Microsoft in the '90s felt free to sodomize at will most of the software industry as well as most of the hardware industry. Today they're a minnow in mobile and they hate it when the sharks aren't playing nice with them.
Yes, the Micro is an excellent pen, with a 0.5 mm tip. It's "fade and water resistant", which is good. I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned them.
My only complaint is a matter of logistics. I have no problem buying blue ones or black ones. But I've only found red ones in combo packs with other colors.
now, as we well know, power consumption is a square law of the clock rate. so in a rough comparison, in the same geometry (e.g. 45nm), that 1.6ghz CPU is going to be roughly TEN times more power consumption than that dual-core ARM Cortex A9.
You have mis-remembered the power consumption rules. It's directly proportional to clock rate. It's a square law with respect to voltage. That's why Intel takes great pains to constantly vary the voltage of its chips as they operate. C.f. this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_voltage_scaling
Of course, there are a whole lot of details beyond the simplistic formula of v-squared times f. E.g., until recently, the "leakage currents" (i.e. power drawn even at zero clock rate) were getting worse and worse (as a percentage of total power). That's why when Intel announced Ivy Bridge it was a big deal. Their tri-gate transistors are much better in terms of leakage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#Tri-gate_transistors
But not all Fry's are the same. There's one in the Portland Oregon metro area. It's OK, but it's a mere shadow of the "real" ones I've been to in the Bay Area.
Which of the following four companies is a convicted monopolist? a) Microsoft b) Apple c) Facebook d) Google
The correct answer is "a" (Microsoft). The leadership that festered that predatory behavior is still at Microsoft. Bill Gates is Chairman, Steve Ballmer is CEO. That's why Microsoft's actions warrant careful scrutiny.
It's unfortunate that the "editors" allowed themselves to be trolled this way.
Others have already agreed with you, but I wanted to "pile on", in the hopes of influencing the "editors" who select these stories. Yeah, I know, it's silly for me to think this post might make a difference. Most of the time, the "editors" can't be bothered to even read the story; I have no realistic expectation that they might actually read our comments.
That's the problem. I don't care about technical solutions, because PHBs will invariably do whatever it takes to fuck things up. This was true for the two space shuttle accidents, for Three Mile Island, for Chernobyl, and most recently for Fukushima.
How do we solve the management problem? Without a solution to that, the only technical schemes that could work long term are those that can be proactively designed to survive actively hostile management for the entire operating lifetime of a nuclear plant. That just doesn't seem possible, does it? PHBs are lazy and stupid, but, given 50 years of effort, they will figure out how to fuck something up. That's as universal a law as gravity.
The decline of engineering as a career in this country is primarily because of two groups: a) top management and b) government policies. MBAs control top management, lawyers control government. Nothing will change until and unless those two groups understand that things need to change.
I don't remember if it was Photo CD or its successor Picture CD. But this thing was *worthless*. I paid about $7 extra exactly once for one of these. Never again.
The reason was quality. I was taking full frame 35 mm images. For $7 extra they put crappy 1 MB scans of those onto a CD for me. Really? That's $7 of value added? Screw them.
Yes it's simple "Economics 101", but too many nerds here on Slashdot don't understand it. Unfortunately they probably still won't understand it even after reading your post. Because their minds are closed, and they're just saying to themselves "that's not fair" without thinking it through.
What's worrying is that this is promoted by a stock exchange for the sole purpose of private communications and documents in public companies.
Exactly right.
Why the fuck is *NASDAQ* promoting this program? They're a stock exchange. Let them do that. Let someone else write and sell garbage like this.
Security breaches like this taint NASDAQ's reputation. And for what? The amount of revenue this could have generated is peanuts compared to revenue from running the exchange itself.
Oh, for the good old days, when "heads will roll for this" was meant literally, not figuratively. Just think of it as a little chlorine in the gene pool.
I haven't studied the case in enough detail to have an opinion on whether there is barratry or contempt. But I will opine that you don't want to piss off a Federal Judge. This isn't traffic court. This isn't a smart move by Righthaven.
The schools could gotten laptops for less with a bigger screen, more ram , more hdd space and more software.
How the fuck did this drivel get modded +5 insightful??? Anyone who considers that comment +5 insightful is either a total imbecile or has never used both an iPad and a laptop. I've used both. Extensively. They're not equivalent. Not even close. They each have their place.
