From the FCC web site: "Mr. Powell, a Republican, was nominated by President William J. Clinton on July 31, 1997, and confirmed by the United States Senate on October 28, 1997." That took about 10 seconds and a few mouse clicks.
An episode of the Simpsons had Homer issuing a verbal EULA as people left his new tree house that was on fire: "By using these ladders you are agreeing to not sue for any injuries sustained." I'm amazed at how many people put any credence into the various bullshit EULA's that we have to wade through.
I'll give you this much: at least you are refreshingly honest about your reasons. PC games were an important factor in why I assembled my Athlon 2400 XP Pro box (it started life as a Duron 700). The other part was to be able to use an HDTV tuner card. My three kids love to game, surf, edit graphics and so forth using both machines which are connected to DSL. In fact so is the PS2 (and an old G2 Power Center Mac clone running linux). I actually enjoy having the XP box because I enjoy a challenge. But it is unquestionably more fragile than my G4 OS X. Also an application I am working on has some unavoidably cross platform aspects to it.
I won't bother boring everyone with reasons why I prefer OS X (except for the obvious and easily understood factor that it just doesn't ever need to be rebooted except for some system updates). The happy fact is that we agree that games are a primary reason to have at least one Windows box.
Isn't it fairly obvious that text messaging has the possibility of being less obtrusive than making a voice call while still at the movie? Once you've left the movie and could easily call, you might be less likely to bother since you are not being actively tortured by it and may want to move on to other activities.
That seems to be what is so scary to these bankers/moviemakers. If you hand over the money and keep your mouth shut they can still "buy the gross". If you've left the movie theater it seems like they are just about in the clear (based on experience from previous years). But text messaging makes it an easy impulse decision while it is still unpleasantly right in your face.
Well I wasn't emphatic enough in my examples. All of them are dead: AtariST, Amiga, Newton, and countless others could be thrown in like PenPoint and Symbolics. There aren't new books being written about them, or conferences, or software, or hardware. On the other hand all of those are on the upswing for the Mac.
It seems obvious at this point that you aren't interested in buying a Mac. Your mistake is in assuming this says something about the Macintosh as a platform when all it really indicates is something about you. Do you think I give a shit about some stupid benchmark (whether it says the G5 is faster or not)? My question is whether it runs OS X. If not, you lose. If I want to get a game machine I'll buy a PS2 or Xbox. If I want to spend a lot more (and more headaches, like I said I have an XP) then I'll buy a Windows box. But I thought the topic was computers, not game machines. But when you puff yourself up and make grand pronouncements I will speak up and point out how little content there is in what you say.
For instance you continue to make a big deal about the dominant position Apple had if you go back far enough. But the only machines they made at the time were the Apple II and possibly the Apple III. By the time they introduced the Mac in 1984 they were already a much less significant player. Their choice of the Lisa and then the Mac was intended to advance the state of the art rather than be the largest shipper of beige boxes. They succeeded after about 10 years. The future was won by machines that were designed to imitate the Mac.
I'll predict here for no extra cost that some time this decade Microsoft will again copy Apple and produce a real OS that is unix based with a Windows layer on top. Maybe that will spell an end for Apple's chances to make a useful contribution. I doubt it.
I suspect I missed your original post because it was modded down too low for my threshold. I think I did read all your comments that were not submerged.
Let me try a couple of comparable statements and see your reaction. The Amiga is dead. The AtariST is dead. These were systems much admired by a fraction of the computer owning public. But they are truly dead because there is no more hardware and software being created (by commercial entities) for those platforms. The Newton is dead in a sense but remarkably there are individuals able to continue to create software and drivers that extend its usefulness. For a time it appeared that NeXT would be dead, but with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple its future became assured (well, at least in retrospect).
If all you're saying is that Apple will remain a multibillion dollar company (and not another clone assembler) with millions of customers and industry wide support and choose to characterize that as DEAD because there are even larger companies offering competing products, I guess we have no dispute. But I don't think your definition of "dead" is very useful or one that is shared by ANYONE else.
