> That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.
You're arguing that a hypothetical bug in an unreleased product makes Windows Mobile better?
No, he's arguing that a closed platform is (all other things being equal, which we have no reason not to believe, seeing as the device hasn't been released yet) naturally inferior to a more open one. Obviously, Windows Mobile isn't as open as you can get, but more open platforms are lagging behind in development, so aren't equal.
Then all we need is cameras absolutely everywhere and we'll stop all crime.
That's not what I said. I only said crime is reduced in such areas; I didn't say all crime was stopped in them. I did point out that murder was effected relatively little due to it usually happening in quiter areas that are rarely subject to surveillance.
The technical phrase for this is "their data does not support their conclusion" - a more honest conclusion would be that they have no proof that wholesale invasion of privacy reduces crime.
No, the data does support the conclusion, just not -- err -- conclusively.
What if someone figured out your SSN, Birth Date, and a couple other key piece of information, and opened a credit card in your name
In Britain, it's rather harder than that to get a bent credit card. You'd also have to show a forged passport, birth certificate or driver's license, and official correspondence of some kind that shows your address. Not out of the question, but information isn't enough, you need some technical ability in forgery as well.
Of course, there is no evidence that he actually broke the law. If he did not "make copies" of the images he saw, and was not "in posession" of them, then he didn't commit an offense. Typically, this is interpreted as meaning that as long as you delete any automatically downloaded copies, you're in the clear. IANAL, this ain't legal advice, etc.
You said "The Defense is always better funded." That is true if they accuse a lawyer, doctor, etc. When they accuse joe shmoe, who works as a fry cook, he gets bupkiss for defenese, and goes to jail.
No, actually, in the British justice system, legal aid pays more to defending barristers than the crown prosecution service pays to prosecuting ones; therefore most of the better barristers do more defence work (for free, at least to the accused) than prosecution work.
That and with all the cameras out there, crime still happens in the UK. Murders [including shootings] still happen. So what are the cameras really solving?
You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody believes the cameras prevent all crime. Most murders, including shootings, occur in areas where there are no cameras, so wouldn't be affected. According to this study, there is usually a reduction in reported crime, although their sample size was too small for it to be statistically significant.
Out of the 13 systems analysed, six showed a reduction in all relevant crime: City Outskirts, Hawkeye, Northern Estate, City Hospital, South City and Shire Town. All except South City had a relative effect size greater than one and there f o re showed a gre a t e r reduction in the target than the control area, suggesting that CCTV could have played a role in reducing crime in these areas. However, only two (City Outskirts and Hawkeye) p e rf o rmed statistically significantly better than their respective control areas following the introduction of CCTV.
It sounds to me as if the effect is too small to justify the cost (both in monetary terms and in liberty) of such programs, but that conclusion is arguable. Is a median crime reduction of 3% worth it? Probably not, but it isn't worthless.
And one has to wonder, on noting that this study was based on reported crimes, what the effects of CCTV on reporting are: I would expect a higher proportion of crimes to be reported in the areas with CCTV, because victims might reasonably expect a better outcome of reporting the crime in such an area.
Never mind IE, the idiots I'd like to kick the shit out of are the ones who do a website entirely in Flash!
Not all of those people are total idiots. Back in 2002 or so, my company was called in to fix one of these sites whose original developer had gone AWOL without completing it. It was a flash front-end talking to ASP on the back end. We immediately ripped out the ASP and replaced it with PHP, it was so bad. We switched from flash to HTML/JS much later on, but did do it in the end. But the point of this story is that we asked the guy whose site it was why he'd done it that way. It turned out the MS and Macromedia had agreed to finance half of the development of it if he used those particular technologies. Can't say I blame him for doing it that way in these circumstances.
Do you honestly believe there exists a/. webmaster who would require IE?
And if such a monster exists, do you honestly believe he'd admit it?
