You're saying I didn't read the GP, but I'm not sure you read my five liner.
No, I didn't say that at all. I said you didn't comprehend (i.e., understand) what you read. Just because you read something doesn't mean you understood it.
And, for the record, I did read your "five liner," which is why I responded. Considering that the person to whom you responded, prisoner-of-enigma, confirms that my interpretation of his original post was correct (in a sibling post to this one), I think I am in the right on this.
Columbus said the world was round, while everyone else laughed because it was an unknown that nobody had ever been able to comprehend... until he proved it.
Factually incorrect. Most scholars of Columbus' era were pretty sure the earth was round. Check out Carl Sagan's book Cosmos, or the television show of the same name (which is out on DVD). He tells of how Eratosthenes not only deduced this fact in the 3rd century BCE, but he even calculated the Earth's circumference to within about 10%.
I'm amazed this lie about Columbus' "discovery" that the earth was round is still perpetuated in American schools to this day. (Then again, when my home state of Connecticut declared Leif Erikson Day to commemorate the Viking discovery of North America, which predated Columbus' voyage by a healthy margin, many prominent Italian-Americans got a little upset because a prominent role model had been knocked down a peg. I am an Italian-American, and knowing what I know now about what Columbus did, all I can say is... We need better role models.)
The atmospheric pressure on mars is only ~10 millibars, whereas earth's atmospheric pressure is ~1000 millibars. That drops water's boiling point to around ~70 celcius [sic].
Not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but that's almost certainly wrong. According to this article:
The boiling point of water is 100 C (212 F) at standard pressure. On top of Mount Everest the pressure is about 260 mbar (26 kPa) so the boiling point of water is 69 C.
So if the boiling point of water is 69 degrees Celsius at 260 millibars, it's most assuredly far lower at 10 millibars. Assuming that the surface pressure on Mars is 10 millibars (which is 1 kPa), you can calculate the boiling point there. There's a handy boiling point calculator to assist with this; for 1 kPa of atmospheric pressure, you get just above -11 degrees Celsius as the boiling point of water. (This temperature is well within the typical temperature swing for the planet Mars. You can find the temperature and atmospheric pressure ranges at this site; the temperature ranges from -140 C to 20 C, with the average at -63 C. Pressure varies from 6.8 mbar to 10.8 mbar.)
IIRC, water boiling isn't a matter of temperature, but rather atmospheric pressure.
The boiling point of any liquid is a function of both pressure and temperature, a point which you yourself seemed to make later in your post. Check out this article on phase transitions for more technical discussion. (For yet more info, follow the link in the article pertaining to critical points.)
It's entirely possible for three material phases (solid, liquid, gas) to exist simultaneously for a given substance if you have the right combination of temperature and pressure; this is called the triple point.
"kicked Christian Europe out of its downward spiral into an increasingly overpopulated, socially-stratified Dark Ages II."
Uh, how did the Black Death lead to overpopulation, it caused a population crash?
I think you misread that. I believe the passage you quoted meant that Europe was already in a downward spiral, and was overpopulated (which contributed to the downward spiral), and the Black Death kicked Europe out of that downward spiral by culling the population. I do not believe the post you're quoting was at all suggesting that the Black Death led to overpopulation.
Granted, the sentence you quoted is awkward, but to me, it's pretty clear that the OP was making the case that if the Black Death hadn't happened, Europe would have continued its "downward spiral" into an "increasingly overpopulated [and] socially stratified Dark Ages II." The second prepositional phrase is intended to modify "downward spiral," rather than the way you read it.
What is it about abysmal reading comprehension skills that gets my blood boiling? *sigh*
Anyway...
The grandparent poster was, according to my reading, suggesting that Intel's future response is to turn the volume knob to 11 on their marketing, in order to drown out the competition's claims. In other words, the FUD is yet to come. Otellini's response was pretty mealy-mouthed, if you ask me. "Let the market decide" has got to be the most overused line in this industry, and let's face it -- since Intel has engaged in anticompetitive practices, and probably will into the foreseeable future, the "market" isn't going to be a fair metric of merit. Instead, the "market" is only going to be a metric of how well Intel can keep a lock on it through exclusionary tactics.
