How come I haven't seen a "Titers Please..." joke yet?
It's only a matter of time until we have the GATTACA-style finger-prick turnstiles. The right to privacy will be viewed as a historically-interesting extravagance in the future. It's only a matter of time until possession of encrypted data is viewed as "probable cause."
Maybe we'll still have privacy for those of us willing to skip out on a few useful things (e.g. medicine, travel, food, energy, shelter).
I'm sure that there will be more than a few people out there complaining about the pre-determined "art" that is the refereeing of the NFL a few beers after the kick-off (what, end of the first quarter?).
There are graphics, there is commentary, it's a private stadium, and we have our legal system.
People don't need to be brainwashed to want some simple (even if it's wrong) explanation for phenomena or fears that they can't fit in their head. Most of us aren't comfortable believing that we have a short period of time here to get things done, and that what we have on earth is, sadly, all we're going to get. I, on the other hand, am not comfortable trying to prove a negative. Why bother?
You're not fooling anyone, though. I'm sure that you see the difference between public disclosure and secrecy in any organization. Clearly, though, your threshold for "cult" is the same as your threshold for "church."
"Cult" is far easier to say than "bait-and-switch church," so why not allow for some formal distinction?
I think a cult is a bit like pornography. You know it when you see the piles of bodies.
Compared to Vaios that have a DVD drive or 200GB second drive built in?
Really thin is only so useful. The Vaio TZ (along with some Japanese laptops that we don't get here in the states) allows you to change the way that you live. You can stuff those notebooks into a man-purse (Tumi makes some that fit rather well) and go. You can use them in the coach section of an airplane without fear of screen-crunch.
I'm not saying that the Macbook Air is a bad thing. Thin notebooks are nice, but thickness is the dimension that I find least annoying in a notebook (keeping in mind that my thickest notebook is a comparably enormous Vaio FZ, and my favorite notebook is my Thinkpad T42). I wouldn't want my sub-notebook to be as thick as the old Thinkpads were (think DSM-IV hardcover) size, but the footprint matters as well.
If only someone would bring back the old butterfly keyboard of the Thinkpad 701...
On modern systems, threads are themselves first-class constructs, and it runs somewhat like this:
A process has things like memory-tables for virtual memory, handles for objects, files, socket connections, etc. A process always contains at least one thread (this isn't always true while a process is being set up or torn down, but it's true when most anyone's code is running).
A thread generally has a stack (in the host-process's virtual address space, so everyone can read it), some thread-local storage to make life easier for some api's (you don't need to care about this in most cases), and lives in a process. This means that threads can use virtual addresses for memory interchangeably with other threads in the same process.
Additionally, some operating systems support fibers. A fiber is like a thread except that it has to be explicitly or cooperatively (not quite the same thing) multi-tasked. Fibers use even less memory than threads, and you really don't have to care about them.
When you're in, say, Visual Studio, there's a "threads" window for all of the threads of the process that you are debugging. You can end up stepping through code on one thread while other threads are running.
The modern hardware designs lead to interesting performance side-effects from cache location and memory location. It's not quite as hard as systems that have asymmetric access to resources (e.g. Playstation 2), but it makes for fun work.
The parent is exactly how I would have replied a couple of years ago. I was doing lots of threading work, and I found it easy to the point of being frustrated with other programmers who weren't thinking about threading all of the time.
I was wrong in two ways:
1. It's not that easy to do threading in the most efficient way possible. There's almost always room for improvement in real-world software.
2. There are plenty of programmers who don't write thread-safe/parallel code well (or at all) that are still quite useful in a product development context. Some haven't bothered to learn and some just don't have the head for it. Both types are still useful for getting your work finished, and, if you're responsible for the architecture, you need to think about presenting threading to them in a way that makes it obvious while protecting the ability to reach in and mess with the internals.
