I just submitted this story, and it showed up as being posted at 4am. Which would explain why it only has 1 comment, it was posted 1 minute ago and yet it claims to be posted 14 hours ago.
Anyone who is reading this, contact (Hemos?) and tell them something is wacky with their clock.
How many times have we heard we are going to run out of oil? And guess what: it never happens. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but I don't see it happening any sooner than running out of other important resources like vandium, molybdenum, etc.. New deposits are always being found, and the majority of the world's oil is still present in oil sands (which are becoming much more economical to extract)
The environmental reasons for switching away from oil are a lot more reasonable, however I imagine the replacement is really going to be more fossil fuels, probably hydrogen harvested (or reformed) from natural gas for fuel cells. So keep those oil rigs pumping.
I hit the 50 karma cap ages ago. Also, bashing a company doesn't get you karma, negative comments almost always get modded down. How many Intel employees do you think read slashdot?;-)
I understand now it was just an ambiguous wording, when I saw "dropped 26% to 53%" I figured they meant from a previous discount of 26% to a current discount 53% for all their mobile chips. In fact they meant a varying range for all their different chips. Thanks for the clarification.
How they arrived at the number 53% is a little bizarre:
Intel cut prices on its Pentium 4 processor for laptop computers by 26 percent to 53 percent
So they just add all the price cuts they've made on the processor together to come up with 53%? What's up with that? It's not like they just dropped it 53%, they dropped it by 26%.
The problem is with mozilla, it won't allow per-user plugin or chrome app installs. Since the problem doesn't exist on Windows, there hasn't been any rush to fix it.
A better solution for a multi-user system is to give your user's group access to/usr/lib/mozilla, but I gave the simplest solution for a single user desktop system(which I'm assuming will account for the large majority of installs) I figure anyone running a multi-user system with untrusted users knows how to give just themselves and root access to/usr/lib/mozilla.
This sounds like a plug, but the few searches I tried with this engine to my surprise turned up interesting, relevant results.
Maybe that's because it gets its results from Google? Try a search for "nanotechnology" in Kartoo and Google, you will find the results are exactly the same.
Now Kartoo admits they are a "meta search engine", so the real question here is: is this map thing actually useful? And is it worth the 12 seconds it took to make that map? In my small amount of experimentation, I would say its nifty, but not terribly useful, and its slower than molasses.
The license has no more stringent terms than the Google Toolbar.... I suggest you do a comparison. Is there something in there in particular that bothers you?
The license is designed to prevent others from commercially exploiting the code, and to disclaim liability over whatever evil uses users may find for the toolbar;-) It's not like some sort of horrible Microsoft EULA where you're not allowed to review the product after using it.
Let Tigert loose on that game and it would be great. FreeCiv could also use a graphic overhaul. Unfortunately geek and graphic artist do not often go hand in hand. Even if we had one graphic artist who could come up with a decent isometric tileset, it might be possibly to recycle that tileset between games like FreeCraft and FreeCiv.
Yeah, but it's not legal to perform the procedure using federal funding. And considering UCSF is a public university, there could very well be federal funds involved. It would be nice if the article were more clear on this point.
Why would a Gilmore patent alienate IBM and HP? They just have to pay license fees, like with a regular patent. And since they are a commercial entity, they can afford to. The Gilmore Patent does not put any more restrictions on its use that a regular patent, and it is most definitely not "religious."
I think Redhat should Gilmore Patent these ideas. The Gilmore Patent was proposed by John Gilmore ( I saw him present this idea at a Foresight Conference ) Basic concept is that a Gilmore Patent is like the GPL of the patent world, once you Gilmore Patent something only companies who have Gilmore Patents (or no patents at all) may use the patent royalty-free.
The only thing that concerns me about this idea is that it seems like it might be easily circumventable, you could do something like set up a subsidiary that doesn't have any patents, and then funnel the money back to the parent company. Any IP lawyers out there have a feasibility assessment of this idea?
Anyone with some knowledge of online transactions knows that offering something for $1 is generally not profitable. First, you've got fees from the credit cards, and then you've got the the whole chargeback thing. One song gets charged back, and you've wiped out any profit from at least 100 sales. The only thing they've got on their side is that an mp3 is not a very good target for credit card fraud, and most people will not bother to chargeback $1.
