At many offices, there simply is no choice. IE is that standard, and users either do not have the ability, or the knowledte, to install Firefox. And since IE is supported at the office, IE is installed at home, as it would be silly to use an unsupported program. if it was so great, the office would use it.
From the article it is hard to tell what they are taking about. IBM used an atomic tunnelling microscope, a reltively complicated piece of equipment that relies on the fact that quantum particles can tunnel through a potential, to move that atoms. The ATM can either be used to create a atomic scale picture of a surface, or move atoms. An atomic force microscope is simply a physical hammer that gently taps a surface and through the change in deflection creates an image. The tip on an ATM is currently so fragile I don't think it could be used to move atoms. The lifetime of a tip is pretty short just becuase of wear, and their is not way to reliable create good tips.
So we must assume they are talking about an ATM, which a largish and complicated peice of equipment. It requires a piezoelctric device to move the tip to the proper placed on the substrate. For years, such devics kept cell phones large. The ATM requires a highly senstive feeback loop to keep the current constant. And is still requires a very delicae tip that can be easily damaged. Durable tips are probably years away and involve carbon nanotubes. Tips that have a lifetime more than a few months are probably even longer away.
It is a neat idea and probably works well in the laboratory on a vibration cancelation table. How would it work on a portable in the train or in the car? Does anyone have any real details on the technology?
I want devices that work. So buy a quality OS and quality devices. I suspect that when the market is willing to pay for Linux to work with devices, they will
Windows has never been the poster child for device drivers. i often remind people of how hard it was to get am external drive running on Windows 3.11, and how easy it was to do the same on System 7. I recently had a Windows 98 box lose the driver setting, and it took a couple days of manually installing drivers to get the proper configuration back. The computer would not autodetect anything.
What has changed is not the quality of the OS, but the willingness of device manufacturers to design in the MS hacks into the device so that it will run with MS Windows. This is very different from using existing standards that allow things like autodocking an external device. Sure all the capabilities may not be there, but at least the device can be used.
And this should be what saves Linux. Linux should be able to use those standards to get basic functionality out of all complient devices. When the market is large enough, device drivers can be written to add functionality. And we should not buy non complient devices just to save a few dollars.
We can even go back further, when the educational system was created to produce a thoughtful electorate. In those days, you were pretty much trained for a particular job by working in that job as you were growing up. The job public education system was to create a citizenry that could support democracy.
This purpose is not obsolete. It is just that some people prefer a stupid electorate, and hate anything that tends to create an electorate generally capable of divergent thought. Our basic classes, in reading, writing, social studies, and math, does tend to create such a population. Most of the population can read and write, and know something of US history, and knows some basic math. Many are not capable of logic, which is a distressing fact, but there is little we can do about this without significant additional resources.
What we are seeing is funding for vocational education drying up. What we are seeing is funding for teachers that can match students to meaningful work drying up. What we are seeing is unfunded mandates from Washington forcing the school to spend millions of dollars on test, rather than use that money to provide students with meaningful education experiences. What we are seeing is MS itself creating byzantine licensing terms that makes it difficult for schools to accept donated computers, and forces those schools to pay for the OEM license and site license for the same machine, thus reducing the technological resources we can provide out kids.
In testing, on the job, and in life in general, there is one simple rule. One has objectives and basis judgments on those objectives. We do not penalize a kid for not knowing how to PDE in high school, as that is not an objective. The CEOs of major corporation will still get paid when they cause a company to go bankrupt, as their job is manage the best they can, and not to insure perpetual solvency.
Likewise, school are supposed to provide meaningful educational experiences that will provide the safest possible space for the child to develop and learn. If, like so many of the whines on/., one chooses not learn, or is offended that the US might want you to learn something for the simple sake of becoming a better and more productive citizen of this great country, then there is little that a school can do. The country needs people to clean up the streets and clean up asbestos and the like. And it is people like this that make the schools so bad because rather than taking advantage of the opportunities, these children tend to disrupt the classroom and then blame the teachers for not having the ability to control them, when these kids know good and well it is illegal for the teacher to beat their asses into a bloody pulp, which is really what many of these kids seem to want.
So, if you want less testing, vote for an intelligent president that did not skirt his military duty by barely passing a single test. If you want more job training, vote for local officials that will reinstitute vocational and career education. If you want the kids to have technology, get the schools to go back to Apple or start on Linux. There are less apps to run, but the important thing is not to have the kids play games or put widgets on screen, but to have the ability to explore the technology from a young age. My first computer experience was a teletype in middle school. Today I would not get that experience because everyone would say it was too antiquated to do any good, and it would not teach me the skills I needed in the workplace
The problem with this argument, and what so many people miss, even the Harvard president, is that in all psychology, even psycobable, there is a center and a spread. The center, if the distribution is normal, is where the most people are and everyone else is else is spaced on either side, with a characteristic spread. The means that many people in a group may want social interaction, but there are also many people on the edges that do want it all, or desperately need it. Just because the center may in fact be located at different places for different groups does not mean there are no qualified persons from any particular group. And in a cooperative environment we cannot ignore anyone.