The first point is probably the most important. There are several things that programmers will go through on their way to being decent at parallelization. This is in no strict order and this is definitely not a complete list:
- OpenMP: "Okay, I've put a loop in OpenMP, and it's faster. I'm using multiple processors!!! Oh.. wait, there's more?" Now, to be fair, OpenMP is enough to catch the low-hanging fruit in a lot of software. It's also really easy to try out on your code (and can be controlled at run-time).
- OpenMP 2: "Wait... why isn't it any faster? Wait.. is it slower?" Are you locking on some object? Did you kill an in-loop stateful optimization to break out into multiple threads? Are you memory bound? Blowing cache? It's time to crack out VTune/CodeAnalyst.
- Traditional threading constructs (mutices, semaphores): "Hey, sweet. I just lock around this important data and we're threadsafe." This is also often enough in current software. A critical section (or mutex) protecting some critical data solves the crashing problem, but it injects the lock-contention problem. It can also add the cost of round-tripping to the kernel, thus making some code slower.
- Transactional data structures: "Awesome. I've cracked the concurrency problem completely." Transactional mechanisms are great, and they solve the larger data problem with the skill and cleanliness of an interlocked pointer exchange. Still, there are some issues. Does the naive approach cleanly handle overlapping threads stomping on each-others' write-changes? If so, does it do it without making life hell for the code changing the data? Does the copy/allocation/write strategy save you enough time through parallelism to make back its overhead?
Should you just go back to a critical section for this code? Should you just go back to OpenMP? Should you just go back to single-threading for this section of code? (not a joke)
Perhaps as processors get faster by core-scaling instead of clock-scaling this will become less of a dilemma, but to say that "[to do multi-threaded programming effectively] is not that difficult" is akin to writing your first ray-tracer and saying that 3D is "not that difficult." Somtimes it is. At least at this point there are places where threading effectively is a delicate dance that not every developer need think about for a team to produce solid multi-threaded software.
That doesn't mean that I object to threading being a more tightly-integrated part of the language, of course.
The sad thing here is that supercomputers have been used (and heavily funded) by the US government for nuclear weapons research in the past.
I'm sure that the first thing that the US government (Congress and the White House) thought when they heard "Iran" and "supercomputer" was "nuclear weapons program." They have years of associating supercomputers with nukes, climate research, physics, NUKES, etc. under their belts.
Every one of these that I've seen (and I've seen quite a few of them) has had Ethernet. My guess is that this reviewer was just dumb.
At this point there is also a version with a 64GB SSD, a 200GB HDD, and an external DVD burner. To me, this sounds ideal. OS, apps, and source code go on the SSD, media goes on the HDD, and the DVD-drive stays in the bag. $4000 is a big chunk of change, but...
Take a look at the cards used in this type of application (lots of Siggraph history). The cards need orientation and recognition markers, and the code needs to be readable from very odd angles well outside of optimal focus. 2D bar-codes are definitely capable of carrying a lot of data, but these cards have more work to do with (generally) cheaper cameras.
They just don't have the space/bits for per-card UIDs.
Even worse than that, the cost of producing each card would go up for individual IDs.
That could certainly work, but there's a trade-off between how many bits you can encode onto the card and how much range you have for the camera to read the card (unless you have some validation steps that the user has to go through).
You also have to consider that people might share cards to play with (legitimately), and any sort of banning might catch legitimate users out.
I think you'd do better with something that's hard to copy with printing (e.g. near-IR ink and a near-IR LED on the camera to do quick validation).
Your PS3 emulates the Emotion Engine in the Cell, but it still has a GS chip for PS2 3D rendering. It's kind of a screw, but the EE emulation is pretty solid.
The new 40GB drops the GS. Personally, I don't like the idea of any Playstation ever not being able to play old games, but that's me.
Having gone from the PS1 to the PS2 to the PS3 (with other systems sprinkled in, of course), the ability to play old games plays heavily into which system I purchase. My wife only wants one gaming system sitting under our TV.
