You totally missed the point. The reason ebooks have become popular in the market is because of this technology which removes the main reason people have not liked reading books electronically.
Prior to this, EVERY SINGLE ONE of the things you mentioned already existed for ebooks.
No, I specifically addressed this point. Even ignoring e-ink, the technology for comfortable ebook display on laptops was not there until recently. Small cheap laptops, PDF software supporting subpixel antialiasing, and widespread availability of ebooks on the scale of google books are all recent developments that just happen to coincide temporally with the development of e-ink.
And perhaps that is it then? You are one of the few who can spend hours reading an LCD ebook after working a desk job doing the same without it effecting your eyes? I am pretty sure that is not the rule?
I have excellent LCD monitors at home and work and could not fathom it without getting bad migraines.
Almost everything I stated about LCDs being acceptable for ebooks was based on the use of small cheap LCDs, so for you to turn around and refer to "desk job", "LCD monitors", and other desk-bound devices is rather missing the point on your part.
Any technology that does not have this [e-ink] is simply a non-starter for most people. This is the SINGLE feature has allowed the ebook revolution to begin, period.
It looks like we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I love e-ink as much as the next person but it is NOT the most important feature of e-books. It's not even fourth or fifth on the list. You can get all of the paper-friendly advantages of e-ink just by... printing the book out on paper. Printers are old technology.
The ebook revolution coincides with e-ink in terms of timing, but that's just because it took computers this long to catch up to the point where ebooks are becoming useful. Before a couple of years ago, google books did not have every book, laptops were bulky and heavy, disk space was more expensive, and of course less content was available. I should also mention, though, that if you consider niche categories like academic publishing, rather than the mass market, electronic journals already became dominant several years ago, because PDFs are so vastly superior to paper for research work.
I've used both eink and LCDs. I have average eyes (neither great nor poor). I find backlit LCDs perfectly acceptable. Most of the eyestrain from LCDs comes from the low resolution of monitors, and from sitting upright at a desktop staring straight at a fixed location for hours on end. The low resolution is greatly mitigated by subpixel antialiasing (which some people apparently hate, although I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would hate it). Get a PDF reader that supports subpixel antialiasing for fonts. Couple that with a book-sized laptop (again, only recently available) and there's no great visual advantage to e-ink displays. E-ink of course wins on battery life, but backlighting has its advantages too; for example, it's easier to read in the dark, or in low light.
The whole dichotomy over printed books vs. ebooks just seems strange. You don't have to choose one or the other, you can have both. And you don't need a special ebook device; most of the key benefits of electronic books are available on an ordinary laptop with a PDF reader.
This is, of course, assuming that the publishers and lobbyists get it right, and don't destroy the entire product category out of greed.
Advantages of ebooks that you will never get in a printed book:
Text search. This is especially important in academics and research. You want to find where a phrase is defined and you don't want to read the whole book to find it. An index is a far inferior alternative.
Did I mention search? Well, it's not limited to just one book. You can go online to google books and search for a phrase in every book ever published. This achievement is stunning when you think about it. The fact that publishers seem determined to kill this golden goose with their greed is pretty depressing.
Portability. Sure, if you have one single book vs. one Kindle, the comparison is pretty favorable towards the book. But a Kindle can hold several hundred books, and a laptop can hold tens of thousands. When traveling, it's not even a question of books vs. ebooks, since 10000 printed books are physically impossible to carry with you. Oh, and of course, you can perform text search across all those books too.
Ease of copying and backup. The publishers hate this one, and try to do everything they can to prevent it, but for the user it's a boon.
Of course, printed books have advantages too: higher resolution, low tech, can read in bathtub, doesn't matter as much if you lose one. So there is room for both formats in this world. What would make sense is for publishers to automatically supply the electronic rights to anyone who purchases a physical volume. That would greatly increase the value proposition in a book purchase, and (dare I say) expand their market and profits. It's frustrating that everyone except the publishers themselves seems to realize this.
Well, that last bit has an important and noteworthy exception. In academic publishing (journals and such), it is the norm rather than the exception for publishers to provide electronic rights to libraries and institutions that purchase the corresponding physical copy. So there is hope that the rest of the industry can come to their senses in time.
It's worth mentioning that technological progress (if not stymied by the copyright lobby) will eventually bring to ebooks all the advantages of printed books, whereas no amount of progress (short of replacing books with ebooks) will allow printed books to compete with the advantages of ebooks. The resolution of ebooks will improve, and it is at least conceivable that they can be engineered to last months on a single battery charge, or be waterproof, or become cheap enough that you wouldn't mind losing the hardware (the content will, of course, be easy to back up, once the DRM fetish subsides). So, for now, we have a choice of printed books vs. ebooks, but in the future I see ebooks taking over.
Not for federal crimes they don't. There's no parole in the federal system for crimes committed since November of 1987 - you do every minute of your sentence unless you can get it reversed somehow or you can get a pardon.
