That's a fair enough choice from a personal perspective, but it doesn't scale well. There's endless examples of wild fish stocks crashing to dangerously low levels, and a few examples of fish populations effectively being fished to extinction, due to the activities of just a couple of countries. It's pretty obvious that you just can't support a world population of 6.5 billion+ on wild-caught fish.
Oh, and one classic example of this is the crash of sardine fisheries in the 1960's...
Or the genetic impacts on wild salmon (naturally selected for overall fitness) of interbreeding with escaped farmed salmon (human selected for fast growth rates). It's actually a fairly nasty problem for wild stocks, and is being extensivelyresearched.
From the well-thats-not-very-exciting dept.
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Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
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What about those of us who've had to update the firmware in our TVs? Or PVRs? My PVR has a couple of in-built games; my TV can surf and play YouTube video and, in some countries, download games, apps, and content. I've written firmware for clock radios, air conditioners, and ovens.
Is your DVD player a computer just because it has a CPU and comes with a bytecode interpreter for running purchased programs?
Face it: the iPad is an appliance, just a multi-purpose one. Is your mom's MixMaster any less of an appliance just because you can buy juicer, grinder, potato peeler, meat slicer, and pasta maker attachments for it?
They're computers, they work like computers, and they should be judged as computers.
Define 'work'.
If you mean "it has a CPU and, internally at least, operates like a computer with an OS and programs and shit", then yes, it is a computer. But so is almost everything from your DVD player up to you car.
If you mean "allows you to write and run your own programs, or install whatever software and hardware you want", then it's not. It's an appliance with lots of attachments available from the manufacturer.
But what I suspect you really mean is "Waaah! I wanted a cool computer that was flat and light and all screen and did everything I wanted it to and what they gave me was an appliance with a whole stack of extras I have to buy from the manufacturer so I'm gonna say nasty things about them and then I'm gonna hold my breath until I turn blue and that'll make them give me what I want!". In which case I say this: you can either pony up the $100 for a developer account, or you can fuck off and learn to program air-conditioners. It's not hard; they're a lot like moisture vaporators or binary load-lifters...
People in the real Sciences would have been forced to take enough Mathematics and/or Statistics to be able to properly interpret Statistics.
You would think so, if you've never worked with Real Scientists. Most biologists and chemists (can't speak to the other ones) know just enough statistics to get by, and make exactly the kinds of mistakes TFA is describing - there's only so much you can "force" people to learn.
My favourite example of puncturing the "Real Scientists (tm)" who think they're above making these sorts of mistakes?
"For instance in Australia where they too[k] readings from several surrounding stations and came up with numbers for imaginary stations or corrected numbers for real stations... that's not stats?"
No, the first is modelling; specifically interpolation. And the applicability (I want to say 'validity', but that's over-simplifying it) of the derived results is highly dependent upon the specific model used. Some models may derive interpolated results statistically, but it's far from a given.
The second? Well, I'd like to comment more, but in high school science 30 years ago I was taught never to throw away data, no matter how 'wrong' it looked. Much more recently in my science degree it was heavily intimated that unless such outliers either prove you right or prove you wrong, you might be better off coming up with a good excuse why that data point is wrong and excluding it;-)
(Yes, it was one of the 'softer' sciences; specifically, ecology & environmental science. I sort of agree with their point, because it's damned near impossible to get clean, steady, reliable data, and there's just no way to account for some of the weird outliers you see without starting up a whole new research project to study them - and that's the job of the person who reads your published paper and says "hey, let's test his hand-wavey excuse and see if it stands up!".
I do agree with the poster above on the excessive reliance & misuse of transformations to normalise data - I always felt it was better to suck it up, accept the fact your data has distributions known to no man and is skewed out the wazoo, and use the least crappy test available to see if there's any significance in it. Which is why there's a significant, if slow, flow of Eco & Enviro people eschewing non-parametric statistical tests for Monte Carlo and Bayesian analysis. Most of the old school smile and make fun of us, but like the results we get;-)
I don't see why the response time of a fluorescent lamp has to be slow. You're dealing with a plasma in a partially evacuated tube controlled by an electrical current.
You're forgetting that what you see is not the plasma (it emits mainly short-wavelength UV), but the phosphor coating (which is excited by the UV & emits visible light). The phosphor coating is specifically chosen to be (relatively) slow, in order to filter out the 50/60Hz flicker.
