I can't agree. Whre's the hard data? It's all JK's subjective impressions. Again.
And what the hell is "Hypermedia" exactly? Anything with hyperlinks? Pray tell, why is this the problem?
The REAL problem (and who knows heo widespread it is?) is that people don't know how to skeptically evaluate information. It doesn't matter one damn bit where it comes from. The main bad effect of this is that public officials are worried about telling the truth because they know it won't be interpreted rationally. Ask Jocelyn Elder.
40 bps is pretty good. I've worked with 9.9 bps before on spacecraft operations. It could take an hour before we get the first transfer frame shipped to us from DSN.
It's painful, but if you design it right, you get all of the info you need to make decisions in a just a few dozen bits.
Firewire isn't really proprietary: Apple gets a tiny fee for every Firewire device sold, but the standard is open: IEE1394. For example, it will be used on spacecraft in the near future to transfer data between redundant recorders.
You can get a Firewire card for a PC for about $70 - and you'll need it if you ahven't got the sense to do digital video on a Mac.
There were a lot of rumors that the iPod would be Airport compatible. That would have been a near miracle in something this small, but would mean you'd never have to plug it into your machine (where the hell is that Firewire cable?). It would also mean it would load songs much more slowly than Firewire, however. Still, with Airport, I would have bought one immediately. Without it, I'll wait until Apple drops the price a few bucks.
Still it's cool that it's so small, and it synchs with iTunes over Firewire. Very convenient. And 5 gigs is plenty. My Rio is about the same size and only holds 64 mB, which is enough for a morning run or a turn on the Stairmaster. 5 gigs would easily cover a transcontinental flight in both directions.
Terrorism is an "ism" that almost no one owns up to. It's actually a strategy for achieving some other means through mass fear and hysteria. Sometimes it works, but it usually backfires.
Viruses are nearly always pranks, created primarily just because they can be. Nealy all the well-publicized viruses of recent years have been exploitations of MS's poor security. Occasionally one might be really malicious; for the purpose of stealing credit card numbers or some such. However, this is theft, not terrorism. The pranks are vandalism, not terrorism.
Ashcroft is proposing wasting vital national resources going after script kiddies. Pshaw!
This will also avoid the problems of the orbiting solar arrays regularly being hit of the collection of space junk that we have deposited in orbit over the years.
Very, very little of that junk is in geosynchronous orbit, where the SPSs would be located. It's really not a serious problem.
It's a massive undertaking, and it's projects like the ISS that will begin to enable further things, like ISS-originating spaceflight which would eliminate the need for costly and difficult ground launches to get space vehicles in the air.
Except that the ISS has no capability to do that, and for a long time has not been designed to that. Just think about everything you have to be able to do to make a stop in LEO worthwhile on the way out - it's a lot. With a maximum permanent crew of three people, there's very little ISS can do except swallow up great gobs of cash.
If NASA has any meaningful plans to get to the moon or Mars via the ISS, they haven't published it. As designed, stopping at the ISS would be very costly in mass and $, since it doesn't have any resources that weren't launched from the ground, and not much at that.
I tend to agree: Moon first, then on to Mars. Mars is more important, but:
We have to make absolutely certain there is no life on Mars now before we start messing around there. If there IS (and I hope so), then we have to study the hell out of it before we decide it's cool to send living organisms there.
We have a lot to learn about space travel, and the Moon is a much easier, lower risk target.
We can get resources from the Moon we can actually use.
The Space Station will probably die with the Goldin admin. This will be bad and sad, but it's a long term good thing, since the beast is poorly conceived, massively expensive, and doesn't do enough to forward long-term goals.
Overall, I liked Dan Goldin. He was in love with new technology, and has been vigorously pushing innovation. The Space Station albatross could have dragged anyone down.
The strategy for the evolution of standards is evolving, too, and partly to address this problem. Thus XHTML, placing HTML on a firmer footing, and providing a higher level of abstraction to work with. This allows you to add new tags to HTML in the future in a way that can be accomodated in an orderly fashion.
