Memory is acutally the biggest diference between the cheapo machines and the quality machines that will be usable for a while. It was not that long ago(1999) when the cheap mini towers were maxed at 384MB, which is really not enough for anything. Yes I tried to install Linux. It was slow.... The machine was still good, but it would not take enough memory to be useful.
So the first thing i look at now is how much memory can I add. 2 GB has been my standard for non-laptops for a while. Most laptops can be had with 512 MB installed, and then drop in another gig later.
Really looking at this is interesting. I have one Compaq portable that has 256MB running XP. It never uses more than 50% of the processor, and already runs hot. I want to drop in another 256, but am told it will just run hotter. Another machine that looks nice, but was engineered to actually take advantage of the otherwise impressive hardware.
I never really saw the idea of carrying around one's entire music collection as such a great idea. I waited until the minis came out to get an iPod, as it held enough music and was the size of my Nomad.
However, the though of carrying videos would justify the size and cost. I would be good if they had a slightly bigger widescreen, but as people have been mentioning one can play it on a tv.
I find many of these responses very interesting. I mean, what can we do? We can call the police, but if no law has been broken, or if no person can be found, then they can do nothing. We can call our congress people and ask for help, but they say that the industry can regulate itself, and any laws would be unfair to an industry that 99% honest. Anyway, improper behavior can be managed by existing laws. So we go to the plaintiff lawyers, but they say the government regulations on filing and limits on compensation means that there is no money to be made, so the case cannot be taken. And we should not sue because the spamers are perfectly free to sue us using the established and unregulated machinery of the corporate lawyer. The machinery that would sign a letter stating that a tax dodge is legal, knowing full well it is not.
So, what is left. Fighting back. Having a bunch of people loading the web site promoted by the spam, which is not so bad, as if the email was spent, a response is to be expected. Or perhaps every person calling the location the spam is promoting. But that would be so unfair, the republicans with high school mentalities protest. The firm may not have known that spam was going to be used. They are just trying to run an honest operation, and the email is just advertising. If you don't like it, ignore it. There is no reason to make trouble for the poor employees at the front desk, who will just lose their jobs if the firm goes down. Think of the children.
So, we are left as sheep, hoping the shepherd will save us. But we have learned first the sheep, then the shepherd. Even so it would be so unfair to do anything that might infringe on the inalienable and self evident right to make money using any means necessary.
Efficiency is sort of the point, but without knowing what the researchers really did, there is no way of really knowing if they have a valid point. In any case, any solution is going to be more expensive and less efficient than oil. The problem is that oil is dirty, and oil is getting more expensive, and other technologies are not so good either.
For instance, oil is not getter cheaper, and the amount of externalized costs are growing. For instance, no matter what your view of the Iraq war is, one must admit that some portion of that 200 million dollars a day or so is spent to stabilize oil production. Compare that to the 20 million or so barrels per day the US uses. If the cost are 10% for oil, then that leads to $1 per barrel unfactored costs, perhaps a few cents a gallon refined.
We also have rechargeable batter powered cars. The efficiencies of these are also quite low, although they can be cleaner if the electricity generation is clean. However, it is likely that the amount of energy extracted is much less. An internal combustion engine might extract 25% of the power from gasoline, however, a battery might only store 30% of the power from the original oil used to generate the electricity, due to losses in the generation of the electricity, losses on the power line, and losses on charging. There may be some efficiency gains from generating the power at a central location rather than refining and transporting fuel. But, even so, teh loss of effeccincy is theoretically worth it for cleaner air and the possibility of generating electricity without oil.
Ethanol is the same issue. It might take more energy to produce, but if the energy comes from the proper sources, it might very well not matter. Cleaner air and reduced oil dependency could be worth it. Not to mention that ethanol can be made from a number of sources that are really just waste.
We really need to look at things in terms of renewable and not renewable, and not just at what is cheapest now. We also need to not ignore externalized costs, like protecting foriegn assets and medical care.
If this story is true, it really is no wonder that so many people get taken. Any law enforcement officer should be able to identify this as a con job or money laundering situation. If law enforcement cannot keep up with the ploys of the criminal industry, what hope does the private citizen have?
I also wonder about the laws that govern the banks. Yes they have to release money, but can they state the check has not really cleared? The regulation are there because, given a choice, the banks would like to keep the money for 30 days. I used to deposit checks from my dad, who lived 50 miles away, and have to wait two weeks to use the money.
OTOH, the bank did have to ask you for the money as they had no way of knowing if you were in on the scam.
It is a bummer though, and really a failure of law enforcement to provide good intelligence. Imagine that. If this was in the US I would say they were too busy going after the peaceful activist groups to have any time left to find scammers and terrorists.
The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.
You know Barney, this working with stone tools is so ice age. I mean, we are settled now. We have shoes and clothes. We are modern men.
I know what you mean Fred. We are no longer uncivilized. My family does not have to eat whatever happens to walk or grow nearby. I have a farm and domisticated animals. I can't be using my father tools. I need more!
And howdy. Instead of using wood and stone, why don't we go down to the walmart and by those new fangled bronze tools. They will let us plow the land so much better.
Yeah, let's rethink how we live. We need to move into te common era with bronze, and even those really expensive new iron tools. And I can't wait until that Jaquard Loom lets us have really fancy patterns in the woven cloth that will be developed any day now.
Which is simply to say mostly we do not rethink how we live. We master new materials, and the processes to create tools from those materials, and society just tends to naturally reform aroun the advantages, making our lives more confortable in the process. Mostly this has involved allowing us to stay in one place without a flea infestation.
The most annoying part of our civilization is the emergence of the useless marketing talk and the related jibberish.
Back in the day it was much simpler. When we saw a terminal that was logged in, we just set the first line in the login script to logout, and then log the person out.
The poor user would try to login several times, then go to support. It was a gentle way to remind people about security.
It seems to me that the Intel switch can mostly be explained by looking at the capabilities of the commodity market over the past 20 years. In 1985 Apple harnessed a set of extremely clever processors to create e computer powerful enough to use a GUI instead of CLI. MS and Intel retrofitted the GUI into a cheaper machine, but it took 10 years for the cheaper market to really catch up. Even then, there were high end machines, like those from SGI, that provided significant advantage to those that needed or wanted power. Fastfoward another 10 years. SGI is almost bankrupt. People can network commodity machines with *nix to create powerful composite computers. The RISC/CISC divide has become a fiction. Frequencies are so high we include eye candy for the purpose of wasting them. The only meaningful difference for most is efficiencies.
That said, the Intel decision is puzzling. Certainly there a fewer compelling reasons not to use commodity hardware. I know why Intel wants Apple. Apple will use the high end stuff that no one else wants. It won't necessarily forever demand x86 compatibility. Some hardware security might be an issue, but Apple is not putting excessive security into any of it's products. Just enough to meet the minimum requirements. And for people who buy Apples just because they work will likely turn to a *nix if Apple DRM becomes more onerous than installing a *nix. I can imagine certain content being linked to certain machines, as it done now, but, it is already being done, so why the bother. It might just be that Apple wants cheaper proccesors for the iPod line, and Intel has the stuff that will let the video iPod work.
The punishment part of laws do little to deter the problems. We punish people who rob and kill, yet the crime rate is little affected by the punishment. Crime rate is mostly affected by employment and policing to enforce expectations.
In business having a known set of expectations is even more important. Rational persons will want a known baseline so that everyone can compete from the same expectations. For example, builders have codes that must be followed. Without regulation, a builder might gain a competitive advantage by building, for example, a house that is not safe from a hurricane. Under your logic building that house should be allowed, and when the hurricane comes and the family of four dies, the corporation that holds the indemnification merely needs to pay off the lawsuit. If enough lawsuits occur, the firm will go bankrupt. Of course hundreds of people may have died, but that is better than limiting the choices we can make building a house.
In fact, at least in the US, the law is based on expectations, and punishments are based on violation of those expectations. One is expected not to steal. One is expected not to kill people. One is expected to have a papers to drive. We tend not to pull people in because they done someone wrong, punish them, and then figure out what wrong was done. We tend to arrest people for violating certain expectations and then decide an appropriate punishment.
Now, where it gets confusing is when specific expectations have not been established. So perhaps I pour unregulated chemicals onto my property and cause some harm to your property. Do I have to pay remuneration's, and perhaps a penalty. Even that is not punishment based, as normally if payment must be made it is because a reasonable person should have known better. Liquid flows, and the harm should have been forssen. As another example, a kid who wants to rob a liquor store for gamecube money, and shots the cashier in the process, probably never meant to kill the cashier. But the kid might still put to death because a reasonable person who brings a gun to a robbery should know that killing is a possibility.
CBEN at Rice University, had a similiar program directed to science teachers in the Houston area. It was a refresher course on physics and chemistry. It also explored the scope and uses of nanotechnology, predictably focusing on fullerenes developed at the university. It was nice because there was so much home grown knowledge on the subject.
The course also explored the possible environmental effects of nanotechnology, and the possible regulation that might help manage those effects. When dealing with one class of nanotech, like fullerenes, this is quite a broad and complex topic. When on introduces the everything that might be nanotech, it becomes nearly unmanageable.
Another project that has some popularity is the nanokids.
There is actually quite a bit from the course that can be used in any number of high school courses. And, since Nanotech is likely to tbe defining technology of the next generation, kids who are familiar with the concepts are going to be better prepared than those who are not.
In 2008, longhorn will be released and will not run firefox. The Longhorn GUI will be based on IE, meaning that there will be zero difference between finding a directory and typing in a website. Everything, be in on your computer, or across the world, will go through MSN. MS will offer free services to anyone can prove, through DRM, that are using IE, and decline those services to the rest of the world.
It will take six months for firefox to make the changes needed to work with Longhorn. In that time every Longhorn user will go back to IE, because there is no way to use longhorn without IE, the usage of Firefox will drop from 40% to 20%. And even though security will be terrible, because the user will not know if they are in a secure zone. Computer techs are free to install other browsers, but that will not help as the user will actually have to start the browser, rather than just using what is already on the desktop.
By the time MS is once again convicted to anti trust behavior in 2013, Firefox will be down to 5%, and MS will have had most Firefox developers sent to jail for treason against the holy capitalist deity. MS will have to donate Longhorn to every school in the country, which will hammer the final nail into the coffin of the non-MS rebellion.
In some sectors the protection has never been abandoned, and it is not always bad. For verticle market applications, in which one might sell a unit a month, protection is imperative. A firm that make $10,000 a month using an application will routinely balk at the $500 a month fee. OTOH, I stopped buying sim city because it would not let me load the game on my computer and play. it wanted the CD to verify i was the owner.
And praise the most holy one that will save us from the wasted hours of reading corporate blah blah. Fortunately the universe is bountiful and giveth us many other ways to waste out time.
There is no right to read. If I write something, there is no body in the universe that should force me to publish the writing. However, if I have a contract to write something and supply it to a certain entity, I then have the obligation to supply that writing in accordance to the contract.
In the end This is not realy abut the right to read, but property rights. If I legally buy a product, that is legally available(and by that I mean that is in not on a government list of contraband), then I should be able to use it any way unless it was stipulated prior to the purchase that such use was forbidden.
Certainly all that is idealized, and it is often necessary to put restrictions on certain property after the fact, but what we are talking about in this case it a book. I do not know of any law that says it is illegal to buy a book before the official release data. I know of no law that says it is illegal to talk about a book before the release date. There are contract terms that prevent these things, but i doubt the purchasers of this book signed any of those contracts. It is really the fault of the retail outlets that sold the books, and any consequences are theirs
If I cared about this lame corporate utterances, and had a copy of the book, i would have read it and posted a review. I am happy that the kids have something to read, and that they are reading, but at the end of the day this just proves that absolute power leads absolutely to evil.
Let's face it. Half of the interest of shows like Tranformers was the animation. This is less true for shows like Robotech, but still the interesting bit was the style or drawing.
Today technology allows us to start with live actors, some practical effects, and seamlessly meld in the animation. What we end up with is something that is not quite live action, and something that is not quite animated. To make matters worse, the animation is not hand drawn, so we end up with something that has a familiar name, and familiar looking characters, but not anything that is fully recognized.
The only reason these movies are made is to try to capatilize on what is left of the target markets childhood. These shows were good at a certain time, in a certain place, but can't really be made again. I forsee a bunch of 20 something people seeing this movie for the sake of nostalgia, and leaving feeling robbed or their childhood hopes and dreams. Just as us 30 somethings felt about scooby doo.
To be more direct, these movies are made to revive a franchise so that the character creators can get some money, and the studios don't have to come up with new ideas. The studios hope that parents who grew up with show will bring the kids. This wold not work with Falcon Crest and Knott's Landing, which, to be true to the original, would have to be rated NC-17.
The birth of the web and the internet was, of course, something that happened in the ivory towers of academia. And those of us that were fortunate enough to be there got the first taste, with mosiac and the like.
What Netscape did was to provide a more polished browser and a credible bussiness plan of what we would now call web based services. It was a very fast exploitation as the web had only been announced as available to everyone for a year. Netscape bussinesses to deliver to a consistent standard, as they do now with IE. In fact until MS bought a browser product and retargeted it, Netscape provided the base that all dot com live on, and those that are most succesful still tend to code to more widely available standards.
So, netscape allowed bussiness to be done on the web. Amazon, Ebay, and the rest got wall street excited. Nescape could not surivive as a browser or server maker with MS pratically giving it away, and I still don't know how Amazon is making it, as they seem to lost money on every order.
If you are wandering around town and pointing out drug dealers, that is not neccesarily a bad thing. But if you are wandering around town and saying, hey, look, there is where you can go and get unlicensed drugs, look, over there, and need unlicensed drugs, that may be a problem. In fact you might get a warning, and then arrested, and a jury of your peers might come to the conclusion that you were promoting an illigal activity.
So it really comes down to how illigal is the referenced site. I mean if the site was a list of hit men, and the link pointing to it said go here to find someone to off your spouse, that would be something most might want removed. The only reason we are having this conversation is that there is difference of opinion of how much control a entity should have over thier copyrighted material. it is really not primarily about the link.
I am not sure what kind of boot times people get, but on my TiPB, with about 512, I am up from the apple logo to the login screen is around 20 seconds. To logon might take another 20 seconds. To open up several applications, another minute or so. This is expected as Apple has always been adamant abut quick bootup. For a newer machine to do it in a quarter the time, I presume without so many network services, is to be expected.
To boot up into XP on my latest WinTel kit takes very little time, and XP runs lightening quick on that box, expectedly faster than my one or two year old Macs, though not as expectedly fast as my 5 year old Mac. OTOH, my three year old WinTel laptop with XP is such a dog it is painful to use.
Which is to say there is no surprise that Apple shipped a fast computer, and no surprise that the latest machine can boot faster than my older machines. I expect MacOS will run faster, as Intel has been ramping up the cycles, damn the electricity, while IBM has not. The concern is, as always, no that Intel is in the picture, is there going to be a philosophy change that makes the computer less consumer friendly. Like more DRM, or more serial numbers, or b0rked math.
I mean, fundementally, the important thing to me is that the computer wakes up in 5 seconds, not that it takes a minute to get to the desktop. And that in five years I still have a usable computer with the latest OS.
USB memory sticks? Probably usable by 95%+ at least. Most are compatible alternative (well the ones using standard mass storage drivers anyway), but there are price issues. The cheapest ones are an order of magnitude or two more expensive than floppys/CDs/DVDs.
USB drives are replacing the floppies in one of the last places that floppies are widely used: public education. On a per MB basis, floppies are already more expensive than USB drives. It is just that most do not need the capacity. These drives will likely replace the floppy as soon as the cost is below $.10 a MB, or a 128MB for around $10. Nearly every middle and high school kid has a phone, so a USB drive attached to the phone will not be a big addition.
Removable media cannot be dead because we do not yet have ultrapersonal portable computers. I see geeks carrying usb drives now in the same way we were carrying floppies when i was a kid.
The floppy has been going away for 10 years. As soon as all my computer had HD, I only used it for sneaker net and backup. Then, when I got my Zip, and then MO drive, I was only using it for sneaker net. Then I could easily email anything, so the sneaker net died. So I have not regularly used a floppy in over five years, although I do have a drive that will read 3.5" floppies and other higher density disks, which I used for backkups until I started backing up onto a server and burning floppies. I remember how annoyed I was that the computer did not come with a floopy. That annoyance lasted for about a month.
However, I do not see the floppy leaving anytime soon. They are still widely used by students who do not have a primary machine and want to keep a physical artifact, or people with unreliable net connection who still do sneaker net. Many cannot yet afford a usb drive, or it is too easily lost or stolen, so the expense of $5 for 14 MB of storage, which is much more than they need, is more reasonable than $20 for 128MB of storage. I think that as this generaion grows up on the internet, and if Yahoo and Google provides drag and drop online storage, then we will see even public computers go floppy free.It may even be that usb drives supplant the 3.5" floppy in the same way the 3.5" floppy supplanted the 5.25" floppy. It can't be that long until 128MB is sold for $6.99 at walmart.
I know it is in vogue to blame the parents, and i know that parents can be better at educating their children. My parents educated me in all the ways you mention, and may more. It often was not just exposure to culture, but actual teaching as my parents were teachers.
But when you look at the public education system in the US, it is about educating everyone. That is, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the general diffusion of basic knowledge to all, rich or poor. This the fundamental to the fantasy that provides stability in the US, that anyone can grow up to be successful.
If we are going to educate everyone we cannot not educate because the parents are idiots. if we are going to educate everyone we cannot not educate because the parent never taught the kid to play with blocks. If we are going to educate everyone, then we cannot not educate because the kid never learned to sit still for an hour.
So, if public education is here to stay in the US, and it provides for the common good, i.e. diffusion of knowledge, social experience, cultural diversity, then it can't be for the privileged few.
Furthermore, we cannot expect the parents to ask for a better education, because the average person has no idea why education exists. For many parent it is simply day care while they are at work. The impact of education on society is understood only by those have the abstract reasoning skills to understand wealth development as opposed to making money, and believe that anyone can have good ideas, no matter who their parents are. Those that do understand either make the decision to provide education everywhere, so that everyone can potenitally be equally valuable to society, or regulate it, so that the masses can be controlled.
In the US we have traditionally had a hybrid. Some say the first us of 'at risk' was slaves at risk of learning to read. In Texas it took years for the slaves to learn they free, partly due to the fact that they could not read. Today funding for public education is skewed, many would argue natrually, to the upper middle and upper class.
So to end, there are parents who do care about education. These parents fight in court to end segregation, win equal funding, and protect thier children from bigoted teachers. But, as mentioned, we cannot just educate those children.
First, I think anyone that defines themselves or anything else by a system of economics has real problems. It really is equivalent to worshiping the art of exchange. I don't think that these abstract concepts really exist, so it can't be fault of the concept. The only thing that really exist in a decision making capacity are people. They may base decision on a percieved philosophy, but that is about it.
What I do believe that any power authority will often do anything to maintain and expand that power. That US pesence in the middle east is so popular because it involves an expansion of power of so many groups. Christians, republicans, energy industry, maybe even the people of iraq who have been powerless for a long time. OTOH, the marginal benifit of doing anything in china is small. Not only have they have proven they can kick the US ass, but the US is increasingly becoming depenedent on them to loan us money so we can continue to buy their stuff(look up the percentage of public debt that the people owned in 1970, and the percentage of debt we own now).
So back to the topic of censorship. The countries and people that overuse censorship want to maintain thier power. If the people don't know, they can't do anything. However, the counties that allow a more free communication tend to be better a creating wealth. Not money, no income, but those creatins and inventions that will be the legacy we leave to out children. On reason for this is that the people who create this wealth tend to prefer to live a land where they are able to learn and grow.
So, many of the issues are not the economic system, but the everyday human greed. I want stuff. You have stuff. So I will kill you for your Nikes, or rob a liquer store so I can take my girl to McDonalds.
I don't know. Did the people here read their textbooks? Would you more likely read short articles on a computer? How many of y'all play video games? Is running through a lesson on a computer, at least sometimes, as good as having a teacher up there talking at you.
The teacher is important, to prepare the lessons that the student will then work through. The learning goes on when the students work through the situations together, with minimal teacher input. The biggest problem is getting the students to work. Too often they just want to write words on a piece of paper, and then get credit for the fact they can write simple words.
So, everything in school, or in fact anywhere, should be done to meet objectives. Much money is spent on textbooks. And not only books, but adminstration of books. I think it can easily cost a few percent of a school budget. This is a questionable cost when one realizes that more lesson plans are experiential, and not just reading pages from a single book. It is unclear how that money meets objectives.
So we need to have more experiences in school, which included current technology, and teachers that can used those technologies, and students that are motivated to learn. As long as it all meets the objectives.
I know some people who were very excited about getting the Itanium. Mostly in CS academic circles. It is a fast processor that could do some things very well.
But, to recoin a phrase, if you live the MS Windows, then you die by the MS Windows. It is the understanding of the poeple, not me, not those on/., that the itanium was not needed for windows desktop, and only sometimes for server. Perhaps not true, but perhaps MS or the OEM did not push this technology enough. So the Itanium was left to compete in the sever market with little marketing, and failed there.
I think people who liked Intel bougt the Itanium. Everyone else compared it against other high performance 64 bit chips and choose the best chip for thier application, which apparently was not the Itanium.
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So the first thing i look at now is how much memory can I add. 2 GB has been my standard for non-laptops for a while. Most laptops can be had with 512 MB installed, and then drop in another gig later.
Really looking at this is interesting. I have one Compaq portable that has 256MB running XP. It never uses more than 50% of the processor, and already runs hot. I want to drop in another 256, but am told it will just run hotter. Another machine that looks nice, but was engineered to actually take advantage of the otherwise impressive hardware.
However, the though of carrying videos would justify the size and cost. I would be good if they had a slightly bigger widescreen, but as people have been mentioning one can play it on a tv.
So, what is left. Fighting back. Having a bunch of people loading the web site promoted by the spam, which is not so bad, as if the email was spent, a response is to be expected. Or perhaps every person calling the location the spam is promoting. But that would be so unfair, the republicans with high school mentalities protest. The firm may not have known that spam was going to be used. They are just trying to run an honest operation, and the email is just advertising. If you don't like it, ignore it. There is no reason to make trouble for the poor employees at the front desk, who will just lose their jobs if the firm goes down. Think of the children.
So, we are left as sheep, hoping the shepherd will save us. But we have learned first the sheep, then the shepherd. Even so it would be so unfair to do anything that might infringe on the inalienable and self evident right to make money using any means necessary.
For instance, oil is not getter cheaper, and the amount of externalized costs are growing. For instance, no matter what your view of the Iraq war is, one must admit that some portion of that 200 million dollars a day or so is spent to stabilize oil production. Compare that to the 20 million or so barrels per day the US uses. If the cost are 10% for oil, then that leads to $1 per barrel unfactored costs, perhaps a few cents a gallon refined.
We also have rechargeable batter powered cars. The efficiencies of these are also quite low, although they can be cleaner if the electricity generation is clean. However, it is likely that the amount of energy extracted is much less. An internal combustion engine might extract 25% of the power from gasoline, however, a battery might only store 30% of the power from the original oil used to generate the electricity, due to losses in the generation of the electricity, losses on the power line, and losses on charging. There may be some efficiency gains from generating the power at a central location rather than refining and transporting fuel. But, even so, teh loss of effeccincy is theoretically worth it for cleaner air and the possibility of generating electricity without oil.
Ethanol is the same issue. It might take more energy to produce, but if the energy comes from the proper sources, it might very well not matter. Cleaner air and reduced oil dependency could be worth it. Not to mention that ethanol can be made from a number of sources that are really just waste.
We really need to look at things in terms of renewable and not renewable, and not just at what is cheapest now. We also need to not ignore externalized costs, like protecting foriegn assets and medical care.
I also wonder about the laws that govern the banks. Yes they have to release money, but can they state the check has not really cleared? The regulation are there because, given a choice, the banks would like to keep the money for 30 days. I used to deposit checks from my dad, who lived 50 miles away, and have to wait two weeks to use the money.
OTOH, the bank did have to ask you for the money as they had no way of knowing if you were in on the scam.
It is a bummer though, and really a failure of law enforcement to provide good intelligence. Imagine that. If this was in the US I would say they were too busy going after the peaceful activist groups to have any time left to find scammers and terrorists.
You know Barney, this working with stone tools is so ice age. I mean, we are settled now. We have shoes and clothes. We are modern men.
I know what you mean Fred. We are no longer uncivilized. My family does not have to eat whatever happens to walk or grow nearby. I have a farm and domisticated animals. I can't be using my father tools. I need more!
And howdy. Instead of using wood and stone, why don't we go down to the walmart and by those new fangled bronze tools. They will let us plow the land so much better.
Yeah, let's rethink how we live. We need to move into te common era with bronze, and even those really expensive new iron tools. And I can't wait until that Jaquard Loom lets us have really fancy patterns in the woven cloth that will be developed any day now.
Which is simply to say mostly we do not rethink how we live. We master new materials, and the processes to create tools from those materials, and society just tends to naturally reform aroun the advantages, making our lives more confortable in the process. Mostly this has involved allowing us to stay in one place without a flea infestation.
The most annoying part of our civilization is the emergence of the useless marketing talk and the related jibberish.
The poor user would try to login several times, then go to support. It was a gentle way to remind people about security.
That said, the Intel decision is puzzling. Certainly there a fewer compelling reasons not to use commodity hardware. I know why Intel wants Apple. Apple will use the high end stuff that no one else wants. It won't necessarily forever demand x86 compatibility. Some hardware security might be an issue, but Apple is not putting excessive security into any of it's products. Just enough to meet the minimum requirements. And for people who buy Apples just because they work will likely turn to a *nix if Apple DRM becomes more onerous than installing a *nix. I can imagine certain content being linked to certain machines, as it done now, but, it is already being done, so why the bother. It might just be that Apple wants cheaper proccesors for the iPod line, and Intel has the stuff that will let the video iPod work.
In business having a known set of expectations is even more important. Rational persons will want a known baseline so that everyone can compete from the same expectations. For example, builders have codes that must be followed. Without regulation, a builder might gain a competitive advantage by building, for example, a house that is not safe from a hurricane. Under your logic building that house should be allowed, and when the hurricane comes and the family of four dies, the corporation that holds the indemnification merely needs to pay off the lawsuit. If enough lawsuits occur, the firm will go bankrupt. Of course hundreds of people may have died, but that is better than limiting the choices we can make building a house.
In fact, at least in the US, the law is based on expectations, and punishments are based on violation of those expectations. One is expected not to steal. One is expected not to kill people. One is expected to have a papers to drive. We tend not to pull people in because they done someone wrong, punish them, and then figure out what wrong was done. We tend to arrest people for violating certain expectations and then decide an appropriate punishment.
Now, where it gets confusing is when specific expectations have not been established. So perhaps I pour unregulated chemicals onto my property and cause some harm to your property. Do I have to pay remuneration's, and perhaps a penalty. Even that is not punishment based, as normally if payment must be made it is because a reasonable person should have known better. Liquid flows, and the harm should have been forssen. As another example, a kid who wants to rob a liquor store for gamecube money, and shots the cashier in the process, probably never meant to kill the cashier. But the kid might still put to death because a reasonable person who brings a gun to a robbery should know that killing is a possibility.
The course also explored the possible environmental effects of nanotechnology, and the possible regulation that might help manage those effects. When dealing with one class of nanotech, like fullerenes, this is quite a broad and complex topic. When on introduces the everything that might be nanotech, it becomes nearly unmanageable.
Another project that has some popularity is the nanokids.
There is actually quite a bit from the course that can be used in any number of high school courses. And, since Nanotech is likely to tbe defining technology of the next generation, kids who are familiar with the concepts are going to be better prepared than those who are not.
It will take six months for firefox to make the changes needed to work with Longhorn. In that time every Longhorn user will go back to IE, because there is no way to use longhorn without IE, the usage of Firefox will drop from 40% to 20%. And even though security will be terrible, because the user will not know if they are in a secure zone. Computer techs are free to install other browsers, but that will not help as the user will actually have to start the browser, rather than just using what is already on the desktop.
By the time MS is once again convicted to anti trust behavior in 2013, Firefox will be down to 5%, and MS will have had most Firefox developers sent to jail for treason against the holy capitalist deity. MS will have to donate Longhorn to every school in the country, which will hammer the final nail into the coffin of the non-MS rebellion.
In some sectors the protection has never been abandoned, and it is not always bad. For verticle market applications, in which one might sell a unit a month, protection is imperative. A firm that make $10,000 a month using an application will routinely balk at the $500 a month fee. OTOH, I stopped buying sim city because it would not let me load the game on my computer and play. it wanted the CD to verify i was the owner.
And praise the most holy one that will save us from the wasted hours of reading corporate blah blah. Fortunately the universe is bountiful and giveth us many other ways to waste out time.
In the end This is not realy abut the right to read, but property rights. If I legally buy a product, that is legally available(and by that I mean that is in not on a government list of contraband), then I should be able to use it any way unless it was stipulated prior to the purchase that such use was forbidden.
Certainly all that is idealized, and it is often necessary to put restrictions on certain property after the fact, but what we are talking about in this case it a book. I do not know of any law that says it is illegal to buy a book before the official release data. I know of no law that says it is illegal to talk about a book before the release date. There are contract terms that prevent these things, but i doubt the purchasers of this book signed any of those contracts. It is really the fault of the retail outlets that sold the books, and any consequences are theirs
If I cared about this lame corporate utterances, and had a copy of the book, i would have read it and posted a review. I am happy that the kids have something to read, and that they are reading, but at the end of the day this just proves that absolute power leads absolutely to evil.
Today technology allows us to start with live actors, some practical effects, and seamlessly meld in the animation. What we end up with is something that is not quite live action, and something that is not quite animated. To make matters worse, the animation is not hand drawn, so we end up with something that has a familiar name, and familiar looking characters, but not anything that is fully recognized.
To be more direct, these movies are made to revive a franchise so that the character creators can get some money, and the studios don't have to come up with new ideas. The studios hope that parents who grew up with show will bring the kids. This wold not work with Falcon Crest and Knott's Landing, which, to be true to the original, would have to be rated NC-17.
What Netscape did was to provide a more polished browser and a credible bussiness plan of what we would now call web based services. It was a very fast exploitation as the web had only been announced as available to everyone for a year. Netscape bussinesses to deliver to a consistent standard, as they do now with IE. In fact until MS bought a browser product and retargeted it, Netscape provided the base that all dot com live on, and those that are most succesful still tend to code to more widely available standards.
So, netscape allowed bussiness to be done on the web. Amazon, Ebay, and the rest got wall street excited. Nescape could not surivive as a browser or server maker with MS pratically giving it away, and I still don't know how Amazon is making it, as they seem to lost money on every order.
So it really comes down to how illigal is the referenced site. I mean if the site was a list of hit men, and the link pointing to it said go here to find someone to off your spouse, that would be something most might want removed. The only reason we are having this conversation is that there is difference of opinion of how much control a entity should have over thier copyrighted material. it is really not primarily about the link.
To boot up into XP on my latest WinTel kit takes very little time, and XP runs lightening quick on that box, expectedly faster than my one or two year old Macs, though not as expectedly fast as my 5 year old Mac. OTOH, my three year old WinTel laptop with XP is such a dog it is painful to use.
Which is to say there is no surprise that Apple shipped a fast computer, and no surprise that the latest machine can boot faster than my older machines. I expect MacOS will run faster, as Intel has been ramping up the cycles, damn the electricity, while IBM has not. The concern is, as always, no that Intel is in the picture, is there going to be a philosophy change that makes the computer less consumer friendly. Like more DRM, or more serial numbers, or b0rked math.
I mean, fundementally, the important thing to me is that the computer wakes up in 5 seconds, not that it takes a minute to get to the desktop. And that in five years I still have a usable computer with the latest OS.
