This seems like more shortsighted tomfoolery on Microsoft's part.
Sure, for performance reasons it may be advantageous to let a driver have free access to the hardware. But I don't see any logical reason why it has to be that way... just as I don't see any law of physics that says memory leaks and buffer overruns are unavoidable.
But, why, exactly, should a faulty display driver, say, cause any fundamental problems? Why doesn't the operating system intervene? Why shouldn't a driver malfunction just cause a brief screen flicker... followed by the OS detecting that something improper has happened, followed by a driver and hardware reset, continue merrily on its way? Yes, I do recognize that a driver that is directly fundamental to a system's own operation--specifically a disk driver--is likely to be more difficult. Still, disk drives are fundamentally unreliable at the analog level, but layers of CRC checking and bad sector remapping hide the problems almost completely. Why couldn't this be true at the disk driver level? So that a bum driver causes only a performance loss and some retries, not total disaster?
As with so much of modern PC practice, this seems to be a case of "because we've always done it that way." It is convenient for Microsoft to point fingers elsewhere, but in the final analysis they are responsible for the user experience. Instead of painting a scarlet letter on bad drivers, why don't they design the OS to tolerate them better?
Instead of posting an electronic "screenshot," take an actual photograph of a computer screen... with some desk clutter like a soda can or a yellow Post-It note in the frame.
Heck, you could probably take a single photo like that and use an image editor to paste the screenshot into the genuine screen image. If television ads can get away with "picture simulated," why not Flickr users?
The Noah's Ark story has great appeal, but events capable of destroying the Earth might well destroy nearby colonies in the solar system.
Or perhaps I should say, if we hypothesize that humankind does not have the wisdom to maintain a stable existence on Earth, the same factors that lead to it destroying the Earth and/or human life thereon might well lead to the same outcome in our planetary colonies.
Unfortunately, I've only had perhaps a dozen chances to look at a good, dark sky in my lifetime. But, fortunately, I have had those chances.
It's unreal. Just as it's hard to recognize the constellations from your typical U. S. suburban location, because you see too few stars, under good conditions it become hard to recognize the constellations because you see too many stars. The brighter stars that form the H. A. Rey connect-the-dots diagrams are lost in a sea of stars that look almost as bright.
I had a real "Aha!" moment on one of those occasions.
We've all been brought up to believe that the constellations are connect-the-dots stick-figures. And most of these stick-figures are so lousy that it's hard to believe anyone ever connected them with anything. There are a few exceptions, like Orion. (H. G. Wells wondered why the Christians had allowed the constellations to continue to be named after pagan mythology, and had never reinterpreted them. He figured that in any such interpretation Orion would be Christ...) Sagittarius does have something that perhaps can be seen to resemble a bow. But, mostly, they are a bunch of slightly-out-of-true triangles and boxes.
Well, one night, when the sky was full of, what can I say but stardust, I suddenly had this perceptual shift, like seeing a Necker cube reverse. I didn't see dots. I saw a silvery, stippled texture. And the sparser and denser stipples of starlight looked sort of like clouds. And, just as you see shapes in clouds... not connect-the-dots, stick-figure shapes, but solid, three-dimensional shapes... I saw solid, three-dimensional shapes, sculpted blobs of starry fog in which I thought I could see animals, and faces, and so forth, just as I can in clouds.
I can't prove it, but I am certain that this is the way the ancients perceived the sky.
Decades ago, companies stayed where they were started. They certainly stayed in the country where they started and they often kept their headquarters or a major plant where they started.
Movie producers run out to California, mostly to escape legal process servers because a patent cartel wanted to price-gouge them for the unlicensed cameras they were using, stayed, and founded Hollywood.
A guy named Chesney starts up a business in Pittfield, MA and GE ends up headquartered there, and employing tens of thousands of people prior to Neutron Jack Welch.
Digital Equipment Corporation starts up in Maynard because the guys who founded it were connected with MIT, and there was cheap space in an old mill there... and grow in that location to a multi-billion-dollar company.
But I can easily see an unstable state in which the United States continues to be a good place for startups, for the reasons mentioned, but all of the really economically important activity gets moved overseas just as the company begins to take hold. Over time, of course, that will undermine all the things that make the U. S. a great place for startups, but not immediately... just as U. S. researchers continue to win Nobel prizes for work performed under conditions that existed in the U. S. decades ago.
Tangentially, New England is a great place for startups because of the existence hundreds of small, independent machine shops that can do prototype work. I believe those shops are a long-lived legacy of a century or two ago when New England and its mills were the most sophisticated industries in the U. S. I wonder whether anyone in the state government is paying attention to the care and feeding of those small businesses?