I'll nearly admit it. My company produces a web content management system whose admin interface was IE-only in the previous version. The current version adds support for FF, Opera and Safari, although we're considering officially recommending that our clients not use FF with it: FF's implementation of HTML design mode ("midas") is severely fucked. So far, we've spent hundreds of hours working around bugs in it, and they're not all finished with yet. Safari support isn't entirely there on the current official versions of Safari, because some of the features we need (specifically execCommand("inserthtml",...)) aren't implemented in that version, although they do apparently work if you use a nightly build of AppleWebKit. So, essentially, yeah, we produce a web site that only works properly in IE and Opera.
There's a few reason to have desktops: 1. Large monitors 2. Large diskspace 3. Better graphics cards 4. You want to tinker with it, upgrade etc.
5. You want the performance of a desktop hard disk, which generally is substantially faster than an equivalent laptop one 6. You want multiple hard disks, because you need a RAID array (either for speed, reliability or both) 7. You want to perform an application with it that requires add-on hardware that isn't supported by the laptop, and the hardware you want to use isn't a USB or PCMCIA device (e.g. most prototyping and data acquisition boards or custom hardware) 8. Multiple monitors. 9. You want something cheap (I paid £150 for my current PC, that's about $300 -- where can you get a laptop for that price?) 10. You need to leave the machine on for long periods, and want to be sure it won't overheat (I've had several laptops that overheat badly after they've been switched on for more than about 4 hours at a time).
In a few years when everyone starts hitting the RAM ceiling for 32 bit CPUs, 64 bit will have to take off.
Current average memory on a new PC = 1GB. Memory ceiling for 32 bit CPUs with PAE = 16GB. Number of doublings required to hit ceiling = 4 Length of doubling per Moore's Law = 18 months Total = 6 years
I think we're farther off that limit than you think.
Right now AMD has the lead on consumer priced 64 bit processors
I'm not sure where you get that idea from. My current Celeron D was cheaper than any AMD machine available, and is comparable in most respects. I'm pretty sure it's a 64 bit chip, even though I'm not running a 64-bit OS, because the BIOS tells me it is during bootup.
It is entirely possible that with the next mass jump (like to Pentiums 12 years ago)
Huh? You seem to be remembering a different 1995 to me. Back in 95, I saw a lot of people still buying 486s. It wasn't until 96 or 97 that they were completely phased out.
that a completely new architecture altogether will take over, although people love their legacy apps so much that x86_64 still has a good shot at it
Legacy apps are only half the issue: vendors for new apps are reluctant to support a new ISA until it looks pretty certain that it'll survive.
We can't just add cores to x86_32 forever, we will need the RAM.
Who's adding cores to 32 bit chips? I don't see any dual or higher core chips on the market today that do not support a 64-bit instruction set.
Also, power consumption will come to bite us since (in theory) a 32 bit CPU is not as efficient as a 64 bit CPU, assuming the program code is truly optimized in 64 bit.
I don't suspect this is true. Most programs don't perform significant amounts of processing on 64 bit values. Process a 32 bit value on a 64 bit processor is no better (and is likely worse) than doing it on a 32 bit one. But again, please point me to a current generation 32 bit CPU, because I don't see any.
According to Wikipedia, Penryn is intended as a laptop processor.
Does it seem odd to anyone else for Intel to launch a new instruction set on a laptop CPU? Are portables that dominant these days?
The Wikipedia article is misleading. The chips that were tested were Yorkfield and Wolfdale, which are listed under the Desktops section. Penryn is the generic name for the entire 45nm Core 2 family, as I understand it.
Actually, the problem is that SKU has two definitions, only one of which is included in the article you linked to. The one being used here is the original one; the meaning of a number to identify a product came later. Think about it. It's a Stock Keeping Unit, right? In what way is the number a unit? It isn't. An SKU is a product. The name makes no sense if you're talking about a code for a product, and this sense (which is, admittedly, now more common than the original) is a corruption of the meaning of the term. See definitions here and here among others.
On Vista, there is no native pre-DX10. All previous versions are emulated via DX10-calls.
You are, however, right: A DX9-capable cards suffices to render Aero, as it uses only the features of DX10 already provided by DX9.
Actually, it's not so much emulation: all recent DirectX implementations *include* the interfaces of previous versions. DirectX10 includes DirectX9 and DirectX8.