There are many emerging standards, and Mozilla complies, or is attempting to comply with, most of the key stable ones. After that, the onus is on the standards bodies to make sure they don't break Mozilla unless they aboslutely must. Besides, a lot of data on the internet would become useless if standards weren't backwards compatible. XML, for example, is a key piece of standards infrastructure that needs to evolve very carefully.
Apple: Port OS X to the Intel platform. Microsoft is already running scared, now is the time to make them cower in fear.
I think Apple has a little fear of their own: they are dependent on Microsoft to keep Office going on the Mac. Microsoft has muscled nearly all competing products off the market. There used to be packages far superior to Powerpoint, for example, and now there's just the misery of Powerpoint. If you don't have Office, many businesses and other organizations would feel forced to drop Macs.
So, I think it's very unlikely Apple will port OS X to Intel, but I believe people already have Darwin running on that hardware.
I'm running it on 128 mB, which is the minimum Apple recommends. It's a bit sluggish at times, but tolerable on my 466 MhZ G3 when multiple apps are running. I can cheaply go to 256 or even 512, if I can just find the time to do it. 512 would probably smooth over most of the bumps.
Of course, how much RAM you really need depends strongly on what you're doing with your machine.
This is probably biased by the effect of porn surfers owning a large set of bookmarks for sites that all include links - why would they search Google?
This is probably true of a lot of the "declining searches" as well. It doesn't mean the public's lost interest, but just that they found what they're looking for. It seems to me that the Google Zeitgeist can at best measure the rate of change of interest in new topics.
The only real problem with this is that for OS X to be a threat, a whole lot of people would have to buy Macs. This couldn't happen at Apple/IBM/Motorola's current production capacity, and they aren't trying to mass market computers to bean counters and the like. They target the education, home and creative markets. I think OS X will be a big success, but even if they run the whole thing on multiple hardware platforms (unlikely), they won't be able to overwhelm Microsoft.
OTOH, Apple has pretty much won the culture war. Today's Windoze machines are functionally better Macs than the 1984 Macs. Today's PCs are more or less user-centric. In 1984, the enemy wasn't so much Microsoft; it was IBM
And in the his case in particular, why do we need an alternative?
First, a couple of notes:
I hate Microsoft as much as anyone. I wouldn't miss them if they shriveled up and went away.
We don't have free market capitalism in this country, and arguably never have. It's pretty clear fomr the current political debates that we're not ready for it intellectually or spiritually.
That said, why do we need the Government to break up M$? Do you want a bunch of DoJ lawyers deciding how the software industry should be structured? The truth is M$ won the popularity contest. They didn't win it fair and square, and they didn't win it with the best, most innovative products or best support. But that's not how popularity works - if it was, 99% of the music on the airwaves today would disappear. We'd also have very different people in elected office. They won, nvertheless, because milions of individuals worldwide voted with their cash that they either preferred to go with Microsoft, or that they didn't much care.
No, it's not pretty, but the people have spoken. That said:
Microsoft does not "control the Internet." (what does that mean?)
You are completely free to make your own computer a Microsoft Free Zone if you choose.
The trial exposed Microsoft as a bunch of lying scumbags, and they'll never completely recover from this. If they had the public trust before, they don't now.
So, how would socialism make this better? By mandating a monopoly by whoever plays the best politics? By forcefully crushing anyone who wants to start their own software business? I don't see it. It's been tried, and it's a nightmare.
It'll mostly fall to the East, but they'll be capable of polar launches, so it could go North or South - probably north. They'll probably never launch to the west, since that's against the Earth's rotation; although the popular sun synchronous orbits are slightly retrograde (inclination of about 98 degrees).
My guess is about 20 launches a year, becuase that's roughly the capacity of most launch sites.
I don't think that restrictions wil be budgetary, since they'll be marketing their services internationally, and charging a fee.
Most space launches have a launch window every day of the year, so that's not a factor. Generally, only spacecraft going outside the Earth's gravitational sphere of influence (e.g. to Mars) have a window that is closed over most of a year (or more).