What would someone from the 1920s find weird about about "the practice of framing shots in the preview window by holding the camera out in front of yourself?"
How is it weirder than the practice of looking down toward your waist to frame the shot in a twin-lens reflex... like the Rolleiflex, available since 1928, wildly popular from the 1920s well into the 1970s? Cheap consumer versions of this camera style were popular, too. In the 1950s my mom took pictures with a "Brownie Reflex," Kodak's cheap twin-lens reflex which used 127 film, was fixed focus, had a fixed aperture, and exactly two shutter settings ("Instantaneous" and "Bulb"). I remember seeing someone with a Bolex 35 mm twin-lens reflex...
How is it weirder from the practice, from the turn of the century at least through the 1990s, if not today, of framing shots by tossing a black cloth over your head and starting at the ground glass in the back of your 4x5 view camera? (Or larger, in the case of Eduard Weston or Ansel Adams?)
RISKS was talking about this in 1997, and I clearly recall discussing this with colleagues in the late 1980s, probably as a result of stories about it in ComputerWorld. Pre-Excel, for sure; it was when Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus 1-2-3 macros written by amateur macro writers had become endemic in the business world.
Nobody has ever solved the problem of people becoming confused by the rules as to when inserting a row or column expands the range references in formulas that refer to it. Like memory leaks or buffer overflows, everybody gets all macho and implies that competent people never experience these problems. The syllogism seems to be "Truly competent people do not experience these problems. The computer industry is populated by practitioners of average competence. Therefore, it is not a problem."
In the computer industry, any problem that has existed for more than about five years is no longer seen as a problem and nobody is interested in solving it.
In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of research on spreadsheets, including error rates. The Spreadsheet Research (SSR) website summarizes data from field audits of more than 300 operational spreadsheets and from experiments involving almost a thousand subjects ranging from spreadsheet novices to long-time spreadsheet professionals. The results are pretty chilling. Every study that has tried to measure spreadsheet error rates has found them and has found them at levels that are deeply disturbing. The URL is: http://www.cba.hawaii.edu/panko/ssr/
I truly don't get it. $200 for a very limited selection of movies... an order of magnitude or so less than the local video rental store and two or more orders of magnitude less than Netflix... on very comparable terms and conditions? True, TFA has responses to these two very questions... but the responses are utterly unconvincing.
"No late fees?" Netflix doesn't have them. The policy of my local Blockbuster is that they leave messages on your phone if you're past the "due date" and that if you keep it _a month_ you need to pay the purchase price... I regard that as a late fee but it's not one that any reasonable person would ever actually need to pay (unlike the bad old days).
Inconvenience of driving to a video store? We're talking about a limited selection of only 100 videos. Half the supermarkets, at least around here, rent videos and have about that many titles. So do many convenience stores. My guess is that if you live more than a mile from a supermarket, the chances that you're within line-of-sight of a PBS station antenna aren't so good, either. Of course, you can get PBS on your cable or satellite, but if you have cable or satellite, how is this much better than what they offer?
TFA doesn't talk about the disadvantages of adding yet another box to the stack of them currently teetering precariously on top of your TV (where DO people with flat screens put them?), jamming yet another remote to the gaggle of them bursting the seams of that organizer you bought for them last year, jerry-rigging yet another ABC switch or figuring out how to control yet another video passthrough feature in the box, teaching the other folks who live under your roof how it all works, and yelling at them when you want to watch a movie and can't find the remote.
The niche served by this product is really very, very narrow.
The only obvious plus I can see to this service would be for people who want to rent titles they would be embarrassed to rent at a brick-and-mortar video store. I wonder whether PBS will be transmitting that kind of material over their airwaves?
Yes, the possibility of its being PCB has occurred to me, too.
We used to put liquid mercury on silver quarters to make them shiny. We were doing this in grade school. I remember doing it, but I don't remember where kids got the mercury in the first place. Broken thermometers? Obliging dentists?
Now that I think about it, my junior high school science teacher used to put liquid mercury into a test tube, put some blue crystals on top, and--are you ready?--heated the mercury over a Bunsen burner. It made the crystals jump and dance around. It supposedly demonstrated something about Brownian motion. Fun, huh?
One of the things that has bothered me for a long time is that educators and policy-makers don't seem to understand the crucial educational role of unstructured, unsupervised, childrens' activity, from, say, about age 7 to 14.
