I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree. I think that we don't do enough biomimetic design, especially for production systems. Look around you. What was built using biological principles? The answer's probably "not much".
The problem seems to be engineers' blindness to "solved problems". Once somebody comes up with a workable solution, everybody just iterates upon it rather than stopping and rethinking the problem entirely. Take the "bat-craft" example. UAV design has consistently been a process of taking classic aircraft design, and then shrinking it. The problems are well understood, but you're never going to get any revolutionary features.
A couple of years ago, I was part of a competition for AUV design (autonomous submarines). Every single entry, except for ours, used the same principles that we've been using on submarines for forever. Pressure hull, with tandem thrusters for turning and propulsion. We tried to go with a more "natural" design, copying fish (flooded hull, the whole body was a control surface).
Talking to the big defense contractors that build these things for the military, all of their designs lacked any biomimetic features. Current AUV design consists of taking classic submarine designs, making them smaller, and whacking out the crew compartment. A lot of them are pretty cool, but they're certainly not borrowing anything from nature.
The same situation exists with UAV design. Look at the designs for the Int'l Aerial Robotics Competition. These are the engineering students that get recruited to design and build "the real thing" for Northrup Grumman and General Atomics. Smart guys, but they're (generally) not looking to nature.
This is not good advice. What exactly is he (or she) supposed to learn from C++? Unspecified language behaviors? Wonky object orientation? Freakiness like "pure virtual private destructors"?
Perhaps you meant C. C is small, clean, portable, and is close enough to the metal to teach you how the hardware works with your software. C teaches you pointers. C is beautiful and useful for things like embedded systems, kernel programming, and device drivers. Every programmer should learn C.
C++ is largely a legacy language that was used for applications programming. It's an unruly mongrel that's being rapidly replaced by nicer languages like Java, C#, Python, and Ruby. Learn it if you have to (or want to), but don't pretend that it's God's gift to programmers.
Or at least took the time to teach themselves algorithm analysis, data structures, some higher math, and some functional programming.
There's a lot of really good self-taught programmers out there, and they can write some pretty cool software. However, the truly elite programmers are the educated ones that can understand the principles that make it all work.
The really good employers know this. You're not going to get the plum job at Google unless you know what a fixed-point function is and what it's good for. Fog Creek Software doesn't want to hire you unless you really understand pointers and recursion. There's really neat jobs at Sun Microsystems that need you to DEEPLY understand object-orientation and algorithm analysis.
The number of people that can learn that stuff on their own is vanishingly small. Even if you can learn it by yourself, there's nothing like going through a rigorous 4-year program where you have these topics stuffed down your throat and drilled into you until you know it backwards and forwards. A good CS degree practically guarantees that you'll have a suite of kick-ass high-level skills by the time you graduate.
Yes, a good programmer will teach his (or herself) on a lot of topics. However, for many things there's just no substitute for a good old education.
Leopard does feature better Japanese support. This is like saying that the sun is brighter than the moon. OS X's Japanese support is nothing short of spectacular. All IMEs and alternate interface languages are included on the DVD (I can't remember if they're installed by default). Hell, it's even got an IME for Ainu. EVERYTHING is unicode, and all applications render Japanese characters correctly. Even mail. Leopard adds three different kinds of built-in Japanese dictionaries, including a pretty handy Japanese-English dictionary. As an added bonus, the fonts are legible and don't look like ass.
Personally, I need a computing environment that supports both Japanese and English seamlessly. Leopard fits the bill nicer than anything else I've ever used, including Vista (which I have to admit is pretty good).
ACLS? Useful in certain circumstances, I'd agree, but otherwise perverse. If you've ever had to manage shared directories that cross corporate reporting structures, ACL is invaluable. Say that Susan in Accounting wants all of Marketing, Accounting, and Sales to have full access to an Excel spreadsheet, except for Bob. Bob is in marketing, but he's an intern and doesn't need to see that data. For a lot of sysadmins, situations like this happen all the time. UNIX permissions just don't hack it.
Alternate data streams a great feature? Name 3 people who know WTF they are, how they work, or a single example of their use. Alternate Data Streams allow HFS compatibility. There's still a shocking amount of Macintosh files out there that need to have their "resource fork" maintained, and NTFS permits you to host those files properly. Again, you may not care, but there's a lot of IT folks that do.