In theory, you could use a faster phosphor and modulate the light output - but then you run into an issue with the half-life of the excited electron state. Basically, the electrons take a finite amount of time to drop from their excited state to their non-excited state (in the process releasing their energy as UV). This limits the maximum modulation frequency to somewhere ~5KHz. Again, this could probably be increased somewhat by the choice of plasma donor material, but there is a limit (e.g. I'd expect x-rays would be hard to contain;-). And, since multi-bit encoding schemes like phase modulation are likely prove be tricky as best (aka 'improbable, if not impossible'), you're basically stuck with a maximum data transmission rate of half the modulation frequency - around 2.5Kbps.
How about some sort of a mechanical linkage between the throttle body and the pedal....oh wait...where have I seen this before?
It still happens with a mechanical throttle though... twice, to me.
First time was when the clip holding the outer at the carbie fractured; the outer pushed forwards into the throttle arm and opened it all the way when I lifted my foot off the accelerator. The second was a worn and frayed inner; it jammed when I accelerated away from an intersection. Both happened on the same stretch of road, oddly enough.
The lesson is this: shit happens; understand what you're doing well enough to automatically know your options when it does; and have the presence of mind to use them. Though, given that most people seem to drive around in some sort of daze or torpor where they don't even know what they're doing until after they start doing it, I doubt they think any further ahead than -0.5 seconds...
Very true. For instance, by applying methods first outlined in the paper "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" (Statistical Science9: 429-438) to Orwell's Animal Farm, I discovered the following statement appears no less than 16 times!
Ask any one of my peers where their file is. Many would say it lives inside Word or iTunes, not in C:/Users/username/wherever/ on the hard disk inside the box on the floor. The very concept of a file/directory structure is confusing to them and is being further abstracted away from the user in our new iToys.
As an old techie (who can design & build reasonably complex analogue & digital electronics from scratch, learnt to program in BASIC & Z80 ASM, maintained electromechanical -> SPC -> IP-based telco gear, etc), I ask "well why, in this day and age, does everyone need to know exactly where their files live?"
That's fine for the tech-types; after all, this is/., where everybody likes to know those details, or needs to take them into account when programming. But there's no reason why that sort of thing can't or shouldn't be abstracted from the average user, or even the casual programmer.
To take your iTunes example (I'll ignore Word's "Recent Files" menu, 'cos it's so limited - and I still can't get my own father to understand that he has more documents than are shown there;-) : why does it matter where in the directory tree your files reside, as long as a) you can find them easily, b) you can read / modify / write their metadata and contents, and preferably c) do it non-destructively or with version control? The answer for most people, barring actual programmers and other anally-retentive / "must-order-my-music-alphabetically-by-artist-year-album directory else my children will die" OCD-types, is "it doesn't".
That abstraction is the point - where the file is isn't important; finding the file & working with it is. Give people an abstracted database-style filesystem containing metadata out the wazoo, and step back and see what happens...
Applied system-wide, it means the difference between the average user saying "where the fsck did Word save my damned thesis?" and "Word, show me all the documents I last changed in November 2009 that refer to the reproductive habits of Anas superciliosa", or "Excel, open all my household budget spreadsheets from 2006 to 2008, and highlight all changes made over each year". With a sensible API, it means programmers can leverage the same functionality without re-inventing it on a per-app basis.
Most people don't think in a particularly dimensionally-structured way; why suppose that a filesystem forcing or expecting them to do so is better? People tend to position things with regard to relationships - to times/dates, events, contents, other objects. iTunes approaches this on an individual app basis, most noticably with Smart Playlists (e.g. "Gimme all tracks where Genre contains Ska, Rating is > 3 stars, and Last Played is < Yesterday"). BeOS came a bit closer to a system-wide approach back in the mid-late 90's, allowing the user to create SQL-like search queries & launch the results. Not being tied to a traditional directory-tree filesystem makes things easier for user and programmer alike - which is a good thing, not bad.
Probably a bit less kit-like than you're after, but eminently doable. Burning the eprom is probably the 'hardest' part; the rest is just painstaking detail. I've been meaning to build one for a few years now but originally work, and now study, keep getting in the way.
While I support the outcome from this court case, realistically the ISP are in someway complicit in the downloading of copyrighted materials - what else do they think we are doing with those 60+Gb data plans they offer?
Read the full judgement - Village Roadshow et. al. tried the same argument; he dismantles it quite well.
In doing so, he explains why it makes no economic or business sense to sell big plans to heavy users - rather, your 60GB (30+30?) plan exists to make people who use only a little more than their 20GB (10+10) plan more profitable by encouraging them to upgrade. Along the way, he blows the rest of their argument out of the water by pointing out how iiNet actually encourage legal downloading with their Freezone (iTunes, ABC, etc don't count towards your quota), while costing them money to provide.