The PS2 consists of two major components: The Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer (EE + GS).
The PS3 uses two that most of us are familiar with these days: The Cell and the Reality Synthesizer (Cell + RSX).
The Cell has no problem emulating the EE, but the GS has a trick up his sleeve, EDRAM, that gives it more bandwidth for a small bit of memory than either the Cell or RSX has. This speed makes up (somewhat) for the relatively small amount of available memory on the PS2. So, here's the run-down:
He asked his question, in a roundabout way. He insinuated that Kerry had given Bush the election because of his Skull & Bones connection, and he asked for a response.
As someone who gave Kerry's legal fund $100 (and Black Box Voting another $100) two hours before Kerry folded, my question would have been roughly the same (though have taken less time).
The hilarious thing is that Kerry was going to answer the question (or dodge it publicly), but the cops were too busy paying off this kid's student loans for that to happen.
I don't think Google needs to own this space. As long as it goes for more than the reserve, Google is flying high on whoever buys this space.
Google's requirements just made sure that Google can step into the game in this juicy section of spectrum even when they don't win the bidding (I don't think that they're going to try very hard).
Either way, I highly doubt that we'll see a completely free wireless mesh that only costs the initial investment of the device crop up any time soon. Your tax dollars hard at taxing you...
(Yes, I know that it would take a lot of hops to cross the country...)
Hey! How many slashdot readers are there.. if we each chipped in... oh... we're all comparatively poor.
I think the argument is that congress could impose tight-enough restrictions to keep the radioactive sludge from ever being kept in a jug.
Even if they don't, accountability is generally a good thing. Others merely knowing about screw-ups is generally enough to illicit measures to avoid future ones.
Nobody expects the congressional sub-committee inquisition!
So the iPhone won't do Exchange push email, leaving it out for me, but I pay more for my contract with Cingular, don't get SMS for free, and am also stuck with EDGE data (there is only one clamshell WM device, and it is EDGE).
I have to admit to being somewhat curious as to whether I can just pop my SIM into the iPhone and party, but I'm not really prepared to pay that kind of dough until I see how things unfold.
It's really a personal comparison between the way that the iPod sounds through Shure e4c's compared to the Zune, network Walkman (some, as others are really noisy), and an older discman. I know a few people who have switched to Zunes because of this, but I absolutely refuse to use that crappy software.
I have issues with being forced to use any software, but the Zune does an astounding job of confirming my distaste.
More to the point at hand, the iPod is a very good sounding player, but it's not the best. No, the cnet numbers are not apples-to-apples, but, even in the context of only that review, the distortion numbers for the HD iPod are fugly. Any of these players does more than a sufficient job ('cept for the iRiver and uwon units) with today's media, but "I will eat a box" jokes have to be met with a bit of ribbing.
Wow... Two informative links, a bit of ribbing for someone joking about eating an iPod box, and a Flamebait mod...
Seriously, people, there is one mad Apple-lovin' bias rolling around here. I'd love for someone to roughly classify posts as pro or anti-Apple and watch their moderation over time. As Apple ascends to being the next Microsoft (in the eyes of this group), will it be a soft turn in moderation or a hard flip as the prevailing sentiment changes?
This was, humorously enough, a mod of a reply to someone citing the "Don't be a mod from the short bus link." Honestly, this kind of moderation was to be expected, but one can dream, right?
The iPod has come a long way in audio quality since gen 1, but its relatively decent 83dB S/N ratio (shown here) gets flat-out whupped by the plainly excellent 98 dB S/N ratio of the Zen Xtra (here).
I'm guessing, from the mac.com address, that you'll either argue against this solid evidence with mac-protecting nonsense or not respond.
It's okay to buck the trend and admit two things:
1) It was a joke. 2) Apple is not always the best at everything. They are a company that, like many others, sells things manufactured by third parties in China, and, as with other companies, real-world cost-considerations come into play along with the limitations of their designers and engineers.