Furthermore, just because IT is not in general social does not mean it cannot, or even should not, be social. It is true that the current club wants their traditional entitlements, and a social programming circle may mean the unqualified members of the current club will be replaced by more qualified personnel, but that is the chance we take. Programming is much less isolating activity than it was even 10 years ago. People use common libraries that are seldom customized. People use common GUIs that are seldom customized, and we are much more focused on shared libraries. All these are social activities, and the only thing keeping it asocial are the losers afraid of having to look for another job.
Let me tell you a story from the time of jefferson. There existed a black gentlemen who was really good in math and spatial reasoning. This gentleman was Benjamin Banneker. He helped design Washington DC. Up until the time that Jefferson met Banneker, it is said that Jefferson believed the hype that white men were the only men capable to advanced thought. Banneker was the counter example, and forced Jefferson to think hard about his beliefs. The rest, as they say, is history.
So what you are spouting is not honesty, but polemics. It is probably true that by certain measures women are better at social abstract things, while men are better at the building things. But claiming that the within the much smaller population individuals that we need in IT and science and engineering, and I mean both men and women because the majority of the people are not qualified for these activities, is suggesting that a relatively small sub population can be characterized solely by the central tendency of the entire group, which is just wrong. Such an assertion is merely an effort to propagate the traditional entitlement.
The issue is not really manipulating variable to solve for the desired quantity, but rather developing an elegant process to allow a well trained individual to derive the unit independently. What we are trying to do is not have a small group of people copy the artifact, and then make copies of the copy for everyone else to use as a standard. the copying introduces uncertainty. Alllowing everyone to create an original solves that problem.
Secondly, there is really only one quantity that we take as certain: the speed of light in a vacuum. It is defined as a certain exact number. The meter, the second, the Lunin, and to some degree the ampere, are known and reproducible units because they are defined in terms of light, and the process of deriving them is a simple matter of counting collisions. The kelvin is reltively well defined because it using a unique physical quantity.
But the mass, and by extension the mole and really the ampere, is basically a measured by a big hunk of metal, and we hope that hunk is not shedding or gaining atoms. 12/1000 of the mass of that hunk of carbon is a mole.
So, we are not going to convert mass to energy to measure mass. With an AFM we might one day count atoms of a certain substance and know that is a gram. For instance a carbon nanotube with 5018333333333333333333 or a a monolayer of gold with 305685279188... atoms. Of course you would have to purify your sample to make sure all the atoms have the same number of nuetrons. Likewise, we may one day have an STM that move the correct number of atoms onto a substrate.
In siencefiction times, we may one day use a matter/energy translator to convert a certain amount of energy to mass standard. However, you then have that pesky 1 part in 10^-15 uncertainty in planks constant, which means that it is hard to design an experiment that has less uncertainty. Planks constant is among those about which we are the least certain(the gavitational constant is the only one that is really worse).
Most people who see for the first time 10 years after B5 started are suitably unimpressed. It is not surprising. B5 does not have a lot of staying power. The writing is only marginal. The best characters were the supporting characters, like Ivanova and Molari, but even they got a bit bogged down.
However, it is an historiacally important show. It broke the SciFi TV standard of using models, and instead went to CGI. It did what few shows have ever done and tried to get the physics right. For instance, the space vehicles are technicaly possible, and do not run thier engines all the time. The alliens have interesting cultures that are a mix of human cultures and not just a tranplant. For those of us in 1994, it was like nothing we had ever seen.
In the end it is like I Love Lucy or All in The Family, or, even to a lesser extent, Dynasty. Not all that interesting from todays standards, but technically and thematically groundbreaking for thier time.
the problem is that religion tends to disengage cause and effect, destroys the concept of rational thought, and create useless factions in what should be one human family.
It is true that people who want to rape pillage and kill will tend to do so, and religion only provides the excuse, but it is a powerful excuse. Raping heathens that are going are dammed anyone is nearly as bad as raping women from your own religion. Killing people who are not the direct decendents of G-d to save the direct decendents of G-d is surely not a bad thing. Denigrating half of the population is perfectly reasonable when you have book that says it is the natural order of things.
From a rational humanist point of view, all these things are bad. Even though they are sometimes justfied, the responsibility for the justification is on the individual, not diluted into some large group with a common mass insanity. The fact is that most people will not commit the horrible act, but that does not mean they do not approve, at least tacitly. Most would not kill a million people, but many say the tsunami was devine retribution. Most would not say the 9/11 attacks were divine retributions, but we have seen muslims and christians come together in agreement on this, as some muslims use this as the excuse, and Falwell seems as rich as ever.
So until i see chritians in the street protesting against Bush's stance on the death penalty(it is the providence of the lord to judge and kill, not humans), or his hypocrisy in prayer(from the text:
[ "And when you pray, you are not to be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, in order to be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you. "And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition, as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need, before you ask Him. "Pray, then, in this way: 'Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name...'" (Matthew 6:5-9)]
i will continue to blame the religion itself as a structural impediment to an enlightened world that does not go about opressing people just because some old book said it is ok to so do.