Teachers think they're doing the teaching, when really they're building on a foundation that the child has laid on his- or her-own. You have to develop the readiness yourself Only when you're interested in something and have tried to figure it out for yourself and failed, are you ready to absorb "the answer."
This applies to all fields, of course. Athletics coaches can't do much for a kid who didn't spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in the backyard tenaciously pitching a baseball over and over and over and over and over again.
But it's particularly true in the sciences.
A lot of the stuff kids do is dangerous and would be frowned on if adults really knew what they were doing. When I crushed vacuum tubes in bench vises, I could have cut myself on the broken glass or got something in my eye. God only knows what that sticky goop was--sort of combined the properties of Vaseline and rubber cement--that was inside some potted telephone transformers my buddy and I opened. We used to throw it at each other because it was so darned hard to get off.
Even the stuff that is not dangerous, at the exploratory stage seems so non-educational and misguided that no supervising adult would be let a kid pursue it. I read the explanations of how a transistor worked in "Popular Electronics." From everything I read, it seemed to me that, well, a transistor was just two diodes back-to-back, right? And, well, a battery was basically like a diode, right? (Wrong, of course, but at a certain age it seems plausible. I mean it made current flow in one direction, right?) Like an alchemist or a perpetual-motion inventor, I spent literally weeks tinkering with 1.5-volt batteries connected plus-to-plus with 9-volt transistor radio batteries, adding resistors and so forth, and trying to get my lashups to amplify. I was certain that I was on the brink of a new discovery and that I was about to get it to work any day now. I even had a name for it. I was going to be the inventor that gave the world the "Chemistor."
I probably learned more NOT getting my "Chemistor" to work than I did building Heathkits which did work.
A few months ago NPR was doing a restrospective of "Fresh Air" interviews, and Terry Gross was interviewing Grandmaster Flash, the rap artist. Holy cow! He was a nerdy basement tinkerer just like me... sort of. He would prowl the alleys for thrown-out radios and audio gear, and spent a lot of time building his own audio consoles that had the features he needed for what he was doing.
I often thing the most underrated social injustice is the different self-educational opportunities available to kids who live in a house with a basement versus kids that live in an apartment.
Biology? I never really "got" biology. Why? Because I was doing my basement tinkering with batteries and wires.
My wife, well, one day when she was a kid, her mother comes into the kitchen. There is a dead chicken on the kitchen table. There is a bottle of preserving fluid. My wife is using a pair of tweezers and is picking lice off the chicken and dropping them in the bottle. My wife's mother says, "Oh, dear. Sweetie, couldn't you manage to be interested in butterflies instead?"
I think what the iPod and ITMS show is not the virtues of putting the customer in control, but the virtues of at least letting the customer share some of the benefits opened up by electronic distribution.
The reason the music companies are seen as greedy is that they want 100% of the benefits to accrue to them. No, it's worse than that: they want to take away things that the customer used to enjoy... the ability to make low-fi cassette copies for friends, for example. The music companies hope they can use DRM lockdowns to deliver less music for more money than they did previously.
Apple does not "put the customer in control." But Apple does not insist on keeping total control to itself.
DRM may be a Faustian bargain, but at least the devil, Apple, promises something valuable, and delivers on what it promises.
Use standardized tests as your criterion, and you will develop... students with a high ability to score well on standardized tests.
If you want the ability to reason scientifically, you will need to do something different.
Unfortunately, the ability to reason scientifically is closely correlated with the ability to reason, the ability to challenge authority, and the ability to insist that 2 and 2 make 4... whether or not that happen to be the official test answer.
...is impossible, due to the therblig frammisating thingumbob.
Well, actually, now that you mention it, a professor and his student did remove it, but you can't call it successful, because um, performance, sure, that's right, in our labs our very own scientific technical unbiased tests showed that because of ferthbernder sprocket-flange snap-toggle linkage, when you removed IE using the professor's techniques, it reduced Windows performance by a lot of percent. No user would accept this, any more than they would accept the reduced performance of WIndows on a year-old PC.
We will now show you just how severe this performance problem is.
Right here. In this very courtroom.
With a faked demo^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h a dramatic, animated illustration presented right on the screen of an actual PC.
Group 3 consists of people who acknowledge that fixing all bugs is impossible, and that judgement is necessary in deciding which bugs need to be fixed... but nevertheless contend that within the personal computer software culture in the United States, these judgements consistently err in the direction of shipping software with too many bugs.
The personal computer software culture in the United States is much like that of automakers in the United States circa the sixties, who insisted that the low quality of U. S. autos was the result of the best and wisest judgement... and that public toleration of low quality, as reflected in good sales and profits, validated their judgement.
