Well, I didn't like XP snooping on me. Right before XP was released, I got a WebTV device from Microsoft for home surfing. Its clickthru license was horrendous in what I'd be allowing it to snoop on. For example, I think there was even some legalese that said I'd be in violation if I did X, then the next paragraph said I'd be in violation if I didn't do X, so clicking would terminate all my rights, but leave Microsoft with all its arbitrary rights, including rights to my data, both on the WebTV and on the network. Which would have made me responsible if MS ran a botnet out of it, on my LAN's other PCs, and commandeering PCs with it across the Internet. But I ignored it, like any mandatory clickthru license. Then I noticed it was phoning home to MS every night at 5AM, and portscanning my other LAN PCs. You can bet I ripped that mofo right out of my home and shipped it back.
A few months later XP was clearly going to depend on phoning home for all kinds of invasive snooping. Plus Hotmail was going to correlate email traffic to it, to say nothing of MSN. And MS had an entire "Palladium" strategy to use a single login key to join all my personal data across every database known to man (ie. Gates - both Bill and the Secretary of Defense). So I went the other way.
But I'm curious. What user problems did you avoid in favor of the Mac? Personally, I find the Linux desktop user problems to be much fewer, less frustrating and less actually damaging (lost data, lost days of work, lost mind) than Windows ever was. Especially using APT, where I can wait a while to see that a large and interested community is inspecting the source of apps for bugs, then downloading only what can be easily forensically tracked from the repos later if there was an exploited security hole. Instead of downloading arbitrary binaries from whoever without any tracks, and always just hoping it's safe before it's too late.
Maybe the Mac is even better. But does it have the variety of software, especially for programmers, that Linux has?
When Microsoft moved from 2000 to the spyware platform (online registration first, then what?) of XP, I decided not to move with it. I never found a reason that really forced me to upgrade. Because I decided to move to Linux, and put the W2K box in a closet running a VNC server. I hardly ever need to fire up the W2K machine at all.
These Microsoft "up"-grades pushed me to using Linux full time. I bet that I'm far from alone.
Oh, yeah - just like George Bush. You Republicans really never learn about trusting authority instead of competence. Or the difference between a false dilemma like "lying ignoramus or honest ignoramus", and someone who can actually understand the economy, which is far from impossible at the level that presidents operate.
It's not like we need a "presidentist". We need someone with a brain who can tell when his advisors are lying to him. Or care - it's been a long time since we've had a Republican president who actually cared whether his advisors were lying to him, instead of just treating him like a spokesmodel.
I think an engineer, especially a systems engineer, would be a better person to be in charge of the country than a lawyer (for a change). At least the engineer can tell the difference beteen what someone told them and what they can test for themself.
It's pretty easy to see through your backwards glass just by considering that "Conservatives" have been spending this economy for 7.5-13.5 years (in the White House and Congress, respectively) into $10 TRILLION Federal debt, plus $10 TRILLION mortgage debt plus $10 TRILLION other personal debt. All of which has been centrally planned to squander, but oh so decentralized in actually wasting on little productive capital. Sure, they're as "Conservative" as the Soviets were "Communist", but likewise there are no real "Conservatives" or "Communists" once either of them get the power and the budgets.
The dollar wasn't "overvalued" when we could buy half a gallon of gas with it, or half a gallon of milk. The destruction of the dollar's value isn't a measure of lowered demand for US goods per se, but rather the fear of investing in the US economy. That "Conservative" economy.
The one that John McCain has been voting to run for over 20 years. The economy McCain helped banks "deregulate" most famously with the Keating 5 to lose over $1.5 TRILLION (in 1980s dollars in a GDP 1/4 today's). The banks that got the biggest handout in history with deregulated lending rules, no oversight, and nearly 0% wholesale rates (on money loaned them by taxpayers) on loans back to taxpayers that they marked up to several percent to people who couldn't do the math to be able to pay them back for more than a few years. A few years they lived on their credit cards (and flipped those houses to the next layer in the pyramid).
Including those Americans who don't have a job, but aren't "unemployed" because the government only counts Americans for a little while "actively seeking" work. Of course, the Feds count any Europeans without a job as unemployed, so we look pretty good, as long as we're willing to pretend.
Like pretending that all those profits we waste on private insurers are giving us healthcare comparable to our international competitors who pay less because theirs is all paid on the same basis as our Medicaid. Like pretending that GM and other big employers can compete with a fat, wasteful private insurance bill that Toyota doesn't pay, or that Wal-Mart could keep its employees well enough to peddle crates of Chinese products without government health insurance (or healthcare in taxpaid emergency rooms).