The radiation environment on Europa is terrible. It's no place for routine operations. It will probably never be directly explored by humans.
Furthermore, navagating safely through the asteroid belt is really no problem. It's been done by 7-8 spacecraft(NEAR dipped into it when flying by Mathilde) to date without hazard. From SF movies we have this image of an asteroid belt as being a dense stream of little rocks requiring frequent twists and turns to avoid, but in fact they are millions of klicks apart, and the chances of hitting one that's too small to be discovered is effectively zero.
Neutrinos have a little mass, so they can't be quite moving at the speed of light. Therefore, when we see a Supernova go off, the light ought to arrive a little ahead of the neutrino burst.
As I recall, on the big, nearby Supernova 1987A, a neutrino burst was detected. My question is, did anyone get the timing nailed down from this event well enough toconfirm that the neutrinos were a little late?
I more or less agree, although there are some damn good Amerian actors. Philip Seymour Hoffman could make an excellent Doctor, for example.
The BBC should resurrect Who, and spend their money on finding a great script editor, a strong writing staff and a perfectly cast Doctor and sidekick(s). I could even embrace the concept of a female Doctor, since sexuality doesn't seem to be much more than window dressing to Gallifrians. The painful TV movie whould be completely forgotten.
Of course they're corrupt. The moral bankruptcy of the mainstream music industry is only too well documented.
I say that it doesn't matter. What's really corrupt is slickly packaged, trite, utterly empty rubbish that passes for music. There's no law against that, and there shouldn't be.
The music industry are scavengers, cleaning up on second handers who don't want to listen to music they like so much as music they are told that other people like. That they ruthlessly exploit musicians is another topic.
My suggestion is that if you don't like what you hear on the radio, turn it off, and support the small labels trying to change the way the business operates; e.g. Chris Cutler's Recommended Records, John Zorn's Tzadik, or Robert Fripp's DGM. That all of the above are run by world class veteran musicians should be no surprise - they've been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the shaft.
Slashdot Mirror
What would a Mozilla user (or strictly speaking, beta tester) want to browse MSN for? Fair question, no?
I can't agree. Whre's the hard data? It's all JK's subjective impressions. Again.
And what the hell is "Hypermedia" exactly? Anything with hyperlinks? Pray tell, why is this the problem?
The REAL problem (and who knows heo widespread it is?) is that people don't know how to skeptically evaluate information. It doesn't matter one damn bit where it comes from. The main bad effect of this is that public officials are worried about telling the truth because they know it won't be interpreted rationally. Ask Jocelyn Elder.
40 bps is pretty good. I've worked with 9.9 bps before on spacecraft operations. It could take an hour before we get the first transfer frame shipped to us from DSN.
It's painful, but if you design it right, you get all of the info you need to make decisions in a just a few dozen bits.
Firewire isn't really proprietary: Apple gets a tiny fee for every Firewire device sold, but the standard is open: IEE1394. For example, it will be used on spacecraft in the near future to transfer data between redundant recorders.
You can get a Firewire card for a PC for about $70 - and you'll need it if you ahven't got the sense to do digital video on a Mac.
There were a lot of rumors that the iPod would be Airport compatible. That would have been a near miracle in something this small, but would mean you'd never have to plug it into your machine (where the hell is that Firewire cable?). It would also mean it would load songs much more slowly than Firewire, however. Still, with Airport, I would have bought one immediately. Without it, I'll wait until Apple drops the price a few bucks.
Still it's cool that it's so small, and it synchs with iTunes over Firewire. Very convenient. And 5 gigs is plenty. My Rio is about the same size and only holds 64 mB, which is enough for a morning run or a turn on the Stairmaster. 5 gigs would easily cover a transcontinental flight in both directions.
Of course, it's aimed solely at the Mac market.
Terrorism is an "ism" that almost no one owns up to. It's actually a strategy for achieving some other means through mass fear and hysteria. Sometimes it works, but it usually backfires.
