Err, actually WebOS was around in 2007 or 2008, it just wasn't officially on a device until 2009.
Who knows. Android was around in 2007 as well, but it looked nothing like the Android we know today. Had it shipped in that state, it would have failed catastrophically.
Maybe WebOS was all brushed up and ready to go, but it's telling that they couldn't push a device for nearly two years after the iPhone. That's half a device lifecycle.
Let's see, when Palm was first starting out, their competition was Apple in the form of the Apple Newton... I remember how the Newton flew off the shelves... oh wait... no they didn't... Palm PDAs were flying off the shelves.
Hmm, I always felt like Palm's first OS was just MacOS (pre-OSX) rebranded into a portable format. Everything from the fonts to the icons to the dialog boxes looked the same. I mean, you couldn't move the icons or resize the windows, but that was about it. It even felt like MacOS at the API level.
Palm's had two primary innovations, and then they surfed on momentum until they inevitably died. The first was Graffiti, which they dumped with the Treo. The second was the Treo itself, which 'innovated' by having a built-in phone.
Palm's problem is that they failed to innovate beyond this point, which made them vulnerable even to a POS like WinCE. Their fate was set by that time. The actual doom came from the iPhone OS, but they were done by that point.
Had they come up with the ideas for WebOS in 2005, everything might have been ok. But fundamentally, WebOS was mostly innovated off of the iPhone, which hadn't been invented yet, so I can't see how it could have happened even if they/had/ it together. Most likely they would have just put out a WinCE-clone and then subsequently gotten crushed by the iPhone.
Judging nuclear power's safety by a first generation reactor design that was built nearly 40 years ago, and that despite a M9 earthquake and 15m tsunami
I think the objection is that the reactor was still operating, despite the fact that it was 40 years old, past its design lifetime, and wasn't rated to handle an event that would occur with relatively high probability in the reactor's lifespan.
In other words, it's everything the previous posters have said: bad management by a for-profit company. It doesn't really matter how safe the technology can be if it's going to be mismanaged in the way that this plant was.
It would probably have been calamitous but extinction level, maybe not. I mean most of those would probably have landed in the ocean anyway, with maybe a thousand or so dropping on land.
My understanding is that a major asteroid strike on the ocean could be catastrophic due to ozone depletion.* It's just a theory (because obviously we haven't tested it), but if true it would indicate that asteroid strikes are a bad thing no matter where they hit.
Granted, processed oil isn't the friendliest thing to the world, there is a finite (though huge) supply, and cleaner fuels are a better alternative once they're economically viable without gigantic government subsidies. But for now we're just fine.
My understanding is that new oil fields continue to be discovered, but the pace and size of the discoveries is trending downward or at least stagnating. Meanwhile global oil demand is accelerating.
Since oil price is the congruence of supply and demand, and because oil demand is relatively inelastic (it's very hard for people to do without the stuff), whenever demand pushes up against supply we tend to see outsized (and unpredictable) price increases.
Furthermore, while there's plenty of oil to be found out there, the cost of recovering that oil is expected to increase (tar sands, deep water oil fields, etc.).
And so far we haven't even dealt with the impact on the environment.
In any case, the point is not simply that our economy is dependent on oil, it's that our economy is dependent on inexpensive oil. Once you increase costs by a factor of 2-3, everything we take for granted -- trillions and trillions dollars of built infrastucture -- becomes completely unviable. When this predictable crisis actually rolls around, the cost of replacing this infrastructure (or switching energy technologies) will be unbelievably high.
The cost of doing something about it now is trivial by comparison.
Well, yes. You have the right to shout that the king is naked, but you also can't be surprised if the king decides to hit you with a club.
In a democratic republic based on the rule of law, you should not have to worry about a king hitting you with a club.
Yes the law can, and is, being abused to produce this outcome. But that'ss an argument against the law as construed. It's not an argument in favor of the abuse.
Its not the only the browsers that need to support the newer versions of these protocols, but also the servers.
Maybe not. It appears that OpenSSL in 0.9.6d implemented a "fix" to TLS 1.0 that may not require a change to the server. The basic idea is that the browser injects message prefixes into the stream as a kind of "fake" IV, to keep the Javascript from having control of which messages get encrypted. This may stop the attack.
