I don't particularly support the notion that "religion is a disease", seeing as it seems somewhat sensationalist. I meant only to point out the complete illogic the counter argument "it cant be a disease because so many people have it".
Impressive and all, but I take umbrage at calling it a "1 TB barrier". Is it disproportionately more difficult than sorting 0.99 TB?
Breaking "the sound barrier" was hard because of the inherent difficulty of going faster that sound in an atmosphere (sonic booms and whatnot). It was harder than simply travelling that fast would have been.
If this is just further evolution of sorting speed, it makes it a milestone, not a barrier.
What's amusing is that you seem to have an unprovable belief that religion is a disease to be cured is somehow obvious.
The fact that a majority of the people on Earth disagree with you demonstrates not only that it isn't obvious, but that you are probably just as irrational in your beliefs as those people are in theirs. But at least they have the intellectual honesty to admit it's faith.
If a majority of people on the planet were afflicted with AIDS, it wouldn't make it any less a disease to be cured.
EVERYTHING is either legal or illegal. That is to say that it is either against some law or other, or it is not.
You may have interpreted the laws as they are to mean that something is legal. All the courts have done is confirm that your interpretation is, in their great experience, correct. They haven't given you any new rights or taken away any old rights, merely confirmed an interpretation that you had already come to.
The legislature could make new laws to alter your rights or confirm what they believe should be illegal- but then they could do this already, with or without the judicial interpretation.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
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· Score: 3, Informative
And the slightly less sceptical version of what you're saying is that there are other concerns with buying technology other than the performance and cost of the technology itself- support contracts, training costs, supplier relationships, interoperability concerns (real or imagined, technical or otherwise).
I'd love to see my business upgrade from XP to a Linux distro, for example, instead of Win7. But I can barely imagine the cost of retooling the entire company, retraining the whole staff, rehiring half the IT department with newly skilled sorts, and burning bridges with MS (who really do give a pretty VIP service to our company, being a pretty big buyer).
Calls of "switch to the better, cheaper products ffs!" from we on the lower ranks really don't account for the half of the corporate shenanigans that go on.
I just bought a new desktop rig. It was surprisingly hard work finding out what the "i5" processor actually was, what family of chip it was, how many cores, what have you. And the graphics card was just as awkward- a choice between a Geforce 330, which is apparently a new card based on the 200 series chipset, or a 340 which is apparently a rebadged 240. This presumably would mean that a 240 is more powerful than a 330; I wonder how many people might get caught out by that.
Admittedly I've never tried to actually do this, but presumably it would be possible to lock the user out of accessing C: and moving My Documents there while you're at it. Stick a default icon in the middle of their desktop linking to their own chunk of the network drive and hey presto.
Maybe I've asking the impossible of Windows though.
In my office there are over 100 people in an open-plan arrangement. Lots of temps, contractors, fixed termers, and shift workers in the mix. Lots of hot-desking too. We all use fairly generic workstations; all the juicy (theft-worthy) stuff is either server-side data, files on shared network drives, or access to our mainframe applications (access to which is tied to user accounts).
Even though the office is locked at night, access controlled and patrolled by security staff out of hours, leaving my account details on a scrap of paper in there would be a serious serious mistake. Access to my actual workstation is nothing- being able to log on to one as me would be killer.
Interface design should be done with the lowest common denominator in mind - making the functionality fully accessible to anybody with a single-button mouse, in other words.
Single button mice are not the lowest common denominator. Keyboard only strikes me as a lower denominator, as are touch-screens (which lack the ability to move the cursor without clicking, among other little bits and pieces).
Single button mice are an arbitrary point somewhat simpler than some things and somewhat more complex than others. There is clearly a point where too much simplicity creates usability difficulties (keyboard only, for example) and clearly also a point where too much complexity harms usability too (such as that insane 100 button mouse that occasionally gets an article on/.). The balancing point between these points isn't necessarily obvious- and I would argue that a standard 3 button mouse is probably about it.
You may argue otherwise, but I shall maintain that you are wrong:)
I somehow feel our military has more important things to do than play Starcraft II on deployment.
I work 8 hours or so a day, with the other 16 or so to do with as I like.
I'm not in the military, but I'd assume that down-time, where you are not actively working and are able to complete some leisure activities, is as vital for keeping military men sane as it is for keeping the rest of us sane.