Junctions? LOL. To the extent they work (and/or the extent to which the now-deceased Sysinternals slightly different implementation and corresponding tool) work or ever have worked, junctions are nothing more than an embarrassing and goofy implementation of symlinks. LOL yourself. They're kind of funky, but you know what? They work. Reliably. Agreed, the lack of tools makes them largely unusable, but that's not NTFS's fault.
A lot of your "problems" are actually with the tools, or the kernel. You seem to be conflating NTFS (which is generally a pretty competent product) with all of the stuff that runs on it (which isn't). Do you want me to agree that it isn't leveraged properly? That was my whole point. NTFS is a great example of a diamond-in-the-rough, something good that's encased in crap.
Speaking as one of those IT people, NTFS is probably one of the coolest pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond. ACLs, alternate data streams, directory junctions, single-instance stores, shadow copy, the list of useful features is huge. Even more surprisingly, it works pretty much as advertised. Frickin' cool.
There's another angle, though. On paper, Vista's NTFS-based backup technology walks all over Time Machine. However, the USABILITY of Vista's technology is crap. This morning, I enabled Time Machine by plugging in a USB drive and clicking "Use as Backup Disk" when prompted. To do restores, I launch the cleverly named "Time Machine" application. I've already used it twice today just because it's fun to watch the spacey animations.
Compare that to Vista's clunky "Backup and Restore Center", which you have to use if you want to backup your files on an alternate volume. I guarantee you that using "Backup and Restore Center" is beyond most average users. Sure, it might be "better", but what good is it if it never gets used?
I've never been to Warsaw, but I did spend some time at Tsinghua University last year. The people that attend Tsinghua are quite literally the best and brightest that China can produce, and that's saying something. The entrance requirements are brutally difficult, and the students I dealt with were some of the smartest people I've ever met. I'm not surprised that Tsinghua students can go toe-to-toe with the best American students and win.
These contest results become even more impressive when you consider that Tsinghua, like many developing Universities, currently has one hand tied behind its back. Tsinghua's School of Software is only a few years old, and has very limited resources. The library is small, the facilities are lacking, and the dorms are absolutely atrocious to live in (much less study). Much of the learning material that these kids are using is in English, not their native language. The fact that they're internationally competitive in any way is astounding.
A lot of us in the American educational system have a kind of bigotry when looking at foreign universities. This is particularly true in the Computer Science field. We see these kind of results and say "Well, these foreign students may be good at these programming challenges, but what can they do in the real world?" There may be a grain of truth there, but not for long. What happens in twenty years, when the great Universities of China, India, Poland, etc. have had some time to develop their C.S. and engineering programs? As an American, I want to believe that my country produces the best engineers and programmers in the world, but I think we're going to have some very stiff competition in the future.
You've got the principle right, but they'll stop working regardless of shock. That was the spooky thing. The iPod would reliably crap out at around 13,000 feet and start working again once we got back down below 10,000. I'm now back home at sea level, and it seems completely functional.
It happened to my wife's iPod as well, at the same altitudes. Apple rates all their stuff the same (10,000 feet), but my experience is that the solid state stuff will go places that spinning platters can't.
A solid state drive has a higher G-shock tolerance, is quieter and requires less power than a hard drive. These features are why the technology is attractive to the people who need it.
Totally true. There's a number of reasons I prefer solid state. I was up at around 15,000 feet this summer and my hard-drive based iPod crapped out. Apparently the head mechanisms require a certain air pressure to operate. My flash-based Newton eMate, however, continued to work just fine. Thank God. If I'd been using a regular laptop (with a spinning drive), I would have been totally screwed.
The Newton's totally solid state construction also allowed for a freaky low power consumption. I could go for a couple of weeks without needing a recharge. For people who work in extreme conditions, solid state is the only way to go.
does anyone think Bush and Kerry will have a real debate?
Actually, tonight's debate was oddly substantial. Kerry stuck to short, cogent, fact-based criticisms of Bush foreign policy, and Bush spent almost all of his time on the defensive. That's not a position he's good at, by the way. Karl Rove has trained W. to take the stance of aggressor, regardless of the facts on the ground.
Not that any of this is terribly surprising. People tend to forget that Kerry was captain of the debate team at Yale, and also gave some of the best Congressional testimony regarding the Vietnam war. The president, on the other hand, has never been particularly quick on his feet. See if you can dig up some of the joint press conferences with Tony Blair during the Iraq War. The president has NEVER been a good extemporaneous speaker, and he looks even worse when he stands next to a professional.
Short version: Kerry wanted a real debate, so he forced one. Regardless of format.
I owned one of the first generation devices. I loved it and it broke my heart.
