SF may be hip, artistic, and fun on weekends, but it is also dirty, crime ridden, noisy, and expensive. Most of the geeks I know prefer to live on the peninsula, in nice, clean, spacious apartment complexes or ranch style homes.
These days, you can get all the culture you want directly in your home, in glorious HD quality and 3D if you like. And usually, it's about as fast to get from the peninsula to entertainment in SF than it is to get from the more residential areas of SF.
You don't need a license from microsoft. The end user can disable secure boot. The end user can install their own keys.
In reality, half the time the only thing that will work is booting with Microsoft's key, if not for any other reason than because that's the only thing vendors will test with. And in the future, more on more of the hardware will become unusable unless you boot with Microsoft's key.
So how does having a desktop monopoly facilitate Microsoft's move on ARM?
Microsoft is shipping the same operating system that they have a monopoly on on x86, now on a new more energy efficient platform. And in order to gain a monopoly on that new platform, they lock it down there.
Apple has locked down all its ARM devices.HTC, Samsung, Motorola are all selling ARM devices with locked bootloaders...
None of these companies have a desktop monopoly, hence it doesn't matter what they do.
Because it seems to me that Microsoft is no different than the already established players in the ARM smartphone and tablet players.
That is true only when they ship a product unrelated to Windows and Office. When they ship Windows and Office, or anything related to it, on any hardware, their monopoly on that software, of course, matters and makes their actions different from anybody else's.
"The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere has reached 396 ppm (parts per million) by volume as of June 2012" that's close to 400 ppm.
The concentration relevant to climate change is 391 ppmv annual average concentration. It's going to take at least a decade to reach 400 ppmv annual average concentration. Conflating seasonal peaks with long term averages is erroneous and deliberate FUD.
but you can't pinpoint a starting point at which humans began influence CO2 ppm (so I said a few centuries, but I could also have said a few million years : we are burning wood for at least 1.9 million years).
CO2 levels in the atmosphere have a cycle of 100kyr, with ever decreasing minima (same with temperatures). We have been through more than a dozen minima since 1.9Myr ago; pretty much nothing about atmospheric composition from more than 100kyr ago matters. Until 20000 years ago, much of the globe was covered in thick ice sheets anyway and humans were barely surviving. Massive global warming and sea level rise since then allows humans to flourish since then.
And there were no "humans" 1.9 million years ago, only hominids. And burning wood doesn't contribute to climate change because wood is a renewable resource. Finally, we know exactly when humans started making net contributions to CO2 in the atmosphere because that requires releasing carbon from fossil fuels.
In different words, your entire statement was complete and utter nonsense.
The general population doesnt know whats happening, and it doesnt even know that it doesnt - Chomsky
As far as volcanoes and solar activity are concerned, yes, that's true. But CO2 concentrations themselves have increased by about as much between about 20000 BC and 1750 as they did between 1750 and now, so there clearly exist effects that can "drown out human activity". In fact, if they kick in and we have a reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we're in big trouble.
The hope is that this stupid debate ends, we can move on with our lives, and in a decade or two, most of the world will have converted to solar and nuclear because it's the economically efficient thing to do.
If you want to speed up that process, stop subsidizing carbon based fuels, directly or indirectly. As long as US and European governments shove vast amounts of subsidies and bailouts in the direction of oil, gas, coal, auto, agriculture, and other fossil-fuel-related industries, one has to assume that their support for renewable energy and their rhetoric about climate change is just a thinly veiled attempt to engage in even more crony capitalism.
So, I'm all for strong action on climate change, starting with the massive amounts of government spending that are currently promoting climate change.
Journalists use technical terms like "unnamed sources", "alleged", "deep throat", etc. They even have their own system of measurements beyond metric and imperial: "size of a football field/bus/grape/head of a pin".
If increasingly acidic oceans kills off ocean food sources
That's extremely unlikely. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past, and there are plenty of organisms that can survive that and that would quickly fill any niches that open up.