I agree, and would like to add that it isn't just Starcraft- many "multiplayer classics" I own don't go online very much- Dawn of War was a great game, but I've played it multiplayer maybe a dozen times. Same goes for first person shooters.
How so? If the government says "we will pay $100 million for a LEO payload launch", and you can do it for $90 million, you make $10 million profit. If you can do it for $80 million, you make $20 million profit.
Sounds like an incentive to lower costs to me. Exactly the same incentive as there is to lower costs in all other business, too.
A zero button mouse would be great "if applications were designed for it". No mouse at all would be even better "if applications were designed for it". Then we would just have a keyboard, and we all know that a computer designed for use with no mouse and a keyboard is a massive step forward, right?
Just because something is simpler it doesn't mean it is more usable. And even if it COULD be more usable, it's reliant on a near mythical level of software interface design.
I grew up with two button mice. When the third button was added I thought it was the most useful development in the world- as did my far less computer savvy parents; it gave programs a whole extra layer of context commands to play with- and context specific controls are excellent. When that third button evolved into a wheel- bliss.
I now own, by user choice, a mouse with 8 buttons (L click, R click, wheel, back, forward, and buttons tied to a program selector and to mouse sensitivity controls). It's a little excessive for most users (I doubt most users have need for more than the first 5 in that list), but it illustrates a point of how complexity is not necessarily alien to usability.
I understand what you say, but EVE is a great game. What might be unacceptably rude in other games is what gives it it's excitement. Playing a game which is fundamentally unfair, and which has meaningful risks, is something that's become alien in the post coin-operated arcade days.
Anyone who acts like that in a game that ISN'T designed to be like that is just being a griefing idiot though. Everything in it's place and all that; most games can't work with it, EVE couldn't work without it.
The whole point of OLPC was to provide internet access, textbook e-reading, paperless word processing, and some joy, to impoverished children, in a form that is both durable and affordable to charities and 3rd world government schemes. How does multi-touch help with any of that again?
It sounds like it's just going to drive the price up, add an extra point of failure, and add a feature that even 99% of "1st world" consumer products hasn't bothered with.
"One library of text books per child" might have been a good idea for a project too, but guess which one seemed more expensive.
If you seriously want to improve education in third world countries there are only so many things you can do. Providing internet- (and thus "all the knowledge in the world")- accessing devices with a full productivity environment built in seems like as good an approach as any. Unless you have a secret stash of trained teachers (will travel) or are the owner of a stationary factory willing to make some donations, I'm not sure what else you might suggest.
When the article says "size" it is being fairly vague and more than a little lazy, you are quite right. But what they actually mean (charge distribution inherited from its composite quarks) is an important something, flashy name or otherwise. And it's considerably different from what the standard model predicts it to be. And that is a big deal.
I don't think "cool" has an awful lot to do with it.
The summary suggests price and availability as factors, and I would tend to agree. For any young hobbyist who just wants to play around writing Pong clones, the colossal free-software ecosystem beats the pay-for MS offerings every time. When those hobbyists graduate into doing something useful, they might stick with what they know.
So what you're saying is that you're desperate to send an authentic medieval crossbow to the moon, and are looking for something that can operate it?
Wait, no? You want to send custom designed cameras, drills and microscopes to the Moon? Then wouldn't they be just as easy to design them for use with pretty much anything with a corresponding interface?
All the "shape of the robot" will affect is its ability to move about on the lunar surface. Humans aren't known for being particularity good about moving about on any surface, lunar or otherwise.
So are tigers, octopuses, chimpanzees, rhinos, giraffes, and pretty much any other animal design you care to think of (and there are thousands upon thousands). There is zero reason why a monkey shaped robot is the best solution for a scientific mission to the Moon.
And the argument about reusing technology is spurious in the context; everything sent into space is custom designed and made anyway (right down to the ball-point pens). It's not like NASA would launch a sample return mission armed with a Dyson vacuum cleaner and a pair of binoculars.
My dumbphone doesn't suffer in this way, presumably because the antenna has been put in such a position that it is not easily blocked by a hand holding the phone in a comfortable grip, possibly helped by the antenna being properly insulated from my sweaty human hands causing it to short.
