The very fact we haven't been attacked yet does prove the measures to be superior.
Good God, man. Simply repeating something over and over in the face of evidence to the contrary does not make your wish reality.
Clinton's administration had a 5 3/4 year span with no terrorism. Bush's longest stretch has been 4 2/3 years. How can you conclude that Bush's method is superior when no evidence of this assertion exists?
Now please explain to us how the Madrid skyscraper, which was of a similar truss design to the twin towers, managed to withstand a fire that burned for over 10 hours and reached peak temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius, even continuing to support a heavy construction crane perched on its roof, while WTC 1, which, according to all accounts, had a much cooler fire (roughly 250 degrees Celsius) burning within it, managed to collapse through sudden, total, and synchronous failure of all support structures, causing the building to fall straight down, at a speed only marginally slower than free-fall, into its own footprint, all in only 85 minutes.
That's easy. The Madrid building didn't have the fireproofing insulation blown off of ten floors worth of steel supports. Having an airplane hit the building will do that.
When you're done with that, perhaps you can explain how, in a stunning suspension of the laws of probability, WTC 2 collapsed in exactly the same manner, despite having sustaned impact damage and fire damage substantially different from WTC1.
It's not clear that the impacts were substantially different; both aircraft were banked at the time of impact, damaging many floors. The kinetic energy borne by debris of the 550-mph jetliner destroyed the fireproofing on the steel columns.
One plane hit near the center of the tower, the other farther off center. The offset was of little ultimate consequence given the load-bearing nature of the open floor plan. It was beneficial, but not ultimately necessary to destroy the core of the building with the initial impact.
And if you've managed to make it this far, mabye you can then enlighten us on how WTC 7, which was of a completely different design than WTC 1 and 2, collapsed into its own footprint in, again, exactly the same manner, despite the tiny detail that it was never struck by an airplane.
It seems obvious that it was a less robust design that was hit with about 50 stories of debris from the neighboring tower's collapse; have you been to ground zero? Building 7 and Building 6 were both heavily damaged by debris from the north tower.
I vehemently disagree with your theories on several grounds, the most obvious being that no conclusive evidence has emerged to show any government involvement in this matter - and I mean that the government of George W. Bush simply doesn't have the competence and follow-through to plan an orchestrate such a horrific and complicated event.
There was also another kind of government detachment from 9/11: ignored warnings, late translations, and a lazy administration with self-interest closest to heart.
For the large and growing segment of the U.S. population that disapproves of the Bush administration's incompetence and self-enrichment during a critical time in our history, your theories are the ravings of a crackpot. We may be united in our disdain and disgust for Bush, but your conspiracy rants are very far removed from the reality-based subjects we should be concerned with as a country and society.
Here's what's so ironic about the whole issue. The Bush administration has successfully kept the US free of terrorist attacks since 9/11/01. But his very success had lead to a sense of complacency, particularly among ultra-myopic Bush-haters.
You seem to be forgetting that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch.
That's not anything to be very proud of, now is it?
I didn't say I agreed with the additional curtailing of felon's rights. In nonviolent/nonsexual cases, I think it might be appropriate to restore full pre-conviction rights to a felon.
But that doesn't change the fact that they are convicted felons. In our system of justice (which works pretty well most of time, regardless of what you read), these people have been convicted of the most serious and egregious class of crimes. To restore full rights upon conditional release is not appropriate in most felony cases, and I do believe the state should have the right to collect biometric information about convicted felons in order to more easily solve recidivist crimes. Most felony criminals are pretty stupid, and few of them are in jail for computer crimes. It makes sense to collect information that reduces the time, money and effort involved in prosecuting recidivism.
Finally, in many states where felons have curtailed rights upon release, there is a clemency process that can restore some rights. Florida, Louisiana, and others will restore voting rights through clemency - a process that includes proving to a clemency board that you have been fully rehabilitated by your incarceration and that it would benefit society to restore some of your rights.
Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA?
Convicted felons have constraints placed on their rights. In many states, they can't ever vote. When you are convicted of a felony, even upon your release from incarceration you have fewer rights by law than people who aren't felons.
This is a non-story. A punk who got charged and convicted wants to stand on principle now. Too bad.
Now there are quotas and you can't spend time with people.