Furthermore, if the prefixes are formatted in a certain way --- total speculation --- it may be possible to get the server to filter them out even if it's not running the same software. Anyway, I can't imagine how OpenSSL would implement this fix if the servers don't support it. But I admit I'm just catching up on this aspect.
It's a waste of money. ipads are a luxury** device. I'm sorry to tell all you hipsters this but these are not mainstream computing devices in the hands of most working class people.
Yes, today tablets are a luxury device. That may even continue to be the case for as long as the next five years or so. But touch-based computing is going to be as ubiquitous as the keyboard and mouse is today. Kids who become comfortable with it an early age will have an advantage when that time comes. Now, it may not be an insurmountable advantage, and it's hard to quantify, but I'm betting that it will be there.
Oil doesn't have a very well defined intrinsic value, because it is easily produced (the *current* scarcity is artificial based on production quotas)
There's strong reason to believe that oil is no longer constrained by production quotas --- that we're very near peak production right now (or will be within a few years). OPEC is famously unwilling to share its production statistics, so any claims of excess production capability should be taken with a grain of salt.
To put this another way, if we could double oil production without massively increasing the cost of production, I would eat my hat.
Well, I want privately operated power plants with new types of design, that's what I want all over the place.
Listen, that's nuts. You can't really talk about state-run nuclear power plants without first talking about France, where about 78% of all electricity generation is nuclear. The French safety record is excellent, and it's mostly excellent because the main electricity producer was (until 2004) owned by the government.
The practical result was to make nuclear power work in a way that it never has under a private ownership regime. Centralized government ownership created enormous technological consistency across the power plants, strong safety regulations, and a great deal of power to deal with NIMBYs.
But rather than take an approach with a proven track record, you want private, profit-motivated ownership. You also expect these private firms to decommission their existing dinosaurs and invest in the latest reactor technology. But that's absurd. What kind of management would be so imprudent? They might do based on liability calculations, but in the US at least, the only way that private firms will touch nuclear is if the government relieves them of most of that liability. So how are we supposed to square this circle?
Ultimately private firms are not incentivized to take huge risks on new reactor technology. They are incentivized to keep using older technology for as long as possible. That's why TEPCO was using an insanely out of date reactor design in the first place.
If it was "black people" or "the Jews" instead of "the Chinese," we would be offended by this headline. But since the Chinese government is unpopular in America, it's a good chance to take a subtle and unwarranted jab at "those crazy Chinese, who will probably kill us all."
Maybe you were thinking that. I was thinking "all those great Arthur C. Clarke stories I read as a kid are finally coming true. Go China!".
I'm only disappointed that it's not really happening.
Look, arguing on the Internet is a fool's game. We're primates, and there's too much dominance at stake in an argument for anyone to admit they're wrong.
So let me just say this. There are facts, and there are interpretations of facts. Everyone is entitled to their own interpretations --- for example, my interpretation is that mainstream conservatism's embrace of backwards, white-supremacist Americans has led to a noticeable drop in the tolerance for freedom and liberty, and that this is expressed (partly) in their hatred of "liberals" and things like the ACLU.
But that's an interpretation, not a fact. Everyone is not entitled to their own facts.
It is a fact that the white-supremacist faction of the Democratic party (usually, but imprecisely referred to as "the South") left and joined the Republicans after LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act. If you're the kind of person who insists on empirical evidence, it's all easily verifiable based on historical polling data. If you're not that kind of a person, you can take it from the mouths of Republicans themselves. Another poster above already referred you to the "Southern Strategy".
I'm not really sure what to offer you beyond that. I will say what I always say: if your political beliefs require you to hold beliefs that demonstrably differ from reality, then the overwhelming probability is that your political beliefs are wrong.
For your own good, you need to do something about that. At very least, you're going to war in a battleship hulled with a graham-cracker crust. The first bullet from the other side is going to put you on the bottom of the ocean. If you can't persuade yourself to ride a different ship, you need to find a better way of supporting the one you're in.
You do realize that some of the most ardent resistance to the abolition of slavery and the crusades for civil rights in the 60's came from Democrats, right?