As long as Apple is designing and creating computers (and other products) for millions of people your pronouncement just sounds ridiculous. Maybe you could find a more accurate brief description for not utterly dominating that does not sound so unconditional as dead?
> "Dead", in this case, is a relative term. They've gone from > king of the hill to bottom of the heap.
I suppose it is useless to respond to someone who is so clumsy in his use of language but I'll try to explain why you are being pilloried. "Dead" is not a relative term even if you declare it is. Dead would make some sense if the only way to get useful software for a Mac would be to run Virtual PC and buy PC software. But there are millions of people who have no intention of putting up with the crap of a Microsoft OS (I have an Athlon 2400 box running XP so I'm not speaking without experience) and the often flimsy excuses for software that PC users endure.
The odd fact is that you are further from reality today than you would have been several years ago before OS X managed to become much more robust and capable than any Microsoft OS and Apple's legacy Mac OS 9. If you cared to, you could try to make the case that Mac as a computing platform died with the passing of OS 9 since many know that OS X is actually the second coming of NextSTEP. But I saw no glimmer that you even suspect that.
As for your top of the hill, bottom of the heap you seem to think companies exist to occupy space. No, they are supposed to produce a profit and Apple is one of the few hardware companies that have been producing profits. They aren't even within sight of the bottom of that heap.
But the thing that seems the most mysterious to so many is why people like you revel in making the same prediction (the death of Apple) year after year for about 20 years and wrong every year. Let me give you a litmus test to watch. When Apple's annual WWDC can no longer attract a large number of paying attendants from around the world then you can start making arrangements. Until then the people are laughing rudely because you look so silly joining all those other psychics who still await vindication.
The fact that Windows is still here is due to the fact that Apple lost the "look and feel" lawsuit with Microsoft. In that case there were additional factors but the most important one was that Microsoft had the financial ability to outlast Apple if necessary.
What continues to be true and probably always be true is that a corporation (or individual) with essentially unlimited resources can file a lawsuit and inflict onerous costs onto anyone they wish to drag into court. Even though the defendant could eventually win and force the complainant to pay the defendant's legal charges the sums required to play that game can be out of reach. In the last few days buy.com forced a parody web site to close down where it appears that scenario played out.
The situation continues to get more dangerous as more people uncritically buy into the idea that copyright covers everything because the copyright industry is promoting that idea. Copyright is limited and specific. Don't let them win by default.
Is this supposed to be humorous or are you so entirely clueless that you think copyright applies to anything you designate? If XGameStation takes an article word for word from Gamespot and publish it without permission or attribution (which may not be enough depending on issues of fair use) then you are discussing an issue of possible copyright infringement. But web site layout is not subject to copyright laws (not are recipes and many other things).
Hey, thanks! This is about the only message posted that doesn't suck out loud. What a bunch of pathetic losers. A movie with a plot that's practically made for slashdot and all anyone can do is whine. ["Oo, Ben Affleck couldn't be a nerd like me." Right, I'm sure it breaks his heart.] Will they get everything wrong? Maybe. But it is based on a Philip K Dick novel and they have a budget. With the millions they spend on marketing I suppose we would have heard about it eventually but I appreciate hearing about here a little earlier.
Now it's my turn to say, "You don't get it". Who says it's a landline? It just has to be an IP network. Seems like any of the 802.11 a/b/g should be acceptable candidates. There's no compelling reason it needs to be at any specific location. The one great distinction from cell phones is paying ridiculous charges so that an over managed network has the resources to track and charge you for all those minutes. When the first 802.11 based SIP phone is marketed with Bluetooth, built in SIP phone directory and scheduler that is synchronized with a click like a T68i is currently with iSync, then you can start numbering the days of the cell phone dinosaurs.
This isn't exactly a new prediction. John Chambers has been saying that rationally there is no reason why anyone should be paying the sums they are currently charged just for voice calls. SIP is the enabling protocol to make the transition of voice telephony from a service to an application. Regulators might throw in a wrench to slow the stampede but forces of nature always prevail eventually. Cell phones are the fax machines of the first decade of the 21 century (however notice that there are still fax machines today so there will still be cell phones tomorrow).
