There's also an Audi A4, and if you put two of those side by side, people say "Look, isn't that a coincidence".
You'll also find that if you put them right next to each other, you won't be able to get the doors open where they come together. This may or may not have anything to do with the square root of 2...
I just switched from Movable Type to Text Pattern and I couldn't be happier. It's more CMS like AND easier to use (granted MT was easy to use but Txp feels much smoother). It makes a good separation of content and display and has a few goodies that make this feel natural.
Sounds like you've already got a solution, but others should really consider Blosxom - it's truly free (not just GPL), and in additoin to being really easy to use, has a bunch of advantages, the bidggest of which is that it understands the concept of using a heirarchical file system to organize posts. Blog entries are simply text files thrown into the appropriate directory. Blosxom can also generate pages dynamically, as most blogs do, or statically, allowing batch updates if you want.
It's written in Perl, and has a large and rapidly growing collection of "plug-ins" that extend its functionality, often in ways that is similar to (or sometimes better than Movable Type's. don't be fooled by its simplicity and small size - Blosxom does nearly everything the larger packages do, and is much, much, easier and more flexible than any other blog program I've run across.
Blosxom really is one of the most impressive programs I've seen in some time. It's worth checking out, and should be considered as an alternative to Movable Type, GreyMatter, Blogger, and the rest more often than it is. Fortunately, a growing number of hosting providers offer Blosxom support, since it's so easy and reliable.
Most of the comments here are focused on the merits or demerits of a particular smartphone. While I have one, the most important thing you should know is that there are real and significant benefits to an integrated smartphone that you cannot get with a separate phone and PDA. I've done both extensively, and the smartphone combo is terrifically more useful. Note the comments below are for a Palm smartphone - I don't know a single person that's tried a PocketPC smartphone (or PDA, for that matter) that's happy with it for very long.
Although it sounds simple, there is just no overstating the importance and power of having *all* your contacts with you at all times, and having that contact list integrated into your phone/dialer. No more wishing you'd put Joe's number into your phone, or trying to juggle data from the PDA to the phone. If you drive and talk, or ever want to be able to, this alone is enough reason to spring for the extra bucks for the smartphone. Bluetooth in both devices gets you closer, but it's nowhere near as transparent, and is a notorious security problem, too.
Don't worry about snazzo marketing features you'll probably never use. If you want an MP3 player, buy one, you'll probably be disappointed in your phone as one anyway - there's a lot of benefit in combining some devices, like the phone and PDA, but not much in combining those with an MP3 player or camera, for instance. The difference, of course, is that combining a PDA and phone is a win-win with few or no tradeoffs, while adding hardware to make even a decent smartphone passable as a digital camera or MP3 player is so expensive you can count on it being done only poorly.
Even 8 MB will store an enormous amount of data on a Palm device - many thousands of contacts, tons of text crunched into compact formats, and schedules forever. My phone is an older 8 MB one, and I have a LOT of contact and schedule data, plus a couple of versions of the entire Bible, and several dozen other essays, articles, and reference documents, and I still have over 2 MB left over. (I never even clean out old schedule events, I just leave them there since they're sometimes handy for future reference. I've been doing this for about 5 years with no problems at all.)
For all the benefits smartphones provide, though, the wireless carriers aren't capitalizing on the benefits of their networks or the growing intelligence at its ends - there are many enhancements that make sense, and could be supported, but aren't. For instance, rather than the relatively useless Bluetooth, why not have the ability to send contact info over the phone call itself? Use a digital connection on PCS networks, or even some clever touch-tone encoding to allow "beaming" directly over the phone line. This just makes sense, and could even be used by the carriers as a significant value-add, especially if the system works transparently across wired, wireless, and IP telephones. Here it is, the 21st century, and I'm still having phone calls saying "e-mail me you contact information, and I'll send you mine back." Why the heck can't that happen over the phone call? (Information could now justify some of their ridiculous $1.00 charges by "beaming" the number you just looked up into your contacts list, too, so you'll still have it after they've helpfully "connected you at no additional charge" - hope you wrote that number down, or it's another buck!)
Now a bit about specific phones, and picking them: Although it's really hard to find working demos of these phones, insist on using a live one *before* buying - there are often subtle things that will irritate you that you can't see until you try it. (For instance, I recently decided against upgrading to the Treo 600 because it has the camera (both useless and a liability) and also does not support Graffiti. The missing Graffiti support is not something that's obvious until you hold it in your hands - some people prefer silly blackberry-ish keyboards, but the lack of Graffiti killed the Treo for me - if i
For $1500 I can have, like, 6 or 7 T600 stinkpads.
Not quite, but the older Thinkpads can be a great deal. If you want something that can travel significantly lighter than the Thinkpad 600, but with nearly identical capabilities, try to find a 570E. This is much thinner and lighter than the 600, since the heavy peripherals (CD/2nd HDD and Floppy/2nd Batttery) live in the easily removed "Ultrabase" media slice. The ethernet docking base is handy, too, but oddly, requires the Ultrabase to be snapped in place first.
I carry a 570E as my primary laptop, and have an older 570 as a backup. These are great, tough, formerly top-of-the-line machines that can be had for a decent price if you scour the web a bit. One of these days I'll need more memory and be forced to "upgrade", but for now, this is still a great, rugged machine at a fraction of the price of anything else that offers the same features (and yes, for me at least, the "thin and light" aspect far outweighs having the latest P4 battery-eater...)
Loud horns, too. The Italians understand this, which is why the snarl of a V8 through an ANSA exhaust combined with the auditory assualt of a FIAMM air horn will usually keep even the slinkiest wedge of an Italian exotic from getting run over by trucks and clueless SUV drivers.
I like SUVs, but anywhere outside of Texas (where SUVs have been the norm for 20+ years) no one knows how to drive the dang things! (Transplanted yankees are positively dangerous in the things, but they're usually easily enough identified because they drive play-toy BMW and Lexus "luxury" SUVs instead of the real deal.) Driving a car that's only belt-buckle-high among SUVs can be almost as bad as riding a bike in traffic...
As of yet there are very few full-featured todo applications that will allow you to sort by category, view by category, list with date, category, and summary, add notes, and sync with the Palm.
If you're on Windows or Mac, just use Palm Desktop. It's a free download, and it offers all of the above. Quite useful on it's own, and it works with a Palm device like, well, it was (cough) made for it...
Alternatively, consider a web-based alternative like Yahoo's or (soon) Google's hosted services.
But how about, say, the R4400 or R10000? PA8000? Faster than Alpha 21164? Hardly.
