Go look at iFixit's teardown. The nexus has about 1/3 of the battery and runs about as long as an iPad3. The display on the iPad drove up the cost and sucks battery because they pushed it out before the tech was really ready.
And I'd bet profit is being banked on the Nexus at launch. Tablets are insanely overpriced. You can go to Walmart today and pick up a netbook for about $220 with a 10.1 inch display, hard drive, Windows 7 license, all the extra fans and crap to run Intel Inside and a more complicated laptop housing. We were told an SoC built around ARM was simplier, cheaper and needed less power. So why do they cost so much more?
Why wouldn't they? How many people buy directly from Adobe's webstore? Any other distribution chain is going to rake off at least thirty points. And it is a fairly safe bet that even sales through the Adobe site get put into the books with at least 10% to sales costs. Remember, even prime A list retailers like WalMart give up a point or so just to the credit card companies, I'd bet $10 that Adobe's web storefront is paying at least three, stuff like that gets a fair amount of chargebacks from fraud, etc. No, Adobe won't pull out. Besides, if I'm reading the tea leaves right Windows will be doing exactly the same thing by then so where would they go? It is the retailers who are f*cked.
Was trying to wade through all the annualized crap and in a hurry to get a quick 'back of the envelope' number. So I read "With these assumptions, figuring out how much solar energy hits the entire planet is relatively simple. 12.2 trillion watt-hours converts to 12,211 gigawatt-hours, and based on 8,760 hours per year, and 197 million square miles of earth’s surface (including the oceans), the earth receives about 274 million gigawatt-years of solar energy, which translates to an astonishing 8.2 million “quads” of Btu energy per year." and parsed out the 12,211gw hours. Note that it did bug me enough to try running the numbers a different way as a cross check.
And those still don't look very good.
> I sincerely hope you're not presuming that it needs to be done in one single blot....
Ok, so we do little one square km blots..... 7569 of them dotted across the fruited plain? Can't see that plan flying any better, especially since they really need to be concentrated in the lower desert areas of the country to avoid being even less efficient. If the greens won't allow wind turbines because they might disturb a little lizard I just can't imagine square kilometers of collectors passing without a decade or two of legal wrangling. Remember I already factored in fairly large derate for gaps to allow sunlight to get to the ground, but that won't satisfy a green. I know that, you know that.
> Figure out how much is involved in the continual epic projects of extracting and transporting fossil fuels
A lot. But I doubt it is more than filling the country with collectors. In either money or ecological impact.
Nukes. It is the only medium term solution. Remember that we not only want to convert existing electrical consumption we want to get off oil, and that means enough electricity to run cars, big rigs, buses, trains, everything. Solar ain't going to do that.
1. We already tried it. Turned out there were no shovel ready jobs so the money just flowed to state governments to postpone layoffs a year or so. It is now so bad that even the government itself can't actually DO anything because of the government red tape. If you announced a massive project tomorrow, got it through Congress next week the actual dirt couldn't start being moved for at least five and probably ten years. More if it is a really big project because of the lawsuits.
2. We don't have the money. We are already borrowing over a trillion dollars a year.
Replying to myself. Never trust a green website. Just did my own math. The amount of energy hitting the ground averages 1361 Watts per square meter. US peak electrical generation in the summer (which happens to be peak sunshine) needs 1017GW. So my math says 747 square kilometers receive that much energy. So if you could cover that much territory 100% (and get the greens to allow totally darkening that much sky) and achieve 100% conversion (not!) then you could power the US entirely with solar. Discounting the need to have some way to power us at night since there wouldn't be any spare capacity to store.
So since you aren't likely to get anywhere near even 50% efficency on the conversion and you will need to allow some light past lets multiply the area needed by ten. So an 86x86 kilometer square would be a good starting point for powering the current US grid. Reality would probably need to at least double that again. So the questions are two:
1. In what alternate reality will the greens allow paving over that much of the Earth?
2. Anyone care to guess how much in dollars, labor and natural resources would be involved in such an epic project?
The math smells. "200,000 gigawatts in the United States alone" has to mean 200,000 gigawatts per hour since it is being compared to a nuke plant generating 1GW, otherwise they instantly fail, am I right? But the first link I hit on google says only 12,211GW of solar energy hits the whole Earth. See the problem? Guess math is hard for greens.
> > "Fat people: the singing canary in the mineshaft of freedom" -Dennis Miller
> What the fuck does that.SIG even mean?