The real threat to ocean food sources is massive overfishing, mostly to satisfy the sea food craze in the West. That's what should be stopped.
changing weather conditions turn formerly productive farming regions into drought stricken arid wastelands without also changing formerly unfarmable areas into productive farming regions
Most of the areas threatened by desertification from global warming are already marginal. And if you look at the distribution of landmasses and deserts, global warming will produce much more arable land up north (in Alaska, Canada, northern Europe and Siberia) than it destroys around the equator.
I doubt the climate changes will be so dramatic, but no one really knows for sure - we may hit a tipping point that uncontrollably drives the climate to new extremes never seen before.
The natural progression of climate would be to have a major glaciation even some time soon: tens of thousands of years of much of Europe, Asia, and the Americas covered in thick ice sheets, a cycle that has existed for millions of years and been getting progressively more serious each time around. Talk about "civilization destroying climate change".
On the other hand, we know that if we "tip out of" that glaciation cycle (complete melting of all ice sheets, sea level rise, etc.), the world climate we get would be very different from what we have today, and adaptation would be very costly, but it would be fine for humans and human civilization.
I'm not proposing that we deliberately tinker with the climate. But I think the carbon we have emitted into the atmosphere so far is not an altogether bad thing, and economics will probably cause us to greatly reduce emissions over the next few decades anyway, as solar and nuclear become cheaper and cheaper.
It may be easier to keep warm in a cold climate, but things don't grow well there. Even brief and light periods of cooling in the past ("little ice age") have cause massive famine and death. Furthermore, with global warming, we lose far less arable land around the equator than we gain up north.
Cooling is a disaster for civilization, warming is merely an inconvenience.
I think you give them (the governments and law enforcement) too much credit.
I pointed out that data mining by police has a false positive rate that is too high. That says nothing about the false negative rate, which is even higher. So, I'm not "giving them credit" for anything in particular. If you want to be a privacy advocate, you need to understand these concepts.
Furthermore, the US has much stronger privacy protections than Europe when it comes to the government; unfortunately, post 9/11 these are being eroded, by both conservatives and progressives alike.
Well, no, I left out Microsoft, RIM, and a few others. Apple has taste after all. In any case, the point is: Apple massively rips off other companies and innovates very little by themselves. Show me a single significant feature in Mountain Lion that Apple actually came up with first.
You're typically irrational about privacy, but focusing on Facebook.
In fact, it makes little difference whether Facebook snoops on your E-mail in order to show you ads; there's little they can do to you, and if they harm you, you can recover damages.
What should concern you is that governments and law enforcement get ever increasing access to your data, and the false positive rate for their data mining techniques is doubtlessly high. And when they drag you away in some pre-crime effort, you have little recourse. Yet, politicians successfully stoke the fear of companies like Facebook while at the same time creating laws that let government and police intrude ever more into our private lives.
Until people like you actually start getting a clue, acting rationally, and demanding change from politicians, privacy will continue to spiral down the drain.
I bought all my music legally, much of it on CDs, some in iTunes. Then I converted it to MP3 and uploaded it to a bunch of "lockers". How are "filters" supposed to determine whether I legally own the music, i.e., whether I have the CD on my shelf?
Re:Here we see the difference between Free and Sla
on
OS X Mountain Lion Review
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Ah, the old astroturfing: a "dearth of applications for Linux" and "great backwards support for Windows". Give it up, man, you'll never hype your stock up again.
Almost all the features I saw in Apple's presentation and feature list are rip-offs of features from third party iOS developers, Android, Firefox, Chrome, Gnome, KDE, and other non-Apple developers and systems.
In principle, I don't see anything wrong with that, except that Apple then goes around suing others when they (supposedly) copy similarly trivial features from iPhone.
Google Apps claims 4 million businesses as their customers, and they're just one of many companies offering cloud services. Many more businesses are converting their in-house IT services to web-based services. And Microsoft is doing the same thing with their product line, they're just slow, as usual.
Sounds like you need to get out of your dark IT basement and update your skills. If you actually work for a corporation, you might find that your users have thrown most of your work under a bus already; my coworkers and I certainly have.