If you're going to offer support, either charge for it after a reasonable period (to allow people to report defects or problems out of the box for free) or be up front about the fact that your support organization is essentially "Dial-a-voice" where someone will read you the online help you were unable to process on your own.
Hard time quotas for phone agents are put in place by companies and decision makers that care less about helping customers than they do about the color of the sticker on the box that says "Free Support!"
"The code works," he says, "that's the important thing."
I hope he keeps his current job, because with that attitude, he won't get another one easily.
Spelling is as crucial to operating a machine as code that works. Does this guy know about the concept of the user? Does he not understand that attention to detail, especially on something like medical equipment might be more significant than a spelling lesson?
How many realized it was time to move on, not just from the job, but from the "customerz R teh st00pitz" attitude as well?
No kidding. I moved into Apple Cusotmer Relations as an Intern. 18 months later I'd survived the March '97 layoffs and I had moved off the phones to a job I really enjoyed.
Sure, we bitched about the customers - and they often deserved it - but normally only after work, with the attitude that if we could make people who were that pissed off into happy Apple customers day after day, we could do anything. This was during the PowerBook5300/Performa5200/color StyleWriter/PowerSurge/Ohmygodwecan'tbuildnaything thatworks! period at Apple.
I continued to work peripherally with the Customer and Executive relations groups and kept my friends there, but there's nothing that keeps people on the phones and out of the positions they really want more than a shitty attitude.
For the record, I did find that working the phones in Customer Relations, which required dealing with people who were nearly always combative was more difficult years after the fact than at the time. I had to unlearn a lot of behavior, and I don't think any training program can prepare you for getting yelled at by 30 different people every day while the calls pile up behind the current customer.
Finally, I know it's trite, but people really can hear you smile over the phone. I don't think this guy smiles much.
I temped at an insurance agency phone support office (thankfully not on phone support). The phone support had to hit a certain time per call. Consistent overshooting of this target time got one of my friends who was also temping there on phone support and who is one of the nicest people I know fired.
When I worked in Apple Customer Relations, we had call time targets, but no one would seriously think of firing you if you spent too long on a call with someone; when I worked there (95-97), the only reason I ever heard anyone getting fired was for being a stupid dumbass and replacing a machine four times because...the CD-ROM was vibrating. Talk about improperly setting the customer's expectations...
Technical support was in a little different world (and 1800 miles away in Austin, although our phones were all connected to the same switch, so I could call long distance from Austin to the other phone on my desk); you didn't assume people who were calling had run into an intractable or difficult to solve problem as we did in Customer Relations.
I think call time limits in call centers were invented by Lumbergh. If you're going to invite customers call at all, be prepared to solve their problems with adequate staffing and intelligent, well-trained phone agents.
TFA complains a lot, but Apple has what is probably one of the finer phone support organizations around. When I was there and to a greater extent after I left, Apple really focussed a lot of energy on tracking and gathering significant data from calls, and while they've made significant missteps (not covering some obvious design problems like some models of PowerBook hinges) AppleCare is probably the best support organization at a computer manufacturer.
At least Apple has a Customer Relations and Executive Relations groups for unhappy customers. Companies like Yahoo think it's appropriate to have unhappy customers exhaust online support options, then call to get a mystery e-mail address to get help, then wait while the elves at Yahoo deign to call them back. There's isn't even an executive in charge of customer support at Yahoo.
I'm a large format photographer (still use film - 20 square inches of it at a time) and I got really excited for just a minute until I started to think: "Why the hell would Slashdot run an article so interesting to me?"
A few years ago I saw a TV show regarding plane crashes. They showed one example of a commercial airliner taking off while its flaps were down.
You must be misremembering, because commcial airliners cannot leave the ground without lowering the flaps at least a few degrees. Leading (slats) and trailing edge flaps are required to produce enough lift on the thin, swept wing of a commercial airliner for a successful take off.
Jet airliner wings are a compromise design that must slice through thin air at 550mph and lift an airplane into thick air at 120mph - and be maneuverable everywhere in between. A commercial airliner could leave the ground with no flaps deployed, but chances are that even with a normal load of passengers and fuel that they'd overrun the end of the runway first.
"EarthLink said it expects the project to run to between $6 million and $8 million in initial costs, which include attaching radios and receivers to utility poles throughout the city. Within 10 years it expects the whole network, complete with upgrades and maintenance, to cost about $15 million.