Good sales and high profits, that is, until overseas competitors began to ship high-quality cars to the U. S.
Dilbert once ran a strip in which the PHB says "Reasoning that anything I don't understand must be easy..." before assigning Dilbert a monumental task on an impossibly short deadline. This is a mental trap that's easy to fall into.
Another similar trap is "Any security technology I don't understand must be secure."
Everyone has some vague notion of how a traditional lock and key work, and how they might be circumvented.
But if there is no hole where the keyhole should be, and what IS there has some spiffy up-to-date appearance, and is "electronic" or "digital," the natural assumption is that because it clearly isn't a traditional lock and key, it must not have the traditional security vulnerabilities of a traditional lock and key... and since we aren't familiar with the new technology, we assume that "no traditional security vulnerabilities" = "no security vulnerabilities."
And, obviously, the vendor of the new system, who is likely to be in the best situation to know them, isn't likely to explain them to us.
It's always puzzled me why the music and movie publishers are so obsessed about the possibility of "exact digital copies." The commercial success of indifferently remastered "AAD" or "ADD" albums, or mediocre DVD transfers of slightly worn or dirty film, shows that the public puts only a small value on technical state-of-the-art perfection.
I've also thought, quite seriously, that a good way out of the DRM impasse would be to retain all the technical garbage and lockdown of current DRM systems, with one important difference. If the DRM system thinks you might not be licensed to use the content, it should not deny you access at all. Instead, it should merely introduce a small amount of degradation, comparable to the amount introduced by an analog copy made on decent consumer equipment. (And twice as much for a second-generation copy, three times as much for the third generation, and so forth).
The prospect of being locked out of content I've purchased if the software is buggy or the vendor goes out of business or there's no practical mechanism for transferring the license of another machine... or not being able to give a copy to a friend or relative... infuriates me. The prospect that I (or my friend or relative) might have to be content with a level of quality corresponding to, say, a CD-to-cassette copy made on a boombox, is something I think I could live with quite happily.
How many catalytic-converters-worth of palladium are there in one gallon of hydrogen-fuel balls?
What do you put in the engine so that all that palladium doesn't get squirted out into the atmosphere as particulates... and while I don't think palladium itself kills, the consequences of squirting finely-divided catalyst into the atmosphere might be interesting. (As techology cheerleaders always say, "for all we know, it might be beneficial.")
If the palladium can be recovered, what percentage of it gets recovered and reused? 80%? 99%? 99.9999%?
Do we pay a deposit of $500 when we fill up, then get it back when we bring the "empties" back to the redemption center?
Fusion power has been Just Around the Corner. For the last fifty years or so. There is always some new technical breakthrough that is about to overcome the biggest obstacle.
And we are always told that fusion power will be safe because, uh, well, because, well, it's not fission. It's completely new and totally different, so it must be safe. (Not that fission isn't safe, mind you, but fusion will be even safer). And it won't produce any radioactive waste. To speak of. Not from the actual fusion reaction. Well, sure, the neutron flux may make a lot of other things radioactive, but that's big deal. Why, in fact, the government has promised that Yucca Mountain will be ready by 1998. If you want to pick nits it isn't, uh, actually in operation yet, but it's Just Around the Corner.
Also Just Around the Corner: helicars and moon colonies.
It seems to be one of those mysterious things like IBM's "SAA" or Microsoft's ".NET" or Vitalis' "V7..." .
It's a secret miracle ingredient about which all that is clear is that you're supposed to think it's good without needing to know what it is, exactly, or what it does, or why it's good.
Intel says: With Intel Viiv technology, you control a highly integrated Intel platform designed for digital entertainment. That means you can: Take charge of your media. Share experiences with movies, photos, and music with your friends and family. Simplify your digital life.
It's sort of like saying "Texaco gasoline has CleanSystem3, which will help you score with hot chicks."
Will somebody please explain to me what technical characteristics of a processor allow you to "share experiences with movies, photos, and music with your friends and family?"
Slashdot Mirror
This seems like more shortsighted tomfoolery on Microsoft's part.
Sure, for performance reasons it may be advantageous to let a driver have free access to the hardware. But I don't see any logical reason why it has to be that way... just as I don't see any law of physics that says memory leaks and buffer overruns are unavoidable.