Maybe chimps have shorter lifespans. Thus there have been more generations of chimps to mix and mingle the chimp gene pool.
Biologicially, chimps are pretty similar in terms of lifespan to humans. What matters, of course, is time to reach maturity, which is ~14 years in the case of a female for both species. Obviously, civilizationary pressures mean that human females tend not to have children until later in life than maturity. The precise age is a figure that has been increasing rapidly in recent years, and is higher in developed countries than the third world. The figure in the USA has increased from about 22 to closer to 30 over the last 30 years, but those last few years are irrelevant. In some areas even now the figure may be as low as 19. Data is hard to come by for any time prior to 1970, but it seems the trend continues back: for most of the period of this study, there has probably been little to no difference in the number of years between successive generations.between humans and chimps.
Perhaps chimps have a bigger gene pool. More chimps=more genetic variety=more chance for beneficial genes to surface.
Chimp fossils are relatively rare. This suggests that chimp population has been lower most of the time than the human population. Large populations would tend to imply a greater genetic variety.
Maybe human DNA doesn't have the same genetic variety as chimp DNA. Thus the variability in chimps could be greater than in humans.
This is probably true -- the question is, why is it true?
Perhaps the population density has kept chimp DNA in greater flux. Humans have ranged all over the planet, thus human genes don't get as much of a chance to mix.
This strikes me as rubbish. Moving into different environments should create new evolutionary pressures that encourage the development of new genes that would otherwise die out. Populations that are isolated from each other tend to show a higher degree of genetic variance than homogenous, geographically close populations do.
Maybe human evolution has slowed because there are different social pressures on our mating practices. It's not all about physical prowess and attractiveness with people. Certain families/tribes don't mix with certain others, or perhaps only mix with others. Religion, money, power, history, language, etc all affect how (with whom) humans mate. Chimps are free from these pressures.
The whole point of evolution is that a species changes over time to deal with pressure from its environment. Humankind has been "coddling the weak" for thousands upon thousands of years now.
OTOH, the timescale of this study was 6,000,000 years. ~10,000 years of civilization shouldn't have had a huge overall effect on our evolution compared to the preceding 5,990,000 of them.
"Advantage of using SATA for connecting an optical drive: zero."
Except that new motherboards coming out do not support bootable PATA.
You're begging the question. You're saying its OK for motherboards to not support bootable PATA because PATA is dying, and that PATA is dying because motherboards don't support bootable PATA. That argument is nonsensical.
Then it isn't IDE, which is a standard interface that isn't being followed in this case. It might be compatible with traditional IDE hard discs, but if it's connecting via USB then it's a SCSI-over-USB-to-PATA bridge.
Are you telling me these asshats want to try to charge internet radio stations in *my* name for playing *my* original music that I freely give to them to play unless I make some legal arrangements with Soundexchange!?!? How can they usurp *my* rights to let anyone I want play *my* music?
They can't. What they can do, however, is refuse to license the music that they do have rights to if the station refuses to pay them for each and every track they play, whether it's on their catalogue or not. Same as MS used to charge OEMs per computer they produce, whether Windows was installed on it or not.
SATA DVD/CD-ROM drives did take a while to become widely available
They still aren't. None of my local shops or usual mail order suppliers stock SATA DVD- or CD-ROM drives. Some of them have writers available, but not all, and the writers they do have are more expensive than the PATA equivalents.
Advantage of using SATA for connecting an optical drive: zero.
Whilever there's a price difference like this, you'll find a lot of people don't think PATA is dead. I just bought a new shop-built PC that came with PATA hard disks and DVD drive. OK, it was a low end model, but while new machines are being supplied with an old technology, that technology isn't dead.
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> That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.
You're arguing that a hypothetical bug in an unreleased product makes Windows Mobile better?
No, he's arguing that a closed platform is (all other things being equal, which we have no reason not to believe, seeing as the device hasn't been released yet) naturally inferior to a more open one. Obviously, Windows Mobile isn't as open as you can get, but more open platforms are lagging behind in development, so aren't equal.
