Maybe the *only* thing holding millions of people back from buying MacOS is that it's tied to Mac hardware, which is typically 50% to 100% more expensive than PC hardware? Many, many, many computer stores sell Macs alongside their PCs, which means many, many, many people are exposed to them, and know that Macs are easier to use. But ask any computer salesman at any store that also sells macs, and I'm sure that the number one reason that the Mac doesn't outsell their PCs is cost. People probably hardly even consider compatibility, although the (relatively) limited number of Mac apps probably doesn't help that much.
Sell OS X on PC hardware, and poof, overnight explosion in sales. Of course, supporting buggy PC hardware would be a nightmare, just like it is for Windows. But enh. Still. Overnight explosion in sales!
Honestly, I couldn't possibly think of a worse movie. With the possible exception of Doom. Doom should have been a huge bright red blinking neon sign warning them away from this path.
You know, I hear that chauffeurs are pretty expensive. And the next best thing - taxis - are way more than owning a car. Which has been the choice of wealthy New Yorkers for decades.
Re:Besides imagining a beowulf cluster of those...
on
Make Your Own Sputnik
·
· Score: 1
I thought about this for a moment, before saying "sure!"
If you were to build an underground supercollider ring (which in principle is basically a huge railgun) from scrap parts, using free labour from friends and family, and you could build a payload that would withstand the 10,000 or so Gs during accelleration, then yes, you could do this, and for about $10,000.
If you don't want to get caught, I would recommend doing the launch during the day, so that the bright flash emitted as the payload hits the atmosphere wouldn't quite light up the *entire* neighbourhood. Also, make sure you get the permits with the city for tunneling underground. Tell them you're building a personal subway system.
Well sure, but the trick here is that you can do both and look like saints. Send a satellite that beams back data about oh, the Van Allen belts, and you can issue a press release saying "Observe the Mighty Soviet Science and Engineering Team in Action! Space Probe studies Van Allen Belts for 6 month mission!" And then when the US government shits their pants and says "OMGWTFBBQ!! They can nuke us from anywhere!", you can say "What are you talking about? This is a mission of Science and Peace! For Peaceful scientific purposes only! You are evil capitalist warmongers for saying such a thing!"
The *entire* point of the project was to make the USA look bad.
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors.
You have this all wrong, and history demonstrates this quite starkly.
First off, before civilisation, instead of organized religion, there was superstition and shamanism. The indiginous people of North America for instance had their medicine men and shamans. Usually they weren't even full-time spiritual leaders, but did it in addition to their other responsibilities.
In the Middle East and North Africa at the dawn of history, kings were basically gods. At some point in time, someone obviously decided to use the superstition of the common people to instill fear in the populace, and to gain and maintain control over them in a broad sense. This worked quite well right into the Roman Empire, when the practice continued in various forms up until about Constantine. Except in Palestine, because Moses had previously gained *his* power by taking the monotheism of his people and saying "God has spoken to me", and they followed him. This evolved into a system by which the king was *appointed* by god, and was his spokesperson. This worked well enough for Europe and later the Muslim world for some thousand years or so. Then the Europeans took over the rest of the world and built global empires with this kind of leadership.
Eventually, government was abstracted again and various forms of democracy took over all those kingdoms, removing religion from politics entirely. Not that politicians today don't still use religion to gain control, they just don't claim to be king just because $DIETY says so (which was typically a euphemistic way of saying they murdered and blackmailed their way into power).
So societies didn't invent religions. People invented societies which invented men posing as gods which invented religions as a means of gaining power. It was just easier for primitive kings to say "Follow @commandments or $DIETY the all-knowing will smite you in your sleep", and then have your imperial guards do the smiting. In other words, you have power over people because they're already afraid of the gods that make thunder and lightning and famine and poison. Especially poison, because that's how gods smite you in your sleep.
This is a corollary to the rule "Wise men think religion is false, fools think religion is true, and politicians think religion is useful."
And it was copyrighted too. I wonder if that means I wasn't supposed to read the book, on the off chance that I *might* copy some of it. Perhaps, that book would give me a good idea for my own book, and then the author could sue my ass for violating his proprietary secrets.
But somehow, "software" is different. It's magical and stuff, and if I look at how they do things, I might be inspired to make similar but different magic. That sort of thing must be stopped.