This drivel completely misses the point of the iPad. It's *not* a laptop. It weighs a third as much as much as a small laptop. It has a much better display than the typical budget laptop. It exits standby instantly, quite unlike a typical laptop. It's much more secure and easier to use than the typical laptop. It can easily run on a single battery charge for a full day, most laptops can't.
And there's more wrong with the second half of that sentence. E.g why does the typical middle school student need to lug around "a bigger screen"? Why does he need "more ram"? Why does he need "more hdd space"? Now you're out of the range of a small laptop. With the bigger-is-better mantra, a 12 y/o kid should be lugging around a 6 lb laptop? Add how much more weight for a case and a charger?
I think we can debate whether middle school students even need an iPad. Without reading TFA, my initial reaction is *no*. But certainly middle school students don't need a laptop to drag around all day, every day. I can't even begin to imagine how many laptops would be broken by the end of a school year. My SWAG would be: more than 70%. The iPad is much more robust, but still would have a hard time surviving a year of daily classroom use by a typical middle school student.
You're not alone in your despair. Categorizing the new discussion system as a clusterfuck doesn't begin to describe how badly broken it is. The slashdot "editors" must never read any of the stories, because, as you point out, it's been *months*, and yet nothing much seems to have changed.
Of course, the whole hierarchy viewing mechanism is also totally fubarred, so you'll probably never even be able to view this response.
I see it as a positive. I'm now wasting much less time on slashdot.
Actually had a twerp from NYT Tech support tell me this morning that they had a new iPad app. True, 2.0.4 (the only version on the appstore) was new on April 1, 2010.
The info in the App store is a little misleading. If you search for the NYT app it says April 1, 2010. But if you actually click for more details, you see that it was updated to version 2.0.4 on December 23, 2010. So it's not as out of date as it appears to be at first glance.
Not sure if you'll ever see this, the newest/. discussion system is a total disaster. Anyway, here goes...
Pilots are getting "dumber" because planes do so much for them now. But, in order to save lives, I want pilots to be dumber still. I want them to have an "Easy" button, like Staples advertises.
When the situation is totally fucked up, and the pilot can't stabilize it, the pilot hits the Easy button. Then the plane does what it has to in order to at least stay in the air. E.g. in the case of pitot tube failure causing loss of airspeed information, software sets IIRC 85% thrust at a specified AOA. Then at least the plane doesn't drop from the sky. Software can use info from sources that are still available. E.g. if altimeter isn't trustworthy, maybe GPS is valid, so use altitude from that (in case thrust setting varies with altitude). Or if no GPS, then use the radar altimeter. Or maybe the inertial nav system has an idea of the current altitude. Etc. In other words, do whatever you can to keep the plane from crashing. Also, if the plane is already in a bad configuration or even in a stall, then do whatever is possible to recover. A computer should be better at that then a "data entry operator".
This is an incredible can of worms to open. But, given how so many pilots are now "data entry operators" (see a comment below, and see lamentations on various pilot forums), it might actually save lives.
I predict, that ten or twenty years from now, most pilots will be next to useless in emergencies, and something like what I suggest will be de rigueur. Yes, the autopilot can disengage when it can't handle a dynamic situation. But then, after the pilots also can't handle it, there needs to be a "last ditch" computer on board. Given my druthers, I'd rather have Sully fly the plane. But I'd trust a computer over a "data entry operator" any day.
Yeah -- I bought the first three as a set, but I never could bring myself to invest the effort to learn an imaginary language. The book could have been written in a very simplified C, which can be trivially reduced to assembly if need-be, but can be easily read by nearly any programmer today.
C did not even exist when the first two volumes of TAOCP were published. I'm not at all crazy about MIX, but Knuth can't be criticized for not "simplifying" a language that hadn't even been invented at the time.
Plus, MIX isn't completely "imaginary". Emulators actually exist for it.
You're exactly right, if society valued engineers they would be paid better. It's an imperfect method, but it's the best we've found in many years of trying.
Too bad you're only at +2, many people won't even see your comment.
And you probably won't even see my comment,/. is totally fucked up since the recent change to the discussion system.