Of course there were probably civilisations prior to 10,000 years ago. Unfortunately the only evidence we have of this is the Sphinx.
You mean the Sphinx that has been variously dated between 6,000 and 2,000 BC (i.e., less than 10,000 years ago)?
Then all we need is cameras absolutely everywhere and we'll stop all crime.
That's not what I said. I only said crime is reduced in such areas; I didn't say all crime was stopped in them. I did point out that murder was effected relatively little due to it usually happening in quiter areas that are rarely subject to surveillance.
The technical phrase for this is "their data does not support their conclusion" - a more honest conclusion would be that they have no proof that wholesale invasion of privacy reduces crime.
No, the data does support the conclusion, just not -- err -- conclusively.
No, he accepted a caution, which is somewhat different.
Equifax is the other. There are only these two operating in the UK, AFAIK.
What if someone figured out your SSN, Birth Date, and a couple other key piece of information, and opened a credit card in your name
In Britain, it's rather harder than that to get a bent credit card. You'd also have to show a forged passport, birth certificate or driver's license, and official correspondence of some kind that shows your address. Not out of the question, but information isn't enough, you need some technical ability in forgery as well.
Of course, there is no evidence that he actually broke the law. If he did not "make copies" of the images he saw, and was not "in posession" of them, then he didn't commit an offense. Typically, this is interpreted as meaning that as long as you delete any automatically downloaded copies, you're in the clear. IANAL, this ain't legal advice, etc.
You said "The Defense is always better funded." That is true if they accuse a lawyer, doctor, etc. When they accuse joe shmoe, who works as a fry cook, he gets bupkiss for defenese, and goes to jail.
No, actually, in the British justice system, legal aid pays more to defending barristers than the crown prosecution service pays to prosecuting ones; therefore most of the better barristers do more defence work (for free, at least to the accused) than prosecution work.
That and with all the cameras out there, crime still happens in the UK. Murders [including shootings] still happen. So what are the cameras really solving?
You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody believes the cameras prevent all crime. Most murders, including shootings, occur in areas where there are no cameras, so wouldn't be affected. According to this study, there is usually a reduction in reported crime, although their sample size was too small for it to be statistically significant.
Out of the 13 systems analysed, six showed a reduction in all relevant crime: City
Outskirts, Hawkeye, Northern Estate, City Hospital, South City and Shire Town. All except
South City had a relative effect size greater than one and there f o re showed a gre a t e r
reduction in the target than the control area, suggesting that CCTV could have played a role
in reducing crime in these areas. However, only two (City Outskirts and Hawkeye)
p e rf o rmed statistically significantly better than their respective control areas following the
introduction of CCTV.
It sounds to me as if the effect is too small to justify the cost (both in monetary terms and in liberty) of such programs, but that conclusion is arguable. Is a median crime reduction of 3% worth it? Probably not, but it isn't worthless.
And one has to wonder, on noting that this study was based on reported crimes, what the effects of CCTV on reporting are: I would expect a higher proportion of crimes to be reported in the areas with CCTV, because victims might reasonably expect a better outcome of reporting the crime in such an area.
If the images have appropriate alt text, it'll work just fine.
Never mind IE, the idiots I'd like to kick the shit out of are the ones who do a website entirely in Flash!
Not all of those people are total idiots. Back in 2002 or so, my company was called in to fix one of these sites whose original developer had gone AWOL without completing it. It was a flash front-end talking to ASP on the back end. We immediately ripped out the ASP and replaced it with PHP, it was so bad. We switched from flash to HTML/JS much later on, but did do it in the end. But the point of this story is that we asked the guy whose site it was why he'd done it that way. It turned out the MS and Macromedia had agreed to finance half of the development of it if he used those particular technologies. Can't say I blame him for doing it that way in these circumstances.
Do you honestly believe there exists a /. webmaster who would require IE?
...)) aren't implemented in that version, although they do apparently work if you use a nightly build of AppleWebKit. So, essentially, yeah, we produce a web site that only works properly in IE and Opera.
And if such a monster exists, do you honestly believe he'd admit it?