There is no such thing as copyrights on a character. That is unadulterated crap (yes, I know it is not your fault). Of course attempts have been made to create such a right by cases like the "sequel" to Gone with the Wind. It is yet another example of why there is such contempt for copyright law.
>> Math is always changing, 10 years is a HUGE HUGE gap. This is why people in China and Japan are so much better at math, they have NEW techniques for teaching it, while our kids waste their time learning their multiplication tables their kids are learning linear algebra, all because we focus on calculation speed and memorizing the solutions instead of focusing on improving logic and problem solving skills. I dont remember a damn thing I learned in math class, thats why I cant do calculus now
You are a moron who presumes to lecture about things that even you should know are beyond your grasp (you can't "do" calculus and you sermonize about math education?). First of all people in China and Japan are NOT so much better at math. Our elite institutions do a fine job of turning out world class mathematicians and have throughout the twentieth century. The best students from every part of the world have been coming to US universities to study in much the same way they went to German universities in earlier times. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.
These little dog and pony shows put on for journalists about every country in the world having better educated students are laughable. Let's take a slightly different tack to see what is going on. Remember a few years back when every year the Little League World Series would be won by some team from Taiwan or Korea? After a number of years you would expect some of these players would show up for those lucrative pay checks in the major leagues. When this phenomenon did not take off the officials took a more critical look at whether the eligibility rules of the competition were being strictly enforced.
Education systems don't have the luxury of taking a long view and forsaking the tool of using standardized tests. But that doesn't mean we can't check conclusions based on tests that have a deeper basis than promised aptitude (which are easily manipulated by careful selection of sample populations). If you look at various measures like productivity for the general population, or Nobel prizes, Field Medals, etc. for elites you notice that the US does quite well. When that is the case you are left with the task of explaining why many contra indicators should not just be thrown out as fraudulent or at least explain why they vary so much from hard realities.
On the other hand if you largely ignore 'standardized' test results for international comparisons and stick with something like the International Math Olympiad you find that teams from the US tend to do quite well. None of this means that mathematical education might not benefit from innovations. But it does mean you do not have a basic understanding of the facts.
Of course for me this utterly undermines all of what you advocate.
You ever hear of a program called DeCSS? I agree that it is unacceptable that a disc decides when I can and cannot use fast forward or skip chapter (or even play a disc if it is from the "wrong" region). So I rip the contents to my hard drive, use a program (IFOEdit) to get rid of the objectionable crap and watch from the PC or Mac. Now my original disc is a backup, I can play it on any computer on the network and a TV show collection like my Star Trek The Next Generation season 5 set is arranged by episode and I can choose to play any episode with a few quick clicks of a mouse. With the price of IDE drives as low as they are now, there is no reason to put up with this petty tyranny.
Maybe because your TV is not even close to the front door? Perhaps it is in the basement, in your bedroom, or you are watching a recorded HDTV program on your laptop over the home 802.11a wireless network out by the pool. Assuming everyone is glued to a TV set in their living rooms just feet from the front entrance is not a reasonable assumption and has the faint scent of condescension. But I'm probably just overreacting.
I doubt that more than a handful of readers here have any difference with you on the specific example cited. That isn't where the challenge resides. Shift the people involved up the food chain to the development team and then the readers here will go all Buchanan on you (Patrick Buchanan, author of "Death of the West", sometimes presidential candidate, xenophobe, etc). There really are issues of technology transfer that should not be ignored.
For instance, when hi tech jobs started shifting from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas in the 80's we're really talking about almost the same pool of individuals. Same thing for the surge of activity in Seattle in the 90's. We are all part of the same political and social fabric. That is a parochial US view but I'm certain it could be extended to include the hi tech regions of England and Europe (maybe even Israel). But when you get to India and China you need to re-examine your assumptions.