According to Justin Petersen (who spent 41 months in federal prison - he should know), they have indeed abolished parole, but you still get 15% time off for good behavior.
If they were inclined to sell at the current price it seems to me that they would sell regardless of any insider trading. Any attempt to buy up stock at the lower price would signal other investors to anticipate a price increase, making them less likely to sell....
... any significant degree of insider selling should signal other investors that the price will soon be falling, resulting in a more rapid price correction and thus a more efficient market.
Your arguments presume an extremely large amount of insider trading, large enough to affect the market price. Such a large amount of insider trading is probably not happening in today's markets, since insider trading is, after all, illegal.
With insider trading being illegal, the few who break the law gain an unfair advantage, and since finance (unlike manufacturing or engineering) is a zero sum game, if some people have an advantage, then others are by definition disadvantaged.
If insider trading were legal to everyone, then the unfair advantage disappears, and in that case your arguments might hold. Whether insider trading should be legal or not is a separate debate. The fact is, it's illegal now, and I have no sympathy for those who break this particular law.
But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!
The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.
Indeed, 20 seconds to boot is not "incredibly short" by any means, unless you've been trapped in Windows for so long that your standards have lowered. Fedora has been at the 20 second mark for a while now. On "retrofitted" platforms (similar to what is used in the article), Linux has achieved five second boot times.
It's worth noting that in the Linux world, "Done booting means CPU and disk idle" as per Arjan van de Ven, whereas in the Windows world your computer is still loading up services and anti-virus programs even after you get to the desktop. So Linux is booting up faster despite measuring itself against a tougher standard. Hmm...
This whole thing is a non-story except to sufferers of inferior operating systems. The so-called "incredibly short" boot times are merely normal on alternative operating systems, and have been for quite some time.
If you install acpid on your laptop, you can shut down your laptop cleanly by pressing the power button. Once you get into the habit, it's a pretty failsafe method of guaranteeing that you shut down the right machine.
I disagree. Rude behavior, by definition, is behavior that negatively affects others in a society. Society relies on laws to discourage unacceptable behaviors. This is why there are laws against driving too slow on highways, unnecessarily holding up traffic, or making obscene hand gestures, for instance.
This is getting off topic, but in all honesty, if we are going to outlaw rude behavior on these grounds, let's start with major annoyances such as telemarketing, spamming, door-to-door solicitations, advertising, and even talking on a cell phone in public, all of which I find far more negative to society than merely missing a light because someone was late restarting traffic.
That's the other serious problem with government micromanagement: even if the outcome of the law is beneficial (which we disagree about in this case), it is almost never optimal once you factor in the opportunity cost of spending those same resources somewhere else.
If traffic is at a standstill, then unless there's a cop right next to you, you're not likely to get caught. Technically, you're not driving in that situation.
The phrase used in laws is "operating a motor vehicle", which you certainly are doing even in stopped traffic, unless you turn off the ignition. Alcohol laws are even more stringent, forbidding any sort of open containers in a car even if the ignition is not on, and even if the alcohol was never consumed.
I am absolutely 100% in favor of a 0.00% BAC limit on anyone sitting in the drivers seat while the car is on, but extending this ban to situations when the car is not on and/or no alcohol is consumed strikes me as ridiculous and overreaching.
On the other hand, the other day I was in backed up traffic. Nothing was moving. Then traffic started to move... all except for the car in front of me. I can only guess that she was texting and had not noticed. People were starting to honk... finally she looked up and remembered where she was. She made me miss the next light... maybe not dangerous, but exceptionally rude!
The whole point I'm trying to make is that "rude" does not constitute a sufficient standard for making something illegal. Otherwise we'd have a whole raft of stupid and ridiculous laws. Well, we already have them, but we'd have more.
What could possibly be so vitally important that it has to be texted right now, yet not so important that you can't pull over to do it?
What if you're stuck in standstill traffic, and you want to inform someone you'll be late? You can't pull over, because traffic is a standstill.
My concern with these types of laws is that, in overreaching, they lead to ridiculous outcomes. Texting at 0mph is not dangerous and does not merit jail time.
Well that's just silly. If you collect a penny from thirty million people, that's a pretty significant amount of money, no?
This is true anywhere, but if you're collecting a penny each from 30 million people (ignoring the fact that $300000 is actually a virtually meaningless amount of money to a government), you could just as easily levy an income tax.
certain items, such as basic groceries, are exempt from the GST. This makes the tax less regressive
I fail to see how this is in any way better than just starting from a progressive tax to begin with.
Thanks for your response. Actually, I basically agree with everything that you said (well, if not agree, I can at least understand your viewpoint).
Everything, that is, except for the GST.
The GST is an enormous contradiction in terms. Some of these contradictions are laid out in your very post which I am replying to. Let me explain.
First of all, you say the GST is miniscule on an individual level yet provides significant funding. I have no idea what you can possibly mean by this. A miniscule tax, by definition, cannot provide significant funding. Taxes are measured in numbers which have magnitude. A number cannot be simultaneously large and small.
