Probably similar to what happens when one of the Soviet-era sodium-cooled nuclear submarine gets hit... really a torpedo hit that breaches the hull is going to be a Bad Day no matter what.
If the Pre had used established methods (ie. writing software to parse the iTunes XML catalog and syncing with the files on the HD) you'd have a point. However, the Pre was tricking iTunes into identifying it to the customer as an iPod. Ignoring trademark violations, that seems like it could be harmful and confusing to Apple customers less technically inclined than yourself. In any case it's really hard to argue that Apple shouldn't have its software identify hardware correctly or not at all.
I have little sympathy for Palm here, and by extension the customers they duped.
factor in how much of your tax dollars when into that and then get back to us with a valid point....
That's pretty easy to do. The USPS publishes annual reports just like a company. According to the 2008 annual report, the USPS took in about $75B in revenue, had about $78B in operating costs, and had a contribution of about $3B from the US government. That's about 3% of its costs covered by your taxes.
It was a monster that consumed so much of NASA's budget since its inception that we couldn't afford to get back to the moon. If we'd just continued improving the Apollo technology then it probably would have gone on the same trajectory as the other technologies you mention and we'd be on Mars by now.
It seemed like a really good idea at the time, though.
Many governments publish gigabytes of CSV files, PDF files, and database files. I assume that's what you're referring to when you say you just want facts published. Should the New York Times just be filled with tables of data?
If you want that information translated into written English, the author of that text is going to have a point of view and a context within which they write. It's the way language works. And everyone wants other people to share their understanding of events.
The original poster is using the term "Computer Science" but seems to be expecting a "Computer Programming" degree. The latter is often a 2-year associates degree at your local college. The former is a grounding in the science and mathematics of computation such that any language is just some syntax details that describe the same concepts you'll learn in your theory class.
And Brazil gets only 3% from nuclear, has only slightly less power requirements than France, and yet is largely independent of foreign oil, while France is not.
It's not a subscription, though, because you don't have to pay it every month. If you go over the limit in a month, the fee really is one time to get more Pandora that month. You won't be charged the next month unless you go over the limit again and want to listen again. I agree it's not a "lifetime" membership for a one-time fee, but it's not a subscription either. Maybe they should just drop the qualifier and call it a "$1 fee".
Slashdot generally seems to consider tech something that requires cutting-edge skills but management as something anyone could do. I haven't found that to be the case. Being a good manager requires staying up on the management skills, techniques, and tools. It also often requires some politics, budget skills, and decisiveness. It's not something anyone can do well, and it's not something you can sit back and relax in and expect to stay good at it.
Personally if I left tech I'd head for business development, but that's just me. You still get to play with all the latest toys that way.:)
by the time some patents would expire (e.g. 20 years), our window to affect climate change may have past.
Presumably Toyota could license the patents to recoup investment costs and make a profit long before they expire. THAT's the way the patent game is supposed to be played. It lowers the barrier to entry for everyone and allows the innovator to profit.
Contrast this book with the Holy Koran, which has not changed one iota since it was written
Maybe. The original Koran is lost. It was copied off its original materials into book form by the first Caliph after Mohammed's death. The original book was then borrowed and copied and distributed 4 times by the third Caliph, from which all other "official" copies are made (while the rest were destroyed). Diacritical marks indicating vowels and pronounciation were added by the fifth Caliph which some claim actually slightly changed some meaning (it reduced ambiguity in particular words). None of these acts were carried out by Mohammed, and therefore were not verified against the "original" heavenly text.
That was my immediate reaction. Microsoft like to play "the version game"... remember when they traded a license to the Mac GUI in exchange for a specific version of Office, then immediately revved the version? (No, probably not-- that happened in the 80's and 90's.)
So now that they've come out with a new version, they're freeing up the previous version. While that's a nice step, it doesn't exactly make Mono free and clear, nor does it allow Mono to create a runtime that will run any.NET app on any platform other than Windows. The old argument that C# locks you in to Windows is still largely true.
HTML doesn't specify what image format must be supported (PNG, GIF, JPG, etc); why is video any different? If HTML had specified GIF explicitly up-front, we'd all be in trouble when UniSys became dicks about it.