The software is smooth and elegant, the design is slick, and it's the best portable email terminal ever made. The damn thing was unreliable, though. I went through no less than FIVE units while under the warranty period.
One had the screen crap out. One refused to turn on. One couldn't charge its' battery. One had a flaky keyboard, and the last one's radio stopped working one day. The last one was a real pisser, since it's a frickin' paperweight without network access.
Obviously, I'm a little bitter. Each time, I spoke to T-Mobile and they promptly sent me a refurbished unit as a replacement. The "new" phone would last for a few weeks, and then something would fail. The last unit I had for three months. When I called T-Mobile, they said that it was out of warranty because they start counting from the INITIAL purchase, regardless of the age of the one that flaked. They offered to send me a refurbished unit for $70.
I wasn't willing to shell out $70 every few weeks for my phone, so I switched carriers. That's when the second problem with Sidekicks reared it's head. Your data is hostage to your carrier.
The Sidekick/Hiptop works like WebTV and merely acts as a terminal for large servers run by the phone carriers. Great, because you never have to worry about backing up your data. Not great, because it makes the phone useless if you don't have GPRS service. I took the phone into Mexico, and I couldn't use any of the PDA functions because all of my data was on T-Mobile's servers in the US.
Also, it's darn near impossible to extract information from the phone for your computer. Like to sync your address books? Forget it. Your computer only has access to the data through a web interface. They kept promising sync capability "soon". I had the phone for a year. "Soon" never arrived. When I left T-Mobile, I had to hand type all of my addresses and notes into my computer.
Summary: I loved mine, when it worked. When it failed, it became a nightmare. I'd pass on this new one until they can prove they've got some quality control.
Godzilla ought to be retiring. The threat of environmental damage and subsequent mutations caused by a nuclear waste spill has been shown to be a Chicken Little cause. As more countries shift their means of electricity production to nuclear, we have seen a progressive reduction of air pollution in those countries. In the US, coal and oil are still the primary means of power generation, and it shows when looking at statistical charts how much pollution per capita is produced by Americans.
True, but Godzilla wasn't really about nuclear power. Godzilla was all about the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Japan.
The effect that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese psyche was simply incredible. It instantly broke the will of the Japanese to fight, enabling the Americans to come in and transform their society. The scars still haven't completely healed. Every time you see some post-apocalyptic anime/film/book come out of Japan, you can bet that it was influenced by the atomic bomb.
Gojira was just a natural outgrowth of that. Look at the original story: A huge amoral destructive force comes from abroad and lays waste to Japan. Conventional weapons are useless against it, and it destroys the Japanese military. The monster is only stopped by the use of a weapon that is so terrible that the creator would rather die than see it unleashed upon the world.
Gojira was always a bomb reference. As long as we have super-weapons, he'll never be irrelevant. I'll miss the big guy.
Be sure to LART the person who installed it for you. telnetd is not part of Debian's base installation, so it had to have been manually added later.
My point. The moron that screwed the initial configuration was me. Of course, it was my first Debian install. Maybe I screwed up in dselect. I don't know. What I do know is that Debian automagically put it in my startup scripts, and I didn't know that it would do that. Debian just gave a n00b more than enough rope to hang himself.
You see, THAT'S THE PROBLEM. The most popular Linux distros let you easily turn on all sorts of insecure things without so much as a warning.
A total n00b won't get rooted on OS X or (IIRC) the BSDs because turning on services is done post-install and takes an explicit administrator login. You have to really dig to find ways to expose yourself.
Totally agreed. Linux's worst enemy is the Linux boosters who think it's perfect. I'm exhausted, but I'll try and share an anecdote.
I was up all night last night securing a Debian webserver. Maybe I pushed the wrong buttons, but when that box first booted up a port scan lit it up like a christmas tree. SSH was open, but so was RPC, Finger, FTP, time, LPD, SMTP, and Telnet. Frickin' TELNET! OS X doesn't even come with a telnet server!
This was my first Debian box, so it took quite a while to learn the ropes so that I could hunt down and properly squash all of these open ports and set up some firewall rules. Sure, a knowledgeable Linux guy could have done this a lot faster. I came from the OS X world, though, so I had a lot of catching up to do.
The BSDs don't let newbies make those kind of mistakes. Set up a Mac with all of the defaults, and it's secure. OpenBSD and FreeBSD don't have squat enabled by default. Linux is great, but it still contains a LOT of pitfalls for new admins and users. These security issues are going to get worse as Linux becomes more popular.