Perhaps you mean to say that the GST is imperceptible to taxpayers, yet provides significant funding. This is actually very true, and in my view it is a huge reason why GSTs/VATs are destructive. They are essentially a way of deceiving the population about how much taxes they are paying. The argument that "GST/VAT is deceptively perceived as a small amount relative to the amount of money it actually raises" is to me one of the biggest problems with GST. I dislike policy proposals that exploit public deception.
The other thing that Canadians need to decide is whether they want a tax policy that is progressive or regressive. Your post mentions transfer payments, something which is inherently progressive, and further evidence is provided by the income tax code, which in Canada is far more progressive than in the US, approaching levels only seen in northern European countries. Yet the GST is without question strongly regressive. Contrary to your assertion that the GST only affects the "very rich", it is in fact the poor people who are most harmed by GST. Don't believe me? Think of the GST as a 5% flat tax on consumption (which it is). Now consider the fact that poor people spend a greater percentage of their incomes on consumption than rich people (which they do). It follows, mathematically, that poor people pay a larger percentage of their incomes to GST than rich people. That's right, the GST is worse than a flat tax. At least with a 5% flat tax, all individuals, rich or poor, would be paying 5% of their incomes.
Yes, I know, there is a so-called "GST/HST tax credit", but it has no relationship whatsoever to GST, does not depend in any way on the amount of GST that you actually paid, and IMO the linking of this tax credit to the GST is in and of itself a political deception. As proof, I point out that the Earned Income Credit in the US, which operates in exactly the same way, has nothing to do with GST, as indeed the US has no GST.
Rather, certain Americans (and Canadians, for that matter) sometimes need to be reminded that their nation *isn't* the greatest, most free, most awesome country in the world... that it is flawed, and often *doesn't* live up to its lauded ideals.
Yes, Canadians need to be reminded too. I'm an American living in Canada, and here's some of the problems I see:
Almost total ban on handgun ownership and concealed carry.
As for some of your specific points:
thought: Didn't we just see a story about a man [in the US] arrested for possessing child porn that didn't actually depict children?
Virtual child porn has alwaysbeenillegal in Canada to a much greater degree than in the US.
I think our system of democracy is more representative of the people's wishes...
Oh really? I've literally never met anyone who supports the GST, so why is it still around?
Point is, Canada and the US are free in different ways. I would not go so far as to say that one is any freer than the other -- if anything, they are incomparable.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse. How is that we hear so many stories of Asian immigrants coming to this country with nothing, or next to nothing and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, often with less than most native-born people who linger in stagnant poverty over generations. If you took those well-off Asian-Americans and put them in the same situation as the perpetually poor in the U.S., the majority of them would eventually rise out of that level again.
You're missing something very obvious here. US immigration law is tortuous and acts as a giant filter selecting for only the most desirable immigrants. In order to even make it to the US from Asia, you need to be abnormally hard-working, resourceful, and industrious.
The astounding success of Asian immigrants in the US has nothing to do with Asian culture. It is entirely due to the fact that Asian immigrants in the US form a highly biased selection relative to the population of all Asians, consisting only of those people who are smart and persistent enough to make it through the immigration gauntlet. In other words, you only see the bright ones in America, because the others aren't even allowed to immigrate here.
In contrast, the majority of African Americans are descended from slaves (sad, but true), and most (80-85%) of the Hispanic population stems from illegal immigration (source). This explains why the selection effect of immigration law is only really visible in Asians.
The "Vista debacle" is only a "debacle" on Slashdot. Everywhere else, it's at best a "minor inconvenience." Please don't fall into the trap of believing that Slashdot represents reality in any way.
The following recent quote is taken directly from CNN, about as far away from slashdot as you can get:
Microsoft's Vista operating system, which was released in early 2007, never took off like the company had hoped. Sales in the division that produces Vista fell 16% in the previous quarter. User satisfaction has been underwhelming, and IT departments have largely opted to stick with Vista's predecessor, Windows XP.
It sure sounds like more than merely a minor inconvenience to me.
Can I install my copy of Microsoft Office on two laptops?
Yes, the licensed device may be a portable device. The secondary portable installation right is for use of the primary user of the first installed copy only and must be on a portable device. If you are the primary user of the licensed device, you may install a second copy on another laptop, but the copy of Microsoft Office on that laptop may only be used by you.
There is data on disk drive failure rates, but not enough on SSD failure rates. I read the paper and it doesn't seem they do anything with failures for either side. What the hell did you read?
There is an entire section in the paper on disk failure rates (Section 4.5). Although you are correct that data on mechanical drive failure rates is plentiful, and data on SSD failure rates is not, the paper for some reason only analyzes SSD failures based on nonexistent data, while ignoring the established body of literature on mechanical drive failures.
It may perhaps be true that no other analysis in the paper depends on the analysis in Section 4.5. However, a scientific analysis is not required to have another analysis depend on it in order for the first analysis to be meaningful. Therefore it is fair game to question their inclusion of the analysis on SSD failure rates. The authors of the paper seem to take the position that RAID renders failure rates meaningless, but if that were truly the case, why do they bother discussing failure rates at all?