I see "trial lawyers" spending their money in the US (though they do get a lot more of those Bush/McCain taxfree holidays than most Americans), but Halliburton seems to have absconded directly to the Persian Gulf with all the $BILLIONS it stole, out of range of US jurisdiction, but somehow right in the laps of our enemies.
But really, it's that Iraq War that is John McCain's most obvious contribution. The one that's already cost over $600 BILLION already spent, headed to over a $TRILLION even if we shut it down ASAP. And that's not counting the collateral damage to our military, some of which we can rebuild for money, much of which will cost untold $BILLIONS for veterans injuries, and the further damage to an economy running on $4+ gallons of gas for the years while it runs out, prematurely inflated on endless fear and risk in the producing countries. Since the Iraq War is run on borrowed money, at least 80% of it borrowed (if you just count it equally with the rest of the discretionary expenditures), and borrowed from enemies like China, that's something like $600T * (.8 * 1.55) = $744 BILLION so far. After McCain's next 100 years (or more) there, the figures will be higher. All in an economy in recession, and eventually depression, with our reserves wasted for nothing but more violence, threats and uncertainty.
It's the Enron economy. Fake profits pitched under government cover without regulation, counting debt as assets. The "Conservative" economy, centrally planned from Dick Cheney's bunker, and eaten up by "Conservatives" like you. People who'd rather ignore all that to pretend that Europe is doing badly, that the US somehow is the opposite of "socialism" (with the greate
So what you're saying is that IT people (like you, that is) like McCain because he'll import more foreigners to compete with Americans for IT jobs? IT people (like you) want to leave the economy with Bush's policies intact, so no taxes to pay for a continuing explosion in spending (like a $TRILLION+ for Iraq), and continuing to leave no oversight of the corporations who have robbed that economy, like the banks, Halliburton, KBR, Enron and whichever new ones are based in Arizona instead of over in Texas?
IT people like you think that Progressivism is socialism, but that the Bush handouts McCain will continue (if there's anything left) are somehow not? That haven't noticed how different the US is from real socialisms like Canada, UK, France, Germany and so many others whose economies are making ours look like some failing MBA's final project?
Are there really that many IT people like you who haven't noticed that McCain and Bush's "Conservatism" has failed more miserably than any kind of government since the Soviet system it most closely resembes?
What could possibly make an IT person vote for McCain? He doesn't seem likely to even have a cellphone, let alone relate at all to anything IT people have to deal with. He's confessed he doesn't understand the economy. His Republican anti-immigration policies don't protect any IT jobs. What makes him seem like he could possibly represent their interests as president?
I already spent years in brutal mind games competitions, while dating girls. I retired with the gold medal when I married my wife.
I thought the entire appeal of online porn is that it's "victory" without the mind games, though its ultimate dissatisfaction is because it's really just a single-player mind game anyway.
You are totally wrong. You obviously don't know what's in a passport file.
But even that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that spying on that file is a crime. Sharing info found in it is a felony. 3 people were fired over it, even though the office tried to hide that it had happened. When it happened to Bill Clinton in 1992, an Assistant Secretary of State was fired over it. And people keep doing it, despite the risk and cost. So it's obviously worth the effort.
But even if it wasn't, it's still important.
You don't even have the nerve to post with a real UserID. You've got a lot of nerve talking about how revealing personal info is not important. But then, you apologists for these political ripoffs never have any shame.
Hydrogen can be a useful element for storing power, but it is not a power source, except (shortsightedly) when looking only at the device in front of you at the moment.
Sure, the only true power sources are the Sun, the Earth's core, and radioactive decay, but I'm not being hair-splitting. Even petroleum or gasoline can be considered "power sources", because they've already been "charged" (by the Sun and the Earth's gravity). There are no standing deposits of hydrogen around on the Earth already charged and waiting. The only way to get power from hydrogen here is to charge it up with an actual power source, and use the hydrogen as transport, like when electrolyzing water. Or to purify charged hydrogen from other charged energy-bearing materials, like from ethanol, gasoline or the like. Producing hydrogen with enough energy in it to use to power devices requires putting energy in, and is a net reduction in the total energy available before producing the charged hydrogen.
As transport, hydrogen has many efficiencies, so it's well worth exploring as a storage material. Handling it can be energy inefficient, so converting it to other materials (especially room-temperature/pressure liquids) can be a net gain, though that expends energy, too.
Yeah, but that's why 4KA lines are subject to administration by professionals, and kept isolated from anything else (hanging far up in the air) whenever possible.
These little chips will be everywhere, in everything, including cellphones and headsets propped right against (and a little inside) regular people's heads.
If you think a few laptop batteries going up caused a stir, wait until the whole device blazes up between someone's hand and their face.