USB drives are replacing the floppies in one of the last places that floppies are widely used: public education. On a per MB basis, floppies are already more expensive than USB drives. It is just that most do not need the capacity. These drives will likely replace the floppy as soon as the cost is below $.10 a MB, or a 128MB for around $10. Nearly every middle and high school kid has a phone, so a USB drive attached to the phone will not be a big addition.
Removable media cannot be dead because we do not yet have ultrapersonal portable computers. I see geeks carrying usb drives now in the same way we were carrying floppies when i was a kid.
However, I do not see the floppy leaving anytime soon. They are still widely used by students who do not have a primary machine and want to keep a physical artifact, or people with unreliable net connection who still do sneaker net. Many cannot yet afford a usb drive, or it is too easily lost or stolen, so the expense of $5 for 14 MB of storage, which is much more than they need, is more reasonable than $20 for 128MB of storage. I think that as this generaion grows up on the internet, and if Yahoo and Google provides drag and drop online storage, then we will see even public computers go floppy free.It may even be that usb drives supplant the 3.5" floppy in the same way the 3.5" floppy supplanted the 5.25" floppy. It can't be that long until 128MB is sold for $6.99 at walmart.
But when you look at the public education system in the US, it is about educating everyone. That is, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the general diffusion of basic knowledge to all, rich or poor. This the fundamental to the fantasy that provides stability in the US, that anyone can grow up to be successful.
If we are going to educate everyone we cannot not educate because the parents are idiots. if we are going to educate everyone we cannot not educate because the parent never taught the kid to play with blocks. If we are going to educate everyone, then we cannot not educate because the kid never learned to sit still for an hour.
So, if public education is here to stay in the US, and it provides for the common good, i.e. diffusion of knowledge, social experience, cultural diversity, then it can't be for the privileged few.
Furthermore, we cannot expect the parents to ask for a better education, because the average person has no idea why education exists. For many parent it is simply day care while they are at work. The impact of education on society is understood only by those have the abstract reasoning skills to understand wealth development as opposed to making money, and believe that anyone can have good ideas, no matter who their parents are. Those that do understand either make the decision to provide education everywhere, so that everyone can potenitally be equally valuable to society, or regulate it, so that the masses can be controlled.
In the US we have traditionally had a hybrid. Some say the first us of 'at risk' was slaves at risk of learning to read. In Texas it took years for the slaves to learn they free, partly due to the fact that they could not read. Today funding for public education is skewed, many would argue natrually, to the upper middle and upper class.
So to end, there are parents who do care about education. These parents fight in court to end segregation, win equal funding, and protect thier children from bigoted teachers. But, as mentioned, we cannot just educate those children.
What I do believe that any power authority will often do anything to maintain and expand that power. That US pesence in the middle east is so popular because it involves an expansion of power of so many groups. Christians, republicans, energy industry, maybe even the people of iraq who have been powerless for a long time. OTOH, the marginal benifit of doing anything in china is small. Not only have they have proven they can kick the US ass, but the US is increasingly becoming depenedent on them to loan us money so we can continue to buy their stuff(look up the percentage of public debt that the people owned in 1970, and the percentage of debt we own now).
So back to the topic of censorship. The countries and people that overuse censorship want to maintain thier power. If the people don't know, they can't do anything. However, the counties that allow a more free communication tend to be better a creating wealth. Not money, no income, but those creatins and inventions that will be the legacy we leave to out children. On reason for this is that the people who create this wealth tend to prefer to live a land where they are able to learn and grow.
So, many of the issues are not the economic system, but the everyday human greed. I want stuff. You have stuff. So I will kill you for your Nikes, or rob a liquer store so I can take my girl to McDonalds.
The teacher is important, to prepare the lessons that the student will then work through. The learning goes on when the students work through the situations together, with minimal teacher input. The biggest problem is getting the students to work. Too often they just want to write words on a piece of paper, and then get credit for the fact they can write simple words.
So, everything in school, or in fact anywhere, should be done to meet objectives. Much money is spent on textbooks. And not only books, but adminstration of books. I think it can easily cost a few percent of a school budget. This is a questionable cost when one realizes that more lesson plans are experiential, and not just reading pages from a single book. It is unclear how that money meets objectives.
So we need to have more experiences in school, which included current technology, and teachers that can used those technologies, and students that are motivated to learn. As long as it all meets the objectives.
But, to recoin a phrase, if you live the MS Windows, then you die by the MS Windows. It is the understanding of the poeple, not me, not those on /., that the itanium was not needed for windows desktop, and only sometimes for server. Perhaps not true, but perhaps MS or the OEM did not push this technology enough. So the Itanium was left to compete in the sever market with little marketing, and failed there.
I think people who liked Intel bougt the Itanium. Everyone else compared it against other high performance 64 bit chips and choose the best chip for thier application, which apparently was not the Itanium.