Let the market decide. If h.264 succeeds despite the extra cost, it means folks found enough value to justify the cost. If DivX or VC1 come out of nowhere to take over the web we won't be left with an out-dated standard. If a sleeper patent hits Theora hard we'll be glad we didn't lock ourselves down.
CLucene is faster than lucene as it is written in C++.
XXX is better than YYY as it is written in [my favorite language].
Haven't we explored this one to death already? Java isn't slow, and there's nothing magic about C/C++. Badly written C/C++ gets trounced by Java any day, and algorithmic efficiency trounces both of those when it comes to complex functions like indexed searches.
If he didn't read his contract that's his problem. I also find it very unlikely.
Agreed. ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) is something that all defense workers are trained in. It's also explained very carefully that if there's a violation it's not the government program's fault, it's not the company's fault, but it's the employee that's going to prison. It's a pretty strict standard. Even discussing things in the public domain for the wrong purposes can land you in hot water-- giving a citation (book name, page number) of public domain information can violate ITAR if it's in response to, say, a question about missile technology. In essence what you exported there was your expertise in leading the foreign national to that source of information.
Incidentally, these are the same regulations that kept the old PowerMac G4's from being exported and led to the "tank" commercial at the time.
I could be wrong, but I think that until recently Wikipedia's license would have forbid copying it into an iPhone app for sale at the App Store. I think the recent license change is what allowed this more than any technological advance.
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
As was argued by the original author, you're left in a situation where if Ogg were specified in the standard, you'd have folks who followed the standard at a disadvantage in quality and/or bitrate.
Besides, W3C doesn't say which image file formats are allowable, why should it specify a codec?
If those are the discs you've got, those are the discs you want to play. The point is if lots of people have dozens of Blu-Ray discs they'll want to play them on their car, on those portable devices on planes, etc. In a hypothetical world where people start replacing all their DVDs with Blu-Ray editions, those devices will have to get on board even if they're not capable of the quality.
The best use-case for ripping for me is to bring a movie with me on my iPhone. But Blu-Ray discs increasingly contain a full low-res version that can be ripped to the iPhone, fulfilling that need. The next most common need I've heard cited (but am not affected by myself) is the ubiquity of DVD players in car entertainment centers, meeting rooms, etc. Once the licensing, circuits, optics and laser for Blu-Ray are down to trivial cost we'll see that support explode.
All I can say is that on a recent HDTV Blu-Ray sure beats the pants off of cable or downloadable content, even those that are terms "HD". It's all about the bit-rate there, and few other sources have even a quarter of Blu-Ray's capacity there.
Considering that Apple has sold millions of these things already and a relatively few are having problems, I don't think testing would likely have caught this issue. Besides, it sounds like a software problem not a hardware problem. Almost no embedded device is designed to be run with everything pegged at 100% for extended periods... obviously some bug in the OS is doing so.
While others point out, probably correctly, that the problem is probably a binary/ascii conversion, in actuality the error checking on TCP is simply not that good.
TCP uses a 16-bit checksum, so you have 1 in 65536 chance of an error packet being incorrectly validated as being correct. To make matters worse, it uses 1's complement instead of 2's complement, so 0x00 and 0xFF are indistinguishable.
Ethernet has a 32-bit, 2's complement checksum so if you're transmitting over that link-layer you're probably in good shape. But depending on that from a systems point of view seems risky.
Much better to only transfer ZIPs and check them at the other end if you only have control over the endpoints. If you can control the transmission, use a better error-correcting high-level protocol or even a forward-error correction protocol on top of TCP.
The sun at this point is well over halfway through its yellow-phase lifetime. Earth only has a few billion more years left to reach whatever culmination it's going to. There's not really enough time to evolve another species to our level from scratch. A mere 95% extinction wouldn't be as bad, but if it's only 60-some-odd million years from now the next sentient species is going to have to make due with dramatically fewer energy reserves left on the planet to bootstrap its civilization.
In short, if you value sentience we're a pretty valuable resource for the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably similar to what happens when one of the Soviet-era sodium-cooled nuclear submarine gets hit... really a torpedo hit that breaches the hull is going to be a Bad Day no matter what.