I'm sure if I removed the case, located the antenna, and gripped said antenna in my hands I would experience the laws of physics in all their glory. But my £12 Nokia does not suffer the same problems in general usage as the iPhone 4 (and probably other phones too) are reported to suffer.
As you quite rightly mention in your first paragraph, people have been creating "special" yeasts for years. There are already literally countless "special" yeasts manufactured for use in beverage making and industry.
In other words- that's hardly new. Presumably that problem has long since already been encountered and solved.
There is always an optimum for these things. 100 people working for a day and a half isn't necessarily it, and neither is 1 man working for 2 months. But assuming you stick with whatever seems about optimum, "man-hours" is still a relevant term- it is a perfectly useful way of measuring the cost of things.
E.g., if the "optimum" for this project happens to be 4 employees working for 2 weeks, that's "2 man-months". If each of your employees costs $5k a month, then that tells you the project will cost you about $10k.
That's the information all of the "man-month" business in TFA is supposed to confer to you- i.e., that it was relatively cheap for them.
For a company like, I don't know, Valve say, "2 man-months" (or 3 or 4 or 5) is the tiniest drop in the ocean.
I've been saying it for years and I'll say it again- its for this reason that Mac's rise back to relevance is a Good Thing for Linux users.
If a developer (and we're not just talking games here) is thinking about cross-platform portability right from day 1, it makes it far easier to port a product at any point in the future. If ever the proportion of desktops/laptops running something non-Windows becomes high enough, developers will have an excuse to spare a thought for portability. Even if Linux is still languishing in low single digits, it'll still benefit from it's BSD-powered younger cousin growing it's market share.
The results were for the last quarter, which is the most recent period anyone can report on. Maybe the iPhone 4 will completely change that (and that's a perfectly sensible possibility) but we won't know until at least a few months have gone by for someone to gather meaningful data.
And more importantly, it doesn't invalidate the ACs point- Android has been outselling iOS recently, and Android phones (allegedly) currently amount to 50 million+ handsets sold a year. If true, that is more than double the number of iPhones sold in 2009, which itself was approaching double the number sold in 2008.
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I don't particularly support the notion that "religion is a disease", seeing as it seems somewhat sensationalist. I meant only to point out the complete illogic the counter argument "it cant be a disease because so many people have it".
Impressive and all, but I take umbrage at calling it a "1 TB barrier". Is it disproportionately more difficult than sorting 0.99 TB?
Breaking "the sound barrier" was hard because of the inherent difficulty of going faster that sound in an atmosphere (sonic booms and whatnot). It was harder than simply travelling that fast would have been.
If this is just further evolution of sorting speed, it makes it a milestone, not a barrier.
What's amusing is that you seem to have an unprovable belief that religion is a disease to be cured is somehow obvious.
The fact that a majority of the people on Earth disagree with you demonstrates not only that it isn't obvious, but that you are probably just as irrational in your beliefs as those people are in theirs. But at least they have the intellectual honesty to admit it's faith.
If a majority of people on the planet were afflicted with AIDS, it wouldn't make it any less a disease to be cured.
Judges don't make laws, they interpret them.
EVERYTHING is either legal or illegal. That is to say that it is either against some law or other, or it is not.
You may have interpreted the laws as they are to mean that something is legal. All the courts have done is confirm that your interpretation is, in their great experience, correct. They haven't given you any new rights or taken away any old rights, merely confirmed an interpretation that you had already come to.
The legislature could make new laws to alter your rights or confirm what they believe should be illegal- but then they could do this already, with or without the judicial interpretation.
And the slightly less sceptical version of what you're saying is that there are other concerns with buying technology other than the performance and cost of the technology itself- support contracts, training costs, supplier relationships, interoperability concerns (real or imagined, technical or otherwise).
I'd love to see my business upgrade from XP to a Linux distro, for example, instead of Win7. But I can barely imagine the cost of retooling the entire company, retraining the whole staff, rehiring half the IT department with newly skilled sorts, and burning bridges with MS (who really do give a pretty VIP service to our company, being a pretty big buyer).
Calls of "switch to the better, cheaper products ffs!" from we on the lower ranks really don't account for the half of the corporate shenanigans that go on.
Exactly. And it is a pain.
