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User: PingPongBoy

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Comments · 1,268

  1. Re:Nonsense. on ARM — Heretic In the Church of Intel, Moore's Law · · Score: 1

    >sell 1M phones ... 50K more profit

    50K is less than the rounding error involved in the accounting of sales of a megaphone. If one or two more staff were hired somewhere in the chain, goodbye extra profit. Profits more likely come from contracts, rate charges, and fees.

  2. In case you don't know on Baby Chicks Have Innate Mathematical Skills · · Score: 1

    Chicks are baby chicks. Or so I've always thought. Concepts like adolescent chicks and adult chicks have never entered my consciousness. Can there even be such things?

    At any rate, if adult chicks were found to be counters but baby chicks not so good as counters, then how would that be explained? There isn't exactly a chicken school in the barnyard.

  3. Re:Glad to see.. on Angry Villagers Run Google Out of Town · · Score: 1

    Sigh. Google would invade your privacy if it could, and a lot of people let them search their computer. If Google can find any info about your secrets on the Internet, it will help anyone find it.

    Google is just a sign of the weakening of privacy protection though. Technology makes it harder and harder for people to hide or obscure their actions, appearance, and thoughts. Maybe people will end up spending the majority of their day inside private campuses, but this might force people to act and think in very conformist ways.

    It is fair for Google to see and post what anyone can see in public. Even if it is unpopular, it is only a matter of time before someone, Google or not, will post enormous detail on everyone's public actions. And even if no one posts this publicly, there will be those who will privately gather this information, at surprisingly affordable cost. The outrage is all in vain.

    The solace is that in such a world, there is likely enough technology to help people achieve their desires without resorting to anything shameful or competitive. No one becomes exceptional, yet everyone would be exceptional compared to the people of today.

  4. Re:wait a minute here... on Microsoft Asks Fed For Bailout · · Score: 1

    >if Microsoft is the GM of the operating systems

    There's the mistake.

    Who isn't asking for a bailout? Ford. What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
    The analogy is striking. A company that has made really crappy products doesn't need a bailout. Maybe Ford understand the market better than GM, and Microsoft is really the Ford of software rather than GM.

    Ford may be struggling, but it may have foreseen the need to struggle, and planned to be just a struggler. In the car industry, a struggler may be the kind that survives because they survival rather than profits is the strategy. A paradoxical psychology and philosophy and maybe not accurate, but Microsoft may be the master of this strategy--big profits while merely struggling with Windows and Office. The computing industry is based on quantum mechanics, and quantum mechanics involves not a continuum, which is related to continuous technological improvement and company growth, but discrete levels, which is related to megajumps in technological advancement. Microsoft knows its software can only improve marginally until the next quantum leap in technology. The wait may be long so Microsoft keeps up sales with crap that gets better with a upgrade path. Brilliant.

  5. Re:Yes on Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English? · · Score: 1

    >Yes, almost certainly. You need to understand English to develop in programming languages where the syntax and reserved words are in English

    A point that is most excellent!

    Yet, the whole debate may have been intended to extract from us the No answer.

    A function syntax is not anything stuck to English, and surely the advanced languages of the world contain readily translatable words for the reserved words. Besides, the whole point of a compiler is to let people program and still communicate to the machine--no one goes around saying we should converse in binary, 0100011000001 (that's binary for "right" in uppercase Morse Code)?

    That Segways into the age-old idea of computers programming computers. The corollary: computers ought to know a modern language. At the very least, reverse engineering a program in C++ should consistently yield the same English.

  6. Re:Sesame Street & the Importance of Bilingual on Shouldn't Every Developer Understand English? · · Score: 1

    I never heard German and only a little Spanish, but watching 2 movies in these languages helped me know a tiny bit of their phrasing. Be sure the subtitles match (Chinese movies are realy bad for this) the actual foreign language and people speaking with respect rather than as punks offer better guidance.

  7. Re:am i missing something? on Game Companies Face Hard Economic Choices · · Score: 1

    >Most instead went with the tactic of "Lets put out games we already made for older systems with only the control scheme changed.

