Like many of us, he seems to find keeping a nice current PC
desirable, and also having a low end entertainment rig redundant.
That does not follow from wanting Microsoft to release an actual
Windows version stripped down to the guts for gaming, which would
more-or-less preclude using it as a general-purpose PC - Do you
plan to use it to surf the web without Flash, Quicktime, Java, and
game-killing AV/AS installed? Plan to use Office and Acrobat without
a dozen input and conversion services/startups enabled? Plan to do
some graphics work without tablet support, colorspace conversion
filters, and resource-sucking printer and camera drivers? Plan
to do multimedia editing without a million+1 memory-sucking
codecs installed?
Now, my somewhat toned down followup, making it easy to turn everything
off temporarily (or permanantly, if desired) on a standard installation,
does satisfy your statement. Yet you take exception with that.
Thus, you appear simply argumentative, since as far as I can tell,
you basically agree with me, and not so much with the GP.
Why can I not install the most basic framework of the OS
and DX in order to utilize all available resources of my rig?
You can - Microsoft sells that under the name "XBox".
Joking aside, personally, I would say Windows needs less
stratification among the various versions. Have a standard version,
a server version, and if really neccessary, an uber-high-end-server
version. No more than that. Well, perhaps the embedded version (for
those softcore wimps who think "embedded" means "only" 64MB of RAM and
a CPU measured in hundreds of MHz), but that counts as something of a
special case.
Within those, Microsoft should make it easy to turn off individual
resource hogs (and I mean easier and more self-explanatory than the SCM).
But I don't see the need to confuse users with 27 different versions just
for the home market.
MSN-Zogby, IIRC, conducts online polls. Online polls tend to
violate a wide array of rules regarding statistical bias.
If you expect the results to generalize to the offline crowd, correct.
If, however, you want to know primarily what people-who-answer-online-polls
think, then they work simply wonderfully - You wouldn't want a
truly "random" sample in that case.
Selection bias only matters when it gives you an unrepresentative
subsection of your target population.
I'd just hate to see another Lovecraft work botched
I don't think we'll ever get to see a decent big-screen
rendition of a Lovecraft work. His style just doesn't lend itself
to what audiences want, and no studio will foot the bill to make a
"true" production that only a handfull of purists will pay to see.
That said, I could see AtMoM as reasonably adaptable to the
documentary-horror subgenre without butchering it too
badly... As long as it doesn't have the entire second half framed
as one long flee-the-Shoggoth scene.
Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location
of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary,
central service.
...Because putting "wget mywebsite.com" in your system startup
script (yes, you can do that on Windows as well, you just need to
download wget first) has sooooo many proprietary,
centralized dependancies?
I actually use something very like that, solely for the purpose
of finding my own remote machines' dynamic IP addresses. I don't
really see the need for a dedicated "project" to make an entry
in your access_log on startup.
Another good example is the \pi^0 (neutral pion), which is made of
up and anti-up (or down and anti-down) quarks. It decays after some
time to two photons.
As a slightly more familiar example, a photon consists of a positron and
an electron. Since it occurs reverseably, you could just as well consider
their "annhilation" into a photon as a composition, and their creation as
a decomposition.
Although TFA has a few obvious errors, they apparently just use
thermal depolymerization to crack just about anything organic into
a light crude-like goo.
Not at all vaporware, and not even all that difficult (though not
something you can really do on a small scale, thus the need for VC).
The biggest "problems" with it appear mostly regulatory... At the same
time we have everyone crying about the price of energy, we have just
about every viable alternative energy proposal shot down for
completely assinine reasons ranging from cosmetic to FUD.
True, and you can usually disable that by turning off all "optimization"
features in your player (or if you use one of the far superior FOSS
players, just tell it to use software rather than overlay or DX rendering).
Presto, DVD output goes to a normal capturable window rather than to
a magic green rectangle only visible to the video card.
I have a problem with the idea of software becoming open
sourced just because the users want it.
The entire concept of intellectual property (by which I include both
patents and copyrights) exists precisely because
"users want it" - ie, We-The-People grant the creator a
limited monopoly to encourage that entity to do
their thing.
Without the "limited" part of that, they, not the users,
have broken their end of the bargain.
By explicitly no longer allowing us to license WFW311 (or releasing it
into the wild for free), Microsoft has done no less than exploited
our beneficence - They've gotten their cash, now they want to
take our shared cultural resource away from the very society
that allowed them to gain by it.
