You're not misreading anything, and the author is quite serious. Enthusiasts for a particular technology tend to read too much into proposals like this. Nothing new about that.
There's also an official Ubuntu port for SPARC. This has been around for a while now, but there's been no talk of reviving the Windows on SPARC project.
Perhaps the submitter was mislead by the marketing BS in the annoucement. The "software advantage" of x86 is not going to go away because people start buying ARM-based netbooks instead of x86-based netbooks. Most computers are not netbooks!
...poses a paradox to the traditional way delusion is defined under the diagnostic guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which says that if a belief is held by a person's "culture or subculture," it is not a delusion.
I don't see the problem. Why is it sane for people to believe in angels, but not sane for people to believe they're being followed by secret agents in red cars? People believe in a lot of silly things. That's not delusion, that just buying into a set of beliefs that don't make sense to outsiders.
The social norm definition of delusion is perfectly fine. The real problem is that the mental health community insists on treating this as a "diagnosis". This is a concept that makes no sense in describing mental conditions. The human brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe, and poorly understood. There are a few physical or chemical abnormalities that can screw up your thinking, but except for those, the idea that you can take a list of behaviors and "diagnose" an underlying condition the way an oncologist diagnoses a tumor is absurd.
Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck with this charade. People won't trust mental health professionals (who actually are useful now and then) if they don't maintain the pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo. And of course insurance companies won't pay any bills without a "diagnosis".
Actually, "Chunghwa" is just the Chinese name for China. Taiwanese companies that have "China" in their names tend to use "Chungwa" instead of "China". I guess that's to avoid confusing westerners who don't know that there are two Chinas — or Sarah Palin, who probably doesn't know there's even one!
The Google toolbar comes with a button that feeds the current page to Google Translate. Saves steps.
I'm constantly impressed by Google's ability to come up with cutting edge software that does things their competitors can't even approach. I'm less happy with their total inability to polish off the rough edges, document features properly, stomp bugs, and think through their GUI designs.
Maybe I'm just jealous because Google hires only brilliant computer scientists (like whoever came up with with Google Translate) and has no room for unimaginative drudges (like me). The problem with that approach is that your products never mature, because there's nobody to do the scutwork that separates a mature product from a permanent beta.
It's ok to be adverse to cell phones, it's ok to long for the pager days, but the pager functionality is *completely integrated* in the cell phone system, so are they asking that we "burn them all", or are they really whining about not being able to transition?
This particular FA is whin^H^H^H^Hcomplaining about the inability of his particular cell phone to not let him sleep through a page. He basically needs a really loud ring tone, and he needs to phone not to shut up until it's gotten his attention. I'm not familiar with this phone, but it wouldn't surprise me if its alert features were pretty limited.
In theory, you can get a phone that replaces your PDA, your MP3 player, your pager, your GPS, and your pocket game gadget. I don't need a pager, but until recently I had all the others. I only got rid of my PDA because it was too hard to keep it in sync with my phone — and I still find not being able to refer to my PDA while I'm talking on the phone to be a pain. As for the other functions, the phone can theoretically do all of them, but the available software just plain sucks.
Maybe some people who resist the convergent devices trend do so out of an inability to change. But I think mostly we resist because vendors don't do a very good job of converging.
If I could design my perfect cell phone, it would have very few features indeed. You obviously need a cell radio with voice and data capability. And you need bluetooth so you can integrate it with other devices. I guess you need speaker and mic so you won't have to wear one of those silly headsets. (Everytime I see one, I want to shout, "Resistance is Futile!") But that's it. Really, you don't even need a dial (90% of the time you're dialing numbers in your phone book, and that's easier from the PDA) though I suppose consumers would balk at a phone that minimalistic.
According to this article, that 10% figure applies to people who've inherited a single gene that confers reduced susceptibility, not immunity. To get immunity, you need to inherit the gene from both parents.
I'm sure if you put Solaris on your sun servers it would support the framebuffers just fine.
Also Windows and Linux. These are the OSs that Sun supports on x64 servers.
On the other hand, they are servers, why the hell would you want to use a framebuffer on them? Serial is the only way to manage a server since then you don't need to set foot inside the datacenter.
Actually, most current Sun servers support remote graphic console via ILOM.
Only four? I think that describes every horror movie that doesn't feature a faceless psycho, a supernatural monster, or a giant ape. Bear in mind that such movies always feature the improbable. This is by design, because they wouldn't be so comforting otherwise.