Total number of messages that attempted delivery 250350 Total number of connections refused because of incorrect e-mail 10553 4% Total number of messages refused by rblsmtpd 203057 81%
By spamhaus 73932
By spamcop 129143 Number of messages rejected because they were spam 20725 8% Number of messages rejected because they were viruses 428 0% Number of messages that failed (probably No_mailbox) 1246 0% Projected number of messages actually delivered 14769 5% Number of messages actually delivered 19420 7%
The discrepancy between projected and actual is likely due to bounce messages that get caught in a loop and eventually get delivered to Postmaster. Projected is just total messages minus filtered messages.
And this is a pretty typical day. Remember that some spam still makes it through the filter.
Also, I don't know if you've noticed lately, but there's probably spam coming from your computer because you "avoid" viruses rather than actually check for them.
It should be clear to any human being in this world that democracy leads to a populace who have a moral investment in the country in which they live - and this leads them to think of greater things, such as science, and not the day-to-day issues like how to not be killed for wearing the wrong clothes.
Oh, I see. So science in Soviet Russia was hindered by a lack of democracy?
Odd. I could swear that they managed some astonishing feats of science and engineering. Even and especially under Stalin, the very worst of their leaders. In fact, I seem to recall that before the Soviets, Russia was a backwater country where people routinely died of starvation in great numbers.
Likewise, Japan under Hirohito must have done very poorly scientifically by your hypothesis. As did Great Britain while the monarchy still held power. Or France. Or Italy. I seem to recall that they all spearheaded the industrial revolution during that time.
And of course, there's also the Obvious Example, which I won't bother to mention for fear of invoking Godwin.
*I* predict that by 2020, cement will be free! That cold fusion will destroy every energy company in existance, and that everyone will be using iPhones.
Or, we can toss these stupidly speculative articles and actually cover something that's happened, or currently happening? I thought this was *news* for nerds.
Oh, and by the way, you'll never see a laptop or a desktop for $250, because at that price point there's no point in selling them at all unless your shop is selling thousands of them a month. The same thing has happened to PDAs. You can now only get a Palm Tungsten E in a bundle with a wireless keyboard because the technology has been on the shelf so long that it's not worth $300 by itself anymore. In 6 months, you won't be able to get them at all, replaced with something else at that price point.
Jack Thompson is batshit crazy, and little things like the law, restraining orders, and previous failed lawsuits couldn't prevent him from smashing everything he sees with the one hammer he has.
I guess it has a lot to do with how a lot of porn these days features hardcore misogyny, nevermind not exactly being a good guidebook on how to perform such delicate tasks as anal sex.
Now, while I have exactly no problem with consensual misogyny (and practice it in my spare time), I am not a moron. That kind of imagery needs to be tempered with warnings like "Do Not Try This At Home" and "Noone Really Does It This Way". Something you probably have to instill upon your kids in the first place.
Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel has a nice discussion of acceleration and interplanetary distances.
Actually, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" also goes on at length about learning, the process of learning, how the public school system gets in the way of that, and how to get around that. That's at least as important - if not more - than any discussion of physics and math.
Obviously, you've just lumped all of Heinlein's work into the "must be porn" pile.
And obviously, you haven't actually *read* "Have Space Suit, Will Travel". Nor "Space Cadet". Nor a dozen of his other hard sci-fi novels.
"Have Space Suit, Will Travel" is in fact a remarkably *good* example of a book that will help kids gain an insight and interest in science, mathematics, and oddly enough, Latin. In fact, I would recommend it as a guide for How Not To Let Your Education Get In The Way Of Your Learning. Because in that book, the main character's father describes high school as "Occupational Therapy for Morons", and strongly encourages him to actually get out and learn everything he's actually interested in, instead of passively absorbing whatever The State wants you to absorb.
"Space Cadet" is also a book about learning. The main character in that novel spends most of his time studying and occasionally applying the knowledge learned - as would happen on any long voyage on a military vessel.
Interstellar gas clouds are pretty static. You would have to take one image every, say, year or maybe 100 years to really get any difference in the image quality. Whereas the earth's atmosphere produces an effect almost exactly the same as if you were to look at the bottom of a swimming pool, and in about the same timeframe.
No, the images we get right now from space telescopes are the best we can get at any given epoch, and that's just the way it is.
Well, I guess that all depends on whether or not you can *prove* that the that you throw away is worth throwing away. If you take a thousand images of exactly the same thing over the course of an hour, and keep only the best images, that's a little different than taking toxicology readings from a thousand different patients and keeping only the best results. The cat's eye nebula isn't going to change measurably from our perspective over the course of an hour. If you keep careful documentation on what you do to the images during processing, (after all, the results must be reproducible) that should keep problems to a minimum.
However, there's also a term called "overprocessing", by which some amateurs can create images with detail that doesn't actually exist in the original images. But if you keep careful documentation on what you do to the images during processing, (after all, the results must be reproducible) that should keep problems to a minimum.