Double those costs.
Now, double them again.
Google is trying to do with one public frequency and a LAN-based technology what Metricom could barely do with three public frequency ranges and a true microcellular architecture built specifically for WAN. And they're budgeting far too little for an area the size of San Francisco - where Metricom had four to five Ricochet radios every square mile, Google proposes to install a much higher density (they'll HAVE to, simply for decent frequency reuse in a hilly city full of highly reinforced concrete) of radios for less money...five years later?
Have fun, Google. It won't be easy. I predict the whole thing will degenerate into failure within three years. Why this fantasy about repurposing 802.11 for jobs it wasn't meant to do? I think this will be remembered as Google's first failure...depending on how the P.R. department manages to spin the eventual failure.
Yes. If they're trying so desperately to build marketshare, why not hire a couple of Unix/Linux experienced folks and hammer out drivers for OS X and Linux?
With the advent of Intel Macs, they don't even need anyone to write Open Firmware declaration ROMs for their hardware anymore - supporting the Mac is now the same as supporting any other OS - just write the drivers. Support should be relatively easy, too. Just hand the phone agents a Mac or Linux-based script for troubleshooting and spend some money on training.
They've already got the VIA tit to suck on (pardon the imagery) - don't tell me there's no cash for headcount if it meant another 10,000 customers or more.
I've made a few "what about UFS?" comments in this story, but I hope I don't come across as some weird filesystem fanboy. It's just that I can't figure out why this announcement is so exciting. ZFS is cool, sure, but I see it as an incremental improvement to widely used Unix filesystems rather than a quantum leap.
I think part of what makes this story so interesting is that despite the past few years' developments, most of us still expect Apple to act as it used to with regard to adopting new technology. In other words, we expect Apple to adhere to the 1980s and 1990s playbook of "NIH" - in other words, if Apple didn't come up with it, it's crap.
I think Steve Jobs changed all that, but I think there are lots of us who still find it interesting when Apple drops some in-house technology (Intel chipset over Apple's ASICs, Mach over NuKernel, KHTML over ????, etc.) for free software or technology for equal or better alternatives. We spent years wishing they'd do it, and now they are.
If the rumor is true, someone somewhere got ZFS working already, made a cool demo of a feature, showed it someone who showed it to Jobs, and now it's a real, honest-to-God feature.
My school required MMR booster or proof thereof and I believe (!) tetanus. You were not allowed to live in the dorms without proof of your MMR - the lines in the infirmary were always quite long during fall admissions.
I have a true issue with the concept of a "neutral" point of view. No POV is neutral. The belief that such a POV exists is born of the idea that all issues have 2 sides to them, black and white, right and wrong, and that a neutral POV can exist somewhere in the middle. This simply isn't the case.?
This is not Wikipedia's definition of NPOV [wikipedia.org]. What you are talking about is more similar to "balance."
Balance in and of itself can be wrong. Imagine a five minute news story about a shooting witnessed by 1000 people. You spend half the allotted TV time giving the criminal's story about the reasons he shot someone in front of 1000 witnesses. Is that balanced, or just a waste of viewer's time?
Part of the problem with news gathering (not wikis) is that cable networks have been trying to sell themselves on balance (usually code for "reporters are no longer allowed to be critical of obvious bullshit") when news organizations don't exist to report both sides of news, and they don't even pretend to do so. You think Crazy Nancy Grace on Cnn cares about balance? What about Hallucinating Hume from Fox? He's just plain nuts - but both are sold as "balanced" sources, even when neither has anything to do with the news or facts at hand. They're just analysts pretending to give both ides of the story when they probably only agree with and understand one side.
Real balance allows presenters from both sides of a debate to state their case in an open forum for an equal length of time. Pretending that a reporter could do so - as unfamiliar as they usually are with the subjects they report on - is laughable. Balance in a wiki setting would have to provide for the same thing - a point/counterpoint setting on neutral ground with limits as to the length and subject of opposing views.
Jesus. Who let George have the computer after a hard week?
I see how it works! A magical disco ball is allowed to emit it's soooper groovy radiation over the surface of the disc, which liberates the bits to stand up and boogie! It's so obvious!
If publishing these trade secrets assists Apple's competitors, that can only increase overall competition, which ultimately will result in lower prices for the public. Apple may not benefit, but the public will.