I'm all for solar power. But I've become convinced that all the people trying to "help out" with their spending on home solar crap are wasting their money. And under "home solar crap" I even include those who spend big bucks covering their roofs with solar cells. Not only are they absurdly expensive for the power they provide, but they cost serious energy to manufacture and install — in most cases more energy than they'll ever generate.
To succeed, alternative energy needs to operate on a big scale. Huge thermal solar plants, windmill farms, tidal engines, geothermal engines and so on. If you want to throw your money at the problem, invest in those. Though there is some danger you'll actually make a profit, but I think most people can live with that.
Another thing: stop looking for little gimmicks that serve only to assuage your environmental guilt. There's no way you can make a real difference without making some basic changes. If you think you're green because you have some solar powered gadgets and you recycle your water bottles, you're fooling yourself.
We can argue about what might have happened forever. The crucial detail is that she was served coffee hot enough to put her in the hospital with serious burns. Not scalds, burns.
There are certainly a lot of laughable lawsuits out there. This just wasn't one of them, despite popular mythology.
"I was going to switch to Linux. But even though it's more secure, stable, and faster than Windows, I didn't switch because there are too many issues with X Windows. But now that's a decent windowing system, it's time to make the move!"
Do you you actually know anybody who's in that position? People who are motivated to switch because of "under the hood" issues have already done so.
That woman who sued over hot coffee was not simply whining about scalding her hands. She went to the hospital with 3rd degree burns. Probably the coffee had been reheated in a microwave. One hazard of heating liquids this way is that you can make them superhot without causing them to boil.
Anyway, we both know that people's hatred for blister packs has nothing to do with the risk of personal injury. (I have several scars on my hands from cutting vegetables or slicing bagels. Not one from opening a blister pack.) It's the extreme frustration you experience while you try to cut away enough plastic to get at the contents. Unfortunately "frustation" aint tortable.
The current bureaucratic status quo has many origins. Basically, it's been slow to change because a lot of people have a vested interest in limiting the voting pool. So whenever anybody advocates measures to make it easier to vote, they talk about "fraud" and other hot-button issues.
That situation is beginning to change, because the internet generation has developed a healthy interest in actually participating in democracy, and don't have a lot of use for rules that are basically designed to make it hard for them to vote. But it's going to change slowly.
By your definition, anybody who indulges in creative accounting has the ability to "print money". Playing those kinds of games can make you temporarily richer, but it doesn't actually increase the money supply. If it did, you could drop the "temporarily" from the above statement.
And yes, the banks' creative accounting did inflate housing prices. (Though not nearly as much as lending billions of dollars to people who had no hope of paying it back.) But again, that's not "printing money". If a con man blows into town and buys up all the local Sousaphones with rubber checks, you will certainly see a run up in the price of Sousaphones. But when those checks bounce, the Sousaphone inflation is likely to go away.
I say again: printing money is a perfectly effective way of counteracting the kind of downturn we're experiencing now. It's also very dangerous, but that's another issue.
This guy won due to superior design, not due to the fact that he used free software.
I disagree. I'm not saying the judges said "Ooh, this guy used Python, let's give him the prize." But they must have reacted to the unusual nature and the playfulness of his design, and that's very much a reflection of the way he went about designing it.
And the way Stani went about designing it is very unusual for a graphic designer. But not for a member of the Open Source community. The members of that community are motivated by their love of a clever hack, more so even than the desire to create useful software. This sort of creative algorithm fiddling showed in the final design, and must have struck the judges as fresh and different, whether or not they understood where it came from.
You seem to be under the impression that all the banks just failed had the ability to print money. If they had, do you think they would have failed?
Printing too much money doesn't cause this kind of crisis, which is actually about a shortage of money. What printing too much money does is cause inflation. That's how the German hyperinflation happened. During that period, the German economy roared right along, and everybody was employed, even though they were paid with worthless paper.
I'm in Texas and apparently 23% of Texans believe Obama is a Muslim.
Well, 75% of Muslims probably believe that all Texans are oil barons (excluding these guys of course), so that's only fair.
The above statement is actually less bigoted than it sounds. I had a co-worker once who was an immigrant from Belgium. His biggest problem with living in America was persuading his parents that the America he lived in bore no resemblance to the America they saw on their favorite TV shows, Dallas and Miami Vice.
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Delusion generally requires that you believe something despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
Russell Eugene Weston Jr. believed that he was receiving secret messages from the future. Disprove.
You're not misreading anything, and the author is quite serious. Enthusiasts for a particular technology tend to read too much into proposals like this. Nothing new about that.
There's also an official Ubuntu port for SPARC. This has been around for a while now, but there's been no talk of reviving the Windows on SPARC project.