None of this stupid OEM versus retail pack versus upgrade versus full bullshit stuff to keep up with.
Full rights to install Mac OS X on 5 machines for $200. Full package. Easy, easy activation and updates.
No activiation codes to look up, no gestapo maniacs that want to see my papers. Just an honest and reasonable transaction, with an honest and generally sane company.
Why I no longer buy simcity, or the sims. Have to have a CD to run it, and codes to install. That bullshit might fly on the braindead PC side, but over hear we want value for out money, not wasted time
Remeber, MS is only a value if your time is worth nothing!
The context is more subtle than that. In terms of research, there is some need to have some level of confidence that your base information is reasonable. In classic research, at least the more sophisticated levels, this was accomplished by using respected bound indexes that collated peer reviewed journals. On the a more mundane level, this involves going to the popular rags, like Time and Newsweek and People, or, as as a best case, the major dailies like the New York Times, Washington Post, and hoping that their budget and exposure maximized the likelihood of reasonable information.
The problem with blogs is that same problem with spam. The normal economic forces and rules of transparency do not apply. There is no way of knowing the quality level, or if that quality will be consistent. From the viewpoint of advancing human knowledge, while blogs have the possibility of releasing us from the stranglehold of conventions, it also might plunge us into intellectual chaos. The reality is that every person cannot be expected to evaluate every piece of writing for reasonableness and accuracy. That is why we have peer reviewed journals. That is why reasonable writing has a economic value.
So, there is no reason to believe that a net search on a subject is of any use. If 10 blogs seem to have one consensus opinion, and 5 blogs have another, does that mean that the majority wins? If one particular blog seems to have a logical argument that proves a case, does that mean the case is proven, or has the reader missed a logical error or a mistake in assumptions. If other bloggers reads the logical case, and publishes hundreds of derivatives, and one blogger catches the error in the argument, does that mean the case is strengthened by the agreement, or destroyed by the one dissenter? Is the dissenter going to be ranked high enough to actually be seen? Where is the process that insures quality?
Blogging has value. If nothing else it has gotten people writing, and the best way to learn how to write is just to write. It will probably have some formal value as well as the rules of engagement evolve. But the fact is that librarians are trained to get reasonable information. The average person does not know how to do this. Even though I have been doing informal research for 20 years, I still do not do research as well as a librarian. A mistake can meant that unreasonable information is disseminated. Probably many bloggers are trying to disseminate good information, and the problem is that they do not know how to make sure the information is good. The bloggers that are just interested in polemics, like the classic Fox News example, are not even at issue.
Bloggers that see themselves as saviors of intellectual freedom do not understand the issues. We are not talking about the politics of today, and getting ones message of dissent of agreement out on the net. We are talking about the advancement of human knowledge, and the refinement of the processes to make sure that knowledge is reasonable. Bloggers will be a part of the a process, but the process itself does not need a savior.
We should have certain charactistics that can be used to define legitimate software, and point towards 'malware'. This would align well with the current situation in the US in which spam is possible anything that does not follow certain rules. There are things that follow those rules that still might be spam, but at the very least we have a known baseline, which is, at legally, really critical.
So here is my proposal for legitimate software. Legitimate software will request the users permission to install. Legitimate software will have a simple screen, with information provided in large type, about it's functionality. Practically this list should be kept short, to about 4 or 5 items, like personal information, connected to servers, and changing configurations. The laguage will be standardized. If the user accepts this function, the program will then install the applicaiton as well as a removal application. The details of the removal apllications will also have to negotiated, but it must remove and registry or library keys, code, and data sets. The program must inform that the uninstaller is available, and how to use it.
Now, some applications that follow these rules might be malware, and some applications that don't follow these rules may not be, but at least there would be a reasonable level of expectation. Legally, companies that do not provide reasonable disclosure and build in removal tools would no longer be able to claim that the label of malware is actionable.
which is the difference between people who know history, and people who repeat what any random fool says.
IBM created the PC, and there were no standards because there was no standard PC, only many different machines that ran off microprocessors. IBM would not open it's specifications because it knew that such a thing would cost profit. Eventually Compaq reversed engineered the beast, won court cases, and started the creation of the modern PC standard. People who could not afford IBM would buy compaq, and the cheap OS ripoff created by MS. Byte magazine, for instance, lived well in this world of many options, and died when it became a MS world.
In the midst of this, Apple updated it's version of the PC with the Mac. Companies were begining to standardize on the IBM PC or clone, and MS was begining to release a reasonable OS in term of DOS 3.3. It was far from clear where the market was going. The Mac was a closed appliance, but had a nifty GUI and useful ports that could, for instance, provide an instant network, something that DOS could not do. You could add stuff to the PC to get a system that had the Mac features, but that would cost more money. The Mac was competing against the Compaq and IBM, not the fly by night builders.
Now, as standards started to develop, especially the standard that could compete in speed and quality, Apple did adopt them. They even adopted some inferior standards to compete on price.