My guess is that the authors are well aware that failure rates make a huge difference in real life, which is why they attempt (badly) to discuss failure rates. See for example this Wikipedia discussion on RAID failure which also coincidentally describes the dramatic advantages that solid state drives offer in this regard.
This paper is biased and premature even by the prevailing low standards of typical CS papers. For example, they model SSD failure, but completely ignore mechanical drive failure, which is far more devastating and commonplace. I kid you not:
Since this paper is focused on solid-state storage, and
wear is a novel, SSD-specific phenomenon, we include it in
our device models. Currently we do not model other failures,
such as mechanical failures in disks.
The correct approach to incomplete data is, of course, to gather complete data, and they have no excuse here, because there is PLENTY of data on mechanical drive failure rates. However, if you are not willing to do that, the least you can do is ignore the data equally on both sides. The authors' failure to treat both sides equally leads to a hopelessly biased and skewed analysis.
Because my reading of Anand's research tells me that in active, non-stop use SSD would fail in about the same time as normal laptop 1.8"/2.5" harddrives - 1-1.5 years. Limit on number of rewrite cycles is high (~100k), yet is quite easy to reach.
The article you cite does not contain the 1-1.5 years figure anywhere. How did you get that number? For what it's worth, I've been using solid state drives in both my laptops for more than a year now, with no problems whatsoever.
Another very important point which often gets ignored is that a solid state drive failure is far more benign than a spinning platter drive failure. When a solid state drive fails, you lose the ability to write data, but you can still read data. On the other hand, failure of a spinning platter drive means that you can't read your data anymore, at least not without sending it to a very expensive data recovery firm.
OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Amen to that. I'm guessing that out of all the Apple proponents who have hijacked this thread, not a single one of them has seriously tried to use OS X the way a Unix system is normally used.
Any sort of serious Unix user quickly encounters numerous differences and peculiarities that hamper the use of OS X as a Unix system. For example, the pathnames are different, leading to widespread breakage of shell scripts and (crucially) build scripts and makefiles. Of course, a well written program would be able to deal with this, but in the real world not all programs are perfect, and some programs just don't compile correctly no matter what you do. If the program that you're looking for is in DarwinPorts, then you're okay, because somebody else has already gone to the considerable trouble of fixing the package so that it works, but otherwise you're SOL.
A specific example is the PBC library, which works great on Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD, and even versions of OS X prior to Leopard, but won't build on Leopard.
I've been a Linux/Unix admin for 12 years and as far as being a unix goes, even Cygwin does a better job than OS X of acting the way Unix users expect.
Turns out that for only $300 MORE, the Air will provide you with a CPU that's 400 MHz faster, the 128 GB SSD and dedicated graphics, along with OS X Leopard and the ability to run Windows Vista (probably better than the Adamo can).
Notwithstanding its many advantages, the Macbook Air has only one USB port. I was seriously considering getting a Macbook Air at one point, but the lack of expansion ports was a deal-breaker.
The larger point, and the main problem with the Macintosh line, is that Mac customers have far less flexibility than PC users to pick and choose the features that they want. Unless your computing needs happen to fit one of the five machines that Apple offers at any one time, you're either going to pay for a bunch of features that you don't need and/or lack some features that you do need.
You can run Photoshop and almost any other piece of business software in a virtual machine.
Are you saying I should switch from Windows to Linux so that I can run Windows in a VM?
Yes, I am saying exactly that.
Running Windows in a VM is not as ridiculous as it sounds. VMWare's entire business plan is built on this idea, and their ESX server product even has a Linux kernel, so in a very real sense they run Windows in a Linux VM.
The argument for running Windows in a VM is straightforward. VMs are very powerful tools. I gave some examples in my previous post. For instance, the ability to save OS state makes disaster recovery a breeze. I never have to worry about viruses when I run Windows in a VM -- if I open a program and it turns out to be a virus, I just revert to a previous state. The overhead of running in a VM is way way less than the overhead of running an antivirus program. (Incidentally, monitoring for malicious behavior such as atypical disk or network access is also made easier when the system in question runs on a VM, since you can just monitor from the host system.) Of course, it is still possible to screw things up beyond repair, but with a good setup, you are much less likely to.
The amount of performance available in a VM today easily matches what bare metal computers could achieve two years ago. In my view, this level of performance is quite acceptable for regular business applications, and well worth trading in exchange for the management advantages of virtual machines.
Even for personal use, I am not so sure I want to switch to all *BSD/Linux. I can get zsh and all common utilities (including vi) running on my Windows machine along with all business software.
First of all, you say "personal use" but then go on to discuss business software. So it's not clear to me exactly what the context is. I'll assume you mean something like a home machine on which company work occasionally occurs.
