greater flexibility, since they wouldn't have been tied as much to older applications and standards -- possibly making it easier for them to produce a more modern Windows. And possibly even a Windows desktop environment + API for Linux.
And the application people wouldn't have been limited to Windows only plus a weak Mac version; they could have been producing Exchange/SQL for Linux as well as Office for Linux.
The warm-up period is in single digit minutes, max, even in very below zero temperatures.
The only place I don't use them outside is in my motion lights. CFLs are poor applications for short-cycle lighting and they also don't come in high enough output. My garage has a 250W halogen motion light and my back door 2x75w floods.
My luck with CFLs in cold weather has been great.
11 years ago my wife convinced everyone on our street to put out these cheesy plastic candles at Christmas. She and a neighbor went and bought like 40 of them for the whole block. Out of the box the candles used some kind of small, 20w incandescent bulb. As luck would have it, our candle's socket was broken. I replaced it with a regular socket and put a CFL in it (15w? I forget).
That bulb is STILL in service and lights perfectly, even on nights below -20 F.
I eventually replaced all my outdoor lighting with CFLs and haven't had any problems. Many are real dim when they first come on if it is very cold, but always warm up and provide the same light they did in warm weather.
And I'm not particular about bulbs, either --- whatever's the low cost brand at home depot.
And strangely, I've had more problems with CFLs IN my house than outside my house.
Does Kaspersky have a relationship with the Putin administration or the FSB?
Do either of these organizations have any influence on the business practices or technology of Kaspersky antivirus?
Should a security minded person be concerned with the geographic origin of security software?
There was a great documentary on History channel or one of this similar channels about a retired machinist who made counterfeit slot machine tokens back when casinos took tokens.
He used wire EDM to make a perfect copy of a coin as a stamping die but was totally flummoxed when the slot machine spit his fakes back out. He figured out that the machine was using the electromagnetic signature of the token, not just the size and weight (which he had cloned perfectly).
As it turns out there was a fairly unusual stainless steel composition used for silverware that was about the best match. Once he got that right his counterfeits were perfect.
As is typical, guy got greedy and sloppy and ended up getting caught, but had he done it right he could have really made bank.
They already have display mirror capability, either via wireless or wired connections. The missing element is remote touch capability and that's not very hard to implement.
It'd be simplest to implement this via HDMI for the mirroring and Bluetooth for music and phone calling, but I'm sure there's some way to do it via wifi without disabling the phone's cellular data.
The people behind "Mimics" seem to be doing this, but it requires jailbreaking and apparently there are some gotchas in the video output and phone orientation.
An Apple-approved solution for touch mirroring would make this a total no-brainer.
Every time I hear a sales pitch about a data center or hear of someone wanting to add generator power to their building, they talk about diesel powered generators. Usually after they show off their huge generators they talk about how often they run them for test purposes.
When you start to ask about fuel capacity they get kind of hinky and immediately start emphasizing their multi-supplier, prepaid, penalties-for-non-delivery fuel delivery contracts.
Which is all well and good if you have a simple issue, like a down power line or some other small utility problem. But what happens when have you a significant issue, like the hurricane where there is serious demand for fuel and limited ability to delivery it? No delivery company in the world would accept a contract that held them liable when governments issue emergency edicts, rationing or just plain commandeer the fuel supply (and there may already be legal exemptions in those cases anyway that would nullify contract provisions).
So I always think "Why not natural gas?" It's less fuel efficient, but its gotten cheaper lately and in backup power applications its not meant to be a form of primary generation anyway. There's seldom a supply issue as most gas piping is done underground and is seldom affected by disasters except by earthquakes.
This means while everyone else is hoping for diesel deliveries, paying pollution surcharges and paying fees for on-premise fuel storage, you're just burning the near infinite natural gas supply.
It strikes me that the people who would have the most to lose in this would be third party mainboard makers and then closely right behind them, major PC manufacturers.
The former cater to the builder, enthusiast and whitebox market. It would be a lot harder for them to supply enough variety -- my last build I spent a lot of time figuring out which of the CPU options I wanted, and that was just sticking with Core-i5 (I've built plenty of systems, but I don't spend a lot of time monitoring the endless releases of CPUs and chipsets, so I had some catching up to do). If these vendors had to keep mainboards on hand for every possible variation that would be difficult.
I can also see major PC manufacturers disliking this, even at their level of assembly automation. Dell charges incrementally more money for better CPUs and offers a half-dozen choices on most systems. They would probably handle this at board assembly versus soldering on the CPU. And then what about warranty work? It'd be a lot more expensive for them to swap entire system boards with CPUs -- most of the time when I've dealt with this, they swap motherboards but keep the CPU.