Today, pretty much anything can be put into a Mac. Any PCI card, and PCMCIA card, I don't know about cardbus. What one loses, as in any machine, is functionality and quality. I can't imagine how the service calls are going up now that any old memory can be stuck in a MAC. I know from personal experience of buying a cheap SCSI card that sometime being forced to buy quality product is a good thing.
During WWI, the US military learned that it was hard to get the common man to kill another person, even with official sanction and encouragement. This caused the military to establish special training programs that allowed the brainwashing of the common person and reprogramming of the soldier to become a machine that will kill on demand. One practice, which I have seen on military produced videos, is to give the trainee ample opportunity to fire a gun without consequence to create a situation in which the soldier will instinctively fire without considering the result of the action.
Some like to point out that video games give the player the same thrill. Firing a weapon and even 'killing' with no consequence. They marvel at how interesting it is that many kids have the same ability to fire several hundred rounds, without even thinking. This is what soldiers are trained to do, and the video games seem to give children that same ability.
The problem with this is two fold. First, if a child knows how to fire a weapon, they likely did not learn it from a video game. Guns tend to be heavy and have a quite different feel from a joystick or even gun mockup. If a child can go into a school have the dexterity and stamina to fire off a few hundred rounds, and in the process take out a dozen or so people, it is likely because they have experience doing so with a real weapon, not a joystick. It really is the case that bowling will more likely develop the strength to fire a gun than a video game.
Second, there were a fair number of soldier during WWI that were happy to kill the enemy at point blank range. There are a fair number of common of criminals on the street today that are willing to kill a person at point blank range for their tennis shoes. There are a fair number of people that will doom hundreds of families to starvation to satisfy a personal lust for stuff.
Taken together this tells us that for many people regard for human life and suffering is non existent. These kids and adult are just looking for an excuse to kill and main and steal. Any excuse will do and trying to rid the world of excuses is not a useful endeavor. It is much more useful to identify these miscreants and enemies of civilization and attempt to put them to useful work, such as the CEO of a corporations, or isolate them.
this has become standard, at least in the US. Corporations play one state against the other to gain tax breaks, increase dole payments, and other entitlements. These welfare subsidies can net a several hundred dollars of government payments per anticipated position.
Machine: Hello. How can I help you?
Cat: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: I will!
cats, like basement trapped boys, have little else to do than figure out how to hack the machine.
The statement is simplisitic. Scientists are not perfect. They make mistakes, and often have to make changes over the course of the peer review process. Some of thesse changes are valid, but certainly some are editorial in nature. We do not live the pristine enviroment of a reasearch beaker. There are many definitions of "altering data", and the importance depends on the research one is doing. For example, outliers are either all you are conceened with, or not what you are concerned with.
Likewise, a precher does not have to base a message on a higher being. The message can be that it is better to be nice to one another because that will bring the promised land to earth now, without all the mess that fullfilling end time prophecy will entail.
So what do these two things have in common. A good scientist and a good preacher are both looking for fact patterns that point to underlying and basic truths. I would argue that both require an honest look at observables, and honest look at the needs of the people, an honest look at available resources, and an honest effort to reconcile them all into objective solutions.
Both the scientist and the preacher will tempted to the evils of the simple solution. Take accepted results, repackege the conclusions, and pss them off as gospel. Conform all new knowledge into the confines of accepted dogma to insure continued funding. The good scientist and preacher will stay away from the evil of the known and risk to bring thier students into the world of the explorer.
The standards do generally work. However, many companies use HTML as a page layout and not a text m arkup language. Their insistance that all page have a consistant look, even wityh CSS2, forces them into an incompatible state.
Of course the page layout mindset leads to other issues such as assumed screen size and other issues. These are covered by the standards, but require flexibility in postioning.
This was also the goal of OS X and carbon. It mostly worked, if you were running in the emulated environment. And it did not work all the time. This was also true of the various MS Windows flavors. Developers often have to do some testing to figure out exactly what is running, if not various compilations.
It is reasonable to expect that many apps, especially the games, will be broken. It is also reasonabl to expect that MS will take this opportunity to break specific unwelcome applications. MS will maintain the necceasry APIs and update thier applications to work with longhorn. Hopefully they will get changes to developers, and hopefully the developers have not written code that depends on obsolete features.
Any corporate site will have a definite and unambiguous bias. Whether the bias is present in every product is debateble, but it will be present as an overall trend.
Any community product might have a bias. This depends on the bias of the community, or the control that a biased subset of the community exerts.
In the case of Wikipdeia, it would be difficult to imagine a true bias as there is no mechanism to overtly select specific editors, and one cannot easily imigine a process of self selection that would create a situation leading to major biases. OTOH, one cannot imagine a MS owned property not be biased.
The one exception might be that Wikipedia would tend to be biased towards open source, while MS would be biased towards world domination. However, even in this regard, I bet you find a more balanced view of the subject of Wikipedia than MS.
While this is a printed book, and I understand the need for well-formed english, I am glad that the reviewer didn't subtract from the books overall score just because of this.