Seriously, I know nobody even reads the damned articles here, but the judgement - the whole 200 pages - is well worth reading, and remarkably light on the legalese. If it was a/. comment, it'd probably get equal parts "+5, Funny" and "+5, Insightful" mods.
If you read the ruling (I'm ~ 1/2 way through it now), he defines it as a 'system' primarily in order to distinguish BitTorrent (the whole kit & caboodle) from BitTorrent (the protocol), BitTorrent Inc. (the company), and various BitTorrent clients (which, to quote from para 60, "include Vuze, and, rather confusingly, the BitTorrent Client, which is the BitTorrent client of BitTorrent Inc."). In doing so, he nicely separates the technical, legal, and 'social' aspects - and decides purely on the legalities.
(Yeah, 'social' in quotes - look, I'm old, so personally I'd argue against BT being some sort of expression of a proto techno-utopian society. I don't get Facebook or Twitter either;-)
Read the whole thing - it's remarkably easy to read (as decisions from Australian courts often are), well explained, and the decision is well thought out and justified.
There's plenty of wry giggles to be found in there too - his explanation of the whole studio / AFACT / MPA / MPAA relationship, his respectful smackdown of many of AFACT's claims & arguments, and more - plus some interesting points regarding related issues such as the number of infringing copies each user is responsible for (hint: not as many as the MPAA / RIAA likes to usually claim).
In short, this is a guy who either had a good handle on the tech beforehand, or has listened well to both the technical and legal arguments of both sides, and has ruled based on both the way the tech works and the law.
Despite expanding the acronym once, and linking to the organisation, the article manages to spell it incorrectly 3 times out of 4.
It's CSIRO, you numbnuts!
Also, IIRC, the CSIRO patents referred to pre-date any work on 802.11n, and their reluctance to release the patents for use by the WiFi consortium was due to the fact that they were still involved in outstanding suits and countersuits with IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Netgear, Buffalo, etc. When all that was cleared up / dropped, CSIRO agreed to sign off on the LoA.
If you are too stupid to figure out how to download and install an alternative web browser, how is that Micorsoft's fault or problem?
I'm reminded of the time when IE was in its infancy and it had trouble downloading Netscape Navigator. FTP worked fine, Mosaic worked fine, and NN could download itself - but IE often stalled at ~98%. Not saying that was a deliberate act on the part of MS, but an odd co-incidence, no?
Besides, if the threshold for a computer licence was "figuring out how to download and install Application X", the world would still be be using typewriters, doing budgets in ledgers and cashbooks by hand &/or calculator, listening to music on the radio or stereo system, and surreptitiously buying Playboy at the local corner store...
Why not demand that Microsoft offer alternatives to every application that is bundled with Windows? (Notepad, Paintbrush, etc)
Because they haven't been accused, charged and convicted of leveraging their effective OS monopoly in an attempt to ensure Notepad, Paintbrush, etc are the de facto text / graphics / etc program, nor have they been accused, charged, and nearly convicted of deliberately stalling to delay following up on their legally-mandated penalties and obligations in relation to the original conviction?
(Oh, and it usually goes "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" - I don't think you get to choose to mix and match;-)
Honestly, don't bother. "Dimmable" CFLs are only dimmable in the vaguest sense of the word (need to be at or near full brightness to turn on, only dimmable to ~70% of output). The one good thing that can be said about them is that they seem to last longer when always run at full brightness than the non-dimmable variety*, presumably because the electronics are designed properly to accept a nasty grunged-up, noisy, and chopped supply from a dimmer rather than designed to be as cheap and borderline as possible like the non-dimmable variety.
Save your money, find somewhere that sells incandescent lamps (if you can over there; at least in Australia, where standard incandescent globes are now supposedly banned, they're still readily available at larger hardware stores), and either start planning to replace them with halogens where you can, or sit and wait for decent drop-in LED replacement globes.
(* Interesting aside: I've got 3 16w (100w replacement) 3700K CFL lamps I bought about a dozen years ago when CFL's first came on the market at over AU$20 each - I managed to get them cheap because the shelf price was incorrectly marked the same as 100w incandescents, so when they scanned them at the checkout I got the first 1 free and the remaining 2 (all they had, otherwise I would have gotten more!) at the marked shelf price. Those 3 CFLs are still running today getting normal household on/off cycles & hours of use, outlasting every other CFL I've bought since.
I think I got the last of the well-built ones, before they learned how to scrimp on design & component quality to save costs...)