I don't mean to sound contrary, but you are aware that, beginning with LBJ's support of the Civil Rights Act, there was an enormous political realignment in this country, and that the result was that the white supremacist faction of the Democratic Party deserted en masse and realigned with today's Republican Party?
I mean, this is such a basic fact of political history that it should be up there with Bunker Hill and the Fugitive Slave Act. And yet, from time to time people express an understanding of politics that makes me wonder if they appreciate this and how it created the country we live in today.
To be clear, when I say that conservative politicians have castigated liberals because liberalism included civil rights, I'm making a factual statement. Forty years ago those conservative politicians may have called themselves Democrats, but they were never liberals and they always opposed to "liberty" as embodied by the idea of all people having equal rights and being free from the threat of terrorist violence.
And people who hold that world view (and their descendants), for some reason or other, seem to also be quite receptive to the idea that civil liberties are an encumbrance that just get in cops' way, that "supporting the troops" equates with unquestioning support of bad decisions made by civilian leaders (the Democracy-bringers), and that (alleged) terrorists don't have rights and should be tortured and tried by a kangaroo court.
As for Obama, he's a fucking coward. Not for holding those terrible, awful views himself, but for allowing the people who hold those fucking awful views to cow him into submission with the (quite legitimate) threat that they would bludgeon him as a terrorist sympathizer and a large swathe of Americans would believe it.
But it doesn't make me forget who made the threats, why they made them, and what they believe in.
But that sure doesn't make me forget who the enemy is.
Prior to a certain point in history, the word "liberal" was used to describe a platform of liberty. In other words, the exact opposite of today. At some point, the progressives co-opted the term so that they could sound more appealing to people that loved liberty.
With due respect, I've been alive long enough to witness the very deliberate campaign to slander the term "liberal" and I happened to notice how, and more importantly why, it was done.
The motivation behind this slander was never "those bastards are pretending to be in favor of freedom, but they're actually secret fascists and we need to stop them". I mean, maybe someone believed that, but it's not what went out over the airwaves.
No, at every step of the way it was "those bastards think brown people and women should have all the same rights as you", and "those bastards like criminals more than our fine police officers" and "those bastards don't properly respect our large, standing military". It was systematically targeted to take the most close-minded, brutal portion of our population and whip up their resentment towards racial equality and civil liberties, and it was undertaken by conservative politicians for the sole purpose of amassing power.
I should add that it was very successful.
So successful, as you apparently noticed, that our current Democratic President isn't all that liberal. I'm not thrilled about it, but I'm not one bit surprised. Why should he be liberal, in a country where acting, let alone being liberal is political poison. When Obama tried to release the prisoners from Guantanamo, what exactly happened to him?
I have a Kindle DX and an iPad. I love the idea of ePaper, but in practice the rendering is too slow if you need to flip a few pages back to get a definition, the screen isn't quite big enough, and reading sideways is a bitch when you hit a two-column paper. Oh, and zoom is a joke.
The DX now gathers dust.
The iPad LCD isn't ideal but it's functional in all the ways that the DX is not. Try GoodReader.
This is probably true, but not the whole story. Once you factor in the cost of shipping, marketing, retail markup, and the intangible losses inherent in purchasing a product that's only 95% correct for your application --- the cost of manufacturing that simple object can go up by many times.
So if 3D printing can get to the point where it's in the home, or at least the neighborhood, it doesn't have to achieve parity with mass manufacturing. There's still a lot of room.
This is news to me. I'm on two conference Program Committees for major CS conferences, and I routinely review journal articles. Am I being compensated without my knowledge?
Re:Is there any hope?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Every single Reagan budget was pronounced DOA by Tip O'Neil (D), Speaker of the House. Every single budget that Congress approved was far larger then what Reagan wanted but had no choice but to sign it.
This is factually incorrect, and honestly it's not even hard to check. Why didn't you?
over Reagan's 8 years, Congress approved smaller budgets than he requested on average, and the deviation from what he requested averaged less than half a percent. He raised the debt by $1,860 billion and Congress reduced his budgets by $16 billion. Otherwise he would have raised the debt by $1,876 billion.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but we all have to work from the same set of facts. If your political stance requires that you believe things that are not true, that doesn't necessarily mean that your politics are wrong. But it's a strong indication.