We agree on the Alpha - it's always kicked butt, but was doomed from the point DEC decided that they were going to try to force the execrable OSF/1 (later called Digital Unix) down their customers throats when those customers pleaded for them to support Ultrix on Alpha as well. This was a political decision, and in a nutshell, is what led to the downfall of the company and assimilation by Compaq a few years later. (At the time, I was heading up Unix/IP networking for Chevron, which was DEC's largest Unix customer. They had drunk the OSF kool-aid, though, and there was no keeping them from following that pied piper down the path to destruction...
I'll argue the others are close enough that the winner is very application-dependent. When you factor in the relative immaturity of the OS on those other platforms, though, SPARC and Solaris were far and away the better choice back then.
No, I think Sun is unique here - AFAIK (and I could be wrong here), Sun is the only OEM to have fully bought out its Unix license. Everyone else (and Sun, up to the buyout point) paid essentially on a royalty/per-unit basis. Sun shelled out a lot of money to have a fee-and-clear license forever. I remember McNealy making a big deal out of this in one of his talks to the troops shortly after I joined Sun in the mid 1990's.
But none of these people are home users confined to a $2000 budget for a computer (or better yet, sub-$1k).
For the past several technology cycles, I've adhered to a policy of not letting *anything* drive me to spend more than $400-$800 on any new computer. I have no regrets whatever. This seems to be the sweet spot for my uses, which are notably more rigorous than the average office worker, but not so cutting edge that I'm paying through the nose for a bunch of unreliable bleeding edge fluff. (The stability benefit of riding back a bit on the wave is an often overlooked bennie to this option.)
I'm sure lots of PC snobs will be happy to let us all know how they *require* a Longhorn-spec system, but realistically, I haven't been able to tell any diference in CPU speeds since about 500-600 MHz (especially if you go with the lighter XP Home, which doesn't have all the heavyweight crap that has no value anyway if you use samba rather than MS servers.) XP is memory hungry, though: 256 MB is pretty much a bottom end minimum due to its wasteful ways, and more sure helps. (Being a user of the equally bloated Mozilla doesn't help this any...)
The power available/power used curve is just *way* out of hand now, though: even with my "cheapo" systems, I have more cycles, RAM, and disk sitting in my office than my first employer (a very large aerospace subcrontractor) had across the entire company when I graduated in 1985. Listen, people: that means it's really possible to run an entire multi-billion dollar business (including serious apps such as database/ERP and 3D CAD/CAM systems) off a few sub-kilobuck PCs. For those of you too young to remember, there's really not much that gets done in Excel that couldn't have been done in Lotus 1-2-3 back then. We're burning all these cycles on the user interface, and it's not even a particularly good one! To put this in perspective, I called a hardware vendor today to try to order the really slick little 1 GHz laptop they introduced a few months ago. "Bangalore Bob" was all to happy to tell me that, "Oh, no, a 1GHz CPU is much too slow for real working. We cannot be selling them anymore..." Maybe I'm just getting to be a curmudgeon, but I think that instead, things really *have* gone off in the weeds, and the industry is desperately trying every trick they have to convince us that every single desktop needs systems more powerful in every way than the fastest high-end workstations or even mainframes of just a few years ago. I call, "B.S.!"
Sun is one of the few companies on the planet that would be in no danger at all even if SCO miraculously turned out to be right about *everything* they so ridiculously allege. That's because Sun bought out thier own perpetual Unix license from AT&T years ago. No other computer company has done this, to my knowledge.
Now I can build a server that is twice as fast as a $10k sun for $300 if I search pricewatch long enough.
Sorry, but this is just complete and utter BS.
You can't even come close to doing that on your best day, and even after your best pathetic attempt, you won't have anything even remotely approaching a properly engineered system. Rather, you'll have a ratbag of cheap crap slapped together under the guiding principle that the quantity of blue LEDs is the primary determinant of computer speed...
(Several years of extensive field trials have proven conclusively that Blue LEDs cannot help OLAP, Knowledge Managment Portals, Data Warehouses, and Enterprise Application Integration Engines put dollars on the bottom line. Not even a little bit...)
No cowering here: UltraSparc is a dog. It was a dog when it was new, and there's no reason to think that the performance delta between Sun's SPARC and the rest of the general purpose CPU market is going to improve.
Oh, I guess it was because UltraSPARC was such a dog that customers were clamoring to get on weeks-long waiting lists to get a demo and a visit with a sales rep. Yes that happened when UltraSPARC was announced - I was working for Sun in Houston at the time, and pretty much every geophysicist, and geneticist in the city was doing whatever they could to get one. You're just wrong here - SuperSPARC never delivered as promised, but UltraSPARC was a whole new level of proce/performance that Intel couldn't even touch. Not to mention it positioned Sun for its extremely successful entry into the server space...
I've both worked for Sun, and was a customer for many years. I've also worked for IBM and Dell. Sun's performace is usually near the head of the pack, service is more competent than IBM's and cheaper than Dell's. Hardware quality, is IMO, generally excellent - only (pre-Compaq) DEC was as good (and DEC's service always kicked the snot out of all of the above...)
I've worked with and bought them all - I personally like Sun's stuff because it works, and works well. Well, that and they're mostly a really great bunch of people.
IBM re-invented itself. Apple re-invented itself. Sun is capable of doing the same.
Arguably, Sun is one of the most striking examples ever of a company proving its ability to re-invent itself on a fairly regular basis.