If Intel is masterful with their PR and marketing, they can spin this refusal to accept AMD's challenge and cast doubt on AMD's claims of greater speed. Nothing suggests that Intel is going to flub this now.
Intel maintains its market position through what I consider to be unfair practices. Sure, they haven't been convicted in a court yet, but so what? Oh, wait... it seems that they did get into hot water in Japan, didn't they? And that is one of the foundations of AMD's lawsuit against Intel.
I'm surprised nobody else has really latched onto this. Intel's statement can be summarized as: "We prefer to let the market do the talking for us." Or, as Otellini put it, "Products are best judged in the marketplace." But saying this presupposes that the market is fair, and that the best products will come out on top.
The market for CPU chips is far from fair. AMD hasn't been able to grow the way Intel has because AMD has been locked out of several lucrative markets for its chips. Time and again, PC manufacturers have been pressured into using Intel-only solutions, or to relegate their AMD offerings to a small percentage of their product lines. So Otellini's words are disingenuous, and propped up by an unspoken logical fallacy.
AMD wants to compete on merit, to see whose product is "best" -- where "best" is apparently defined by whose product is the fastest overall. Intel side-steps this and says, "Hey, let the market decide." But they are shamelessly manipulating the market in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, so they're practically guaranteed to come out on top no matter what. The logical fallacy is the suggestion that greater numbers means better (or suggests a greater degree of "correctness") -- you see this fallacy all the time in a variety of guises. "There are more PCs running Windows than Linux, so Windows must be better." "My nation has more resources, so we're better than you." "More people believe in the tooth fairy than don't, so the tooth fairy must exist."
Intel isn't directly saying their chips are faster. In fact, they're not even suggesting it, at least not with words. As I said before, Intel can spin this so that their refusal to participate will play in the media (and therefore, in people's minds) as a silent rebuke to AMD's claims, and this will cause many to draw the conclusion that Intel's chips are really faster/better/whatever.
Let's be clear here. FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt." Intel can't address AMD's challenge head-on because they might lose, so the only weapon they have left is to sow -- you guessed it -- fear, uncertainty, and doubt about AMD's claims and products. So what does Intel do? Talk about the market -- the market that they know they can succeed in because they've done so for as long as they've been in competition with AMD and every other x86 knock-off vendor on the planet. Intel knows they'll win because they don't have to play on a fair, level playing field.
AMD, for its part, has nothing to lose and everything to gain by issuing its challenge, and they're going to spin this refusal as confirmation that Intel knows it can't win on merit alone. So no, technically, AMD isn't e
Well, I apologize. I honestly couldn't tell if you were joking or not. At first, I thought you were... then, I wasn't so sure. The problem is twofold: First, "for all intensive purposes" is apparently a very common mistake, and many people fervently believe this is the correct phrase. Second, you slipped "intensive (ahem)" into your comment at a later point; this really undermines your attempt at humor, and lends the impression that you're being serious.
No, really. I can almost see you rolling your eyes at my latter point, but it's true. What you did is use a rhetorical device that's intended to amplify a point through the use of sarcastic or sardonic humor, which can imply that you intended your original point seriously. If you'd omitted the parenthetical "ahem" from your comment, I'd have been laughing along with you instead of going on a tear.
However, you still can't apply the punctuation rules of a programming language to English, much as you'd like to.:-) Strunk and White trumps Kernighan and Ritchie. (The article you linked is interesting, though, because the author points out that hacker-style quotation, or something similar to it, has become the norm in Great Britain. Personally, I think it looks ugly, so I hope that convention doesn't get imported to the States.)
Since you apparently need all the help you can get, I might also point out that the period goes before the ending quotation mark according to most English style guides.
So your (bogus) correction should read:
You misspelled "all intensive purposes."
The more I re-read your comment, the more I realize you weren't joking; you were actually seriously trying to correct me. Twit. As one of the sources I quoted in my previous response put it, "Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don't read much."