Anyone who thinks the girls in those images look "dumpy" needs a good quick reality check.
Agreed. The "Kate Rose" sketches look particularly hot. I really worry about the folks that lust after Rei Ayanami. She looks about twelve.
That being said, I think that people are seriously misunderstanding the intention of this concept art. When you're drafting concept art for a live action film, you're trying to produce designs that will work in live-action, with real people. They totally changed the costume designs for the X-Men movies because brightly colored spandex suits didn't look good in the real world. Those movies still turned out pretty darn good.
I've just gotta chime in that 2 to 3 minute toons are definately not enough
Actually, they are.
I was at ComiCon (sp) in San Diego this year, and they had a panel discussion with Genndy and his team about "Clone Wars". The quote I remember is, "You can do a lot in three minutes." In order to figure out pacing, they spliced together Samurai Jack footage to see how much of an episode they could stuff into three minutes. Turns out, they could fit quite a lot. One of Genndy's strengths is being able to convey a lot of information and character development into very brief moments.
They showed the first short not once, but twice because the audience reaction was so good. It was incredible. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.
How charming to think that the lying, snivelling legal lapdogs at SCO are going to get the Big Blue treatment.
That's one of the really weird things about this case. IBM is NOTORIOUS for savage and unethical business practices. There was once a time when the whole tech world lived in fear of getting the "Big Blue Treatment". That treatment quite possibly involved a public reaming in court.
Now that "Big Blue" is our Linux-loving buddy, I find myself rooting for IBM to demolish a smaller company in court. Weird.
Granted, my 400mhz may run OSX nicely, It'd prolly crawl on an iBook of the equiv
Untrue. That's the nice thing about the Apple laptops. Due to the PowerPC's low power consumption, they can use the same chip in both their laptops and their desktops. Performance-wise, there's not a lot of difference between a 1Ghz Powerbook and a 1Ghz G4 tower.
The only reason why the x86 manufacturers need "mobile" chips is because their architecture is so damned inefficient, power-wise. The new 17" G4 powerbook still gets almost five hours of battery life, and that's with a "desktop" chip and a monster screen. A good architecture helps in more ways than just performance.
So companies cut those groups and buy the same whitebox stock from Taiwan. The author seems to think that this is just some Anti-R&D attitude, when all it is is the proper reaction to a market reality.
Alright, let's take your "proper reaction" to its' logical conclusion, shall we?
Companies eliminate all their proprietary technologies to buy the same whitebox stock from Taiwan. "We'll compete on price!"
The Taiwanese whitebox manufacturers decide that they can make more money by selling directly to the U.S. consumer while still undercutting the Dells and HPs.
HP and Dell, having no specialized technologies of their own, are unable to compete with the cheaper Taiwanese brands.
Dell and HP go out of business. Apple and IBM stick around because they're the only ones doing R&D these days.
Seriously. Why should I pay an extra $300 to get the same product from HP? If all you're competing on is price, then the foreign manufacturers will always kick your ass. Always. The only thing keeping Apple alive right now is fat margins supported by having *gasp* a unique product! R&D is what has enabled that, not competing in some silly price war. HP has forgotten how to do research, so they find themselves competing with Dell. Oops.
Dell is busy putting HP out of business, but what innovations has Dell developed? What will Dell fall back on when Samsung or LG makes a move and undercuts them? Commodity markets are a suckers game, and R&D is what keeps you out of them.
Like a lot of people here, I've been wondering why Intel is trying to reinvent the wheel when OpenBoot is both flexible and reliable. It's a little intimidating for Forth newbies (like myself), but I've never had a problem with any of the Sun or Apple boxen that use OF.
The motivation behind EFI is probably simple economics. Intel has effectively maximized their revenue from CPUs. This forces them to branch into other markets to keep the profits growing and the stockholders happy. By improving on the BIOS they make a more compelling case for Intel chipsets, especially in the highly profitable server arena.
OpenFirmware is an open standard, so other chipset vendors could implement their own OF solutions without ever paying a dime to Intel. EFI is probably patent encumbered and represents a nice opportunity to collect fat license checks from companies like VIA and ServerWorks. Also, MS has demonstrated how profitable controlling a platform can be. Intel's probably trying to extend their strong processor position so that they have more control over your computer. OF is, well, open. That makes it kind of suck as a monopoly extension tool.
That's what I've come up with, anyways. If anyone's got a better theory please share.