Well, yes, superconductors aren't immune to the random kinetic energy that is heat, or they'd all be easily made and used as low-temperature superconductors, without any fancy tricks. The electronic conductance nearly always comes along with thermal conductance.
What I meant was that the current through them doesn't heat them up (as you say, "not via resistance"). So they can be sandwiched in there. I do think that dual-purposing the superconductors for efficient transmission of both heat, as you suggest, and electrons will make stacked layer chips finally extremely powerful, without the same bottlenecks.
I wonder what kind of efficiencies a pressurized silane superconductor could gain as a photocell. Will the photoelectric conversion efficiency start to near 100% without the internal resistance of the conductor impeding incoming photons?
Actually, silane has a problem becoming smoke when the pressure gets out: At room temperature, silane is a gas, and is pyrophoric -- it undergoes spontaneous combustion in air, without the need for external ignition. [...] Above 420C, silane decomposes into silicon and hydrogen; it can therefore be used in the chemical vapor deposition of silicon.
So when the pressure is off, this stuff goes up in flames. When the flames get hotter than 420C, the "stuff" is pure hydrogen as driven apart from the silicon.
Sounds to me like a serious risk of fire if a chipful of this stuff cracks. If current does increase its temperature at all enough to expand it and crack it, the little bit that combusts could burn the entire chip, which could burn the entire machine, and everything around it.
That's a lot different from silicon/dioxide, which is as chemically inert as glass.
I think that growing silane superconductors on top of chips already using strained silicon techniques would become common, as the manufacturing has already invested in the lattice strain processing, so the extra cost of the silane doesn't require strain for its own sake, which could multiply the cost of the whole die.
But growing silanes inside fullerene jackets could be very cheap.
Another possibility could be finally sandwiching wire layers between substrate layers for multilayer chips. That technique has always been prohibited partly because of the heat those embedded wires would generate (which would also shift the lattice and alignment of the substrates/traces as it expands/contracts). But superconductors don't heat up, so they could safely sandwich between substrates. Those substrates could also be sealed together to maintain the pressure, though I don't know if extra engineering would be required to ensure the integrity of the lattice under those pressure conditions, or exactly what kind of fastening tech would be best. It might be hard to put a flexible gasket between at that scale.
If you can embed a Excel sheet, complete with all the Excel controls/menus/features/etc into SimpleText, why would anybody buy Excel from Microsoft? (And, of course, it means the SimpleText document would be huge to incorporate all that functionality-- not sure if that was ever addressed.) It didn't help that all the preview technologies (CyberDog, for example) completely sucked and crashed all the time.
That's why it never worked. Which is an interesting point, because the concept could actually work in open source, if open source implemented it.
Well, the real OpenDoc model wasn't like that. The model was that OpenDoc "compound documents" were docs that hosted the GUI from external apps like Excel and SimpleText in embedded panes. So to "embed an Excel spreadsheet in a SimpleText doc" you'd really embed each of the Excel doc and the SimpleText doc, in a compound OpenDoc. Each of the two external docs would manage their own data. You'd have to buy both apps to embed their data.
Which is why it didn't work. Microsoft pulled off this feat with Office, because Office bundles all the cross-embeddable apps in a single distro. But in 1993, we hadn't yet evolved to MIME types for data types. Apple itself still relied on Creator types in data docs, which were still "owned" by their creating app. Only later would it become easy to open a doc with an app that hadn't created it, especially if that doc was to use two different apps that used the same data type (eg "HTML").
The other reason it didn't work was the difficulty of IPC among the different external apps maintaining their embedded data, and whatever process was maintaining the OpenDoc operation. Apple tried to do it with AppleEvents, which IBM wanted to serialize into CORBA across networks, which was the basic architecture for their Taligent JV. But, like whenever someone tries to use CORBA, the project was too ambitious (and straitjacketed by CORBA's top-down hierarchy of service categories), and it failed. Again, MS pulled it off with DDE, but that only really worked with Office apps because DDE was such a limited protocol. When MS went to COM, and then COM+, the limits of those protocols (like the corruptible/nonrelational Registry) on MS' hard to distribute and scale architecture always killed it for anyone who didn't have access to the Windows source code and its in-house whizzes.
But in fact the point is still interesting. Because now, in 2008, we've got Linux Desktops with very solid IPC. MIME types and protocols are registered with the OS, for different use modes (read/edit/etc) and prioritized lists of apps to access objects of a given datatype. Networks can even access a single object in different formats using HTTP Accepts values. And of course we've got the open source, all of it inherently networked, including URLs and even X itself.
So I wonder whether there's already some obscure apps or techniques already approaching this presentation style. For example, my "weak request" for opening a doc that just launches and arranges/aligns separate docs each in their own app's frame could be done with a shell script that opens their windows with X params for positioning their corners appropriately, all at once. But it would be good to have a simple GUI, like a GNOME desktop panel widget, that let me arrange my windows, then save them in that batchfile.