The people who will be enabled by the technological shift we are starting are not the programmers and managers with whom we deal on a day to day basis. As someone has noted in his sig: slashdot, all the news that matters to people who don't. The same is true in those other societies. These are not just economic decisions that are being made.
x=t^2 take the derivative x'=2t substitute for t = sqrt(x) x'=2 sqrt(x)
It does NOT fit the equation x'=kx. It's one of the most common differential equations. I didn't make it up. I'm not claiming an original result. Where do you guys come from? You are wrong.
The solution to the differential equation x' = kx is the exponential function which is of the form x = a*e^kt. I'm not certain about the nature of the solutions to x' = y^x or if there are solutions. The term geometric growth is, I think, an older term that could mean any polynomial growth beyond linear, e.g. x = t^2. But I can't find the term in my Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics so I'm guessing.
Uninterested means what you would think it does: not interested. On the other hand disinterested used to be a description of someone like a scientist looking for an explanation but completely impartial what the final result would be. He wouldn't find his object of study uninteresting but would not go in with preconceptions (an interest). Impartial would be a good synonym. Thanks for asking.
I read my reply again to see how condescending it actually was (it wasn't). Are you so thin-skinned that no one can point out errors to you without you taking offense? You misused the term exponential in the same way as almost every newspaper article, TV news program, and just about all of popular culture. But this is slashdot where I would presume there is at least a desire to be technically literate. Instead you just care about your ego so you reply "I meant *exactly* what I said".
If it will make your ego feel any better, you are just abusing the term in the same way as 90% of the population. Eventually (already?) the preferred definition will be "really big" just like disinterested has been redefined by the majority to be synonymous with uninterested. But in a technical forum exponential will always retain its original meaning. Learn it. Use it correctly. Stop whining. Now that's condescending.
I know you won't (or can't), but please take a moment to learn what exponential actually means. It does not mean really big like many people treat it. We already have words for that like "really big". Exponential growth refers to growth whose rate of increase is proportional to its magnitude. That's all. It satisfies the equation x' = kx.
Solid state storage can be much faster than hard drive storage. There is nothing exponential about it. Incidentally there are various sorts of solid state storage. Some are faster than hard drive storage, some are not.
The reason you don't see many screens with tuners is due to political forces. There is a much higher tariff in the US to import a TV set (screen with tuner built in) than to import a screen that can be considered a computer display device (or whatever). I'm not sure what domestic TV set manufacturing sector this is protecting but the response has been obvious, import the parts separately.
"which are far more expensive than I can justify when compared to a comparably priced rear projection"
If it is far more expensive then how can it be comparably priced? (I agree that plasma is too expensive). I don't think DVI can be mooted because with digital source and digital display (especially if it were 720 x 480 or a multiple), DVI would allow that data to be mapped with no "errors" except for those implicit in the original sampling. This presumes a movie source, not interlaced NTSC.
Since almost no one on this thread is particularly close to reality I'm picking your comment since it is at least hailing distance from relevance. The big deal here is that the DVI output is not HDCP encoded which means you could play it on computer monitors with DVI input that don't support HDCP. Screens (like plasma, DLP, LCD) for home entertainment are supposed to include HDCP support but they should also handled unscrambled inputs.
There are three reasons why this is much ado about nothing (from a cryptographic standpoint). First, the uncompressed data stream is so huge you would have to have swamp water in your head to think it is a good place to capture the data. Second, ever hear of DeCSS? The publisher has nicely compressed the data for you, capture it in that compressed form. Finally if any of you were paying attention a fairly short time ago it was reported right here (on Slashdot) that HDCP was utterly flawed and will be cracked by anyone with any motivation to do so. As I recall it is a simple matter of linear algebra. Anyhow why bother? It's the compressed data stream that matters and DeCSS gives you that while the DVI stream is equivalent to the uncompressed stream that can always be re-created with the decrypted compressed stream.
As a consumer device this and the Samsung DVD-HD931 are of interest because they are both digital all the way to the display which can also be digital. The scrambling that may or may not take place across the DVI connection is immaterial (except if you want to use a DVI non-HDCP compliant computer display as your output device, then get the Bravo).