The difference is the resolution of the camera. The Phillips Toucam can produce movies at 640x480, whereas I would expect that the cameras they were using in this research produce research-grade resolutions in excess of 1280x1024, which is no small feat to get working at 30fps. Also, to make this work with a Toucam requires very bright objects and/or very large telescopes.
However, it's worth noting that amateurs' results today are typically much better than those of professional astronomers 30 or even 20 years ago, and are no doubt the inspiration for this new camera.
ObRTFA: RTFA. It's not used *instead* of adaptive optics, it's used together with adaptive optics.
No, they propose that it be used together with adaptive optics. The research that was done to produce this press release was actually done at the Mount Palomar observatory, which was completed in 1947 and most certainly does not feature adaptive optics.
From the article:
The technique could now be used to improve much larger telescopes such as those at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, or the Keck telescopes in the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This has the potential to produce even sharper images.
it takes a lot of solar panels to match the power generation of even a small coal power plant let alone a nuclear power plant, etc.
Yup. And it takes a lot of homes to use the power generated. Soooo.... how's about you remove a large amount of power lost due to long transmission cables and step-down transformers and generate the power at the source?
Most people don't want to live in a place that's covered in solar panels and windmills far as the eye can see...
Most people don't want to live in a world where rain is corrosive enough to eat the paint off your car and the ground water is radioactive enough to cause birth defects, either.
neither windmills nor solar panels are benign - they both have a subtle effect on the environment
Versus the major effect on the environment that coal and nuclear power plants have? Hmm... lemme see here... which would be the *lesser* of two evils?
You aren't building automobiles or painting teapots. You are a support function and not a line function.
Perhaps the sysadmin's efficiency could be measured in the efficiency of everyone else then. It is after all, the sysadmin's job to improve efficiency, often by making everyone else's job easier and automating away repetitive tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the *only* thing holding millions of people back from buying MacOS is that it's tied to Mac hardware, which is typically 50% to 100% more expensive than PC hardware? Many, many, many computer stores sell Macs alongside their PCs, which means many, many, many people are exposed to them, and know that Macs are easier to use. But ask any computer salesman at any store that also sells macs, and I'm sure that the number one reason that the Mac doesn't outsell their PCs is cost. People probably hardly even consider compatibility, although the (relatively) limited number of Mac apps probably doesn't help that much.
Sell OS X on PC hardware, and poof, overnight explosion in sales. Of course, supporting buggy PC hardware would be a nightmare, just like it is for Windows. But enh. Still. Overnight explosion in sales!
WHAT?!
Oh no. Oh dear god, no! Kill it! Kill it now!!!
Honestly, I couldn't possibly think of a worse movie. With the possible exception of Doom. Doom should have been a huge bright red blinking neon sign warning them away from this path.
they don't want to be seen as being "cheap"
You know, I hear that chauffeurs are pretty expensive. And the next best thing - taxis - are way more than owning a car. Which has been the choice of wealthy New Yorkers for decades.
I thought about this for a moment, before saying "sure!"
If you were to build an underground supercollider ring (which in principle is basically a huge railgun) from scrap parts, using free labour from friends and family, and you could build a payload that would withstand the 10,000 or so Gs during accelleration, then yes, you could do this, and for about $10,000.
If you don't want to get caught, I would recommend doing the launch during the day, so that the bright flash emitted as the payload hits the atmosphere wouldn't quite light up the *entire* neighbourhood. Also, make sure you get the permits with the city for tunneling underground. Tell them you're building a personal subway system.
Well sure, but the trick here is that you can do both and look like saints. Send a satellite that beams back data about oh, the Van Allen belts, and you can issue a press release saying "Observe the Mighty Soviet Science and Engineering Team in Action! Space Probe studies Van Allen Belts for 6 month mission!" And then when the US government shits their pants and says "OMGWTFBBQ!! They can nuke us from anywhere!", you can say "What are you talking about? This is a mission of Science and Peace! For Peaceful scientific purposes only! You are evil capitalist warmongers for saying such a thing!"
The *entire* point of the project was to make the USA look bad.
As Carl Sagan pointed out "Human beings are like butterflies who live for a day and think it's forever."
What people really have trouble grasping, is a number like 1 billion years. Change in nature happens so slowly that we don't notice it at all.
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors.
You have this all wrong, and history demonstrates this quite starkly.
First off, before civilisation, instead of organized religion, there was superstition and shamanism. The indiginous people of North America for instance had their medicine men and shamans. Usually they weren't even full-time spiritual leaders, but did it in addition to their other responsibilities.