I currently have mod points, but I'm responding anyway. Two reasons 1) it's already +5 funny and even if it wasn't, then 2) the new discussion system is so borked that I don't want to moderate: I can't in good conscience do it, because I simply can't follow all the hidden posts and confusing nesting to make sure I'm doing the right thing.
I haven't had mod points in about 6 months. Once my karma went from positive to good they just disappeared. Before that I had them pretty much every week. Things must be desperate, maybe nobody wants to moderate. Currently there are very few highly rated comments in the posts. So now slashdot is scraping the dregs (e.g. I have mod points again)!
I agree in principle; I'm sure there are many difficult implementation details.
Heck, even charging $1 per IP address per year would free up vast numbers of addresses.
E.g. here's a thought example: MIT gets a bill for $16,277,216 for the use of their IP block for the next month. Think they'd pay? How about $16,277,216 for the next year? I don't think they'd pay that either.
But there are far too many sacred cows out there for something like you suggest to be practical. As someone else said just below: "Internet does not work like that. Not even close". So we'll instead spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the switchover.
2. Enumerating Badness.... But AV works by keeping a list of "things that are bad" and blocking them all - you know how long that list is these days? You only need one thing to slip the net and your system's 0wned anyway. It's the computer equivalent of having sex with every disease-ridden cheap whore you can find working the streets and hoping to Christ the condom never breaks. The bad thing only needs to be lucky once, you need to be lucky every time.
I'd like to rephrase your analogy a little:
I'd say it's the computer equivalent of encountering a random whore, checking a list of names of infected whores that you carry with you, and then deciding to have unprotected sex with this whore. After all, her name isn't on your list.
Unfortunately I didn't work on my rephrasing for long enough to completely maintain the spirit in which your original was written. E.g. I didn't include the colorfully descriptive phrase "disease-ridden cheap whore". But you get the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo.
Microsoft in the '90s felt free to sodomize at will most of the software industry as well as most of the hardware industry. Today they're a minnow in mobile and they hate it when the sharks aren't playing nice with them.
Boo hoo is exactly right.
Yes, the Micro is an excellent pen, with a 0.5 mm tip. It's "fade and water resistant", which is good. I'm surprised that nobody else has mentioned them.
My only complaint is a matter of logistics. I have no problem buying blue ones or black ones. But I've only found red ones in combo packs with other colors.
now, as we well know, power consumption is a square law of the clock rate. so in a rough comparison, in the same geometry (e.g. 45nm), that 1.6ghz CPU is going to be roughly TEN times more power consumption than that dual-core ARM Cortex A9.
You have mis-remembered the power consumption rules. It's directly proportional to clock rate. It's a square law with respect to voltage. That's why Intel takes great pains to constantly vary the voltage of its chips as they operate. C.f. this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_voltage_scaling
Of course, there are a whole lot of details beyond the simplistic formula of v-squared times f. E.g., until recently, the "leakage currents" (i.e. power drawn even at zero clock rate) were getting worse and worse (as a percentage of total power). That's why when Intel announced Ivy Bridge it was a big deal. Their tri-gate transistors are much better in terms of leakage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#Tri-gate_transistors
Certainly Boston would be a good candidate city.
But not all Fry's are the same. There's one in the Portland Oregon metro area. It's OK, but it's a mere shadow of the "real" ones I've been to in the Bay Area.
Which of the following four companies is a convicted monopolist?
a) Microsoft
b) Apple
c) Facebook
d) Google
The correct answer is "a" (Microsoft). The leadership that festered that predatory behavior is still at Microsoft. Bill Gates is Chairman, Steve Ballmer is CEO. That's why Microsoft's actions warrant careful scrutiny.
It's unfortunate that the "editors" allowed themselves to be trolled this way.
I agree, this is not news for nerds.
Others have already agreed with you, but I wanted to "pile on", in the hopes of influencing the "editors" who select these stories. Yeah, I know, it's silly for me to think this post might make a difference. Most of the time, the "editors" can't be bothered to even read the story; I have no realistic expectation that they might actually read our comments.
That olpcnews link was very informative. And your comments are exactly to the point.
A while ago I saved a comment (I think from slashdot, I'm too lazy to google for it) that summarizes the situation:
OLPC is a rich man's idea of what poor men need. It's like donating an expresso machine to a homeless shelter.