If the Pre had used established methods (ie. writing software to parse the iTunes XML catalog and syncing with the files on the HD) you'd have a point. However, the Pre was tricking iTunes into identifying it to the customer as an iPod. Ignoring trademark violations, that seems like it could be harmful and confusing to Apple customers less technically inclined than yourself. In any case it's really hard to argue that Apple shouldn't have its software identify hardware correctly or not at all.
I have little sympathy for Palm here, and by extension the customers they duped.
factor in how much of your tax dollars when into that and then get back to us with a valid point....
That's pretty easy to do. The USPS publishes annual reports just like a company. According to the 2008 annual report, the USPS took in about $75B in revenue, had about $78B in operating costs, and had a contribution of about $3B from the US government. That's about 3% of its costs covered by your taxes.
What's your point again?
The Space Shuttle.
It was a monster that consumed so much of NASA's budget since its inception that we couldn't afford to get back to the moon. If we'd just continued improving the Apollo technology then it probably would have gone on the same trajectory as the other technologies you mention and we'd be on Mars by now.
It seemed like a really good idea at the time, though.
Many governments publish gigabytes of CSV files, PDF files, and database files. I assume that's what you're referring to when you say you just want facts published. Should the New York Times just be filled with tables of data?
If you want that information translated into written English, the author of that text is going to have a point of view and a context within which they write. It's the way language works. And everyone wants other people to share their understanding of events.
The original poster is using the term "Computer Science" but seems to be expecting a "Computer Programming" degree. The latter is often a 2-year associates degree at your local college. The former is a grounding in the science and mathematics of computation such that any language is just some syntax details that describe the same concepts you'll learn in your theory class.
And Brazil gets only 3% from nuclear, has only slightly less power requirements than France, and yet is largely independent of foreign oil, while France is not.
It's not a subscription, though, because you don't have to pay it every month. If you go over the limit in a month, the fee really is one time to get more Pandora that month. You won't be charged the next month unless you go over the limit again and want to listen again. I agree it's not a "lifetime" membership for a one-time fee, but it's not a subscription either. Maybe they should just drop the qualifier and call it a "$1 fee".
Slashdot generally seems to consider tech something that requires cutting-edge skills but management as something anyone could do. I haven't found that to be the case. Being a good manager requires staying up on the management skills, techniques, and tools. It also often requires some politics, budget skills, and decisiveness. It's not something anyone can do well, and it's not something you can sit back and relax in and expect to stay good at it.
Personally if I left tech I'd head for business development, but that's just me. You still get to play with all the latest toys that way. :)
by the time some patents would expire (e.g. 20 years), our window to affect climate change may have past.
Presumably Toyota could license the patents to recoup investment costs and make a profit long before they expire. THAT's the way the patent game is supposed to be played. It lowers the barrier to entry for everyone and allows the innovator to profit.
Contrast this book with the Holy Koran, which has not changed one iota since it was written
Maybe. The original Koran is lost. It was copied off its original materials into book form by the first Caliph after Mohammed's death. The original book was then borrowed and copied and distributed 4 times by the third Caliph, from which all other "official" copies are made (while the rest were destroyed). Diacritical marks indicating vowels and pronounciation were added by the fifth Caliph which some claim actually slightly changed some meaning (it reduced ambiguity in particular words). None of these acts were carried out by Mohammed, and therefore were not verified against the "original" heavenly text.
That was my immediate reaction. Microsoft like to play "the version game"... remember when they traded a license to the Mac GUI in exchange for a specific version of Office, then immediately revved the version? (No, probably not-- that happened in the 80's and 90's.)
So now that they've come out with a new version, they're freeing up the previous version. While that's a nice step, it doesn't exactly make Mono free and clear, nor does it allow Mono to create a runtime that will run any .NET app on any platform other than Windows. The old argument that C# locks you in to Windows is still largely true.
HTML doesn't specify what image format must be supported (PNG, GIF, JPG, etc); why is video any different? If HTML had specified GIF explicitly up-front, we'd all be in trouble when UniSys became dicks about it.
Let the market decide. If h.264 succeeds despite the extra cost, it means folks found enough value to justify the cost. If DivX or VC1 come out of nowhere to take over the web we won't be left with an out-dated standard. If a sleeper patent hits Theora hard we'll be glad we didn't lock ourselves down.