People watch those videos if they find them useful. What opinions traditional teachers hold of them shouldn't matter to anyone, in particular since I suspect that most people who watch Khan videos are people who were failed by traditional schools in one way or another. If Khan Academy ever turns into a charter school, it will again be up to parents and students to decide whether they like the format and find it useful. In education, it's ultimately only results that count, and parents and students are smart enough to figure that out themselves.
If you think that "roaming profiles" are what "collaboration and communication" are about, you're about 30 years behind the times. And if you think that in 2012, you can give people a corporate laptop and force them to run corporate software on it, you're working for a dinosaur.
And you suggest that it being a poor game is a good reason to pirate it?
No, but a developer of a poor game will have a biased sample: pirates will pirate anything, but paying users don't want crap. So, if you develop poor software, it will seem like piracy is rampant, even though overall, it is not.
Active directory is much easier to deploy and manage than an assortment of linux servers running ldap, DNS, etc
DNS, LDAP, etc. are available with easy-to-use web-based managment interfaces as appliances, far easier than maintaining Microsoft stuff. But that's the wrong argument to make, because the entire style of computing Active Directory represents is itself obsolete.
Business isn't just email, word, and excel. It is about effortless collaboration and communication.
Yes, and cloud solutions like Google Apps and Zoho beat anything Microsoft has to offer hands down, both in terms of usability and ease of management. Microsoft knows that their stuff is obsolete, which is why they'll drag you into cloud computing whether you want to or not anyway, all the while keeping a tight grip on your wallet.
Yes, Microsoft has fixed crashes, and Windows is now at least technically an acceptable system. But the only reason it is any good in a business setting is because people actually know it and because backwards compatibility is important.
Objectively, if Microsoft would offer Windows and Office as a new product on the market, they'd be laughed at: Microsoft's products are ridiculously complex, inconsistent, and buggy.
Minitel came out in 1978, and satisfied most of the needs that the Internet satisfies today: online shopping (mail order, tickets, etc.), messaging, directory services, showing both the necessary hardware and software was available; it became popular even though France Telecom charged vastly inflated prices. In the US, we had all the pieces: the Apple II came out in 1977, the IBM PC in 1981, BBSes in the early 1980s, USENET in 1980. That is the hardware and software that we would have connected to the Internet with in the late 70's and early 80's; many people (including myself) actually did, getting in through arrangements with universities and companies. The only obstacle to more widespread adoption back then was the limitations and high cost of US data services, largely due to AT&T's near monopoly, and the restrictions placed on the Internet by its operators.
Slashdot Mirror
SF may be hip, artistic, and fun on weekends, but it is also dirty, crime ridden, noisy, and expensive. Most of the geeks I know prefer to live on the peninsula, in nice, clean, spacious apartment complexes or ranch style homes.
These days, you can get all the culture you want directly in your home, in glorious HD quality and 3D if you like. And usually, it's about as fast to get from the peninsula to entertainment in SF than it is to get from the more residential areas of SF.
In reality, half the time the only thing that will work is booting with Microsoft's key, if not for any other reason than because that's the only thing vendors will test with. And in the future, more on more of the hardware will become unusable unless you boot with Microsoft's key.
Microsoft is shipping the same operating system that they have a monopoly on on x86, now on a new more energy efficient platform. And in order to gain a monopoly on that new platform, they lock it down there.
None of these companies have a desktop monopoly, hence it doesn't matter what they do.
That is true only when they ship a product unrelated to Windows and Office. When they ship Windows and Office, or anything related to it, on any hardware, their monopoly on that software, of course, matters and makes their actions different from anybody else's.
In a world in which natural, common plants are illegal, it doesn't seem unusual that shapes might be as well.
The concentration relevant to climate change is 391 ppmv annual average concentration. It's going to take at least a decade to reach 400 ppmv annual average concentration. Conflating seasonal peaks with long term averages is erroneous and deliberate FUD.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere have a cycle of 100kyr, with ever decreasing minima (same with temperatures). We have been through more than a dozen minima since 1.9Myr ago; pretty much nothing about atmospheric composition from more than 100kyr ago matters. Until 20000 years ago, much of the globe was covered in thick ice sheets anyway and humans were barely surviving. Massive global warming and sea level rise since then allows humans to flourish since then.