This is part of Sun's *normal* cycle, and although in every trough there are naysayers calling for McNealy's head, he and the rest of the Sun team have shown they have what it takes to make good moves over the long haul. Sun has "re-invented" itself so many times (usually successfully) that it's not even funny. Here are just a few of the things Sun has reinvented itself as over the years:
- The first open systems computer company - Arguably the first workstation company, period - The first computer company to embrace TCP/IP and Ethernet technologies when everyone else was pushing proprietary networks - A high-performance graphics company (it was this success that led to the founding of SGI as a competitor...) - The inventor of practical, transparent network file access (NFS), and the first company ever to realize that it's better to open the spec and let competitors build systems based on the same thing - An OEM powerhouse - Sun boards are still in almost all medical imaging systems and many other products - A microprocessor design and fabless semiconductor company, and arguably a quite successful one - I expect there have been several dozen companies other than Sun that have built products around SPARC - A network mangement company, with the leading NM platform (for a while, anyway - this is one of Sun's biggest goofs) - As a high-performance server company and high-end multiprocessor workstation company - many said this was a doomed move, but it lead to Sun's best years - As the first company to recognize that storage should be networked too, and making previously very expensive high performance FibreChannel subsystems cheap enough to be the standard way to add more than a few disks. - The inventor and shepherd of Java, which *is* the most influential and important computer technology of the past 10 years. Anything you claim is better owes much of what it is to Java. Whether you like Sun's loose control of Java or not, there's one thing for sure: MS would have poisoned the coffeepot far worse than it did if Sun not excercised the minor control it has. - Sun made itself the chief driver behind making Gnome a serious product that might even be considered by businesses, contributing enormous amounts of talent and resources ot the project. - Sun claimed the role of leader in providing an alternative to Microsoft's applicaiton suite by puttign their money where Scott's mouth is. Sun was committed to this idea to the point of paying millions for StarDivision's StarOffice, pouring millions more into an almost complete re-write, and then *giving* it away by open-sourcing it. - As an application software company. This has been a rockier road, but Sun has acquired a LOT of really great software over the past few years, from companies like Pirus, Net Dynamics, Clustra, Gridware, and Forte, not to mention, of course, Netscape's server-side offerings, which are excellent. - Recently, by recognizing that SPARC is not the only future, and going with AMD's Opteron in some servers. (McNealy has always maintained that he would pull th plug on SPARC when it could not maintain a 2X performance advantage over Intel. He gave SPARC another chance, but has sent the message loud and clear to the SPARC team: get with the program, or you're just in the backplane i/o interconnect business from here on out...
Sun certainly has its warts, but it is *unique* among computer companies in being able to serially innovate its way to new hieghts. A momentary pause or even fall-back every few years is part of that process. Ive worked for Sun. I've also worked for Dell and IBM, and I can tell you without any doubt that McNealy and the other folks that run Sun "get it" so much better than their competitors that it's not even funny. In a bizarre b
OK, it sounds like this technology is starting to make it to mass market. Let's see if it lasts. As I said before, there have been attempts to do this before and they have been less than successful. The fact that GM only deactivates cylinders in limp home mode may indicate that they can't do it on a regular basis for fuel economy.
It will last. GM's Northstar and Aurora V8's have offered this for several years, not to save fuel, but to allow the car to continue to run at reduced power output even if it's lost all its coolant.
Remember the commercial from a few years ago where the Cadillac engineers drain their radiator before heading off into the desert? This really works, and in reality, it's just a simple software tweak, which is basically variable displacement: Instead of firing every time, each cylinder is alternately fired one cycle, and then just has air pumped through it on the next. Power output is cut in half, of course, but this air-cooling effect works well enough that it is possible to continue to drive the car (with air conditioning!) even in the event of a total cooling system failure. That's a pretty neat trick for a software hack.
I suspect variable displacement will gain as much ground in the next few years as variable valve timing has in the last few. In fact, once the hardware for the latter is in place, the former becomes much easier - there are lots of reasons why this is likely to become a mainstream technology, and economics is the biggest.
Their [sic] is a lot more work going on for the linux kernel than solaris. The resources being thrown at each kernel is decidedly in linuxes [sic] favor.
On this much, at least, we agree. Linux is solidly mid-pack at best in any given area you care to name, but it is indeed getting better faster than anything else out there. (With the possible exception of the BSDs, which seem to stay solidly ahead of Linux technologically in spite of thier dramatically smaller developer communities. But Linux quickly apes important BSD functionality when it can - just look at the impact OpenBSD has had on security philosophy and stack issues in Linux the last few years...)
i suppose you are one of those Cool Aid drinkers who thinks condoms are useless...
Actually, condoms *are* useless in preventing many serious STD's, and often not terribly effective at preventing pregnancy. HPV(Human Papilloma Virus) is the most prominent example among several, and also one of the most important, since recent studies indicate that it is quite likely that upwards of 99% of Cervical Cancers are caused by HPV. Repeated studies have shown that condoms are useless in preventing HPV infections - the CDC's figures, for instance, show that about 2/3 of sexually active women *will* contract one or more strains of HPV, regardless of condom use. Since we're talking about life and death here, it's pretty obvious wise women should refuse sex even with "protection", which is really nothing of the sort...
and that abstinance can really be taught. pray tell, do you abstain? it always amuses me that none of the people who want to impose abstinance on others never really tried it themselves.
Of *course* abstinence can really be taught. All it takes is a solid framework of morality. You're right to the extent that you think it cannot be taught in a morality-free environment. And although I would not normally discuss such things, your high-handedness galls me. I don not abstain now, because I am happily (in all ways) married to a wonderful and beautiful woman. For the record, I have had sex with exactly one woman, and I do not feel deprived in the least. (And, yes (horrors!) that means I somehow managed to exert enough self control to abstain all the way through college!) If anything, I feel sorry for all the people out there that have cheapened their own sexual relationships by giving up that exclusivity. Abstinence definitely does not kill. Not abstaining definitely can.
Here are the ones I find essential (I use Windows unapologetically on the desktop - it makes my life much easier):
1) Mozilla, for both Browsing and Mail - and all the stuff Mozilla is going to want:
a) Sun JRE
b) Adobe Acrobat Reader
c) Macromedia Flash (disgusting, but needed too often to ignore...)
d) Piro's Tabbed Browser Extensions
2) Antivirus and antispyware programs, plus firewall if the machine will have a wireless network connection.
3) Palm Desktop (worth having as a local PIM even if you don't have a Palm device, but indispensible if you do: there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good...)
4) SpaceMonger (Absolutely essential once version 2 is out soon...)
5) PuTTY (excellent SSH client)
6) Vim (*When* are they going to let this thing deal with spaces in pathnames and install into "Program Files" like it should??)
7) CyberKit (nslookup, traceroute, NTP, and a few other essentials for Windows.)
8) VNC (I'm trying out UltraVNC now, and I like it so far - the built-in file transfer is handy, although I understand Tridia's added that to their new version, too...)
9) Microsoft Office (Still indispensible, and there is no adeqately capable alternative quite yet...)
10) Unix toolkit: Cygwin (big, piggy, buggy shell, but more complete) or U/Win (cleaner, more stable, far better shell, but missing some utility pieces.) Usually I install both. I'm not much of a programmer, but the Unix text utilities and awk are vital for *so* many things...
11) SysInternals Tools, especially Filemon and Process Explorer
12) Unison (File Synchronizer, works between both Windows and Linux, so it's especially handy for syncronizing between a laptop (Windows, of course) and a Samba Server.)
13) Visio (*Definitely* no alternative, free or pay, open or closed source...)
14) HTMLDOC (HTML to PDF filter)
15) Copy of Knoppix-STD CD to boot into for all those other tools you need every once in a while.