Three important qualities of my Linux system that a Windows machine cannot match are: stability, security, and useful virtual desktops. (Yes I am aware that Windows has third-party virtual desktop implementations. They all suck.)
I cannot get the reverse if I change the OS. Sorry, Gimp is not Photoshop, and nothing in the open source comes close to Adobe suites (an advice to use LaTex instead of Framemaker gets the rest of your arguments automatically disqualified).
You can run Photoshop and almost any other piece of business software in a virtual machine. The only exception is 3d graphics, but businesses that require 3d graphics for daily work really are a minority. The virtual machine approach has many advantages, including ease of checkpointing and deployment. It's a lot easier to save and copy machine state in a virtual machine for when something goes wrong (and with Windows, sooner or later, something goes wrong). It's true that there is some performance overhead, but the overhead is small and getting smaller all the time. Try KVM if you haven't already -- it was an eye-opener for me.
Slashdot Mirror
You totally missed the point. The reason ebooks have become popular in the market is because of this technology which removes the main reason people have not liked reading books electronically. Prior to this, EVERY SINGLE ONE of the things you mentioned already existed for ebooks.
No, I specifically addressed this point. Even ignoring e-ink, the technology for comfortable ebook display on laptops was not there until recently. Small cheap laptops, PDF software supporting subpixel antialiasing, and widespread availability of ebooks on the scale of google books are all recent developments that just happen to coincide temporally with the development of e-ink.
And perhaps that is it then? You are one of the few who can spend hours reading an LCD ebook after working a desk job doing the same without it effecting your eyes? I am pretty sure that is not the rule?
I have excellent LCD monitors at home and work and could not fathom it without getting bad migraines.
Almost everything I stated about LCDs being acceptable for ebooks was based on the use of small cheap LCDs, so for you to turn around and refer to "desk job", "LCD monitors", and other desk-bound devices is rather missing the point on your part.
Any technology that does not have this [e-ink] is simply a non-starter for most people. This is the SINGLE feature has allowed the ebook revolution to begin, period.
It looks like we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I love e-ink as much as the next person but it is NOT the most important feature of e-books. It's not even fourth or fifth on the list. You can get all of the paper-friendly advantages of e-ink just by ... printing the book out on paper. Printers are old technology.
The ebook revolution coincides with e-ink in terms of timing, but that's just because it took computers this long to catch up to the point where ebooks are becoming useful. Before a couple of years ago, google books did not have every book, laptops were bulky and heavy, disk space was more expensive, and of course less content was available. I should also mention, though, that if you consider niche categories like academic publishing, rather than the mass market, electronic journals already became dominant several years ago, because PDFs are so vastly superior to paper for research work.
I've used both eink and LCDs. I have average eyes (neither great nor poor). I find backlit LCDs perfectly acceptable. Most of the eyestrain from LCDs comes from the low resolution of monitors, and from sitting upright at a desktop staring straight at a fixed location for hours on end. The low resolution is greatly mitigated by subpixel antialiasing (which some people apparently hate, although I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would hate it). Get a PDF reader that supports subpixel antialiasing for fonts. Couple that with a book-sized laptop (again, only recently available) and there's no great visual advantage to e-ink displays. E-ink of course wins on battery life, but backlighting has its advantages too; for example, it's easier to read in the dark, or in low light.
This is, of course, assuming that the publishers and lobbyists get it right, and don't destroy the entire product category out of greed.
Advantages of ebooks that you will never get in a printed book:
Of course, printed books have advantages too: higher resolution, low tech, can read in bathtub, doesn't matter as much if you lose one. So there is room for both formats in this world. What would make sense is for publishers to automatically supply the electronic rights to anyone who purchases a physical volume. That would greatly increase the value proposition in a book purchase, and (dare I say) expand their market and profits. It's frustrating that everyone except the publishers themselves seems to realize this.
Well, that last bit has an important and noteworthy exception. In academic publishing (journals and such), it is the norm rather than the exception for publishers to provide electronic rights to libraries and institutions that purchase the corresponding physical copy. So there is hope that the rest of the industry can come to their senses in time.
It's worth mentioning that technological progress (if not stymied by the copyright lobby) will eventually bring to ebooks all the advantages of printed books, whereas no amount of progress (short of replacing books with ebooks) will allow printed books to compete with the advantages of ebooks. The resolution of ebooks will improve, and it is at least conceivable that they can be engineered to last months on a single battery charge, or be waterproof, or become cheap enough that you wouldn't mind losing the hardware (the content will, of course, be easy to back up, once the DRM fetish subsides). So, for now, we have a choice of printed books vs. ebooks, but in the future I see ebooks taking over.
Not for federal crimes they don't. There's no parole in the federal system for crimes committed since November of 1987 - you do every minute of your sentence unless you can get it reversed somehow or you can get a pardon.
According to Justin Petersen (who spent 41 months in federal prison - he should know), they have indeed abolished parole, but you still get 15% time off for good behavior.