Perhaps the submitter was mislead by the marketing BS in the annoucement. The "software advantage" of x86 is not going to go away because people start buying ARM-based netbooks instead of x86-based netbooks. Most computers are not netbooks!
...poses a paradox to the traditional way delusion is defined under the diagnostic guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which says that if a belief is held by a person's "culture or subculture," it is not a delusion.
I don't see the problem. Why is it sane for people to believe in angels, but not sane for people to believe they're being followed by secret agents in red cars? People believe in a lot of silly things. That's not delusion, that just buying into a set of beliefs that don't make sense to outsiders.
The social norm definition of delusion is perfectly fine. The real problem is that the mental health community insists on treating this as a "diagnosis". This is a concept that makes no sense in describing mental conditions. The human brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe, and poorly understood. There are a few physical or chemical abnormalities that can screw up your thinking, but except for those, the idea that you can take a list of behaviors and "diagnose" an underlying condition the way an oncologist diagnoses a tumor is absurd.
Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck with this charade. People won't trust mental health professionals (who actually are useful now and then) if they don't maintain the pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo. And of course insurance companies won't pay any bills without a "diagnosis".
Actually the only place in Alaska where you can see Russia is Diomede — and Palin's never been there.
Actually, "Chunghwa" is just the Chinese name for China. Taiwanese companies that have "China" in their names tend to use "Chungwa" instead of "China". I guess that's to avoid confusing westerners who don't know that there are two Chinas — or Sarah Palin, who probably doesn't know there's even one!
Perhaps it would have been better to wait before proclaiming it?
That would require editors with a reasonable attention span.
The Google toolbar comes with a button that feeds the current page to Google Translate. Saves steps.
I'm constantly impressed by Google's ability to come up with cutting edge software that does things their competitors can't even approach. I'm less happy with their total inability to polish off the rough edges, document features properly, stomp bugs, and think through their GUI designs.
Maybe I'm just jealous because Google hires only brilliant computer scientists (like whoever came up with with Google Translate) and has no room for unimaginative drudges (like me). The problem with that approach is that your products never mature, because there's nobody to do the scutwork that separates a mature product from a permanent beta.
It's ok to be adverse to cell phones, it's ok to long for the pager days, but the pager functionality is *completely integrated* in the cell phone system, so are they asking that we "burn them all", or are they really whining about not being able to transition?
This particular FA is whin^H^H^H^Hcomplaining about the inability of his particular cell phone to not let him sleep through a page. He basically needs a really loud ring tone, and he needs to phone not to shut up until it's gotten his attention. I'm not familiar with this phone, but it wouldn't surprise me if its alert features were pretty limited.
In theory, you can get a phone that replaces your PDA, your MP3 player, your pager, your GPS, and your pocket game gadget. I don't need a pager, but until recently I had all the others. I only got rid of my PDA because it was too hard to keep it in sync with my phone — and I still find not being able to refer to my PDA while I'm talking on the phone to be a pain. As for the other functions, the phone can theoretically do all of them, but the available software just plain sucks.
Maybe some people who resist the convergent devices trend do so out of an inability to change. But I think mostly we resist because vendors don't do a very good job of converging.
If I could design my perfect cell phone, it would have very few features indeed. You obviously need a cell radio with voice and data capability. And you need bluetooth so you can integrate it with other devices. I guess you need speaker and mic so you won't have to wear one of those silly headsets. (Everytime I see one, I want to shout, "Resistance is Futile!") But that's it. Really, you don't even need a dial (90% of the time you're dialing numbers in your phone book, and that's easier from the PDA) though I suppose consumers would balk at a phone that minimalistic.
After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint...
Did it occur to you to try Google? What's left of the pager market is tiny, and the big telecoms can't be bothered with it.
According to this article, that 10% figure applies to people who've inherited a single gene that confers reduced susceptibility, not immunity. To get immunity, you need to inherit the gene from both parents.
I'm sure if you put Solaris on your sun servers it would support the framebuffers just fine.
Also Windows and Linux. These are the OSs that Sun supports on x64 servers.
On the other hand, they are servers, why the hell would you want to use a framebuffer on them? Serial is the only way to manage a server since then you don't need to set foot inside the datacenter.
Actually, most current Sun servers support remote graphic console via ILOM.
Only four? I think that describes every horror movie that doesn't feature a faceless psycho, a supernatural monster, or a giant ape. Bear in mind that such movies always feature the improbable. This is by design, because they wouldn't be so comforting otherwise.