No, I did not. Unfortunately, I can't tell if you were trying to be funny or not. This entry on Dictionary.com shows that "for all intents and purposes" and "to all intents and purposes" are accepted idioms in the English language. If your "correction" was in fact an attempt at humor, my apologies. If you were actually trying to correct me, then you are sadly mistaken, and I would invite you to take Mark Twain's advice: "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt."
For more on the topic of this badly mangled turn of phrase, see here and here. There's an amusing take here as well.
Back on topic: Yes, it is possible to create a general purpose computing device that is completely silent. If, however, you want something that uses today's mass storage technologies, you'll never get something perfectly silent. Optical drives and hard disks both generate a fair bit of noise. In the absence of fan noise, these sounds are easy to distinguish.
Turns out the "piracy tax" (aka royalty) on blank media I spoke of is handled by the U.S. Copyright Office; they act as the middle-man for the money. The AARC (the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies) disposes monies for the Sound Recordings Fund that the AHRA established. (The AHRA established two "funds" for where this money goes -- they look like escrow accounts to me. The other fund is called the Musical Works Fund, which has to do with the copyrights over musical composition, not recordings.)
Because most consumers use data-grade CD-Rs that they burn on their computers, instead of "Audio/Music CD-R" discs which are only required for consumer-grade CD recorders sold as stereo components. Data-grade CD-Rs play just fine in most standard CD players, and are all you need to burn Red Book compliant audio on a computer.
Consumer-grade CD recorders pretty much failed in the U.S. market because computers do the same job better, with more flexibility. The higher blank media cost didn't exactly help with their adoption, either. And since computers and data-grade CD-recorders are exempted from the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), any Red Book disc burned on a computer doesn't have to include SCMS; the consumer-grade recorders out there, on the other hand, must use SCMS, which insures that you can't make copies of copies.
If you're buying and using CD-R media specifically for music applications, then you are either very principled (in which case, I salute you), or you enjoy pissing your money away needlessly. Or else you're forced to use the media because that's what your recording deck requires, if you actually have one of those.
However, those consumer-grade CD recorders (the ones that look and feel like stereo components, because that's what they're intended to be) implement something called SCMS. That's Serial Copy Management System. These recorders also mandate the use of higher-cost recordable CD media (CD-R "for music" discs, instead of CD-R "for data"); a portion of that higher cost goes to pay a "piracy tax" to the RIAA, I believe. (It might be another recording industry body which manages those funds, but you get the idea.)
SCMS insures that you can copy a CD, but you can't make a copy of a copy. So yeah, Philips and Sony make decks that can dub from one disc to another. But you'll never see mass piracy being committed with these devices.
SCMS is mandated by the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (in the United States, at least). However, computers, hard drives, MP3 players, and computer optical media drives are exempted from the AHRA. So most consumers buy the unrestricted technology (computers with CD-R/W drives or DVD-/+R drives) and use that preferentially. And guess what? Data CDs burned with Red Book audio play just fine in most standard CD players. Since the hardware used to burn these discs doesn't have to include SCMS, it doesn't, so piracy becomes an issue.
Philips and Sony would like you to buy these dubbing decks, because at least then, they know they can keep a cap on piracy. (They'll never expect the rate to go to zero, but it would plateau at a level these companies consider "tolerable.") Consumers just don't want such recording appliances when their computers do a much better job for less money, and don't hobble them with any restrictions.
If what you say is true... why is it that microsoft had to bail Apple out of bankruptcy.
Factually incorrect. (You weren't suckered by that April Fool's Day article on CodePoetry, were you?) The only time Apple ever flirted with bankruptcy was back in the 1995/96 time frame, when the company was undergoing restructuring due to some bad quarterly losses. The events you're thinking of occurred in 1997, and this was in no way a "bail-out."
Here's what really happened: Microsoft agreed to pay a certain amount of money ($150 million) to Apple in exchange for essentially two things: some non-voting shares of stock (which Microsoft has subsequently sold off for a tidy profit), and a resolution of some still-pending lawsuits by Apple against Microsoft. For its part, Apple got a modest amount of money and a promise from Microsoft to continue supporting the Mac with new versions of Office and Internet Explorer for several years to come.