The goal of a good technical book is to clearly communicate. Many of the rules of good grammar, and the need for generally proper spelling, exist to maximize the potential for clear writing. If one wishes to be flowery or playful, fiction provides a fertile medium. This is especially true of extended subordinate clauses.
The problem is that there is no way of knowing when an error is going to materially change the intended meaning. It should be the purpose of any professional to take pride in his or her work and insure that meaning is intact. I feel such errors in computer books is more a symptom of the decline of craftsmanship that has afflicted the computer industry, especially over the past 10 years, rather than any specific need for speedy publishing. After all, technology has allowed books to be written and published with unprecedented speed. The only item preventing well formed english is that willingness to hire a competent editor rather than depending on the MS grammer checker.
But with the coke you will be condemning some innocent viliage to chaos and forcing thier leader to walk to the end of the earth to get rid of the instrument of evil.
The most annoying thing to me between the TiPB and the current PB is the battery life. While the TiPB approached 5 hours of battery life, the current ones have a hard time getting to three.
A portable is a compromise. It must be small and power concious. One mistake of many portable makers is to ignore the power requirement. Apple is having to do so to compete. I wish we could go back to the days when a PB would last long enough to be really useful.
Re:And a flood of "What's the point?" ensues
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Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 1
As mentioned elsewhere, the Mocha, the closest commerical competitor, costs well over $1000 in this configurations. At this size the Wintel machine is not a good value at all.
This is standard fanboy argument. If a system cannot win on performacne, argue price. If it can't win on price, argue equal perfomance and de-facto standards.
This system has been mentioned many times before, and each time someone states the bleeding obvious. The cheaper models are not equal in perfomance, the the more expensvice model is not equal in price.
A properly configured mac mini , with 80 GB, 512M ram, wireless, bluetooth, keyboard, USB, Firewire, CD/DVD and writer, the works, is significantly less than $1000. A similiarly configured Mocha, with all that, a P4 and XP proffesional, is significantly more than $1000, approaches the cost of similiarly confgured iMac G5.
So as always, if you need a PC, then it is worth the cost.
But really the issue is that we should be buying machines on needed capabilities, not on rhetoric. Both will do what most people want.
No your not. Many slaves chose to stay in slavery. Many slaves chose to become the slavedrivers to earn the perks. They believed they could do best to help thier brothers and sisters by becoming part of the oppresion.
The implicit assumption of freedom is dangerous. Freedom is a gradient, and we chose the level of freedom that we can tolerate.
Slashdot Mirror
At many offices, there simply is no choice. IE is that standard, and users either do not have the ability, or the knowledte, to install Firefox. And since IE is supported at the office, IE is installed at home, as it would be silly to use an unsupported program. if it was so great, the office would use it.
So we must assume they are talking about an ATM, which a largish and complicated peice of equipment. It requires a piezoelctric device to move the tip to the proper placed on the substrate. For years, such devics kept cell phones large. The ATM requires a highly senstive feeback loop to keep the current constant. And is still requires a very delicae tip that can be easily damaged. Durable tips are probably years away and involve carbon nanotubes. Tips that have a lifetime more than a few months are probably even longer away.
It is a neat idea and probably works well in the laboratory on a vibration cancelation table. How would it work on a portable in the train or in the car? Does anyone have any real details on the technology?
Windows has never been the poster child for device drivers. i often remind people of how hard it was to get am external drive running on Windows 3.11, and how easy it was to do the same on System 7. I recently had a Windows 98 box lose the driver setting, and it took a couple days of manually installing drivers to get the proper configuration back. The computer would not autodetect anything.
What has changed is not the quality of the OS, but the willingness of device manufacturers to design in the MS hacks into the device so that it will run with MS Windows. This is very different from using existing standards that allow things like autodocking an external device. Sure all the capabilities may not be there, but at least the device can be used.
And this should be what saves Linux. Linux should be able to use those standards to get basic functionality out of all complient devices. When the market is large enough, device drivers can be written to add functionality. And we should not buy non complient devices just to save a few dollars.
This purpose is not obsolete. It is just that some people prefer a stupid electorate, and hate anything that tends to create an electorate generally capable of divergent thought. Our basic classes, in reading, writing, social studies, and math, does tend to create such a population. Most of the population can read and write, and know something of US history, and knows some basic math. Many are not capable of logic, which is a distressing fact, but there is little we can do about this without significant additional resources.
What we are seeing is funding for vocational education drying up. What we are seeing is funding for teachers that can match students to meaningful work drying up. What we are seeing is unfunded mandates from Washington forcing the school to spend millions of dollars on test, rather than use that money to provide students with meaningful education experiences. What we are seeing is MS itself creating byzantine licensing terms that makes it difficult for schools to accept donated computers, and forces those schools to pay for the OEM license and site license for the same machine, thus reducing the technological resources we can provide out kids.
In testing, on the job, and in life in general, there is one simple rule. One has objectives and basis judgments on those objectives. We do not penalize a kid for not knowing how to PDE in high school, as that is not an objective. The CEOs of major corporation will still get paid when they cause a company to go bankrupt, as their job is manage the best they can, and not to insure perpetual solvency.
Likewise, school are supposed to provide meaningful educational experiences that will provide the safest possible space for the child to develop and learn. If, like so many of the whines on /., one chooses not learn, or is offended that the US might want you to learn something for the simple sake of becoming a better and more productive citizen of this great country, then there is little that a school can do. The country needs people to clean up the streets and clean up asbestos and the like. And it is people like this that make the schools so bad because rather than taking advantage of the opportunities, these children tend to disrupt the classroom and then blame the teachers for not having the ability to control them, when these kids know good and well it is illegal for the teacher to beat their asses into a bloody pulp, which is really what many of these kids seem to want.
So, if you want less testing, vote for an intelligent president that did not skirt his military duty by barely passing a single test. If you want more job training, vote for local officials that will reinstitute vocational and career education. If you want the kids to have technology, get the schools to go back to Apple or start on Linux. There are less apps to run, but the important thing is not to have the kids play games or put widgets on screen, but to have the ability to explore the technology from a young age. My first computer experience was a teletype in middle school. Today I would not get that experience because everyone would say it was too antiquated to do any good, and it would not teach me the skills I needed in the workplace
Furthermore, just because IT is not in general social does not mean it cannot, or even should not, be social. It is true that the current club wants their traditional entitlements, and a social programming circle may mean the unqualified members of the current club will be replaced by more qualified personnel, but that is the chance we take. Programming is much less isolating activity than it was even 10 years ago. People use common libraries that are seldom customized. People use common GUIs that are seldom customized, and we are much more focused on shared libraries. All these are social activities, and the only thing keeping it asocial are the losers afraid of having to look for another job.
Let me tell you a story from the time of jefferson. There existed a black gentlemen who was really good in math and spatial reasoning. This gentleman was Benjamin Banneker. He helped design Washington DC. Up until the time that Jefferson met Banneker, it is said that Jefferson believed the hype that white men were the only men capable to advanced thought. Banneker was the counter example, and forced Jefferson to think hard about his beliefs. The rest, as they say, is history.
So what you are spouting is not honesty, but polemics. It is probably true that by certain measures women are better at social abstract things, while men are better at the building things. But claiming that the within the much smaller population individuals that we need in IT and science and engineering, and I mean both men and women because the majority of the people are not qualified for these activities, is suggesting that a relatively small sub population can be characterized solely by the central tendency of the entire group, which is just wrong. Such an assertion is merely an effort to propagate the traditional entitlement.
Secondly, there is really only one quantity that we take as certain: the speed of light in a vacuum. It is defined as a certain exact number. The meter, the second, the Lunin, and to some degree the ampere, are known and reproducible units because they are defined in terms of light, and the process of deriving them is a simple matter of counting collisions. The kelvin is reltively well defined because it using a unique physical quantity.
But the mass, and by extension the mole and really the ampere, is basically a measured by a big hunk of metal, and we hope that hunk is not shedding or gaining atoms. 12/1000 of the mass of that hunk of carbon is a mole.
So, we are not going to convert mass to energy to measure mass. With an AFM we might one day count atoms of a certain substance and know that is a gram. For instance a carbon nanotube with 5018333333333333333333 or a a monolayer of gold with 305685279188... atoms. Of course you would have to purify your sample to make sure all the atoms have the same number of nuetrons. Likewise, we may one day have an STM that move the correct number of atoms onto a substrate.
In siencefiction times, we may one day use a matter/energy translator to convert a certain amount of energy to mass standard. However, you then have that pesky 1 part in 10^-15 uncertainty in planks constant, which means that it is hard to design an experiment that has less uncertainty. Planks constant is among those about which we are the least certain(the gavitational constant is the only one that is really worse).
However, it is an historiacally important show. It broke the SciFi TV standard of using models, and instead went to CGI. It did what few shows have ever done and tried to get the physics right. For instance, the space vehicles are technicaly possible, and do not run thier engines all the time. The alliens have interesting cultures that are a mix of human cultures and not just a tranplant. For those of us in 1994, it was like nothing we had ever seen.
In the end it is like I Love Lucy or All in The Family, or, even to a lesser extent, Dynasty. Not all that interesting from todays standards, but technically and thematically groundbreaking for thier time.
It is true that people who want to rape pillage and kill will tend to do so, and religion only provides the excuse, but it is a powerful excuse. Raping heathens that are going are dammed anyone is nearly as bad as raping women from your own religion. Killing people who are not the direct decendents of G-d to save the direct decendents of G-d is surely not a bad thing. Denigrating half of the population is perfectly reasonable when you have book that says it is the natural order of things.
From a rational humanist point of view, all these things are bad. Even though they are sometimes justfied, the responsibility for the justification is on the individual, not diluted into some large group with a common mass insanity. The fact is that most people will not commit the horrible act, but that does not mean they do not approve, at least tacitly. Most would not kill a million people, but many say the tsunami was devine retribution. Most would not say the 9/11 attacks were divine retributions, but we have seen muslims and christians come together in agreement on this, as some muslims use this as the excuse, and Falwell seems as rich as ever.
So until i see chritians in the street protesting against Bush's stance on the death penalty(it is the providence of the lord to judge and kill, not humans), or his hypocrisy in prayer(from the text:
i will continue to blame the religion itself as a structural impediment to an enlightened world that does not go about opressing people just because some old book said it is ok to so do.None of this stupid OEM versus retail pack versus upgrade versus full bullshit stuff to keep up with.
Full rights to install Mac OS X on 5 machines for $200. Full package. Easy, easy activation and updates.
No activiation codes to look up, no gestapo maniacs that want to see my papers. Just an honest and reasonable transaction, with an honest and generally sane company.
Why I no longer buy simcity, or the sims. Have to have a CD to run it, and codes to install. That bullshit might fly on the braindead PC side, but over hear we want value for out money, not wasted time
Remeber, MS is only a value if your time is worth nothing!
The problem with blogs is that same problem with spam. The normal economic forces and rules of transparency do not apply. There is no way of knowing the quality level, or if that quality will be consistent. From the viewpoint of advancing human knowledge, while blogs have the possibility of releasing us from the stranglehold of conventions, it also might plunge us into intellectual chaos. The reality is that every person cannot be expected to evaluate every piece of writing for reasonableness and accuracy. That is why we have peer reviewed journals. That is why reasonable writing has a economic value.
So, there is no reason to believe that a net search on a subject is of any use. If 10 blogs seem to have one consensus opinion, and 5 blogs have another, does that mean that the majority wins? If one particular blog seems to have a logical argument that proves a case, does that mean the case is proven, or has the reader missed a logical error or a mistake in assumptions. If other bloggers reads the logical case, and publishes hundreds of derivatives, and one blogger catches the error in the argument, does that mean the case is strengthened by the agreement, or destroyed by the one dissenter? Is the dissenter going to be ranked high enough to actually be seen? Where is the process that insures quality?
Blogging has value. If nothing else it has gotten people writing, and the best way to learn how to write is just to write. It will probably have some formal value as well as the rules of engagement evolve. But the fact is that librarians are trained to get reasonable information. The average person does not know how to do this. Even though I have been doing informal research for 20 years, I still do not do research as well as a librarian. A mistake can meant that unreasonable information is disseminated. Probably many bloggers are trying to disseminate good information, and the problem is that they do not know how to make sure the information is good. The bloggers that are just interested in polemics, like the classic Fox News example, are not even at issue.
Bloggers that see themselves as saviors of intellectual freedom do not understand the issues. We are not talking about the politics of today, and getting ones message of dissent of agreement out on the net. We are talking about the advancement of human knowledge, and the refinement of the processes to make sure that knowledge is reasonable. Bloggers will be a part of the a process, but the process itself does not need a savior.
So here is my proposal for legitimate software. Legitimate software will request the users permission to install. Legitimate software will have a simple screen, with information provided in large type, about it's functionality. Practically this list should be kept short, to about 4 or 5 items, like personal information, connected to servers, and changing configurations. The laguage will be standardized. If the user accepts this function, the program will then install the applicaiton as well as a removal application. The details of the removal apllications will also have to negotiated, but it must remove and registry or library keys, code, and data sets. The program must inform that the uninstaller is available, and how to use it.
Now, some applications that follow these rules might be malware, and some applications that don't follow these rules may not be, but at least there would be a reasonable level of expectation. Legally, companies that do not provide reasonable disclosure and build in removal tools would no longer be able to claim that the label of malware is actionable.
IBM created the PC, and there were no standards because there was no standard PC, only many different machines that ran off microprocessors. IBM would not open it's specifications because it knew that such a thing would cost profit. Eventually Compaq reversed engineered the beast, won court cases, and started the creation of the modern PC standard. People who could not afford IBM would buy compaq, and the cheap OS ripoff created by MS. Byte magazine, for instance, lived well in this world of many options, and died when it became a MS world.
In the midst of this, Apple updated it's version of the PC with the Mac. Companies were begining to standardize on the IBM PC or clone, and MS was begining to release a reasonable OS in term of DOS 3.3. It was far from clear where the market was going. The Mac was a closed appliance, but had a nifty GUI and useful ports that could, for instance, provide an instant network, something that DOS could not do. You could add stuff to the PC to get a system that had the Mac features, but that would cost more money. The Mac was competing against the Compaq and IBM, not the fly by night builders.
Now, as standards started to develop, especially the standard that could compete in speed and quality, Apple did adopt them. They even adopted some inferior standards to compete on price.
Today, pretty much anything can be put into a Mac. Any PCI card, and PCMCIA card, I don't know about cardbus. What one loses, as in any machine, is functionality and quality. I can't imagine how the service calls are going up now that any old memory can be stuck in a MAC. I know from personal experience of buying a cheap SCSI card that sometime being forced to buy quality product is a good thing.
Some like to point out that video games give the player the same thrill. Firing a weapon and even 'killing' with no consequence. They marvel at how interesting it is that many kids have the same ability to fire several hundred rounds, without even thinking. This is what soldiers are trained to do, and the video games seem to give children that same ability.