What seems like a decent compromise would be some kind of adapter that CPUs could be soldered onto and then a companion slot for this adapter. A consortium of interested parties could make it a standard so that you'd have similar levels of portability between boards that you have now with socketed CPUs. It seems like reinventing the wheel since we're already at that point and it kind of reminds me of Slot 1 CPUs from the PII and P3 days.
I remember being kind of annoying in the early 90s when I started using Windows and had to deal with Installers; as a Mac user, I was always used to just copying applications from system to system (although IIRC, some set resource values during install or copied INITs to the System folder).
A couple of software developers told me DLLs were better technically due to resource usage, but to me it just seemed like a clunky form of copy protection.
I kind of felt the same way on Linux/BSD platforms -- why couldn't everything be compiled statically? How much more disk space would it REALLY take to have an entire system statically linked?
I still think this would be a good idea on Windows, even though DLL conflicts seem to not occur that often.
I would think at some point that someone in whatever amounts to leadership of Gaza would wake up and realize that they are in possession of a 150 square miles of land on the Mediterranean, with only open ocean separating them from Europe.
To me this sounds like a great economic opportunity.
Step 1 -- announce you still disagree with the Israeli government on a broad array of issues involving the Palestinian people, but that you are renouncing all violent means and accept Israel's right to exist.
Step 2 -- announce your desire to improve the lives of Palestinians by developing the economy of Gaza. Given step 1 being done sincerely (and with the acceptance of some kind of third party oversight, at least initially), I would expect a lot of money to roll in.
Step 3 -- Profit. By and large the Palestinian people are educated people and could offer a kind of Singapore/Hong Kong kind of economic opportunity -- no tariffs, low cost labor, close access to European markets & global shipping, etc.
Sure, the Israelis might make it difficult at first but if you have an open and sincere renunciation of violence and a willingness to accept Israel's right to exist, the Israelis will have a hard time maintaining a blockade, etc, especially if some third party agrees to supervise imports/exports to prevent weapons from being imported/exported.
Tough shit, they had their chance for the zero regulation solution but their greed and willful ignorance is putting and end to that.
It was just easy money for them -- the toothless loser driving the '98 Grand Am turning in a few hundred feet of brand-new 00 wire was perfectly willing to accept 30% below melt value for the wire and the owner was happy to resell it as new to the "ask no questions" contractor at a 15% discount below new retail.
If you want it no regulation, that's fine, but let's make the punishments if you get caught:
1) Accepting stolen merchandise -- clerk goes to jail
2) Business is fined 3x the metal value and the metal or its on-site equivilent is confiscated
3) Three violations in a 12 month period and you lose your recycling license for six months
4) Two loss of license violations? Company, its owners and officers are barred from engaging in commercial metal recycling for 10 years.
I think thats the goal of the system to make sure they have something on everyone and then keep everyone in their places and no one gets above their station.
I think that's both the unintended consequence AND the desired state of affairs for the cops.
It's an unintended consequence of there being too many laws -- we tend to outlaw the same kinds of things, over and over in different ways, and at least in the US, at different levels of government, too. Not even freedom from double-jeapordy can help, as you can always be tried again for a different legal violation for the same act.
And generally speaking, I think the cops like the "extra" laws as it gives them the freedom to enforce as they see fit, picking and choosing what they'll enforce depending on whether or not they want at somebody.
I think it's why they want pot kept illegal; not because they care if people smoke pot (certainly pot smokers are a hell of lot less work for them than drinkers), but because it gives them a reason and justification to be intrusive and bullying or go on other fishing expeditions. Legalizing it would make investigations into other drug activity actually harder because they would need to work at it a lot more to credibly suspect someone.
Automobile law enforcement is another area where they love a lot of excess laws and ambiguity because it gives them nearly infinite freedom to pull you over. There was a recent dustup over a local women's pro basketball player being pulled over; she's African-American and the reason was she had something dangling from her mirror -- yet you can't even count fast enough to count the number of cars you see with shit hanging from their rear view mirrors, it's just not a law the police bother enforcing.
The same is true with window tint; I had my windows tinted when I bought the car and the installer was real careful to make sure I didn't tint too dark due to state law, yet every day I see several cars with obviously illegal window tint. Again, you *could* get pulled over, but they don't bother unless they want to fish for something else.
It struck and still strikes me that the Apple "apology" was as much a result of the hype and publicity than significant problems. I think the biggest significant "problem" was that it wasn't Google maps, and that's what people expected and/or wanted.
I still don't get the transit POI complaints -- most cities with significant transit infrastructure (NYC, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, Bay Area) have either custom apps or sophisticated enough existing info (ie, mobile-enabled web sites from the transit authority) that makes Google Maps transit info look weak (which in practice it is).