Many companies release that information far in advance so you can make a more educated decision.
Do tell. Which companies give away tactical information about the details of upcoming products?
Does I.B.M. explain to potential customers the exact details of new servers before introduction without obtaining an NDA?
You are confusing strategic direction for customers with "tactical" product details and descriptions. For example:
"We will be releasing servers this year that will double performance for intricate web applications"
versus....
"We're going to get around the limitations in Windows by releasing a product that installs Linux on your machine and delivers higher performance"
I won't even get into the difference between corporate brifings and leaking the deatils of a consumer product except to say that one is for guidance, and the other is a window into the development process of a competitor.
See the difference? O'Grady was given information about specific details of a product that may well have been cancelled because of the leak, negating thousands of person-hours and lots of physical equipment.
The success of the product relied on secrecy during the development phase and promotion once the product was released.
You're claiming that it's OK to tell anyone the details of a product. What you don't understand is that considerable development dollars go into a project like this, but the engineers have no ability to control concurrent development by competitors except by secrecy. When chips are commodities and boards can be prototyped and built in the same week, knowledge and time are a company's only advantages.
Ogrady negated those advantages by publishing information passed on by a disgruntled, starstruck, or stupid employee. None of these circumstances counts as "public interest", the only circumstance in which a secret can be made public by the press.
If you work for a high-tech company, you can't support O'Grady's argument (and his whiny-ass-titty-baby ZDNet column about this incident) and support your employer at the same time. Otherwise, your co-workers have the ability and the right to sell the company out from underneath you for nothing in return.
But Apple's way of doing things really isn't the best for business
Maybe not for yours, but definitely for Apple's. And Apple deserves (just like any other business, including yours) to be able to find out who is responsible for causing them harm by breaking a contractual agreement. The information in question does not compel or motivate it's release in the public's interest - the principle upon which freedom fo the press is based.
There's nothing in the Constitution that says freedom of the press only applies to professionals.
No, but journalists don't usually solicit for trade secrets to drive sales and/or views of a newspaper or web site.
Freedom of the press relies on the principle that what the press is reporting is in the public interest. Apple's unreleased products are in no one's interest but their competitors.
Trust me when I say this: O'Grady is a slimeball who only a few years ago solicited me for confidential information about what the wireless company I worked for was up to. He comes off as a very nice guy, promises that he'll write nice stuff about your company, and asks about things that aren't public knowledge. Of course, you're free to say no, and I did. The people at Apple were bound by contract to say no and they didn't, and from my experience, O'Grady's motivation is based purely on how many fanboys he can drive to his web site with a scoop about Apple or whoever's unreleased product.
The EFF's tactics are bullsh*t in this case. They're trying to get political bloggers to amplify this case by pretending that bloggers won't be able to write about ANY secrets or newsworthy but confidential information.
The key word here is newsworthy, and in a world where missing white women and rich white athletes in trouble for hiring (and possibly raping) black strippers are the biggest news items of the week, perhaps we have dropped down the well of profit-driven news to a new standard for freedom of the press. But I hardly think that's something to celebrate, especially when it's clear there are far more pressing (ha ha...er...oh, no) things to report on. Still, that doesn't keep CNN or Fox from breathlessly jumping from non-news story to non-news story.
I think Portal has always had designs on the Windows Media/Media Center market. When I worked there a few months after the first iPod shipped, employees were strongly discouraged from talking about their then largest (and possibly only) customer. I worked there for six months and never heard the word "Apple" from a single employee.
The PP2002C,D, etc and PP5003 were good designs to get Portal off the ground, but it was never a product designed for Apple, just a convenient all-purpose dual core CPU with some nice specialized I/O logic. I think Apple probably found the PP500x series a convenient fit, but they can probably get away with less power and more specialization at this point.
I'd be happy that Portal is trying to move into other markets besides the iPod - relying on that one product line to move all their silicon was dangerous - although now they're really over a barrel unless they can ink some significant deals pretty soon - they've added, uh, quite a bit of staff since I contracted there in 2002, and instead of the oldish early '80s location in the silicon ghetto off of Scott Blvd. they're now in fancy new digs...but I still wish the tech pubs dept. would "get back to me".
Slashdot Mirror
The very fact we haven't been attacked yet does prove the measures to be superior.