And there were no "humans" 1.9 million years ago, only hominids. And burning wood doesn't contribute to climate change because wood is a renewable resource. Finally, we know exactly when humans started making net contributions to CO2 in the atmosphere because that requires releasing carbon from fossil fuels.
In different words, your entire statement was complete and utter nonsense.
Well, you certainly don't know what's happening.
Atmospheric CO2 increased from 180 ppmv to about 270 ppmv without human interference. Humans then contributed to an increase to about 390 ppmv.
Don't tell me that "200/250 to 400 ppm" is similar to that; you are deliberately adjusting the numbers to promote an agenda.
As far as volcanoes and solar activity are concerned, yes, that's true. But CO2 concentrations themselves have increased by about as much between about 20000 BC and 1750 as they did between 1750 and now, so there clearly exist effects that can "drown out human activity". In fact, if they kick in and we have a reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we're in big trouble.
The hope is that this stupid debate ends, we can move on with our lives, and in a decade or two, most of the world will have converted to solar and nuclear because it's the economically efficient thing to do.
If you want to speed up that process, stop subsidizing carbon based fuels, directly or indirectly. As long as US and European governments shove vast amounts of subsidies and bailouts in the direction of oil, gas, coal, auto, agriculture, and other fossil-fuel-related industries, one has to assume that their support for renewable energy and their rhetoric about climate change is just a thinly veiled attempt to engage in even more crony capitalism.
So, I'm all for strong action on climate change, starting with the massive amounts of government spending that are currently promoting climate change.
Journalists use technical terms like "unnamed sources", "alleged", "deep throat", etc. They even have their own system of measurements beyond metric and imperial: "size of a football field/bus/grape/head of a pin".
That's extremely unlikely. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past, and there are plenty of organisms that can survive that and that would quickly fill any niches that open up.
The real threat to ocean food sources is massive overfishing, mostly to satisfy the sea food craze in the West. That's what should be stopped.
Most of the areas threatened by desertification from global warming are already marginal. And if you look at the distribution of landmasses and deserts, global warming will produce much more arable land up north (in Alaska, Canada, northern Europe and Siberia) than it destroys around the equator.
The natural progression of climate would be to have a major glaciation even some time soon: tens of thousands of years of much of Europe, Asia, and the Americas covered in thick ice sheets, a cycle that has existed for millions of years and been getting progressively more serious each time around. Talk about "civilization destroying climate change".
On the other hand, we know that if we "tip out of" that glaciation cycle (complete melting of all ice sheets, sea level rise, etc.), the world climate we get would be very different from what we have today, and adaptation would be very costly, but it would be fine for humans and human civilization.
I'm not proposing that we deliberately tinker with the climate. But I think the carbon we have emitted into the atmosphere so far is not an altogether bad thing, and economics will probably cause us to greatly reduce emissions over the next few decades anyway, as solar and nuclear become cheaper and cheaper.
It may be easier to keep warm in a cold climate, but things don't grow well there. Even brief and light periods of cooling in the past ("little ice age") have cause massive famine and death. Furthermore, with global warming, we lose far less arable land around the equator than we gain up north.
Cooling is a disaster for civilization, warming is merely an inconvenience.
I pointed out that data mining by police has a false positive rate that is too high. That says nothing about the false negative rate, which is even higher. So, I'm not "giving them credit" for anything in particular. If you want to be a privacy advocate, you need to understand these concepts.
Furthermore, the US has much stronger privacy protections than Europe when it comes to the government; unfortunately, post 9/11 these are being eroded, by both conservatives and progressives alike.
Well, no, I left out Microsoft, RIM, and a few others. Apple has taste after all. In any case, the point is: Apple massively rips off other companies and innovates very little by themselves. Show me a single significant feature in Mountain Lion that Apple actually came up with first.