This kind of thinking is exactly what we need right now. Our space program has kind of a "chicken and egg" problem right now. NASA doesn't really have the budget to do the research we need. Space won't become cheaper until commercial interests get involved, and commercial interests won't touch space as long as it's so expensive.
By eliminating or reducing launch costs, we get more people interested in joining the party. More companies == more research dollars == better space programs for everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like the link I gave is bad. Try looking at the Wikipedia entry, particularly the "Aerial Robots" section.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree. I think that we don't do enough biomimetic design, especially for production systems. Look around you. What was built using biological principles? The answer's probably "not much".
The problem seems to be engineers' blindness to "solved problems". Once somebody comes up with a workable solution, everybody just iterates upon it rather than stopping and rethinking the problem entirely. Take the "bat-craft" example. UAV design has consistently been a process of taking classic aircraft design, and then shrinking it. The problems are well understood, but you're never going to get any revolutionary features.
A couple of years ago, I was part of a competition for AUV design (autonomous submarines). Every single entry, except for ours, used the same principles that we've been using on submarines for forever. Pressure hull, with tandem thrusters for turning and propulsion. We tried to go with a more "natural" design, copying fish (flooded hull, the whole body was a control surface).
Talking to the big defense contractors that build these things for the military, all of their designs lacked any biomimetic features. Current AUV design consists of taking classic submarine designs, making them smaller, and whacking out the crew compartment. A lot of them are pretty cool, but they're certainly not borrowing anything from nature.
The same situation exists with UAV design. Look at the designs for the Int'l Aerial Robotics Competition. These are the engineering students that get recruited to design and build "the real thing" for Northrup Grumman and General Atomics. Smart guys, but they're (generally) not looking to nature.
They're a mathematical concept useful for some pretty cool stuff. Google was built on a fixed point function.
From wikipedia:
The vector of PageRank values of all web pages is the fixed point of a linear transformation derived from the World Wide Web's link structure.
The wikipedia entry.
This is not good advice. What exactly is he (or she) supposed to learn from C++? Unspecified language behaviors? Wonky object orientation? Freakiness like "pure virtual private destructors"?
Perhaps you meant C. C is small, clean, portable, and is close enough to the metal to teach you how the hardware works with your software. C teaches you pointers. C is beautiful and useful for things like embedded systems, kernel programming, and device drivers. Every programmer should learn C.
C++ is largely a legacy language that was used for applications programming. It's an unruly mongrel that's being rapidly replaced by nicer languages like Java, C#, Python, and Ruby. Learn it if you have to (or want to), but don't pretend that it's God's gift to programmers.
Or at least took the time to teach themselves algorithm analysis, data structures, some higher math, and some functional programming.
There's a lot of really good self-taught programmers out there, and they can write some pretty cool software. However, the truly elite programmers are the educated ones that can understand the principles that make it all work.
The really good employers know this. You're not going to get the plum job at Google unless you know what a fixed-point function is and what it's good for. Fog Creek Software doesn't want to hire you unless you really understand pointers and recursion. There's really neat jobs at Sun Microsystems that need you to DEEPLY understand object-orientation and algorithm analysis.
The number of people that can learn that stuff on their own is vanishingly small. Even if you can learn it by yourself, there's nothing like going through a rigorous 4-year program where you have these topics stuffed down your throat and drilled into you until you know it backwards and forwards. A good CS degree practically guarantees that you'll have a suite of kick-ass high-level skills by the time you graduate.
Yes, a good programmer will teach his (or herself) on a lot of topics. However, for many things there's just no substitute for a good old education.
Personally, I need a computing environment that supports both Japanese and English seamlessly. Leopard fits the bill nicer than anything else I've ever used, including Vista (which I have to admit is pretty good).
Alright, let's dance.
ACLS? Useful in certain circumstances, I'd agree, but otherwise perverse. If you've ever had to manage shared directories that cross corporate reporting structures, ACL is invaluable. Say that Susan in Accounting wants all of Marketing, Accounting, and Sales to have full access to an Excel spreadsheet, except for Bob. Bob is in marketing, but he's an intern and doesn't need to see that data. For a lot of sysadmins, situations like this happen all the time. UNIX permissions just don't hack it. Alternate data streams a great feature? Name 3 people who know WTF they are, how they work, or a single example of their use. Alternate Data Streams allow HFS compatibility. There's still a shocking amount of Macintosh files out there that need to have their "resource fork" maintained, and NTFS permits you to host those files properly. Again, you may not care, but there's a lot of IT folks that do. Junctions? LOL. To the extent they work (and/or the extent to which the now-deceased Sysinternals slightly different implementation and corresponding tool) work or ever have worked, junctions are nothing more than an embarrassing and goofy implementation of symlinks. LOL yourself. They're kind of funky, but you know what? They work. Reliably. Agreed, the lack of tools makes them largely unusable, but that's not NTFS's fault.A lot of your "problems" are actually with the tools, or the kernel. You seem to be conflating NTFS (which is generally a pretty competent product) with all of the stuff that runs on it (which isn't). Do you want me to agree that it isn't leveraged properly? That was my whole point. NTFS is a great example of a diamond-in-the-rough, something good that's encased in crap.
Speaking as one of those IT people, NTFS is probably one of the coolest pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond. ACLs, alternate data streams, directory junctions, single-instance stores, shadow copy, the list of useful features is huge. Even more surprisingly, it works pretty much as advertised. Frickin' cool.
There's another angle, though. On paper, Vista's NTFS-based backup technology walks all over Time Machine. However, the USABILITY of Vista's technology is crap. This morning, I enabled Time Machine by plugging in a USB drive and clicking "Use as Backup Disk" when prompted. To do restores, I launch the cleverly named "Time Machine" application. I've already used it twice today just because it's fun to watch the spacey animations.
Compare that to Vista's clunky "Backup and Restore Center", which you have to use if you want to backup your files on an alternate volume. I guarantee you that using "Backup and Restore Center" is beyond most average users. Sure, it might be "better", but what good is it if it never gets used?
I've never been to Warsaw, but I did spend some time at Tsinghua University last year. The people that attend Tsinghua are quite literally the best and brightest that China can produce, and that's saying something. The entrance requirements are brutally difficult, and the students I dealt with were some of the smartest people I've ever met. I'm not surprised that Tsinghua students can go toe-to-toe with the best American students and win.
These contest results become even more impressive when you consider that Tsinghua, like many developing Universities, currently has one hand tied behind its back. Tsinghua's School of Software is only a few years old, and has very limited resources. The library is small, the facilities are lacking, and the dorms are absolutely atrocious to live in (much less study). Much of the learning material that these kids are using is in English, not their native language. The fact that they're internationally competitive in any way is astounding.
A lot of us in the American educational system have a kind of bigotry when looking at foreign universities. This is particularly true in the Computer Science field. We see these kind of results and say "Well, these foreign students may be good at these programming challenges, but what can they do in the real world?" There may be a grain of truth there, but not for long. What happens in twenty years, when the great Universities of China, India, Poland, etc. have had some time to develop their C.S. and engineering programs? As an American, I want to believe that my country produces the best engineers and programmers in the world, but I think we're going to have some very stiff competition in the future.
You've got the principle right, but they'll stop working regardless of shock. That was the spooky thing. The iPod would reliably crap out at around 13,000 feet and start working again once we got back down below 10,000. I'm now back home at sea level, and it seems completely functional.
It happened to my wife's iPod as well, at the same altitudes. Apple rates all their stuff the same (10,000 feet), but my experience is that the solid state stuff will go places that spinning platters can't.
Totally true. There's a number of reasons I prefer solid state. I was up at around 15,000 feet this summer and my hard-drive based iPod crapped out. Apparently the head mechanisms require a certain air pressure to operate. My flash-based Newton eMate, however, continued to work just fine. Thank God. If I'd been using a regular laptop (with a spinning drive), I would have been totally screwed.
The Newton's totally solid state construction also allowed for a freaky low power consumption. I could go for a couple of weeks without needing a recharge. For people who work in extreme conditions, solid state is the only way to go.
does anyone think Bush and Kerry will have a real debate?
Actually, tonight's debate was oddly substantial. Kerry stuck to short, cogent, fact-based criticisms of Bush foreign policy, and Bush spent almost all of his time on the defensive. That's not a position he's good at, by the way. Karl Rove has trained W. to take the stance of aggressor, regardless of the facts on the ground.
Not that any of this is terribly surprising. People tend to forget that Kerry was captain of the debate team at Yale, and also gave some of the best Congressional testimony regarding the Vietnam war. The president, on the other hand, has never been particularly quick on his feet. See if you can dig up some of the joint press conferences with Tony Blair during the Iraq War. The president has NEVER been a good extemporaneous speaker, and he looks even worse when he stands next to a professional.
Short version: Kerry wanted a real debate, so he forced one. Regardless of format.
Because I distinctly saw President Bush take a drink of water while he was speaking.
That's because you weren't watching Karl Rove.