16) And last, but definitely not least (because it will save your sanity from assualt by stupid algebraic calculators), the Excalibur32 RPN Calculator.
Now for the big Iron, the altrix is exactly what you are talking about. SGI has been selling linux systems with thousands of processors. That is more than big enough to be considered big iron and it doesn't have crappy sparcs in it to boot.
It also has only a fraction of capacity of Sun's "big iron" for solving the really tough problems. A cluster (even a really big one) does not a supercomputer make, despite what you read on Slashdot.
The really amazing thing is that for those problems that require a single large OS image with lots of processors pulling in perfect harmony, Sun's nearly 10-year-old SPARC/Solaris architecture is still about the best thing out there, and is a better deal than IBM's and SGI's alternatives when price is factored in.
In any case, Schwartz is right that Linux really isn't a contender yet in the large SMP machine space. When it is, my bets are on Sun's expertise in high performance interconnects combined with the Opteron's price/performance. Whether Linux can actually rise to the challenge of such hardware is extremely doubtful, since scaling to dozens of processors would require *huge* changes to the kernel, including, in all liklihood, Linus having to give up his fundamental attachment to a monlithic kernel. That could happen, but I'm not betting on it...
Imagine - oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground.
Don't be ridiculous. There has *always* been trouble there (at least through all of human history...), and there always will be. Long before oil was even known and long after it's forgotten, people will be fighting in the middle east for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with oil.
Sorry to burst your hate-bubble, but oil is not really all *that* important in world politics. It's a factor, but there are many that are much larger...
Uh, I hate to break this to you, Mr. "Scientist", but abstinence is proven to be very nearly 100% effective in preventing AIDS, a conclusion that in no way flies in the face of science, but instead, simply stands to reason. African countries are now pushing abstinence because *it works*, and if they don't, most of their population will be dead in 20 years. (Barring corner cases like birth to an AIDS-infected mother and transfusions, it's fair to say that abstinence is as close to 100% effective as anything ever will be in this world...)
(A good friend of mine is on the board of the Federal Reserve and visited South Africa recently - government officials told him privately that AIDS figures for all African countries are actually far higher than they're willing to admit publicly, and they realize they have to take the most effective actions possible. Barring an actual cure, that's abstinence...)
BTW, although there is certainly some dreadful stuff from some creation scientists, others are doing real, solid, work that is sucessfully changing the consensus scientific view of things - for instance catastrophism theories have resulted in geologists now believing that the Grand Canyon and other similar features are in fact far, far younger than previously believed. Don't be too quick to think you know everything - any good scientist is quick to admit that he doesn't know very much at all going in. And don't be too quick to assume that others are idiots simply because you disagree with their view on certain issues...
Someone, ANYONE really needs to come up with a full-featured linux distribution which actually uses ACLs.
I vote for Novell. If they would just put the fine-grained, inheritable permissions of the NetWare filesystem (which is excellent, btw) into SuSE, they'd have a *real* winner...
Somebody mod parent up. He has one of the only constructive suggestions here. I (and others) have pointed out that Java was missing from Miguel's list, but this combination is a legitimate contender as well, if wxwindows can develop all the capabilities it would need to really pull this off.
And, of course, it has the advantage of being based on mature, open technologies...
Finally, WINE (or similar) may make it possible for some or most of those Windows-targeted.NET applications to run on Linux. Time will tell.
This has been a quixotic dream for over a decade now, and always will be. As a practical matter it is simply NOT POSSIBLE to "emulate" Microsoft's functionality in any significantly usable way - at least not soon enough for anyone to care.
Let me explain: By the time the proprietary bits have been figured out (and reimplemented in a useful way), you're at least a generation behind, and your capabilities are pretty much irrelevant to the market, which has moved on to now require the capabilities of current products. Those will take you *another* few years to figure out.
But you don't have to take my word for it, we've put probably millions of man-hours of effort into projects and products that have proven that emulating Windows (or other complex proprietary MS APIs) is not practical: Insignia's SoftPC, Sun's Wabi, and of course, WINE itself, among many others.
How much more proof do we need that the entire concept of Windows emulation is a waste of effort and a losing strategy? (Even Transmeta's code-morphing doesn't really help, does it?)
And the road-blocks MS can throw up in this process are considerable: The Product Manager for Sun's Wabi told me that they were amazed how quickly they were able to get all the non-MS apps working well. Turns out it wasn't really all that hard to duplicate the public API. But it took them several more *years* to figure out all the undocumented API calls used Microsoft's applications (which, of course, is why they are usually faster and more stable than competitors: in essence, they cheat.) By the time the Wabi team had even Microsoft's Win16 apps working, Win 95 and its 32-bit API had been out for a year, and Sun's management realized that it was pouring (big) money down the toilet, for no return. (I used the never-released "Final" Wabi extensively, and it really was flawless - it was just irrelevant by the time it was ready, because it couldn't run Office 95.)
If Miguel and the reast of the OSS community are really as smart as they think they are, they'll give up trying to ape MS and reimplement.NET and its ilk. The ONLY way to really counter MS here is with Java, but the GNU bigots are almost certain to let their hatred of commercial software and especially Sun, prevent this from being the direction followed, even though it's the only one with a prayer of success. (I've always found this FSF/GNU hatred (there's no other word) for Sun to be both ironic and sad, since Sun has contributed more open source software than anyone other than UC Berkeley...) This attitude will almost certainly ensure that MS will win in the end.
Until now it hasn't made much difference for another emulation project to fail, but this time, the stakes are high: nothing less than the future of the world's computing environment, and even whether it will be *possible* for MS alternatives to really exist. Let's don't screw this up by making the same mistakes yet again...
Actual text from an Economist science article on the Schroedinger cat-in-the-box experiment from around 1990,as best I can recall it:
"The only reason that countless milliions of cats have not been sacrificed on the altar of science is that actually doing the experiment would prove nothing..."
No mystery there. You spin it with your hand, and there's very little friction to slow it down, and you're not drawing any power from it, so it will keep spinning until air friction gradually decelerates it.
Of course that's what happens when you just spin it. (I never clained it didn't run down - it clearly does.) But the behavior is odd when you hold a magnet next to it as it spins - you really have to try it to see and feel for yourself. Heck, there may be nothing new here, but the effect at least *seems* strange...
I don't think we were unconsciously adding energy to it (that would be pretty difficult, I'd think) but you have a good point...
Slashdot Mirror
There's also an Audi A4, and if you put two of those side by side, people say "Look, isn't that a coincidence".