If they were inclined to sell at the current price it seems to me that they would sell regardless of any insider trading. Any attempt to buy up stock at the lower price would signal other investors to anticipate a price increase, making them less likely to sell....
Your arguments presume an extremely large amount of insider trading, large enough to affect the market price. Such a large amount of insider trading is probably not happening in today's markets, since insider trading is, after all, illegal.
With insider trading being illegal, the few who break the law gain an unfair advantage, and since finance (unlike manufacturing or engineering) is a zero sum game, if some people have an advantage, then others are by definition disadvantaged.
If insider trading were legal to everyone, then the unfair advantage disappears, and in that case your arguments might hold. Whether insider trading should be legal or not is a separate debate. The fact is, it's illegal now, and I have no sympathy for those who break this particular law.
But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!
The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.
Indeed, 20 seconds to boot is not "incredibly short" by any means, unless you've been trapped in Windows for so long that your standards have lowered. Fedora has been at the 20 second mark for a while now. On "retrofitted" platforms (similar to what is used in the article), Linux has achieved five second boot times.
It's worth noting that in the Linux world, "Done booting means CPU and disk idle" as per Arjan van de Ven, whereas in the Windows world your computer is still loading up services and anti-virus programs even after you get to the desktop. So Linux is booting up faster despite measuring itself against a tougher standard. Hmm...
This whole thing is a non-story except to sufferers of inferior operating systems. The so-called "incredibly short" boot times are merely normal on alternative operating systems, and have been for quite some time.
If you install acpid on your laptop, you can shut down your laptop cleanly by pressing the power button. Once you get into the habit, it's a pretty failsafe method of guaranteeing that you shut down the right machine.
I disagree. Rude behavior, by definition, is behavior that negatively affects others in a society. Society relies on laws to discourage unacceptable behaviors. This is why there are laws against driving too slow on highways, unnecessarily holding up traffic, or making obscene hand gestures, for instance.
This is getting off topic, but in all honesty, if we are going to outlaw rude behavior on these grounds, let's start with major annoyances such as telemarketing, spamming, door-to-door solicitations, advertising, and even talking on a cell phone in public, all of which I find far more negative to society than merely missing a light because someone was late restarting traffic.
That's the other serious problem with government micromanagement: even if the outcome of the law is beneficial (which we disagree about in this case), it is almost never optimal once you factor in the opportunity cost of spending those same resources somewhere else.
If traffic is at a standstill, then unless there's a cop right next to you, you're not likely to get caught. Technically, you're not driving in that situation.
The phrase used in laws is "operating a motor vehicle", which you certainly are doing even in stopped traffic, unless you turn off the ignition. Alcohol laws are even more stringent, forbidding any sort of open containers in a car even if the ignition is not on, and even if the alcohol was never consumed.
I am absolutely 100% in favor of a 0.00% BAC limit on anyone sitting in the drivers seat while the car is on, but extending this ban to situations when the car is not on and/or no alcohol is consumed strikes me as ridiculous and overreaching.
On the other hand, the other day I was in backed up traffic. Nothing was moving. Then traffic started to move... all except for the car in front of me. I can only guess that she was texting and had not noticed. People were starting to honk... finally she looked up and remembered where she was. She made me miss the next light... maybe not dangerous, but exceptionally rude!
The whole point I'm trying to make is that "rude" does not constitute a sufficient standard for making something illegal. Otherwise we'd have a whole raft of stupid and ridiculous laws. Well, we already have them, but we'd have more.
What could possibly be so vitally important that it has to be texted right now, yet not so important that you can't pull over to do it?
What if you're stuck in standstill traffic, and you want to inform someone you'll be late? You can't pull over, because traffic is a standstill.
My concern with these types of laws is that, in overreaching, they lead to ridiculous outcomes. Texting at 0mph is not dangerous and does not merit jail time.
There's a difference between the program cost divided by missions and the incremental cost per mission.
There is indeed a difference, and believe it or not, the $450 million figure is actually the latter, not the former.
According to Wikipedia, the program cost divided by missions is a staggering $1.5 billion per launch.
the incremental cost for a shuttle launch is ~$60M.
NASA says the cost per shuttle launch is $450 million.
Well that's just silly. If you collect a penny from thirty million people, that's a pretty significant amount of money, no?
This is true anywhere, but if you're collecting a penny each from 30 million people (ignoring the fact that $300000 is actually a virtually meaningless amount of money to a government), you could just as easily levy an income tax.
certain items, such as basic groceries, are exempt from the GST. This makes the tax less regressive
I fail to see how this is in any way better than just starting from a progressive tax to begin with.
Everything, that is, except for the GST.
The GST is an enormous contradiction in terms. Some of these contradictions are laid out in your very post which I am replying to. Let me explain.
First of all, you say the GST is miniscule on an individual level yet provides significant funding. I have no idea what you can possibly mean by this. A miniscule tax, by definition, cannot provide significant funding. Taxes are measured in numbers which have magnitude. A number cannot be simultaneously large and small.