I just bought a new desktop rig. It was surprisingly hard work finding out what the "i5" processor actually was, what family of chip it was, how many cores, what have you. And the graphics card was just as awkward- a choice between a Geforce 330, which is apparently a new card based on the 200 series chipset, or a 340 which is apparently a rebadged 240. This presumably would mean that a 240 is more powerful than a 330; I wonder how many people might get caught out by that.
Admittedly I've never tried to actually do this, but presumably it would be possible to lock the user out of accessing C: and moving My Documents there while you're at it. Stick a default icon in the middle of their desktop linking to their own chunk of the network drive and hey presto.
Maybe I've asking the impossible of Windows though.
In my office there are over 100 people in an open-plan arrangement. Lots of temps, contractors, fixed termers, and shift workers in the mix. Lots of hot-desking too. We all use fairly generic workstations; all the juicy (theft-worthy) stuff is either server-side data, files on shared network drives, or access to our mainframe applications (access to which is tied to user accounts).
Even though the office is locked at night, access controlled and patrolled by security staff out of hours, leaving my account details on a scrap of paper in there would be a serious serious mistake. Access to my actual workstation is nothing- being able to log on to one as me would be killer.
Interface design should be done with the lowest common denominator in mind - making the functionality fully accessible to anybody with a single-button mouse, in other words.
Single button mice are not the lowest common denominator. Keyboard only strikes me as a lower denominator, as are touch-screens (which lack the ability to move the cursor without clicking, among other little bits and pieces).
Single button mice are an arbitrary point somewhat simpler than some things and somewhat more complex than others. There is clearly a point where too much simplicity creates usability difficulties (keyboard only, for example) and clearly also a point where too much complexity harms usability too (such as that insane 100 button mouse that occasionally gets an article on /.). The balancing point between these points isn't necessarily obvious- and I would argue that a standard 3 button mouse is probably about it.
You may argue otherwise, but I shall maintain that you are wrong :)
I somehow feel our military has more important things to do than play Starcraft II on deployment.
I work 8 hours or so a day, with the other 16 or so to do with as I like.
I'm not in the military, but I'd assume that down-time, where you are not actively working and are able to complete some leisure activities, is as vital for keeping military men sane as it is for keeping the rest of us sane.
I agree, and would like to add that it isn't just Starcraft- many "multiplayer classics" I own don't go online very much- Dawn of War was a great game, but I've played it multiplayer maybe a dozen times. Same goes for first person shooters.
How so? If the government says "we will pay $100 million for a LEO payload launch", and you can do it for $90 million, you make $10 million profit. If you can do it for $80 million, you make $20 million profit.
Sounds like an incentive to lower costs to me. Exactly the same incentive as there is to lower costs in all other business, too.
A zero button mouse would be great "if applications were designed for it". No mouse at all would be even better "if applications were designed for it". Then we would just have a keyboard, and we all know that a computer designed for use with no mouse and a keyboard is a massive step forward, right?
Just because something is simpler it doesn't mean it is more usable. And even if it COULD be more usable, it's reliant on a near mythical level of software interface design.
I grew up with two button mice. When the third button was added I thought it was the most useful development in the world- as did my far less computer savvy parents; it gave programs a whole extra layer of context commands to play with- and context specific controls are excellent. When that third button evolved into a wheel- bliss.
I now own, by user choice, a mouse with 8 buttons (L click, R click, wheel, back, forward, and buttons tied to a program selector and to mouse sensitivity controls). It's a little excessive for most users (I doubt most users have need for more than the first 5 in that list), but it illustrates a point of how complexity is not necessarily alien to usability.
I understand what you say, but EVE is a great game. What might be unacceptably rude in other games is what gives it it's excitement. Playing a game which is fundamentally unfair, and which has meaningful risks, is something that's become alien in the post coin-operated arcade days.
Anyone who acts like that in a game that ISN'T designed to be like that is just being a griefing idiot though. Everything in it's place and all that; most games can't work with it, EVE couldn't work without it.
My thoughts exactly on reading this.
The whole point of OLPC was to provide internet access, textbook e-reading, paperless word processing, and some joy, to impoverished children, in a form that is both durable and affordable to charities and 3rd world government schemes. How does multi-touch help with any of that again?
It sounds like it's just going to drive the price up, add an extra point of failure, and add a feature that even 99% of "1st world" consumer products hasn't bothered with.