Good God, man. Simply repeating something over and over in the face of evidence to the contrary does not make your wish reality.
Clinton's administration had a 5 3/4 year span with no terrorism. Bush's longest stretch has been 4 2/3 years. How can you conclude that Bush's method is superior when no evidence of this assertion exists?
Now please explain to us how the Madrid skyscraper, which was of a similar truss design to the twin towers, managed to withstand a fire that burned for over 10 hours and reached peak temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius, even continuing to support a heavy construction crane perched on its roof, while WTC 1, which, according to all accounts, had a much cooler fire (roughly 250 degrees Celsius) burning within it, managed to collapse through sudden, total, and synchronous failure of all support structures, causing the building to fall straight down, at a speed only marginally slower than free-fall, into its own footprint, all in only 85 minutes.
That's easy. The Madrid building didn't have the fireproofing insulation blown off of ten floors worth of steel supports. Having an airplane hit the building will do that.
When you're done with that, perhaps you can explain how, in a stunning suspension of the laws of probability, WTC 2 collapsed in exactly the same manner, despite having sustaned impact damage and fire damage substantially different from WTC1.
It's not clear that the impacts were substantially different; both aircraft were banked at the time of impact, damaging many floors. The kinetic energy borne by debris of the 550-mph jetliner destroyed the fireproofing on the steel columns.
One plane hit near the center of the tower, the other farther off center. The offset was of little ultimate consequence given the load-bearing nature of the open floor plan. It was beneficial, but not ultimately necessary to destroy the core of the building with the initial impact.
And if you've managed to make it this far, mabye you can then enlighten us on how WTC 7, which was of a completely different design than WTC 1 and 2, collapsed into its own footprint in, again, exactly the same manner, despite the tiny detail that it was never struck by an airplane.
It seems obvious that it was a less robust design that was hit with about 50 stories of debris from the neighboring tower's collapse; have you been to ground zero? Building 7 and Building 6 were both heavily damaged by debris from the north tower.
I vehemently disagree with your theories on several grounds, the most obvious being that no conclusive evidence has emerged to show any government involvement in this matter - and I mean that the government of George W. Bush simply doesn't have the competence and follow-through to plan an orchestrate such a horrific and complicated event.
There was also another kind of government detachment from 9/11: ignored warnings, late translations, and a lazy administration with self-interest closest to heart.
For the large and growing segment of the U.S. population that disapproves of the Bush administration's incompetence and self-enrichment during a critical time in our history, your theories are the ravings of a crackpot. We may be united in our disdain and disgust for Bush, but your conspiracy rants are very far removed from the reality-based subjects we should be concerned with as a country and society.
Here's what's so ironic about the whole issue. The Bush administration has successfully kept the US free of terrorist attacks since 9/11/01. But his very success had lead to a sense of complacency, particularly among ultra-myopic Bush-haters.
You seem to be forgetting that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch.
That's not anything to be very proud of, now is it?
I didn't say I agreed with the additional curtailing of felon's rights. In nonviolent/nonsexual cases, I think it might be appropriate to restore full pre-conviction rights to a felon.
But that doesn't change the fact that they are convicted felons. In our system of justice (which works pretty well most of time, regardless of what you read), these people have been convicted of the most serious and egregious class of crimes. To restore full rights upon conditional release is not appropriate in most felony cases, and I do believe the state should have the right to collect biometric information about convicted felons in order to more easily solve recidivist crimes. Most felony criminals are pretty stupid, and few of them are in jail for computer crimes. It makes sense to collect information that reduces the time, money and effort involved in prosecuting recidivism.
Finally, in many states where felons have curtailed rights upon release, there is a clemency process that can restore some rights. Florida, Louisiana, and others will restore voting rights through clemency - a process that includes proving to a clemency board that you have been fully rehabilitated by your incarceration and that it would benefit society to restore some of your rights.
Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA?
Convicted felons have constraints placed on their rights. In many states, they can't ever vote. When you are convicted of a felony, even upon your release from incarceration you have fewer rights by law than people who aren't felons.
This is a non-story. A punk who got charged and convicted wants to stand on principle now. Too bad.
Now there are quotas and you can't spend time with people.
If you're going to offer support, either charge for it after a reasonable period (to allow people to report defects or problems out of the box for free) or be up front about the fact that your support organization is essentially "Dial-a-voice" where someone will read you the online help you were unable to process on your own.
