"why not just burn the recovery partition to CDs?Voila, instant recovery disks."
Hardly. Burning the recovery partition to CD-R, segmenting it god-knows-how onto 17 discs does not a bootable recovery disk make. For one thing, the recovery programs have no way of knowing which of the other 16 CDs the myriad files it needs are on, but that's just for starters.
In short it's like segmenting your car with a chainsaw so you can fit it in your friends 17 cars, and wondering why it won't run when you turn the key in the chunk with the steering wheel.
Rather than try to 'rehabilitate' those blacklists that are too rigid, count on those who subscribe to the block lists to pick those that are most responsible.
Think about it: If I run a mail server and use the biggest, least lenient blacklist provider out there, my users will start to complain when they're not getting important emails from people.
As in everything there's a middle ground between blocking too much and blocking not enough (or even none). the right answer is tu make sure mailadmins listen to their users, so they can find the right black hole list, striking the balance between spam and legitimate access.
Who knows, we may even get a responsible public organization out of this, recognized for specific rules and procedures for blacklist inclusion and removal. the sooner there's one list, the sooner we have less spam and less illegitimate blocking.
'cause I watch (and love) SG-1 on Fox (or is it CBS? I dunno, but god I love that my TiVo does) instead of Cinemax, and therefore am running a year or two behind the production episodes, I still have a year or two of good episodes left! Nyah, nyah!
And since none of my friends have Cinemax either (at least not ones who are SG-1 fans) I don't have to hear spoilers two years in advance...
Thanks for your insight. I disagree on one point though. My original response to you was that you seemed to think that Microsoft would plough ahead while Tivo and others stood still. I was saying that both move forward, but that technology alone won't win the game (remember the Newton?).
It's good to remember that when people make better products, we all win. I'll love my TiVo until I love something better. I just don't think it's going to be Microsoft, and I don't think it'll be soon, but if it is, then so be it.
"The sad fact is that Yahoo has never been a good search site. Like many dotcoms, they put too much emphasis on branding and marketing, and not enough on technology."
Except, of course, that in addition to news and directory results, a Yahoo search provides Google results as well...
"That's awefully short sited. You also assume I was talking about just the XBox. What about when M$ comes up with XBox 2 or the Y Box or XBox 2005 or their next generation the "Ultimate Web Xbox"."
Okay, first, it's sighted, but more to the point, it's your myopia, not mine. Do you think that while Microsoft is making the 'x-box2' and y-boxen' TiVo is standing still? no. TiVo has a 5-year arrangement with Sony that will enable Sony to embed TiVo recorders into standard Sony televisions. Panasonic's arrangement is likely to go the same way, and consumer market history indicates that consumer electronics companies are less likely to incorporate Microsoft technologies into their mainstream machines.
In addition, TiVo (at CES) announced that they're moving into interactive gaming (interactive with ither TiVos, not just with your box).
Frankly, I stand by what I said in my original post because the perceived (and hence actual) consumer benefit of a TiVo over a UTV is the TiVo interface. While Microsoft has been better at engineering interfaces, they still take a get-out of a long time to refine a good one. Ultimate TV certainly didn't make the cut. The user functionality, inability to make season pases, and general information architecture were sorely lacking.
And as any interaction designer knows full well, adding a lot more functionality to an existing product makes designing a comprehensible and enjoyable user interface harder, not easier.
This assumes that an X-box device would be as good at what TiVo does as TiVo is. TiVo has a cult following, and I've yet to meet a person who has a UTV who raves about it.
Feature parity doesn't mean an equal product, and if you're not a gamer and don't want a big fat gamer box in your entertainment tower, you might be happier with a cheaper box that's geared towards what you want, and has a superior interface.
Sure these uplink boxes may be small in 5 years, but they won't be mainstream.
Generic hardware scales well. Invent something, make a million of them, costs plummet. But this also requires a sizable chunk of satellite bandwidth, and you can bet that not only can the current satellite infrastructure not handle more than a handful of these uplinks, but that that infrastructure will grow a whole hell of a lot more slowly than would be required for a cheap uplink box in 5 years.
More to the point, what company would pony up the dough to field a team of these satellites, with so unproven and nacent a market? I think we all remember Iridium...
UV lithography has nothing to do with silicon (or silicone, for that matter...)
It just means using light with a shorter wavelength to etch the silicon wafer, allowing you to use a smaller micron process than you could with longer wavelengths.
You'd still use silicon for the wafer. To say otherwise is like saying that deisel fuel makes cars obsolete. They're entirely different problems.
