Every time I see a mention of Silverlight, it's followed shortly thereafter by a stream of comments of the form "Silverlight sux0rz". However, none of the ones I've skimmed have given any particular reasons.
I'm curious as to specific reasons why I should avoid installing the Silverlight plug-in on my Mac. I'm already aware of (and sympathetic to) the "DRM is fundamentally evil" argument; I'm looking for other reasons beyond that (and its companion "Microsoft is evil").
Perhaps there is a significant group (who I do not travel with) who are unable to stay up for 28 hours on the odd occasion when it's necessary to resync with the local time zone? You don't mention your age but I'd make a small wager you're under thirty? I found that in my twenties and earlier, I was completely unfazed by jet lag as you describe; for most of my thirties, still fairly unaffected as long as I managed it carefully; but in the last few years (I've just reached the big four oh) I've found that despite careful management jet lag hits me harder than it used to. These days I find that the one day of adjustment per one hour TZ shift rule of thumb seems about right.
A similar principal applies to hangovers, BTW. Up until some time in my thirties, I didn't even know what a hangover was other than in theory.
Aging's a bitch except when you consider the alternative.
I can't think of any good reasons (that don't come with several bad reasons) to actually ditch a LAN for a WAN connection.
Indeed. Funnily enough, the telcos had this same silly idea about ISDN -- everyone was going to use it instead of building an in-office LAN infrastructure. Daft though it was, it was probably a little less daffy an idea the first time around, since at least there wasn't as massive an installed base of hardware and mindshare behind LANs at the time.
Actually, according to this summary in The Week, that's incorrect. From the article (itself quoting the Toronto Star), "Emery is a victim of Canada's failure to enforce its own laws. [...] Selling marijuana seeds is, technically, illegal here." The quote from the Toronto Star article goes on to say, "Since most Canadians do not consider selling or growing marijuana to be a prison-worthy offense, Canada should strike down that law."
Not that I think that justice is being done in this case. But it's good to keep the facts straight.
I really wish I agreed, but I travel a fair amount and I can think of many occasions when I overheard or actually spoke with someone who expressed the general sentiment that "yeah, it's a pain, but it's for our own good, I'm just glad they're protecting us."
Which is all anecdotal of course. I'd be interested in seeing a controlled survey of air travelers and their opinions of airport security. Who's the outlier? Me, the curmudgeon? Or the "take my shoes, take my jockstrap, just please keep me safe" traveler?
I simply can't believe that the things you get are highly sought after.
It's certainly endemic to Slashdot to believe that if you don't want something, nobody does.
For someone who travels a lot and cares about their back, shaving 2 lbs -- that would be 40% -- of the weight off is huge. I think this is a traveler's laptop.[*] I know a couple of people who travel several weeks out of the month who have already placed their orders.
[*] And, I suppose, one for the fashion-conscious. Whatever.
Why is Apple "even worse"? Just curious -- Apple has various unappealing qualities but unlike Microsoft they don't have a monopoly which they've been found guilty of abusing to extort money from you. "Even worse" would seem to be a pretty high bar.
With respect, that's spoken like someone who doesn't drive much in unfamiliar cities, or at least has never done so with a GPS nav system.
Up until a few years ago, I might have had a similar attitude to yours. Then I rented a few cars with nav systems included (Hertz offers 'em for a few bucks extra a day, and sometimes you luck out and they give you one gratis). I was hooked. There are many reasons why a GPS nav system is better than Google maps (et al), but they can mostly be summarized by the observation that a good nav system will allow you to simulate someone who knows their way around a given area really well. A scenario: you're visiting an unfamiliar city, heading back to your hotel, your friend calls and suggests you meet someplace for dinner? No trouble as long as your nav system knows the restaurant (and it likely does). No need to ask for directions, no need to go back to your hotel room, connect your laptop, get the Google map, and copy it down. Miss a turn? The nav system will recompute on the fly. Yeah, you get some of this with Google maps over EDGE -- but not with +/- a few meters accuracy, and not with real time spoken driving directions. Just not the same thing, qualitatively.