Miller was obviously riffing the whole Bloomberg vs fat thing. But he was wrong. The canary was smokers. When they came for them we did nothing, because the smoke was annoying anyway so screw em. We were warned at the time that it wouldn't stop there. It didn't. Now we calmly discuss whether salt should be banned instead of yelling "WTF! What sort of fascist f*ck would even suggest telling a restaurant that it can't put out salt shakers. Your political career is ovah!" In other words, the fight on the big issue of freedom is over and we are debating the style of the chains we shall wear.
Re:Windows 8 seems like a solid product
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 1
You can't actually post while an article is still in the Mysterious Future. But recently they put in the compose box so you can get a head start on writing a post, which beats having to cut/paste from an editor. But you will get an error if you try to preview until the appointed time.
Question, because I don't have direct knowledge and might be talking outta my butt here....
> The problem here is that HP and Dell both have significant inroads > into the corporate, small and medium sized business worlds...
How many medium and large entities wouldn't already have an assigned Microsoft sales weasel hanging around to do the licensing deals? I'd think there wouldn't be all that many. Small is another story, but they will adapt to whatever the world gives em since they are generally not tech savvy and lack any sort of bargaining power anyway.
Re:Let the bitching begin....
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> I really wish Valve would do a general App store, beyond games...
You don't get it do you. Value does, which is why they are prepared to run a Hail Mary pass; their balls are in a vise and they know it.
Once the Microsoft Market takes over there is no place for a third party store. The App stores aren't about the improved customer experience. They aren't about security. The whole point of the App Store model is everyone saw Apple rake off thirty thick juicy points from each and every sale and Microsoft wants in. If they don't do it today, they will do it next version; only App Store purchased apps will run and any 'in app' purchases will be required to be fulfilled through the app store, exactly the same rules as Apple so no possibility of an Anti-Trust action cranking up.
Steam on WIndows will be as impotent as Amazon is on iProducts.
And yes Apple will also eventually pull the trigger on OS X apps being required to come from the App Store, and for the same reason. To them the question is "Do we want 30% of the sticker price on Adobe's Creative Suite and all those high priced plugins, fonts, etc?" And if you ask that question the only possible answer is pretty obvious, isn't it?
Re:Let the bitching begin....
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I can see where Microsoft is coming from actually. Dell, HP, etc. add almost nothing anymore. They all just rebadge stuff made in the same Chinese factories Apple, the phone makers, etc. gets their stuff from. So why leave the profits currently going to Dell and friends on the table? Cut out the middleman AND gain agility to innovate. The downside of course that with that vast 'PC' ecosystem out there competing it ensures that one lame batch of designers can't kill off the PC as a platform. And Microsoft has never been known as a 'innovator' or even particularly creative. They ain't no Apple. Heck, they have never been known to even play at the level of a Sony or Samsung. They better get really good, really fast because they have pretty much declared open season on the OEM partners.
So Google and Moz are pissed that only Microsoft can get to native code but googling does seem to confirm that some layer other than just the hyped html5 stuff is being partly exposed on ARM but Metro is the only permitted API. Confusing. Meh, they will either break down and allow third party native code or nobody is going to care about WinRT. Even Google relented on the Java or bust dictate with Android. I'm betting then also give in and let 3rd parties port Win32 applications.
Re:Let the bitching begin....
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Before they had a monopoly. OEMs had no choice, neither did customers. You ran Windows, whether this year's version sucked or not. If you were an enterprise you had the option to get your new machines licensed with the non-sucking version but end users just sucked it up.
That is what is now in doubt. Will people just sigh and buy that PC with the Win8 turd on the drive anyway, because they still feel they have no other choice, or do they go ahead and move to a tablet. Cut total boxes shipped in half and the economies of scale come into question in a world where even flat sales is considered a disaster by the stock market. AMD will certainly be dead leaving Intel to carry the workstation CPU flag forward alone. Dell would survive but HP probably dies. Enough of the chop shops and builders leave and the flood of generic 'PC' motherboard and other parts start to dry up. That is the phones/tablets/consoles vs workstation future I worry about.
Re:Windows 8 seems like a solid product
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 1
Yea, good catch on that. I am a sub so I take the Mysterious Future for granted, which is how I got the second post and even had time to put a little effort into it. But how exactly did this guy get first? Is Slashdot offering select people the ability to post without the subscriber indicator? I only get the option to post anonymous, in the past there was an option to post without taking the karma bonus but apparently it vanished at some point and I didn't notice.