You'll also find that if you put them right next to each other, you won't be able to get the doors open where they come together. This may or may not have anything to do with the square root of 2...
I just switched from Movable Type to Text Pattern and I couldn't be happier. It's more CMS like AND easier to use (granted MT was easy to use but Txp feels much smoother). It makes a good separation of content and display and has a few goodies that make this feel natural.
Sounds like you've already got a solution, but others should really consider Blosxom - it's truly free (not just GPL), and in additoin to being really easy to use, has a bunch of advantages, the bidggest of which is that it understands the concept of using a heirarchical file system to organize posts. Blog entries are simply text files thrown into the appropriate directory. Blosxom can also generate pages dynamically, as most blogs do, or statically, allowing batch updates if you want.
It's written in Perl, and has a large and rapidly growing collection of "plug-ins" that extend its functionality, often in ways that is similar to (or sometimes better than Movable Type's. don't be fooled by its simplicity and small size - Blosxom does nearly everything the larger packages do, and is much, much, easier and more flexible than any other blog program I've run across.
Blosxom really is one of the most impressive programs I've seen in some time. It's worth checking out, and should be considered as an alternative to Movable Type, GreyMatter, Blogger, and the rest more often than it is. Fortunately, a growing number of hosting providers offer Blosxom support, since it's so easy and reliable.
Most of the comments here are focused on the merits or demerits of a particular smartphone. While I have one, the most important thing you should know is that there are real and significant benefits to an integrated smartphone that you cannot get with a separate phone and PDA. I've done both extensively, and the smartphone combo is terrifically more useful. Note the comments below are for a Palm smartphone - I don't know a single person that's tried a PocketPC smartphone (or PDA, for that matter) that's happy with it for very long.
Although it sounds simple, there is just no overstating the importance and power of having *all* your contacts with you at all times, and having that contact list integrated into your phone/dialer. No more wishing you'd put Joe's number into your phone, or trying to juggle data from the PDA to the phone. If you drive and talk, or ever want to be able to, this alone is enough reason to spring for the extra bucks for the smartphone. Bluetooth in both devices gets you closer, but it's nowhere near as transparent, and is a notorious security problem, too.
Don't worry about snazzo marketing features you'll probably never use. If you want an MP3 player, buy one, you'll probably be disappointed in your phone as one anyway - there's a lot of benefit in combining some devices, like the phone and PDA, but not much in combining those with an MP3 player or camera, for instance. The difference, of course, is that combining a PDA and phone is a win-win with few or no tradeoffs, while adding hardware to make even a decent smartphone passable as a digital camera or MP3 player is so expensive you can count on it being done only poorly.
Even 8 MB will store an enormous amount of data on a Palm device - many thousands of contacts, tons of text crunched into compact formats, and schedules forever. My phone is an older 8 MB one, and I have a LOT of contact and schedule data, plus a couple of versions of the entire Bible, and several dozen other essays, articles, and reference documents, and I still have over 2 MB left over. (I never even clean out old schedule events, I just leave them there since they're sometimes handy for future reference. I've been doing this for about 5 years with no problems at all.)
For all the benefits smartphones provide, though, the wireless carriers aren't capitalizing on the benefits of their networks or the growing intelligence at its ends - there are many enhancements that make sense, and could be supported, but aren't. For instance, rather than the relatively useless Bluetooth, why not have the ability to send contact info over the phone call itself? Use a digital connection on PCS networks, or even some clever touch-tone encoding to allow "beaming" directly over the phone line. This just makes sense, and could even be used by the carriers as a significant value-add, especially if the system works transparently across wired, wireless, and IP telephones. Here it is, the 21st century, and I'm still having phone calls saying "e-mail me you contact information, and I'll send you mine back." Why the heck can't that happen over the phone call? (Information could now justify some of their ridiculous $1.00 charges by "beaming" the number you just looked up into your contacts list, too, so you'll still have it after they've helpfully "connected you at no additional charge" - hope you wrote that number down, or it's another buck!)
Now a bit about specific phones, and picking them: Although it's really hard to find working demos of these phones, insist on using a live one *before* buying - there are often subtle things that will irritate you that you can't see until you try it. (For instance, I recently decided against upgrading to the Treo 600 because it has the camera (both useless and a liability) and also does not support Graffiti. The missing Graffiti support is not something that's obvious until you hold it in your hands - some people prefer silly blackberry-ish keyboards, but the lack of Graffiti killed the Treo for me - if i
For $1500 I can have, like, 6 or 7 T600 stinkpads.
Not quite, but the older Thinkpads can be a great deal. If you want something that can travel significantly lighter than the Thinkpad 600, but with nearly identical capabilities, try to find a 570E. This is much thinner and lighter than the 600, since the heavy peripherals (CD/2nd HDD and Floppy/2nd Batttery) live in the easily removed "Ultrabase" media slice. The ethernet docking base is handy, too, but oddly, requires the Ultrabase to be snapped in place first.
I carry a 570E as my primary laptop, and have an older 570 as a backup. These are great, tough, formerly top-of-the-line machines that can be had for a decent price if you scour the web a bit. One of these days I'll need more memory and be forced to "upgrade", but for now, this is still a great, rugged machine at a fraction of the price of anything else that offers the same features (and yes, for me at least, the "thin and light" aspect far outweighs having the latest P4 battery-eater...)
Loud Pipes Save Lives.
Loud horns, too. The Italians understand this, which is why the snarl of a V8 through an ANSA exhaust combined with the auditory assualt of a FIAMM air horn will usually keep even the slinkiest wedge of an Italian exotic from getting run over by trucks and clueless SUV drivers.
I like SUVs, but anywhere outside of Texas (where SUVs have been the norm for 20+ years) no one knows how to drive the dang things! (Transplanted yankees are positively dangerous in the things, but they're usually easily enough identified because they drive play-toy BMW and Lexus "luxury" SUVs instead of the real deal.) Driving a car that's only belt-buckle-high among SUVs can be almost as bad as riding a bike in traffic...
As of yet there are very few full-featured todo applications that will allow you to sort by category, view by category, list with date, category, and summary, add notes, and sync with the Palm.
If you're on Windows or Mac, just use Palm Desktop. It's a free download, and it offers all of the above. Quite useful on it's own, and it works with a Palm device like, well, it was (cough) made for it...
Alternatively, consider a web-based alternative like Yahoo's or (soon) Google's hosted services.
But how about, say, the R4400 or R10000? PA8000? Faster than Alpha 21164? Hardly.