I owned one of the first generation devices. I loved it and it broke my heart.
The software is smooth and elegant, the design is slick, and it's the best portable email terminal ever made. The damn thing was unreliable, though. I went through no less than FIVE units while under the warranty period.
One had the screen crap out. One refused to turn on. One couldn't charge its' battery. One had a flaky keyboard, and the last one's radio stopped working one day. The last one was a real pisser, since it's a frickin' paperweight without network access.
Obviously, I'm a little bitter. Each time, I spoke to T-Mobile and they promptly sent me a refurbished unit as a replacement. The "new" phone would last for a few weeks, and then something would fail. The last unit I had for three months. When I called T-Mobile, they said that it was out of warranty because they start counting from the INITIAL purchase, regardless of the age of the one that flaked. They offered to send me a refurbished unit for $70.
I wasn't willing to shell out $70 every few weeks for my phone, so I switched carriers. That's when the second problem with Sidekicks reared it's head. Your data is hostage to your carrier.
The Sidekick/Hiptop works like WebTV and merely acts as a terminal for large servers run by the phone carriers. Great, because you never have to worry about backing up your data. Not great, because it makes the phone useless if you don't have GPRS service. I took the phone into Mexico, and I couldn't use any of the PDA functions because all of my data was on T-Mobile's servers in the US.
Also, it's darn near impossible to extract information from the phone for your computer. Like to sync your address books? Forget it. Your computer only has access to the data through a web interface. They kept promising sync capability "soon". I had the phone for a year. "Soon" never arrived. When I left T-Mobile, I had to hand type all of my addresses and notes into my computer.
Summary: I loved mine, when it worked. When it failed, it became a nightmare. I'd pass on this new one until they can prove they've got some quality control.
Godzilla ought to be retiring. The threat of environmental damage and subsequent mutations caused by a nuclear waste spill has been shown to be a Chicken Little cause. As more countries shift their means of electricity production to nuclear, we have seen a progressive reduction of air pollution in those countries. In the US, coal and oil are still the primary means of power generation, and it shows when looking at statistical charts how much pollution per capita is produced by Americans.
True, but Godzilla wasn't really about nuclear power. Godzilla was all about the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Japan.
The effect that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese psyche was simply incredible. It instantly broke the will of the Japanese to fight, enabling the Americans to come in and transform their society. The scars still haven't completely healed. Every time you see some post-apocalyptic anime/film/book come out of Japan, you can bet that it was influenced by the atomic bomb.
Gojira was just a natural outgrowth of that. Look at the original story: A huge amoral destructive force comes from abroad and lays waste to Japan. Conventional weapons are useless against it, and it destroys the Japanese military. The monster is only stopped by the use of a weapon that is so terrible that the creator would rather die than see it unleashed upon the world.
Gojira was always a bomb reference. As long as we have super-weapons, he'll never be irrelevant. I'll miss the big guy.
Be sure to LART the person who installed it for you. telnetd is not part of Debian's base installation, so it had to have been manually added later.
My point. The moron that screwed the initial configuration was me. Of course, it was my first Debian install. Maybe I screwed up in dselect. I don't know. What I do know is that Debian automagically put it in my startup scripts, and I didn't know that it would do that. Debian just gave a n00b more than enough rope to hang himself.
You see, THAT'S THE PROBLEM. The most popular Linux distros let you easily turn on all sorts of insecure things without so much as a warning.
A total n00b won't get rooted on OS X or (IIRC) the BSDs because turning on services is done post-install and takes an explicit administrator login. You have to really dig to find ways to expose yourself.
Totally agreed. Linux's worst enemy is the Linux boosters who think it's perfect. I'm exhausted, but I'll try and share an anecdote.
I was up all night last night securing a Debian webserver. Maybe I pushed the wrong buttons, but when that box first booted up a port scan lit it up like a christmas tree. SSH was open, but so was RPC, Finger, FTP, time, LPD, SMTP, and Telnet. Frickin' TELNET! OS X doesn't even come with a telnet server!
This was my first Debian box, so it took quite a while to learn the ropes so that I could hunt down and properly squash all of these open ports and set up some firewall rules. Sure, a knowledgeable Linux guy could have done this a lot faster. I came from the OS X world, though, so I had a lot of catching up to do.
The BSDs don't let newbies make those kind of mistakes. Set up a Mac with all of the defaults, and it's secure. OpenBSD and FreeBSD don't have squat enabled by default. Linux is great, but it still contains a LOT of pitfalls for new admins and users. These security issues are going to get worse as Linux becomes more popular.
