Extending your logic, the tax bill on an 80,000 lb 18-wheeler that hauls food to your local grocery would be 2.56 million times the taxes paid on a 2,000 lb car.
So, the question is how much are you willing to pay for strawberries?
Wow, iPhone users are a lot more clued in than I would have given them credit for. If queried, I'd have probably guessed that only 40-50% actually understood that 4 != 4G...
Then again I manage a Consumer software product, and I regularly read user feedback (of which at least half is from people who, by their comments, don't seem likely to be capable of feeding and clothing themselves, let alone installing and using computer software)... So maybe I've become biased into thinking people are stupider than they really are, or perhaps Apple users are actually *gasp* more intelligent than the average Consumer.
Full disclosure: I do not work at Apple, do not directly own any Apple stock, nor do I own any version of the iPhone.
The main problem with prop 13 was that it wasn't tied to inflation, but capped annual increases at something like 2% (not sure the exact number). It basically assured that over time property taxes would tend to zero for those in their homes for a long time and anybody who purchased a home would end up with an unfair burden of the social services that the old-timers could then vote in for themselves.
Well it's certainly implied. If citizen's vote on every single piece of legislation, then it's majority rules. Having lived in many places and now residing in California, where 'the people' are given a chance to vote directly for all kinds of weird legislative proposals, I can tell you that the majority here make plenty of bad decisions.
Of course in the case of many of many middle eastern dictatorships, it doesn't hurt that there are only a handful of state-owned Internet entry points into the country in the first place.
Beyond increasing core counts (which appears mostly useless for most gaming engines beyond a couple), nothing much is doing in the world of CPUs these days.
I remember choosing between a 486 @ 25MHz versus 50MHz for an extra several hundred bucks. That's twice the clock speed within a single CPU generation for those who are keeping track.
A generation later I purchased a Pentium 75MHz, and 18 months after that upgraded it to 233MHz. That's triple the clock speed.
I even remember having a 400MHz Pentium (II I believe) and about a year later upgraded to a 1GHz P3. That's 2.5 times, not to mention the greater efficiency per clock of a P3 vs a P2.
I now sit with a nearly *5 year old* dual core 2.4GHz CPU (overclocked to 3.3GHz mind you) and I can't find even a $1000 CPU that will give me anywhere near a worthwhile performance bump for anything other than super specific parallelizable applications like scientific computations or workstation-style 3D rendering.
This transistor efficiency stall has also hit the GPU market in the past few years. Have a look at how much Nvidia or AMD have pushed top end GPU performance in the past couple years. They're making incremental 15-20% bumps per generation -- that's nothing like back in the TNT/3dfx days when you could count on a 50-100% framerate jump with each successive generation.
Consoles are stalled because GPU/CPU technology is stalled. If CPUs and GPUs were were keeping up with the previous pace from the 90s, we'd have software/games that pushed those limits.
Ah yes, the ever present analog loophole. How soon before the camera manufacturers come up with a technology that prevents the digital signature from being applied to a picture when a large 2-dimensional plane parallel to the sensor is detected? And how long before some Julian Beever wannabe finds a way around that?
IQ is highly correlated to conventional measures of success in life. My father's a psychologist and he says that IQ tests are instrumental in identifying learning problems (e.g. if you score high on an IQ test, but have poor grades, this can be an indicator that there's a deficiency that needs to be investigated) among other things.
I think the main problem is what it's called. "Intelligence Quotient" is an unfortunate vestige of the bygone era in which its standard testing methodology was devised. The average Joe (like the AC above) assumes that IQ is treated as a comprehensive, innate label of the inner workings of your brain and that's just not how it's treated today.
How could anyone think it makes sense to mod this up? The initial premise (that collection agencies are evil) is not even remotely supported by the relayed story.
P.S. Statute of limitations my ass. You and your wife are the kind of folks that make things more expensive for the rest of us.
Yeah I don't know. "Sales and Marketing people" is their competitive advantage? Are they much higher quality than the Sales and Marketing folks anywhere else or did they just recycle an old business idea and merry it to the web at an opportune time? I would grant them first mover advantage for sure, but the question is whether they can sustain it in the face of stiffer competition and with the prospect of small business eventually realizing that the quality of the Groupon customer base sucks.
What's stupid is the wrong stuff is being concentrated on.
No, what's stupid is that you make a statement that shows you misunderstand the fact that a blog post by an individual Engineer does not represent the priority or scope of items that a large organization like Mozilla is able to work on.
Your pet beef *is* being worked on and it's called Electrolysis.
Now up to Firefox 4.0b9 and STILL you can't watch Flash videos with 64-bit Flash on 64-bit Firefox on Mac OS X. It's been two or three betas now since they broke this, and they just refuse to fix it. The videos play fine in Safari and in Firefox in full-screen. But in a Firefox window, the video freezes (while the audio is okay).
