Most would say we are not seeing anything that violates the standard model because the standard model is good, and works well at least for the masses we can currently create. Others would say that we see no anamolies becuase we don't know what to look for, and all analysis is skewed to proving the validity of the standard model, save a few minor modifications here and there.
If the later is true, observation does not always triumph speculation. In addition to a neccesarily limited data set, it is hard to know the systematic errors that are made due to ignorance. For instance, observation does tell us that objeects of different shapes and masses fall at different speed, and this is true if we add 'in a atmosphere of" and "due to frictional forces, not gravity". Likewise, Classical mechanincs works well if we add "for speeds very much smaller than C. We can even say the earth is flat for very small areas. Observation is generally a started point, then we have to build a theoretical scaffolding for why those observats occur, then we have to look for more observations that provide couterexamples to the model.
The fallacy that many people fall into is that lack of counterexamples imply validity of the model outside of domain of the observations. Science has plenty of examples that indicate such as assumption is not supported. And since science is largely, as you say, an inductive field, the preponderance of experince indicates that our models tend to invalid when we move far outide the original domain.
And black holes are my favorite. It is clear there is something there. It is clear that it has a great gavitation effect. It is clear that even though no particles can escape, some due, as we have a good model for that. What is also clear is that experience tells us that an infinity indicates a problem in the model. What is also clear is to make the model work we have to add a lot of mass that we cannot observe. Science is great because every model leads to a bunch of wonderful questions, and even more whacky notions. Some people find science boring because they think these models are static and there is nothing more to be discoverd. But there is much that we do not understand, and the hand waving arguments will only endure so long.
It is like Jason's mom is going to come back the camp and avenge his death after some old guy pretending to be a horny girl seduces him over myspace for a tryst that results in a tragic boating accident in which they both drown. Hey, entire industries have been built on lamer premises.
If best buy is going to pick a machne, they will pick the machine that they get paid extra to sell. Thinking that anyone would sell on the basis of quality is like thinking that best buy reviews the music and movies and only puts the highest quality on prominant display.
Netflix and blockbuster will choose on the basis of what machines are sold. It does them no good to stock something if only four people have the machine. When the PS3 begins to sell, and blockbuster starts renting the games, it would make sense for them to have the choose the PS3 movies as well. Unless MS gets behind HD 100%, HD is going to have a hard row to hoe.
The ibooks were well priced, and perhpas the MacBooks are not so well priced. The performance was not terrific, but for people who needed a computer to get work done, it would get work done better than many other equally priced machines.
The problem was, and seems to continue to be, quality. In 2001 the iBooks had quality problems. Same thing now. Apple does seem to cut costs on these machines, and that may be a reason to avoid them.
OTOH, the pro machines are typically good, and always seem to get better. Even though in many ways I prefer my TiPB, the way they had to put it together to make it affordable was not good. The Al construction is much better.
This is a product that pops up every once in a while. The pile metaphor, while interesting, requires some underlying technology to make it work. I am not just talkig about the eye candy, which is, as you say, interesting in itself and could lead to some interesting things, but the file structure.
This is why I think 'the pile' has never taken off. To really work it requires a robust data driven file system. For instance, we now use a folder metaphor to represent related catagories to materials. We have nested folder for deeper level of heirachacal organization. This system does not work with the pile, as scanning a directory with 1000 files is not reasonable.
The piles on desks work with people who have good sense on 3d visualazation. I know where things are by thier reletive 3d location. For such people, this metaphor will work well, and I think it is why we see implemetations of it. Many designers have good 3d visulations, so doesn't everyone? It seems to me that what past implementations have missing is the data driven aceess, which is implicit in the file model, but not moved to the pile model.
I suppose the good news is tha we are slowly moving to data driven file systems. Mac OS has sherlock, and MS Windows Vista will have something similiar, though it will not have the full database system that would be perfect for the pile. Here is how it would work. You have piles on your desk, piles on the floor, piles in drawers. On could succesively search different piles, and the candidate objects would fly out, or zoom, or whatever. I question if we have the horsepower for this yet, but it is coming. This is the type of GUI that could be considered a Humane Interface.
But I am seeing fewer ads lately. I never block ads, but increasingly ads are delivered by flash and animated gifs. Since I run camino, flash is on demand and images are never animated. As such, all I ever see is a blank space. The ads are not blocked, it is just that I am not compatible with web 2.0.
I am thankful that the adverstising agency seems to always believe complexity is better. It is the same thing when I am going down the freeway and most of the incredible expensive billboards are so busy as to be useless.
you youngens. The osborne I, with a Z80, was 25 pounds. And it did not have all the fancy complicated stuff that makes the modern so-called laptop unreliable.
Ads should not be about building excitement. It should be about establishing a consumer need for a product that they do not yet know they need. Furthermore, it should not make the customer expect more real aspects than the product can deliver. With these coming soon ads the expectations are free to form uncontrolled so naturely consumers are disappointed. For things like laundry detergent expectation can be overstated, and that does not present an investment, but with compters where purchasing decisions are often driven by word of mouth, such unmanaged expectation is deadly.
Oragami was not a revolutionary product. It was is not even an xbox. What it is is a product that really doesn't exist, and the initial marketing was done for the benifit of the fer vendors who took a chance to manufacture it. Not that MS did not take that risk.
There was a happy time when one could wirte some code, have it do something occasionally useful, and sell it. When the customer asked why doesn't the software do x,y, and z, the reply was it might do that later. When a customer asks why the prodcut does not work as advertised, the reply was that functionality was not guaranteed. When a customer asked who was responsible, the reply was ask the hardwar vendor, or pay an MSCE, or perhaps a neighbor.
This worked foir a while, because it was a cheap way to get some fucntionilty, and MS thrived on this cheapness. MS outsourced the integration, customer support, even development of new products. But if MS is going to grow and thrive it must provide value to large customer. Sure, some money can be made selling invidiual licenses to the home user, but the real money is the site licenses. And though MS certainly has an application stack, it does not provide solutions. And though many people think buying a solution is too expensive, companies like IBM make a pretty penny off selling solutions.
So, MS is going to have to simpify by deciding which solutions to support, and going full blast in that direction. If it is office applications, web servers, or whatever they should have reference systems to run those, and more respectfully partner with hardware suppliers. What I mean is that they should not threaten these suppliers, but work with them to get reliable and cost effective hardware. What has gotten them in trouble is treating the hardware suppliers as neccesary evils instead of the means of thier deliverence. Remember, if compaq had not created the PC, then MS would have no reason to exist. OTOH, perhaps it is MS knowledge that they are so expendable that keeps them on the defensive.
All Apple laptops get really hot, especially why they are really used. Last summer I was doing one particular project on my Powerbook, I thought is was going to melt. But all engineering is a compromise, and one compromise Apple makes is to try not have it's computers imitate vacuum cleaners.
So the principles of engineering, the one that most companies ignore, is to create an optimized system. There is no reason to put in high speed hardware with a slow bus, even though such a thing might look good in the press copy. What is nice is that my post 2000 powerbooks were the first Macs to not have the power connectors broken inthe first two years, as opposed to my pre-2000 Macs that always have dodgy plugs.
The game thing is always an issue. I don't care about it anymore becuase I do not like being treaed as a criminal, so I try not to deal with comapnies that treat customers like criminals. I do agree that the backlight keyboard is a bit silly, and at times annoying, especially for touch typists that have never had problems typing in the dark.
It is tempting to simplify the issue, but here is the problem we have. In April of 1981, we once again launched people into space, albeit LEO, and everything was good. We had a theory that we made a great improvement with a reusable space craft that would have quick turn around. This not only might provide cost saving, but also opportunities for the common researchers, or even student, to have a greater access to the space environment. But there were two problems. The first, which was pretty quickly discovered, was that the space shuttle was not a resuable machine, but in fact many of the compnents were single use consumable, and had to at least be rebuilt. This decreased the shuttle's value.
Second, was when challenger was destroyed. This event showed us that the shuttle were subject to catastophic disasters, and replacing them would be no small task. Though endevour was started with the orginal fleet, I do not believe it was fully funded until after the los of Challenger, and took five years to flight.
At that time, money was desperately needed to build a new fleet of ships, without the problems of the Shuttle, namely the need to have human safety for cargo ships. It was clear that this was a problem, and that a new fleet would be needed, perhpas as early as 2000.
That funding did not emerge, and then we lost Columbia. We are now down to fleet of three. The president wants the US to magically get a man to the moon and the mars, and NASA wants us to magically get build a new fleet of ships in 4-6 years. As far as I know there are no hard contracts for the building of the next generation ship. As far as I know we are stuck with the shuttle, mostly because money was not invested in space transport in the 80's.
So, what we are taking about here is not naysayers and fear mongering. What we are saying here is that we have three ships and no replacements. We have a job to finish, the space station, using these three ships. We are not going to building anymore. We do not a replacement design on the horizon. And, from a practicle point of view, we are unlike going to conitnue flying shuttles after the next accident. The best hope we have is to stop flying shuttles soon before such an accident occurs.
If you run air conditioning, the cost must be multiplied by some factor >>1. This will still be under $100 a year, but it is significant. This does not include indirect and opportunity costs of using massive quantatities of electricty.
The interesting part is the massive growth in the consumption of energy. Take to any power distrubition person and they will tell you that meeting that demand, 24X7, is no small task, and conservation would greatly increase the reliability of the power grid, and therefore the quality of life and national security.
The press release is not on the SCO website. The website has a list of all press releases, and the last on is dated June 8. Openlinux.org does appear to an SCO property, and one that is not new.
The question becomes why is the SCO group hosting two pages on a domain that is 18 months old, and will expire in a month, but not linking back to the original website? Is it a big joke? Is the site hacked?
Does the URL resolve to to any known SCO netblock, or does it resolve to another entity?
I know what you mean about the application section. It seems that sometimes researchers just look around the room and figure out an application for the first thing they see.
In this case the lens thing may not be so crackpot. SiO2, quartz, is the lens and glass material used in certain situations. Single crystal is just in the more demanding cases, but amorphous is used where possible. The size of a single crystal quartz stone is limited due to growth constraints. Chemicaly CO2 and SiO2 might bind well enough to allow the amorphous glass to be used in more situations. Don't know, been a while since I worked with eitherbut it seems like on of the first things that might be tried as soon as they get the process working.
Sp, by 2007 it must be up to the spec of a 2005 mac, and then surpass that spec with the need for full digital i/o.
I only bring this up because on big reason for the price discrepency of a base mac and base PC is that the base PC is using older technology. Some required techology for the PC in 2007 will continue to be reletively expensive, particularly on the digigtal front. I wonder how a businees case can be made to buy a PC with full digital connection and HD DVD when all it will be doing is MS Office.
It seems to me that godaddy has become a bad registrar over the past couple years. It has moved to MS servers, it has promoted the domain name hijacking market, it has severly degraded customer experience with exesive ads, and now had turned to extortion to make money.
Now, don't get me wrong. If godaddy saw a registrant engaging in uncuth activity, I would have no problem with godaddy sending a letter saying the registrant had 30 days to find another registrar. I would not even have a big issue with godaddy not giving a prorated refund. I would not even have an issue with godaddy helping bringing these people to justice. But in this case godaddy notices a venurable customer, perhaps engaging in crimanal acitvity, and is asking for a cut either in the form of protection money or a ransom. This is bad. This is worse than when earthlink negotiated protection money in the contract, because at least they were upfront about it.
The court, which in many ways were the last ally of the individual against corporate and governement greed, are quickly losing thier power. The drive again liberal activist judges, and replacing them with corporate activist judges, kills the opportunity to gain reasonable recompense for damages.
For instance, insurance companies routinely offer minimum settlement knowing that one of two things will happen. Either the claimant is poor and must accept the substandard settlement, or the claimant has means and can wait the years until a suit can be filed. If the later happens, the insurance company often will pay to insurance limits, but has still managed to keep, and freely invest, the claimant monies for a number of years.
A few years ago their was a case in which an insurance company did this on a particular grevious case. They all but lied in court in an effort to pay a claim that any reasonable person would deem valid. They hounded the claimant, and said that he should sell assets to cover costs that the insurance comapny in fact should have covered. When it finally ended up in court, it was found that insurance company acted extremely badly and was ordered to not only pay the claim but a large amount. The amount was large enough to catch the attention of the industry and stop thier practice of lowballing claims and abusing the court system by encouraging unnecesary suits. However, high courts found the settlement too large and block the last remaining path to justice.
For most large companies, the courts provide a known limited risks, and encourage said companies to abuse certain privaledges knowing that any cosequences will be long off and, at the end of the day, insignificant. It is unlikely that the 65m will hold through appleals. We can expect another 5-10 years of fights, after all MS has nothing to lose and will probably get the settlement whittled to half as much.
I am hardly a real expert, but this is again is an overstatement from the popular press. What is known, and what can be seen in the pictures, is that the subject likely had web feet and possible other features similiar to animals that lived in aquatic environments.
The exact wording, from the abstract is
The anatomy of Gansus, like that of other non-neornithean (nonmodern) ornithuran birds, indicates specialization for an amphibious life-style, supporting the hypothesis that modern birds originated in aquatic or littoral niches.
Which can be summarized as 'if something looks like a duck, then it likely live, at least sometimes, in water'. Doesn't mean it does, but it is likely. Also note that the researchers admit that this is just a single data point, and no real conclusions can be drawn. Also of note is that other researchers are not convinced, as the development to modern birds, or all varieties, probably took many different paths, leading to birds occupying various niches, from tress to water.
I thing I notice is missing in the summary is that these fossil remains are not crushed. They are three dimensional, and of great detail.
The other issue is that young people tend to have cable TV, and while most cable seperates the two services, having an existed business relationship is alwasy a plus. Only about 60% of US household have cable, but I am sure that it is nearly 100% for young adults who could also afford broadband. OTOH, I am sure that land lines still exist in nearly 100% of such homes.
So, DSL remains useful for those that don't want to deal with cable companies, even if one has to tack on a land line, which is no great expense and is realy cheap insurance given the reletive reliability of phones versus electricity, cable, and complex electronic systems.
However, I am waiting for the 21st cetury to arrive. I am waiting for the day when we are no longer subjigated to the wired communication, like those poor fellows of the 19th century, and can one again move to "the wireless".
It will likely suceed to a significant degree. The next version of WMP will have full juke box capability and link to the store. Most people will use WMP player as it is what will be on all MS based machines. IE will have links to the music store built in, and annoy ware will be present to discourage other music stores. For instance, if linking to iTMS one can image 10 messages warning the user about the insecurity of the store, while the MS solution will have non.
The two main problems, as you mentioned, is that everyone owns ITMS tracks, and everyone owns a iPod. Niether of these are things MS needs to worry about in the long term. First, when teens become adults they are often very willing to replace a significant portion of thier collections with music in a new format. This is no different from the change to CD. Second, it is not hard to converty ITMS tracks to plain MP3. And the kids who do not yet have an iPod will simply start with MS. The other issue, that everyone has iPods, will not be a big deal as iPods needs to periodically replaced, and MS will position it's products at a lower price point. One can easily imagine a $99 entry machine with radio.
What is kind of puzzleing is why MS wants a music player. The music store is quite understandable. They do these things just becaue everyone else is. It will drive out most other competitors, and insure that MS DRM is dominate. But they hae started fair play to encourge hardware development. The only reason for MS to make a music player is because no one else is really producing machine that push the MS DRM. This is where I think MS could fumble. It might be that, like sony, MS is going to try to produce a player that will only work with DRM infested tracks. This would make sense as it will create a situation in which only MS will be the defender of the artists and labels, and might ganer some good will, like in the battle for the next DVD format. This will be good news for the rest of us as it will probably limit the appeal of such players, and make the market be tolerable like in video consoles. Three of four majors dominating. It would not be bad for Applel, MS and creative to evenly split the market.
Of course at the base of all this is a desire to limit the penetration of Macs into the home and school. As soon as people gets confortable with a mac, then they start using them other places.
It is not uncommon, when talking to someone who believes you to be inferior, to become defensive. This defensiveness is often interpreted as having a "chip on ones shoulder".
In my experience, I have found truly competent software developers, men or women, to be in the minority. Most appear to be the equivelent of semi-skilled workers, putting together the cogs as directed by an outside supervisor. This is only to be expected as the demand for reletively low paying developers has increased, vis a vis the MS temporary contract labor model. I have also found that men in particular get very upset when women are competeing for the jobs, especially men that are not themselves extremely good at what they do.
I have worked with women in many different technical. Like men, women have different perspectvies and long term reasons for working. These reasons affect the type of work done. I know women how have gotten degrees, so as to be women of letters, and then do something that requires much less skill becuase it fits thier lifestyle better. I have known men to do the same thing.
At the end of day, I think there is a norm for each field, and the dominant players in the field consider that norm the only possible reality. It does not take that much creativity to realize that changes in norm is what has driven technological growth, but most people just want to go to work for 8 hours, do as little as possible, and draw thier pay. It in only the special few that will uspet the apple cart in hope of achieving something new and exciting.
So, it's the most secure operating system ever... and from my use of the beta, I might be tempted to believe that. Here's an example of that "security":
*insert CD*
"You've just inserted an insecure piece of removable media. Are you sure you want to proceed?"
*clicks yes*
When autorun is turn off for all removable media, and can only be turned on with an administrator password, and there is no override for "special DRM encoded media", then I will believe that MS is concerned about security. Until then, they are doing the minimum neccesary to meet a current PR, while making sure that control of MS Windows stays out of the hand of the end user, and in the hands of MS and it's partner advertisers.
I was quite nuetral on MS product until the late 90's when they began to force these validation programs on users. Companies that paid MS huge sums of money and actively made sure that all software was properly acquired, were forced to incur further unaccounted costs by submitting to audits and spyware and living under the constant threat of huge financial settlements. I mean, if a compnay is trying to play nice, why beat them down with the idea that a single employee, installing a single program, could force a company into bankruptcy.
I still think the development tools are intersting, and thier simplicity is why MS WIndows is so popular, but fail to see why somany people are allowing themselves to be treated like criminals.
Furthermore this WGA thing is really ass backwards. It represents an admission that MS does not have adaquate control of the ditribution of it's products, and really indicates that the consumer has no guarantee of quality. The game that MS plays right now, where OEMs buy the license, then MS takes no responsibility for the product, helps creates a situation where all this piracy can occur. MS is not trying to protect user experience, buy it's licensing costs,which makes since as it has no responsibility for user experience.
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If the later is true, observation does not always triumph speculation. In addition to a neccesarily limited data set, it is hard to know the systematic errors that are made due to ignorance. For instance, observation does tell us that objeects of different shapes and masses fall at different speed, and this is true if we add 'in a atmosphere of" and "due to frictional forces, not gravity". Likewise, Classical mechanincs works well if we add "for speeds very much smaller than C. We can even say the earth is flat for very small areas. Observation is generally a started point, then we have to build a theoretical scaffolding for why those observats occur, then we have to look for more observations that provide couterexamples to the model.
The fallacy that many people fall into is that lack of counterexamples imply validity of the model outside of domain of the observations. Science has plenty of examples that indicate such as assumption is not supported. And since science is largely, as you say, an inductive field, the preponderance of experince indicates that our models tend to invalid when we move far outide the original domain.
And black holes are my favorite. It is clear there is something there. It is clear that it has a great gavitation effect. It is clear that even though no particles can escape, some due, as we have a good model for that. What is also clear is that experience tells us that an infinity indicates a problem in the model. What is also clear is to make the model work we have to add a lot of mass that we cannot observe. Science is great because every model leads to a bunch of wonderful questions, and even more whacky notions. Some people find science boring because they think these models are static and there is nothing more to be discoverd. But there is much that we do not understand, and the hand waving arguments will only endure so long.
It is like Jason's mom is going to come back the camp and avenge his death after some old guy pretending to be a horny girl seduces him over myspace for a tryst that results in a tragic boating accident in which they both drown. Hey, entire industries have been built on lamer premises.
Netflix and blockbuster will choose on the basis of what machines are sold. It does them no good to stock something if only four people have the machine. When the PS3 begins to sell, and blockbuster starts renting the games, it would make sense for them to have the choose the PS3 movies as well. Unless MS gets behind HD 100%, HD is going to have a hard row to hoe.
The problem was, and seems to continue to be, quality. In 2001 the iBooks had quality problems. Same thing now. Apple does seem to cut costs on these machines, and that may be a reason to avoid them.
OTOH, the pro machines are typically good, and always seem to get better. Even though in many ways I prefer my TiPB, the way they had to put it together to make it affordable was not good. The Al construction is much better.
This is why I think 'the pile' has never taken off. To really work it requires a robust data driven file system. For instance, we now use a folder metaphor to represent related catagories to materials. We have nested folder for deeper level of heirachacal organization. This system does not work with the pile, as scanning a directory with 1000 files is not reasonable.
The piles on desks work with people who have good sense on 3d visualazation. I know where things are by thier reletive 3d location. For such people, this metaphor will work well, and I think it is why we see implemetations of it. Many designers have good 3d visulations, so doesn't everyone? It seems to me that what past implementations have missing is the data driven aceess, which is implicit in the file model, but not moved to the pile model.
I suppose the good news is tha we are slowly moving to data driven file systems. Mac OS has sherlock, and MS Windows Vista will have something similiar, though it will not have the full database system that would be perfect for the pile. Here is how it would work. You have piles on your desk, piles on the floor, piles in drawers. On could succesively search different piles, and the candidate objects would fly out, or zoom, or whatever. I question if we have the horsepower for this yet, but it is coming. This is the type of GUI that could be considered a Humane Interface.
I am thankful that the adverstising agency seems to always believe complexity is better. It is the same thing when I am going down the freeway and most of the incredible expensive billboards are so busy as to be useless.
you youngens. The osborne I, with a Z80, was 25 pounds. And it did not have all the fancy complicated stuff that makes the modern so-called laptop unreliable.
Oragami was not a revolutionary product. It was is not even an xbox. What it is is a product that really doesn't exist, and the initial marketing was done for the benifit of the fer vendors who took a chance to manufacture it. Not that MS did not take that risk.
This worked foir a while, because it was a cheap way to get some fucntionilty, and MS thrived on this cheapness. MS outsourced the integration, customer support, even development of new products. But if MS is going to grow and thrive it must provide value to large customer. Sure, some money can be made selling invidiual licenses to the home user, but the real money is the site licenses. And though MS certainly has an application stack, it does not provide solutions. And though many people think buying a solution is too expensive, companies like IBM make a pretty penny off selling solutions.
So, MS is going to have to simpify by deciding which solutions to support, and going full blast in that direction. If it is office applications, web servers, or whatever they should have reference systems to run those, and more respectfully partner with hardware suppliers. What I mean is that they should not threaten these suppliers, but work with them to get reliable and cost effective hardware. What has gotten them in trouble is treating the hardware suppliers as neccesary evils instead of the means of thier deliverence. Remember, if compaq had not created the PC, then MS would have no reason to exist. OTOH, perhaps it is MS knowledge that they are so expendable that keeps them on the defensive.
So the principles of engineering, the one that most companies ignore, is to create an optimized system. There is no reason to put in high speed hardware with a slow bus, even though such a thing might look good in the press copy. What is nice is that my post 2000 powerbooks were the first Macs to not have the power connectors broken inthe first two years, as opposed to my pre-2000 Macs that always have dodgy plugs.
The game thing is always an issue. I don't care about it anymore becuase I do not like being treaed as a criminal, so I try not to deal with comapnies that treat customers like criminals. I do agree that the backlight keyboard is a bit silly, and at times annoying, especially for touch typists that have never had problems typing in the dark.
Second, was when challenger was destroyed. This event showed us that the shuttle were subject to catastophic disasters, and replacing them would be no small task. Though endevour was started with the orginal fleet, I do not believe it was fully funded until after the los of Challenger, and took five years to flight.
At that time, money was desperately needed to build a new fleet of ships, without the problems of the Shuttle, namely the need to have human safety for cargo ships. It was clear that this was a problem, and that a new fleet would be needed, perhpas as early as 2000.
That funding did not emerge, and then we lost Columbia. We are now down to fleet of three. The president wants the US to magically get a man to the moon and the mars, and NASA wants us to magically get build a new fleet of ships in 4-6 years. As far as I know there are no hard contracts for the building of the next generation ship. As far as I know we are stuck with the shuttle, mostly because money was not invested in space transport in the 80's.
So, what we are taking about here is not naysayers and fear mongering. What we are saying here is that we have three ships and no replacements. We have a job to finish, the space station, using these three ships. We are not going to building anymore. We do not a replacement design on the horizon. And, from a practicle point of view, we are unlike going to conitnue flying shuttles after the next accident. The best hope we have is to stop flying shuttles soon before such an accident occurs.
The interesting part is the massive growth in the consumption of energy. Take to any power distrubition person and they will tell you that meeting that demand, 24X7, is no small task, and conservation would greatly increase the reliability of the power grid, and therefore the quality of life and national security.
The question becomes why is the SCO group hosting two pages on a domain that is 18 months old, and will expire in a month, but not linking back to the original website? Is it a big joke? Is the site hacked?
Does the URL resolve to to any known SCO netblock, or does it resolve to another entity?
Because the only one who can save us from the drones is Max, the bitchin' X5-452
In this case the lens thing may not be so crackpot. SiO2, quartz, is the lens and glass material used in certain situations. Single crystal is just in the more demanding cases, but amorphous is used where possible. The size of a single crystal quartz stone is limited due to growth constraints. Chemicaly CO2 and SiO2 might bind well enough to allow the amorphous glass to be used in more situations. Don't know, been a while since I worked with eitherbut it seems like on of the first things that might be tried as soon as they get the process working.
Brilliant guy. I have loved his cartoons since I was a kid. Have most of his collections. If you want a true belly laugh, get a copy.
I only bring this up because on big reason for the price discrepency of a base mac and base PC is that the base PC is using older technology. Some required techology for the PC in 2007 will continue to be reletively expensive, particularly on the digigtal front. I wonder how a businees case can be made to buy a PC with full digital connection and HD DVD when all it will be doing is MS Office.
Now, don't get me wrong. If godaddy saw a registrant engaging in uncuth activity, I would have no problem with godaddy sending a letter saying the registrant had 30 days to find another registrar. I would not even have a big issue with godaddy not giving a prorated refund. I would not even have an issue with godaddy helping bringing these people to justice. But in this case godaddy notices a venurable customer, perhaps engaging in crimanal acitvity, and is asking for a cut either in the form of protection money or a ransom. This is bad. This is worse than when earthlink negotiated protection money in the contract, because at least they were upfront about it.
So, who are the registrars that are not scum?
For instance, insurance companies routinely offer minimum settlement knowing that one of two things will happen. Either the claimant is poor and must accept the substandard settlement, or the claimant has means and can wait the years until a suit can be filed. If the later happens, the insurance company often will pay to insurance limits, but has still managed to keep, and freely invest, the claimant monies for a number of years.
A few years ago their was a case in which an insurance company did this on a particular grevious case. They all but lied in court in an effort to pay a claim that any reasonable person would deem valid. They hounded the claimant, and said that he should sell assets to cover costs that the insurance comapny in fact should have covered. When it finally ended up in court, it was found that insurance company acted extremely badly and was ordered to not only pay the claim but a large amount. The amount was large enough to catch the attention of the industry and stop thier practice of lowballing claims and abusing the court system by encouraging unnecesary suits. However, high courts found the settlement too large and block the last remaining path to justice.
For most large companies, the courts provide a known limited risks, and encourage said companies to abuse certain privaledges knowing that any cosequences will be long off and, at the end of the day, insignificant. It is unlikely that the 65m will hold through appleals. We can expect another 5-10 years of fights, after all MS has nothing to lose and will probably get the settlement whittled to half as much.
The exact wording, from the abstract is
The anatomy of Gansus, like that of other non-neornithean (nonmodern) ornithuran birds, indicates specialization for an amphibious life-style, supporting the hypothesis that modern birds originated in aquatic or littoral niches.
Which can be summarized as 'if something looks like a duck, then it likely live, at least sometimes, in water'. Doesn't mean it does, but it is likely. Also note that the researchers admit that this is just a single data point, and no real conclusions can be drawn. Also of note is that other researchers are not convinced, as the development to modern birds, or all varieties, probably took many different paths, leading to birds occupying various niches, from tress to water.
I thing I notice is missing in the summary is that these fossil remains are not crushed. They are three dimensional, and of great detail.
So, DSL remains useful for those that don't want to deal with cable companies, even if one has to tack on a land line, which is no great expense and is realy cheap insurance given the reletive reliability of phones versus electricity, cable, and complex electronic systems.
However, I am waiting for the 21st cetury to arrive. I am waiting for the day when we are no longer subjigated to the wired communication, like those poor fellows of the 19th century, and can one again move to "the wireless".
The two main problems, as you mentioned, is that everyone owns ITMS tracks, and everyone owns a iPod. Niether of these are things MS needs to worry about in the long term. First, when teens become adults they are often very willing to replace a significant portion of thier collections with music in a new format. This is no different from the change to CD. Second, it is not hard to converty ITMS tracks to plain MP3. And the kids who do not yet have an iPod will simply start with MS. The other issue, that everyone has iPods, will not be a big deal as iPods needs to periodically replaced, and MS will position it's products at a lower price point. One can easily imagine a $99 entry machine with radio.
What is kind of puzzleing is why MS wants a music player. The music store is quite understandable. They do these things just becaue everyone else is. It will drive out most other competitors, and insure that MS DRM is dominate. But they hae started fair play to encourge hardware development. The only reason for MS to make a music player is because no one else is really producing machine that push the MS DRM. This is where I think MS could fumble. It might be that, like sony, MS is going to try to produce a player that will only work with DRM infested tracks. This would make sense as it will create a situation in which only MS will be the defender of the artists and labels, and might ganer some good will, like in the battle for the next DVD format. This will be good news for the rest of us as it will probably limit the appeal of such players, and make the market be tolerable like in video consoles. Three of four majors dominating. It would not be bad for Applel, MS and creative to evenly split the market.
Of course at the base of all this is a desire to limit the penetration of Macs into the home and school. As soon as people gets confortable with a mac, then they start using them other places.
In my experience, I have found truly competent software developers, men or women, to be in the minority. Most appear to be the equivelent of semi-skilled workers, putting together the cogs as directed by an outside supervisor. This is only to be expected as the demand for reletively low paying developers has increased, vis a vis the MS temporary contract labor model. I have also found that men in particular get very upset when women are competeing for the jobs, especially men that are not themselves extremely good at what they do.
I have worked with women in many different technical. Like men, women have different perspectvies and long term reasons for working. These reasons affect the type of work done. I know women how have gotten degrees, so as to be women of letters, and then do something that requires much less skill becuase it fits thier lifestyle better. I have known men to do the same thing.
At the end of day, I think there is a norm for each field, and the dominant players in the field consider that norm the only possible reality. It does not take that much creativity to realize that changes in norm is what has driven technological growth, but most people just want to go to work for 8 hours, do as little as possible, and draw thier pay. It in only the special few that will uspet the apple cart in hope of achieving something new and exciting.
*insert CD*
"You've just inserted an insecure piece of removable media. Are you sure you want to proceed?"
*clicks yes*
When autorun is turn off for all removable media, and can only be turned on with an administrator password, and there is no override for "special DRM encoded media", then I will believe that MS is concerned about security. Until then, they are doing the minimum neccesary to meet a current PR, while making sure that control of MS Windows stays out of the hand of the end user, and in the hands of MS and it's partner advertisers.
I still think the development tools are intersting, and thier simplicity is why MS WIndows is so popular, but fail to see why somany people are allowing themselves to be treated like criminals.
Furthermore this WGA thing is really ass backwards. It represents an admission that MS does not have adaquate control of the ditribution of it's products, and really indicates that the consumer has no guarantee of quality. The game that MS plays right now, where OEMs buy the license, then MS takes no responsibility for the product, helps creates a situation where all this piracy can occur. MS is not trying to protect user experience, buy it's licensing costs,which makes since as it has no responsibility for user experience.