You've managed to explain why Ubuntu is so damned bloated. I mean, jeez, Linux is usually known for being lean and mean and making absurdly small demands on the hardware. But Ubuntu's system requirements are right up there with Windows!
I'm reminded of a programmer I used to know who claimed he could only code while stoned. His applications used to have all kinds of baroque options.
I don't really think the Ubuntu team consists of potheads. I mean, Cannonical is in London, not Amsterdam. But there do seem to be stoner-like attention issues here.
I normally ignore AC posts. But I have to call attention to this one. It is positively the most moronic, content free post I've ever seen on Slashdot. And that's saying a lot!
I don't think you're in much of a position to talk about trolling.
OK, you're not Noyce. In which case, you might tell her to vary her prose a bit. She always refers to "Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site." And wait, "Tom" always seems to be a link to your Slashdot home page...
No, I take it back. You're a sock puppet. Which is consistent with your various other bits of bullshit.
No, my contention is that science doesn't work that way. It's evidence, maybe even strong evidence, but it's not "proof".
This isn't just a semantic issue. Medical experts will tell you that you shouldn't base your health care decisions on just one study. And in any case the technical details of the study are important, which is not something you're going to get from a vague second-hand news story.
Sorry, no flame war here. In any case, you're one to talk, having written dozens of long righteous posts defending one lame, shoot-from-the-lip comment about the Mass. data security law. Which, last time I looked, still hadn't been challenged in the courts.
BTW, what exactly is your relationship with Katherine Noyes? She quotes you a lot, and always with the exact same phrasing. Are you her sockpuppet? If so, you seem to have skipped the ethics class at journalism school.
The article didn't say that the study proved that BPA is dangerous.
True. But the headline did. Does rather (look at the caption line of your current window)
It said that they proved that BPA can cross the placenta.
No, it said researchers "found" this to be the case in experiments with pregnant rats. I'm not just quibbling when I refuse to use the P word here. This is evidence that BPA crosses human placentas, and anybody who cares about neonatal health should certainly pay attention. But it's just not the same as proof. Another researcher might do another study that confirms or refutes this one. That wouldn't be proof either, just more evidence. And any of the above studies might get torn down if something finds fault with their methodology — which happens a lot in science, especially medical science.
Science isn't about proof. It's about accumulating evidence that backs up or tears down whatever theory or model happens to be under examination. This is inconvenient if you want to write pat little headlines, but it's the main reason science is more effective at advancing human knowledge than religion.
I think you'll find that UEFI is not nearly as complex as BIOS. The big advantage that UEFI has is that somebody actually designed it. Unlike BIOS which just sort of evolved out of IBM's old firmware I/O libraries.
And you don't have to use the GUI if you don't want to. UEFI actually has a command line. I don't recall seeing one in BIOS...
Studies don't "prove" anything. All they do is add a little weight to one side of an argument or another. Exactly how much weight depends on what was studied, how it relates to existing science, the methodology of the study, etc., etc., etc.
This study seems to add a little evidence to the belief that BPA is dangerous, of which there's already a lot. But only scientifically illiterate journalists and pundits (and, unfortunately, not a few opinionated doctors) look a single study and jump to big conclusion. You really need to look at the whole body of research.s
It's a lot easier to make Big Paradigm Shifts when you have your own proprietary environment with the hardware and OS directly under your control. Of course, there's a price for having your own proprietary environment.
Though come to think of it, didn't Apple move to EFI and the same time they moved to Intel architecture? If the market is forcing you to redesign all your motherboards, you might as well go to the latest and greatest firmware. And before that they were using the Open Boot firmware that's sort of standard in the non-x86 market, so switching to EFI wasn't that major. So sorry, Apple doesn't get any points for being ahead of the curve.
This is a reminder that commodity systems evolved from the old "IBM compatible" PCs. (It dates me that I'm old enough to remember when IBM's decisions determined the course of the entire marketplace; now they don't even make PCs anymore!) The weird thing is that IBM never intended the BIOS to be a general-purpose bootstrap environment. It was just a place to stick ROM-resident I/O code that they thought would be shared by all the different OSs that would run on the PC. Hence the crude nature of the BIOS's bootstrap support. Like all the other early hardware makers, IBM had no clue as to how to deal with OS issues. The world would be a simpler and kinder place if they had. But then, Bill Gates would still be writing code for a living, and that would be truly evil!
I shot down your argument. You can't resurrect it that easily.
You going to make an honest attempt to find the flaws in my argument, the way I did in yours? Or are you just going to refuse to admit that you're full of shit?
Indeed. It reminds me of how I came to hate the Newton for its size (among other reason): too big to put in your pocket, too small to serve as a serious device for reading or writing.
I own an HTC Hero (named "Dudley"; anybody get the joke?) with a 3.2" screen. For me, that's the perfect size — any bigger or smaller and it's a literal pain to use. (My left hand spasms if I even think about some of the other phones I've used.) If they're going to make a device bigger, it needs to be a lot bigger, so that there's enough screen real-estate for serious business.
Unfortunately, you can't specify an arbitrary size for an LCD panel: you have to go with whatever the manufacturers find it worthwhile to set up production lines for. (That's why monitor makers switched to landscape layout at the same time as the switch to digital mandated it for TVs.) Maybe if thousands of people went to the window and yelled "I'm as mad as hell, and I want an 8x8 LCD!"
That being said, it looks like an excellent little device to hack on...
Which pretty much defines the product. You'll notice that the web site emphasizes developers, not consumers.
Which limits the market, and guarantees that nobody's going to get rich selling the thing. I doubt that these guys care. Obviously their goal is to create a new open-source ecosystem. If that ecosystem reaches critical mass, then they (and anybody else who jumps on the bandwagon) will have a chance to design kewl products and make a modest living. Which is the ultimate goal of all serious OS projects.
I'm skeptical that this can go anywhere, but with such low upfront costs, why not give it a try?
What's special about "infrastructure equipment"? When your grocery store decides how much perishable food to stock, they have to make exactly the same kind of prediction. And yet few stores insist on monthly milk-buying contracts.
The truth is that a recurring fee is the ultimate wet dream of anybody designing a business model. Harder to do when there's real competition. Which there is in the grocery business.
And also in the wireless data business almost everywhere outside the U.S. Which is why, contrary to what you believe, that these models have been tried and do work, in countries where there's real competition in the wireless space.
That court is popular with IP plaintiffs. Reasons cited: sympathetic jurors, lots of judges who don't need to brush up on IP law, low backlogs. We've actually been here before:
This is my chance to snark back at the SPARCophiles at my former employer, Sun. You'll notice that Sun has a respectable presence on this list, lagging just behind SGI. And not a single Sun system on the Top 500 runs SPARC. They're all x64.
The SPARC Uber Alles mentality at Sun in its last days was really frustrating. I was working on x64 systems that were widely considered the best in their class. But you couldn't get the marketing and sales people to make an effort to sell them. They'd march into sales meetings with prospective customers that already had extensive Intel or AMD investment, and try to tell them that they really needed to abandon all that and switch to SPARC.
I once told one these bozos, "1998 called. It wants its sales strategy back." Probably had something to do with my being shown the door.
In other words, you think most people are stupid. You, of course, are smart.
The reality is that nobody is capable of objective self-examination of their own thought processes. That's why we have the scientific method, formalized education, peer review, psychotherapists, 12-step groups, clergypeople, etc.
In fact, smart people are better then others in maintaining beliefs contradicted by evidence. Example: William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of solid-state logic (WTF would we be without that?), who made bad decisions about his personal life, who started businesses that had no hope of succeeding, and who spent the last part of his life propounding racial theories worthy of the most ignorant Nazi or Klansman. His brilliance facilitated his idiocies; anybody who tried to argue with him got cut off at the knees.
Example: Christopher McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp. Graduated from Emory with honors, refused an offer of membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Shared Shockley's ability to out-argue anybody in sight. Developed weird theories from reading too much mysticism, gave away his money and embarked on a hand-to-mouth existence that ended when he tried to hike from Anchorage to the Bering Strait without so much as a compass.
Example: Our own Pudge. People who tangle with him tend to dismiss him as a braindamaged wingnut, but I find his arguments to be cleverly constructed, if somewhat factually challenged.
What these folks lack is not intellectual skill but emotional maturity.
True tablet, no keyboard, though it supports most USB keyboards (obviously). Runs Windows 7 just fine (ran Vista when I got it, which was a nightmare), and has really good handwriting recognition. Great for reading in bed. And being able to play Plants vs. Zombies with a stylus instead of a mouse nicely offsets my hand-eye coordination problems.
Which is not to say that I disagree with TFA about the economic viability of the thing. It's way too expensive, and if I weren't an overpaid geek who's willing to pay a huge premium just to have certain ubercool technologies, I wouldn't own one.
The iPad is overhyped, as are all Apple products. But so what? Even if it's just an overgrown iPod Touch (which means it's something I'd never bother with), there's obviously a market for it. On the train to work this morning, half my fellow commuters were passing the time on some kind of pocket device, and maybe a third of these were iPhones or iPads. Take one of these and give it a half-decent screen, and I think you've got a winner, even if it is a product most geeks would sneer at.
Slashdot Mirror
You've managed to explain why Ubuntu is so damned bloated. I mean, jeez, Linux is usually known for being lean and mean and making absurdly small demands on the hardware. But Ubuntu's system requirements are right up there with Windows!
I'm reminded of a programmer I used to know who claimed he could only code while stoned. His applications used to have all kinds of baroque options.
I don't really think the Ubuntu team consists of potheads. I mean, Cannonical is in London, not Amsterdam. But there do seem to be stoner-like attention issues here.
I normally ignore AC posts. But I have to call attention to this one. It is positively the most moronic, content free post I've ever seen on Slashdot. And that's saying a lot!
Next time use a graphite rod...
I don't think you're in much of a position to talk about trolling.
OK, you're not Noyce. In which case, you might tell her to vary her prose a bit. She always refers to "Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site." And wait, "Tom" always seems to be a link to your Slashdot home page...
No, I take it back. You're a sock puppet. Which is consistent with your various other bits of bullshit.
No, my contention is that science doesn't work that way. It's evidence, maybe even strong evidence, but it's not "proof".
This isn't just a semantic issue. Medical experts will tell you that you shouldn't base your health care decisions on just one study. And in any case the technical details of the study are important, which is not something you're going to get from a vague second-hand news story.
I take that as a "yes" to the sockpuppet ethics question.
Sorry, no flame war here. In any case, you're one to talk, having written dozens of long righteous posts defending one lame, shoot-from-the-lip comment about the Mass. data security law. Which, last time I looked, still hadn't been challenged in the courts.
BTW, what exactly is your relationship with Katherine Noyes? She quotes you a lot, and always with the exact same phrasing. Are you her sockpuppet? If so, you seem to have skipped the ethics class at journalism school.
I think he meant "moderation" as in "not extreme".
Unfortunately, "educated in science" usually means knowing lots of "scientific facts", not understanding scientific thinking.
The article didn't say that the study proved that BPA is dangerous.
True. But the headline did. Does rather (look at the caption line of your current window)
It said that they proved that BPA can cross the placenta.
No, it said researchers "found" this to be the case in experiments with pregnant rats. I'm not just quibbling when I refuse to use the P word here. This is evidence that BPA crosses human placentas, and anybody who cares about neonatal health should certainly pay attention. But it's just not the same as proof. Another researcher might do another study that confirms or refutes this one. That wouldn't be proof either, just more evidence. And any of the above studies might get torn down if something finds fault with their methodology — which happens a lot in science, especially medical science.
Science isn't about proof. It's about accumulating evidence that backs up or tears down whatever theory or model happens to be under examination. This is inconvenient if you want to write pat little headlines, but it's the main reason science is more effective at advancing human knowledge than religion.
I think you'll find that UEFI is not nearly as complex as BIOS. The big advantage that UEFI has is that somebody actually designed it. Unlike BIOS which just sort of evolved out of IBM's old firmware I/O libraries.
And you don't have to use the GUI if you don't want to. UEFI actually has a command line. I don't recall seeing one in BIOS...
Dude, did you read even a single word of what I said? If you had, you'd know I wasn't defending BPA.
Studies don't "prove" anything. All they do is add a little weight to one side of an argument or another. Exactly how much weight depends on what was studied, how it relates to existing science, the methodology of the study, etc., etc., etc.
This study seems to add a little evidence to the belief that BPA is dangerous, of which there's already a lot. But only scientifically illiterate journalists and pundits (and, unfortunately, not a few opinionated doctors) look a single study and jump to big conclusion. You really need to look at the whole body of research.s
It's a lot easier to make Big Paradigm Shifts when you have your own proprietary environment with the hardware and OS directly under your control. Of course, there's a price for having your own proprietary environment.
Though come to think of it, didn't Apple move to EFI and the same time they moved to Intel architecture? If the market is forcing you to redesign all your motherboards, you might as well go to the latest and greatest firmware. And before that they were using the Open Boot firmware that's sort of standard in the non-x86 market, so switching to EFI wasn't that major. So sorry, Apple doesn't get any points for being ahead of the curve.
This is a reminder that commodity systems evolved from the old "IBM compatible" PCs. (It dates me that I'm old enough to remember when IBM's decisions determined the course of the entire marketplace; now they don't even make PCs anymore!) The weird thing is that IBM never intended the BIOS to be a general-purpose bootstrap environment. It was just a place to stick ROM-resident I/O code that they thought would be shared by all the different OSs that would run on the PC. Hence the crude nature of the BIOS's bootstrap support. Like all the other early hardware makers, IBM had no clue as to how to deal with OS issues. The world would be a simpler and kinder place if they had. But then, Bill Gates would still be writing code for a living, and that would be truly evil!
I shot down your argument. You can't resurrect it that easily.
You going to make an honest attempt to find the flaws in my argument, the way I did in yours? Or are you just going to refuse to admit that you're full of shit?
Indeed. It reminds me of how I came to hate the Newton for its size (among other reason): too big to put in your pocket, too small to serve as a serious device for reading or writing.
I own an HTC Hero (named "Dudley"; anybody get the joke?) with a 3.2" screen. For me, that's the perfect size — any bigger or smaller and it's a literal pain to use. (My left hand spasms if I even think about some of the other phones I've used.) If they're going to make a device bigger, it needs to be a lot bigger, so that there's enough screen real-estate for serious business.
Unfortunately, you can't specify an arbitrary size for an LCD panel: you have to go with whatever the manufacturers find it worthwhile to set up production lines for. (That's why monitor makers switched to landscape layout at the same time as the switch to digital mandated it for TVs.) Maybe if thousands of people went to the window and yelled "I'm as mad as hell, and I want an 8x8 LCD!"
That being said, it looks like an excellent little device to hack on...
Which pretty much defines the product. You'll notice that the web site emphasizes developers, not consumers.
Which limits the market, and guarantees that nobody's going to get rich selling the thing. I doubt that these guys care. Obviously their goal is to create a new open-source ecosystem. If that ecosystem reaches critical mass, then they (and anybody else who jumps on the bandwagon) will have a chance to design kewl products and make a modest living. Which is the ultimate goal of all serious OS projects.
I'm skeptical that this can go anywhere, but with such low upfront costs, why not give it a try?
But yeah, comparisons with the iPad are lame.
What's special about "infrastructure equipment"? When your grocery store decides how much perishable food to stock, they have to make exactly the same kind of prediction. And yet few stores insist on monthly milk-buying contracts.
The truth is that a recurring fee is the ultimate wet dream of anybody designing a business model. Harder to do when there's real competition. Which there is in the grocery business.
And also in the wireless data business almost everywhere outside the U.S. Which is why, contrary to what you believe, that these models have been tried and do work, in countries where there's real competition in the wireless space.
wait for it -- East Texas District Court.
That court is popular with IP plaintiffs. Reasons cited: sympathetic jurors, lots of judges who don't need to brush up on IP law, low backlogs. We've actually been here before:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/24/1236255/Patent-Trolls-Target-Small-East-Texas-Companies?from=rss
This is my chance to snark back at the SPARCophiles at my former employer, Sun. You'll notice that Sun has a respectable presence on this list, lagging just behind SGI. And not a single Sun system on the Top 500 runs SPARC. They're all x64.
The SPARC Uber Alles mentality at Sun in its last days was really frustrating. I was working on x64 systems that were widely considered the best in their class. But you couldn't get the marketing and sales people to make an effort to sell them. They'd march into sales meetings with prospective customers that already had extensive Intel or AMD investment, and try to tell them that they really needed to abandon all that and switch to SPARC.
I once told one these bozos, "1998 called. It wants its sales strategy back." Probably had something to do with my being shown the door.
For future reference, the Sun does not contain any user-servicable parts.
That's what they said about the planet.
This comes alongside a report confirming some of the BS we told our parents when we were growing up
Be that as it may, your parents were still right about exercise, fresh air, and socialization.
In other words, you think most people are stupid. You, of course, are smart.
The reality is that nobody is capable of objective self-examination of their own thought processes. That's why we have the scientific method, formalized education, peer review, psychotherapists, 12-step groups, clergypeople, etc.
In fact, smart people are better then others in maintaining beliefs contradicted by evidence. Example: William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of solid-state logic (WTF would we be without that?), who made bad decisions about his personal life, who started businesses that had no hope of succeeding, and who spent the last part of his life propounding racial theories worthy of the most ignorant Nazi or Klansman. His brilliance facilitated his idiocies; anybody who tried to argue with him got cut off at the knees.
Example: Christopher McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp. Graduated from Emory with honors, refused an offer of membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Shared Shockley's ability to out-argue anybody in sight. Developed weird theories from reading too much mysticism, gave away his money and embarked on a hand-to-mouth existence that ended when he tried to hike from Anchorage to the Bering Strait without so much as a compass.
Example: Our own Pudge. People who tangle with him tend to dismiss him as a braindamaged wingnut, but I find his arguments to be cleverly constructed, if somewhat factually challenged.
What these folks lack is not intellectual skill but emotional maturity.
Like I said, the thing ain't economically viable. But it does exist.
I'm writing this on one of them. Specifics:
http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/tablet_pc_le17.asp
True tablet, no keyboard, though it supports most USB keyboards (obviously). Runs Windows 7 just fine (ran Vista when I got it, which was a nightmare), and has really good handwriting recognition. Great for reading in bed. And being able to play Plants vs. Zombies with a stylus instead of a mouse nicely offsets my hand-eye coordination problems.
Which is not to say that I disagree with TFA about the economic viability of the thing. It's way too expensive, and if I weren't an overpaid geek who's willing to pay a huge premium just to have certain ubercool technologies, I wouldn't own one.
The iPad is overhyped, as are all Apple products. But so what? Even if it's just an overgrown iPod Touch (which means it's something I'd never bother with), there's obviously a market for it. On the train to work this morning, half my fellow commuters were passing the time on some kind of pocket device, and maybe a third of these were iPhones or iPads. Take one of these and give it a half-decent screen, and I think you've got a winner, even if it is a product most geeks would sneer at.