I fail to see what functionality you're missing here. If the 64-bit builds are not yet properly optimized to be faster than 32-bit and Flash 64 is not faster than 32-bit Flash, what exactly is the point in rushing toward 64-bit support other than to satisfy your obsessive compulsive need for uniformity?
Tell me this, what would you remove from FF3 that you consider to be bloated -- or did you just want to get a comment in early so you could be modded up?
I dare any of you who modded the parent Insightful to benchmark FF2 versus the current build of FF3.6 versus FF4 beta9 in startup speed, memory usage, page loading time and javascript. I'll let you in an a little secret: it's gotten progressively faster across the board over time.
I may also be completely pathetic, however the next time a job interviewer googles my name, they're unlikely to find out that I got into a completely pathetic argument over meaningless comments on a discussion board with other anonymous losers.
It depends on whether the anti-bacterial agent's action is general or specific. Chlorine bleach is an effective anti-bacterial agent because it has a general mechanism of anti-bacterial action -- it rips apart cell walls... Bacteria can not easily evolve around this as cell walls are a most basic building block of most bacteria (with the possible exception of mycoplasma?) and so chlorine will continue to be effective.
The problem comes about when you have an anti-bacterial agent whose action is specific to a pathway that at least theoretically can be overcome through evolution. Given enough time and instances of exposure, there is a chance that bacteria will be successful at selecting around the disrupted pathway.
Last I heard (circa 2007), it was believed that Triclosan acted in a general way as it had not been shown that targeted bacteria had evolved a mechanism for surviving Triclosan introduction. However the exact mechanism by which Triclosan performs its anti-bacterial action was not completely understood.
Regardless, the notion that Triclosan could be affecting the amount or breadth of bacteria that children are exposed to during a time when their immune system is developing is not a good thing.
You could have predicted this lateness because the Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days".
I think you're confusing cause and effect. You could argue that early on they mismanaged the scope of the project and therefore set unrealistic expectations, but so far as I've seen, the build monikers themselves (alpha, beta, nightly, RC, etc.) have proven to have surprisingly little to do with the actual readiness of the code.
Rather I would say you could have predicted this lateness based on a quick gander at a historical trend showing the number of bugs that are being found, fixed and remain on a daily basis. You tend to get a rather predictable bell curve from release to release when you track such things. We appear to have just recently started building horizontally over the crest of the bell curve for Firefox 4, as you can see here. As a fairly clued-in nightly tester, and based on what I see in the bugzilla database and the movement of the trend graphs over the past several months (and also assuming a nearly 3 week dead time for winter holidays) I would not at all be surprised to see a mid-late March final release.
Dude, grow up. The storyline's certainly got major flaws. It made horrible caricatures of military leaders and business men and in my humble opinion is quite obviously drenched with white liberal guilt. But it is without a doubt the most spectacular visual experience I've had at a movie theater. Ever. If you're a CGI or Sci-fi fan, you truly missed out because your stubborn world view prevented you from seeing it and building an informed first hand opinion.
Apple had a crude input device made for them in 1979 that was called a "tablet" because its shape resembled... um, a tablet. Coincidentally, Apple recently introduced a mobile computing device that is also tablet-shaped.
It also look like Apple's PR team completely messed up
I wouldn't pin this on Marketing/PR. This came directly from the top. Apple is where it is largely because they have a bullheaded perfectionist CEO, but that attitude has proven to become a liability when the going gets tough. I bet there's a bunch of people in Apple PR secretly fuming over their boss's public outbursts.
I suspect this will eventually bring down the manufacturing costs of Enterprise class drives, rather than making consumer drives "more reliable". I think reliability concerns with current consumer-oriented MLC designs to be overstated.
Anecdotally, my Intel 160GB G2 drive is going on 7 months of usage as a primary drive on a daily used Win7-64 box, and has averaged about 6GB per day of writes over that period (according to Intel's SSD toolbox utility). Given that rate of use over a sustained period (which theoretically means it could last decades, assuming that some as yet undiscovered manufacturing defect doesn't cut it short) combined with the fact that even when SSDs fail, they do so gracefully on the next write operation, I just don't see the need for consumer-oriented drives to sport such fancy reliability tricks.
EVERY PENNY THESE GUYS MAKE COMES OUT OF OUR POCKET.
That's only partially true -- it only comes out of the pockets of those who regularly buy and sell. Choose an asset allocation and diversify your investments in market-wide indexes and you can bypass the vast majority of that skimming.
Slashdot Mirror
Extending your logic, the tax bill on an 80,000 lb 18-wheeler that hauls food to your local grocery would be 2.56 million times the taxes paid on a 2,000 lb car.
So, the question is how much are you willing to pay for strawberries?