The main drawback of the things is that one becomes reliant on them, so that when they fail (outdated maps, circumstances like temporary road closures, poor reception, etc) you can end up disoriented and without an immediate backup plan. It's like outsourcing that part of your brain. Or at least, that's how it works for me. They also come up with freakish routings sometimes (but so do Google maps et al). Notwithstanding, I find the bargain on the whole to be very worthwhile.
By the way, this goes squared for driving in European cities, many of which don't have street signs, or more correctly have street signs which are so hard to spot that they might as well not exist from the point of view of a non-native driver moving at 50 kph.
I don't know why you say that an iPhone with GPS couldn't be a good substitute for a "true automotive GPS nav system". These days, a decent "true automotive GPS nav system" is just a moderately powerful CPU, some flash memory, a screen, a GPS receiver, and some software. The first three an iPhone has, the fourth is what we're speculating about, and I see no reason in principle why the fifth couldn't be ported to the iPhone as it has been to many other lesser handhelds (for example, Garmin sells its quite good nav software for many PocketPC handhelds). These days I travel with a pocketable Garmin GPS which is certainly as good as the built-in unit I frequently had in my rental car last year. If I could integrate that functionality with my phone and end up carrying less electronic crap around with me, I would willingly pay for the privilege, and to judge by the other comments, others would too.
Rent a car with a nav system next time you're driving in an unfamiliar city. Try it. You may be surprised.
I want a bunch of that other stuff (GPS, faster data, let me use it as a modem, third-party apps) but what I want most of all is to be able to use it with a corporate liability account. For some reason, AT&T has seen fit to limit the plans the iPhone can be used with to non-discounted, personal liability plans. Sure, I understand the non-discounted aspect. The personal liability, less so. I suppose it might be that they want the 2-year lock-in and can't get it with corporate accounts, but gee does it seem short sighted. I might be prepared to drop a few hundred bucks on some new phone hardware but no way am I going to give up my company-paid account and eat the monthly charges myself instead. I can't be the only one like that.
Of course, that wouldn't take iPhone 2.0 to achieve, just AT&T 2.1. One hopes that once they think they've saturated the early and early-ish adopter market, they'll adopt a more accommodating position in order to continue to drive sales. How long did it take, say, the Treo to move from the height of geek jewelry to a discounted commodity phone? Maybe it'll take as long as that, and then I can get one. Come to think of it, the iPod 2.0 hardware the rest of you are writing about may be out by then!
Years ago (early 90's maybe?) I remember reading a paper about an empirical study -- as opposed to unsupported but vehement opinions -- of the relative efficiency of Pascal and C object code. As I recall, the conclusion was that Pascal fared better, because Pascal's strong typing and other semantic clues make it an easier target for an optimizer.
Anyone remember the paper, and have a pointer to it? The requisite five minutes with google haven't been successful for me.
According the guys running the conference network, Macs were about 40% of the machines at SIGCOMM 2007. I don't have numbers but I've observed similar at IETFs and other networking geek gatherings.
IT at the medium-sized, engineering driven technology company where I work recently came to its senses and approved Macs as a supported platform. Naturally everyone I know is in line to trade their Stinkpad in.
I feel safer in the USA than I do in any other country when it comes to expressing my rights, even though I know that in some backwater town that ability may be more suppressed than in other areas.
TFA and the presentation don't provide that much information, but it looks like they used a Linksys WRT54 (check out the photo on slide 13). IIRC, the WRT54 Tx power tops out at 100mW (the presentation also mentions 100mW on one of the "background" slides).
Based on that, I'd say the answer to your question is "none whatsoever".
Huh? I suppose you may be correct on a technicality since the iPod doesn't have a stick-y form factor, but it certainly can be used as a mass storage device. In fact for several years after the iPod was introduced, every few months we were treated to some news story or other in the popular press of the form "OMG! People can {pirate software, distribute viruses, steal trade secrets} using their iPod's 'external disk' mode! Whatever shall we do?!?"