Exactly. Except it wouldn't have that melted goo all over it.
I was also thinking like a mini Borg ship you could hold in your hand. I think it would be really satisfying to have a big mass of processors in your hand, not like these wimpy delicate little things we have now in their static-proof baggies. Also, once we've conquered the 2nd dimension (ie. we've hit fundamental size limits, like 1 molecule thick wires), 3rd dimension is the next logical step. And vascularization like that found in the brain is a pretty good way to cool things off.
Interestingly, what separates us from the Neanderthals is an extensive system of veins in the back of our head designed to cool the brain. It was an important evolutionary step that allowed us evolve a lot more cerebral processing power.
Given that you don't need to actively cool these chips, I think what would be even cooler(N.P.I.) is a cube of chips stuck together and interwoven with some sort of vascularized heat-sink. A meaty cluster of 100 chips you can hold in your hand, and plug into a big cube-shaped socket on your supercomputing motherboard. Now *that* would be New for Nerds.
This is the concept Christensen is famous for (and there is a book titled after it which you should all read) Here's my 10 second synopsis of Innovator's Dilemma:
Your old customers are demanding you spend all your resources on your old technology (eg. 5 1/4 inch disk drives) But there are new potential customers who want to buy new technology you haven't developed yet (eg. 3 1/2 inch disk drives) There are more potential new customers than old customers, and thus more profits in devoting your resources to new technology. But you already have your old customers, and you're supposed to *listen to your customers* So there's the dilemma.
Solution to the dilemma? Sometimes it doesn't pay to listen to your customers. And that's a tough pill for an established company to swallow, since that's how they made money in the first place.
In a personal injury lawsuit, it is relevant to kknow whether a plaintiff
who claimed to be wheelchair-bound in fact left his chair; yet, one would be
hardpressed to find a discovery ruling in which a judge ordered a plaintiff
to place an electronic sensor in his chair seat. In a defamation lawsuit,
it would be helpful to know if in fact the defamatory comment had a wide
circulation among plaintiff's neighbors; yet, it is unfathomable to think
that a court would order a microphone to be place in the local pub.
The point I think they are trying to make is that the only reason this seems even slightly reasonable (and the above examples do not) is because it affects so many people that it becomes a statistic, and the way in which those people's privacy is violated is complicated enough that it is easy to gloss over the fact that it is a severe intrusion into the living rooms of SONICBlue's customers!
This ruling is sickening, and I think it seriously hints at some money changing hands between the plaintiff's and the powers that be. This ruling unquestionably violates the rights of SONICBlue and its customers, and it is without legal precedent.
You can't compare mechanical engineering and software engineering. Like it or not, all large software projects have bugs... lots of bugs. In a perfect world, there would be no bugs, but in this world the bugs are the standard. Since IE6 is the predominant browser, people code HTML to work around IE6's rendering problems, and if other browsers do not account for these bugs, they will render incorrectly. No browser will ever support W3C's standards perfectly, Mozilla sure doesn't and neither does W3C's own reference browser!
There is only one solution to this problem, and that is to limit the number of browsers. Otherwise there will simply be too many rendering problems for web developers to worry about, and a bunch of the browsers will get left behind. I do not have the time to test my pages in every browser, and neither does anyone else.
Yes, competition is good, but there is a point where there are just too many browsers. As a maker of all things web, it is very difficult to work around all the quirks of these browsers (and yes, *all* browsers have quirks) I have Opera users tell me they are MSIE in their user agents, I have Galeon users thinking they are running Mozilla, and bizarre rendering bugs across the board.
Making things even more difficult, I have to contend with varying and often non-existant toolbar API's which make things like the superb Google Toolbar and (in my mind) the also superb StumbleUpon Toolbar impossible to develop for browsers that are not Mozilla or IE.
I think its time to go for a little Darwinian Selection. Survival of the fittest browser. And I think that browser is Mozilla. Its the most full featured browser out there, it's free, it's open source. I had a couple problems with it, I filed bugs, and they were both fixed within the week! I'm having a hard time finding any flaws with RC2, it's brilliant. For all those who are using alternate browsers because Mozilla is "bloated" and "buggy", check again.