National security is the realm of the Commander-in-Chief - NOT
congress, and broad military issues should be left with strong
leadership, not with bureaucracy.
Agreed, thus we have Congress only sign the paychecks rather
than dictating battlefield strategies.
International terrorism is primarily a
military - NOT LAW ENFORCEMENT - matter.
Sorry, but there we part ways. The military works great against
large, armed, easily-identified, centrally-organized opponents.
Remove any of those modifiers, and you use a maul to trim a hangnail.
Fighting a small group? Massive overkill. Fighting unarmed
opponents? Massacre. Fighting unidentifiable opponents? Iraq.
Fighting loosely organized isolated cells? Fingers-in-the-dike.
Communications of internationals, like it or not, are NOT covered
by the US Constitution.
"No person shall [...] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Notice the choice of words: "No person". Not "No American". Not "No one
on US soil". Not "No person who only communicates from and to the US". Nor,
you'll notice, does it contain exceptions for "unless communicating
internationally", or "unless on a watchlist", or "unless of the currently
unpopular race/religion/ideology".
Every time I see this discussed online, there are people who
say things like "the telecoms shouldn't be punished for doing
as the government asked", ignoring the illegality, that Qwest
didn't go along, etc.
Funny, that.
Most small-scale human-committed crimes occur either spontaneously or
out of necessity. Killing a cheating spouse, stealing to make a
living, downloading Chinese Democracy, that sort of thing.
Harsh punishments thus do not act as a deterrent to such
crime. Simple as that. People either do not consider the consequences
before hand, or decide the benefits outweigh the risks.
Now here, with the telecoms, we have a situation where harsh
punishment would very much deter similar future cooperation
with illegal requests from the government... And yet, as far as I
can tell, that seems like exactly the reason our congresscritters
don't want to punish them? Because it might make them
actually obey (or at least think twice about) the law next time
a black helecopter lands in the CEO's back yard?
Sick.
I have to agree with the FP on this one... I weakly supported
Obama as not too offensive to most of my views. I feel
rather strongly on this issue, however, and his vote in this
situations has reduced him from "passable" to the all-too-common
"lesser of two evils".
All this law does is provide legal protection for teachers
to tech "alternate views" to the Theory of Evolution. It is NOT
exclusively restricted to ID teaching.
And Microsoft only gives users the choice of using the
built-in browser and media player rather than needing to go out
of their way to download or buy better alternatives. They did
NOT exclusively restrict Windows from running popular alternatives.
we are seeing way too many people discount notions
of the supernatural simply because it's supernatural
True - Because science can neither "prove" or "disprove" anything.
You merely support or fail to support your hypothesis (or more
strictly, you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis).
In the case of supernatural explanations of a given phenomenon,
science has, repeatedly, considered that as a hypothesis
and consistantly failed to support it (borderline or weakly positive confirmation sometimes happens, but if you can't reproduce it,
you have to toss it out).
And at some point, after you have failed enough times to support the
idea that ghosts keep stealing your car keys, only an idiot would
consider that as a hypothesis before exhausting just about
every other possibility.
Sure, the companies say that they hope to drive the
price down to $40,000, but they don't ever seem to give
any data to explains how they came up with that number.
They don't really need to explain it.
That spoooky high number comes from the fact that they've made a
few hundred prototypes by hand, and factored the engineering costs
into it. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of parts or
mass-production, which should realistically not come out all
that much higher than any other mass-produced car...
H2 vehicles have only two big additional expenses over ICEs - The
oft-mentioned "expensive" catalysts, which only really add a few
hundred dollars to the cost, and battery arrays (if applicable),
which can add up to a few thousand. Certainly nothing even
close to a million dollars, and the rest of the drivetrain
arguably costs less than an ICE (you basically have no
engine, no transmission, no emissions control, no breaks... Just
batteries, two/four electric motors, and a PEM stack.
Calling them an absolute limit to longevity is tantamount
to call him a fool or a fraud.
Others have done so outright. I give him the benefit of the doubt.
I'd rather not have his time wasted fielding ill-informed
questions like this one.
Wasted??? Sorry, but when someone glosses over major problems
with suggestions that we "solve" a problem by exacerbating it
(and then require regular, no doubt expensive, treatments once
or twice a year just to allow certain of our cells to function
normally) - I'd hardly call that "ill-informed" or "wasted".
A bullet will absolutely cure Cancer - We just need to come up
with three or four currently-nonexistant solutions to the problem
of how to keep functioning normally after bleeding to death.
Look into his work. WILT specifically adresses the problems
brought about by telomeres.