Re:Let the bitching begin....
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
> But killing off.net?! Where do you get that from?
Take another look at Metro. Especially at what they permit on ARM. Microsoft gets to release native code but everyone else must use the MIcrosoft version of HTML5. Does that sound like a winning tactic to you? Doesn't to me either and when the developers raise a loud enough stink that they simply can't port real applications to that Microsoft is going to have to make a decision. Back down and allow at least some way for select 3rd party applications to access a more usable ABI or just go with the closed platform and abandon what has to date been the very successful strategy of deoending on a vibrant 3rd party software sector.
Re:Windows 8 seems like a solid product
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Says the account with exactly three posts, all posted today and all praising Windows 8.
Let the bitching begin....
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Microsoft seems to repeat mistakes don't they? DOS 4.0, Bob, ME, Vista; the public reaction to all should have been predictable enough that somebody in a corporation their size should have been able to see it coming and delay or abort the release of those turds. But no, they dropped em all and took the abuse and ridicule while apparently learning nothing. Now comes Windows 8.
Maybe they will have time to get Windows 9 right, maybe not. That is what has changed, before they were an unstoppable monopoly and now? We shall see. They have offended their OEM partners with the Surface tablet, the Developers, Developers, Developers! with the knifing of Silverlight and apparently the beginning of the end for both Win32 and.NET and I'm not convinced customers are going to be all that happy with what is about to be rammed down their thoat. All at a time when their monopoly is threatened like never before. The desktop PC itself is being questioned for most users, Office is threatened by Cloud apps and even the long standing stranglehold of Blackberry + Exchange is not looking very healthy about now.
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet but Microsoft just might be dying. And after hating on them for decades I'm not entirely sure I'm going to applaud when they exit the stage. The PC is likely to go with them, by which I mean the open platform anyone can write programs for and create add on hardware, etc. The post Microsoft future looks like a grim world of sealed media consumption devices for most and a return to 'workstations' for the select who can afford machines costing as much as a car.
Few will question anymore that Apple is a dark force of DRM and lockin. And the release of the Nexus 7 shows Google to be fast getting in touch with their Evil side. The only major difference (other than a model years' worth of hardware refresh) between it and the equally sealed up Amazon Fire is which app/media ecosystem it is bundled to.
> > I actually like gun control laws, but I can't see any way they can be enforced
> Why would you LIKE a law that is not enforceable, or wildly ignored?
Please do not argue for my team if that is the sort of debating skill you are going to bring to the effort. You cut off the original post's very next words that would supply the answer to your question. They were ", long term, in light of this kind of technology" Since the original wasn't clear enough for you I'll try to make the argument in different words for you. He likes the idea of gun control but in light of the long term trend in tech doesn't believe it is workable. In other words he doesn't like it but thinks the pro gun camp is going to win in the end. I agree with his conclusion but think it a good thing overall instead of lamenting it. You are apparently just confused.:)
We are the good guys, remember? We normally are the ones having to deal with our words being twisted beyond recognition. Lets not adopt their ways, winning isn't worth losing what makes winning worth it.
I get it. Downloading stuff is what this whole trend is leading to. Now we download content but still have to get our stuff from Chinese factories while the profits still go to the same mega corps who slap a logo on and charge out the wazoo.
So fear will be used to keep the little people in line. The Soviets feared the printer and photocopier because they were mortal threats to the lie at the heart of their civilization. Our leaders fear this for pretty much the same reason, materialism is the heart of our civilization.
This fight is already happening. What do ya think the whole war over software patents boils down to? Is it a patentable machine or a copyrightable expression in code? Well soon it will be everything is downloadable and where is the line? That is the heart of this argument in a nutshell.
When the data going to the climate models is of such short duration as to be meaninless or is outright garbage in the first place and there is no way to even test a one hundred year prediction in less than a century (should be sorta obvious) it is not even clear what place a confidence interval would even have in this discussion. If we know the inputs are dubious and incomplete and the outputs are untestable I don't even know where science fits into this discussion. I'm not challenging a particular paper, model or result. I question the idea.
> It's a real shame we don't have a systematic way of investigating the accuracy of a model
Exactly. If we want to test a model of a nuke we model away and then conduct an underground test once in a while to confirm the model data and usually end up refining the model. Or at least we used to. If we are modeling a new airplane design we test the model by evenually building the plane. If we are testing a weather model we get results in a few days we can use to refine the model. If we want to test a climate model we do what? Wait a hundred years and see? But we have to act NOW, no time to wait! See the problem.