They didn't opt-out. They didn't read the email Yahoo sent them (since they are usually not worth reading) And they are not conscious of why they are getting more and more junk mail and *very annoying unsolicited phone calls* during their family dinner. They think it's just a sign of the times, when in fact it's because Yahoo sold their phone number, mailing address and other personal information without their consent.
Even worse, the reason Yahoo has all this information like phone numbers and mailing addresses in the first place is because they require it when processing credit card transactions for Yahoo Wallet (ie. Yahoo is screwing over its own paying customers).
What Yahoo did is criminal. And if people understood that, there would be a class action suit, just like there were criminal procedings against DoubleClick and Alexis for similar violations of privacy. I'm all for free market, but what Yahoo did is fraudulent, and I have never heard of a free market that protects fraud.
There's another fairly balanced article and discussion about iDrive over at Kuro5hin that's worth checking out. The author has similar mixed feelings about the technology, and talks about how other car manufacturers like Saab and Audi are developing similar systems.
I'm dying for this feature. I don't install messenger, and I use sylpheed as my mail client. I'm sure lots of people are using other handlers like mutt, outlook, evolution, etc... In the old and netscape they had this API where you had to write a C program just to use an alternative handler. Seems pretty crazy to me. All I want is a text box like:
Mail Handler : sylpheed -to %email
Or something to that effect. Maybe a substitution for ?subject= as well.
I find no matter how quiet they make these cooling systems in both laptops and desktops, water or air-cooled, its the hard drive noise that's drives me nuts. I use SilentPC stuff, including their hard drive cover, but I still find that high pitched whir of the HD is the loudest and most irritating thing coming out of my box.
Now sure I can get my hard drive to spin down when not in use, but even when I'm not sitting at the computer there are many a cron job that need to get done, and when they write to disk the hard drive spins up again. Apparently IBM's drives are supposed to be quiet, but I got one and they are anything but.
Slashdot Mirror
I just submitted this story, and it showed up as being posted at 4am. Which would explain why it only has 1 comment, it was posted 1 minute ago and yet it claims to be posted 14 hours ago.
Anyone who is reading this, contact (Hemos?) and tell them something is wacky with their clock.
Consider yourself lucky.
7 3, 778226,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/adslump/story/0,107
Bah, I made a bipedal walker out of Robotix when I was 10 years old. Great toy, by the way.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Writing perl code! Write once, read never.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
How many times have we heard we are going to run out of oil? And guess what: it never happens. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but I don't see it happening any sooner than running out of other important resources like vandium, molybdenum, etc.. New deposits are always being found, and the majority of the world's oil is still present in oil sands (which are becoming much more economical to extract)
The environmental reasons for switching away from oil are a lot more reasonable, however I imagine the replacement is really going to be more fossil fuels, probably hydrogen harvested (or reformed) from natural gas for fuel cells. So keep those oil rigs pumping.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
I hit the 50 karma cap ages ago. Also, bashing a company doesn't get you karma, negative comments almost always get modded down. How many Intel employees do you think read slashdot? ;-)
I understand now it was just an ambiguous wording, when I saw "dropped 26% to 53%" I figured they meant from a previous discount of 26% to a current discount 53% for all their mobile chips. In fact they meant a varying range for all their different chips. Thanks for the clarification.
How they arrived at the number 53% is a little bizarre:
Intel cut prices on its Pentium 4 processor for laptop computers by 26 percent to 53 percent
So they just add all the price cuts they've made on the processor together to come up with 53%? What's up with that? It's not like they just dropped it 53%, they dropped it by 26%.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
The problem is with mozilla, it won't allow per-user plugin or chrome app installs. Since the problem doesn't exist on Windows, there hasn't been any rush to fix it.
/usr/lib/mozilla, but I gave the simplest solution for a single user desktop system(which I'm assuming will account for the large majority of installs) I figure anyone running a multi-user system with untrusted users knows how to give just themselves and root access to /usr/lib/mozilla.
A better solution for a multi-user system is to give your user's group access to
I hope you enjoy the toolbar!
This sounds like a plug, but the few searches I tried with this engine to my surprise turned up interesting, relevant results.