Anyone who thinks the girls in those images look "dumpy" needs a good quick reality check.
Agreed. The "Kate Rose" sketches look particularly hot. I really worry about the folks that lust after Rei Ayanami. She looks about twelve.
That being said, I think that people are seriously misunderstanding the intention of this concept art. When you're drafting concept art for a live action film, you're trying to produce designs that will work in live-action, with real people. They totally changed the costume designs for the X-Men movies because brightly colored spandex suits didn't look good in the real world. Those movies still turned out pretty darn good.
Folks are freaking out about nothing.
I've just gotta chime in that 2 to 3 minute toons are definately not enough
Actually, they are.
I was at ComiCon (sp) in San Diego this year, and they had a panel discussion with Genndy and his team about "Clone Wars". The quote I remember is, "You can do a lot in three minutes." In order to figure out pacing, they spliced together Samurai Jack footage to see how much of an episode they could stuff into three minutes. Turns out, they could fit quite a lot. One of Genndy's strengths is being able to convey a lot of information and character development into very brief moments.
They showed the first short not once, but twice because the audience reaction was so good. It was incredible. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.
I'd verify this, but then I'd have to watch Underworld again.
How charming to think that the lying, snivelling legal lapdogs at SCO are going to get the Big Blue treatment.
That's one of the really weird things about this case. IBM is NOTORIOUS for savage and unethical business practices. There was once a time when the whole tech world lived in fear of getting the "Big Blue Treatment". That treatment quite possibly involved a public reaming in court.
Now that "Big Blue" is our Linux-loving buddy, I find myself rooting for IBM to demolish a smaller company in court. Weird.
Granted, my 400mhz may run OSX nicely, It'd prolly crawl on an iBook of the equiv
Untrue. That's the nice thing about the Apple laptops. Due to the PowerPC's low power consumption, they can use the same chip in both their laptops and their desktops. Performance-wise, there's not a lot of difference between a 1Ghz Powerbook and a 1Ghz G4 tower.
The only reason why the x86 manufacturers need "mobile" chips is because their architecture is so damned inefficient, power-wise. The new 17" G4 powerbook still gets almost five hours of battery life, and that's with a "desktop" chip and a monster screen. A good architecture helps in more ways than just performance.
So companies cut those groups and buy the same whitebox stock from Taiwan. The author seems to think that this is just some Anti-R&D attitude, when all it is is the proper reaction to a market reality.
Alright, let's take your "proper reaction" to its' logical conclusion, shall we?
Seriously. Why should I pay an extra $300 to get the same product from HP? If all you're competing on is price, then the foreign manufacturers will always kick your ass. Always. The only thing keeping Apple alive right now is fat margins supported by having *gasp* a unique product! R&D is what has enabled that, not competing in some silly price war. HP has forgotten how to do research, so they find themselves competing with Dell. Oops.
Dell is busy putting HP out of business, but what innovations has Dell developed? What will Dell fall back on when Samsung or LG makes a move and undercuts them? Commodity markets are a suckers game, and R&D is what keeps you out of them.
Like a lot of people here, I've been wondering why Intel is trying to reinvent the wheel when OpenBoot is both flexible and reliable. It's a little intimidating for Forth newbies (like myself), but I've never had a problem with any of the Sun or Apple boxen that use OF.
The motivation behind EFI is probably simple economics. Intel has effectively maximized their revenue from CPUs. This forces them to branch into other markets to keep the profits growing and the stockholders happy. By improving on the BIOS they make a more compelling case for Intel chipsets, especially in the highly profitable server arena.
OpenFirmware is an open standard, so other chipset vendors could implement their own OF solutions without ever paying a dime to Intel. EFI is probably patent encumbered and represents a nice opportunity to collect fat license checks from companies like VIA and ServerWorks. Also, MS has demonstrated how profitable controlling a platform can be. Intel's probably trying to extend their strong processor position so that they have more control over your computer. OF is, well, open. That makes it kind of suck as a monopoly extension tool.
That's what I've come up with, anyways. If anyone's got a better theory please share.
This kind of thinking is exactly what we need right now. Our space program has kind of a "chicken and egg" problem right now. NASA doesn't really have the budget to do the research we need. Space won't become cheaper until commercial interests get involved, and commercial interests won't touch space as long as it's so expensive.
By eliminating or reducing launch costs, we get more people interested in joining the party. More companies == more research dollars == better space programs for everybody.