"One library of text books per child" might have been a good idea for a project too, but guess which one seemed more expensive.
If you seriously want to improve education in third world countries there are only so many things you can do. Providing internet- (and thus "all the knowledge in the world")- accessing devices with a full productivity environment built in seems like as good an approach as any. Unless you have a secret stash of trained teachers (will travel) or are the owner of a stationary factory willing to make some donations, I'm not sure what else you might suggest.
I feel you missed the good chap's point a little.
When the article says "size" it is being fairly vague and more than a little lazy, you are quite right. But what they actually mean (charge distribution inherited from its composite quarks) is an important something, flashy name or otherwise. And it's considerably different from what the standard model predicts it to be. And that is a big deal.
I don't think "cool" has an awful lot to do with it.
The summary suggests price and availability as factors, and I would tend to agree. For any young hobbyist who just wants to play around writing Pong clones, the colossal free-software ecosystem beats the pay-for MS offerings every time. When those hobbyists graduate into doing something useful, they might stick with what they know.
So what you're saying is that you're desperate to send an authentic medieval crossbow to the moon, and are looking for something that can operate it?
Wait, no? You want to send custom designed cameras, drills and microscopes to the Moon? Then wouldn't they be just as easy to design them for use with pretty much anything with a corresponding interface?
All the "shape of the robot" will affect is its ability to move about on the lunar surface. Humans aren't known for being particularity good about moving about on any surface, lunar or otherwise.
So are tigers, octopuses, chimpanzees, rhinos, giraffes, and pretty much any other animal design you care to think of (and there are thousands upon thousands). There is zero reason why a monkey shaped robot is the best solution for a scientific mission to the Moon.
And the argument about reusing technology is spurious in the context; everything sent into space is custom designed and made anyway (right down to the ball-point pens). It's not like NASA would launch a sample return mission armed with a Dyson vacuum cleaner and a pair of binoculars.
My dumbphone doesn't suffer in this way, presumably because the antenna has been put in such a position that it is not easily blocked by a hand holding the phone in a comfortable grip, possibly helped by the antenna being properly insulated from my sweaty human hands causing it to short.
I'm sure if I removed the case, located the antenna, and gripped said antenna in my hands I would experience the laws of physics in all their glory. But my £12 Nokia does not suffer the same problems in general usage as the iPhone 4 (and probably other phones too) are reported to suffer.
As you quite rightly mention in your first paragraph, people have been creating "special" yeasts for years. There are already literally countless "special" yeasts manufactured for use in beverage making and industry.
In other words- that's hardly new. Presumably that problem has long since already been encountered and solved.
There is always an optimum for these things. 100 people working for a day and a half isn't necessarily it, and neither is 1 man working for 2 months. But assuming you stick with whatever seems about optimum, "man-hours" is still a relevant term- it is a perfectly useful way of measuring the cost of things.
E.g., if the "optimum" for this project happens to be 4 employees working for 2 weeks, that's "2 man-months". If each of your employees costs $5k a month, then that tells you the project will cost you about $10k.
That's the information all of the "man-month" business in TFA is supposed to confer to you- i.e., that it was relatively cheap for them.
For a company like, I don't know, Valve say, "2 man-months" (or 3 or 4 or 5) is the tiniest drop in the ocean.
I've been saying it for years and I'll say it again- its for this reason that Mac's rise back to relevance is a Good Thing for Linux users.
If a developer (and we're not just talking games here) is thinking about cross-platform portability right from day 1, it makes it far easier to port a product at any point in the future. If ever the proportion of desktops/laptops running something non-Windows becomes high enough, developers will have an excuse to spare a thought for portability. Even if Linux is still languishing in low single digits, it'll still benefit from it's BSD-powered younger cousin growing it's market share.
The results were for the last quarter, which is the most recent period anyone can report on. Maybe the iPhone 4 will completely change that (and that's a perfectly sensible possibility) but we won't know until at least a few months have gone by for someone to gather meaningful data.
And more importantly, it doesn't invalidate the ACs point- Android has been outselling iOS recently, and Android phones (allegedly) currently amount to 50 million+ handsets sold a year. If true, that is more than double the number of iPhones sold in 2009, which itself was approaching double the number sold in 2008.