This was just plain bad management
That's the problem. I don't care about technical solutions, because PHBs will invariably do whatever it takes to fuck things up. This was true for the two space shuttle accidents, for Three Mile Island, for Chernobyl, and most recently for Fukushima.
How do we solve the management problem? Without a solution to that, the only technical schemes that could work long term are those that can be proactively designed to survive actively hostile management for the entire operating lifetime of a nuclear plant. That just doesn't seem possible, does it? PHBs are lazy and stupid, but, given 50 years of effort, they will figure out how to fuck something up. That's as universal a law as gravity.
Too bad I don't have mod points. I strongly agree with you. Watching TV while driving is asinine. It's a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The decline of engineering as a career in this country is primarily because of two groups: a) top management and b) government policies. MBAs control top management, lawyers control government. Nothing will change until and unless those two groups understand that things need to change.
I'm not optimistic.
They tried PhotoCD
I don't remember if it was Photo CD or its successor Picture CD. But this thing was *worthless*. I paid about $7 extra exactly once for one of these. Never again.
The reason was quality. I was taking full frame 35 mm images. For $7 extra they put crappy 1 MB scans of those onto a CD for me. Really? That's $7 of value added? Screw them.
Thanks for your posting.
Yes it's simple "Economics 101", but too many nerds here on Slashdot don't understand it. Unfortunately they probably still won't understand it even after reading your post. Because their minds are closed, and they're just saying to themselves "that's not fair" without thinking it through.
What's worrying is that this is promoted by a stock exchange for the sole purpose of private communications and documents in public companies.
Exactly right.
Why the fuck is *NASDAQ* promoting this program? They're a stock exchange. Let them do that. Let someone else write and sell garbage like this.
Security breaches like this taint NASDAQ's reputation. And for what? The amount of revenue this could have generated is peanuts compared to revenue from running the exchange itself.
Oh, for the good old days, when "heads will roll for this" was meant literally, not figuratively. Just think of it as a little chlorine in the gene pool.
I haven't studied the case in enough detail to have an opinion on whether there is barratry or contempt. But I will opine that you don't want to piss off a Federal Judge. This isn't traffic court. This isn't a smart move by Righthaven.
The schools could gotten laptops for less with a bigger screen, more ram , more hdd space and more software.
How the fuck did this drivel get modded +5 insightful??? Anyone who considers that comment +5 insightful is either a total imbecile or has never used both an iPad and a laptop. I've used both. Extensively. They're not equivalent. Not even close. They each have their place.
This drivel completely misses the point of the iPad. It's *not* a laptop. It weighs a third as much as much as a small laptop. It has a much better display than the typical budget laptop. It exits standby instantly, quite unlike a typical laptop. It's much more secure and easier to use than the typical laptop. It can easily run on a single battery charge for a full day, most laptops can't.
And there's more wrong with the second half of that sentence. E.g why does the typical middle school student need to lug around "a bigger screen"? Why does he need "more ram"? Why does he need "more hdd space"? Now you're out of the range of a small laptop. With the bigger-is-better mantra, a 12 y/o kid should be lugging around a 6 lb laptop? Add how much more weight for a case and a charger?
I think we can debate whether middle school students even need an iPad. Without reading TFA, my initial reaction is *no*. But certainly middle school students don't need a laptop to drag around all day, every day. I can't even begin to imagine how many laptops would be broken by the end of a school year. My SWAG would be: more than 70%. The iPad is much more robust, but still would have a hard time surviving a year of daily classroom use by a typical middle school student.
You're not alone in your despair. Categorizing the new discussion system as a clusterfuck doesn't begin to describe how badly broken it is. The slashdot "editors" must never read any of the stories, because, as you point out, it's been *months*, and yet nothing much seems to have changed.
Of course, the whole hierarchy viewing mechanism is also totally fubarred, so you'll probably never even be able to view this response.
I see it as a positive. I'm now wasting much less time on slashdot.
Actually had a twerp from NYT Tech support tell me this morning that they had a new iPad app. True, 2.0.4 (the only version on the appstore) was new on April 1, 2010.
The info in the App store is a little misleading. If you search for the NYT app it says April 1, 2010. But if you actually click for more details, you see that it was updated to version 2.0.4 on December 23, 2010. So it's not as out of date as it appears to be at first glance.
Not sure if you'll ever see this, the newest /. discussion system is a total disaster. Anyway, here goes ...