Take some time. Familiarize yourself with the numbers. Decide what you really believe, not what other people have told you. Then resume posting to Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Who knows. Android was around in 2007 as well, but it looked nothing like the Android we know today. Had it shipped in that state, it would have failed catastrophically.
Maybe WebOS was all brushed up and ready to go, but it's telling that they couldn't push a device for nearly two years after the iPhone. That's half a device lifecycle.
Hmm, I always felt like Palm's first OS was just MacOS (pre-OSX) rebranded into a portable format. Everything from the fonts to the icons to the dialog boxes looked the same. I mean, you couldn't move the icons or resize the windows, but that was about it. It even felt like MacOS at the API level.
Palm's had two primary innovations, and then they surfed on momentum until they inevitably died. The first was Graffiti, which they dumped with the Treo. The second was the Treo itself, which 'innovated' by having a built-in phone.
Palm's problem is that they failed to innovate beyond this point, which made them vulnerable even to a POS like WinCE. Their fate was set by that time. The actual doom came from the iPhone OS, but they were done by that point.
Had they come up with the ideas for WebOS in 2005, everything might have been ok. But fundamentally, WebOS was mostly innovated off of the iPhone, which hadn't been invented yet, so I can't see how it could have happened even if they /had/ it together. Most likely they would have just put out a WinCE-clone and then subsequently gotten crushed by the iPhone.
I think the objection is that the reactor was still operating, despite the fact that it was 40 years old, past its design lifetime, and wasn't rated to handle an event that would occur with relatively high probability in the reactor's lifespan.
In other words, it's everything the previous posters have said: bad management by a for-profit company. It doesn't really matter how safe the technology can be if it's going to be mismanaged in the way that this plant was.
If you're interested, here's a summary of the attack:
http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/10/attack-of-week-xml-encryption.html
My understanding is that a major asteroid strike on the ocean could be catastrophic due to ozone depletion.* It's just a theory (because obviously we haven't tested it), but if true it would indicate that asteroid strikes are a bad thing no matter where they hit.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-asteroid-ocean-deplete-ozone-layer.html
* This depends on a single very large asteroid, so a bunch of smaller ones might not be as much of an issue. Unless they're fast moving.
My understanding is that new oil fields continue to be discovered, but the pace and size of the discoveries is trending downward or at least stagnating. Meanwhile global oil demand is accelerating.
Since oil price is the congruence of supply and demand, and because oil demand is relatively inelastic (it's very hard for people to do without the stuff), whenever demand pushes up against supply we tend to see outsized (and unpredictable) price increases.
Furthermore, while there's plenty of oil to be found out there, the cost of recovering that oil is expected to increase (tar sands, deep water oil fields, etc.).
And so far we haven't even dealt with the impact on the environment.
In any case, the point is not simply that our economy is dependent on oil, it's that our economy is dependent on inexpensive oil. Once you increase costs by a factor of 2-3, everything we take for granted -- trillions and trillions dollars of built infrastucture -- becomes completely unviable. When this predictable crisis actually rolls around, the cost of replacing this infrastructure (or switching energy technologies) will be unbelievably high.
The cost of doing something about it now is trivial by comparison.
In a democratic republic based on the rule of law, you should not have to worry about a king hitting you with a club.
Yes the law can, and is, being abused to produce this outcome. But that'ss an argument against the law as construed. It's not an argument in favor of the abuse.
Maybe not. It appears that OpenSSL in 0.9.6d implemented a "fix" to TLS 1.0 that may not require a change to the server. The basic idea is that the browser injects message prefixes into the stream as a kind of "fake" IV, to keep the Javascript from having control of which messages get encrypted. This may stop the attack.
Furthermore, if the prefixes are formatted in a certain way --- total speculation --- it may be possible to get the server to filter them out even if it's not running the same software. Anyway, I can't imagine how OpenSSL would implement this fix if the servers don't support it. But I admit I'm just catching up on this aspect.
Here's a brief post describing the "fix":
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.openvpn.user/32566
And my speculation on how the attack works, in detail:
http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/09/brief-diversion-beast-attack-on-tlsssl.html
I had posted this in another thread, but in case it's helpful --- this is my best guess on how the attack works in detail:
http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/09/brief-diversion-beast-attack-on-tlsssl.html
XOR symbols, images and boldface text don't copy paste very nicely.