We agree on the Alpha - it's always kicked butt, but was doomed from the point DEC decided that they were going to try to force the execrable OSF/1 (later called Digital Unix) down their customers throats when those customers pleaded for them to support Ultrix on Alpha as well. This was a political decision, and in a nutshell, is what led to the downfall of the company and assimilation by Compaq a few years later. (At the time, I was heading up Unix/IP networking for Chevron, which was DEC's largest Unix customer. They had drunk the OSF kool-aid, though, and there was no keeping them from following that pied piper down the path to destruction...
I'll argue the others are close enough that the winner is very application-dependent. When you factor in the relative immaturity of the OS on those other platforms, though, SPARC and Solaris were far and away the better choice back then.
No, I think Sun is unique here - AFAIK (and I could be wrong here), Sun is the only OEM to have fully bought out its Unix license. Everyone else (and Sun, up to the buyout point) paid essentially on a royalty/per-unit basis. Sun shelled out a lot of money to have a fee-and-clear license forever. I remember McNealy making a big deal out of this in one of his talks to the troops shortly after I joined Sun in the mid 1990's.
But none of these people are home users confined to a $2000 budget for a computer (or better yet, sub-$1k).
For the past several technology cycles, I've adhered to a policy of not letting *anything* drive me to spend more than $400-$800 on any new computer. I have no regrets whatever. This seems to be the sweet spot for my uses, which are notably more rigorous than the average office worker, but not so cutting edge that I'm paying through the nose for a bunch of unreliable bleeding edge fluff. (The stability benefit of riding back a bit on the wave is an often overlooked bennie to this option.)
I'm sure lots of PC snobs will be happy to let us all know how they *require* a Longhorn-spec system, but realistically, I haven't been able to tell any diference in CPU speeds since about 500-600 MHz (especially if you go with the lighter XP Home, which doesn't have all the heavyweight crap that has no value anyway if you use samba rather than MS servers.) XP is memory hungry, though: 256 MB is pretty much a bottom end minimum due to its wasteful ways, and more sure helps. (Being a user of the equally bloated Mozilla doesn't help this any...)
The power available/power used curve is just *way* out of hand now, though: even with my "cheapo" systems, I have more cycles, RAM, and disk sitting in my office than my first employer (a very large aerospace subcrontractor) had across the entire company when I graduated in 1985. Listen, people: that means it's really possible to run an entire multi-billion dollar business (including serious apps such as database/ERP and 3D CAD/CAM systems) off a few sub-kilobuck PCs. For those of you too young to remember, there's really not much that gets done in Excel that couldn't have been done in Lotus 1-2-3 back then. We're burning all these cycles on the user interface, and it's not even a particularly good one! To put this in perspective, I called a hardware vendor today to try to order the really slick little 1 GHz laptop they introduced a few months ago. "Bangalore Bob" was all to happy to tell me that, "Oh, no, a 1GHz CPU is much too slow for real working. We cannot be selling them anymore..." Maybe I'm just getting to be a curmudgeon, but I think that instead, things really *have* gone off in the weeds, and the industry is desperately trying every trick they have to convince us that every single desktop needs systems more powerful in every way than the fastest high-end workstations or even mainframes of just a few years ago. I call, "B.S.!"
Wasn't Sun one of the SCO licensees?
Sun is one of the few companies on the planet that would be in no danger at all even if SCO miraculously turned out to be right about *everything* they so ridiculously allege. That's because Sun bought out thier own perpetual Unix license from AT&T years ago. No other computer company has done this, to my knowledge.
Now I can build a server that is twice as fast as a $10k sun for $300 if I search pricewatch long enough.
Sorry, but this is just complete and utter BS.
You can't even come close to doing that on your best day, and even after your best pathetic attempt, you won't have anything even remotely approaching a properly engineered system. Rather, you'll have a ratbag of cheap crap slapped together under the guiding principle that the quantity of blue LEDs is the primary determinant of computer speed...
(Several years of extensive field trials have proven conclusively that Blue LEDs cannot help OLAP, Knowledge Managment Portals, Data Warehouses, and Enterprise Application Integration Engines put dollars on the bottom line. Not even a little bit...)
No cowering here: UltraSparc is a dog. It was a dog when it was new, and there's no reason to think that the performance delta between Sun's SPARC and the rest of the general purpose CPU market is going to improve.
Oh, I guess it was because UltraSPARC was such a dog that customers were clamoring to get on weeks-long waiting lists to get a demo and a visit with a sales rep. Yes that happened when UltraSPARC was announced - I was working for Sun in Houston at the time, and pretty much every geophysicist, and geneticist in the city was doing whatever they could to get one. You're just wrong here - SuperSPARC never delivered as promised, but UltraSPARC was a whole new level of proce/performance that Intel couldn't even touch. Not to mention it positioned Sun for its extremely successful entry into the server space...
I've both worked for Sun, and was a customer for many years. I've also worked for IBM and Dell. Sun's performace is usually near the head of the pack, service is more competent than IBM's and cheaper than Dell's. Hardware quality, is IMO, generally excellent - only (pre-Compaq) DEC was as good (and DEC's service always kicked the snot out of all of the above...)
I've worked with and bought them all - I personally like Sun's stuff because it works, and works well. Well, that and they're mostly a really great bunch of people.
IBM re-invented itself. Apple re-invented itself. Sun is capable of doing the same.
Arguably, Sun is one of the most striking examples ever of a company proving its ability to re-invent itself on a fairly regular basis.
This is part of Sun's *normal* cycle, and although in every trough there are naysayers calling for McNealy's head, he and the rest of the Sun team have shown they have what it takes to make good moves over the long haul. Sun has "re-invented" itself so many times (usually successfully) that it's not even funny. Here are just a few of the things Sun has reinvented itself as over the years:
- The first open systems computer company
- Arguably the first workstation company, period
- The first computer company to embrace TCP/IP and Ethernet technologies when everyone else was pushing proprietary networks
- A high-performance graphics company (it was this success that led to the founding of SGI as a competitor...)
- The inventor of practical, transparent network file access (NFS), and the first company ever to realize that it's better to open the spec and let competitors build systems based on the same thing
- An OEM powerhouse - Sun boards are still in almost all medical imaging systems and many other products
- A microprocessor design and fabless semiconductor company, and arguably a quite successful one - I expect there have been several dozen companies other than Sun that have built products around SPARC
- A network mangement company, with the leading NM platform (for a while, anyway - this is one of Sun's biggest goofs)
- As a high-performance server company and high-end multiprocessor workstation company - many said this was a doomed move, but it lead to Sun's best years
- As the first company to recognize that storage should be networked too, and making previously very expensive high performance FibreChannel subsystems cheap enough to be the standard way to add more than a few disks.