Pilots are getting "dumber" because planes do so much for them now. But, in order to save lives, I want pilots to be dumber still. I want them to have an "Easy" button, like Staples advertises.
When the situation is totally fucked up, and the pilot can't stabilize it, the pilot hits the Easy button. Then the plane does what it has to in order to at least stay in the air. E.g. in the case of pitot tube failure causing loss of airspeed information, software sets IIRC 85% thrust at a specified AOA. Then at least the plane doesn't drop from the sky. Software can use info from sources that are still available. E.g. if altimeter isn't trustworthy, maybe GPS is valid, so use altitude from that (in case thrust setting varies with altitude). Or if no GPS, then use the radar altimeter. Or maybe the inertial nav system has an idea of the current altitude. Etc. In other words, do whatever you can to keep the plane from crashing. Also, if the plane is already in a bad configuration or even in a stall, then do whatever is possible to recover. A computer should be better at that then a "data entry operator".
This is an incredible can of worms to open. But, given how so many pilots are now "data entry operators" (see a comment below, and see lamentations on various pilot forums), it might actually save lives.
I predict, that ten or twenty years from now, most pilots will be next to useless in emergencies, and something like what I suggest will be de rigueur. Yes, the autopilot can disengage when it can't handle a dynamic situation. But then, after the pilots also can't handle it, there needs to be a "last ditch" computer on board. Given my druthers, I'd rather have Sully fly the plane. But I'd trust a computer over a "data entry operator" any day.
Yeah -- I bought the first three as a set, but I never could bring myself to invest the effort to learn an imaginary language. The book could have been written in a very simplified C, which can be trivially reduced to assembly if need-be, but can be easily read by nearly any programmer today.
C did not even exist when the first two volumes of TAOCP were published. I'm not at all crazy about MIX, but Knuth can't be criticized for not "simplifying" a language that hadn't even been invented at the time.
Plus, MIX isn't completely "imaginary". Emulators actually exist for it.
You're exactly right, if society valued engineers they would be paid better. It's an imperfect method, but it's the best we've found in many years of trying.
Too bad you're only at +2, many people won't even see your comment.
And you probably won't even see my comment, /. is totally fucked up since the recent change to the discussion system.
Back in the old days when Pud ran FuckedCompany.com, he would love to post stories about Accenture. He'd always say: Accenture (pronounced ass-enter).
I currently have mod points, but I'm responding anyway. Two reasons
1) it's already +5 funny
and even if it wasn't, then
2) the new discussion system is so borked that I don't want to moderate: I can't in good conscience do it, because I simply can't follow all the hidden posts and confusing nesting to make sure I'm doing the right thing.
I haven't had mod points in about 6 months. Once my karma went from positive to good they just disappeared. Before that I had them pretty much every week. Things must be desperate, maybe nobody wants to moderate. Currently there are very few highly rated comments in the posts. So now slashdot is scraping the dregs (e.g. I have mod points again)!
I agree in principle; I'm sure there are many difficult implementation details.
Heck, even charging $1 per IP address per year would free up vast numbers of addresses.
E.g. here's a thought example: MIT gets a bill for $16,277,216 for the use of their IP block for the next month. Think they'd pay? How about $16,277,216 for the next year? I don't think they'd pay that either.
But there are far too many sacred cows out there for something like you suggest to be practical. As someone else said just below: "Internet does not work like that. Not even close". So we'll instead spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the switchover.
Thanks for writing that. History was never my strong suite, and they don't usually teach real history in high school anyway.
2. Enumerating Badness. ... But AV works by keeping a list of "things that are bad" and blocking them all - you know how long that list is these days? You only need one thing to slip the net and your system's 0wned anyway. It's the computer equivalent of having sex with every disease-ridden cheap whore you can find working the streets and hoping to Christ the condom never breaks. The bad thing only needs to be lucky once, you need to be lucky every time.
I'd like to rephrase your analogy a little:
I'd say it's the computer equivalent of encountering a random whore, checking a list of names of infected whores that you carry with you, and then deciding to have unprotected sex with this whore. After all, her name isn't on your list.
Unfortunately I didn't work on my rephrasing for long enough to completely maintain the spirit in which your original was written. E.g. I didn't include the colorfully descriptive phrase "disease-ridden cheap whore". But you get the idea.