Maybe that's because it gets its results from Google? Try a search for "nanotechnology" in Kartoo and Google, you will find the results are exactly the same.
Now Kartoo admits they are a "meta search engine", so the real question here is: is this map thing actually useful? And is it worth the 12 seconds it took to make that map? In my small amount of experimentation, I would say its nifty, but not terribly useful, and its slower than molasses.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
The license has no more stringent terms than the Google Toolbar.... I suggest you do a comparison. Is there something in there in particular that bothers you?
;-) It's not like some sort of horrible Microsoft EULA where you're not allowed to review the product after using it.
The license is designed to prevent others from commercially exploiting the code, and to disclaim liability over whatever evil uses users may find for the toolbar
Let Tigert loose on that game and it would be great. FreeCiv could also use a graphic overhaul. Unfortunately geek and graphic artist do not often go hand in hand. Even if we had one graphic artist who could come up with a decent isometric tileset, it might be possibly to recycle that tileset between games like FreeCraft and FreeCiv.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Yeah, but it's not legal to perform the procedure using federal funding. And considering UCSF is a public university, there could very well be federal funds involved. It would be nice if the article were more clear on this point.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Why would a Gilmore patent alienate IBM and HP? They just have to pay license fees, like with a regular patent. And since they are a commercial entity, they can afford to. The Gilmore Patent does not put any more restrictions on its use that a regular patent, and it is most definitely not "religious."
I think Redhat should Gilmore Patent these ideas. The Gilmore Patent was proposed by John Gilmore ( I saw him present this idea at a Foresight Conference ) Basic concept is that a Gilmore Patent is like the GPL of the patent world, once you Gilmore Patent something only companies who have Gilmore Patents (or no patents at all) may use the patent royalty-free.
The only thing that concerns me about this idea is that it seems like it might be easily circumventable, you could do something like set up a subsidiary that doesn't have any patents, and then funnel the money back to the parent company. Any IP lawyers out there have a feasibility assessment of this idea?
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Anyone with some knowledge of online transactions knows that offering something for $1 is generally not profitable. First, you've got fees from the credit cards, and then you've got the the whole chargeback thing. One song gets charged back, and you've wiped out any profit from at least 100 sales. The only thing they've got on their side is that an mp3 is not a very good target for credit card fraud, and most people will not bother to chargeback $1.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Exactly. Except it wouldn't have that melted goo all over it.
I was also thinking like a mini Borg ship you could hold in your hand. I think it would be really satisfying to have a big mass of processors in your hand, not like these wimpy delicate little things we have now in their static-proof baggies. Also, once we've conquered the 2nd dimension (ie. we've hit fundamental size limits, like 1 molecule thick wires), 3rd dimension is the next logical step. And vascularization like that found in the brain is a pretty good way to cool things off.
Interestingly, what separates us from the Neanderthals is an extensive system of veins in the back of our head designed to cool the brain. It was an important evolutionary step that allowed us evolve a lot more cerebral processing power.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Given that you don't need to actively cool these chips, I think what would be even cooler(N.P.I.) is a cube of chips stuck together and interwoven with some sort of vascularized heat-sink. A meaty cluster of 100 chips you can hold in your hand, and plug into a big cube-shaped socket on your supercomputing motherboard. Now *that* would be New for Nerds.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
This is the concept Christensen is famous for (and there is a book titled after it which you should all read) Here's my 10 second synopsis of Innovator's Dilemma:
Your old customers are demanding you spend all your resources on your old technology (eg. 5 1/4 inch disk drives) But there are new potential customers who want to buy new technology you haven't developed yet (eg. 3 1/2 inch disk drives) There are more potential new customers than old customers, and thus more profits in devoting your resources to new technology. But you already have your old customers, and you're supposed to *listen to your customers* So there's the dilemma.
Solution to the dilemma? Sometimes it doesn't pay to listen to your customers. And that's a tough pill for an established company to swallow, since that's how they made money in the first place.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
SONICBlue's legal doc makes some good analogies:
In a personal injury lawsuit, it is relevant to kknow whether a plaintiff who claimed to be wheelchair-bound in fact left his chair; yet, one would be hardpressed to find a discovery ruling in which a judge ordered a plaintiff to place an electronic sensor in his chair seat. In a defamation lawsuit, it would be helpful to know if in fact the defamatory comment had a wide circulation among plaintiff's neighbors; yet, it is unfathomable to think that a court would order a microphone to be place in the local pub.