Which would be a good start. But really there's probably some GNOME or X innards that could go further. Open the separate apps minimized and somehow export their relevant GUI panels to a single compound doc, with their app data and menus/toolbars/context-menus all wrapped in the compound doc. But which would save the individual data types as separate data via their respective apps. And then launching a single icon would open the compound doc's frame, launch the apps that the compound app's data objects each depend on, and recompose the data inside the compound doc as it was arranged. So the compound doc would stor
I am indeed talking about what Apple was working on with OpenDoc, and then Bento from their Taligent JV with IBM. I was working with Apple at the time, and it never materialized. Later, it was promised that HTML would deliver that, but it really doesn't. Or rather, its compound docs are achieved by sacrificing most of their widgetsets and local interactivity.
So since you guessed OpenDoc from what I described, I think you get it. I can't give pictures, because I don't have any. But if you think GNOME or KDE or something can do it now, I'd love to hear about it. OpenDoc was a promise made a decade and a half ago, and I still haven't seen anyone keep it. And it's needed now, more than ever, with so much complex relationships established between different docs, and more (and less sophisticated) people needing to work on them.
It's hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It's hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell's Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers, the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications -- kind of like the rest of the Internet, come to think of it.
None of that stuff Apple does is "evil". And it's not at all unusual among Silicon Valley companies. In fact, the two corporate giants Kahney measures Apple against, Intel and Dell, are neither Silicon Valley corporations. They're both Texan. And of course they design their leading products by strict management of extremely creative individuals, not "design by committee".
None of that is "evil". And it's not really "old fashioned", or "Industrial Revolution". It's how successful corporations manage invention.
But why should someone writing for _Wired_ magazine know that? _Wired_, since its inception, has always been wrong about everything. Its analysis is always totally wrong, and even inconsistent. All _Wired_ has ever gotten right is knowing where the cool action is happening, but never able to do anything like that itself.
That's why its reporters will whine about how hard it is to find parking at Apple after 10AM, and manifest their jealousy of Steve Jobs in whining about how Jobs will park his Mercedes wherever he wants.
And it's why those reporters can't get jobs at Apple: they're neither creative, hardworking nor right enough to do anything but write technoporn. Which, while pretending to have standing to arbitrate about Apple's management "morality", actually approaches the kind of watered-down evil that is jealousy, conceit and stubborn wrongness.
I know it's too late to get it into OO.o 3.0, or Firefox 3.0, but what I'd really love to have on my desktop is for any app that shows a document of any datatype/mix (and most of them do), to be able to show two of those docs side by side (or above/below) in the same window. Without window widgets interfering between them. So I can really look at both side by side.
Comparing them, editing one against the other, using one as instructions to modify the other. In fact, if every window panel could slide open (side/side, or up/down) into two, each displaying a different doc (of the same type, or even of different types), that would really increase my productivity. Using one doc as a guide to another is an extremely common use case for most people. All the extra window dragging/resizing/aligning, every time a pair of docs are used, is a hassle of prohibitive annoyance.
What would really be great would be "generic windows" into which I could assign panels from arbitrary different external apps. So I could open a configured document that would spring up with a Firefox window already showing in the 2/3 left side of the main window, and an editable OO.o Writer document in the right 1/3. I could, for example, save "configmarks" setting some page (eg. instructions) as the default in the browser panel, and some template (eg. my letterhead/footer) in the Writer panel. I could have compound docs with different configmarks in each. And let the other GUI widgets for the parent apps get called when I use the compound doc's menus/toolbars, combined together.
I'd love to have quick access to arrangements of windows in stacks of tabs, each with a compound doc with Firefox, Evolution and Writer (or Calc, or any other GNOME app) panes in their usable panels, pointing to each of the actual docs I'm using right now.
GNOME (and KDE, too, with its own apps) could have the windowing-level messaging and composition features to do this. I'd love to stop "using Evolution while using Firefox" and instead just send messages while browsing/searching the Web. It also seems to me that such compound docs would be a lot easier to swing over to my mobile devices, which have such a small screen and clumsy manual controls. Is there a way to do this without rewriting all the apps to use "external panels"?
At the very least I'd like to keep a config that I open, which in turn opens several different independent apps, and just arranges their windows for that specific use. Including which doc gets opened in each, their arrangement on the screen. Is even that simple organization possible in the GNOME window manager? If not, then in KDE?