Then again, as discussed by various posters to this thread, Vonage service does generally work fine for fax, even though they don't promise support, as long as you set the "bandwidth saver" setting to "highest" (allegedly this translates to G.711 PCM).
In fact even things you would never imagine you can haggle on, you can. Case in point, I've witnessed my uncle (who is a shameless haggler) get 10% off a small pile of books at a chain bookstore just for asking. I'm sure many of us have done the same at big box electronics stores -- "I can get this disk for $x00 from J. Random Internet Merchant, can you match that?" As you say, if you're not sure, try -- and you might be surprised where it works.
A cheaper and more promising way to produce this oil is using the Fischer Tropche process and doing coal->liquids or coal->gas. (...etc...)
An interesting analysis, although you do focus entirely on the extraction-of-fuels aspect. The other notable aspect of fuel from biomass is that (in principle anyway) it's a carbon-neutral energy cycle. Extraction of new and different fossil fuels isn't.
40 megatons of biomass/day does sound like rather a lot, though. This article (hardly authoritative, just what I happened upon with 42 seconds of googling) says the world grain harvest is ~2 gigatons... which according to your figures would fuel the US of A for 50 days or so, leaving us with nothing to eat in the bargain.
When I saw 2.0 had Session Restore, which can furthermore be turned on for regular app restarts [*] as well as the default crash/software upgrade, I decided it was time for me to switch from Safari. I've been waiting for a browser with this feature approximately forever. First, because software has bugs, and browsers (even good ones) crash. Second, because sometimes you want to restart your browser for other reasons (OS update that requires restart, memory leak in browser, etc). It's very nice to be able to do so with the knowledge your 17 windows and 42 tabs will be restored when you re-launch.
I'd be interested in knowing of (Mac) browsers other than Firefox 2.0 that do this trick, if any. I'm sorry Safari doesn't do this since I generally prefer its design. I nag Apple periodically about it through their feedback page, for all the good that does.
The headline says "It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used." This seemed way too high to be believed. So I checked and in reality what TFA says is "Across Europe, cutting standy power to 1-Watt would give countries a four percent start toward the Kyoto targets".
That's four percent towards the Kyoto targets which are of course nowhere near zero. So, parasitic power is (claimed by TFA to be) 0.04 * ((current Euro power consumption) - (Kyoto target for Euro power consumption)). Not quite as dramatic.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I see a mention of Silverlight, it's followed shortly thereafter by a stream of comments of the form "Silverlight sux0rz". However, none of the ones I've skimmed have given any particular reasons.
I'm curious as to specific reasons why I should avoid installing the Silverlight plug-in on my Mac. I'm already aware of (and sympathetic to) the "DRM is fundamentally evil" argument; I'm looking for other reasons beyond that (and its companion "Microsoft is evil").
A similar principal applies to hangovers, BTW. Up until some time in my thirties, I didn't even know what a hangover was other than in theory.
Aging's a bitch except when you consider the alternative.
Tangentially related, here's a blog entry by an NPR staffer who was harassed and threatened with arrest for using a Gigapan in Union Station.
Not that I think that justice is being done in this case. But it's good to keep the facts straight.
I really wish I agreed, but I travel a fair amount and I can think of many occasions when I overheard or actually spoke with someone who expressed the general sentiment that "yeah, it's a pain, but it's for our own good, I'm just glad they're protecting us."
Which is all anecdotal of course. I'd be interested in seeing a controlled survey of air travelers and their opinions of airport security. Who's the outlier? Me, the curmudgeon? Or the "take my shoes, take my jockstrap, just please keep me safe" traveler?
I simply can't believe that the things you get are highly sought after.
It's certainly endemic to Slashdot to believe that if you don't want something, nobody does.
For someone who travels a lot and cares about their back, shaving 2 lbs -- that would be 40% -- of the weight off is huge. I think this is a traveler's laptop.[*] I know a couple of people who travel several weeks out of the month who have already placed their orders.
[*] And, I suppose, one for the fashion-conscious. Whatever.
Why is Apple "even worse"? Just curious -- Apple has various unappealing qualities but unlike Microsoft they don't have a monopoly which they've been found guilty of abusing to extort money from you. "Even worse" would seem to be a pretty high bar.