Slashdot Mirror
From the FCC web site: "Mr. Powell, a Republican, was nominated by President William J. Clinton on July 31, 1997, and confirmed by the United States Senate on October 28, 1997." That took about 10 seconds and a few mouse clicks.
An episode of the Simpsons had Homer issuing a verbal EULA as people left his new tree house that was on fire: "By using these ladders you are agreeing to not sue for any injuries sustained." I'm amazed at how many people put any credence into the various bullshit EULA's that we have to wade through.
I'll give you this much: at least you are refreshingly honest about your reasons. PC games were an important factor in why I assembled my Athlon 2400 XP Pro box (it started life as a Duron 700). The other part was to be able to use an HDTV tuner card. My three kids love to game, surf, edit graphics and so forth using both machines which are connected to DSL. In fact so is the PS2 (and an old G2 Power Center Mac clone running linux). I actually enjoy having the XP box because I enjoy a challenge. But it is unquestionably more fragile than my G4 OS X. Also an application I am working on has some unavoidably cross platform aspects to it.
I won't bother boring everyone with reasons why I prefer OS X (except for the obvious and easily understood factor that it just doesn't ever need to be rebooted except for some system updates). The happy fact is that we agree that games are a primary reason to have at least one Windows box.
Isn't it fairly obvious that text messaging has the possibility of being less obtrusive than making a voice call while still at the movie? Once you've left the movie and could easily call, you might be less likely to bother since you are not being actively tortured by it and may want to move on to other activities.
That seems to be what is so scary to these bankers/moviemakers. If you hand over the money and keep your mouth shut they can still "buy the gross". If you've left the movie theater it seems like they are just about in the clear (based on experience from previous years). But text messaging makes it an easy impulse decision while it is still unpleasantly right in your face.
Well I wasn't emphatic enough in my examples. All of them are dead: AtariST, Amiga, Newton, and countless others could be thrown in like PenPoint and Symbolics. There aren't new books being written about them, or conferences, or software, or hardware. On the other hand all of those are on the upswing for the Mac.
It seems obvious at this point that you aren't interested in buying a Mac. Your mistake is in assuming this says something about the Macintosh as a platform when all it really indicates is something about you. Do you think I give a shit about some stupid benchmark (whether it says the G5 is faster or not)? My question is whether it runs OS X. If not, you lose. If I want to get a game machine I'll buy a PS2 or Xbox. If I want to spend a lot more (and more headaches, like I said I have an XP) then I'll buy a Windows box. But I thought the topic was computers, not game machines. But when you puff yourself up and make grand pronouncements I will speak up and point out how little content there is in what you say.
For instance you continue to make a big deal about the dominant position Apple had if you go back far enough. But the only machines they made at the time were the Apple II and possibly the Apple III. By the time they introduced the Mac in 1984 they were already a much less significant player. Their choice of the Lisa and then the Mac was intended to advance the state of the art rather than be the largest shipper of beige boxes. They succeeded after about 10 years. The future was won by machines that were designed to imitate the Mac.
I'll predict here for no extra cost that some time this decade Microsoft will again copy Apple and produce a real OS that is unix based with a Windows layer on top. Maybe that will spell an end for Apple's chances to make a useful contribution. I doubt it.
I suspect I missed your original post because it was modded down too low for my threshold. I think I did read all your comments that were not submerged.
Let me try a couple of comparable statements and see your reaction. The Amiga is dead. The AtariST is dead. These were systems much admired by a fraction of the computer owning public. But they are truly dead because there is no more hardware and software being created (by commercial entities) for those platforms. The Newton is dead in a sense but remarkably there are individuals able to continue to create software and drivers that extend its usefulness. For a time it appeared that NeXT would be dead, but with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple its future became assured (well, at least in retrospect).
If all you're saying is that Apple will remain a multibillion dollar company (and not another clone assembler) with millions of customers and industry wide support and choose to characterize that as DEAD because there are even larger companies offering competing products, I guess we have no dispute. But I don't think your definition of "dead" is very useful or one that is shared by ANYONE else.