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Well, I didn't like XP snooping on me. Right before XP was released, I got a WebTV device from Microsoft for home surfing. Its clickthru license was horrendous in what I'd be allowing it to snoop on. For example, I think there was even some legalese that said I'd be in violation if I did X, then the next paragraph said I'd be in violation if I didn't do X, so clicking would terminate all my rights, but leave Microsoft with all its arbitrary rights, including rights to my data, both on the WebTV and on the network. Which would have made me responsible if MS ran a botnet out of it, on my LAN's other PCs, and commandeering PCs with it across the Internet. But I ignored it, like any mandatory clickthru license. Then I noticed it was phoning home to MS every night at 5AM, and portscanning my other LAN PCs. You can bet I ripped that mofo right out of my home and shipped it back.
A few months later XP was clearly going to depend on phoning home for all kinds of invasive snooping. Plus Hotmail was going to correlate email traffic to it, to say nothing of MSN. And MS had an entire "Palladium" strategy to use a single login key to join all my personal data across every database known to man (ie. Gates - both Bill and the Secretary of Defense). So I went the other way.
But I'm curious. What user problems did you avoid in favor of the Mac? Personally, I find the Linux desktop user problems to be much fewer, less frustrating and less actually damaging (lost data, lost days of work, lost mind) than Windows ever was. Especially using APT, where I can wait a while to see that a large and interested community is inspecting the source of apps for bugs, then downloading only what can be easily forensically tracked from the repos later if there was an exploited security hole. Instead of downloading arbitrary binaries from whoever without any tracks, and always just hoping it's safe before it's too late.
Maybe the Mac is even better. But does it have the variety of software, especially for programmers, that Linux has?
When Microsoft moved from 2000 to the spyware platform (online registration first, then what?) of XP, I decided not to move with it. I never found a reason that really forced me to upgrade. Because I decided to move to Linux, and put the W2K box in a closet running a VNC server. I hardly ever need to fire up the W2K machine at all.
These Microsoft "up"-grades pushed me to using Linux full time. I bet that I'm far from alone.
Why would Microsoft abandon HD-DVD now that it's got a monopoly on them with Toshiba exiting the market?
Inferior quality and lone support has never stopped Microsoft from exploiting a monopoly position on a technology.
Oh, yeah - just like George Bush. You Republicans really never learn about trusting authority instead of competence. Or the difference between a false dilemma like "lying ignoramus or honest ignoramus", and someone who can actually understand the economy, which is far from impossible at the level that presidents operate.
It's not like we need a "presidentist". We need someone with a brain who can tell when his advisors are lying to him. Or care - it's been a long time since we've had a Republican president who actually cared whether his advisors were lying to him, instead of just treating him like a spokesmodel.
I think an engineer, especially a systems engineer, would be a better person to be in charge of the country than a lawyer (for a change). At least the engineer can tell the difference beteen what someone told them and what they can test for themself.
It's pretty easy to see through your backwards glass just by considering that "Conservatives" have been spending this economy for 7.5-13.5 years (in the White House and Congress, respectively) into $10 TRILLION Federal debt, plus $10 TRILLION mortgage debt plus $10 TRILLION other personal debt. All of which has been centrally planned to squander, but oh so decentralized in actually wasting on little productive capital. Sure, they're as "Conservative" as the Soviets were "Communist", but likewise there are no real "Conservatives" or "Communists" once either of them get the power and the budgets.
The dollar wasn't "overvalued" when we could buy half a gallon of gas with it, or half a gallon of milk. The destruction of the dollar's value isn't a measure of lowered demand for US goods per se, but rather the fear of investing in the US economy. That "Conservative" economy.
The one that John McCain has been voting to run for over 20 years. The economy McCain helped banks "deregulate" most famously with the Keating 5 to lose over $1.5 TRILLION (in 1980s dollars in a GDP 1/4 today's). The banks that got the biggest handout in history with deregulated lending rules, no oversight, and nearly 0% wholesale rates (on money loaned them by taxpayers) on loans back to taxpayers that they marked up to several percent to people who couldn't do the math to be able to pay them back for more than a few years. A few years they lived on their credit cards (and flipped those houses to the next layer in the pyramid).
Including those Americans who don't have a job, but aren't "unemployed" because the government only counts Americans for a little while "actively seeking" work. Of course, the Feds count any Europeans without a job as unemployed, so we look pretty good, as long as we're willing to pretend.
Like pretending that all those profits we waste on private insurers are giving us healthcare comparable to our international competitors who pay less because theirs is all paid on the same basis as our Medicaid. Like pretending that GM and other big employers can compete with a fat, wasteful private insurance bill that Toyota doesn't pay, or that Wal-Mart could keep its employees well enough to peddle crates of Chinese products without government health insurance (or healthcare in taxpaid emergency rooms).
I see "trial lawyers" spending their money in the US (though they do get a lot more of those Bush/McCain taxfree holidays than most Americans), but Halliburton seems to have absconded directly to the Persian Gulf with all the $BILLIONS it stole, out of range of US jurisdiction, but somehow right in the laps of our enemies.
But really, it's that Iraq War that is John McCain's most obvious contribution. The one that's already cost over $600 BILLION already spent, headed to over a $TRILLION even if we shut it down ASAP. And that's not counting the collateral damage to our military, some of which we can rebuild for money, much of which will cost untold $BILLIONS for veterans injuries, and the further damage to an economy running on $4+ gallons of gas for the years while it runs out, prematurely inflated on endless fear and risk in the producing countries. Since the Iraq War is run on borrowed money, at least 80% of it borrowed (if you just count it equally with the rest of the discretionary expenditures), and borrowed from enemies like China, that's something like $600T * (.8 * 1.55) = $744 BILLION so far. After McCain's next 100 years (or more) there, the figures will be higher. All in an economy in recession, and eventually depression, with our reserves wasted for nothing but more violence, threats and uncertainty.
It's the Enron economy. Fake profits pitched under government cover without regulation, counting debt as assets. The "Conservative" economy, centrally planned from Dick Cheney's bunker, and eaten up by "Conservatives" like you. People who'd rather ignore all that to pretend that Europe is doing badly, that the US somehow is the opposite of "socialism" (with the greate
So what you're saying is that IT people (like you, that is) like McCain because he'll import more foreigners to compete with Americans for IT jobs? IT people (like you) want to leave the economy with Bush's policies intact, so no taxes to pay for a continuing explosion in spending (like a $TRILLION+ for Iraq), and continuing to leave no oversight of the corporations who have robbed that economy, like the banks, Halliburton, KBR, Enron and whichever new ones are based in Arizona instead of over in Texas?
IT people like you think that Progressivism is socialism, but that the Bush handouts McCain will continue (if there's anything left) are somehow not? That haven't noticed how different the US is from real socialisms like Canada, UK, France, Germany and so many others whose economies are making ours look like some failing MBA's final project?
Are there really that many IT people like you who haven't noticed that McCain and Bush's "Conservatism" has failed more miserably than any kind of government since the Soviet system it most closely resembes?
What could possibly make an IT person vote for McCain? He doesn't seem likely to even have a cellphone, let alone relate at all to anything IT people have to deal with. He's confessed he doesn't understand the economy. His Republican anti-immigration policies don't protect any IT jobs. What makes him seem like he could possibly represent their interests as president?
I already spent years in brutal mind games competitions, while dating girls. I retired with the gold medal when I married my wife.
I thought the entire appeal of online porn is that it's "victory" without the mind games, though its ultimate dissatisfaction is because it's really just a single-player mind game anyway.
Falun Gong is Chinese. That sentence should say "Chinese rebel groups like Falun Gong".
You are totally wrong. You obviously don't know what's in a passport file.
But even that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that spying on that file is a crime. Sharing info found in it is a felony. 3 people were fired over it, even though the office tried to hide that it had happened. When it happened to Bill Clinton in 1992, an Assistant Secretary of State was fired over it. And people keep doing it, despite the risk and cost. So it's obviously worth the effort.
But even if it wasn't, it's still important.
You don't even have the nerve to post with a real UserID. You've got a lot of nerve talking about how revealing personal info is not important. But then, you apologists for these political ripoffs never have any shame.
Hydrogen can be a useful element for storing power, but it is not a power source, except (shortsightedly) when looking only at the device in front of you at the moment.
Sure, the only true power sources are the Sun, the Earth's core, and radioactive decay, but I'm not being hair-splitting. Even petroleum or gasoline can be considered "power sources", because they've already been "charged" (by the Sun and the Earth's gravity). There are no standing deposits of hydrogen around on the Earth already charged and waiting. The only way to get power from hydrogen here is to charge it up with an actual power source, and use the hydrogen as transport, like when electrolyzing water. Or to purify charged hydrogen from other charged energy-bearing materials, like from ethanol, gasoline or the like. Producing hydrogen with enough energy in it to use to power devices requires putting energy in, and is a net reduction in the total energy available before producing the charged hydrogen.
As transport, hydrogen has many efficiencies, so it's well worth exploring as a storage material. Handling it can be energy inefficient, so converting it to other materials (especially room-temperature/pressure liquids) can be a net gain, though that expends energy, too.
How long until someone reverse engineers AnyDVD and releases a FOSS tool for Linux for backing up our own BD+ content?
Terabyte drives already cost only $200, so 50GB BDs cost only $10 each to store, though blank BD-Rs still cost $40 each.
Yes, this system would work perfectly for spying on all political opponents (and blackmailable "friends") personal info, just like reported tonight at at the State Department, spying on Obama's passport file.
Yeah, but that's why 4KA lines are subject to administration by professionals, and kept isolated from anything else (hanging far up in the air) whenever possible.
These little chips will be everywhere, in everything, including cellphones and headsets propped right against (and a little inside) regular people's heads.
If you think a few laptop batteries going up caused a stir, wait until the whole device blazes up between someone's hand and their face.
Well, yes, superconductors aren't immune to the random kinetic energy that is heat, or they'd all be easily made and used as low-temperature superconductors, without any fancy tricks. The electronic conductance nearly always comes along with thermal conductance.
What I meant was that the current through them doesn't heat them up (as you say, "not via resistance"). So they can be sandwiched in there. I do think that dual-purposing the superconductors for efficient transmission of both heat, as you suggest, and electrons will make stacked layer chips finally extremely powerful, without the same bottlenecks.
I wonder what kind of efficiencies a pressurized silane superconductor could gain as a photocell. Will the photoelectric conversion efficiency start to near 100% without the internal resistance of the conductor impeding incoming photons?
Actually, silane has a problem becoming smoke when the pressure gets out:
At room temperature, silane is a gas, and is pyrophoric -- it undergoes spontaneous combustion in air, without the need for external ignition. [...] Above 420C, silane decomposes into silicon and hydrogen; it can therefore be used in the chemical vapor deposition of silicon.
So when the pressure is off, this stuff goes up in flames. When the flames get hotter than 420C, the "stuff" is pure hydrogen as driven apart from the silicon.
Sounds to me like a serious risk of fire if a chipful of this stuff cracks. If current does increase its temperature at all enough to expand it and crack it, the little bit that combusts could burn the entire chip, which could burn the entire machine, and everything around it.
That's a lot different from silicon/dioxide, which is as chemically inert as glass.
I think that growing silane superconductors on top of chips already using strained silicon techniques would become common, as the manufacturing has already invested in the lattice strain processing, so the extra cost of the silane doesn't require strain for its own sake, which could multiply the cost of the whole die.
But growing silanes inside fullerene jackets could be very cheap.
Another possibility could be finally sandwiching wire layers between substrate layers for multilayer chips. That technique has always been prohibited partly because of the heat those embedded wires would generate (which would also shift the lattice and alignment of the substrates/traces as it expands/contracts). But superconductors don't heat up, so they could safely sandwich between substrates. Those substrates could also be sealed together to maintain the pressure, though I don't know if extra engineering would be required to ensure the integrity of the lattice under those pressure conditions, or exactly what kind of fastening tech would be best. It might be hard to put a flexible gasket between at that scale.
I don't see why superconducting wires of these silanes couldn't be kept pressurized by containment inside a fullerene jacket, at macroscopic lengths.
Once superconductors don't require huge apparatus for cooling or even pressure, I expect labs will make superconducting semiconductors less exotic.
Well, the real OpenDoc model wasn't like that. The model was that OpenDoc "compound documents" were docs that hosted the GUI from external apps like Excel and SimpleText in embedded panes. So to "embed an Excel spreadsheet in a SimpleText doc" you'd really embed each of the Excel doc and the SimpleText doc, in a compound OpenDoc. Each of the two external docs would manage their own data. You'd have to buy both apps to embed their data.
Which is why it didn't work. Microsoft pulled off this feat with Office, because Office bundles all the cross-embeddable apps in a single distro. But in 1993, we hadn't yet evolved to MIME types for data types. Apple itself still relied on Creator types in data docs, which were still "owned" by their creating app. Only later would it become easy to open a doc with an app that hadn't created it, especially if that doc was to use two different apps that used the same data type (eg "HTML").
The other reason it didn't work was the difficulty of IPC among the different external apps maintaining their embedded data, and whatever process was maintaining the OpenDoc operation. Apple tried to do it with AppleEvents, which IBM wanted to serialize into CORBA across networks, which was the basic architecture for their Taligent JV. But, like whenever someone tries to use CORBA, the project was too ambitious (and straitjacketed by CORBA's top-down hierarchy of service categories), and it failed. Again, MS pulled it off with DDE, but that only really worked with Office apps because DDE was such a limited protocol. When MS went to COM, and then COM+, the limits of those protocols (like the corruptible/nonrelational Registry) on MS' hard to distribute and scale architecture always killed it for anyone who didn't have access to the Windows source code and its in-house whizzes.
But in fact the point is still interesting. Because now, in 2008, we've got Linux Desktops with very solid IPC. MIME types and protocols are registered with the OS, for different use modes (read/edit/etc) and prioritized lists of apps to access objects of a given datatype. Networks can even access a single object in different formats using HTTP Accepts values. And of course we've got the open source, all of it inherently networked, including URLs and even X itself.