With respect, that's spoken like someone who doesn't drive much in unfamiliar cities, or at least has never done so with a GPS nav system.
Up until a few years ago, I might have had a similar attitude to yours. Then I rented a few cars with nav systems included (Hertz offers 'em for a few bucks extra a day, and sometimes you luck out and they give you one gratis). I was hooked. There are many reasons why a GPS nav system is better than Google maps (et al), but they can mostly be summarized by the observation that a good nav system will allow you to simulate someone who knows their way around a given area really well. A scenario: you're visiting an unfamiliar city, heading back to your hotel, your friend calls and suggests you meet someplace for dinner? No trouble as long as your nav system knows the restaurant (and it likely does). No need to ask for directions, no need to go back to your hotel room, connect your laptop, get the Google map, and copy it down. Miss a turn? The nav system will recompute on the fly. Yeah, you get some of this with Google maps over EDGE -- but not with +/- a few meters accuracy, and not with real time spoken driving directions. Just not the same thing, qualitatively.
The main drawback of the things is that one becomes reliant on them, so that when they fail (outdated maps, circumstances like temporary road closures, poor reception, etc) you can end up disoriented and without an immediate backup plan. It's like outsourcing that part of your brain. Or at least, that's how it works for me. They also come up with freakish routings sometimes (but so do Google maps et al). Notwithstanding, I find the bargain on the whole to be very worthwhile.
By the way, this goes squared for driving in European cities, many of which don't have street signs, or more correctly have street signs which are so hard to spot that they might as well not exist from the point of view of a non-native driver moving at 50 kph.
I don't know why you say that an iPhone with GPS couldn't be a good substitute for a "true automotive GPS nav system". These days, a decent "true automotive GPS nav system" is just a moderately powerful CPU, some flash memory, a screen, a GPS receiver, and some software. The first three an iPhone has, the fourth is what we're speculating about, and I see no reason in principle why the fifth couldn't be ported to the iPhone as it has been to many other lesser handhelds (for example, Garmin sells its quite good nav software for many PocketPC handhelds). These days I travel with a pocketable Garmin GPS which is certainly as good as the built-in unit I frequently had in my rental car last year. If I could integrate that functionality with my phone and end up carrying less electronic crap around with me, I would willingly pay for the privilege, and to judge by the other comments, others would too.
Rent a car with a nav system next time you're driving in an unfamiliar city. Try it. You may be surprised.
I want a bunch of that other stuff (GPS, faster data, let me use it as a modem, third-party apps) but what I want most of all is to be able to use it with a corporate liability account. For some reason, AT&T has seen fit to limit the plans the iPhone can be used with to non-discounted, personal liability plans. Sure, I understand the non-discounted aspect. The personal liability, less so. I suppose it might be that they want the 2-year lock-in and can't get it with corporate accounts, but gee does it seem short sighted. I might be prepared to drop a few hundred bucks on some new phone hardware but no way am I going to give up my company-paid account and eat the monthly charges myself instead. I can't be the only one like that.
Of course, that wouldn't take iPhone 2.0 to achieve, just AT&T 2.1. One hopes that once they think they've saturated the early and early-ish adopter market, they'll adopt a more accommodating position in order to continue to drive sales. How long did it take, say, the Treo to move from the height of geek jewelry to a discounted commodity phone? Maybe it'll take as long as that, and then I can get one. Come to think of it, the iPod 2.0 hardware the rest of you are writing about may be out by then!
Years ago (early 90's maybe?) I remember reading a paper about an empirical study -- as opposed to unsupported but vehement opinions -- of the relative efficiency of Pascal and C object code. As I recall, the conclusion was that Pascal fared better, because Pascal's strong typing and other semantic clues make it an easier target for an optimizer.
Anyone remember the paper, and have a pointer to it? The requisite five minutes with google haven't been successful for me.
According the guys running the conference network, Macs were about 40% of the machines at SIGCOMM 2007. I don't have numbers but I've observed similar at IETFs and other networking geek gatherings.