> It's just what you imagine the selection criteria to be..
Imagine anyone without a proven, published, paper trail firmly establishing themselves in the warmer camp getting tenure at any institution reputable enough to be taken 'seriously' in the peer reviewed press. Imagine anyone getting a governent research grant without such a politically approved position. Imagine a specific research grant application that isn't setting out to help 'settle' the science. Remember that is clearly established that only government funded researchers are 'real' scientists, since accepting one dollar from industry will be used for the rest of your career to label you an industry shill, see today's slashdot discussion for proof of that. Now consider this: Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel recommended that the AMS boot anyone out who not only doesn't follow the Party line on AGW, but that refuses to misuse their position as a meteorologist to push the government line on climatology, a related subject that we are reminded every time the subject arises here is NOT qualified to hold a disenting opinion on AGW. The remarkable thing here isn't that some idiot spouted some fascist idiocy; no the remarkable thing is the idiot wasn't condemned by all right thinking people. In such a hostile environment is it really remarkable that most 'scientists' (who if you remember your Heinlein you will know that most 'scientists' are bottle washers and button sorters anyway) keep their heads down, duckspeak the Party line and work on getting tenure and growing their empire?
> So why don't we simply use a better designed system...
Because it would work. But it would not serve the political needs of the warmers. They need action NOW. Your proposal would instantly freeze any action to reorder civilization to shift control over pretty much all energy (and thereby industry, transport, most everything) into the hands of a small elite superior cadre of international 'experts' while we waited decades for results.
The idea our actions are changing the environment is fairly intuitive, but our level of scientific knowledge, records and computational ability are utterly inadequate to applying the scientific method to understanding it in anything like the level of detail needed to have a 'consensus' on it. Therefore all we are left with is faith based belief calling itself science. Which just happens to recommend the deepest desires in the hearts of those making the policy recomendations. Total coincidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Go look at iFixit's teardown. The nexus has about 1/3 of the battery and runs about as long as an iPad3. The display on the iPad drove up the cost and sucks battery because they pushed it out before the tech was really ready.
And I'd bet profit is being banked on the Nexus at launch. Tablets are insanely overpriced. You can go to Walmart today and pick up a netbook for about $220 with a 10.1 inch display, hard drive, Windows 7 license, all the extra fans and crap to run Intel Inside and a more complicated laptop housing. We were told an SoC built around ARM was simplier, cheaper and needed less power. So why do they cost so much more?
Why wouldn't they? How many people buy directly from Adobe's webstore? Any other distribution chain is going to rake off at least thirty points. And it is a fairly safe bet that even sales through the Adobe site get put into the books with at least 10% to sales costs. Remember, even prime A list retailers like WalMart give up a point or so just to the credit card companies, I'd bet $10 that Adobe's web storefront is paying at least three, stuff like that gets a fair amount of chargebacks from fraud, etc. No, Adobe won't pull out. Besides, if I'm reading the tea leaves right Windows will be doing exactly the same thing by then so where would they go? It is the retailers who are f*cked.
Was trying to wade through all the annualized crap and in a hurry to get a quick 'back of the envelope' number. So I read "With these assumptions, figuring out how much solar energy hits the entire planet is relatively simple. 12.2 trillion watt-hours converts to 12,211 gigawatt-hours, and based on 8,760 hours per year, and 197 million square miles of earth’s surface (including the oceans), the earth receives about 274 million gigawatt-years of solar energy, which translates to an astonishing 8.2 million “quads” of Btu energy per year." and parsed out the 12,211gw hours. Note that it did bug me enough to try running the numbers a different way as a cross check.
And those still don't look very good.
> I sincerely hope you're not presuming that it needs to be done in one single blot....
Ok, so we do little one square km blots..... 7569 of them dotted across the fruited plain? Can't see that plan flying any better, especially since they really need to be concentrated in the lower desert areas of the country to avoid being even less efficient. If the greens won't allow wind turbines because they might disturb a little lizard I just can't imagine square kilometers of collectors passing without a decade or two of legal wrangling. Remember I already factored in fairly large derate for gaps to allow sunlight to get to the ground, but that won't satisfy a green. I know that, you know that.