Perhaps you mean to say that the GST is imperceptible to taxpayers, yet provides significant funding. This is actually very true, and in my view it is a huge reason why GSTs/VATs are destructive. They are essentially a way of deceiving the population about how much taxes they are paying. The argument that "GST/VAT is deceptively perceived as a small amount relative to the amount of money it actually raises" is to me one of the biggest problems with GST. I dislike policy proposals that exploit public deception.
The other thing that Canadians need to decide is whether they want a tax policy that is progressive or regressive. Your post mentions transfer payments, something which is inherently progressive, and further evidence is provided by the income tax code, which in Canada is far more progressive than in the US, approaching levels only seen in northern European countries. Yet the GST is without question strongly regressive. Contrary to your assertion that the GST only affects the "very rich", it is in fact the poor people who are most harmed by GST. Don't believe me? Think of the GST as a 5% flat tax on consumption (which it is). Now consider the fact that poor people spend a greater percentage of their incomes on consumption than rich people (which they do). It follows, mathematically, that poor people pay a larger percentage of their incomes to GST than rich people. That's right, the GST is worse than a flat tax. At least with a 5% flat tax, all individuals, rich or poor, would be paying 5% of their incomes.
Yes, I know, there is a so-called "GST/HST tax credit", but it has no relationship whatsoever to GST, does not depend in any way on the amount of GST that you actually paid, and IMO the linking of this tax credit to the GST is in and of itself a political deception. As proof, I point out that the Earned Income Credit in the US, which operates in exactly the same way, has nothing to do with GST, as indeed the US has no GST.
Rather, certain Americans (and Canadians, for that matter) sometimes need to be reminded that their nation *isn't* the greatest, most free, most awesome country in the world... that it is flawed, and often *doesn't* live up to its lauded ideals.
Yes, Canadians need to be reminded too. I'm an American living in Canada, and here's some of the problems I see:
As for some of your specific points:
thought: Didn't we just see a story about a man [in the US] arrested for possessing child porn that didn't actually depict children?
I think our system of democracy is more representative of the people's wishes...
Point is, Canada and the US are free in different ways. I would not go so far as to say that one is any freer than the other -- if anything, they are incomparable.
I think you are putting the cart before the horse. How is that we hear so many stories of Asian immigrants coming to this country with nothing, or next to nothing and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, often with less than most native-born people who linger in stagnant poverty over generations. If you took those well-off Asian-Americans and put them in the same situation as the perpetually poor in the U.S., the majority of them would eventually rise out of that level again.
You're missing something very obvious here. US immigration law is tortuous and acts as a giant filter selecting for only the most desirable immigrants. In order to even make it to the US from Asia, you need to be abnormally hard-working, resourceful, and industrious.
The astounding success of Asian immigrants in the US has nothing to do with Asian culture. It is entirely due to the fact that Asian immigrants in the US form a highly biased selection relative to the population of all Asians, consisting only of those people who are smart and persistent enough to make it through the immigration gauntlet. In other words, you only see the bright ones in America, because the others aren't even allowed to immigrate here.
In contrast, the majority of African Americans are descended from slaves (sad, but true), and most (80-85%) of the Hispanic population stems from illegal immigration (source). This explains why the selection effect of immigration law is only really visible in Asians.
The "Vista debacle" is only a "debacle" on Slashdot. Everywhere else, it's at best a "minor inconvenience." Please don't fall into the trap of believing that Slashdot represents reality in any way.
The following recent quote is taken directly from CNN, about as far away from slashdot as you can get:
It sure sounds like more than merely a minor inconvenience to me.
Show me the law that makes installing a purchased copy of Microsoft Office on more than one computer illegal.
Office is a bad example because even Microsoft explicitly grants the right to install retail Office on a second laptop.
From the Microsoft Office FAQ:
There is data on disk drive failure rates, but not enough on SSD failure rates. I read the paper and it doesn't seem they do anything with failures for either side. What the hell did you read?
There is an entire section in the paper on disk failure rates (Section 4.5). Although you are correct that data on mechanical drive failure rates is plentiful, and data on SSD failure rates is not, the paper for some reason only analyzes SSD failures based on nonexistent data, while ignoring the established body of literature on mechanical drive failures.
It may perhaps be true that no other analysis in the paper depends on the analysis in Section 4.5. However, a scientific analysis is not required to have another analysis depend on it in order for the first analysis to be meaningful. Therefore it is fair game to question their inclusion of the analysis on SSD failure rates. The authors of the paper seem to take the position that RAID renders failure rates meaningless, but if that were truly the case, why do they bother discussing failure rates at all?
My guess is that the authors are well aware that failure rates make a huge difference in real life, which is why they attempt (badly) to discuss failure rates. See for example this Wikipedia discussion on RAID failure which also coincidentally describes the dramatic advantages that solid state drives offer in this regard.
Since this paper is focused on solid-state storage, and wear is a novel, SSD-specific phenomenon, we include it in our device models. Currently we do not model other failures, such as mechanical failures in disks.