Why is a review of Orange County news for nerds, just because Mr. Katz is writing the review?
/. is not Jon's personal weblog. Are these stories likely to make the/. front page soon?:
Let me tell you how much having your wisdom teeth pulled sucks.
So I went on a date last night.
I have this great idea for a perpetual motion machine
I just discovered this really great author. His name is Assimov or something.
Really, it's not that we all don't like you, Jon, it's just that you obviously have a lot of subjective things to say, and you should start your own weblog. Personally, I don't thikn it's stuff that matters...
The article, as written, is pretty shoddy, and looks similar to articles written 70 years ago touting how everyone would eat pills for food and fly personal jetpacks.
The problem that's not addressed in the article is that sure, antimatter is small, light, and excellent for storing energy with little mass, but what does that energy get you? Every spacecraft we've ever designed uses a reaction drive (and yes, solar sails are reaction drives too. They just use external sources as propellant.). The article doesn't address how we tackle the problem that for reaction drives to work we need to have something to throw behind us at high speed.
Not to say NASA isn't working on it. I'm sure they're looking at Bussard Ramjets or some other mechanism for using this tremendous energy to snare interstellar particles and throw them behind the ship. In fact, NASA has a few projects on the books for exploring exactly where the barriers between stellar and interstellar wind lay, and what the particle densities are really like. I guess this sort of detail is just too much for the average CNN reader.
The article, as is, doesn't provide any reason for being written now, other than a 'gee whiz the future's out there' fluff piece.
Hey, at least it's not about Afghanistan or weapons development.
Nope, I still stand by my first paragraph (minus the last sentence). LCD, CRT, or projector, white is made up by the combination of R, G, and B. Black is made up by the absence of all three. The 'A' graphics are bogus, no two ways about it.
You're absolutely right. In my self-deprecation, I didn't say "Pay attention to only the first paragraph, and even then, ignore the last sentence." I realized that was wrong as well, but I didn't want to overcomplicate.;-)
Actually, LCDs are subtractive *and* additive. They take white light and strain out the proper color, then they add those colors back together.
Checking out the linked page, there are explanatory graphics midway down, but they're simply wrong. They show an enlarged letter A, (black on white) then show how that letter is formed on 'stripe' CRTs vs their tile system. The problem is that they have it reversed. They show the color phosphor dots on the black areas and the white areas are still white. The more fundamental difference here is that CRTs are additive, while LCD displays are subtractive, but they don't even go into that.
Worse, they base their assumptions of superiority on the misconception that striped CRT monitors have one trio of RGB stripes for each pixel. They don't even address the triangular RGB phosphor pattern that non-trinitron CRTs use.
In a nutshell, it sounds like a neat idea, but it's no panacea, and looks like it'll have many of the same edge-color problems that current CRTs do (Trinitron and non), only they'll be more obvious on 45deg angles of red and green surfaces, rather than 90deg angles. Take a look at the tile pattern, and see how the pattern does still have stripes, only they're rotated 45degrees right for green and 45 degrees left for red. I imagine a field of 100% blue will, on close inspection, be a thousand little points of light, since each one is surrounded by dark space that takes up 70% of the screen.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding. I wonder when they'll have samples at tradeshows.
Think about all the things your computer does: word processor, game player, email client, web browser, and all the rest. How would you like to have a different device for each of these tasks?
Of course, the computer's complex enough that each of these *feels* different, because they're abstracted from the hardware, and you can upgrade your apps to new versions, or from vendors you appreciate.
Right now PDAs aren't like that. the Linux PDAs are an important step because the hardware isn't strongly tied to the software. Palm is also moving along this direction, albeit slowly.
When the hardware is sophisticated enough that buying a particular device doesn't mean buying into a single software model, then I bet you'll be a lot happier.
Slashdot Mirror
So when are we going to see hordes of mutant bimbos released into dive bars and frat parties to help curb overpopulation by one-night-stand?
Me, I'm all in favor of mutant politicians, or ones with expiration dates ala Blade Runner.
"why not just burn the recovery partition to CDs?Voila, instant recovery disks."
Hardly. Burning the recovery partition to CD-R, segmenting it god-knows-how onto 17 discs does not a bootable recovery disk make. For one thing, the recovery programs have no way of knowing which of the other 16 CDs the myriad files it needs are on, but that's just for starters.
In short it's like segmenting your car with a chainsaw so you can fit it in your friends 17 cars, and wondering why it won't run when you turn the key in the chunk with the steering wheel.