IT at the medium-sized, engineering driven technology company where I work recently came to its senses and approved Macs as a supported platform. Naturally everyone I know is in line to trade their Stinkpad in.
Problem is most of america is retarted.
Too retarted to spell "retarded"?
I feel safer in the USA than I do in any other country when it comes to expressing my rights, even though I know that in some backwater town that ability may be more suppressed than in other areas.
Yeah -- even a backwater town like New York City.
and will not purchase an iPhone until they can be unlocked
We shall see if these guys are for real, but here's a place that says they'll be selling them unlocked.
TFA and the presentation don't provide that much information, but it looks like they used a Linksys WRT54 (check out the photo on slide 13). IIRC, the WRT54 Tx power tops out at 100mW (the presentation also mentions 100mW on one of the "background" slides).
Based on that, I'd say the answer to your question is "none whatsoever".
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is an oldie but a goodie on this subject.
can't act as a mass storage USB stick
Huh? I suppose you may be correct on a technicality since the iPod doesn't have a stick-y form factor, but it certainly can be used as a mass storage device. In fact for several years after the iPod was introduced, every few months we were treated to some news story or other in the popular press of the form "OMG! People can {pirate software, distribute viruses, steal trade secrets} using their iPod's 'external disk' mode! Whatever shall we do?!?"
Then again, as discussed by various posters to this thread, Vonage service does generally work fine for fax, even though they don't promise support, as long as you set the "bandwidth saver" setting to "highest" (allegedly this translates to G.711 PCM).
On the other hand, in the real world fax-over-Vonage typically works fine (at least for me and many of the others who've posted to this thread).
"The difference between theory and practice is always greater in practice than in theory."
In fact even things you would never imagine you can haggle on, you can. Case in point, I've witnessed my uncle (who is a shameless haggler) get 10% off a small pile of books at a chain bookstore just for asking. I'm sure many of us have done the same at big box electronics stores -- "I can get this disk for $x00 from J. Random Internet Merchant, can you match that?" As you say, if you're not sure, try -- and you might be surprised where it works.
A cheaper and more promising way to produce this oil is using the Fischer Tropche process and doing coal->liquids or coal->gas. (...etc...)
An interesting analysis, although you do focus entirely on the extraction-of-fuels aspect. The other notable aspect of fuel from biomass is that (in principle anyway) it's a carbon-neutral energy cycle. Extraction of new and different fossil fuels isn't.
40 megatons of biomass/day does sound like rather a lot, though. This article (hardly authoritative, just what I happened upon with 42 seconds of googling) says the world grain harvest is ~2 gigatons... which according to your figures would fuel the US of A for 50 days or so, leaving us with nothing to eat in the bargain.
When I saw 2.0 had Session Restore, which can furthermore be turned on for regular app restarts [*] as well as the default crash/software upgrade, I decided it was time for me to switch from Safari. I've been waiting for a browser with this feature approximately forever. First, because software has bugs, and browsers (even good ones) crash. Second, because sometimes you want to restart your browser for other reasons (OS update that requires restart, memory leak in browser, etc). It's very nice to be able to do so with the knowledge your 17 windows and 42 tabs will be restored when you re-launch.
I'd be interested in knowing of (Mac) browsers other than Firefox 2.0 that do this trick, if any. I'm sorry Safari doesn't do this since I generally prefer its design. I nag Apple periodically about it through their feedback page, for all the good that does.
[*] set browser.startup.page to 3.
The headline says "It's estimated that in industrialized countries, devices on standby consume on average 4% of the power used." This seemed way too high to be believed. So I checked and in reality what TFA says is "Across Europe, cutting standy power to 1-Watt would give countries a four percent start toward the Kyoto targets".
That's four percent towards the Kyoto targets which are of course nowhere near zero. So, parasitic power is (claimed by TFA to be) 0.04 * ((current Euro power consumption) - (Kyoto target for Euro power consumption)). Not quite as dramatic.
their million dollar badasses which they bought from another party
Huh? CRS-1 was done in-house.