I'm sure that you don't understand climate physics as well as yousay you do.
Now, in this case, we're largely on the same side on things. Not wanting to take measures to curb CO2 emissions for political reasons is as bad as calling people who want explanations deniers and crackpots (this last part is where you and I differ).
The best way that we can stifle these politicizations of climatology is to demonstrate a clear effort to scientifically invalidate "holes" proposed by deniers and separate skeptics from those with political motives. Skeptics can be won over with evidence.
So, are you up to it? Do you want to explain to this poster what water and CO2 do to visible and infra-red light, or do I? Can you be bothered to show the balance of evidence for other claims? Can you have a real discussion instead of just scoffing at people with questions and treating them like idiots or crackpots? Can you actually answer questions in context, or account for the obvious politicization of this issue from all sides? (I'll show you this one again, which you've avoided answering before.)
In all of your posts on the matter (and there are a lot of them), I see a bunch of trolling, baiting, and name calling. Let's see some links to some evidence. Can you be bothered with even linking to this obvious body of evidence? Could you explain it to all of the crackpots who crazily value the scientific method? Shower us with your brilliance...
Please lump me in with the crackpots, as long as I'm not lumped in with you.
The volume of claims from established climatologists would be enough to suggest the politicization of this body of science, but we don't have to. In fact, we can merely look at an older slashdot posting.
Your game of skipping over genuine concerns and asking for proof that there is no proof is over when you back yourself into a corner like this.
I'm not saying that the IPCC is saying that our cities will be underwater, but I am saying that political push on the IPCC (Nearly all public research funding is political. If someone disagrees, he is either an idiot or not in research.) is clearly towards affirming significant change as a result of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The alarmism comes on the heels of that research.
Show of hands.
How many of us have heard from researchers who lost funding because they had dire prediction of runaway warming?
How many of us have heard from researchers who lost funding because they questioned some findings of extreme change?
Heck, I see at least one in this thread.
You're wrong about having to say *why* it is stupid to take jelly beans for cancer. If you want me to take jelly beans for cancer, you have to have the data to back it up (though I'd probably take the jelly beans, anyway, as long as it's orally).
Now, it's worth noting that the depth of the IPCC reports is generally comprehensive and explanatory. The largest problem is that the policy-makers don't read past the IPCC summaries. The time spent on IPCC summaries reflects this, and the end result for people not willing to read is this garbage.
CO2 almost certainly has a significant impact on global climate, but our research shouldn't need to lead to dramatic changes regarding only CO2. We're trying to turn only the knobs that we feel comfortable twiddling (CO2 emissions). We do this while largely ignoring the knobs that we find it difficult to twiddle (water consumption, regional urbanization, and agricultural development). Where's the funding for research showing that these are not significant causes of climate change? This is what Lindzen was talking about.
Being a doubter gets me lumped in with deniers, which is why I want the debate to be rooted in science. I think that our focus on CO2 will ultimately overlook other important causes of climate change, and I expect to be doing this again in 30 years. If we are open to answering real questions instead of quick to remove their funding, we're doing real science. Show me that care has been taken to carefully confirm and explore and I'll go along. At this point, I'm not comfortable that this is the case.
Slashdot Mirror
How come I haven't seen a "Titers Please..." joke yet?
It's only a matter of time until we have the GATTACA-style finger-prick turnstiles. The right to privacy will be viewed as a historically-interesting extravagance in the future. It's only a matter of time until possession of encrypted data is viewed as "probable cause."
Maybe we'll still have privacy for those of us willing to skip out on a few useful things (e.g. medicine, travel, food, energy, shelter).
Fear is a far more powerful weapon than reason.
I'm sure that there will be more than a few people out there complaining about the pre-determined "art" that is the refereeing of the NFL a few beers after the kick-off (what, end of the first quarter?).
There are graphics, there is commentary, it's a private stadium, and we have our legal system.