    Reality rears its cute head though - people are buying the games, or else they wouldn't be made. If someone buys a new system, but couldn't find an old game that would work (even if the old system was at a buddy's place), they just might not consider the next new system.

    I do find games to be difficult to play because of the unnatural controls. Prodding a few buttons to move a two dimensional image isn't as rewarding as it seems after a few minutes of diversion. There isn't that much adrenalin in a simulated world, is there? There are better controllers under development, and I am patient enough to wait for them.

    The game market should be left to developers that can make profitable games. Crap games don't deserve any attention. This is the reality of the economy today. We face our frailties and try to do better. The old way of borrowing and hoping the easy opportunity of earning the easily purchased rewards is over.

  8. Re:Just me? on How Google Routes Around Outages · · Score: 1

    All that aside, having tires is not absolutely critical to driving a car. One time I saw a Honda Civic going just fine down the street with two rims sans tires on the driver's side. Many people have no respect for their cars, but in spite of this being an older car, it was quite disturbing. The guy probably did something to shred his (bald?) tires, didn't have a spare or enough money/patience for a tow/new tires. As usual, no police were in sight.

    I think the Internet is better maintained than poor people's cars. The Internet is more like a 10-axle vehicle that loses a tire not as infrequently as I used to think. Lines get cut all the time, and there's always someone splicing. It isn't juat Google worried about outages - we are all dealing with them, and barely notice.

  9. Re:Hard drives?? on Sun Puts Data Center Through 6.7 Earthquake · · Score: 1

    One word SSD. I bet these data-center-in-a-container things can run even inside a moving truck if SSDs are used. Takes a lot of fuel though.

    Personally, if I lived in quakeland, I would do a lot of backups and live in paranoia.

    A possible protection is to strap everything into racks that are suspended by cables attached to an overhead crane. About 18 yrs ago I was at a fab designed to not get jiggled by the continual tremors that always occur everywhere. It was like a big room sitting on jello. Large dampers were used to support this large room so that it's floor and walls were completely separated from the rest of the building.

  10. Re:Prevention for exploit via backups on How To Prevent Being Hacked Via Backups? · · Score: 1

    That's the total paradox - do backups and be screwed or don't and be screwed.

    Well, for what it's worth, if you really must, use a different OS to run the backup. This other OS is always not networked, always booted from a read-only drive, or whatever is required to keep it from being corrupted. You have to tolerate some downtime though, so maybe copy your working files to another machine if possible. Security and reliability are a bitch, but combating entropy has its price.

  11. Re:solution: on Narcissistic College Graduates In the Workplace? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apparently douchebag-syndrome runs rampant in colleges where students

    The words college and student are highly relevant in your nonsense.

    The educational system is not keeping up with the complexity of the world. Even though so much can be achieved now by a few simple gestures of the arm-a simple point and click can start a factory on the other side of the earth-the technology required a long and dedicated effort to implement.

    I was talking to someone working on cell-phone software. A cell phone is just a little thing held in the hand so how big can the software be? Hundreds of millions of lines. Try writing that in time to catch the next market cycle, which is coming up in only a few months-it's hard work and high risk. Teamwork is required. Most of the procedures are standardized so the whole thing is doable, but no one is going to really stand out. If they need someone to stand out, it could be too risky-what if that person missed a few days or weeks?

    Maybe ten years ago this complexity would be cutting edge, but now it's run-of-the-mill, yet schools have their hands full just getting people to learn basic concepts. Only a few students may have an opportunity to see how work is done in the real world-the seemingly endless calculations and the long lists of tiny functions to implement.

    On the other hand, the high tech industry makes it easy for a nondescript insider to take advantage of the perks. There are so many people and the pay for designers versus third world assembly people is so vastly different that it is understandable for a mentality of get it while you can. So let people set their own compensation targets, and see if they can justify them.

  12. Re:And on Fermilab Not Dead Yet, Discovers Rare Single Top Quark · · Score: 1

    Wish I had some points right now.