In the Middle East and North Africa at the dawn of history, kings were basically gods. At some point in time, someone obviously decided to use the superstition of the common people to instill fear in the populace, and to gain and maintain control over them in a broad sense. This worked quite well right into the Roman Empire, when the practice continued in various forms up until about Constantine. Except in Palestine, because Moses had previously gained *his* power by taking the monotheism of his people and saying "God has spoken to me", and they followed him. This evolved into a system by which the king was *appointed* by god, and was his spokesperson. This worked well enough for Europe and later the Muslim world for some thousand years or so. Then the Europeans took over the rest of the world and built global empires with this kind of leadership.
Eventually, government was abstracted again and various forms of democracy took over all those kingdoms, removing religion from politics entirely. Not that politicians today don't still use religion to gain control, they just don't claim to be king just because $DIETY says so (which was typically a euphemistic way of saying they murdered and blackmailed their way into power).
So societies didn't invent religions. People invented societies which invented men posing as gods which invented religions as a means of gaining power. It was just easier for primitive kings to say "Follow @commandments or $DIETY the all-knowing will smite you in your sleep", and then have your imperial guards do the smiting. In other words, you have power over people because they're already afraid of the gods that make thunder and lightning and famine and poison. Especially poison, because that's how gods smite you in your sleep.
This is a corollary to the rule "Wise men think religion is false, fools think religion is true, and politicians think religion is useful."
And it was copyrighted too. I wonder if that means I wasn't supposed to read the book, on the off chance that I *might* copy some of it. Perhaps, that book would give me a good idea for my own book, and then the author could sue my ass for violating his proprietary secrets.
But somehow, "software" is different. It's magical and stuff, and if I look at how they do things, I might be inspired to make similar but different magic. That sort of thing must be stopped.
Well, you don't have to believe them.
Here's our stats from yesterday:
Total number of messages that attempted delivery 250350
Total number of connections refused because of incorrect e-mail 10553 4%
Total number of messages refused by rblsmtpd 203057 81%
By spamhaus 73932
By spamcop 129143
Number of messages rejected because they were spam 20725 8%
Number of messages rejected because they were viruses 428 0%
Number of messages that failed (probably No_mailbox) 1246 0%
Projected number of messages actually delivered 14769 5%
Number of messages actually delivered 19420 7%
The discrepancy between projected and actual is likely due to bounce messages that get caught in a loop and eventually get delivered to Postmaster. Projected is just total messages minus filtered messages.
And this is a pretty typical day. Remember that some spam still makes it through the filter.
Also, I don't know if you've noticed lately, but there's probably spam coming from your computer because you "avoid" viruses rather than actually check for them.
I'm sure the discussion and tags on this story will be completely G Rated ;)
Oh fuck off!
It should be clear to any human being in this world that democracy leads to a populace who have a moral investment in the country in which they live - and this leads them to think of greater things, such as science, and not the day-to-day issues like how to not be killed for wearing the wrong clothes.
Oh, I see. So science in Soviet Russia was hindered by a lack of democracy?
Odd. I could swear that they managed some astonishing feats of science and engineering. Even and especially under Stalin, the very worst of their leaders. In fact, I seem to recall that before the Soviets, Russia was a backwater country where people routinely died of starvation in great numbers.
Likewise, Japan under Hirohito must have done very poorly scientifically by your hypothesis. As did Great Britain while the monarchy still held power. Or France. Or Italy. I seem to recall that they all spearheaded the industrial revolution during that time.
And of course, there's also the Obvious Example, which I won't bother to mention for fear of invoking Godwin.
*I* predict that by 2020, cement will be free! That cold fusion will destroy every energy company in existance, and that everyone will be using iPhones.
Or, we can toss these stupidly speculative articles and actually cover something that's happened, or currently happening? I thought this was *news* for nerds.
Oh, and by the way, you'll never see a laptop or a desktop for $250, because at that price point there's no point in selling them at all unless your shop is selling thousands of them a month. The same thing has happened to PDAs. You can now only get a Palm Tungsten E in a bundle with a wireless keyboard because the technology has been on the shelf so long that it's not worth $300 by itself anymore. In 6 months, you won't be able to get them at all, replaced with something else at that price point.
Fuck the cigars man. I'd rather have the *Cubans* in hand!
I have a third theory:
Jack Thompson is batshit crazy, and little things like the law, restraining orders, and previous failed lawsuits couldn't prevent him from smashing everything he sees with the one hammer he has.