I'm all for solar power. But I've become convinced that all the people trying to "help out" with their spending on home solar crap are wasting their money. And under "home solar crap" I even include those who spend big bucks covering their roofs with solar cells. Not only are they absurdly expensive for the power they provide, but they cost serious energy to manufacture and install — in most cases more energy than they'll ever generate.
To succeed, alternative energy needs to operate on a big scale. Huge thermal solar plants, windmill farms, tidal engines, geothermal engines and so on. If you want to throw your money at the problem, invest in those. Though there is some danger you'll actually make a profit, but I think most people can live with that.
Another thing: stop looking for little gimmicks that serve only to assuage your environmental guilt. There's no way you can make a real difference without making some basic changes. If you think you're green because you have some solar powered gadgets and you recycle your water bottles, you're fooling yourself.
We can argue about what might have happened forever. The crucial detail is that she was served coffee hot enough to put her in the hospital with serious burns. Not scalds, burns.
There are certainly a lot of laughable lawsuits out there. This just wasn't one of them, despite popular mythology.
"I was going to switch to Linux. But even though it's more secure, stable, and faster than Windows, I didn't switch because there are too many issues with X Windows. But now that's a decent windowing system, it's time to make the move!"
Do you you actually know anybody who's in that position? People who are motivated to switch because of "under the hood" issues have already done so.
That woman who sued over hot coffee was not simply whining about scalding her hands. She went to the hospital with 3rd degree burns. Probably the coffee had been reheated in a microwave. One hazard of heating liquids this way is that you can make them superhot without causing them to boil.
Anyway, we both know that people's hatred for blister packs has nothing to do with the risk of personal injury. (I have several scars on my hands from cutting vegetables or slicing bagels. Not one from opening a blister pack.) It's the extreme frustration you experience while you try to cut away enough plastic to get at the contents. Unfortunately "frustation" aint tortable.
And forgot that a better X server isn't going to make a lot of people switch to Linux.
But Netcraft confirms it! Are you going to argue with Netcraft?
You've already had several answers. Here's mine.
The current bureaucratic status quo has many origins. Basically, it's been slow to change because a lot of people have a vested interest in limiting the voting pool. So whenever anybody advocates measures to make it easier to vote, they talk about "fraud" and other hot-button issues.
That situation is beginning to change, because the internet generation has developed a healthy interest in actually participating in democracy, and don't have a lot of use for rules that are basically designed to make it hard for them to vote. But it's going to change slowly.
I always wondered why the camera work was so bad...
By your definition, anybody who indulges in creative accounting has the ability to "print money". Playing those kinds of games can make you temporarily richer, but it doesn't actually increase the money supply. If it did, you could drop the "temporarily" from the above statement.
And yes, the banks' creative accounting did inflate housing prices. (Though not nearly as much as lending billions of dollars to people who had no hope of paying it back.) But again, that's not "printing money". If a con man blows into town and buys up all the local Sousaphones with rubber checks, you will certainly see a run up in the price of Sousaphones. But when those checks bounce, the Sousaphone inflation is likely to go away.
I say again: printing money is a perfectly effective way of counteracting the kind of downturn we're experiencing now. It's also very dangerous, but that's another issue.
The big deal is the creative way in which he used the software. RTFA.
This guy won due to superior design, not due to the fact that he used free software.
I disagree. I'm not saying the judges said "Ooh, this guy used Python, let's give him the prize." But they must have reacted to the unusual nature and the playfulness of his design, and that's very much a reflection of the way he went about designing it.
And the way Stani went about designing it is very unusual for a graphic designer. But not for a member of the Open Source community. The members of that community are motivated by their love of a clever hack, more so even than the desire to create useful software. This sort of creative algorithm fiddling showed in the final design, and must have struck the judges as fresh and different, whether or not they understood where it came from.
You seem to be under the impression that all the banks just failed had the ability to print money. If they had, do you think they would have failed?
Printing too much money doesn't cause this kind of crisis, which is actually about a shortage of money. What printing too much money does is cause inflation. That's how the German hyperinflation happened. During that period, the German economy roared right along, and everybody was employed, even though they were paid with worthless paper.
I'm in Texas and apparently 23% of Texans believe Obama is a Muslim.
Well, 75% of Muslims probably believe that all Texans are oil barons (excluding these guys of course), so that's only fair.
The above statement is actually less bigoted than it sounds. I had a co-worker once who was an immigrant from Belgium. His biggest problem with living in America was persuading his parents that the America he lived in bore no resemblance to the America they saw on their favorite TV shows, Dallas and Miami Vice.