The point I think they are trying to make is that the only reason this seems even slightly reasonable (and the above examples do not) is because it affects so many people that it becomes a statistic, and the way in which those people's privacy is violated is complicated enough that it is easy to gloss over the fact that it is a severe intrusion into the living rooms of SONICBlue's customers!
This ruling is sickening, and I think it seriously hints at some money changing hands between the plaintiff's and the powers that be. This ruling unquestionably violates the rights of SONICBlue and its customers, and it is without legal precedent.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
You can't compare mechanical engineering and software engineering. Like it or not, all large software projects have bugs... lots of bugs. In a perfect world, there would be no bugs, but in this world the bugs are the standard. Since IE6 is the predominant browser, people code HTML to work around IE6's rendering problems, and if other browsers do not account for these bugs, they will render incorrectly. No browser will ever support W3C's standards perfectly, Mozilla sure doesn't and neither does W3C's own reference browser!
There is only one solution to this problem, and that is to limit the number of browsers. Otherwise there will simply be too many rendering problems for web developers to worry about, and a bunch of the browsers will get left behind. I do not have the time to test my pages in every browser, and neither does anyone else.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Yes, competition is good, but there is a point where there are just too many browsers. As a maker of all things web, it is very difficult to work around all the quirks of these browsers (and yes, *all* browsers have quirks) I have Opera users tell me they are MSIE in their user agents, I have Galeon users thinking they are running Mozilla, and bizarre rendering bugs across the board.
Making things even more difficult, I have to contend with varying and often non-existant toolbar API's which make things like the superb Google Toolbar and (in my mind) the also superb StumbleUpon Toolbar impossible to develop for browsers that are not Mozilla or IE.
I think its time to go for a little Darwinian Selection. Survival of the fittest browser. And I think that browser is Mozilla. Its the most full featured browser out there, it's free, it's open source. I had a couple problems with it, I filed bugs, and they were both fixed within the week! I'm having a hard time finding any flaws with RC2, it's brilliant. For all those who are using alternate browsers because Mozilla is "bloated" and "buggy", check again.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
They didn't opt-out. They didn't read the email Yahoo sent them (since they are usually not worth reading) And they are not conscious of why they are getting more and more junk mail and *very annoying unsolicited phone calls* during their family dinner. They think it's just a sign of the times, when in fact it's because Yahoo sold their phone number, mailing address and other personal information without their consent.
Even worse, the reason Yahoo has all this information like phone numbers and mailing addresses in the first place is because they require it when processing credit card transactions for Yahoo Wallet (ie. Yahoo is screwing over its own paying customers).
What Yahoo did is criminal. And if people understood that, there would be a class action suit, just like there were criminal procedings against DoubleClick and Alexis for similar violations of privacy. I'm all for free market, but what Yahoo did is fraudulent, and I have never heard of a free market that protects fraud.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
There's another fairly balanced article and discussion about iDrive over at Kuro5hin that's worth checking out. The author has similar mixed feelings about the technology, and talks about how other car manufacturers like Saab and Audi are developing similar systems.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
I'm dying for this feature. I don't install messenger, and I use sylpheed as my mail client. I'm sure lots of people are using other handlers like mutt, outlook, evolution, etc... In the old and netscape they had this API where you had to write a C program just to use an alternative handler. Seems pretty crazy to me. All I want is a text box like:
Mail Handler : sylpheed -to %email
Or something to that effect. Maybe a substitution for ?subject= as well.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
I find no matter how quiet they make these cooling systems in both laptops and desktops, water or air-cooled, its the hard drive noise that's drives me nuts. I use SilentPC stuff, including their hard drive cover, but I still find that high pitched whir of the HD is the loudest and most irritating thing coming out of my box.
Now sure I can get my hard drive to spin down when not in use, but even when I'm not sitting at the computer there are many a cron job that need to get done, and when they write to disk the hard drive spins up again. Apparently IBM's drives are supposed to be quiet, but I got one and they are anything but.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon