One worry is that the fact is misleading. What if a product just had a measure of the mercury contents and didn't differentiate between Ethyl- and Methyl-mercury?
One such mechanism is that you can choose the researchers you fund. Then, results that jive with your purpose will be over-represented. I'm not saying that such a thing is happening here, because I don't think that there is enough funding to skew results in favor of AGW, but we should remember that cigarette companies planted uncertainty in the danger associated with smoking. Eventually the more correct result does reign I think, but there are advantages to lengthening the period of uncertainty.
Given that the sun radiates in all directions, and not all of its radiation is captured by earth...
Sun to the Earth: 1.49*10^8 Km
Diameter of Earth: 1.27562*10^4 Km
Surface area of sphere with radius from the Sun to the Earth: 2.7899*10^17 Km^2
Cross section of Earth: 1.278*10^8 Km^2
Only 4.581 * 10^-10 of the Sun's radiation reaches Earth. Therefore, if each bit of radiation the sun emitted were captured by earth, there would be 0.406 m^2 of surface per person. That's still quite a bit of super-hot material, but not quite as outrageous as you claimed.
Even so, it doesn't matter how much of the sun is shining on each part of the earth, but rather the change in the radiation. Furthermore, humans affect how much of the radiation is retained; we do not heat the planet by leaving our space heaters on too long.
In those recent drive tests, AT&T's network dropped only 1.44 percent of calls nationwide, within two-tenths of 1 percent of the industry leader and a difference of less than two calls out of 1,000.
The usual caveats apply, where this information is in aggregate. I don't know whether smartphones generally have a different dropped call rate because of usage patterns. I think that instead of measuring dropped calls they should measure dropped calls per hour of talk time, which would help normalize the data. For example, I only use my cell phone for calls that are under a minute or two.
Even so, this is far better than this old story where iPhones in NY had a 30% drop rate.
None of the people who asked for the data were amateurs. But more importantly, the data that Jones was trying to hide had already been lost - by Jones.
"In order to test the principal allegations of withholding data and making inappropriate adjustments, the Review undertook its own trial analysis of land station temperature data. The goal was to determine whether it is possible for an independent researcher to (a) obtain primary data and (b) to analyse it in order to produce independent temperature trend results. This study was intended only to test the feasibility of conducting such a process, and not to generate scientific conclusions." In other words, if we can do it, anyone can.
They found that the data was readily available at at least three different websites. They downloaded the data, selected every station that had an adequate amount of data and performed some smoothing and spatial averaging operations on them. In effect, they replicated the CRU's main research results, producing nearly identical instrumental temperature records, in very little time.
Broken FoIA system
The key findings here are pretty bleak. Basically, the UEA logged FoIA requests, but that was about it. After that, everything was down to the individual researchers figuring out if the data had to be, or, indeed, should be released, and then figuring out how to release it properly. Essentially, the entire system was dysfunctional, and the CRU made no attempt to make life easier for anyone.
In my opinion, it seems like bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice or ideology.
It may be the feature, along with clicktoflash, that moves me to safari.
clicktoflash has an equivalent for firefox and chrome called flashblock. However, the placeholder graphic for clicktoflash I find much better than the one for flashblock.
I know it feels like that, but 10.6 only came out 8 months ago. It hasn't been that long compared to the wait for 10.5 when they first released the iPhone. Their multitasking seems to have improved, though it could definitely still use some work.
He's saying that CPUs need to be massively parallel, like GPUs, to remain relevant.
He also contends that the current design of CPUs are too inefficient to compete with GPUs.
My question is: why? Programming for the GPU is tons harder than programming for multiple cores. The GPU is so efficient because it is so limited. If we were to migrate to GPUs, they would have to gain more general functionality, and lose some of their efficiency.
What's wrong with going the other way and start with a general purpose processor and make it more parallel, which surprise surprise we're already doing?
Pre-emptive multitasking only governs the CPU resources; the iPhone only has 256 MiB of RAM. I think that in their implementation the App archives its data such that it can be quickly re-opened. An app not rewritten to support that would work as they currently do, where the App has to boot up each time it's opened. That isn't terrible, and other companies would probably let the market sort it out, but Apple wants a seamless experience.
Pro: Better memory management.
Con: Not automatic.
Re:Would be 100% more fun with a camera
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
From the iFixIt teardown we know that it's basically all battery under there, and the battery life is great. But if there was an 8-hour version it would balance better in your hand.
I'm pretty sure that they found that the display was half of the weight. If the battery were the entirety of the opposite side, then an 8-hour battery would only cut down the weight by 10%, which is a slight improvement, but not enough in my opinion.
I did not say that the iPhone hardware did not change, but that done correctly upping the screen resolution should be transparent for most current apps.
Games would look far better, existing UI's may be able to be modified so that they're not limited by the existing low resolution for high res users and so forth. At the end of the day, there's only so much you can fit on screen per resolution, and if a higher resolution allows you to build a better UI then you're going to want to do it.
Apps that are not games should require almost no modification. They are mostly comprised of built-in widgets which, if Apple did things right, would scale correctly to the higher resolution and not need to be modified. It is true that you can cram more stuff onto the display with a higher resolution, but you don't want to. The alleged resolution is almost the size of the original iMac, but you wouldn't want to cram a desktop UI onto a phone. I would hazard that the most important aspect of designing a UI is the physical size. Games probably would require tweaking, because they rely on original graphics which would need to be updated to the higher resolution.
I brought in aspect ratios and screen size because those require much more work on the UI (although in many cases the change can be easy) and don't lend themselves to automatic translation. Any app that was written for the original iPhone will still work on current versions, and most likely future versions better than they did on the original. An app written for a long aspect ratio doesn't necessarily translate well to a different one which is stubbier. An app written for a 2.8" screen will look stretched on a 3.7" screen and one written for a 3.7" screen could be unreadable on a 2.8" screen. Actually porting the app to the separate screens could be very easy, but it's not something that could be done automatically very easily.
All of this hinges on whether Apple does a good job on the transition though. If they do pixel doubling like they did on the iPad then being resolution aware would be a must. Done correctly though, multiple resolutions can be done transparently. A good example is the handling of the GPS (which you stated was a compatibility issue). The Core Location framework uses the GPS if available, but can fall back onto approximation by Cell Towers and WiFi hotspots.
Assuming that the screen is the same physical size, would there be any reason to resize the GUI for existing apps? Your fingers haven't changed size.
It's much harder to translate a GUI between different aspect ratios than to just up the resolution. If Apple increased the resolution on the built in widgets, then existing applications would look the same as they do on current hardware but sharper.
Honestly, what changes would you make to the layout if the resolution was higher? Even though we can put books onto microfiche, we still print them onto paper. An increased resolution can make it easier to distinguish between widgets, but with hardware as small as a phone no radical changes to the layout are really necessary. The only major problem for current apps will be custom icons and widgets that haven't been scaled up to the higher resolution.
The problem with different Android devices are the different aspect ratios like 3:4 or 3:5 and different physical screen sizes like 2.8", 3.2" and 3.7". The iPhone will most likely always be 2:3 and 3.5"
I agree, paying for regular small things doesn't fit into the insurance model.
However, I think that it would be handy in terms of prevention. It would be like investing in the health of the person. Perhaps if I called it a subsidy rather than insurance, it would make more sense. It would raise the price of insurance by the amount you suggest, but only if the vaccine had no effects. If encouraging everybody to take the flu vaccine lowered the incidence of serious complications, then the total cost for health insurance might go down.
A similar example would be a policy that my car insurance company had. If new drivers took a class or kept a log while driving then their rates would go down. In that case they were lowering costs by trying to make people better drivers. In the case of health insurance, encouraging people to live more healthy or get vaccinated (for example) would lower the chance of serious complications.
Overhead is a problem though, and I don't know how much of a hassle it is. I'm young and thus haven't had to deal with health insurance at all. I would think that if a provider guaranteed that everyone they covered could get a vaccine, and had an efficient method for the vaccine distributer to check that it was covered (e.g. a credit card sort of deal) then I think that overhead could be minimal. I have no experience in this regard though, so overhead could mandate that small expenses shouldn't be paid for.
Summary: I was taking more about health care by subsidy rather than insurance.
I disagree on the point that common things shouldn't be covered under insurance.
The reason is that if prevention cost money then people are more likely to take risks. For example, getting a cold isn't life threatening for most people and thus they are unlikely to get vaccinated. However if more of the population were to get vaccinated then the total incidence of colds would go down and help the people who are threatened by colds. If it's free to get a shot, then more people will consider getting a shot.
Granted it's more persuasive prevention than insurance, but lumping them together could bring down the total cost of healthcare
One option you missed is requiring insurance providers to offer the same plan at the same price to everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. Obviously it isn't the best solution, but that combined with the requirement to buy insurance (and subsidies if those who don't qualify for Medicaid are found to not be able to afford a decent plan) should provide insurance for all people.
Upside: maintains a market which many people think is necessary. Personally I would rather have a single-payer system like Medicare (I'm somewhat of an idealist) which could have much lower overhead (Medicare I've heard does a good job, though there's always the possibility of people screwing it up) than a market system. However, people are much more willing to undergo small change and at least on Slashdot the majority are suspicious of the government.
Note: Medicare is single-payer in that all seniors are covered by it. There are other options, but they're bought in addition to Medicare.
The manufactures aren't trying to destroy Android, but the negligence is sure to stunt its growth. As long as Android is free and provides a good tech demo companies will continue to use it to sell the newest version of their phone.
Without a more cohesive foundation it will probably stagnate though. The same thing happened with Linux; 'the year of the linux desktop'. Linux has survived not because of market viability but because technical people liked it. It still doesn't have more than a couple percent of marketshare (in the consumer market.) Android has an advantage in that smartphones are more integrated platforms than desktops, and people expect less expandability, but each smartphone will be a part of the manufacturers brand, rather than the Android brand. On a fragmented market it's much more difficult to deliver expanded functionality in the form of applications to consumers. It will be more like the crappy java games that you'd see on old phones than the market for desktop software.
It's a new concept for phone companies though, and they'll probably start updating the OS once they get used to it. If they don't though, Android will probably see a limited success.
The perennial issue that always crops up when gender issues are discussed is the fact that men and women are different.
Yes, what you're saying is entirely true. The problem however is that the discussion is always left at that and never explored further. The difference may be due to inherent differences, but using that as the default answer is just as disingenuous as saying 'God did it' and leaving it at that. A historical example could be the wide gap in participation in sports, which has changed along with societal attitudes.
A similar statement to yours could be made as such: It's almost like whites and blacks are well, different!
Never underestimate cultural values, as humans are social creatures.
I don't think your examples are quite accurate. For emacs + console + PDF you want to see all of them at the same time, rather than hidden behind tabs. I think a more apt metaphor would be frames where the sides of applications stick together: that would be much more handy. Groups of app already have tabs—they're called workspaces.
Tabs work well in browsers because you don't need interoperability between webpages that often. Somebody will find a use for attaching apps together, but that feature isn't the revolutionary bit; tabs for every application for free is.
Slashdot Mirror
For every story like this which gets national attention, there are many many incidents which go by unnoticed.
One worry is that the fact is misleading. What if a product just had a measure of the mercury contents and didn't differentiate between Ethyl- and Methyl-mercury?
Please explain the mechanism.
One such mechanism is that you can choose the researchers you fund. Then, results that jive with your purpose will be over-represented. I'm not saying that such a thing is happening here, because I don't think that there is enough funding to skew results in favor of AGW, but we should remember that cigarette companies planted uncertainty in the danger associated with smoking. Eventually the more correct result does reign I think, but there are advantages to lengthening the period of uncertainty.
That's 887 Km^2/habitant
Given that the sun radiates in all directions, and not all of its radiation is captured by earth...
Sun to the Earth: 1.49*10^8 Km
Diameter of Earth: 1.27562*10^4 Km
Surface area of sphere with radius from the Sun to the Earth: 2.7899*10^17 Km^2
Cross section of Earth: 1.278*10^8 Km^2
Only 4.581 * 10^-10 of the Sun's radiation reaches Earth. Therefore, if each bit of radiation the sun emitted were captured by earth, there would be 0.406 m^2 of surface per person. That's still quite a bit of super-hot material, but not quite as outrageous as you claimed.
Even so, it doesn't matter how much of the sun is shining on each part of the earth, but rather the change in the radiation. Furthermore, humans affect how much of the radiation is retained; we do not heat the planet by leaving our space heaters on too long.
AT&T Two months ago
In those recent drive tests, AT&T's network dropped only 1.44 percent of calls nationwide, within two-tenths of 1 percent of the industry leader and a difference of less than two calls out of 1,000.
The usual caveats apply, where this information is in aggregate. I don't know whether smartphones generally have a different dropped call rate because of usage patterns. I think that instead of measuring dropped calls they should measure dropped calls per hour of talk time, which would help normalize the data. For example, I only use my cell phone for calls that are under a minute or two.
Even so, this is far better than this old story where iPhones in NY had a 30% drop rate.
None of the people who asked for the data were amateurs. But more importantly, the data that Jones was trying to hide had already been lost - by Jones.
From Ars
Data they were trying to hide
"In order to test the principal allegations of withholding data and making inappropriate adjustments, the Review undertook its own trial analysis of land station temperature data. The goal was to determine whether it is possible for an independent researcher to (a) obtain primary data and (b) to analyse it in order to produce independent temperature trend results. This study was intended only to test the feasibility of conducting such a process, and not to generate scientific conclusions." In other words, if we can do it, anyone can.
They found that the data was readily available at at least three different websites. They downloaded the data, selected every station that had an adequate amount of data and performed some smoothing and spatial averaging operations on them. In effect, they replicated the CRU's main research results, producing nearly identical instrumental temperature records, in very little time.
Broken FoIA system
The key findings here are pretty bleak. Basically, the UEA logged FoIA requests, but that was about it. After that, everything was down to the individual researchers figuring out if the data had to be, or, indeed, should be released, and then figuring out how to release it properly. Essentially, the entire system was dysfunctional, and the CRU made no attempt to make life easier for anyone.
In my opinion, it seems like bureaucratic incompetence rather than malice or ideology.
It may be the feature, along with clicktoflash, that moves me to safari.
clicktoflash has an equivalent for firefox and chrome called flashblock. However, the placeholder graphic for clicktoflash I find much better than the one for flashblock.
clicktoflash flashblock
People feeling vibes of previous Apple iDevice releases are not alone.
Anyone else notice how the previous incident was a price cut, and the current one is a price increase? (for unlimited)
if I wanted to use a Mac I'd already be using one.
Funnily enough, the Mac version doesn't have the wrench or document icons, it has F/E/V, and more. Here's the full Menubar:
Chrome : File : Edit : View : History : Bookmarks : Window : Help
The more they start to slowly ignore OS X
I know it feels like that, but 10.6 only came out 8 months ago. It hasn't been that long compared to the wait for 10.5 when they first released the iPhone. Their multitasking seems to have improved, though it could definitely still use some work.
He's saying that CPUs need to be massively parallel, like GPUs, to remain relevant.
He also contends that the current design of CPUs are too inefficient to compete with GPUs.
My question is: why? Programming for the GPU is tons harder than programming for multiple cores. The GPU is so efficient because it is so limited. If we were to migrate to GPUs, they would have to gain more general functionality, and lose some of their efficiency.
What's wrong with going the other way and start with a general purpose processor and make it more parallel, which surprise surprise we're already doing?
Most of what I use Safari for is reading RSS feeds; it handles that much more nicely than the others I think.
Dammit Dammit Dammit, I meant Theora.
I do much better with random strings of numbers and letters like H.264, AAC, and VP8 than I do with regular names, sorry.
Google is funding Vorbis playback in hardware,
why are they pushing two formats?
Pre-emptive multitasking only governs the CPU resources; the iPhone only has 256 MiB of RAM. I think that in their implementation the App archives its data such that it can be quickly re-opened. An app not rewritten to support that would work as they currently do, where the App has to boot up each time it's opened. That isn't terrible, and other companies would probably let the market sort it out, but Apple wants a seamless experience.
Pro: Better memory management.
Con: Not automatic.
From the iFixIt teardown we know that it's basically all battery under there, and the battery life is great. But if there was an 8-hour version it would balance better in your hand.
I'm pretty sure that they found that the display was half of the weight. If the battery were the entirety of the opposite side, then an 8-hour battery would only cut down the weight by 10%, which is a slight improvement, but not enough in my opinion.
Ur so gay
The wittiest insult.
I did not say that the iPhone hardware did not change, but that done correctly upping the screen resolution should be transparent for most current apps.
Games would look far better, existing UI's may be able to be modified so that they're not limited by the existing low resolution for high res users and so forth. At the end of the day, there's only so much you can fit on screen per resolution, and if a higher resolution allows you to build a better UI then you're going to want to do it.
Apps that are not games should require almost no modification. They are mostly comprised of built-in widgets which, if Apple did things right, would scale correctly to the higher resolution and not need to be modified. It is true that you can cram more stuff onto the display with a higher resolution, but you don't want to. The alleged resolution is almost the size of the original iMac, but you wouldn't want to cram a desktop UI onto a phone. I would hazard that the most important aspect of designing a UI is the physical size. Games probably would require tweaking, because they rely on original graphics which would need to be updated to the higher resolution.
I brought in aspect ratios and screen size because those require much more work on the UI (although in many cases the change can be easy) and don't lend themselves to automatic translation. Any app that was written for the original iPhone will still work on current versions, and most likely future versions better than they did on the original. An app written for a long aspect ratio doesn't necessarily translate well to a different one which is stubbier. An app written for a 2.8" screen will look stretched on a 3.7" screen and one written for a 3.7" screen could be unreadable on a 2.8" screen. Actually porting the app to the separate screens could be very easy, but it's not something that could be done automatically very easily.
All of this hinges on whether Apple does a good job on the transition though. If they do pixel doubling like they did on the iPad then being resolution aware would be a must. Done correctly though, multiple resolutions can be done transparently. A good example is the handling of the GPS (which you stated was a compatibility issue). The Core Location framework uses the GPS if available, but can fall back onto approximation by Cell Towers and WiFi hotspots.
Assuming that the screen is the same physical size, would there be any reason to resize the GUI for existing apps? Your fingers haven't changed size.
It's much harder to translate a GUI between different aspect ratios than to just up the resolution. If Apple increased the resolution on the built in widgets, then existing applications would look the same as they do on current hardware but sharper.
Honestly, what changes would you make to the layout if the resolution was higher? Even though we can put books onto microfiche, we still print them onto paper. An increased resolution can make it easier to distinguish between widgets, but with hardware as small as a phone no radical changes to the layout are really necessary. The only major problem for current apps will be custom icons and widgets that haven't been scaled up to the higher resolution.
The problem with different Android devices are the different aspect ratios like 3:4 or 3:5 and different physical screen sizes like 2.8", 3.2" and 3.7". The iPhone will most likely always be 2:3 and 3.5"
I agree, paying for regular small things doesn't fit into the insurance model.
However, I think that it would be handy in terms of prevention. It would be like investing in the health of the person. Perhaps if I called it a subsidy rather than insurance, it would make more sense. It would raise the price of insurance by the amount you suggest, but only if the vaccine had no effects. If encouraging everybody to take the flu vaccine lowered the incidence of serious complications, then the total cost for health insurance might go down.
A similar example would be a policy that my car insurance company had. If new drivers took a class or kept a log while driving then their rates would go down. In that case they were lowering costs by trying to make people better drivers. In the case of health insurance, encouraging people to live more healthy or get vaccinated (for example) would lower the chance of serious complications.
Overhead is a problem though, and I don't know how much of a hassle it is. I'm young and thus haven't had to deal with health insurance at all. I would think that if a provider guaranteed that everyone they covered could get a vaccine, and had an efficient method for the vaccine distributer to check that it was covered (e.g. a credit card sort of deal) then I think that overhead could be minimal. I have no experience in this regard though, so overhead could mandate that small expenses shouldn't be paid for.
Summary: I was taking more about health care by subsidy rather than insurance.
I disagree on the point that common things shouldn't be covered under insurance.
The reason is that if prevention cost money then people are more likely to take risks. For example, getting a cold isn't life threatening for most people and thus they are unlikely to get vaccinated. However if more of the population were to get vaccinated then the total incidence of colds would go down and help the people who are threatened by colds. If it's free to get a shot, then more people will consider getting a shot.
Granted it's more persuasive prevention than insurance, but lumping them together could bring down the total cost of healthcare
One option you missed is requiring insurance providers to offer the same plan at the same price to everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. Obviously it isn't the best solution, but that combined with the requirement to buy insurance (and subsidies if those who don't qualify for Medicaid are found to not be able to afford a decent plan) should provide insurance for all people.
Upside: maintains a market which many people think is necessary. Personally I would rather have a single-payer system like Medicare (I'm somewhat of an idealist) which could have much lower overhead (Medicare I've heard does a good job, though there's always the possibility of people screwing it up) than a market system. However, people are much more willing to undergo small change and at least on Slashdot the majority are suspicious of the government.
Note: Medicare is single-payer in that all seniors are covered by it. There are other options, but they're bought in addition to Medicare.
The manufactures aren't trying to destroy Android, but the negligence is sure to stunt its growth. As long as Android is free and provides a good tech demo companies will continue to use it to sell the newest version of their phone.
Without a more cohesive foundation it will probably stagnate though. The same thing happened with Linux; 'the year of the linux desktop'. Linux has survived not because of market viability but because technical people liked it. It still doesn't have more than a couple percent of marketshare (in the consumer market.) Android has an advantage in that smartphones are more integrated platforms than desktops, and people expect less expandability, but each smartphone will be a part of the manufacturers brand, rather than the Android brand. On a fragmented market it's much more difficult to deliver expanded functionality in the form of applications to consumers. It will be more like the crappy java games that you'd see on old phones than the market for desktop software.
It's a new concept for phone companies though, and they'll probably start updating the OS once they get used to it. If they don't though, Android will probably see a limited success.
The perennial issue that always crops up when gender issues are discussed is the fact that men and women are different.
Yes, what you're saying is entirely true. The problem however is that the discussion is always left at that and never explored further. The difference may be due to inherent differences, but using that as the default answer is just as disingenuous as saying 'God did it' and leaving it at that. A historical example could be the wide gap in participation in sports, which has changed along with societal attitudes.
A similar statement to yours could be made as such: It's almost like whites and blacks are well, different!
Never underestimate cultural values, as humans are social creatures.
I don't think your examples are quite accurate. For emacs + console + PDF you want to see all of them at the same time, rather than hidden behind tabs. I think a more apt metaphor would be frames where the sides of applications stick together: that would be much more handy. Groups of app already have tabs—they're called workspaces.
Tabs work well in browsers because you don't need interoperability between webpages that often. Somebody will find a use for attaching apps together, but that feature isn't the revolutionary bit; tabs for every application for free is.