I've heard of it before, but I'm not sure how much importance to attach to the stories. Granted, the earliest versions lacked a strain relief at the laptop end of the cord, and the Magsafe-ness of it lends itself to unclipping it sideways rather than pulling it straight out, but you'd still have to be repeatedly pulling on the cord when unplugging it to damage it.
Abuse is abuse, no matter the reason. Unplugging anything by pulling on what's obviously the weakest, thinnest, and most flexible part of it - the cord - is abuse. The Magsafe connector is so easy to disengage with a flick of the finger on the plug that I really can't see how tugging on the cord is anything other than deliberate abuse.
OTOH, I wince whenever I see my gf stand up to put her ASUS laptop down on the table across the room. One day she's gonna stand on the cord and just rip that fucking barrel connector out sideways...
And here we come full circle: the theory of global warming predicts a global temperature increase over the next few decades. And then scientists urge us to do something to counter that. With large amounts of money and maybe even a reduction in our quality of life.
Which is where the Precautionary Principle - the philosophical basis you need to apply, knowingly or unknowingly, whenever you start to apply science (or any action based on anything, for that matter) - comes in.
Let's leave out your little inflammatory "Let's call this strategy of repentance R and the opposite strategy, doing absolutely nothing and keep on sinning S" for the time being - unless you'll agree to me calling it as "Let's call this strategy of attempting to study and save, 'S', and the opposite strategy, doing absolutely nothing and later regretting, 'R', for the time being".
Actually, I think I will, for the sake of argument;-)
So it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis of studying and maybe saving our arses ("S") over relaxing and maybe later regretting our decision not to try ("R").
Undoubtedly, the cost of "S" is huge - but it opens the field for a whole lot of innovation and advancement in multiple fields. Energy production, energy use, technology, climatology, weather prediction (& control), agriculture, construction, etc, etc - all stand to benefit from the application of science and human effort to the issue of potential human influence on climate.
On the other hand, at best the cost of "R" is the same as if we just roll along at our current pace without any major driver for advancement beyond curiosity - the status quo. At worst, we may be fucked.
Somewhere in between lies the more probable option "shit, it's warmer, it doesn't really matter why, because now we're faced with all the social / economic / technical issues it brings up, and we've got to deal with it fast! I wish we'd started dealing with it 20 years ago..."
So, the precautionary principle applies both ways, and is not clear-cut. Does the benefit outweigh the cost? I've gotta say, from my science-based PoV, one option looks like "I'm alright Jack, I've got mine (and will keep getting it regardless)", while the other looks like "Hey, let's try to make things better regardless!"
I'll leave it up to you guys to argue over which is which...;-)
A breaker is a lot faster at disconnecting current than a fuse (it's designed to be fast), and it's resettable.
Really? The reaction / response time curves I've seen for general-purpose fuses & circuit breakers show that fuses are almost always faster than an equivalently-rated circuit breaker, particularly with high fault currents.
Yes, you can get fast-acting breakers. You can also get fast acting fuses, which again are generally faster than fast-acting breakers, except for very specific and expensive versions. It's worth noting that power electronics - and I'm talking things like 500~1000A rectifiers, power converters, UPSs, and SMPSs here - almost exclusively use fuses internally for protection, with breakers only on the input and output.
So to say that the UK version is better because it has a fuse shows me a lack of understanding of practicality or safety.
I don't know if he points this out in the article (10 pages? A sentence or 2 per page? C'mon!), but a fuse in the plug also protects the rest of the circuit against damage to the cord. Which bit of an appliance is most likely to get damaged and cause a risk of short circuit? Yeah, the cord. I'd say that shows quite a bit of understanding of practicality and safety, at least on the part of the original designer.
And note: I'm Australian, so I have no particular attachment to UK-style plugs.
Watch TG review of any american car, with a few exceptions (such as the ford transit van) we think they suck
Well, the transit in most incarnations has always been a German / English design, totally independent of Ford US. It's only the most recent ones that've been styled in the US, onto one of Ford's 'international' platforms (from Germany, IIRC, & used everywhere bar the US), but still built in Southampton (not sure if they're still made in Köln).
So, essentially, the UK Transit is the last of the truly 'European' Fords; a hangover from the days when Ford in the UK and Germany designed their own stuff from the ground up.
(Looks at lid of laptop... looks at shopping receipt...)
Nope, don't see it. Just as well, 'cos I've apparrently got a tree full of copyright-infringement in my backyard...