Take your pick of the reasons for this.
Yes, my own joke, but based, of course, on Justice Potter Stewart's famous "I know it when I see it."
I typed it out in my reply, had a chuckle, and then golf-clapped for myself...
I'm glad that someone else found it funny.
People don't need to be brainwashed to want some simple (even if it's wrong) explanation for phenomena or fears that they can't fit in their head. Most of us aren't comfortable believing that we have a short period of time here to get things done, and that what we have on earth is, sadly, all we're going to get. I, on the other hand, am not comfortable trying to prove a negative. Why bother?
You're not fooling anyone, though. I'm sure that you see the difference between public disclosure and secrecy in any organization. Clearly, though, your threshold for "cult" is the same as your threshold for "church."
"Cult" is far easier to say than "bait-and-switch church," so why not allow for some formal distinction?
I think a cult is a bit like pornography. You know it when you see the piles of bodies.
Compared to Vaios that have a DVD drive or 200GB second drive built in?
Really thin is only so useful. The Vaio TZ (along with some Japanese laptops that we don't get here in the states) allows you to change the way that you live. You can stuff those notebooks into a man-purse (Tumi makes some that fit rather well) and go. You can use them in the coach section of an airplane without fear of screen-crunch.
I'm not saying that the Macbook Air is a bad thing. Thin notebooks are nice, but thickness is the dimension that I find least annoying in a notebook (keeping in mind that my thickest notebook is a comparably enormous Vaio FZ, and my favorite notebook is my Thinkpad T42). I wouldn't want my sub-notebook to be as thick as the old Thinkpads were (think DSM-IV hardcover) size, but the footprint matters as well.
If only someone would bring back the old butterfly keyboard of the Thinkpad 701...
It's not quite like that.
On modern systems, threads are themselves first-class constructs, and it runs somewhat like this:
A process has things like memory-tables for virtual memory, handles for objects, files, socket connections, etc. A process always contains at least one thread (this isn't always true while a process is being set up or torn down, but it's true when most anyone's code is running).
A thread generally has a stack (in the host-process's virtual address space, so everyone can read it), some thread-local storage to make life easier for some api's (you don't need to care about this in most cases), and lives in a process. This means that threads can use virtual addresses for memory interchangeably with other threads in the same process.
Additionally, some operating systems support fibers. A fiber is like a thread except that it has to be explicitly or cooperatively (not quite the same thing) multi-tasked. Fibers use even less memory than threads, and you really don't have to care about them.
When you're in, say, Visual Studio, there's a "threads" window for all of the threads of the process that you are debugging. You can end up stepping through code on one thread while other threads are running.
The modern hardware designs lead to interesting performance side-effects from cache location and memory location. It's not quite as hard as systems that have asymmetric access to resources (e.g. Playstation 2), but it makes for fun work.
I think he was trying to combine the two.
It would also be "they're" rather than "their."
I'm just sayin'...
Well, 2005 called...
it wants its reply back.
The parent is exactly how I would have replied a couple of years ago. I was doing lots of threading work, and I found it easy to the point of being frustrated with other programmers who weren't thinking about threading all of the time.
I was wrong in two ways:
1. It's not that easy to do threading in the most efficient way possible. There's almost always room for improvement in real-world software.
2. There are plenty of programmers who don't write thread-safe/parallel code well (or at all) that are still quite useful in a product development context. Some haven't bothered to learn and some just don't have the head for it. Both types are still useful for getting your work finished, and, if you're responsible for the architecture, you need to think about presenting threading to them in a way that makes it obvious while protecting the ability to reach in and mess with the internals.
The first point is probably the most important. There are several things that programmers will go through on their way to being decent at parallelization. This is in no strict order and this is definitely not a complete list:
- OpenMP: "Okay, I've put a loop in OpenMP, and it's faster. I'm using multiple processors!!! Oh.. wait, there's more?"