But, why, exactly, should a faulty display driver, say, cause any fundamental problems? Why doesn't the operating system intervene? Why shouldn't a driver malfunction just cause a brief screen flicker... followed by the OS detecting that something improper has happened, followed by a driver and hardware reset, continue merrily on its way? Yes, I do recognize that a driver that is directly fundamental to a system's own operation--specifically a disk driver--is likely to be more difficult. Still, disk drives are fundamentally unreliable at the analog level, but layers of CRC checking and bad sector remapping hide the problems almost completely. Why couldn't this be true at the disk driver level? So that a bum driver causes only a performance loss and some retries, not total disaster?
As with so much of modern PC practice, this seems to be a case of "because we've always done it that way." It is convenient for Microsoft to point fingers elsewhere, but in the final analysis they are responsible for the user experience. Instead of painting a scarlet letter on bad drivers, why don't they design the OS to tolerate them better?
Instead of posting an electronic "screenshot," take an actual photograph of a computer screen... with some desk clutter like a soda can or a yellow Post-It note in the frame.
Heck, you could probably take a single photo like that and use an image editor to paste the screenshot into the genuine screen image. If television ads can get away with "picture simulated," why not Flickr users?
...just as we need to accept personal death.
The Noah's Ark story has great appeal, but events capable of destroying the Earth might well destroy nearby colonies in the solar system.
Or perhaps I should say, if we hypothesize that humankind does not have the wisdom to maintain a stable existence on Earth, the same factors that lead to it destroying the Earth and/or human life thereon might well lead to the same outcome in our planetary colonies.
Unfortunately, I've only had perhaps a dozen chances to look at a good, dark sky in my lifetime. But, fortunately, I have had those chances.
It's unreal. Just as it's hard to recognize the constellations from your typical U. S. suburban location, because you see too few stars, under good conditions it become hard to recognize the constellations because you see too many stars. The brighter stars that form the H. A. Rey connect-the-dots diagrams are lost in a sea of stars that look almost as bright.
I had a real "Aha!" moment on one of those occasions.
We've all been brought up to believe that the constellations are connect-the-dots stick-figures. And most of these stick-figures are so lousy that it's hard to believe anyone ever connected them with anything. There are a few exceptions, like Orion. (H. G. Wells wondered why the Christians had allowed the constellations to continue to be named after pagan mythology, and had never reinterpreted them. He figured that in any such interpretation Orion would be Christ...) Sagittarius does have something that perhaps can be seen to resemble a bow. But, mostly, they are a bunch of slightly-out-of-true triangles and boxes.
Well, one night, when the sky was full of, what can I say but stardust, I suddenly had this perceptual shift, like seeing a Necker cube reverse. I didn't see dots. I saw a silvery, stippled texture. And the sparser and denser stipples of starlight looked sort of like clouds. And, just as you see shapes in clouds... not connect-the-dots, stick-figure shapes, but solid, three-dimensional shapes... I saw solid, three-dimensional shapes, sculpted blobs of starry fog in which I thought I could see animals, and faces, and so forth, just as I can in clouds.
I can't prove it, but I am certain that this is the way the ancients perceived the sky.
Decades ago, companies stayed where they were started. They certainly stayed in the country where they started and they often kept their headquarters or a major plant where they started.
Movie producers run out to California, mostly to escape legal process servers because a patent cartel wanted to price-gouge them for the unlicensed cameras they were using, stayed, and founded Hollywood.
A guy named Chesney starts up a business in Pittfield, MA and GE ends up headquartered there, and employing tens of thousands of people prior to Neutron Jack Welch.
Digital Equipment Corporation starts up in Maynard because the guys who founded it were connected with MIT, and there was cheap space in an old mill there... and grow in that location to a multi-billion-dollar company.
But I can easily see an unstable state in which the United States continues to be a good place for startups, for the reasons mentioned, but all of the really economically important activity gets moved overseas just as the company begins to take hold. Over time, of course, that will undermine all the things that make the U. S. a great place for startups, but not immediately... just as U. S. researchers continue to win Nobel prizes for work performed under conditions that existed in the U. S. decades ago.
Tangentially, New England is a great place for startups because of the existence hundreds of small, independent machine shops that can do prototype work. I believe those shops are a long-lived legacy of a century or two ago when New England and its mills were the most sophisticated industries in the U. S. I wonder whether anyone in the state government is paying attention to the care and feeding of those small businesses?
...detect and remove it?
...when they achieved this. Too bad they didn't have a video of the scientists.
Were they wearing white coats?
Were they dignified? ("Indeed, Dr. Fussman, you must write up this notable phenomenon for the Transactions of the Royal Philosophical Society.")
Or did they behave like Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) in "Back to the Future?"
Did they shout "Eureka!" Or "Holy s---!" or "What the f---?" Or the German equivalents thereof?