Viruses are nearly always pranks, created primarily just because they can be. Nealy all the well-publicized viruses of recent years have been exploitations of MS's poor security. Occasionally one might be really malicious; for the purpose of stealing credit card numbers or some such. However, this is theft, not terrorism. The pranks are vandalism, not terrorism.
Ashcroft is proposing wasting vital national resources going after script kiddies. Pshaw!
Very, very little of that junk is in geosynchronous orbit, where the SPSs would be located. It's really not a serious problem.
Except that the ISS has no capability to do that, and for a long time has not been designed to that. Just think about everything you have to be able to do to make a stop in LEO worthwhile on the way out - it's a lot. With a maximum permanent crew of three people, there's very little ISS can do except swallow up great gobs of cash.
If NASA has any meaningful plans to get to the moon or Mars via the ISS, they haven't published it. As designed, stopping at the ISS would be very costly in mass and $, since it doesn't have any resources that weren't launched from the ground, and not much at that.
I tend to agree: Moon first, then on to Mars. Mars is more important, but:
The Space Station will probably die with the Goldin admin. This will be bad and sad, but it's a long term good thing, since the beast is poorly conceived, massively expensive, and doesn't do enough to forward long-term goals.
Overall, I liked Dan Goldin. He was in love with new technology, and has been vigorously pushing innovation. The Space Station albatross could have dragged anyone down.
The strategy for the evolution of standards is evolving, too, and partly to address this problem. Thus XHTML, placing HTML on a firmer footing, and providing a higher level of abstraction to work with. This allows you to add new tags to HTML in the future in a way that can be accomodated in an orderly fashion.
There are many emerging standards, and Mozilla complies, or is attempting to comply with, most of the key stable ones. After that, the onus is on the standards bodies to make sure they don't break Mozilla unless they aboslutely must. Besides, a lot of data on the internet would become useless if standards weren't backwards compatible. XML, for example, is a key piece of standards infrastructure that needs to evolve very carefully.
I think Apple has a little fear of their own: they are dependent on Microsoft to keep Office going on the Mac. Microsoft has muscled nearly all competing products off the market. There used to be packages far superior to Powerpoint, for example, and now there's just the misery of Powerpoint. If you don't have Office, many businesses and other organizations would feel forced to drop Macs.
So, I think it's very unlikely Apple will port OS X to Intel, but I believe people already have Darwin running on that hardware.
I'm running it on 128 mB, which is the minimum Apple recommends. It's a bit sluggish at times, but tolerable on my 466 MhZ G3 when multiple apps are running. I can cheaply go to 256 or even 512, if I can just find the time to do it. 512 would probably smooth over most of the bumps.
Of course, how much RAM you really need depends strongly on what you're doing with your machine.
My daughter's in daycar just outside of D©C© I'm scared to death© The phones here in the D©C© area are intermittent© The cell system works though© Just talked to my wife - the government's sent everyone home and she's heading to pick up my daughter© Confusion is rampant© There mayhave been several other explosions in D©C©, including the Capitol and state department©
The SF paper's wbesite is apparently OK:
http://www©sfgate©com/
This is probably biased by the effect of porn surfers owning a large set of bookmarks for sites that all include links - why would they search Google?
This is probably true of a lot of the "declining searches" as well. It doesn't mean the public's lost interest, but just that they found what they're looking for. It seems to me that the Google Zeitgeist can at best measure the rate of change of interest in new topics.
It sounds to me as if G.A. is doing the right thing for her career and her kid. It's time for X-philes and Fox to let go.
The only real problem with this is that for OS X to be a threat, a whole lot of people would have to buy Macs. This couldn't happen at Apple/IBM/Motorola's current production capacity, and they aren't trying to mass market computers to bean counters and the like. They target the education, home and creative markets. I think OS X will be a big success, but even if they run the whole thing on multiple hardware platforms (unlikely), they won't be able to overwhelm Microsoft.
OTOH, Apple has pretty much won the culture war. Today's Windoze machines are functionally better Macs than the 1984 Macs. Today's PCs are more or less user-centric. In 1984, the enemy wasn't so much Microsoft; it was IBM
.And in the his case in particular, why do we need an alternative?