Hard time quotas for phone agents are put in place by companies and decision makers that care less about helping customers than they do about the color of the sticker on the box that says "Free Support!"
"The code works," he says, "that's the important thing."
I hope he keeps his current job, because with that attitude, he won't get another one easily.
Spelling is as crucial to operating a machine as code that works. Does this guy know about the concept of the user? Does he not understand that attention to detail, especially on something like medical equipment might be more significant than a spelling lesson?
How many realized it was time to move on, not just from the job, but from the "customerz R teh st00pitz" attitude as well?
g thatworks! period at Apple.
No kidding. I moved into Apple Cusotmer Relations as an Intern. 18 months later I'd survived the March '97 layoffs and I had moved off the phones to a job I really enjoyed.
Sure, we bitched about the customers - and they often deserved it - but normally only after work, with the attitude that if we could make people who were that pissed off into happy Apple customers day after day, we could do anything. This was during the PowerBook5300/Performa5200/color StyleWriter/PowerSurge/Ohmygodwecan'tbuildnaythin
I continued to work peripherally with the Customer and Executive relations groups and kept my friends there, but there's nothing that keeps people on the phones and out of the positions they really want more than a shitty attitude.
For the record, I did find that working the phones in Customer Relations, which required dealing with people who were nearly always combative was more difficult years after the fact than at the time. I had to unlearn a lot of behavior, and I don't think any training program can prepare you for getting yelled at by 30 different people every day while the calls pile up behind the current customer.
Finally, I know it's trite, but people really can hear you smile over the phone. I don't think this guy smiles much.
I temped at an insurance agency phone support office (thankfully not on phone support). The phone support had to hit a certain time per call. Consistent overshooting of this target time got one of my friends who was also temping there on phone support and who is one of the nicest people I know fired.
When I worked in Apple Customer Relations, we had call time targets, but no one would seriously think of firing you if you spent too long on a call with someone; when I worked there (95-97), the only reason I ever heard anyone getting fired was for being a stupid dumbass and replacing a machine four times because...the CD-ROM was vibrating. Talk about improperly setting the customer's expectations...
Technical support was in a little different world (and 1800 miles away in Austin, although our phones were all connected to the same switch, so I could call long distance from Austin to the other phone on my desk); you didn't assume people who were calling had run into an intractable or difficult to solve problem as we did in Customer Relations.
I think call time limits in call centers were invented by Lumbergh. If you're going to invite customers call at all, be prepared to solve their problems with adequate staffing and intelligent, well-trained phone agents.
TFA complains a lot, but Apple has what is probably one of the finer phone support organizations around. When I was there and to a greater extent after I left, Apple really focussed a lot of energy on tracking and gathering significant data from calls, and while they've made significant missteps (not covering some obvious design problems like some models of PowerBook hinges) AppleCare is probably the best support organization at a computer manufacturer.
At least Apple has a Customer Relations and Executive Relations groups for unhappy customers. Companies like Yahoo think it's appropriate to have unhappy customers exhaust online support options, then call to get a mystery e-mail address to get help, then wait while the elves at Yahoo deign to call them back. There's isn't even an executive in charge of customer support at Yahoo.
I'm a large format photographer (still use film - 20 square inches of it at a time) and I got really excited for just a minute until I started to think: "Why the hell would Slashdot run an article so interesting to me?"
The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor."
Yeah, if this effort ended up in failure, I'd be steamed too.
A few years ago I saw a TV show regarding plane crashes. They showed one example of a commercial airliner taking off while its flaps were down.
You must be misremembering, because commcial airliners cannot leave the ground without lowering the flaps at least a few degrees. Leading (slats) and trailing edge flaps are required to produce enough lift on the thin, swept wing of a commercial airliner for a successful take off.
Jet airliner wings are a compromise design that must slice through thin air at 550mph and lift an airplane into thick air at 120mph - and be maneuverable everywhere in between. A commercial airliner could leave the ground with no flaps deployed, but chances are that even with a normal load of passengers and fuel that they'd overrun the end of the runway first.
"EarthLink said it expects the project to run to between $6 million and $8 million in initial costs, which include attaching radios and receivers to utility poles throughout the city. Within 10 years it expects the whole network, complete with upgrades and maintenance, to cost about $15 million.
Double those costs.