$150 million is chump-change to Microsoft, and would have been insufficient to "bail out" Apple if it were indeed bankrupt at the time.
Of course, I fail to understand how your response logically follows from the grandparent poster's comments which you quoted, but it certainly doesn't help that you cite a fictitious turn of events.
Yeah, it's common in contemporary English to use "literally" when one really should use "practically." As in, this PC generates "practically no noise" -- i.e., for all intents and purposes, it's as close as you're going to get and remain practical.
Cisco has its own vunerability submission protocols in house, be he instead showed his findings at a Black Hat conference instead
Just to clarify, this vulnerability was reported to Cisco many months before Mr. Lynn made his presentation at the Black Hat conference. (I think it was six months prior.) In addition, Cisco supposedly patched this particular vulnerability over three months ago; the problem is, not every vulnerable router has been patched.
So please, don't go insinuating that Mr. Lynn did something improper. Cisco had plenty of warning about this vulnerability, and supposedly has taken action to fix it. Mr. Lynn only presented new exploits (or expanded versions of existing exploits) for this vulnerability.
DVI-equipped TVs will display video from HDMI sources in low resolution (480p). Kinda defeats the purpose of buying a HDTV.
Factually incorrect. HDMI and DVI(-D) are pin- and signal-compatible. (For the purposes of this discussion, I mean "pin-compatible" in the sense that every pin in DVI has its correlate in HDMI, not that the connectors themselves are the same.) HDMI merely packs the pins into a smaller space and adds pins that carry digital audio information.
Both DVI and HDMI in the consumer electronics world support HDCP. Cables are readily available to connect one to the other. And any HDCP-compliant monitor/TV will treat the video portion of HDMI the same as the signal from a DVI output.
As my sibling poster has suggested, I think you misinterpreted TFA.
TFA specifically talks about analog video being coerced to 480p max. That's an entirely different matter. The upshot of this is that people with HDTVs that only have analog component video inputs won't be able to view HD content on HD-DVDs in high def (which by definition is 720p or higher res).
Incidentally, you might think that only older CRT-based HDTVs might be affected by this, but in reality, I have seen several current-model HDTVs with analog-only inputs. I've even seen a 30" LCD HD monitor from Philips at Ultimate Electronics which, although Ultimate's promo material claims it has HDMI input, seemed to have some kind of kludgy interface instead that looks like a 15-pin VGA connector with a converter cable that breaks out into female component video inputs. Weird. The sales rep couldn't find the supposed HDMI input on the jack panel when I challenged him to find it.
Actually, the "planet" that the characters in Pitch Black crash-landed on was probably a large moon, judging from the way the large gas giant that appeared in the sky managed to eclipse one of the three suns. There's a scene in the movie where the characters find a working model of the solar system they're in, and they use the model (along with dates on geologic samples) to determine that they're in for another imminent eclipse period. I'd have to go watch the film again to be absolutely sure, but the parallels between this news story and the movie Pitch Black are far stronger than any Star Wars parallels.
If you look at the CNN article cited, there's an artist's rendition of what the solar system would look like from the vantage point of a rocky moon orbiting the gas giant, and it looks remarkably similar to one of the scenes from Pitch Black, not to mention several color plates in Carl Sagan's book Cosmos.
Actually, the rule is a little more complicated than that. Another sibling respondent already quoted from Strunk and White (The Elements of Style), so I'll just add what s/he didn't: Possessive forms of proper nouns that are biblical and/or ancient typically omit the additional "s," but contemporary proper nouns keep it. This is by convention, so not all writers may adhere to this, but most style manuals seem to be in consensus on this.
So, Moses' and Jesus' are correct possessive forms of Moses and Jesus, but Jobs's is considered to be the currently correct form, not Jobs'.