IMO, WILT solves the problem caused by telomerase by creating
(at least) two different ones: It requires a way to completely
disable telomerase production (and ACT, and who knows how many
other tricks we'll discover cancer cells have for lengthening
those puppies); It also requires an effectively limitless supply
of compatible stem cells to restore those tissues that do
need some telomere lengthening strategy. And on top of that, it
requires regular therapy to put those stem cells where we need
them, before we run out of such silly little conveniences as
RBCs.
I'd love to believe that we might "cure" aging within my lifetime, but
several of the aging mechanisms discovered over the past 20 years (many
of which you personally get credit for) appear more-or-less absolute
limits to longevity. As just one example, telomerase - Inhibit it (as
most human cells do), and cells can only divide a finite number of times;
reenable it, and we live right up until we die of cancer.
Given such limitations, do you still consider near-immortality as a realistic
possibility, or will we merely see a continuation of the current trend of
higher functionality up the extreme natural limit to our lifespans (110 to
120 years), at which point people simply die of nothing?
Looks like those early Eee PC 900 adopters (£329 inc VAT, initially)
have been stiffed. Still, that's progress, I guess...
I know, right?
Like that first IBM PC clone I owned... Can you believe I (or rather, my
parents) paid almost $2500 for a crappy ol' 8086 CPU with 256MB of RAM???
Bastards, just stickin' it to those of us who can't hold out for the
$0.99 Walmart special on Quantum computers with a petabyte of memory
and a sub-etha WLAN adapter! I say we sue!
Should I 'ride the wave' and join the new company and culture,
or dust off the old CV/resume?"
You should do both - Start looking for a new job ASAP, but don't
burn any bridges. In six months to a year, when they come to
greatly regret the decision to outsource, as someone who already knows
your job, you'll find yourself in a position to demand just about
anything to come back.
Slashdot Mirror
Like many of us, he seems to find keeping a nice current PC desirable, and also having a low end entertainment rig redundant.
That does not follow from wanting Microsoft to release an actual Windows version stripped down to the guts for gaming, which would more-or-less preclude using it as a general-purpose PC - Do you plan to use it to surf the web without Flash, Quicktime, Java, and game-killing AV/AS installed? Plan to use Office and Acrobat without a dozen input and conversion services/startups enabled? Plan to do some graphics work without tablet support, colorspace conversion filters, and resource-sucking printer and camera drivers? Plan to do multimedia editing without a million+1 memory-sucking codecs installed?
Now, my somewhat toned down followup, making it easy to turn everything off temporarily (or permanantly, if desired) on a standard installation, does satisfy your statement. Yet you take exception with that.
Thus, you appear simply argumentative, since as far as I can tell, you basically agree with me, and not so much with the GP.
Why can I not install the most basic framework of the OS and DX in order to utilize all available resources of my rig?
You can - Microsoft sells that under the name "XBox".
Joking aside, personally, I would say Windows needs less stratification among the various versions. Have a standard version, a server version, and if really neccessary, an uber-high-end-server version. No more than that. Well, perhaps the embedded version (for those softcore wimps who think "embedded" means "only" 64MB of RAM and a CPU measured in hundreds of MHz), but that counts as something of a special case.
Within those, Microsoft should make it easy to turn off individual resource hogs (and I mean easier and more self-explanatory than the SCM). But I don't see the need to confuse users with 27 different versions just for the home market.
MSN-Zogby, IIRC, conducts online polls. Online polls tend to violate a wide array of rules regarding statistical bias.
If you expect the results to generalize to the offline crowd, correct.
If, however, you want to know primarily what people-who-answer-online-polls think, then they work simply wonderfully - You wouldn't want a truly "random" sample in that case.
Selection bias only matters when it gives you an unrepresentative subsection of your target population.
I'd just hate to see another Lovecraft work botched
I don't think we'll ever get to see a decent big-screen rendition of a Lovecraft work. His style just doesn't lend itself to what audiences want, and no studio will foot the bill to make a "true" production that only a handfull of purists will pay to see.
That said, I could see AtMoM as reasonably adaptable to the documentary-horror subgenre without butchering it too badly... As long as it doesn't have the entire second half framed as one long flee-the-Shoggoth scene.
Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service.
...Because putting "wget mywebsite.com" in your system startup
script (yes, you can do that on Windows as well, you just need to
download wget first) has sooooo many proprietary,
centralized dependancies?