> Figure out how much is involved in the continual epic projects of extracting and transporting fossil fuels
A lot. But I doubt it is more than filling the country with collectors. In either money or ecological impact.
Nukes. It is the only medium term solution. Remember that we not only want to convert existing electrical consumption we want to get off oil, and that means enough electricity to run cars, big rigs, buses, trains, everything. Solar ain't going to do that.
1. We already tried it. Turned out there were no shovel ready jobs so the money just flowed to state governments to postpone layoffs a year or so. It is now so bad that even the government itself can't actually DO anything because of the government red tape. If you announced a massive project tomorrow, got it through Congress next week the actual dirt couldn't start being moved for at least five and probably ten years. More if it is a really big project because of the lawsuits.
2. We don't have the money. We are already borrowing over a trillion dollars a year.
> Why do you need so much power after dark anyway, can't you live without your iron?
1. Electric cars. Don't we still want those? Or did a miss a meeting?
2. Climate control. Here where I live the outside temp can stay above the typical AC setting 24/7. In other places it gets frickin cold at night.
3. So you want us running the washer/dryer during the day, at peak load time? Jeeze.
4. Many industrial operations go 24/7.
Replying to myself. Never trust a green website. Just did my own math. The amount of energy hitting the ground averages 1361 Watts per square meter. US peak electrical generation in the summer (which happens to be peak sunshine) needs 1017GW. So my math says 747 square kilometers receive that much energy. So if you could cover that much territory 100% (and get the greens to allow totally darkening that much sky) and achieve 100% conversion (not!) then you could power the US entirely with solar. Discounting the need to have some way to power us at night since there wouldn't be any spare capacity to store.
So since you aren't likely to get anywhere near even 50% efficency on the conversion and you will need to allow some light past lets multiply the area needed by ten. So an 86x86 kilometer square would be a good starting point for powering the current US grid. Reality would probably need to at least double that again. So the questions are two:
1. In what alternate reality will the greens allow paving over that much of the Earth?
2. Anyone care to guess how much in dollars, labor and natural resources would be involved in such an epic project?
The math smells. "200,000 gigawatts in the United States alone" has to mean 200,000 gigawatts per hour since it is being compared to a nuke plant generating 1GW, otherwise they instantly fail, am I right? But the first link I hit on google says only 12,211GW of solar energy hits the whole Earth. See the problem? Guess math is hard for greens.
> > "Fat people: the singing canary in the mineshaft of freedom" -Dennis Miller
> What the fuck does that .SIG even mean?
Miller was obviously riffing the whole Bloomberg vs fat thing. But he was wrong. The canary was smokers. When they came for them we did nothing, because the smoke was annoying anyway so screw em. We were warned at the time that it wouldn't stop there. It didn't. Now we calmly discuss whether salt should be banned instead of yelling "WTF! What sort of fascist f*ck would even suggest telling a restaurant that it can't put out salt shakers. Your political career is ovah!" In other words, the fight on the big issue of freedom is over and we are debating the style of the chains we shall wear.
You can't actually post while an article is still in the Mysterious Future. But recently they put in the compose box so you can get a head start on writing a post, which beats having to cut/paste from an editor. But you will get an error if you try to preview until the appointed time.
Question, because I don't have direct knowledge and might be talking outta my butt here....
> The problem here is that HP and Dell both have significant inroads
> into the corporate, small and medium sized business worlds...
How many medium and large entities wouldn't already have an assigned Microsoft sales weasel hanging around to do the licensing deals? I'd think there wouldn't be all that many. Small is another story, but they will adapt to whatever the world gives em since they are generally not tech savvy and lack any sort of bargaining power anyway.
> I really wish Valve would do a general App store, beyond games...
You don't get it do you. Value does, which is why they are prepared to run a Hail Mary pass; their balls are in a vise and they know it.
Once the Microsoft Market takes over there is no place for a third party store. The App stores aren't about the improved customer experience. They aren't about security. The whole point of the App Store model is everyone saw Apple rake off thirty thick juicy points from each and every sale and Microsoft wants in. If they don't do it today, they will do it next version; only App Store purchased apps will run and any 'in app' purchases will be required to be fulfilled through the app store, exactly the same rules as Apple so no possibility of an Anti-Trust action cranking up.
Steam on WIndows will be as impotent as Amazon is on iProducts.
And yes Apple will also eventually pull the trigger on OS X apps being required to come from the App Store, and for the same reason. To them the question is "Do we want 30% of the sticker price on Adobe's Creative Suite and all those high priced plugins, fonts, etc?" And if you ask that question the only possible answer is pretty obvious, isn't it?