I'll nearly admit it. My company produces a web content management system whose admin interface was IE-only in the previous version. The current version adds support for FF, Opera and Safari, although we're considering officially recommending that our clients not use FF with it: FF's implementation of HTML design mode ("midas") is severely fucked. So far, we've spent hundreds of hours working around bugs in it, and they're not all finished with yet. Safari support isn't entirely there on the current official versions of Safari, because some of the features we need (specifically execCommand("inserthtml",
There's a few reason to have desktops:
1. Large monitors
2. Large diskspace
3. Better graphics cards
4. You want to tinker with it, upgrade etc.
5. You want the performance of a desktop hard disk, which generally is substantially faster than an equivalent laptop one
6. You want multiple hard disks, because you need a RAID array (either for speed, reliability or both)
7. You want to perform an application with it that requires add-on hardware that isn't supported by the laptop, and the hardware you want to use isn't a USB or PCMCIA device (e.g. most prototyping and data acquisition boards or custom hardware)
8. Multiple monitors.
9. You want something cheap (I paid £150 for my current PC, that's about $300 -- where can you get a laptop for that price?)
10. You need to leave the machine on for long periods, and want to be sure it won't overheat (I've had several laptops that overheat badly after they've been switched on for more than about 4 hours at a time).
In a few years when everyone starts hitting the RAM ceiling for 32 bit CPUs, 64 bit will have to take off.
Current average memory on a new PC = 1GB.
Memory ceiling for 32 bit CPUs with PAE = 16GB.
Number of doublings required to hit ceiling = 4
Length of doubling per Moore's Law = 18 months
Total = 6 years
I think we're farther off that limit than you think.
Right now AMD has the lead on consumer priced 64 bit processors
I'm not sure where you get that idea from. My current Celeron D was cheaper than any AMD machine available, and is comparable in most respects. I'm pretty sure it's a 64 bit chip, even though I'm not running a 64-bit OS, because the BIOS tells me it is during bootup.
It is entirely possible that with the next mass jump (like to Pentiums 12 years ago)
Huh? You seem to be remembering a different 1995 to me. Back in 95, I saw a lot of people still buying 486s. It wasn't until 96 or 97 that they were completely phased out.
that a completely new architecture altogether will take over, although people love their legacy apps so much that x86_64 still has a good shot at it
Legacy apps are only half the issue: vendors for new apps are reluctant to support a new ISA until it looks pretty certain that it'll survive.
We can't just add cores to x86_32 forever, we will need the RAM.
Who's adding cores to 32 bit chips? I don't see any dual or higher core chips on the market today that do not support a 64-bit instruction set.
Also, power consumption will come to bite us since (in theory) a 32 bit CPU is not as efficient as a 64 bit CPU, assuming the program code is truly optimized in 64 bit.
I don't suspect this is true. Most programs don't perform significant amounts of processing on 64 bit values. Process a 32 bit value on a 64 bit processor is no better (and is likely worse) than doing it on a 32 bit one. But again, please point me to a current generation 32 bit CPU, because I don't see any.
According to Wikipedia, Penryn is intended as a laptop processor.
Does it seem odd to anyone else for Intel to launch a new instruction set on a laptop CPU? Are portables that dominant these days?
The Wikipedia article is misleading. The chips that were tested were Yorkfield and Wolfdale, which are listed under the Desktops section. Penryn is the generic name for the entire 45nm Core 2 family, as I understand it.
Actually, the problem is that SKU has two definitions, only one of which is included in the article you linked to. The one being used here is the original one; the meaning of a number to identify a product came later. Think about it. It's a Stock Keeping Unit, right? In what way is the number a unit? It isn't. An SKU is a product. The name makes no sense if you're talking about a code for a product, and this sense (which is, admittedly, now more common than the original) is a corruption of the meaning of the term. See definitions here and here among others.
On Vista, there is no native pre-DX10. All previous versions are emulated via DX10-calls.
You are, however, right: A DX9-capable cards suffices to render Aero, as it uses only the features of DX10 already provided by DX9.