Here's my description/speculation about how it works. Apologies for the blog whoring, I can't type it all up again:
http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/09/brief-diversion-beast-attack-on-tlsssl.html
Mind you I still can't close an HREF tag :)
Yes, today tablets are a luxury device. That may even continue to be the case for as long as the next five years or so. But touch-based computing is going to be as ubiquitous as the keyboard and mouse is today. Kids who become comfortable with it an early age will have an advantage when that time comes. Now, it may not be an insurmountable advantage, and it's hard to quantify, but I'm betting that it will be there.
My parents worked for a university, so we were lucky enough to get a Decwriter II in our house when I was six years old, long before most people had computers in their house. Today I have a PhD in Computer Science.
** Insofar as any highly functional computing that costs only $500 can be considered a "luxury" device. Sheesh, we've become spoiled.
Oil doesn't have a very well defined intrinsic value, because it is easily produced (the *current* scarcity is artificial based on production quotas)
There's strong reason to believe that oil is no longer constrained by production quotas --- that we're very near peak production right now (or will be within a few years). OPEC is famously unwilling to share its production statistics, so any claims of excess production capability should be taken with a grain of salt.
To put this another way, if we could double oil production without massively increasing the cost of production, I would eat my hat.
Well, I want privately operated power plants with new types of design, that's what I want all over the place.
Listen, that's nuts. You can't really talk about state-run nuclear power plants without first talking about France, where about 78% of all electricity generation is nuclear. The French safety record is excellent, and it's mostly excellent because the main electricity producer was (until 2004) owned by the government.
The practical result was to make nuclear power work in a way that it never has under a private ownership regime. Centralized government ownership created enormous technological consistency across the power plants, strong safety regulations, and a great deal of power to deal with NIMBYs.
But rather than take an approach with a proven track record, you want private, profit-motivated ownership. You also expect these private firms to decommission their existing dinosaurs and invest in the latest reactor technology. But that's absurd. What kind of management would be so imprudent? They might do based on liability calculations, but in the US at least, the only way that private firms will touch nuclear is if the government relieves them of most of that liability. So how are we supposed to square this circle?
Ultimately private firms are not incentivized to take huge risks on new reactor technology. They are incentivized to keep using older technology for as long as possible. That's why TEPCO was using an insanely out of date reactor design in the first place.
Maybe you were thinking that. I was thinking "all those great Arthur C. Clarke stories I read as a kid are finally coming true. Go China!".
I'm only disappointed that it's not really happening.
Look, arguing on the Internet is a fool's game. We're primates, and there's too much dominance at stake in an argument for anyone to admit they're wrong.
So let me just say this. There are facts, and there are interpretations of facts. Everyone is entitled to their own interpretations --- for example, my interpretation is that mainstream conservatism's embrace of backwards, white-supremacist Americans has led to a noticeable drop in the tolerance for freedom and liberty, and that this is expressed (partly) in their hatred of "liberals" and things like the ACLU.
But that's an interpretation, not a fact. Everyone is not entitled to their own facts.
It is a fact that the white-supremacist faction of the Democratic party (usually, but imprecisely referred to as "the South") left and joined the Republicans after LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act. If you're the kind of person who insists on empirical evidence, it's all easily verifiable based on historical polling data. If you're not that kind of a person, you can take it from the mouths of Republicans themselves. Another poster above already referred you to the "Southern Strategy".
I'm not really sure what to offer you beyond that. I will say what I always say: if your political beliefs require you to hold beliefs that demonstrably differ from reality, then the overwhelming probability is that your political beliefs are wrong.
For your own good, you need to do something about that. At very least, you're going to war in a battleship hulled with a graham-cracker crust. The first bullet from the other side is going to put you on the bottom of the ocean. If you can't persuade yourself to ride a different ship, you need to find a better way of supporting the one you're in.
I don't mean to sound contrary, but you are aware that, beginning with LBJ's support of the Civil Rights Act, there was an enormous political realignment in this country, and that the result was that the white supremacist faction of the Democratic Party deserted en masse and realigned with today's Republican Party?