The real travesty here is Woolworths. Their corporate logo is apple green, their staff uniforms are apple green - so what do they do? Make their store loyalty card bright orange, and make their staff wear a bright orange cap to advertise it.
Now I'm as straight as they come and, as such, have absolutely no eye for colour-coordination - but even I would baulk at wearing bright orange and a rather-subdued apple green together. That's about as tasteless as their home brand oven-fry chips. You're checking out the cute checkout chick, you look up to her face, and...
ARRGH!
But, just as the poor girl at the checkout had the decency to apologise for giving me the hard-sell on the card, I had the decency to not laugh at her hat.
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That's a fair enough choice from a personal perspective, but it doesn't scale well. There's endless examples of wild fish stocks crashing to dangerously low levels, and a few examples of fish populations effectively being fished to extinction, due to the activities of just a couple of countries. It's pretty obvious that you just can't support a world population of 6.5 billion+ on wild-caught fish.
Oh, and one classic example of this is the crash of sardine fisheries in the 1960's...
Or the genetic impacts on wild salmon (naturally selected for overall fitness) of interbreeding with escaped farmed salmon (human selected for fast growth rates). It's actually a fairly nasty problem for wild stocks, and is being extensively researched.
Has Wifi. More space than a Nomad. Still lame...
What about those of us who've had to update the firmware in our TVs? Or PVRs? My PVR has a couple of in-built games; my TV can surf and play YouTube video and, in some countries, download games, apps, and content. I've written firmware for clock radios, air conditioners, and ovens.
Is your DVD player a computer just because it has a CPU and comes with a bytecode interpreter for running purchased programs?
Face it: the iPad is an appliance, just a multi-purpose one. Is your mom's MixMaster any less of an appliance just because you can buy juicer, grinder, potato peeler, meat slicer, and pasta maker attachments for it?
Define 'work'.
If you mean "it has a CPU and, internally at least, operates like a computer with an OS and programs and shit", then yes, it is a computer. But so is almost everything from your DVD player up to you car.
If you mean "allows you to write and run your own programs, or install whatever software and hardware you want", then it's not. It's an appliance with lots of attachments available from the manufacturer.
But what I suspect you really mean is "Waaah! I wanted a cool computer that was flat and light and all screen and did everything I wanted it to and what they gave me was an appliance with a whole stack of extras I have to buy from the manufacturer so I'm gonna say nasty things about them and then I'm gonna hold my breath until I turn blue and that'll make them give me what I want!". In which case I say this: you can either pony up the $100 for a developer account, or you can fuck off and learn to program air-conditioners. It's not hard; they're a lot like moisture vaporators or binary load-lifters...
My favourite example of puncturing the "Real Scientists (tm)" who think they're above making these sorts of mistakes?
So You Think You Have a Power Law - Well Isn't That Special?
"For instance in Australia where they too[k] readings from several surrounding stations and came up with numbers for imaginary stations or corrected numbers for real stations... that's not stats?"
No, the first is modelling; specifically interpolation. And the applicability (I want to say 'validity', but that's over-simplifying it) of the derived results is highly dependent upon the specific model used. Some models may derive interpolated results statistically, but it's far from a given.
The second? Well, I'd like to comment more, but in high school science 30 years ago I was taught never to throw away data, no matter how 'wrong' it looked. Much more recently in my science degree it was heavily intimated that unless such outliers either prove you right or prove you wrong, you might be better off coming up with a good excuse why that data point is wrong and excluding it ;-)
(Yes, it was one of the 'softer' sciences; specifically, ecology & environmental science. I sort of agree with their point, because it's damned near impossible to get clean, steady, reliable data, and there's just no way to account for some of the weird outliers you see without starting up a whole new research project to study them - and that's the job of the person who reads your published paper and says "hey, let's test his hand-wavey excuse and see if it stands up!".
I do agree with the poster above on the excessive reliance & misuse of transformations to normalise data - I always felt it was better to suck it up, accept the fact your data has distributions known to no man and is skewed out the wazoo, and use the least crappy test available to see if there's any significance in it. Which is why there's a significant, if slow, flow of Eco & Enviro people eschewing non-parametric statistical tests for Monte Carlo and Bayesian analysis. Most of the old school smile and make fun of us, but like the results we get ;-)
You're forgetting that what you see is not the plasma (it emits mainly short-wavelength UV), but the phosphor coating (which is excited by the UV & emits visible light). The phosphor coating is specifically chosen to be (relatively) slow, in order to filter out the 50/60Hz flicker.