The correct approach to incomplete data is, of course, to gather complete data, and they have no excuse here, because there is PLENTY of data on mechanical drive failure rates. However, if you are not willing to do that, the least you can do is ignore the data equally on both sides. The authors' failure to treat both sides equally leads to a hopelessly biased and skewed analysis.
Any chances that you still have the link(s)?
Because my reading of Anand's research tells me that in active, non-stop use SSD would fail in about the same time as normal laptop 1.8"/2.5" harddrives - 1-1.5 years. Limit on number of rewrite cycles is high (~100k), yet is quite easy to reach.
The article you cite does not contain the 1-1.5 years figure anywhere. How did you get that number? For what it's worth, I've been using solid state drives in both my laptops for more than a year now, with no problems whatsoever.
Another very important point which often gets ignored is that a solid state drive failure is far more benign than a spinning platter drive failure. When a solid state drive fails, you lose the ability to write data, but you can still read data. On the other hand, failure of a spinning platter drive means that you can't read your data anymore, at least not without sending it to a very expensive data recovery firm.
OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.
Amen to that. I'm guessing that out of all the Apple proponents who have hijacked this thread, not a single one of them has seriously tried to use OS X the way a Unix system is normally used.
Any sort of serious Unix user quickly encounters numerous differences and peculiarities that hamper the use of OS X as a Unix system. For example, the pathnames are different, leading to widespread breakage of shell scripts and (crucially) build scripts and makefiles. Of course, a well written program would be able to deal with this, but in the real world not all programs are perfect, and some programs just don't compile correctly no matter what you do. If the program that you're looking for is in DarwinPorts, then you're okay, because somebody else has already gone to the considerable trouble of fixing the package so that it works, but otherwise you're SOL.
A specific example is the PBC library, which works great on Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD, and even versions of OS X prior to Leopard, but won't build on Leopard.
I've been a Linux/Unix admin for 12 years and as far as being a unix goes, even Cygwin does a better job than OS X of acting the way Unix users expect.
Turns out that for only $300 MORE, the Air will provide you with a CPU that's 400 MHz faster, the 128 GB SSD and dedicated graphics, along with OS X Leopard and the ability to run Windows Vista (probably better than the Adamo can).
Notwithstanding its many advantages, the Macbook Air has only one USB port. I was seriously considering getting a Macbook Air at one point, but the lack of expansion ports was a deal-breaker.
The larger point, and the main problem with the Macintosh line, is that Mac customers have far less flexibility than PC users to pick and choose the features that they want. Unless your computing needs happen to fit one of the five machines that Apple offers at any one time, you're either going to pay for a bunch of features that you don't need and/or lack some features that you do need.
Are you saying I should switch from Windows to Linux so that I can run Windows in a VM?
Yes, I am saying exactly that.
Running Windows in a VM is not as ridiculous as it sounds. VMWare's entire business plan is built on this idea, and their ESX server product even has a Linux kernel, so in a very real sense they run Windows in a Linux VM.
The argument for running Windows in a VM is straightforward. VMs are very powerful tools. I gave some examples in my previous post. For instance, the ability to save OS state makes disaster recovery a breeze. I never have to worry about viruses when I run Windows in a VM -- if I open a program and it turns out to be a virus, I just revert to a previous state. The overhead of running in a VM is way way less than the overhead of running an antivirus program. (Incidentally, monitoring for malicious behavior such as atypical disk or network access is also made easier when the system in question runs on a VM, since you can just monitor from the host system.) Of course, it is still possible to screw things up beyond repair, but with a good setup, you are much less likely to.
The amount of performance available in a VM today easily matches what bare metal computers could achieve two years ago. In my view, this level of performance is quite acceptable for regular business applications, and well worth trading in exchange for the management advantages of virtual machines.
Even for personal use, I am not so sure I want to switch to all *BSD/Linux. I can get zsh and all common utilities (including vi) running on my Windows machine along with all business software.
First of all, you say "personal use" but then go on to discuss business software. So it's not clear to me exactly what the context is. I'll assume you mean something like a home machine on which company work occasionally occurs.
Three important qualities of my Linux system that a Windows machine cannot match are: stability, security, and useful virtual desktops. (Yes I am aware that Windows has third-party virtual desktop implementations. They all suck.)
I cannot get the reverse if I change the OS. Sorry, Gimp is not Photoshop, and nothing in the open source comes close to Adobe suites (an advice to use LaTex instead of Framemaker gets the rest of your arguments automatically disqualified).
You can run Photoshop and almost any other piece of business software in a virtual machine. The only exception is 3d graphics, but businesses that require 3d graphics for daily work really are a minority. The virtual machine approach has many advantages, including ease of checkpointing and deployment. It's a lot easier to save and copy machine state in a virtual machine for when something goes wrong (and with Windows, sooner or later, something goes wrong). It's true that there is some performance overhead, but the overhead is small and getting smaller all the time. Try KVM if you haven't already -- it was an eye-opener for me.