Wow, iPhone users are a lot more clued in than I would have given them credit for. If queried, I'd have probably guessed that only 40-50% actually understood that 4 != 4G...
Then again I manage a Consumer software product, and I regularly read user feedback (of which at least half is from people who, by their comments, don't seem likely to be capable of feeding and clothing themselves, let alone installing and using computer software)... So maybe I've become biased into thinking people are stupider than they really are, or perhaps Apple users are actually *gasp* more intelligent than the average Consumer.
Full disclosure: I do not work at Apple, do not directly own any Apple stock, nor do I own any version of the iPhone.
The main problem with prop 13 was that it wasn't tied to inflation, but capped annual increases at something like 2% (not sure the exact number). It basically assured that over time property taxes would tend to zero for those in their homes for a long time and anybody who purchased a home would end up with an unfair burden of the social services that the old-timers could then vote in for themselves.
Well it's certainly implied. If citizen's vote on every single piece of legislation, then it's majority rules. Having lived in many places and now residing in California, where 'the people' are given a chance to vote directly for all kinds of weird legislative proposals, I can tell you that the majority here make plenty of bad decisions.
Of course in the case of many of many middle eastern dictatorships, it doesn't hurt that there are only a handful of state-owned Internet entry points into the country in the first place.
Beyond increasing core counts (which appears mostly useless for most gaming engines beyond a couple), nothing much is doing in the world of CPUs these days.
I remember choosing between a 486 @ 25MHz versus 50MHz for an extra several hundred bucks. That's twice the clock speed within a single CPU generation for those who are keeping track.
A generation later I purchased a Pentium 75MHz, and 18 months after that upgraded it to 233MHz. That's triple the clock speed.
I even remember having a 400MHz Pentium (II I believe) and about a year later upgraded to a 1GHz P3. That's 2.5 times, not to mention the greater efficiency per clock of a P3 vs a P2.
I now sit with a nearly *5 year old* dual core 2.4GHz CPU (overclocked to 3.3GHz mind you) and I can't find even a $1000 CPU that will give me anywhere near a worthwhile performance bump for anything other than super specific parallelizable applications like scientific computations or workstation-style 3D rendering.
This transistor efficiency stall has also hit the GPU market in the past few years. Have a look at how much Nvidia or AMD have pushed top end GPU performance in the past couple years. They're making incremental 15-20% bumps per generation -- that's nothing like back in the TNT/3dfx days when you could count on a 50-100% framerate jump with each successive generation.
Consoles are stalled because GPU/CPU technology is stalled. If CPUs and GPUs were were keeping up with the previous pace from the 90s, we'd have software/games that pushed those limits.
Ah yes, the ever present analog loophole. How soon before the camera manufacturers come up with a technology that prevents the digital signature from being applied to a picture when a large 2-dimensional plane parallel to the sensor is detected? And how long before some Julian Beever wannabe finds a way around that?
Where are my mod points? Yeah exactly that.
IQ is highly correlated to conventional measures of success in life. My father's a psychologist and he says that IQ tests are instrumental in identifying learning problems (e.g. if you score high on an IQ test, but have poor grades, this can be an indicator that there's a deficiency that needs to be investigated) among other things.
I think the main problem is what it's called. "Intelligence Quotient" is an unfortunate vestige of the bygone era in which its standard testing methodology was devised. The average Joe (like the AC above) assumes that IQ is treated as a comprehensive, innate label of the inner workings of your brain and that's just not how it's treated today.
How could anyone think it makes sense to mod this up? The initial premise (that collection agencies are evil) is not even remotely supported by the relayed story.
P.S. Statute of limitations my ass. You and your wife are the kind of folks that make things more expensive for the rest of us.
OMG, the gub'ment is taking down botnet servers illegally controlling millions of PCs!
Seriously, I'm all for hating on government control, but is what they're doing in this instance so egregious?
Yeah I don't know. "Sales and Marketing people" is their competitive advantage? Are they much higher quality than the Sales and Marketing folks anywhere else or did they just recycle an old business idea and merry it to the web at an opportune time? I would grant them first mover advantage for sure, but the question is whether they can sustain it in the face of stiffer competition and with the prospect of small business eventually realizing that the quality of the Groupon customer base sucks.
What's stupid is the wrong stuff is being concentrated on.
No, what's stupid is that you make a statement that shows you misunderstand the fact that a blog post by an individual Engineer does not represent the priority or scope of items that a large organization like Mozilla is able to work on.
Your pet beef *is* being worked on and it's called Electrolysis.
Now up to Firefox 4.0b9 and STILL you can't watch Flash videos with 64-bit Flash on 64-bit Firefox on Mac OS X. It's been two or three betas now since they broke this, and they just refuse to fix it. The videos play fine in Safari and in Firefox in full-screen. But in a Firefox window, the video freezes (while the audio is okay).