Now, double them again.
Google is trying to do with one public frequency and a LAN-based technology what Metricom could barely do with three public frequency ranges and a true microcellular architecture built specifically for WAN. And they're budgeting far too little for an area the size of San Francisco - where Metricom had four to five Ricochet radios every square mile, Google proposes to install a much higher density (they'll HAVE to, simply for decent frequency reuse in a hilly city full of highly reinforced concrete) of radios for less money...five years later?
Have fun, Google. It won't be easy. I predict the whole thing will degenerate into failure within three years. Why this fantasy about repurposing 802.11 for jobs it wasn't meant to do? I think this will be remembered as Google's first failure...depending on how the P.R. department manages to spin the eventual failure.
Yes. If they're trying so desperately to build marketshare, why not hire a couple of Unix/Linux experienced folks and hammer out drivers for OS X and Linux?
With the advent of Intel Macs, they don't even need anyone to write Open Firmware declaration ROMs for their hardware anymore - supporting the Mac is now the same as supporting any other OS - just write the drivers. Support should be relatively easy, too. Just hand the phone agents a Mac or Linux-based script for troubleshooting and spend some money on training.
They've already got the VIA tit to suck on (pardon the imagery) - don't tell me there's no cash for headcount if it meant another 10,000 customers or more.
I've made a few "what about UFS?" comments in this story, but I hope I don't come across as some weird filesystem fanboy. It's just that I can't figure out why this announcement is so exciting. ZFS is cool, sure, but I see it as an incremental improvement to widely used Unix filesystems rather than a quantum leap.
I think part of what makes this story so interesting is that despite the past few years' developments, most of us still expect Apple to act as it used to with regard to adopting new technology. In other words, we expect Apple to adhere to the 1980s and 1990s playbook of "NIH" - in other words, if Apple didn't come up with it, it's crap.
I think Steve Jobs changed all that, but I think there are lots of us who still find it interesting when Apple drops some in-house technology (Intel chipset over Apple's ASICs, Mach over NuKernel, KHTML over ????, etc.) for free software or technology for equal or better alternatives. We spent years wishing they'd do it, and now they are.
If the rumor is true, someone somewhere got ZFS working already, made a cool demo of a feature, showed it someone who showed it to Jobs, and now it's a real, honest-to-God feature.
My school required MMR booster or proof thereof and I believe (!) tetanus. You were not allowed to live in the dorms without proof of your MMR - the lines in the infirmary were always quite long during fall admissions.
This is not Wikipedia's definition of NPOV [wikipedia.org]. What you are talking about is more similar to "balance."
Balance in and of itself can be wrong. Imagine a five minute news story about a shooting witnessed by 1000 people. You spend half the allotted TV time giving the criminal's story about the reasons he shot someone in front of 1000 witnesses. Is that balanced, or just a waste of viewer's time?
Part of the problem with news gathering (not wikis) is that cable networks have been trying to sell themselves on balance (usually code for "reporters are no longer allowed to be critical of obvious bullshit") when news organizations don't exist to report both sides of news, and they don't even pretend to do so. You think Crazy Nancy Grace on Cnn cares about balance? What about Hallucinating Hume from Fox? He's just plain nuts - but both are sold as "balanced" sources, even when neither has anything to do with the news or facts at hand. They're just analysts pretending to give both ides of the story when they probably only agree with and understand one side.
Real balance allows presenters from both sides of a debate to state their case in an open forum for an equal length of time. Pretending that a reporter could do so - as unfamiliar as they usually are with the subjects they report on - is laughable. Balance in a wiki setting would have to provide for the same thing - a point/counterpoint setting on neutral ground with limits as to the length and subject of opposing views.
Jesus. Who let George have the computer after a hard week?
I see how it works! A magical disco ball is allowed to emit it's soooper groovy radiation over the surface of the disc, which liberates the bits to stand up and boogie! It's so obvious!
-Laura
If publishing these trade secrets assists Apple's competitors, that can only increase overall competition, which ultimately will result in lower prices for the public. Apple may not benefit, but the public will.
That's hilarious.
+1 teh funny! Good one!
Many companies release that information far in advance so you can make a more educated decision.
Do tell. Which companies give away tactical information about the details of upcoming products?
Does I.B.M. explain to potential customers the exact details of new servers before introduction without obtaining an NDA?