Furthermore, are there people outside of 2-3 metro areas who have been using the bus/subway all this time who are suddenly in the dark about how to get where they usually go? And in many places with subway service, who cares what the schedule is outside of a handful of express routes or at extreme ends of the day (ie, when some lines become express only or quit stopping at some stations)? In my experience, the wait is in single digit minutes.
Outside of those cities, most people are drivers, not bus riders, and these people don't care about transit POIs because they're not using transit at all or they're only consistent commuters who already know the schedule, and that represents a lot of the US.
At the end of the day, the people who might had a legitimate gripe about transit POIs seems like a really small set of people.
Had Google made a map application available on day 1, I don't think anyone would have cared. And in fact, it seems like Google's failure to provide an iOS maps application becomes a bigger and bigger problem for them as time goes on. Apple Maps backend data gets better and better as more and more people use it and the bugs get worked out. By the time Google actually gets their maps app out for iOS, there will be a lot of inertia to overcome as people are already used to Apple maps and/or find it superior (ie, spoken nav).
To me that seems like the Holy Grail of storage, a universal high capacity, high speed storage medium that is disk AND RAM in the conventional model at the same time.
Even if it was slower than current RAM (up to a point, at least), eliminating paging as an entire concept and eliminating disk/ram/cpu/ram/disk cycle ought to make it overall faster.
And it would be really cool if it was as modular as storage is now, allowing you to tack on an additional "disk drive" whenever you wanted, although it would require some kind of high speed interconnect.
I find the Apple Maps hullabaloo greatly overblown. No problem with finding POIs, turn-by-turn navigation has been perfect, including navigating idiotic suburban mall streets (the kind with dumb names that only run 500 yards and are hard to divorce from the surrounding mall parking).
I can't comment on public transit where I live, but I do know that the subway info on Google Maps was borderline unreliable when I was in NYC last spring. Subway entrances in many cases weren't where they were marked on the map. I gave up after that.
I ended up using iTransNYC on my iPhone and found it orders of magnitude better than Google maps -- directions from one street address to another street address with every practical train combination imaginable. It made the subway so easy to use that it became a game of figuring out how to ride the subway places when it was actually faster to walk. I think we drained $35 off our metro cards in less than 5 days.
Not every area has a custom transit app I know, but in a place like Minneapolis where I live I can't imagine that anyone riding the bus depends on Google maps for directions or schedules.
I read somewhere that the Sunday NY Times contains more information than the typical EDUCATED person of the 17th century would have known.
I'm not sure if this was limited to what an educated person would have been taught, or if it included "natural" knowledge that a person might have learned as they lived -- for example, I would assume that most 17th century people (and earlier) would have been naturalists relative to most modern city dwellers given the rural lifestyles and the greater abundance of nature in a less populated, more "wild" era.
I'd like to see a system where you file for and receive a "provisional" patent. From the date of issue you have 5 years to go back to the patent office and demonstrate a salable product using this patent. If you fail to do so, the patent becomes null and void and the subject of the patent is considered in the public domain and unpatentable.
5 years would protect any reasonable product development (even the little guys) while preventing large entities from patenting stuff they never use just to build a war chest of patents. IMHO, the patent should provide protection from the marketplace for an item actively part of your product portfolio, it shouldn't be part of a larger legal strategy to stifle competition or engage in brinksmanship with other corporations.
I'd also like to see strict limits on patent claims made for patents which were "validated" with salable products but where the company has no products using the patent. In theory, voided provisional patents should eliminate most of the patent trolling, but I think this would eliminate nearly all of it by preventing "patent houses" who merely buy patents and attempt to enforce them, since there are no salable products made by these entities using the patents.
The patent system really shouldn't allow the defense of unused patents, as all that does is stifle useful technology.
I don't know if it was my age (late 20s) or what, but I found that my best programming was when I smoked (hand-rolled cigarettes, usually Drum).
There was something about smoking and staring at code or errors or whatever that really enabled me to focus. Maybe nicotine has a similar effect to Aderall or other stimulant-based ADHD drugs?
I quit smoking years ago and quit smoking in the house years before that; now I find that my best focus is early morning after drinking about 6-8 standard cups of coffee (about two travel mugs). Coffee isn't as effective as nicotine, but then again, I'm nearly 20 years older, too.
Coincidentally, I was also using a DEC VT320 at this same time as my terminal (via dial-up) to a Slackware system. Added focus may have come from fewer distractions, too, like not being able to click into other Windows or whatever. Although trn was always a window away via screen.
....that candidates are winning elections via data mining versus appealing to people with ideas?
It seems like Wall Street's version of capitalism -- just focus on the numbers, not on making a newer widget, and we can manipulate our way to victory.
I know, you can make the argument that sending the right message to the people receptive that message will get you money, votes, whatever, but at the same time it seems cynical and manipulative. It doesn't seem like it's about developing leadership ideas that appeal to people generally and winning them over with charisma and the strength of your arguments.