  13. Re:Well on Testing Lenovo's ThinkPad W700ds Dual-Screen Notebook · · Score: 1

    You can buy little things with wheels to move such weights! Very durable, good for at least 2000 km of walking or even running, and costs about $15.

  14. Re:whats it give us? on Windows Server 2008 One Year On — Hit Or Miss? · · Score: 1

    >2k3 just works.
    >Does anyone have a compelling reason to use 2k8?

    One might be a trifle fascinated with the economics and attitudes of business. Supposedly, a new version of Server would make a company run new hardware better. As hardware has dropped in price while incorporating more features, you would think that business people would salivate at the prospect of taking advantage of the extra computing horsepower just to compete with the big boys.

    Instead, the thinking is "Compete? Can't be bothered. Supercompute? As long as my cash flows and the bank account fattens ..." Surely this is bad and there will be consequences, like smart companies will gobble up the complacent ones or drive them out of business. Little boss man can go find a normal job with a normal pay, but don't blame Microsoft for not making 2008 such a must-have that competing is the way to do business.

    Of course it's not about the OS, and 2008 doesn't make competing less of a battle, but one can only look around the business and economic landscape to realize that the desires of business were not enough to urge Microsoft to add more features to 2008 while 2008 makes no incentive for businesses to go big. So we can look forward to more marginal version improvements while the most mundane businesses are brutally reduced.

  15. Before the obese generation on Boy Killed By Exploding Office Chair · · Score: 1

    Yet another reason to acquire

    buns of steel

  16. Re:Culture on China Aims To Move Up the Food Chain · · Score: 1

    People are not properly motivated to innovate and create new products, better products

    A worldwide malaise. So many products have already been invented to cover every niche of desire that what people really need is a neighborhood warehouse to share really-not-that-much-used-but-I-really-like-it-if-it's-available-when-I-need-it stuff. Theoretically, it would be a lot greener if there were just one or two lawnmowers per cul-de-sac instead of a dozen.

    Even the new stuff that I yearn to buy within 2006-2010 (I've been waiting patiently and taking advantage of sales) has been invented, and it's just a matter of improving the manufacturing to the point where it's affordable.

    It's as though computing power needs to take a quantum leap in order to make must-have technology such as human-class voice recognition or natural language understanding feasible for mass consumption. The risk versus reward for innovating along such lines is difficult to justify on current platforms.

  17. Re:George Carlin - The Real Owners (that's not you on IBM Offers to Send Laid-Off Staff to Other Countries · · Score: 1

    But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking

    Somehow, that doesn't ring true, as Poirot would quickly argue. Businesspeople want to avoid critical thinking though because at the point of criticality there is a lot of risk. The more assembly-line a job is, the more predictable the cash flow.

    The trouble is that computers are doing more and more conversion of raw resources (like electricity from the outlet, as well as raw data) into decision-aiding information while concurrently the Internet spews out wisdom, trends, or predictions that masses of people try to take advantage of. After all, we have a huge number of educated that know there will be no one to pity them if they can't get on a blessed path to easy fortune. This path doesn't have a particularly well-predicted end but going hard and fast is good enough for lemmings so it's good enough for people.

    The people are the owners, and if the people falter, even the rich are burnt.

    But people will have to do more critical thinking anyways because computers are taking over the dumbass jobs. The first decade of the 21st century has gone by, and the economy has shown a tremendous inertia in this decade. Such inertia should not be repeated in future periods or else computers will run the show in 10 or 20 years, and then there will be a select few who will own everything, and they will be gladly given the controls since they know how to keep everything going.

  18. Re:Almost ten years??? on $93,803 a Year to Do Nothing · · Score: 1

    Can we say so what? Why criticize this guy so much? He doesn't do worse than many other highly paid people, if one were to just take a look around.

    BTW, we might have something to say about the system that allows and enforces this. Then again, I've heard of street punks that sue cops and get tens of thousands in payout just to make them leave the system alone, so perhaps we have to applaud making this guy get out of bed daily for his money.