As long as Apple is designing and creating computers (and other products) for millions of people your pronouncement just sounds ridiculous. Maybe you could find a more accurate brief description for not utterly dominating that does not sound so unconditional as dead?
> "Dead", in this case, is a relative term. They've gone from
> king of the hill to bottom of the heap.
I suppose it is useless to respond to someone who is so clumsy in his use of language but I'll try to explain why you are being pilloried. "Dead" is not a relative term even if you declare it is. Dead would make some sense if the only way to get useful software for a Mac would be to run Virtual PC and buy PC software. But there are millions of people who have no intention of putting up with the crap of a Microsoft OS (I have an Athlon 2400 box running XP so I'm not speaking without experience) and the often flimsy excuses for software that PC users endure.
The odd fact is that you are further from reality today than you would have been several years ago before OS X managed to become much more robust and capable than any Microsoft OS and Apple's legacy Mac OS 9. If you cared to, you could try to make the case that Mac as a computing platform died with the passing of OS 9 since many know that OS X is actually the second coming of NextSTEP. But I saw no glimmer that you even suspect that.
As for your top of the hill, bottom of the heap you seem to think companies exist to occupy space. No, they are supposed to produce a profit and Apple is one of the few hardware companies that have been producing profits. They aren't even within sight of the bottom of that heap.
But the thing that seems the most mysterious to so many is why people like you revel in making the same prediction (the death of Apple) year after year for about 20 years and wrong every year. Let me give you a litmus test to watch. When Apple's annual WWDC can no longer attract a large number of paying attendants from around the world then you can start making arrangements. Until then the people are laughing rudely because you look so silly joining all those other psychics who still await vindication.
The fact that Windows is still here is due to the fact that Apple lost the "look and feel" lawsuit with Microsoft. In that case there were additional factors but the most important one was that Microsoft had the financial ability to outlast Apple if necessary.
What continues to be true and probably always be true is that a corporation (or individual) with essentially unlimited resources can file a lawsuit and inflict onerous costs onto anyone they wish to drag into court. Even though the defendant could eventually win and force the complainant to pay the defendant's legal charges the sums required to play that game can be out of reach. In the last few days buy.com forced a parody web site to close down where it appears that scenario played out.
The situation continues to get more dangerous as more people uncritically buy into the idea that copyright covers everything because the copyright industry is promoting that idea. Copyright is limited and specific. Don't let them win by default.
Is this supposed to be humorous or are you so entirely clueless that you think copyright applies to anything you designate? If XGameStation takes an article word for word from Gamespot and publish it without permission or attribution (which may not be enough depending on issues of fair use) then you are discussing an issue of possible copyright infringement. But web site layout is not subject to copyright laws (not are recipes and many other things).
Hey, thanks! This is about the only message posted that doesn't suck out loud. What a bunch of pathetic losers. A movie with a plot that's practically made for slashdot and all anyone can do is whine. ["Oo, Ben Affleck couldn't be a nerd like me." Right, I'm sure it breaks his heart.] Will they get everything wrong? Maybe. But it is based on a Philip K Dick novel and they have a budget. With the millions they spend on marketing I suppose we would have heard about it eventually but I appreciate hearing about here a little earlier.
Now it's my turn to say, "You don't get it". Who says it's a landline? It just has to be an IP network. Seems like any of the 802.11 a/b/g should be acceptable candidates. There's no compelling reason it needs to be at any specific location. The one great distinction from cell phones is paying ridiculous charges so that an over managed network has the resources to track and charge you for all those minutes. When the first 802.11 based SIP phone is marketed with Bluetooth, built in SIP phone directory and scheduler that is synchronized with a click like a T68i is currently with iSync, then you can start numbering the days of the cell phone dinosaurs.
This isn't exactly a new prediction. John Chambers has been saying that rationally there is no reason why anyone should be paying the sums they are currently charged just for voice calls. SIP is the enabling protocol to make the transition of voice telephony from a service to an application. Regulators might throw in a wrench to slow the stampede but forces of nature always prevail eventually. Cell phones are the fax machines of the first decade of the 21 century (however notice that there are still fax machines today so there will still be cell phones tomorrow).