I guess it has a lot to do with how a lot of porn these days features hardcore misogyny, nevermind not exactly being a good guidebook on how to perform such delicate tasks as anal sex.
Now, while I have exactly no problem with consensual misogyny (and practice it in my spare time), I am not a moron. That kind of imagery needs to be tempered with warnings like "Do Not Try This At Home" and "Noone Really Does It This Way". Something you probably have to instill upon your kids in the first place.
Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel has a nice discussion of acceleration and interplanetary distances.
Actually, "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" also goes on at length about learning, the process of learning, how the public school system gets in the way of that, and how to get around that. That's at least as important - if not more - than any discussion of physics and math.
Obviously, you've just lumped all of Heinlein's work into the "must be porn" pile.
And obviously, you haven't actually *read* "Have Space Suit, Will Travel". Nor "Space Cadet". Nor a dozen of his other hard sci-fi novels.
"Have Space Suit, Will Travel" is in fact a remarkably *good* example of a book that will help kids gain an insight and interest in science, mathematics, and oddly enough, Latin. In fact, I would recommend it as a guide for How Not To Let Your Education Get In The Way Of Your Learning. Because in that book, the main character's father describes high school as "Occupational Therapy for Morons", and strongly encourages him to actually get out and learn everything he's actually interested in, instead of passively absorbing whatever The State wants you to absorb.
"Space Cadet" is also a book about learning. The main character in that novel spends most of his time studying and occasionally applying the knowledge learned - as would happen on any long voyage on a military vessel.
Hmm. Yes, but some companies have overcome a lot of the problems with lithium ion batteries by changing their manufacture.
Interstellar gas clouds are pretty static. You would have to take one image every, say, year or maybe 100 years to really get any difference in the image quality. Whereas the earth's atmosphere produces an effect almost exactly the same as if you were to look at the bottom of a swimming pool, and in about the same timeframe.
No, the images we get right now from space telescopes are the best we can get at any given epoch, and that's just the way it is.
Well, I guess that all depends on whether or not you can *prove* that the that you throw away is worth throwing away. If you take a thousand images of exactly the same thing over the course of an hour, and keep only the best images, that's a little different than taking toxicology readings from a thousand different patients and keeping only the best results. The cat's eye nebula isn't going to change measurably from our perspective over the course of an hour. If you keep careful documentation on what you do to the images during processing, (after all, the results must be reproducible) that should keep problems to a minimum.
However, there's also a term called "overprocessing", by which some amateurs can create images with detail that doesn't actually exist in the original images. But if you keep careful documentation on what you do to the images during processing, (after all, the results must be reproducible) that should keep problems to a minimum.
The difference is the resolution of the camera. The Phillips Toucam can produce movies at 640x480, whereas I would expect that the cameras they were using in this research produce research-grade resolutions in excess of 1280x1024, which is no small feat to get working at 30fps. Also, to make this work with a Toucam requires very bright objects and/or very large telescopes.
However, it's worth noting that amateurs' results today are typically much better than those of professional astronomers 30 or even 20 years ago, and are no doubt the inspiration for this new camera.
ObRTFA: RTFA. It's not used *instead* of adaptive optics, it's used together with adaptive optics.
No, they propose that it be used together with adaptive optics. The research that was done to produce this press release was actually done at the Mount Palomar observatory, which was completed in 1947 and most certainly does not feature adaptive optics.
From the article:
The technique could now be used to improve much larger telescopes such as those at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, or the Keck telescopes in the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This has the potential to produce even sharper images.
(Emphasis mine)
No, actually Jack Thompson hardly even needs a bad excuse to senselessly shoot his mouth off. He's just a raging psychopath himself.
it takes a lot of solar panels to match the power generation of even a small coal power plant let alone a nuclear power plant, etc.
Yup. And it takes a lot of homes to use the power generated. Soooo.... how's about you remove a large amount of power lost due to long transmission cables and step-down transformers and generate the power at the source?
Most people don't want to live in a place that's covered in solar panels and windmills far as the eye can see...
Most people don't want to live in a world where rain is corrosive enough to eat the paint off your car and the ground water is radioactive enough to cause birth defects, either.
neither windmills nor solar panels are benign - they both have a subtle effect on the environment
Versus the major effect on the environment that coal and nuclear power plants have? Hmm... lemme see here... which would be the *lesser* of two evils?
You aren't building automobiles or painting teapots. You are a support function and not a line function.
Perhaps the sysadmin's efficiency could be measured in the efficiency of everyone else then. It is after all, the sysadmin's job to improve efficiency, often by making everyone else's job easier and automating away repetitive tasks.