I can see where Microsoft is coming from actually. Dell, HP, etc. add almost nothing anymore. They all just rebadge stuff made in the same Chinese factories Apple, the phone makers, etc. gets their stuff from. So why leave the profits currently going to Dell and friends on the table? Cut out the middleman AND gain agility to innovate. The downside of course that with that vast 'PC' ecosystem out there competing it ensures that one lame batch of designers can't kill off the PC as a platform. And Microsoft has never been known as a 'innovator' or even particularly creative. They ain't no Apple. Heck, they have never been known to even play at the level of a Sony or Samsung. They better get really good, really fast because they have pretty much declared open season on the OEM partners.
Ug, couldn't ya have posted a shorter page. :)
So Google and Moz are pissed that only Microsoft can get to native code but googling does seem to confirm that some layer other than just the hyped html5 stuff is being partly exposed on ARM but Metro is the only permitted API. Confusing. Meh, they will either break down and allow third party native code or nobody is going to care about WinRT. Even Google relented on the Java or bust dictate with Android. I'm betting then also give in and let 3rd parties port Win32 applications.
Before they had a monopoly. OEMs had no choice, neither did customers. You ran Windows, whether this year's version sucked or not. If you were an enterprise you had the option to get your new machines licensed with the non-sucking version but end users just sucked it up.
That is what is now in doubt. Will people just sigh and buy that PC with the Win8 turd on the drive anyway, because they still feel they have no other choice, or do they go ahead and move to a tablet. Cut total boxes shipped in half and the economies of scale come into question in a world where even flat sales is considered a disaster by the stock market. AMD will certainly be dead leaving Intel to carry the workstation CPU flag forward alone. Dell would survive but HP probably dies. Enough of the chop shops and builders leave and the flood of generic 'PC' motherboard and other parts start to dry up. That is the phones/tablets/consoles vs workstation future I worry about.
Yea, good catch on that. I am a sub so I take the Mysterious Future for granted, which is how I got the second post and even had time to put a little effort into it. But how exactly did this guy get first? Is Slashdot offering select people the ability to post without the subscriber indicator? I only get the option to post anonymous, in the past there was an option to post without taking the karma bonus but apparently it vanished at some point and I didn't notice.
> But killing off .net?! Where do you get that from?
Take another look at Metro. Especially at what they permit on ARM. Microsoft gets to release native code but everyone else must use the MIcrosoft version of HTML5. Does that sound like a winning tactic to you? Doesn't to me either and when the developers raise a loud enough stink that they simply can't port real applications to that Microsoft is going to have to make a decision. Back down and allow at least some way for select 3rd party applications to access a more usable ABI or just go with the closed platform and abandon what has to date been the very successful strategy of deoending on a vibrant 3rd party software sector.
Says the account with exactly three posts, all posted today and all praising Windows 8.
Microsoft seems to repeat mistakes don't they? DOS 4.0, Bob, ME, Vista; the public reaction to all should have been predictable enough that somebody in a corporation their size should have been able to see it coming and delay or abort the release of those turds. But no, they dropped em all and took the abuse and ridicule while apparently learning nothing. Now comes Windows 8.
Maybe they will have time to get Windows 9 right, maybe not. That is what has changed, before they were an unstoppable monopoly and now? We shall see. They have offended their OEM partners with the Surface tablet, the Developers, Developers, Developers! with the knifing of Silverlight and apparently the beginning of the end for both Win32 and .NET and I'm not convinced customers are going to be all that happy with what is about to be rammed down their thoat. All at a time when their monopoly is threatened like never before. The desktop PC itself is being questioned for most users, Office is threatened by Cloud apps and even the long standing stranglehold of Blackberry + Exchange is not looking very healthy about now.
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet but Microsoft just might be dying. And after hating on them for decades I'm not entirely sure I'm going to applaud when they exit the stage. The PC is likely to go with them, by which I mean the open platform anyone can write programs for and create add on hardware, etc. The post Microsoft future looks like a grim world of sealed media consumption devices for most and a return to 'workstations' for the select who can afford machines costing as much as a car.
Few will question anymore that Apple is a dark force of DRM and lockin. And the release of the Nexus 7 shows Google to be fast getting in touch with their Evil side. The only major difference (other than a model years' worth of hardware refresh) between it and the equally sealed up Amazon Fire is which app/media ecosystem it is bundled to.