In theory, you could use a faster phosphor and modulate the light output - but then you run into an issue with the half-life of the excited electron state. Basically, the electrons take a finite amount of time to drop from their excited state to their non-excited state (in the process releasing their energy as UV). This limits the maximum modulation frequency to somewhere ~5KHz. Again, this could probably be increased somewhat by the choice of plasma donor material, but there is a limit (e.g. I'd expect x-rays would be hard to contain ;-). And, since multi-bit encoding schemes like phase modulation are likely prove be tricky as best (aka 'improbable, if not impossible'), you're basically stuck with a maximum data transmission rate of half the modulation frequency - around 2.5Kbps.
May as well stick to Bluetooth...
It still happens with a mechanical throttle though ... twice, to me.
First time was when the clip holding the outer at the carbie fractured; the outer pushed forwards into the throttle arm and opened it all the way when I lifted my foot off the accelerator. The second was a worn and frayed inner; it jammed when I accelerated away from an intersection. Both happened on the same stretch of road, oddly enough.
The lesson is this: shit happens; understand what you're doing well enough to automatically know your options when it does; and have the presence of mind to use them. Though, given that most people seem to drive around in some sort of daze or torpor where they don't even know what they're doing until after they start doing it, I doubt they think any further ahead than -0.5 seconds...
Very true. For instance, by applying methods first outlined in the paper "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis" (Statistical Science 9: 429-438) to Orwell's Animal Farm, I discovered the following statement appears no less than 16 times!
"Android good, iPhone Bad!"
As an old techie (who can design & build reasonably complex analogue & digital electronics from scratch, learnt to program in BASIC & Z80 ASM, maintained electromechanical -> SPC -> IP-based telco gear, etc), I ask "well why, in this day and age, does everyone need to know exactly where their files live?"
That's fine for the tech-types; after all, this is /., where everybody likes to know those details, or needs to take them into account when programming. But there's no reason why that sort of thing can't or shouldn't be abstracted from the average user, or even the casual programmer.
To take your iTunes example (I'll ignore Word's "Recent Files" menu, 'cos it's so limited - and I still can't get my own father to understand that he has more documents than are shown there ;-) : why does it matter where in the directory tree your files reside, as long as a) you can find them easily, b) you can read / modify / write their metadata and contents, and preferably c) do it non-destructively or with version control? The answer for most people, barring actual programmers and other anally-retentive / "must-order-my-music-alphabetically-by-artist-year-album directory else my children will die" OCD-types, is "it doesn't".
That abstraction is the point - where the file is isn't important; finding the file & working with it is. Give people an abstracted database-style filesystem containing metadata out the wazoo, and step back and see what happens...
Applied system-wide, it means the difference between the average user saying "where the fsck did Word save my damned thesis?" and "Word, show me all the documents I last changed in November 2009 that refer to the reproductive habits of Anas superciliosa", or "Excel, open all my household budget spreadsheets from 2006 to 2008, and highlight all changes made over each year". With a sensible API, it means programmers can leverage the same functionality without re-inventing it on a per-app basis.
Most people don't think in a particularly dimensionally-structured way; why suppose that a filesystem forcing or expecting them to do so is better? People tend to position things with regard to relationships - to times/dates, events, contents, other objects. iTunes approaches this on an individual app basis, most noticably with Smart Playlists (e.g. "Gimme all tracks where Genre contains Ska, Rating is > 3 stars, and Last Played is < Yesterday"). BeOS came a bit closer to a system-wide approach back in the mid-late 90's, allowing the user to create SQL-like search queries & launch the results. Not being tied to a traditional directory-tree filesystem makes things easier for user and programmer alike - which is a good thing, not bad.
How to build your own ZX80/ZX81.
Probably a bit less kit-like than you're after, but eminently doable. Burning the eprom is probably the 'hardest' part; the rest is just painstaking detail. I've been meaning to build one for a few years now but originally work, and now study, keep getting in the way.
If they have something that they don't want anyone to know, maybe they shouldn't be doing it in the first place?
Read the full judgement - Village Roadshow et. al. tried the same argument; he dismantles it quite well.
In doing so, he explains why it makes no economic or business sense to sell big plans to heavy users - rather, your 60GB (30+30?) plan exists to make people who use only a little more than their 20GB (10+10) plan more profitable by encouraging them to upgrade. Along the way, he blows the rest of their argument out of the water by pointing out how iiNet actually encourage legal downloading with their Freezone (iTunes, ABC, etc don't count towards your quota), while costing them money to provide.