I mean, this is such a basic fact of political history that it should be up there with Bunker Hill and the Fugitive Slave Act. And yet, from time to time people express an understanding of politics that makes me wonder if they appreciate this and how it created the country we live in today.
To be clear, when I say that conservative politicians have castigated liberals because liberalism included civil rights, I'm making a factual statement. Forty years ago those conservative politicians may have called themselves Democrats, but they were never liberals and they always opposed to "liberty" as embodied by the idea of all people having equal rights and being free from the threat of terrorist violence.
And people who hold that world view (and their descendants), for some reason or other, seem to also be quite receptive to the idea that civil liberties are an encumbrance that just get in cops' way, that "supporting the troops" equates with unquestioning support of bad decisions made by civilian leaders (the Democracy-bringers), and that (alleged) terrorists don't have rights and should be tortured and tried by a kangaroo court.
As for Obama, he's a fucking coward. Not for holding those terrible, awful views himself, but for allowing the people who hold those fucking awful views to cow him into submission with the (quite legitimate) threat that they would bludgeon him as a terrorist sympathizer and a large swathe of Americans would believe it.
But it doesn't make me forget who made the threats, why they made them, and what they believe in.
But that sure doesn't make me forget who the enemy is.
Prior to a certain point in history, the word "liberal" was used to describe a platform of liberty. In other words, the exact opposite of today. At some point, the progressives co-opted the term so that they could sound more appealing to people that loved liberty.
With due respect, I've been alive long enough to witness the very deliberate campaign to slander the term "liberal" and I happened to notice how, and more importantly why, it was done.
The motivation behind this slander was never "those bastards are pretending to be in favor of freedom, but they're actually secret fascists and we need to stop them". I mean, maybe someone believed that, but it's not what went out over the airwaves.
No, at every step of the way it was "those bastards think brown people and women should have all the same rights as you", and "those bastards like criminals more than our fine police officers" and "those bastards don't properly respect our large, standing military". It was systematically targeted to take the most close-minded, brutal portion of our population and whip up their resentment towards racial equality and civil liberties, and it was undertaken by conservative politicians for the sole purpose of amassing power.
I should add that it was very successful.
So successful, as you apparently noticed, that our current Democratic President isn't all that liberal. I'm not thrilled about it, but I'm not one bit surprised. Why should he be liberal, in a country where acting, let alone being liberal is political poison. When Obama tried to release the prisoners from Guantanamo, what exactly happened to him?
GoodReader is a fantastic iPad PDF viewer that includes the capability to mount a share on the network and transfer files that way.
I have a Kindle DX and an iPad. I love the idea of ePaper, but in practice the rendering is too slow if you need to flip a few pages back to get a definition, the screen isn't quite big enough, and reading sideways is a bitch when you hit a two-column paper. Oh, and zoom is a joke.
The DX now gathers dust.
The iPad LCD isn't ideal but it's functional in all the ways that the DX is not. Try GoodReader.
Or, if you're a browser that doesn't support it, just set your default search engine to https://encrypted.google.com/#q= followed by the query string.
This is probably true, but not the whole story. Once you factor in the cost of shipping, marketing, retail markup, and the intangible losses inherent in purchasing a product that's only 95% correct for your application --- the cost of manufacturing that simple object can go up by many times.
So if 3D printing can get to the point where it's in the home, or at least the neighborhood, it doesn't have to achieve parity with mass manufacturing. There's still a lot of room.
This is news to me. I'm on two conference Program Committees for major CS conferences, and I routinely review journal articles. Am I being compensated without my knowledge?
This is factually incorrect, and honestly it's not even hard to check. Why didn't you?
over Reagan's 8 years, Congress approved smaller budgets than he requested on average, and the deviation from what he requested averaged less than half a percent. He raised the debt by $1,860 billion and Congress reduced his budgets by $16 billion. Otherwise he would have raised the debt by $1,876 billion.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but we all have to work from the same set of facts. If your political stance requires that you believe things that are not true, that doesn't necessarily mean that your politics are wrong. But it's a strong indication.
Take some time. Familiarize yourself with the numbers. Decide what you really believe, not what other people have told you. Then resume posting to Slashdot.