DId they run out into the hallway and say, "Hey everyone, this is cool, some see what we just did?"
Did they invite their wives and kids to come in and see it the next day?
Were they expecting it or did it surprise them?
Did they get a harsh scolding from the lab safety officer?
Do they plan to aim the next one out the window and launch them into the courtyard?
Or was their first action to file for a patent so they can sell through ThinkGeek?
What would someone from the 1920s find weird about about "the practice of framing shots in the preview window by holding the camera out in front of yourself?"
How is it weirder than the practice of looking down toward your waist to frame the shot in a twin-lens reflex... like the Rolleiflex, available since 1928, wildly popular from the 1920s well into the 1970s? Cheap consumer versions of this camera style were popular, too. In the 1950s my mom took pictures with a "Brownie Reflex," Kodak's cheap twin-lens reflex which used 127 film, was fixed focus, had a fixed aperture, and exactly two shutter settings ("Instantaneous" and "Bulb"). I remember seeing someone with a Bolex 35 mm twin-lens reflex...
How is it weirder from the practice, from the turn of the century at least through the 1990s, if not today, of framing shots by tossing a black cloth over your head and starting at the ground glass in the back of your 4x5 view camera? (Or larger, in the case of Eduard Weston or Ansel Adams?)
Nobody has ever solved the problem of people becoming confused by the rules as to when inserting a row or column expands the range references in formulas that refer to it. Like memory leaks or buffer overflows, everybody gets all macho and implies that competent people never experience these problems. The syllogism seems to be "Truly competent people do not experience these problems. The computer industry is populated by practitioners of average competence. Therefore, it is not a problem."
In the computer industry, any problem that has existed for more than about five years is no longer seen as a problem and nobody is interested in solving it.
Oh, here's the 1997 reference.
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 17:29:14 -1000
From: "Ray Panko"
Subject: Website on Spreadsheet Research
In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of research on
spreadsheets, including error rates. The Spreadsheet Research (SSR) website
summarizes data from field audits of more than 300 operational spreadsheets
and from experiments involving almost a thousand subjects ranging from
spreadsheet novices to long-time spreadsheet professionals. The results are
pretty chilling. Every study that has tried to measure spreadsheet error
rates has found them and has found them at levels that are deeply
disturbing. The URL is:
http://www.cba.hawaii.edu/panko/ssr/
Sorry...
I truly don't get it. $200 for a very limited selection of movies... an order of magnitude or so less than the local video rental store and two or more orders of magnitude less than Netflix... on very comparable terms and conditions? True, TFA has responses to these two very questions... but the responses are utterly unconvincing.
"No late fees?" Netflix doesn't have them. The policy of my local Blockbuster is that they leave messages on your phone if you're past the "due date" and that if you keep it _a month_ you need to pay the purchase price... I regard that as a late fee but it's not one that any reasonable person would ever actually need to pay (unlike the bad old days).
Inconvenience of driving to a video store? We're talking about a limited selection of only 100 videos. Half the supermarkets, at least around here, rent videos and have about that many titles. So do many convenience stores. My guess is that if you live more than a mile from a supermarket, the chances that you're within line-of-sight of a PBS station antenna aren't so good, either. Of course, you can get PBS on your cable or satellite, but if you have cable or satellite, how is this much better than what they offer?
TFA doesn't talk about the disadvantages of adding yet another box to the stack of them currently teetering precariously on top of your TV (where DO people with flat screens put them?), jamming yet another remote to the gaggle of them bursting the seams of that organizer you bought for them last year, jerry-rigging yet another ABC switch or figuring out how to control yet another video passthrough feature in the box, teaching the other folks who live under your roof how it all works, and yelling at them when you want to watch a movie and can't find the remote.
The niche served by this product is really very, very narrow.
The only obvious plus I can see to this service would be for people who want to rent titles they would be embarrassed to rent at a brick-and-mortar video store. I wonder whether PBS will be transmitting that kind of material over their airwaves?
I'm perfectly serious about it.
Yes, the possibility of its being PCB has occurred to me, too.
We used to put liquid mercury on silver quarters to make them shiny. We were doing this in grade school. I remember doing it, but I don't remember where kids got the mercury in the first place. Broken thermometers? Obliging dentists?
Now that I think about it, my junior high school science teacher used to put liquid mercury into a test tube, put some blue crystals on top, and--are you ready?--heated the mercury over a Bunsen burner. It made the crystals jump and dance around. It supposedly demonstrated something about Brownian motion. Fun, huh?
I view this with great alarm.