Rather than try to 'rehabilitate' those blacklists that are too rigid, count on those who subscribe to the block lists to pick those that are most responsible.
Think about it: If I run a mail server and use the biggest, least lenient blacklist provider out there, my users will start to complain when they're not getting important emails from people.
As in everything there's a middle ground between blocking too much and blocking not enough (or even none). the right answer is tu make sure mailadmins listen to their users, so they can find the right black hole list, striking the balance between spam and legitimate access.
Who knows, we may even get a responsible public organization out of this, recognized for specific rules and procedures for blacklist inclusion and removal. the sooner there's one list, the sooner we have less spam and less illegitimate blocking.
'cause I watch (and love) SG-1 on Fox (or is it CBS? I dunno, but god I love that my TiVo does) instead of Cinemax, and therefore am running a year or two behind the production episodes, I still have a year or two of good episodes left! Nyah, nyah!
And since none of my friends have Cinemax either (at least not ones who are SG-1 fans) I don't have to hear spoilers two years in advance...
I'm surprised that nobody here noted that Eve was one of the first webloggers, and an inspiration to thousands.
I met her at a dotcom party in '1997 and she inspired me to learn pi to 100 places.
Beautiful, inelligent, geeky. Truly, Eve, you are the best of us.
...Either that or I am a sad, sad man.
Thanks for your insight. I disagree on one point though. My original response to you was that you seemed to think that Microsoft would plough ahead while Tivo and others stood still. I was saying that both move forward, but that technology alone won't win the game (remember the Newton?).
It's good to remember that when people make better products, we all win. I'll love my TiVo until I love something better. I just don't think it's going to be Microsoft, and I don't think it'll be soon, but if it is, then so be it.
"The sad fact is that Yahoo has never been a good search site. Like many dotcoms, they put too much emphasis on branding and marketing, and not enough on technology."
Except, of course, that in addition to news and directory results, a Yahoo search provides Google results as well...
"That's awefully short sited. You also assume I was talking about just the XBox. What about when M$ comes up with XBox 2 or the Y Box or XBox 2005 or their next generation the "Ultimate Web Xbox"."
Okay, first, it's sighted, but more to the point, it's your myopia, not mine. Do you think that while Microsoft is making the 'x-box2' and y-boxen' TiVo is standing still? no. TiVo has a 5-year arrangement with Sony that will enable Sony to embed TiVo recorders into standard Sony televisions. Panasonic's arrangement is likely to go the same way, and consumer market history indicates that consumer electronics companies are less likely to incorporate Microsoft technologies into their mainstream machines.
In addition, TiVo (at CES) announced that they're moving into interactive gaming (interactive with ither TiVos, not just with your box).
Frankly, I stand by what I said in my original post because the perceived (and hence actual) consumer benefit of a TiVo over a UTV is the TiVo interface. While Microsoft has been better at engineering interfaces, they still take a get-out of a long time to refine a good one. Ultimate TV certainly didn't make the cut. The user functionality, inability to make season pases, and general information architecture were sorely lacking.
And as any interaction designer knows full well, adding a lot more functionality to an existing product makes designing a comprehensible and enjoyable user interface harder, not easier.
I'm not worried.
Can't.. decide! ... Who's more... evil!
Can we axe them both, and start over with Yahoo!?
This assumes that an X-box device would be as good at what TiVo does as TiVo is. TiVo has a cult following, and I've yet to meet a person who has a UTV who raves about it.
Feature parity doesn't mean an equal product, and if you're not a gamer and don't want a big fat gamer box in your entertainment tower, you might be happier with a cheaper box that's geared towards what you want, and has a superior interface.
Sure these uplink boxes may be small in 5 years, but they won't be mainstream.
Generic hardware scales well. Invent something, make a million of them, costs plummet. But this also requires a sizable chunk of satellite bandwidth, and you can bet that not only can the current satellite infrastructure not handle more than a handful of these uplinks, but that that infrastructure will grow a whole hell of a lot more slowly than would be required for a cheap uplink box in 5 years.
More to the point, what company would pony up the dough to field a team of these satellites, with so unproven and nacent a market? I think we all remember Iridium...
UV lithography has nothing to do with silicon (or silicone, for that matter...)
It just means using light with a shorter wavelength to etch the silicon wafer, allowing you to use a smaller micron process than you could with longer wavelengths.
You'd still use silicon for the wafer. To say otherwise is like saying that deisel fuel makes cars obsolete. They're entirely different problems.