  19. Re:Duh on Is Microsoft Improving Its Image? · · Score: 1

    Windows 2000 = lean
    Windows XP = bloated

    What really drives me up the wall is that I run Windows 2000 on more than one virtual machine inside Vista and I can't see why I can't do everything with Windows 2000 except that installation of new software is inhibited to require XP or higher. Windows 2000 can comfortably run on 300 Mb of RAM, but Vista chokes on 1 Gb or less.

    One of the big problems is how much RAM every little process requires. If there's RAM to burn, it's still not that good to load every little feature into RAM before starting up because that means taking more time to load everything from disk. More RAM should mean less need to swap, but instead a lot of it is wasted. There are some apps that need an extra 30 or 40 Mb just because they're loading a moderately larger file. It just hints at inefficiencies pervading everything.

  20. The Ultimate System on Dvorak Layout Claimed Not Superior To QWERTY · · Score: 1

    After I installed speech recognition to my IBM Selectric laptop, I never looked back. You have to get it.

  21. Simple Advice on Steve Jobs Takes Leave of Absence From Apple · · Score: 1

    For Mr. Jobs, the advice is simple. An Apple a day is what you need to keep the doctor away.

    Then who is going to take care of him?

  22. And the Good News Is on "Smash Your Hard Drive" To Fight Identity Theft · · Score: 1

    If this is all true, it's good news.

    We've been looking for the ultimate backup solution. If data is really recoverable, then hard drives make a really good place to store data to survive whatever disaster. Of course, saving the advanced reading techniques will be important too.

  23. Re:Bad economics on $30B IT Stimulus Will Create Almost 1 Million Jobs · · Score: 1

    I say give it a chance. Tie the stimulus payouts to goals, not just jobs.

    Are there any goals that have always been begging for labor, which was not available in boom times?

    If the answer is no, a recession is just what we need. The work is all done, so let's take a holiday.

    Does massive unemployment in an educated workforce mean the education isn't being used? Companies don't want their employees to use too much education because advanced theories make hiring difficult as well as cost more when things don't work. Something has to be done to encourage hiring large numbers of people to do advanced things where failure is a greater possibility. Schools do little to prepare people for failure, but that is where the real jobs are going to be.

    The world is increasingly automated, and in many sectors there is overcapacity due to shortsighted investments aimed at squeezing the last penny out of a trend of housing construction, and due to the bothersome possibility that there really is nothing better for the economy to do than to permit more people to live in greater luxury. Automation is used to reduce failure, but people can't compete with machines in the years to come. Machines are going to get better. People have the edge in doing work where failure is possible. In certain tasks machines are more suited for failure, but the sheer variety of tasks involving failure give people the advantage, for now.

    So do people really lack demand or desire for other endeavors? An average person may see a future of daily work just to pay for children, shelter, transport, retirement. It matters little what job is done as long as the pay is as high as possible for each person's abilities and opportunities. Typically people are in good health and enjoy working infrastructure and government so who is going to look for more than a plum job?

    It's natural for such a situation to come to an end. We need to identify particular collective desires and challenges. A few years ago, I was surprised to hear of biotech and pharmaceutical stocks taking nosedives because of failures. Those kinds of companies were big investment targets, and appeared to earn tons of money. Clearly, investors want quick returns. Medicine has always been full of challenges. It's just that people are scared of losing money.

    Economics is about choices. Many people have avoided unsecure jobs, but the world is not ready for everyone to have job security. That kind of world has to be built, not just waited for with a 50-year mortgage. Individuals can try to find a challenge of their choice or else before long they would be forced to take a bunch of unpleasant challenges. Some inspired people will find success in some of the hardest problems. There has to be many failures.

  24. Well that sucks on Milky Way Heavier Than Thought, and Spinning Faster · · Score: 1

    It's time to go on a diet again.

  25. Re:Global Warning on Is the Yellowstone Supervolcano About To Blow? · · Score: 1

    > Bring animals. Layers. Breeding stock. Shelter them. Protect them.

    Lawyers is spelled with a w