One of the things that has bothered me for a long time is that educators and policy-makers don't seem to understand the crucial educational role of unstructured, unsupervised, childrens' activity, from, say, about age 7 to 14.
Teachers think they're doing the teaching, when really they're building on a foundation that the child has laid on his- or her-own. You have to develop the readiness yourself Only when you're interested in something and have tried to figure it out for yourself and failed, are you ready to absorb "the answer."
This applies to all fields, of course. Athletics coaches can't do much for a kid who didn't spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in the backyard tenaciously pitching a baseball over and over and over and over and over again.
But it's particularly true in the sciences.
A lot of the stuff kids do is dangerous and would be frowned on if adults really knew what they were doing. When I crushed vacuum tubes in bench vises, I could have cut myself on the broken glass or got something in my eye. God only knows what that sticky goop was--sort of combined the properties of Vaseline and rubber cement--that was inside some potted telephone transformers my buddy and I opened. We used to throw it at each other because it was so darned hard to get off.
Even the stuff that is not dangerous, at the exploratory stage seems so non-educational and misguided that no supervising adult would be let a kid pursue it. I read the explanations of how a transistor worked in "Popular Electronics." From everything I read, it seemed to me that, well, a transistor was just two diodes back-to-back, right? And, well, a battery was basically like a diode, right? (Wrong, of course, but at a certain age it seems plausible. I mean it made current flow in one direction, right?) Like an alchemist or a perpetual-motion inventor, I spent literally weeks tinkering with 1.5-volt batteries connected plus-to-plus with 9-volt transistor radio batteries, adding resistors and so forth, and trying to get my lashups to amplify. I was certain that I was on the brink of a new discovery and that I was about to get it to work any day now. I even had a name for it. I was going to be the inventor that gave the world the "Chemistor."
I probably learned more NOT getting my "Chemistor" to work than I did building Heathkits which did work.
A few months ago NPR was doing a restrospective of "Fresh Air" interviews, and Terry Gross was interviewing Grandmaster Flash, the rap artist. Holy cow! He was a nerdy basement tinkerer just like me... sort of. He would prowl the alleys for thrown-out radios and audio gear, and spent a lot of time building his own audio consoles that had the features he needed for what he was doing.
I often thing the most underrated social injustice is the different self-educational opportunities available to kids who live in a house with a basement versus kids that live in an apartment.
Biology? I never really "got" biology. Why? Because I was doing my basement tinkering with batteries and wires.
My wife, well, one day when she was a kid, her mother comes into the kitchen. There is a dead chicken on the kitchen table. There is a bottle of preserving fluid. My wife is using a pair of tweezers and is picking lice off the chicken and dropping them in the bottle. My wife's mother says, "Oh, dear. Sweetie, couldn't you manage to be interested in butterflies instead?"
My wife, she "gets" biology.
...when they were doing things that other companies weren't doing, than when they were "taking on" other companies.
I think what the iPod and ITMS show is not the virtues of putting the customer in control, but the virtues of at least letting the customer share some of the benefits opened up by electronic distribution.
The reason the music companies are seen as greedy is that they want 100% of the benefits to accrue to them. No, it's worse than that: they want to take away things that the customer used to enjoy... the ability to make low-fi cassette copies for friends, for example. The music companies hope they can use DRM lockdowns to deliver less music for more money than they did previously.
Apple does not "put the customer in control." But Apple does not insist on keeping total control to itself.
DRM may be a Faustian bargain, but at least the devil, Apple, promises something valuable, and delivers on what it promises.
Use standardized tests as your criterion, and you will develop... students with a high ability to score well on standardized tests.
If you want the ability to reason scientifically, you will need to do something different.
Unfortunately, the ability to reason scientifically is closely correlated with the ability to reason, the ability to challenge authority, and the ability to insist that 2 and 2 make 4... whether or not that happen to be the official test answer.
Web 2.0 is an ineffably stupid buzzword. Anyone who uses it should shift their paradigm immediately.
...is impossible, due to the therblig frammisating thingumbob.
Well, actually, now that you mention it, a professor and his student did remove it, but you can't call it successful, because um, performance, sure, that's right, in our labs our very own scientific technical unbiased tests showed that because of ferthbernder sprocket-flange snap-toggle linkage, when you removed IE using the professor's techniques, it reduced Windows performance by a lot of percent. No user would accept this, any more than they would accept the reduced performance of WIndows on a year-old PC.
We will now show you just how severe this performance problem is.
Right here. In this very courtroom.
With a faked demo^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h a dramatic, animated illustration presented right on the screen of an actual PC.