I actually use something very like that, solely for the purpose of finding my own remote machines' dynamic IP addresses. I don't really see the need for a dedicated "project" to make an entry in your access_log on startup.
Why exactly would this NOT work on a desktop? Or a UMPC? Or a ULCPC?
It would work just fine... But do you often take your desktop PC out for coffee?
Another good example is the \pi^0 (neutral pion), which is made of up and anti-up (or down and anti-down) quarks. It decays after some time to two photons.
As a slightly more familiar example, a photon consists of a positron and an electron. Since it occurs reverseably, you could just as well consider their "annhilation" into a photon as a composition, and their creation as a decomposition.
vaporware, literally.
Although TFA has a few obvious errors, they apparently just use thermal depolymerization to crack just about anything organic into a light crude-like goo.
Not at all vaporware, and not even all that difficult (though not something you can really do on a small scale, thus the need for VC).
The biggest "problems" with it appear mostly regulatory... At the same time we have everyone crying about the price of energy, we have just about every viable alternative energy proposal shot down for completely assinine reasons ranging from cosmetic to FUD.
AKAIK the DVD plays in an "overlay" layer...
True, and you can usually disable that by turning off all "optimization" features in your player (or if you use one of the far superior FOSS players, just tell it to use software rather than overlay or DX rendering). Presto, DVD output goes to a normal capturable window rather than to a magic green rectangle only visible to the video card.
What's really funny is that I bet those machines run Vista. And Vista has the Stereo Mix functionality built into the OS!
Because, y'know, why should we actually let dedicated hardware do its thing when we can put the load on the CPU instead?
I have a problem with the idea of software becoming open sourced just because the users want it.
The entire concept of intellectual property (by which I include both patents and copyrights) exists precisely because "users want it" - ie, We-The-People grant the creator a limited monopoly to encourage that entity to do their thing.
Without the "limited" part of that, they, not the users, have broken their end of the bargain.
By explicitly no longer allowing us to license WFW311 (or releasing it into the wild for free), Microsoft has done no less than exploited our beneficence - They've gotten their cash, now they want to take our shared cultural resource away from the very society that allowed them to gain by it.
Unacceptible.
National security is the realm of the Commander-in-Chief - NOT congress, and broad military issues should be left with strong leadership, not with bureaucracy.
Agreed, thus we have Congress only sign the paychecks rather than dictating battlefield strategies.
International terrorism is primarily a military - NOT LAW ENFORCEMENT - matter.
Sorry, but there we part ways. The military works great against large, armed, easily-identified, centrally-organized opponents. Remove any of those modifiers, and you use a maul to trim a hangnail. Fighting a small group? Massive overkill. Fighting unarmed opponents? Massacre. Fighting unidentifiable opponents? Iraq. Fighting loosely organized isolated cells? Fingers-in-the-dike.
Communications of internationals, like it or not, are NOT covered by the US Constitution.
"No person shall [...] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Notice the choice of words: "No person". Not "No American". Not "No one on US soil". Not "No person who only communicates from and to the US". Nor, you'll notice, does it contain exceptions for "unless communicating internationally", or "unless on a watchlist", or "unless of the currently unpopular race/religion/ideology".
Take your pick
Okay, how about "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary..."?
Every time I see this discussed online, there are people who say things like "the telecoms shouldn't be punished for doing as the government asked", ignoring the illegality, that Qwest didn't go along, etc.
Funny, that.
Most small-scale human-committed crimes occur either spontaneously or out of necessity. Killing a cheating spouse, stealing to make a living, downloading Chinese Democracy, that sort of thing. Harsh punishments thus do not act as a deterrent to such crime. Simple as that. People either do not consider the consequences before hand, or decide the benefits outweigh the risks.
Now here, with the telecoms, we have a situation where harsh punishment would very much deter similar future cooperation with illegal requests from the government... And yet, as far as I can tell, that seems like exactly the reason our congresscritters don't want to punish them? Because it might make them actually obey (or at least think twice about) the law next time a black helecopter lands in the CEO's back yard?
Sick.
I have to agree with the FP on this one... I weakly supported Obama as not too offensive to most of my views. I feel rather strongly on this issue, however, and his vote in this situations has reduced him from "passable" to the all-too-common "lesser of two evils".
All this law does is provide legal protection for teachers to tech "alternate views" to the Theory of Evolution. It is NOT exclusively restricted to ID teaching.
And Microsoft only gives users the choice of using the built-in browser and media player rather than needing to go out of their way to download or buy better alternatives. They did NOT exclusively restrict Windows from running popular alternatives.