The problem with this is two fold. First, if a child knows how to fire a weapon, they likely did not learn it from a video game. Guns tend to be heavy and have a quite different feel from a joystick or even gun mockup. If a child can go into a school have the dexterity and stamina to fire off a few hundred rounds, and in the process take out a dozen or so people, it is likely because they have experience doing so with a real weapon, not a joystick. It really is the case that bowling will more likely develop the strength to fire a gun than a video game.
Second, there were a fair number of soldier during WWI that were happy to kill the enemy at point blank range. There are a fair number of common of criminals on the street today that are willing to kill a person at point blank range for their tennis shoes. There are a fair number of people that will doom hundreds of families to starvation to satisfy a personal lust for stuff.
Taken together this tells us that for many people regard for human life and suffering is non existent. These kids and adult are just looking for an excuse to kill and main and steal. Any excuse will do and trying to rid the world of excuses is not a useful endeavor. It is much more useful to identify these miscreants and enemies of civilization and attempt to put them to useful work, such as the CEO of a corporations, or isolate them.
this has become standard, at least in the US. Corporations play one state against the other to gain tax breaks, increase dole payments, and other entitlements. These welfare subsidies can net a several hundred dollars of government payments per anticipated position.
Cat: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: Fish!
M: Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
C: I will!
cats, like basement trapped boys, have little else to do than figure out how to hack the machine.
Likewise, a precher does not have to base a message on a higher being. The message can be that it is better to be nice to one another because that will bring the promised land to earth now, without all the mess that fullfilling end time prophecy will entail.
So what do these two things have in common. A good scientist and a good preacher are both looking for fact patterns that point to underlying and basic truths. I would argue that both require an honest look at observables, and honest look at the needs of the people, an honest look at available resources, and an honest effort to reconcile them all into objective solutions.
Both the scientist and the preacher will tempted to the evils of the simple solution. Take accepted results, repackege the conclusions, and pss them off as gospel. Conform all new knowledge into the confines of accepted dogma to insure continued funding. The good scientist and preacher will stay away from the evil of the known and risk to bring thier students into the world of the explorer.
Of course the page layout mindset leads to other issues such as assumed screen size and other issues. These are covered by the standards, but require flexibility in postioning.
It is reasonable to expect that many apps, especially the games, will be broken. It is also reasonabl to expect that MS will take this opportunity to break specific unwelcome applications. MS will maintain the necceasry APIs and update thier applications to work with longhorn. Hopefully they will get changes to developers, and hopefully the developers have not written code that depends on obsolete features.
Any community product might have a bias. This depends on the bias of the community, or the control that a biased subset of the community exerts.
In the case of Wikipdeia, it would be difficult to imagine a true bias as there is no mechanism to overtly select specific editors, and one cannot easily imigine a process of self selection that would create a situation leading to major biases. OTOH, one cannot imagine a MS owned property not be biased.
The one exception might be that Wikipedia would tend to be biased towards open source, while MS would be biased towards world domination. However, even in this regard, I bet you find a more balanced view of the subject of Wikipedia than MS.
The goal of a good technical book is to clearly communicate. Many of the rules of good grammar, and the need for generally proper spelling, exist to maximize the potential for clear writing. If one wishes to be flowery or playful, fiction provides a fertile medium. This is especially true of extended subordinate clauses.
The problem is that there is no way of knowing when an error is going to materially change the intended meaning. It should be the purpose of any professional to take pride in his or her work and insure that meaning is intact. I feel such errors in computer books is more a symptom of the decline of craftsmanship that has afflicted the computer industry, especially over the past 10 years, rather than any specific need for speedy publishing. After all, technology has allowed books to be written and published with unprecedented speed. The only item preventing well formed english is that willingness to hire a competent editor rather than depending on the MS grammer checker.
But with the coke you will be condemning some innocent viliage to chaos and forcing thier leader to walk to the end of the earth to get rid of the instrument of evil.
A portable is a compromise. It must be small and power concious. One mistake of many portable makers is to ignore the power requirement. Apple is having to do so to compete. I wish we could go back to the days when a PB would last long enough to be really useful.
As mentioned elsewhere, the Mocha, the closest commerical competitor, costs well over $1000 in this configurations. At this size the Wintel machine is not a good value at all.
This system has been mentioned many times before, and each time someone states the bleeding obvious. The cheaper models are not equal in perfomance, the the more expensvice model is not equal in price.
A properly configured mac mini , with 80 GB, 512M ram, wireless, bluetooth, keyboard, USB, Firewire, CD/DVD and writer, the works, is significantly less than $1000. A similiarly configured Mocha, with all that, a P4 and XP proffesional, is significantly more than $1000, approaches the cost of similiarly confgured iMac G5.
So as always, if you need a PC, then it is worth the cost.
But really the issue is that we should be buying machines on needed capabilities, not on rhetoric. Both will do what most people want.
The implicit assumption of freedom is dangerous. Freedom is a gradient, and we chose the level of freedom that we can tolerate.