Seriously, I know nobody even reads the damned articles here, but the judgement - the whole 200 pages - is well worth reading, and remarkably light on the legalese. If it was a /. comment, it'd probably get equal parts "+5, Funny" and "+5, Insightful" mods.
If you read the ruling (I'm ~ 1/2 way through it now), he defines it as a 'system' primarily in order to distinguish BitTorrent (the whole kit & caboodle) from BitTorrent (the protocol), BitTorrent Inc. (the company), and various BitTorrent clients (which, to quote from para 60, "include Vuze, and, rather confusingly, the BitTorrent Client, which is the BitTorrent client of BitTorrent Inc."). In doing so, he nicely separates the technical, legal, and 'social' aspects - and decides purely on the legalities.
(Yeah, 'social' in quotes - look, I'm old, so personally I'd argue against BT being some sort of expression of a proto techno-utopian society. I don't get Facebook or Twitter either ;-)
Read the whole thing - it's remarkably easy to read (as decisions from Australian courts often are), well explained, and the decision is well thought out and justified.
There's plenty of wry giggles to be found in there too - his explanation of the whole studio / AFACT / MPA / MPAA relationship, his respectful smackdown of many of AFACT's claims & arguments, and more - plus some interesting points regarding related issues such as the number of infringing copies each user is responsible for (hint: not as many as the MPAA / RIAA likes to usually claim).
In short, this is a guy who either had a good handle on the tech beforehand, or has listened well to both the technical and legal arguments of both sides, and has ruled based on both the way the tech works and the law.
Mod parent up.
Peer review isn't what happens before the paper is published - it's what happens *after*.
Despite expanding the acronym once, and linking to the organisation, the article manages to spell it incorrectly 3 times out of 4.
It's CSIRO, you numbnuts!
Also, IIRC, the CSIRO patents referred to pre-date any work on 802.11n, and their reluctance to release the patents for use by the WiFi consortium was due to the fact that they were still involved in outstanding suits and countersuits with IBM, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Netgear, Buffalo, etc. When all that was cleared up / dropped, CSIRO agreed to sign off on the LoA.
Short timeline here, at the bottom of the page.
I used to work for a guy who thought he was a sociopath who thought he had people skills.
Turned out, he was just a prick...
I'm reminded of the time when IE was in its infancy and it had trouble downloading Netscape Navigator. FTP worked fine, Mosaic worked fine, and NN could download itself - but IE often stalled at ~98%. Not saying that was a deliberate act on the part of MS, but an odd co-incidence, no?
Besides, if the threshold for a computer licence was "figuring out how to download and install Application X", the world would still be be using typewriters, doing budgets in ledgers and cashbooks by hand &/or calculator, listening to music on the radio or stereo system, and surreptitiously buying Playboy at the local corner store...
Because they haven't been accused, charged and convicted of leveraging their effective OS monopoly in an attempt to ensure Notepad, Paintbrush, etc are the de facto text / graphics / etc program, nor have they been accused, charged, and nearly convicted of deliberately stalling to delay following up on their legally-mandated penalties and obligations in relation to the original conviction?
(Oh, and it usually goes "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" - I don't think you get to choose to mix and match ;-)
Honestly, don't bother. "Dimmable" CFLs are only dimmable in the vaguest sense of the word (need to be at or near full brightness to turn on, only dimmable to ~70% of output). The one good thing that can be said about them is that they seem to last longer when always run at full brightness than the non-dimmable variety*, presumably because the electronics are designed properly to accept a nasty grunged-up, noisy, and chopped supply from a dimmer rather than designed to be as cheap and borderline as possible like the non-dimmable variety.
Save your money, find somewhere that sells incandescent lamps (if you can over there; at least in Australia, where standard incandescent globes are now supposedly banned, they're still readily available at larger hardware stores), and either start planning to replace them with halogens where you can, or sit and wait for decent drop-in LED replacement globes.
(* Interesting aside: I've got 3 16w (100w replacement) 3700K CFL lamps I bought about a dozen years ago when CFL's first came on the market at over AU$20 each - I managed to get them cheap because the shelf price was incorrectly marked the same as 100w incandescents, so when they scanned them at the checkout I got the first 1 free and the remaining 2 (all they had, otherwise I would have gotten more!) at the marked shelf price. Those 3 CFLs are still running today getting normal household on/off cycles & hours of use, outlasting every other CFL I've bought since.
I think I got the last of the well-built ones, before they learned how to scrimp on design & component quality to save costs...)
I've heard of it before, but I'm not sure how much importance to attach to the stories. Granted, the earliest versions lacked a strain relief at the laptop end of the cord, and the Magsafe-ness of it lends itself to unclipping it sideways rather than pulling it straight out, but you'd still have to be repeatedly pulling on the cord when unplugging it to damage it.