CLucene is faster than lucene as it is written in C++.
XXX is better than YYY as it is written in [my favorite language].
Haven't we explored this one to death already? Java isn't slow, and there's nothing magic about C/C++. Badly written C/C++ gets trounced by Java any day, and algorithmic efficiency trounces both of those when it comes to complex functions like indexed searches.
72127,3114
I was also on GEnie, but ironically don't remember my login there.
If he didn't read his contract that's his problem. I also find it very unlikely.
Agreed. ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) is something that all defense workers are trained in. It's also explained very carefully that if there's a violation it's not the government program's fault, it's not the company's fault, but it's the employee that's going to prison. It's a pretty strict standard. Even discussing things in the public domain for the wrong purposes can land you in hot water-- giving a citation (book name, page number) of public domain information can violate ITAR if it's in response to, say, a question about missile technology. In essence what you exported there was your expertise in leading the foreign national to that source of information.
Incidentally, these are the same regulations that kept the old PowerMac G4's from being exported and led to the "tank" commercial at the time.
I could be wrong, but I think that until recently Wikipedia's license would have forbid copying it into an iPhone app for sale at the App Store. I think the recent license change is what allowed this more than any technological advance.
Presumably it could also discern the difference between Ancient Margaret of Crete and Walter's Tablets 'R Us Reproductions on 4th and Broadway.
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
As was argued by the original author, you're left in a situation where if Ogg were specified in the standard, you'd have folks who followed the standard at a disadvantage in quality and/or bitrate.
Besides, W3C doesn't say which image file formats are allowable, why should it specify a codec?
As an aside, your comment was especially amusing juxtaposed with your sig.
Please don't try to diagnose or treat folks without training or examination.
If those are the discs you've got, those are the discs you want to play. The point is if lots of people have dozens of Blu-Ray discs they'll want to play them on their car, on those portable devices on planes, etc. In a hypothetical world where people start replacing all their DVDs with Blu-Ray editions, those devices will have to get on board even if they're not capable of the quality.
The best use-case for ripping for me is to bring a movie with me on my iPhone. But Blu-Ray discs increasingly contain a full low-res version that can be ripped to the iPhone, fulfilling that need. The next most common need I've heard cited (but am not affected by myself) is the ubiquity of DVD players in car entertainment centers, meeting rooms, etc. Once the licensing, circuits, optics and laser for Blu-Ray are down to trivial cost we'll see that support explode.
All I can say is that on a recent HDTV Blu-Ray sure beats the pants off of cable or downloadable content, even those that are terms "HD". It's all about the bit-rate there, and few other sources have even a quarter of Blu-Ray's capacity there.
Considering that Apple has sold millions of these things already and a relatively few are having problems, I don't think testing would likely have caught this issue. Besides, it sounds like a software problem not a hardware problem. Almost no embedded device is designed to be run with everything pegged at 100% for extended periods... obviously some bug in the OS is doing so.
While others point out, probably correctly, that the problem is probably a binary/ascii conversion, in actuality the error checking on TCP is simply not that good.
TCP uses a 16-bit checksum, so you have 1 in 65536 chance of an error packet being incorrectly validated as being correct. To make matters worse, it uses 1's complement instead of 2's complement, so 0x00 and 0xFF are indistinguishable.
Ethernet has a 32-bit, 2's complement checksum so if you're transmitting over that link-layer you're probably in good shape. But depending on that from a systems point of view seems risky.
Much better to only transfer ZIPs and check them at the other end if you only have control over the endpoints. If you can control the transmission, use a better error-correcting high-level protocol or even a forward-error correction protocol on top of TCP.
Or just use rsync.
The sun at this point is well over halfway through its yellow-phase lifetime. Earth only has a few billion more years left to reach whatever culmination it's going to. There's not really enough time to evolve another species to our level from scratch. A mere 95% extinction wouldn't be as bad, but if it's only 60-some-odd million years from now the next sentient species is going to have to make due with dramatically fewer energy reserves left on the planet to bootstrap its civilization.
In short, if you value sentience we're a pretty valuable resource for the solar system.