/. is not Jon's personal weblog. Are these stories likely to make the
- Let me tell you how much having your wisdom teeth pulled sucks.
- So I went on a date last night.
- I have this great idea for a perpetual motion machine
- I just discovered this really great author. His name is Assimov or something.
Really, it's not that we all don't like you, Jon, it's just that you obviously have a lot of subjective things to say, and you should start your own weblog. Personally, I don't thikn it's stuff that matters.....and it's certainly not 'news for nerds.'
Wow. You're older than you look!
The problem that's not addressed in the article is that sure, antimatter is small, light, and excellent for storing energy with little mass, but what does that energy get you? Every spacecraft we've ever designed uses a reaction drive (and yes, solar sails are reaction drives too. They just use external sources as propellant.). The article doesn't address how we tackle the problem that for reaction drives to work we need to have something to throw behind us at high speed.
Not to say NASA isn't working on it. I'm sure they're looking at Bussard Ramjets or some other mechanism for using this tremendous energy to snare interstellar particles and throw them behind the ship. In fact, NASA has a few projects on the books for exploring exactly where the barriers between stellar and interstellar wind lay, and what the particle densities are really like. I guess this sort of detail is just too much for the average CNN reader.
The article, as is, doesn't provide any reason for being written now, other than a 'gee whiz the future's out there' fluff piece.
Hey, at least it's not about Afghanistan or weapons development.
First a store-within-a-store at CompUSA, now IKEA!
(Or should that be iKea?)
Nope, I still stand by my first paragraph (minus the last sentence). LCD, CRT, or projector, white is made up by the combination of R, G, and B. Black is made up by the absence of all three. The 'A' graphics are bogus, no two ways about it.
You're absolutely right. In my self-deprecation, I didn't say "Pay attention to only the first paragraph, and even then, ignore the last sentence." I realized that was wrong as well, but I didn't want to overcomplicate. ;-)
Actually, LCDs are subtractive *and* additive. They take white light and strain out the proper color, then they add those colors back together.
Go ahead and ignore all but the first paragraph of my post. I was stupid.
The part about the 'A' graphic still stands though.
Checking out the linked page, there are explanatory graphics midway down, but they're simply wrong. They show an enlarged letter A, (black on white) then show how that letter is formed on 'stripe' CRTs vs their tile system. The problem is that they have it reversed. They show the color phosphor dots on the black areas and the white areas are still white. The more fundamental difference here is that CRTs are additive, while LCD displays are subtractive, but they don't even go into that.
Worse, they base their assumptions of superiority on the misconception that striped CRT monitors have one trio of RGB stripes for each pixel. They don't even address the triangular RGB phosphor pattern that non-trinitron CRTs use.
In a nutshell, it sounds like a neat idea, but it's no panacea, and looks like it'll have many of the same edge-color problems that current CRTs do (Trinitron and non), only they'll be more obvious on 45deg angles of red and green surfaces, rather than 90deg angles. Take a look at the tile pattern, and see how the pattern does still have stripes, only they're rotated 45degrees right for green and 45 degrees left for red. I imagine a field of 100% blue will, on close inspection, be a thousand little points of light, since each one is surrounded by dark space that takes up 70% of the screen.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding. I wonder when they'll have samples at tradeshows.
Don't believe everything Joss says in the newsgroups. He has a flare for misdirection.
Re Boromir, thanks a lot. Might want to put spoiler warnings up next time.
So it was designed to carry boxcar-sized atomic weapons, yet 5 years later, the first atomic weapons were inly 15 feet long.
We can only try to imagine what kind of payload these planes would deliver in 2040.
I wonder how many nanorounds one of these babies can pack.
FYI while the blurb says "Years end" the article says 'end of this year.'
I'll be mighty impressed if they can make 40 of their 50 metro areas profitable in the next two weeks.
I bet you don't mind convergence on your desktop.
Think about all the things your computer does: word processor, game player, email client, web browser, and all the rest. How would you like to have a different device for each of these tasks?
Of course, the computer's complex enough that each of these *feels* different, because they're abstracted from the hardware, and you can upgrade your apps to new versions, or from vendors you appreciate.
Right now PDAs aren't like that. the Linux PDAs are an important step because the hardware isn't strongly tied to the software. Palm is also moving along this direction, albeit slowly.
When the hardware is sophisticated enough that buying a particular device doesn't mean buying into a single software model, then I bet you'll be a lot happier.