First, a couple of notes:
That said, why do we need the Government to break up M$? Do you want a bunch of DoJ lawyers deciding how the software industry should be structured? The truth is M$ won the popularity contest. They didn't win it fair and square, and they didn't win it with the best, most innovative products or best support. But that's not how popularity works - if it was, 99% of the music on the airwaves today would disappear. We'd also have very different people in elected office. They won, nvertheless, because milions of individuals worldwide voted with their cash that they either preferred to go with Microsoft, or that they didn't much care.
No, it's not pretty, but the people have spoken. That said:
So, how would socialism make this better? By mandating a monopoly by whoever plays the best politics? By forcefully crushing anyone who wants to start their own software business? I don't see it. It's been tried, and it's a nightmare.
It'll mostly fall to the East, but they'll be capable of polar launches, so it could go North or South - probably north. They'll probably never launch to the west, since that's against the Earth's rotation; although the popular sun synchronous orbits are slightly retrograde (inclination of about 98 degrees).
My guess is about 20 launches a year, becuase that's roughly the capacity of most launch sites.
I don't think that restrictions wil be budgetary, since they'll be marketing their services internationally, and charging a fee.
Most space launches have a launch window every day of the year, so that's not a factor. Generally, only spacecraft going outside the Earth's gravitational sphere of influence (e.g. to Mars) have a window that is closed over most of a year (or more).
Not so.
The radiation environment on Europa is terrible. It's no place for routine operations. It will probably never be directly explored by humans.
Furthermore, navagating safely through the asteroid belt is really no problem. It's been done by 7-8 spacecraft(NEAR dipped into it when flying by Mathilde) to date without hazard. From SF movies we have this image of an asteroid belt as being a dense stream of little rocks requiring frequent twists and turns to avoid, but in fact they are millions of klicks apart, and the chances of hitting one that's too small to be discovered is effectively zero.
Neutrinos have a little mass, so they can't be quite moving at the speed of light. Therefore, when we see a Supernova go off, the light ought to arrive a little ahead of the neutrino burst.
As I recall, on the big, nearby Supernova 1987A, a neutrino burst was detected. My question is, did anyone get the timing nailed down from this event well enough toconfirm that the neutrinos were a little late?
I more or less agree, although there are some damn good Amerian actors. Philip Seymour Hoffman could make an excellent Doctor, for example.
The BBC should resurrect Who, and spend their money on finding a great script editor, a strong writing staff and a perfectly cast Doctor and sidekick(s). I could even embrace the concept of a female Doctor, since sexuality doesn't seem to be much more than window dressing to Gallifrians. The painful TV movie whould be completely forgotten.
Then, by this reasoning Apple Computer should be the dominant force on the desktop?
They're not, as I presume you know.
Microsoft's rise to market dominance had very little to do with their products' performance, and much more to do with its positioning.
Ipecac looks respectable, and their splash page is a hoot©
There were lots of labels I left out© The Grateful Dead had their own label, as did Sun Ra in the 1960s© There's Bill Rieflin's First World, Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe, and so on©
The playing field's not entirely even© It's hard for these small guys to get reliable mainstream distribution and prominent display space in record stores ¥payola again© That's why I buy about 90% of my CDs mail order, and directly from a small label when applicable©
Of course they're corrupt. The moral bankruptcy of the mainstream music industry is only too well documented.
I say that it doesn't matter. What's really corrupt is slickly packaged, trite, utterly empty rubbish that passes for music. There's no law against that, and there shouldn't be.
The music industry are scavengers, cleaning up on second handers who don't want to listen to music they like so much as music they are told that other people like. That they ruthlessly exploit musicians is another topic.
My suggestion is that if you don't like what you hear on the radio, turn it off, and support the small labels trying to change the way the business operates; e.g. Chris Cutler's Recommended Records, John Zorn's Tzadik, or Robert Fripp's DGM. That all of the above are run by world class veteran musicians should be no surprise - they've been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the shaft.