- The inventor and shepherd of Java, which *is* the most influential and important computer technology of the past 10 years. Anything you claim is better owes much of what it is to Java. Whether you like Sun's loose control of Java or not, there's one thing for sure: MS would have poisoned the coffeepot far worse than it did if Sun not excercised the minor control it has.
- Sun made itself the chief driver behind making Gnome a serious product that might even be considered by businesses, contributing enormous amounts of talent and resources ot the project.
- Sun claimed the role of leader in providing an alternative to Microsoft's applicaiton suite by puttign their money where Scott's mouth is. Sun was committed to this idea to the point of paying millions for StarDivision's StarOffice, pouring millions more into an almost complete re-write, and then *giving* it away by open-sourcing it.
- As an application software company. This has been a rockier road, but Sun has acquired a LOT of really great software over the past few years, from companies like Pirus, Net Dynamics, Clustra, Gridware, and Forte, not to mention, of course, Netscape's server-side offerings, which are excellent.
- Recently, by recognizing that SPARC is not the only future, and going with AMD's Opteron in some servers. (McNealy has always maintained that he would pull th plug on SPARC when it could not maintain a 2X performance advantage over Intel. He gave SPARC another chance, but has sent the message loud and clear to the SPARC team: get with the program, or you're just in the backplane i/o interconnect business from here on out...
Sun certainly has its warts, but it is *unique* among computer companies in being able to serially innovate its way to new hieghts. A momentary pause or even fall-back every few years is part of that process. Ive worked for Sun. I've also worked for Dell and IBM, and I can tell you without any doubt that McNealy and the other folks that run Sun "get it" so much better than their competitors that it's not even funny. In a bizarre b
OK, it sounds like this technology is starting to make it to mass market. Let's see if it lasts. As I said before, there have been attempts to do this before and they have been less than successful. The fact that GM only deactivates cylinders in limp home mode may indicate that they can't do it on a regular basis for fuel economy.
It will last. GM's Northstar and Aurora V8's have offered this for several years, not to save fuel, but to allow the car to continue to run at reduced power output even if it's lost all its coolant.
Remember the commercial from a few years ago where the Cadillac engineers drain their radiator before heading off into the desert? This really works, and in reality, it's just a simple software tweak, which is basically variable displacement: Instead of firing every time, each cylinder is alternately fired one cycle, and then just has air pumped through it on the next. Power output is cut in half, of course, but this air-cooling effect works well enough that it is possible to continue to drive the car (with air conditioning!) even in the event of a total cooling system failure. That's a pretty neat trick for a software hack.
I suspect variable displacement will gain as much ground in the next few years as variable valve timing has in the last few. In fact, once the hardware for the latter is in place, the former becomes much easier - there are lots of reasons why this is likely to become a mainstream technology, and economics is the biggest.
Their [sic] is a lot more work going on for the linux kernel than solaris. The resources being thrown at each kernel is decidedly in linuxes [sic] favor.
On this much, at least, we agree. Linux is solidly mid-pack at best in any given area you care to name, but it is indeed getting better faster than anything else out there. (With the possible exception of the BSDs, which seem to stay solidly ahead of Linux technologically in spite of thier dramatically smaller developer communities. But Linux quickly apes important BSD functionality when it can - just look at the impact OpenBSD has had on security philosophy and stack issues in Linux the last few years...)
i suppose you are one of those Cool Aid drinkers who thinks condoms are useless...
Actually, condoms *are* useless in preventing many serious STD's, and often not terribly effective at preventing pregnancy. HPV(Human Papilloma Virus) is the most prominent example among several, and also one of the most important, since recent studies indicate that it is quite likely that upwards of 99% of Cervical Cancers are caused by HPV. Repeated studies have shown that condoms are useless in preventing HPV infections - the CDC's figures, for instance, show that about 2/3 of sexually active women *will* contract one or more strains of HPV, regardless of condom use. Since we're talking about life and death here, it's pretty obvious wise women should refuse sex even with "protection", which is really nothing of the sort...
and that abstinance can really be taught. pray tell, do you abstain? it always amuses me that none of the people who want to impose abstinance on others never really tried it themselves.
Of *course* abstinence can really be taught. All it takes is a solid framework of morality. You're right to the extent that you think it cannot be taught in a morality-free environment. And although I would not normally discuss such things, your high-handedness galls me. I don not abstain now, because I am happily (in all ways) married to a wonderful and beautiful woman. For the record, I have had sex with exactly one woman, and I do not feel deprived in the least. (And, yes (horrors!) that means I somehow managed to exert enough self control to abstain all the way through college!) If anything, I feel sorry for all the people out there that have cheapened their own sexual relationships by giving up that exclusivity. Abstinence definitely does not kill. Not abstaining definitely can.
Here are the ones I find essential (I use Windows unapologetically on the desktop - it makes my life much easier):
1) Mozilla, for both Browsing and Mail - and all the stuff Mozilla is going to want:
a) Sun JRE
b) Adobe Acrobat Reader
c) Macromedia Flash (disgusting, but needed too often to ignore...)
d) Piro's Tabbed Browser Extensions
2) Antivirus and antispyware programs, plus firewall if the machine will have a wireless network connection.
3) Palm Desktop (worth having as a local PIM even if you don't have a Palm device, but indispensible if you do: there is no alternative that's anywhere near as good...)
4) SpaceMonger (Absolutely essential once version 2 is out soon...)
5) PuTTY (excellent SSH client)
6) Vim (*When* are they going to let this thing deal with spaces in pathnames and install into "Program Files" like it should??)
7) CyberKit (nslookup, traceroute, NTP, and a few other essentials for Windows.)
8) VNC (I'm trying out UltraVNC now, and I like it so far - the built-in file transfer is handy, although I understand Tridia's added that to their new version, too...)
9) Microsoft Office (Still indispensible, and there is no adeqately capable alternative quite yet...)
10) Unix toolkit: Cygwin (big, piggy, buggy shell, but more complete) or U/Win (cleaner, more stable, far better shell, but missing some utility pieces.) Usually I install both. I'm not much of a programmer, but the Unix text utilities and awk are vital for *so* many things...
11) SysInternals Tools, especially Filemon and Process Explorer
12) Unison (File Synchronizer, works between both Windows and Linux, so it's especially handy for syncronizing between a laptop (Windows, of course) and a Samba Server.)
13) Visio (*Definitely* no alternative, free or pay, open or closed source...)