You're typically irrational about privacy, but focusing on Facebook.
In fact, it makes little difference whether Facebook snoops on your E-mail in order to show you ads; there's little they can do to you, and if they harm you, you can recover damages.
What should concern you is that governments and law enforcement get ever increasing access to your data, and the false positive rate for their data mining techniques is doubtlessly high. And when they drag you away in some pre-crime effort, you have little recourse. Yet, politicians successfully stoke the fear of companies like Facebook while at the same time creating laws that let government and police intrude ever more into our private lives.
Until people like you actually start getting a clue, acting rationally, and demanding change from politicians, privacy will continue to spiral down the drain.
I bought all my music legally, much of it on CDs, some in iTunes. Then I converted it to MP3 and uploaded it to a bunch of "lockers". How are "filters" supposed to determine whether I legally own the music, i.e., whether I have the CD on my shelf?
Ah, the old astroturfing: a "dearth of applications for Linux" and "great backwards support for Windows". Give it up, man, you'll never hype your stock up again.
Almost all the features I saw in Apple's presentation and feature list are rip-offs of features from third party iOS developers, Android, Firefox, Chrome, Gnome, KDE, and other non-Apple developers and systems.
In principle, I don't see anything wrong with that, except that Apple then goes around suing others when they (supposedly) copy similarly trivial features from iPhone.
Google Apps claims 4 million businesses as their customers, and they're just one of many companies offering cloud services. Many more businesses are converting their in-house IT services to web-based services. And Microsoft is doing the same thing with their product line, they're just slow, as usual.
Sounds like you need to get out of your dark IT basement and update your skills. If you actually work for a corporation, you might find that your users have thrown most of your work under a bus already; my coworkers and I certainly have.
People watch those videos if they find them useful. What opinions traditional teachers hold of them shouldn't matter to anyone, in particular since I suspect that most people who watch Khan videos are people who were failed by traditional schools in one way or another. If Khan Academy ever turns into a charter school, it will again be up to parents and students to decide whether they like the format and find it useful. In education, it's ultimately only results that count, and parents and students are smart enough to figure that out themselves.
If you think that "roaming profiles" are what "collaboration and communication" are about, you're about 30 years behind the times. And if you think that in 2012, you can give people a corporate laptop and force them to run corporate software on it, you're working for a dinosaur.
No, but a developer of a poor game will have a biased sample: pirates will pirate anything, but paying users don't want crap. So, if you develop poor software, it will seem like piracy is rampant, even though overall, it is not.
DNS, LDAP, etc. are available with easy-to-use web-based managment interfaces as appliances, far easier than maintaining Microsoft stuff. But that's the wrong argument to make, because the entire style of computing Active Directory represents is itself obsolete.
Yes, and cloud solutions like Google Apps and Zoho beat anything Microsoft has to offer hands down, both in terms of usability and ease of management. Microsoft knows that their stuff is obsolete, which is why they'll drag you into cloud computing whether you want to or not anyway, all the while keeping a tight grip on your wallet.
Yes, Microsoft has fixed crashes, and Windows is now at least technically an acceptable system. But the only reason it is any good in a business setting is because people actually know it and because backwards compatibility is important. Objectively, if Microsoft would offer Windows and Office as a new product on the market, they'd be laughed at: Microsoft's products are ridiculously complex, inconsistent, and buggy.
Minitel came out in 1978, and satisfied most of the needs that the Internet satisfies today: online shopping (mail order, tickets, etc.), messaging, directory services, showing both the necessary hardware and software was available; it became popular even though France Telecom charged vastly inflated prices. In the US, we had all the pieces: the Apple II came out in 1977, the IBM PC in 1981, BBSes in the early 1980s, USENET in 1980. That is the hardware and software that we would have connected to the Internet with in the late 70's and early 80's; many people (including myself) actually did, getting in through arrangements with universities and companies. The only obstacle to more widespread adoption back then was the limitations and high cost of US data services, largely due to AT&T's near monopoly, and the restrictions placed on the Internet by its operators.