I fail to see what functionality you're missing here. If the 64-bit builds are not yet properly optimized to be faster than 32-bit and Flash 64 is not faster than 32-bit Flash, what exactly is the point in rushing toward 64-bit support other than to satisfy your obsessive compulsive need for uniformity?
Tell me this, what would you remove from FF3 that you consider to be bloated -- or did you just want to get a comment in early so you could be modded up?
I dare any of you who modded the parent Insightful to benchmark FF2 versus the current build of FF3.6 versus FF4 beta9 in startup speed, memory usage, page loading time and javascript. I'll let you in an a little secret: it's gotten progressively faster across the board over time.
I may also be completely pathetic, however the next time a job interviewer googles my name, they're unlikely to find out that I got into a completely pathetic argument over meaningless comments on a discussion board with other anonymous losers.
It depends on whether the anti-bacterial agent's action is general or specific. Chlorine bleach is an effective anti-bacterial agent because it has a general mechanism of anti-bacterial action -- it rips apart cell walls... Bacteria can not easily evolve around this as cell walls are a most basic building block of most bacteria (with the possible exception of mycoplasma?) and so chlorine will continue to be effective.
The problem comes about when you have an anti-bacterial agent whose action is specific to a pathway that at least theoretically can be overcome through evolution. Given enough time and instances of exposure, there is a chance that bacteria will be successful at selecting around the disrupted pathway.
Last I heard (circa 2007), it was believed that Triclosan acted in a general way as it had not been shown that targeted bacteria had evolved a mechanism for surviving Triclosan introduction. However the exact mechanism by which Triclosan performs its anti-bacterial action was not completely understood.
Regardless, the notion that Triclosan could be affecting the amount or breadth of bacteria that children are exposed to during a time when their immune system is developing is not a good thing.
You could have predicted this lateness because the Firefox folks seem to think "beta" means "Let's add new features every couple of days".
I think you're confusing cause and effect. You could argue that early on they mismanaged the scope of the project and therefore set unrealistic expectations, but so far as I've seen, the build monikers themselves (alpha, beta, nightly, RC, etc.) have proven to have surprisingly little to do with the actual readiness of the code.
Rather I would say you could have predicted this lateness based on a quick gander at a historical trend showing the number of bugs that are being found, fixed and remain on a daily basis. You tend to get a rather predictable bell curve from release to release when you track such things. We appear to have just recently started building horizontally over the crest of the bell curve for Firefox 4, as you can see here. As a fairly clued-in nightly tester, and based on what I see in the bugzilla database and the movement of the trend graphs over the past several months (and also assuming a nearly 3 week dead time for winter holidays) I would not at all be surprised to see a mid-late March final release.
Dude, grow up. The storyline's certainly got major flaws. It made horrible caricatures of military leaders and business men and in my humble opinion is quite obviously drenched with white liberal guilt. But it is without a doubt the most spectacular visual experience I've had at a movie theater. Ever. If you're a CGI or Sci-fi fan, you truly missed out because your stubborn world view prevented you from seeing it and building an informed first hand opinion.
Your nightmare already exists. it's called Proctor and Gamble: http://www.pg.com/en_US/brands/index.shtml/
Apple had a crude input device made for them in 1979 that was called a "tablet" because its shape resembled... um, a tablet. Coincidentally, Apple recently introduced a mobile computing device that is also tablet-shaped.
Slow news day, eh?
It also look like Apple's PR team completely messed up
I wouldn't pin this on Marketing/PR. This came directly from the top. Apple is where it is largely because they have a bullheaded perfectionist CEO, but that attitude has proven to become a liability when the going gets tough. I bet there's a bunch of people in Apple PR secretly fuming over their boss's public outbursts.
I suspect this will eventually bring down the manufacturing costs of Enterprise class drives, rather than making consumer drives "more reliable". I think reliability concerns with current consumer-oriented MLC designs to be overstated.
Anecdotally, my Intel 160GB G2 drive is going on 7 months of usage as a primary drive on a daily used Win7-64 box, and has averaged about 6GB per day of writes over that period (according to Intel's SSD toolbox utility). Given that rate of use over a sustained period (which theoretically means it could last decades, assuming that some as yet undiscovered manufacturing defect doesn't cut it short) combined with the fact that even when SSDs fail, they do so gracefully on the next write operation, I just don't see the need for consumer-oriented drives to sport such fancy reliability tricks.
Classic case of innovator's dilemma. This is a great excerpt from the authoritative book on the topic:
http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/christensen.htm/
EVERY PENNY THESE GUYS MAKE COMES OUT OF OUR POCKET.
That's only partially true -- it only comes out of the pockets of those who regularly buy and sell. Choose an asset allocation and diversify your investments in market-wide indexes and you can bypass the vast majority of that skimming.