Now, to be fair, OpenMP is enough to catch the low-hanging fruit in a lot of software. It's also really easy to try out on your code (and can be controlled at run-time).
- OpenMP 2: "Wait... why isn't it any faster? Wait.. is it slower?"
Are you locking on some object? Did you kill an in-loop stateful optimization to break out into multiple threads? Are you memory bound? Blowing cache? It's time to crack out VTune/CodeAnalyst.
- Traditional threading constructs (mutices, semaphores): "Hey, sweet. I just lock around this important data and we're threadsafe."
This is also often enough in current software. A critical section (or mutex) protecting some critical data solves the crashing problem, but it injects the lock-contention problem. It can also add the cost of round-tripping to the kernel, thus making some code slower.
- Transactional data structures: "Awesome. I've cracked the concurrency problem completely."
Transactional mechanisms are great, and they solve the larger data problem with the skill and cleanliness of an interlocked pointer exchange. Still, there are some issues. Does the naive approach cleanly handle overlapping threads stomping on each-others' write-changes? If so, does it do it without making life hell for the code changing the data? Does the copy/allocation/write strategy save you enough time through parallelism to make back its overhead?
Should you just go back to a critical section for this code? Should you just go back to OpenMP? Should you just go back to single-threading for this section of code? (not a joke)
Perhaps as processors get faster by core-scaling instead of clock-scaling this will become less of a dilemma, but to say that "[to do multi-threaded programming effectively] is not that difficult" is akin to writing your first ray-tracer and saying that 3D is "not that difficult." Somtimes it is. At least at this point there are places where threading effectively is a delicate dance that not every developer need think about for a team to produce solid multi-threaded software.
That doesn't mean that I object to threading being a more tightly-integrated part of the language, of course.
The sad thing here is that supercomputers have been used (and heavily funded) by the US government for nuclear weapons research in the past.
I'm sure that the first thing that the US government (Congress and the White House) thought when they heard "Iran" and "supercomputer" was "nuclear weapons program." They have years of associating supercomputers with nukes, climate research, physics, NUKES , etc. under their belts.
Every one of these that I've seen (and I've seen quite a few of them) has had Ethernet. My guess is that this reviewer was just dumb.
At this point there is also a version with a 64GB SSD, a 200GB HDD, and an external DVD burner. To me, this sounds ideal. OS, apps, and source code go on the SSD, media goes on the HDD, and the DVD-drive stays in the bag. $4000 is a big chunk of change, but...
Take a look at the cards used in this type of application (lots of Siggraph history). The cards need orientation and recognition markers, and the code needs to be readable from very odd angles well outside of optimal focus. 2D bar-codes are definitely capable of carrying a lot of data, but these cards have more work to do with (generally) cheaper cameras.
They just don't have the space/bits for per-card UIDs.
Even worse than that, the cost of producing each card would go up for individual IDs.
That could certainly work, but there's a trade-off between how many bits you can encode onto the card and how much range you have for the camera to read the card (unless you have some validation steps that the user has to go through).
You also have to consider that people might share cards to play with (legitimately), and any sort of banning might catch legitimate users out.
I think you'd do better with something that's hard to copy with printing (e.g. near-IR ink and a near-IR LED on the camera to do quick validation).
Your PS3 emulates the Emotion Engine in the Cell, but it still has a GS chip for PS2 3D rendering. It's kind of a screw, but the EE emulation is pretty solid.
The new 40GB drops the GS. Personally, I don't like the idea of any Playstation ever not being able to play old games, but that's me.
Having gone from the PS1 to the PS2 to the PS3 (with other systems sprinkled in, of course), the ability to play old games plays heavily into which system I purchase. My wife only wants one gaming system sitting under our TV.
The issue is one of parts:
The PS2 consists of two major components:
The Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer (EE + GS).
The PS3 uses two that most of us are familiar with these days:
The Cell and the Reality Synthesizer (Cell + RSX).
The Cell has no problem emulating the EE, but the GS has a trick up his sleeve, EDRAM, that gives it more bandwidth for a small bit of memory than either the Cell or RSX has. This speed makes up (somewhat) for the relatively small amount of available memory on the PS2. So, here's the run-down:
20GB PS3 Cell + RSX + EE + GS
60GB PS3 Cell + RSX + EE + GS
80GB PS3 Cell + RSX + EE-emulation-in-Cell + GS
40GB PS3 Cell + RSX
I imagine that PS1 games will work. After all, those are straight software, and the "classics" section of the Playstation Store is PS1 titles.
Vista also has "better" APIs and tools for developers to make better applications. Hell, they even slapped some of it (e.g. .NET 3.0) back into XP.
I don't think we'll be seeing any back-porting for Tiger.
The comparison with Vista is pretty fair. A new finder is, honestly, reason enough to upgrade... That puppy is awful.
You're the fucking idiot.
He asked his question, in a roundabout way. He insinuated that Kerry had given Bush the election because of his Skull & Bones connection, and he asked for a response.
As someone who gave Kerry's legal fund $100 (and Black Box Voting another $100) two hours before Kerry folded, my question would have been roughly the same (though have taken less time).
The hilarious thing is that Kerry was going to answer the question (or dodge it publicly), but the cops were too busy paying off this kid's student loans for that to happen.
I don't think Google needs to own this space. As long as it goes for more than the reserve, Google is flying high on whoever buys this space.
Google's requirements just made sure that Google can step into the game in this juicy section of spectrum even when they don't win the bidding (I don't think that they're going to try very hard).
Either way, I highly doubt that we'll see a completely free wireless mesh that only costs the initial investment of the device crop up any time soon. Your tax dollars hard at taxing you...
(Yes, I know that it would take a lot of hops to cross the country...)
Hey! How many slashdot readers are there.. if we each chipped in... oh... we're all comparatively poor.
I think the argument is that congress could impose tight-enough restrictions to keep the radioactive sludge from ever being kept in a jug.
Even if they don't, accountability is generally a good thing. Others merely knowing about screw-ups is generally enough to illicit measures to avoid future ones.
Nobody expects the congressional sub-committee inquisition!
So the iPhone won't do Exchange push email, leaving it out for me, but I pay more for my contract with Cingular, don't get SMS for free, and am also stuck with EDGE data (there is only one clamshell WM device, and it is EDGE).
I have to admit to being somewhat curious as to whether I can just pop my SIM into the iPhone and party, but I'm not really prepared to pay that kind of dough until I see how things unfold.
And, of course, don't sweat the trolls.
It's really a personal comparison between the way that the iPod sounds through Shure e4c's compared to the Zune, network Walkman (some, as others are really noisy), and an older discman. I know a few people who have switched to Zunes because of this, but I absolutely refuse to use that crappy software.
I have issues with being forced to use any software, but the Zune does an astounding job of confirming my distaste.
More to the point at hand, the iPod is a very good sounding player, but it's not the best. No, the cnet numbers are not apples-to-apples, but, even in the context of only that review, the distortion numbers for the HD iPod are fugly. Any of these players does more than a sufficient job ('cept for the iRiver and uwon units) with today's media, but "I will eat a box" jokes have to be met with a bit of ribbing.
Wow... Two informative links, a bit of ribbing for someone joking about eating an iPod box, and a Flamebait mod...
Seriously, people, there is one mad Apple-lovin' bias rolling around here. I'd love for someone to roughly classify posts as pro or anti-Apple and watch their moderation over time. As Apple ascends to being the next Microsoft (in the eyes of this group), will it be a soft turn in moderation or a hard flip as the prevailing sentiment changes?
This was, humorously enough, a mod of a reply to someone citing the "Don't be a mod from the short bus link." Honestly, this kind of moderation was to be expected, but one can dream, right?