You are confusing strategic direction for customers with "tactical" product details and descriptions. For example:
"We will be releasing servers this year that will double performance for intricate web applications"
versus....
"We're going to get around the limitations in Windows by releasing a product that installs Linux on your machine and delivers higher performance"
I won't even get into the difference between corporate brifings and leaking the deatils of a consumer product except to say that one is for guidance, and the other is a window into the development process of a competitor.
See the difference? O'Grady was given information about specific details of a product that may well have been cancelled because of the leak, negating thousands of person-hours and lots of physical equipment.
The success of the product relied on secrecy during the development phase and promotion once the product was released.
You're claiming that it's OK to tell anyone the details of a product. What you don't understand is that considerable development dollars go into a project like this, but the engineers have no ability to control concurrent development by competitors except by secrecy. When chips are commodities and boards can be prototyped and built in the same week, knowledge and time are a company's only advantages.
Ogrady negated those advantages by publishing information passed on by a disgruntled, starstruck, or stupid employee. None of these circumstances counts as "public interest", the only circumstance in which a secret can be made public by the press.
If you work for a high-tech company, you can't support O'Grady's argument (and his whiny-ass-titty-baby ZDNet column about this incident) and support your employer at the same time. Otherwise, your co-workers have the ability and the right to sell the company out from underneath you for nothing in return.
But Apple's way of doing things really isn't the best for business
Maybe not for yours, but definitely for Apple's. And Apple deserves (just like any other business, including yours) to be able to find out who is responsible for causing them harm by breaking a contractual agreement. The information in question does not compel or motivate it's release in the public's interest - the principle upon which freedom fo the press is based.
I don't know about Super Mario, but my wife calls the THX sound the "Orgasm sound".
And you know what, she's right. If any of you slashdotters ever get a girlfrie^H^H wife, check it out!
There's nothing in the Constitution that says freedom of the press only applies to professionals.
No, but journalists don't usually solicit for trade secrets to drive sales and/or views of a newspaper or web site.
Freedom of the press relies on the principle that what the press is reporting is in the public interest. Apple's unreleased products are in no one's interest but their competitors.
Trust me when I say this: O'Grady is a slimeball who only a few years ago solicited me for confidential information about what the wireless company I worked for was up to. He comes off as a very nice guy, promises that he'll write nice stuff about your company, and asks about things that aren't public knowledge. Of course, you're free to say no, and I did. The people at Apple were bound by contract to say no and they didn't, and from my experience, O'Grady's motivation is based purely on how many fanboys he can drive to his web site with a scoop about Apple or whoever's unreleased product.
The EFF's tactics are bullsh*t in this case. They're trying to get political bloggers to amplify this case by pretending that bloggers won't be able to write about ANY secrets or newsworthy but confidential information.
The key word here is newsworthy, and in a world where missing white women and rich white athletes in trouble for hiring (and possibly raping) black strippers are the biggest news items of the week, perhaps we have dropped down the well of profit-driven news to a new standard for freedom of the press. But I hardly think that's something to celebrate, especially when it's clear there are far more pressing (ha ha...er...oh, no) things to report on. Still, that doesn't keep CNN or Fox from breathlessly jumping from non-news story to non-news story.
I think Portal has always had designs on the Windows Media/Media Center market. When I worked there a few months after the first iPod shipped, employees were strongly discouraged from talking about their then largest (and possibly only) customer. I worked there for six months and never heard the word "Apple" from a single employee.
The PP2002C,D, etc and PP5003 were good designs to get Portal off the ground, but it was never a product designed for Apple, just a convenient all-purpose dual core CPU with some nice specialized I/O logic. I think Apple probably found the PP500x series a convenient fit, but they can probably get away with less power and more specialization at this point.
I'd be happy that Portal is trying to move into other markets besides the iPod - relying on that one product line to move all their silicon was dangerous - although now they're really over a barrel unless they can ink some significant deals pretty soon - they've added, uh, quite a bit of staff since I contracted there in 2002, and instead of the oldish early '80s location in the silicon ghetto off of Scott Blvd. they're now in fancy new digs...but I still wish the tech pubs dept. would "get back to me".
"I am looking forward to full 3D hardware acceleration and bringing rich, robust and dynamic GUI into my OS design."
So am I!
Let me just switch on my three-year-old Macintosh.