So I wonder whether there's already some obscure apps or techniques already approaching this presentation style. For example, my "weak request" for opening a doc that just launches and arranges/aligns separate docs each in their own app's frame could be done with a shell script that opens their windows with X params for positioning their corners appropriately, all at once. But it would be good to have a simple GUI, like a GNOME desktop panel widget, that let me arrange my windows, then save them in that batchfile.
Which would be a good start. But really there's probably some GNOME or X innards that could go further. Open the separate apps minimized and somehow export their relevant GUI panels to a single compound doc, with their app data and menus/toolbars/context-menus all wrapped in the compound doc. But which would save the individual data types as separate data via their respective apps. And then launching a single icon would open the compound doc's frame, launch the apps that the compound app's data objects each depend on, and recompose the data inside the compound doc as it was arranged. So the compound doc would stor
Yes, you are correct.
You are correct.
I am indeed talking about what Apple was working on with OpenDoc, and then Bento from their Taligent JV with IBM. I was working with Apple at the time, and it never materialized. Later, it was promised that HTML would deliver that, but it really doesn't. Or rather, its compound docs are achieved by sacrificing most of their widgetsets and local interactivity.
So since you guessed OpenDoc from what I described, I think you get it. I can't give pictures, because I don't have any. But if you think GNOME or KDE or something can do it now, I'd love to hear about it. OpenDoc was a promise made a decade and a half ago, and I still haven't seen anyone keep it. And it's needed now, more than ever, with so much complex relationships established between different docs, and more (and less sophisticated) people needing to work on them.
None of that stuff Apple does is "evil". And it's not at all unusual among Silicon Valley companies. In fact, the two corporate giants Kahney measures Apple against, Intel and Dell, are neither Silicon Valley corporations. They're both Texan. And of course they design their leading products by strict management of extremely creative individuals, not "design by committee".
None of that is "evil". And it's not really "old fashioned", or "Industrial Revolution". It's how successful corporations manage invention.
But why should someone writing for _Wired_ magazine know that? _Wired_, since its inception, has always been wrong about everything. Its analysis is always totally wrong, and even inconsistent. All _Wired_ has ever gotten right is knowing where the cool action is happening, but never able to do anything like that itself.
That's why its reporters will whine about how hard it is to find parking at Apple after 10AM, and manifest their jealousy of Steve Jobs in whining about how Jobs will park his Mercedes wherever he wants.
And it's why those reporters can't get jobs at Apple: they're neither creative, hardworking nor right enough to do anything but write technoporn. Which, while pretending to have standing to arbitrate about Apple's management "morality", actually approaches the kind of watered-down evil that is jealousy, conceit and stubborn wrongness.
I know it's too late to get it into OO.o 3.0, or Firefox 3.0, but what I'd really love to have on my desktop is for any app that shows a document of any datatype/mix (and most of them do), to be able to show two of those docs side by side (or above/below) in the same window. Without window widgets interfering between them. So I can really look at both side by side.
Comparing them, editing one against the other, using one as instructions to modify the other. In fact, if every window panel could slide open (side/side, or up/down) into two, each displaying a different doc (of the same type, or even of different types), that would really increase my productivity. Using one doc as a guide to another is an extremely common use case for most people. All the extra window dragging/resizing/aligning, every time a pair of docs are used, is a hassle of prohibitive annoyance.
What would really be great would be "generic windows" into which I could assign panels from arbitrary different external apps. So I could open a configured document that would spring up with a Firefox window already showing in the 2/3 left side of the main window, and an editable OO.o Writer document in the right 1/3. I could, for example, save "configmarks" setting some page (eg. instructions) as the default in the browser panel, and some template (eg. my letterhead/footer) in the Writer panel. I could have compound docs with different configmarks in each. And let the other GUI widgets for the parent apps get called when I use the compound doc's menus/toolbars, combined together.
I'd love to have quick access to arrangements of windows in stacks of tabs, each with a compound doc with Firefox, Evolution and Writer (or Calc, or any other GNOME app) panes in their usable panels, pointing to each of the actual docs I'm using right now.
GNOME (and KDE, too, with its own apps) could have the windowing-level messaging and composition features to do this. I'd love to stop "using Evolution while using Firefox" and instead just send messages while browsing/searching the Web. It also seems to me that such compound docs would be a lot easier to swing over to my mobile devices, which have such a small screen and clumsy manual controls. Is there a way to do this without rewriting all the apps to use "external panels"?
At the very least I'd like to keep a config that I open, which in turn opens several different independent apps, and just arranges their windows for that specific use. Including which doc gets opened in each, their arrangement on the screen. Is even that simple organization possible in the GNOME window manager? If not, then in KDE?