> > I actually like gun control laws, but I can't see any way they can be enforced
> Why would you LIKE a law that is not enforceable, or wildly ignored?
Please do not argue for my team if that is the sort of debating skill you are going to bring to the effort. You cut off the original post's very next words that would supply the answer to your question. They were ", long term, in light of this kind of technology" Since the original wasn't clear enough for you I'll try to make the argument in different words for you. He likes the idea of gun control but in light of the long term trend in tech doesn't believe it is workable. In other words he doesn't like it but thinks the pro gun camp is going to win in the end. I agree with his conclusion but think it a good thing overall instead of lamenting it. You are apparently just confused. :)
We are the good guys, remember? We normally are the ones having to deal with our words being twisted beyond recognition. Lets not adopt their ways, winning isn't worth losing what makes winning worth it.
> of course if you add something meaningful or modify the original enough for it to be a new invention, it ceases to be an issue.
Nope. You can patent your addition but you will still need to license the underlying patent to sell your improvement.
I get it. Downloading stuff is what this whole trend is leading to. Now we download content but still have to get our stuff from Chinese factories while the profits still go to the same mega corps who slap a logo on and charge out the wazoo.
So fear will be used to keep the little people in line. The Soviets feared the printer and photocopier because they were mortal threats to the lie at the heart of their civilization. Our leaders fear this for pretty much the same reason, materialism is the heart of our civilization.
This fight is already happening. What do ya think the whole war over software patents boils down to? Is it a patentable machine or a copyrightable expression in code? Well soon it will be everything is downloadable and where is the line? That is the heart of this argument in a nutshell.
> Do you even know what a confidence interval is?
When the data going to the climate models is of such short duration as to be meaninless or is outright garbage in the first place and there is no way to even test a one hundred year prediction in less than a century (should be sorta obvious) it is not even clear what place a confidence interval would even have in this discussion. If we know the inputs are dubious and incomplete and the outputs are untestable I don't even know where science fits into this discussion. I'm not challenging a particular paper, model or result. I question the idea.
> It's a real shame we don't have a systematic way of investigating the accuracy of a model
Exactly. If we want to test a model of a nuke we model away and then conduct an underground test once in a while to confirm the model data and usually end up refining the model. Or at least we used to. If we are modeling a new airplane design we test the model by evenually building the plane. If we are testing a weather model we get results in a few days we can use to refine the model. If we want to test a climate model we do what? Wait a hundred years and see? But we have to act NOW, no time to wait! See the problem.
> It's just what you imagine the selection criteria to be..
Imagine anyone without a proven, published, paper trail firmly establishing themselves in the warmer camp getting tenure at any institution reputable enough to be taken 'seriously' in the peer reviewed press. Imagine anyone getting a governent research grant without such a politically approved position. Imagine a specific research grant application that isn't setting out to help 'settle' the science. Remember that is clearly established that only government funded researchers are 'real' scientists, since accepting one dollar from industry will be used for the rest of your career to label you an industry shill, see today's slashdot discussion for proof of that. Now consider this: Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel recommended that the AMS boot anyone out who not only doesn't follow the Party line on AGW, but that refuses to misuse their position as a meteorologist to push the government line on climatology, a related subject that we are reminded every time the subject arises here is NOT qualified to hold a disenting opinion on AGW. The remarkable thing here isn't that some idiot spouted some fascist idiocy; no the remarkable thing is the idiot wasn't condemned by all right thinking people. In such a hostile environment is it really remarkable that most 'scientists' (who if you remember your Heinlein you will know that most 'scientists' are bottle washers and button sorters anyway) keep their heads down, duckspeak the Party line and work on getting tenure and growing their empire?
> So why don't we simply use a better designed system...
Because it would work. But it would not serve the political needs of the warmers. They need action NOW. Your proposal would instantly freeze any action to reorder civilization to shift control over pretty much all energy (and thereby industry, transport, most everything) into the hands of a small elite superior cadre of international 'experts' while we waited decades for results.
The idea our actions are changing the environment is fairly intuitive, but our level of scientific knowledge, records and computational ability are utterly inadequate to applying the scientific method to understanding it in anything like the level of detail needed to have a 'consensus' on it. Therefore all we are left with is faith based belief calling itself science. Which just happens to recommend the deepest desires in the hearts of those making the policy recomendations. Total coincidence.