So why all the fuss?
we are seeing way too many people discount notions of the supernatural simply because it's supernatural
True - Because science can neither "prove" or "disprove" anything. You merely support or fail to support your hypothesis (or more strictly, you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis).
In the case of supernatural explanations of a given phenomenon, science has, repeatedly, considered that as a hypothesis and consistantly failed to support it (borderline or weakly positive confirmation sometimes happens, but if you can't reproduce it, you have to toss it out).
And at some point, after you have failed enough times to support the idea that ghosts keep stealing your car keys, only an idiot would consider that as a hypothesis before exhausting just about every other possibility.
Sure, the companies say that they hope to drive the price down to $40,000, but they don't ever seem to give any data to explains how they came up with that number.
They don't really need to explain it.
That spoooky high number comes from the fact that they've made a few hundred prototypes by hand, and factored the engineering costs into it. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of parts or mass-production, which should realistically not come out all that much higher than any other mass-produced car...
H2 vehicles have only two big additional expenses over ICEs - The oft-mentioned "expensive" catalysts, which only really add a few hundred dollars to the cost, and battery arrays (if applicable), which can add up to a few thousand. Certainly nothing even close to a million dollars, and the rest of the drivetrain arguably costs less than an ICE (you basically have no engine, no transmission, no emissions control, no breaks... Just batteries, two/four electric motors, and a PEM stack.
Calling them an absolute limit to longevity is tantamount to call him a fool or a fraud.
Others have done so outright. I give him the benefit of the doubt.
I'd rather not have his time wasted fielding ill-informed questions like this one.
Wasted??? Sorry, but when someone glosses over major problems with suggestions that we "solve" a problem by exacerbating it (and then require regular, no doubt expensive, treatments once or twice a year just to allow certain of our cells to function normally) - I'd hardly call that "ill-informed" or "wasted".
A bullet will absolutely cure Cancer - We just need to come up with three or four currently-nonexistant solutions to the problem of how to keep functioning normally after bleeding to death.
Look into his work. WILT specifically adresses the problems brought about by telomeres.
IMO, WILT solves the problem caused by telomerase by creating (at least) two different ones: It requires a way to completely disable telomerase production (and ACT, and who knows how many other tricks we'll discover cancer cells have for lengthening those puppies); It also requires an effectively limitless supply of compatible stem cells to restore those tissues that do need some telomere lengthening strategy. And on top of that, it requires regular therapy to put those stem cells where we need them, before we run out of such silly little conveniences as RBCs.
I'd love to believe that we might "cure" aging within my lifetime, but several of the aging mechanisms discovered over the past 20 years (many of which you personally get credit for) appear more-or-less absolute limits to longevity. As just one example, telomerase - Inhibit it (as most human cells do), and cells can only divide a finite number of times; reenable it, and we live right up until we die of cancer.
Given such limitations, do you still consider near-immortality as a realistic possibility, or will we merely see a continuation of the current trend of higher functionality up the extreme natural limit to our lifespans (110 to 120 years), at which point people simply die of nothing?
that will harm or impugn the dignity of the congress.
Ahahahahaahahaaa... Too funny, man!
Ads for amateur Goatse imitators couldn't possibly make those clowns look any less dignified.
Looks like those early Eee PC 900 adopters (£329 inc VAT, initially) have been stiffed. Still, that's progress, I guess...
I know, right?
Like that first IBM PC clone I owned... Can you believe I (or rather, my parents) paid almost $2500 for a crappy ol' 8086 CPU with 256MB of RAM???
Bastards, just stickin' it to those of us who can't hold out for the $0.99 Walmart special on Quantum computers with a petabyte of memory and a sub-etha WLAN adapter! I say we sue!
But, alas, that day has come and now I have no clue how to troubleshoot Windows anymore.
Silly, you don't troubleshoot Windows anymore.
First, you reboot.
If that fails to fix the problem, you roll back to the last restore point.
If that fails, you reinstall from the recovery partition.
And if even that fails, you call it a hardware failure and buy a new one.
Troubleshoot... Kids these days, sheesh.
Linux For Housewives.
Hey, some of us read Slashdot at work! Can we at least keep the porn off the front page, please?
Should I 'ride the wave' and join the new company and culture, or dust off the old CV/resume?"
You should do both - Start looking for a new job ASAP, but don't burn any bridges. In six months to a year, when they come to greatly regret the decision to outsource, as someone who already knows your job, you'll find yourself in a position to demand just about anything to come back.