Actually, it's not so much emulation: all recent DirectX implementations *include* the interfaces of previous versions. DirectX10 includes DirectX9 and DirectX8.
Maybe chimps have shorter lifespans. Thus there have been more generations of chimps to mix and mingle the chimp gene pool.
Biologicially, chimps are pretty similar in terms of lifespan to humans. What matters, of course, is time to reach maturity, which is ~14 years in the case of a female for both species. Obviously, civilizationary pressures mean that human females tend not to have children until later in life than maturity. The precise age is a figure that has been increasing rapidly in recent years, and is higher in developed countries than the third world. The figure in the USA has increased from about 22 to closer to 30 over the last 30 years, but those last few years are irrelevant. In some areas even now the figure may be as low as 19. Data is hard to come by for any time prior to 1970, but it seems the trend continues back: for most of the period of this study, there has probably been little to no difference in the number of years between successive generations.between humans and chimps.
Perhaps chimps have a bigger gene pool. More chimps=more genetic variety=more chance for beneficial genes to surface.
Chimp fossils are relatively rare. This suggests that chimp population has been lower most of the time than the human population. Large populations would tend to imply a greater genetic variety.
Maybe human DNA doesn't have the same genetic variety as chimp DNA. Thus the variability in chimps could be greater than in humans.
This is probably true -- the question is, why is it true?
Perhaps the population density has kept chimp DNA in greater flux. Humans have ranged all over the planet, thus human genes don't get as much of a chance to mix.
This strikes me as rubbish. Moving into different environments should create new evolutionary pressures that encourage the development of new genes that would otherwise die out. Populations that are isolated from each other tend to show a higher degree of genetic variance than homogenous, geographically close populations do.
Maybe human evolution has slowed because there are different social pressures on our mating practices. It's not all about physical prowess and attractiveness with people. Certain families/tribes don't mix with certain others, or perhaps only mix with others. Religion, money, power, history, language, etc all affect how (with whom) humans mate. Chimps are free from these pressures.
Probably true: but is this a good thing?
The whole point of evolution is that a species changes over time to deal with pressure from its environment. Humankind has been "coddling the weak" for thousands upon thousands of years now.
OTOH, the timescale of this study was 6,000,000 years. ~10,000 years of civilization shouldn't have had a huge overall effect on our evolution compared to the preceding 5,990,000 of them.
Can you run Linux on chimps now? That's evolution in action, I guess.
"Advantage of using SATA for connecting an optical drive: zero."
Except that new motherboards coming out do not support bootable PATA.
You're begging the question. You're saying its OK for motherboards to not support bootable PATA because PATA is dying, and that PATA is dying because motherboards don't support bootable PATA. That argument is nonsensical.
Then it isn't IDE, which is a standard interface that isn't being followed in this case. It might be compatible with traditional IDE hard discs, but if it's connecting via USB then it's a SCSI-over-USB-to-PATA bridge.
Are you telling me these asshats want to try to charge internet radio stations in *my* name for playing *my* original music that I freely give to them to play unless I make some legal arrangements with Soundexchange!?!? How can they usurp *my* rights to let anyone I want play *my* music?
They can't. What they can do, however, is refuse to license the music that they do have rights to if the station refuses to pay them for each and every track they play, whether it's on their catalogue or not. Same as MS used to charge OEMs per computer they produce, whether Windows was installed on it or not.
SATA DVD/CD-ROM drives did take a while to become widely available
They still aren't. None of my local shops or usual mail order suppliers stock SATA DVD- or CD-ROM drives. Some of them have writers available, but not all, and the writers they do have are more expensive than the PATA equivalents.
Honestly here, IDE(PATA) is a dieing format.
From my usual supplier:
PATA DVD-RW drive: £17
SATA DVD-RW drive: £23
Advantage of using SATA for connecting an optical drive: zero.
Whilever there's a price difference like this, you'll find a lot of people don't think PATA is dead. I just bought a new shop-built PC that came with PATA hard disks and DVD drive. OK, it was a low end model, but while new machines are being supplied with an old technology, that technology isn't dead.