There is no such thing as copyrights on a character. That is unadulterated crap (yes, I know it is not your fault). Of course attempts have been made to create such a right by cases like the "sequel" to Gone with the Wind. It is yet another example of why there is such contempt for copyright law.
>> Math is always changing, 10 years is a HUGE HUGE gap. This is why people in China and Japan are so much better at math, they have NEW techniques for teaching it, while our kids waste their time learning their multiplication tables their kids are learning linear algebra, all because we focus on calculation speed and memorizing the solutions instead of focusing on improving logic and problem solving skills. I dont remember a damn thing I learned in math class, thats why I cant do calculus now
You are a moron who presumes to lecture about things that even you should know are beyond your grasp (you can't "do" calculus and you sermonize about math education?). First of all people in China and Japan are NOT so much better at math. Our elite institutions do a fine job of turning out world class mathematicians and have throughout the twentieth century. The best students from every part of the world have been coming to US universities to study in much the same way they went to German universities in earlier times. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.
These little dog and pony shows put on for journalists about every country in the world having better educated students are laughable. Let's take a slightly different tack to see what is going on. Remember a few years back when every year the Little League World Series would be won by some team from Taiwan or Korea? After a number of years you would expect some of these players would show up for those lucrative pay checks in the major leagues. When this phenomenon did not take off the officials took a more critical look at whether the eligibility rules of the competition were being strictly enforced.
Education systems don't have the luxury of taking a long view and forsaking the tool of using standardized tests. But that doesn't mean we can't check conclusions based on tests that have a deeper basis than promised aptitude (which are easily manipulated by careful selection of sample populations). If you look at various measures like productivity for the general population, or Nobel prizes, Field Medals, etc. for elites you notice that the US does quite well. When that is the case you are left with the task of explaining why many contra indicators should not just be thrown out as fraudulent or at least explain why they vary so much from hard realities.
On the other hand if you largely ignore 'standardized' test results for international comparisons and stick with something like the International Math Olympiad you find that teams from the US tend to do quite well. None of this means that mathematical education might not benefit from innovations. But it does mean you do not have a basic understanding of the facts.
Of course for me this utterly undermines all of what you advocate.
Just google HBM-30 and you'll find something like what you describe (but only available soon).
You ever hear of a program called DeCSS? I agree that it is unacceptable that a disc decides when I can and cannot use fast forward or skip chapter (or even play a disc if it is from the "wrong" region). So I rip the contents to my hard drive, use a program (IFOEdit) to get rid of the objectionable crap and watch from the PC or Mac. Now my original disc is a backup, I can play it on any computer on the network and a TV show collection like my Star Trek The Next Generation season 5 set is arranged by episode and I can choose to play any episode with a few quick clicks of a mouse. With the price of IDE drives as low as they are now, there is no reason to put up with this petty tyranny.
Maybe because your TV is not even close to the front door? Perhaps it is in the basement, in your bedroom, or you are watching a recorded HDTV program on your laptop over the home 802.11a wireless network out by the pool. Assuming everyone is glued to a TV set in their living rooms just feet from the front entrance is not a reasonable assumption and has the faint scent of condescension. But I'm probably just overreacting.
I doubt that more than a handful of readers here have any difference with you on the specific example cited. That isn't where the challenge resides. Shift the people involved up the food chain to the development team and then the readers here will go all Buchanan on you (Patrick Buchanan, author of "Death of the West", sometimes presidential candidate, xenophobe, etc). There really are issues of technology transfer that should not be ignored.
For instance, when hi tech jobs started shifting from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas in the 80's we're really talking about almost the same pool of individuals. Same thing for the surge of activity in Seattle in the 90's. We are all part of the same political and social fabric. That is a parochial US view but I'm certain it could be extended to include the hi tech regions of England and Europe (maybe even Israel). But when you get to India and China you need to re-examine your assumptions.
The people who will be enabled by the technological shift we are starting are not the programmers and managers with whom we deal on a day to day basis. As someone has noted in his sig: slashdot, all the news that matters to people who don't. The same is true in those other societies. These are not just economic decisions that are being made.
x=t^2 take the derivative
x'=2t substitute for t = sqrt(x)
x'=2 sqrt(x)
It does NOT fit the equation x'=kx. It's one of the most common differential equations. I didn't make it up. I'm not claiming an original result. Where do you guys come from? You are wrong.
The solution to the differential equation x' = kx is the exponential function which is of the form x = a*e^kt. I'm not certain about the nature of the solutions to x' = y^x or if there are solutions. The term geometric growth is, I think, an older term that could mean any polynomial growth beyond linear, e.g. x = t^2. But I can't find the term in my Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics so I'm guessing.
Uninterested means what you would think it does: not interested. On the other hand disinterested used to be a description of someone like a scientist looking for an explanation but completely impartial what the final result would be. He wouldn't find his object of study uninteresting but would not go in with preconceptions (an interest). Impartial would be a good synonym. Thanks for asking.
I read my reply again to see how condescending it actually was (it wasn't). Are you so thin-skinned that no one can point out errors to you without you taking offense? You misused the term exponential in the same way as almost every newspaper article, TV news program, and just about all of popular culture. But this is slashdot where I would presume there is at least a desire to be technically literate. Instead you just care about your ego so you reply "I meant *exactly* what I said".
If it will make your ego feel any better, you are just abusing the term in the same way as 90% of the population. Eventually (already?) the preferred definition will be "really big" just like disinterested has been redefined by the majority to be synonymous with uninterested. But in a technical forum exponential will always retain its original meaning. Learn it. Use it correctly. Stop whining. Now that's condescending.
"faster (exponentially) solid state storage"
I know you won't (or can't), but please take a moment to learn what exponential actually means. It does not mean really big like many people treat it. We already have words for that like "really big". Exponential growth refers to growth whose rate of increase is proportional to its magnitude. That's all. It satisfies the equation x' = kx.
Solid state storage can be much faster than hard drive storage. There is nothing exponential about it. Incidentally there are various sorts of solid state storage. Some are faster than hard drive storage, some are not.
The reason you don't see many screens with tuners is due to political forces. There is a much higher tariff in the US to import a TV set (screen with tuner built in) than to import a screen that can be considered a computer display device (or whatever). I'm not sure what domestic TV set manufacturing sector this is protecting but the response has been obvious, import the parts separately.
"which are far more expensive than I can justify when compared to a comparably priced rear projection"
If it is far more expensive then how can it be comparably priced? (I agree that plasma is too expensive). I don't think DVI can be mooted because with digital source and digital display (especially if it were 720 x 480 or a multiple), DVI would allow that data to be mapped with no "errors" except for those implicit in the original sampling. This presumes a movie source, not interlaced NTSC.
Since almost no one on this thread is particularly close to reality I'm picking your comment since it is at least hailing distance from relevance. The big deal here is that the DVI output is not HDCP encoded which means you could play it on computer monitors with DVI input that don't support HDCP. Screens (like plasma, DLP, LCD) for home entertainment are supposed to include HDCP support but they should also handled unscrambled inputs.
There are three reasons why this is much ado about nothing (from a cryptographic standpoint). First, the uncompressed data stream is so huge you would have to have swamp water in your head to think it is a good place to capture the data. Second, ever hear of DeCSS? The publisher has nicely compressed the data for you, capture it in that compressed form. Finally if any of you were paying attention a fairly short time ago it was reported right here (on Slashdot) that HDCP was utterly flawed and will be cracked by anyone with any motivation to do so. As I recall it is a simple matter of linear algebra. Anyhow why bother? It's the compressed data stream that matters and DeCSS gives you that while the DVI stream is equivalent to the uncompressed stream that can always be re-created with the decrypted compressed stream.
As a consumer device this and the Samsung DVD-HD931 are of interest because they are both digital all the way to the display which can also be digital. The scrambling that may or may not take place across the DVI connection is immaterial (except if you want to use a DVI non-HDCP compliant computer display as your output device, then get the Bravo).