Abuse is abuse, no matter the reason. Unplugging anything by pulling on what's obviously the weakest, thinnest, and most flexible part of it - the cord - is abuse. The Magsafe connector is so easy to disengage with a flick of the finger on the plug that I really can't see how tugging on the cord is anything other than deliberate abuse.
OTOH, I wince whenever I see my gf stand up to put her ASUS laptop down on the table across the room. One day she's gonna stand on the cord and just rip that fucking barrel connector out sideways...
Which is where the Precautionary Principle - the philosophical basis you need to apply, knowingly or unknowingly, whenever you start to apply science (or any action based on anything, for that matter) - comes in.
Let's leave out your little inflammatory "Let's call this strategy of repentance R and the opposite strategy, doing absolutely nothing and keep on sinning S" for the time being - unless you'll agree to me calling it as "Let's call this strategy of attempting to study and save, 'S', and the opposite strategy, doing absolutely nothing and later regretting, 'R', for the time being".
Actually, I think I will, for the sake of argument ;-)
So it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis of studying and maybe saving our arses ("S") over relaxing and maybe later regretting our decision not to try ("R").
Undoubtedly, the cost of "S" is huge - but it opens the field for a whole lot of innovation and advancement in multiple fields. Energy production, energy use, technology, climatology, weather prediction (& control), agriculture, construction, etc, etc - all stand to benefit from the application of science and human effort to the issue of potential human influence on climate.
On the other hand, at best the cost of "R" is the same as if we just roll along at our current pace without any major driver for advancement beyond curiosity - the status quo. At worst, we may be fucked.
Somewhere in between lies the more probable option "shit, it's warmer, it doesn't really matter why, because now we're faced with all the social / economic / technical issues it brings up, and we've got to deal with it fast! I wish we'd started dealing with it 20 years ago..."
So, the precautionary principle applies both ways, and is not clear-cut. Does the benefit outweigh the cost? I've gotta say, from my science-based PoV, one option looks like "I'm alright Jack, I've got mine (and will keep getting it regardless)", while the other looks like "Hey, let's try to make things better regardless!"
I'll leave it up to you guys to argue over which is which... ;-)
Really? The reaction / response time curves I've seen for general-purpose fuses & circuit breakers show that fuses are almost always faster than an equivalently-rated circuit breaker, particularly with high fault currents.
Yes, you can get fast-acting breakers. You can also get fast acting fuses, which again are generally faster than fast-acting breakers, except for very specific and expensive versions. It's worth noting that power electronics - and I'm talking things like 500~1000A rectifiers, power converters, UPSs, and SMPSs here - almost exclusively use fuses internally for protection, with breakers only on the input and output.
I don't know if he points this out in the article (10 pages? A sentence or 2 per page? C'mon!), but a fuse in the plug also protects the rest of the circuit against damage to the cord. Which bit of an appliance is most likely to get damaged and cause a risk of short circuit? Yeah, the cord. I'd say that shows quite a bit of understanding of practicality and safety, at least on the part of the original designer.
And note: I'm Australian, so I have no particular attachment to UK-style plugs.
Well, the transit in most incarnations has always been a German / English design, totally independent of Ford US. It's only the most recent ones that've been styled in the US, onto one of Ford's 'international' platforms (from Germany, IIRC, & used everywhere bar the US), but still built in Southampton (not sure if they're still made in Köln).
So, essentially, the UK Transit is the last of the truly 'European' Fords; a hangover from the days when Ford in the UK and Germany designed their own stuff from the ground up.
(Looks at lid of laptop ... looks at shopping receipt...)
Nope, don't see it. Just as well, 'cos I've apparrently got a tree full of copyright-infringement in my backyard...
The real travesty here is Woolworths. Their corporate logo is apple green, their staff uniforms are apple green - so what do they do? Make their store loyalty card bright orange, and make their staff wear a bright orange cap to advertise it.
Now I'm as straight as they come and, as such, have absolutely no eye for colour-coordination - but even I would baulk at wearing bright orange and a rather-subdued apple green together. That's about as tasteless as their home brand oven-fry chips. You're checking out the cute checkout chick, you look up to her face, and ...
ARRGH!
But, just as the poor girl at the checkout had the decency to apologise for giving me the hard-sell on the card, I had the decency to not laugh at her hat.
Until I walked outside, anyway...
How much you gonna be paying for Windows 7 just to make Vista work properly? ;-)