The iPod has come a long way in audio quality since gen 1, but its relatively decent 83dB S/N ratio (shown here) gets flat-out whupped by the plainly excellent 98 dB S/N ratio of the Zen Xtra (here).
I'm guessing, from the mac.com address, that you'll either argue against this solid evidence with mac-protecting nonsense or not respond.
It's okay to buck the trend and admit two things:
1) It was a joke.
2) Apple is not always the best at everything. They are a company that, like many others, sells things manufactured by third parties in China, and, as with other companies, real-world cost-considerations come into play along with the limitations of their designers and engineers.
The second is probably harder to admit.
Happy dining...
I'm sure that you don't understand climate physics as well as you say you do.
Now, in this case, we're largely on the same side on things. Not wanting to take measures to curb CO2 emissions for political reasons is as bad as calling people who want explanations deniers and crackpots (this last part is where you and I differ).
The best way that we can stifle these politicizations of climatology is to demonstrate a clear effort to scientifically invalidate "holes" proposed by deniers and separate skeptics from those with political motives. Skeptics can be won over with evidence.
So, are you up to it? Do you want to explain to this poster what water and CO2 do to visible and infra-red light, or do I? Can you be bothered to show the balance of evidence for other claims? Can you have a real discussion instead of just scoffing at people with questions and treating them like idiots or crackpots? Can you actually answer questions in context, or account for the obvious politicization of this issue from all sides? (I'll show you this one again, which you've avoided answering before.)
In all of your posts on the matter (and there are a lot of them), I see a bunch of trolling, baiting, and name calling. Let's see some links to some evidence. Can you be bothered with even linking to this obvious body of evidence? Could you explain it to all of the crackpots who crazily value the scientific method? Shower us with your brilliance...
Please lump me in with the crackpots, as long as I'm not lumped in with you.
I was making the point about the second question, as I don't think that funding is lost these days over the first.
And you can look here.
The volume of claims from established climatologists would be enough to suggest the politicization of this body of science, but we don't have to. In fact, we can merely look at an older slashdot posting.
Your game of skipping over genuine concerns and asking for proof that there is no proof is over when you back yourself into a corner like this.
Now is the time where you shut up and move on.
I'm not saying that the IPCC is saying that our cities will be underwater, but I am saying that political push on the IPCC (Nearly all public research funding is political. If someone disagrees, he is either an idiot or not in research.) is clearly towards affirming significant change as a result of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The alarmism comes on the heels of that research.
Show of hands.
How many of us have heard from researchers who lost funding because they had dire prediction of runaway warming?
How many of us have heard from researchers who lost funding because they questioned some findings of extreme change?
Heck, I see at least one in this thread.
You're wrong about having to say *why* it is stupid to take jelly beans for cancer. If you want me to take jelly beans for cancer, you have to have the data to back it up (though I'd probably take the jelly beans, anyway, as long as it's orally).
Now, it's worth noting that the depth of the IPCC reports is generally comprehensive and explanatory. The largest problem is that the policy-makers don't read past the IPCC summaries. The time spent on IPCC summaries reflects this, and the end result for people not willing to read is this garbage.
CO2 almost certainly has a significant impact on global climate, but our research shouldn't need to lead to dramatic changes regarding only CO2. We're trying to turn only the knobs that we feel comfortable twiddling (CO2 emissions). We do this while largely ignoring the knobs that we find it difficult to twiddle (water consumption, regional urbanization, and agricultural development). Where's the funding for research showing that these are not significant causes of climate change? This is what Lindzen was talking about.
Being a doubter gets me lumped in with deniers, which is why I want the debate to be rooted in science. I think that our focus on CO2 will ultimately overlook other important causes of climate change, and I expect to be doing this again in 30 years. If we are open to answering real questions instead of quick to remove their funding, we're doing real science. Show me that care has been taken to carefully confirm and explore and I'll go along. At this point, I'm not comfortable that this is the case.