Group 3 consists of people who acknowledge that fixing all bugs is impossible, and that judgement is necessary in deciding which bugs need to be fixed... but nevertheless contend that within the personal computer software culture in the United States, these judgements consistently err in the direction of shipping software with too many bugs.
The personal computer software culture in the United States is much like that of automakers in the United States circa the sixties, who insisted that the low quality of U. S. autos was the result of the best and wisest judgement... and that public toleration of low quality, as reflected in good sales and profits, validated their judgement.
Good sales and high profits, that is, until overseas competitors began to ship high-quality cars to the U. S.
Dilbert once ran a strip in which the PHB says "Reasoning that anything I don't understand must be easy..." before assigning Dilbert a monumental task on an impossibly short deadline. This is a mental trap that's easy to fall into.
Another similar trap is "Any security technology I don't understand must be secure."
Everyone has some vague notion of how a traditional lock and key work, and how they might be circumvented.
But if there is no hole where the keyhole should be, and what IS there has some spiffy up-to-date appearance, and is "electronic" or "digital," the natural assumption is that because it clearly isn't a traditional lock and key, it must not have the traditional security vulnerabilities of a traditional lock and key... and since we aren't familiar with the new technology, we assume that "no traditional security vulnerabilities" = "no security vulnerabilities."
And, obviously, the vendor of the new system, who is likely to be in the best situation to know them, isn't likely to explain them to us.
"... how did you like the play?"
It's always puzzled me why the music and movie publishers are so obsessed about the possibility of "exact digital copies." The commercial success of indifferently remastered "AAD" or "ADD" albums, or mediocre DVD transfers of slightly worn or dirty film, shows that the public puts only a small value on technical state-of-the-art perfection.
I've also thought, quite seriously, that a good way out of the DRM impasse would be to retain all the technical garbage and lockdown of current DRM systems, with one important difference. If the DRM system thinks you might not be licensed to use the content, it should not deny you access at all. Instead, it should merely introduce a small amount of degradation, comparable to the amount introduced by an analog copy made on decent consumer equipment. (And twice as much for a second-generation copy, three times as much for the third generation, and so forth).
The prospect of being locked out of content I've purchased if the software is buggy or the vendor goes out of business or there's no practical mechanism for transferring the license of another machine... or not being able to give a copy to a friend or relative... infuriates me. The prospect that I (or my friend or relative) might have to be content with a level of quality corresponding to, say, a CD-to-cassette copy made on a boombox, is something I think I could live with quite happily.
How many catalytic-converters-worth of palladium are there in one gallon of hydrogen-fuel balls?
What do you put in the engine so that all that palladium doesn't get squirted out into the atmosphere as particulates... and while I don't think palladium itself kills, the consequences of squirting finely-divided catalyst into the atmosphere might be interesting. (As techology cheerleaders always say, "for all we know, it might be beneficial.")
If the palladium can be recovered, what percentage of it gets recovered and reused? 80%? 99%? 99.9999%?
Do we pay a deposit of $500 when we fill up, then get it back when we bring the "empties" back to the redemption center?
Fusion power has been Just Around the Corner. For the last fifty years or so. There is always some new technical breakthrough that is about to overcome the biggest obstacle.
And we are always told that fusion power will be safe because, uh, well, because, well, it's not fission. It's completely new and totally different, so it must be safe. (Not that fission isn't safe, mind you, but fusion will be even safer). And it won't produce any radioactive waste. To speak of. Not from the actual fusion reaction. Well, sure, the neutron flux may make a lot of other things radioactive, but that's big deal. Why, in fact, the government has promised that Yucca Mountain will be ready by 1998. If you want to pick nits it isn't, uh, actually in operation yet, but it's Just Around the Corner.
Also Just Around the Corner: helicars and moon colonies.
It seems to be one of those mysterious things like IBM's "SAA" or Microsoft's ".NET" or Vitalis' "V7..." .
It's a secret miracle ingredient about which all that is clear is that you're supposed to think it's good without needing to know what it is, exactly, or what it does, or why it's good.
Intel says: With Intel Viiv technology, you control a highly integrated Intel platform designed for digital entertainment. That means you can: Take charge of your media. Share experiences with movies, photos, and music with your friends and family. Simplify your digital life.
It's sort of like saying "Texaco gasoline has CleanSystem3, which will help you score with hot chicks."
Will somebody please explain to me what technical characteristics of a processor allow you to "share experiences with movies, photos, and music with your friends and family?"
Unless that means it doesn't support DRM?