14) HTMLDOC (HTML to PDF filter)
15) Copy of Knoppix-STD CD to boot into for all those other tools you need every once in a while.
16) And last, but definitely not least (because it will save your sanity from assualt by stupid algebraic calculators), the Excalibur32 RPN Calculator.
Now for the big Iron, the altrix is exactly what you are talking about. SGI has been selling linux systems with thousands of processors. That is more than big enough to be considered big iron and it doesn't have crappy sparcs in it to boot.
It also has only a fraction of capacity of Sun's "big iron" for solving the really tough problems. A cluster (even a really big one) does not a supercomputer make, despite what you read on Slashdot.
The really amazing thing is that for those problems that require a single large OS image with lots of processors pulling in perfect harmony, Sun's nearly 10-year-old SPARC/Solaris architecture is still about the best thing out there, and is a better deal than IBM's and SGI's alternatives when price is factored in.
In any case, Schwartz is right that Linux really isn't a contender yet in the large SMP machine space. When it is, my bets are on Sun's expertise in high performance interconnects combined with the Opteron's price/performance. Whether Linux can actually rise to the challenge of such hardware is extremely doubtful, since scaling to dozens of processors would require *huge* changes to the kernel, including, in all liklihood, Linus having to give up his fundamental attachment to a monlithic kernel. That could happen, but I'm not betting on it...
Imagine - oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground.
Don't be ridiculous. There has *always* been trouble there (at least through all of human history...), and there always will be. Long before oil was even known and long after it's forgotten, people will be fighting in the middle east for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with oil.
Sorry to burst your hate-bubble, but oil is not really all *that* important in world politics. It's a factor, but there are many that are much larger...
And abstinence AIDS prevention.
Uh, I hate to break this to you, Mr. "Scientist", but abstinence is proven to be very nearly 100% effective in preventing AIDS, a conclusion that in no way flies in the face of science, but instead, simply stands to reason. African countries are now pushing abstinence because *it works*, and if they don't, most of their population will be dead in 20 years. (Barring corner cases like birth to an AIDS-infected mother and transfusions, it's fair to say that abstinence is as close to 100% effective as anything ever will be in this world...)
(A good friend of mine is on the board of the Federal Reserve and visited South Africa recently - government officials told him privately that AIDS figures for all African countries are actually far higher than they're willing to admit publicly, and they realize they have to take the most effective actions possible. Barring an actual cure, that's abstinence...)
BTW, although there is certainly some dreadful stuff from some creation scientists, others are doing real, solid, work that is sucessfully changing the consensus scientific view of things - for instance catastrophism theories have resulted in geologists now believing that the Grand Canyon and other similar features are in fact far, far younger than previously believed. Don't be too quick to think you know everything - any good scientist is quick to admit that he doesn't know very much at all going in. And don't be too quick to assume that others are idiots simply because you disagree with their view on certain issues...
Someone, ANYONE really needs to come up with a full-featured linux distribution which actually uses ACLs.
I vote for Novell. If they would just put the fine-grained, inheritable permissions of the NetWare filesystem (which is excellent, btw) into SuSE, they'd have a *real* winner...
Somebody mod parent up. He has one of the only constructive suggestions here. I (and others) have pointed out that Java was missing from Miguel's list, but this combination is a legitimate contender as well, if wxwindows can develop all the capabilities it would need to really pull this off.
And, of course, it has the advantage of being based on mature, open technologies...
Finally, WINE (or similar) may make it possible for some or most of those Windows-targeted .NET applications to run on Linux. Time will tell.
.NET and its ilk. The ONLY way to really counter MS here is with Java, but the GNU bigots are almost certain to let their hatred of commercial software and especially Sun, prevent this from being the direction followed, even though it's the only one with a prayer of success. (I've always found this FSF/GNU hatred (there's no other word) for Sun to be both ironic and sad, since Sun has contributed more open source software than anyone other than UC Berkeley...) This attitude will almost certainly ensure that MS will win in the end.
This has been a quixotic dream for over a decade now, and always will be. As a practical matter it is simply NOT POSSIBLE to "emulate" Microsoft's functionality in any significantly usable way - at least not soon enough for anyone to care.
Let me explain: By the time the proprietary bits have been figured out (and reimplemented in a useful way), you're at least a generation behind, and your capabilities are pretty much irrelevant to the market, which has moved on to now require the capabilities of current products. Those will take you *another* few years to figure out.
But you don't have to take my word for it, we've put probably millions of man-hours of effort into projects and products that have proven that emulating Windows (or other complex proprietary MS APIs) is not practical: Insignia's SoftPC, Sun's Wabi, and of course, WINE itself, among many others.
How much more proof do we need that the entire concept of Windows emulation is a waste of effort and a losing strategy? (Even Transmeta's code-morphing doesn't really help, does it?)
And the road-blocks MS can throw up in this process are considerable: The Product Manager for Sun's Wabi told me that they were amazed how quickly they were able to get all the non-MS apps working well. Turns out it wasn't really all that hard to duplicate the public API. But it took them several more *years* to figure out all the undocumented API calls used Microsoft's applications (which, of course, is why they are usually faster and more stable than competitors: in essence, they cheat.) By the time the Wabi team had even Microsoft's Win16 apps working, Win 95 and its 32-bit API had been out for a year, and Sun's management realized that it was pouring (big) money down the toilet, for no return. (I used the never-released "Final" Wabi extensively, and it really was flawless - it was just irrelevant by the time it was ready, because it couldn't run Office 95.)
If Miguel and the reast of the OSS community are really as smart as they think they are, they'll give up trying to ape MS and reimplement
Until now it hasn't made much difference for another emulation project to fail, but this time, the stakes are high: nothing less than the future of the world's computing environment, and even whether it will be *possible* for MS alternatives to really exist. Let's don't screw this up by making the same mistakes yet again...
Actual text from an Economist science article on the Schroedinger cat-in-the-box experiment from around 1990,as best I can recall it:
"The only reason that countless milliions of cats have not been sacrificed on the altar of science is that actually doing the experiment would prove nothing..."
No mystery there. You spin it with your hand, and there's very little friction to slow it down, and you're not drawing any power from it, so it will keep spinning until air friction gradually decelerates it.
Of course that's what happens when you just spin it. (I never clained it didn't run down - it clearly does.) But the behavior is odd when you hold a magnet next to it as it spins - you really have to try it to see and feel for yourself. Heck, there may be nothing new here, but the effect at least *seems* strange...
I don't think we were unconsciously adding energy to it (that would be pretty difficult, I'd think) but you have a good point...