(Then again, I recall growing up that the rules for lists of items, and whether you should use a comma prior to the last item in a list, have changed every decade or so. In the 1970s, you would write "The plane, the train, and the automobile are all forms of transportation," whereas in the 1980s, the preferred form was "The plane, the train and the automobile are..." I always found the omission of the last comma to be troublesome, so I always used it. Luckily, in the 1990s, grammarians decided that the trend was swinging back toward keeping all the commas, so I felt vindicated.)
Just to further stir the pot, there are varying rules of style and grammar depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you reside on. In the UK, for example, corporations are treated as plural, whereas in the US, they are treated as singular. Thus, in UK publications, you might see "Microsoft are suing..." whereas in the US you would see "Microsoft is suing..." I guess my point is that natural language isn't as cut and dried as computer languages are, so you shouldn't expect everything to be neat and tidy. Grammar Nazism tends to devolve into hair-splitting bordering on the religious, if not the absurd.
I would rather fix windows than have the person go out and buy a new computer.
This argument only holds water if you consider your time to be worthless. After several instances of repairing a Windows PC by uninstalling Spyware, Adware, and removing viruses, the costs in terms of human labor could easily exceed the cost of a brand new computer.
Personally, I get tired of getting roped into fixing Windows machines for friends, so I either charge them for my services now, or I make them get a Mac.
Fixing windows ensures the person has a running copy and a working computer, so they would not need to pay the microsoft tax again.
Except that the person to whom you are responding clearly stated that he was steering people away from Windows computers and toward the Mac Mini, which runs Mac OS X, not Windows. Therefore, there is no "Microsoft tax" or "Windows tax" to be paid.
It really helps to pay attention to what people have to say instead of responding blindly.
Word! I ran into a bit of trouble with Honeywell once upon a time, because I was working in an office that was right next to a Honeywell satellite office, and one of the Honeywell employees set up an unauthorized access point, wide open.
I discovered this access point when I brought my iBook in to work; Mac OS X automatically connected to the access point as soon as I woke the laptop from sleep. Once I realized it was a Honeywell access point, I continued using it because I thought they had set it up as a public access point for visitors. (This practice is becoming more and more common with large businesses.) My theory was that nobody at Honeywell would be stupid enough to run an access point with no security unless it were set up in a DMZ on their network.
As it turned out, the person who set up the access point knew enough to change the SSID, but not enough to enable WEP or WPA, nor did he think to password-protect the access point. He lost his job, and Honeywell tried to pressure my employer into firing me until I defused the situation by offering to have Honeywell image my laptop's hard drive. (This served as a show of good faith, and proof that I didn't use my access to retrieve any sensitive data.)
That's when I discovered that the access point was not only behind their corporate firewall, but that it had full access to all of their protected network facilities (including file system shares). Of course, I knew none of this because all I ever used their access point for was outbound web access and a software update.
It's a scary situation to be in. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and legal action was averted. The lesson I learned was to never assume that an access point is left wide open by intent, just as I should never assume that a wide open door is an invitation to entry. Reading the original St. Petersburg Times article, it's pretty clear that the perpetrator in this case was intentionally stealing service for potentially fraudulent purposes (i.e., committing some kind of crime beyond theft of service).
One could argue that by continuing to use the unapproved Honeywell access point, I crossed the line from unintentional theft of service to intentional theft of service. However, the fact that many access points are run wide open with the intent that anyone can use them makes this a murky issue. That existing operating systems and network software can automatically connect to such networks upon discovery, and without user interaction, makes this issue even murkier. All it takes is one invalid assumption (such as the one I made) to cross a very fine line.
There has to be some reasonable expectation that people will secure their wireless networks from intruders, just as there is a reasonable expectation that a homeowner will employ locks to secure their doors. As people become more technology-savvy, and as this sort of crime becomes more common, I predict that you'll see less sympathy from the police for people who don't secure their networks. As my lawyer explained to me, it's still breaking and entering if you walk into someone's house when the front door is wide open, but you aren't likely to expect much sympathy from cops if you tell them that you left your front door ajar and came home to find your valuables missing.
And it's so easy to secure the wireless network. You can turn off SSID broadcasting. You can enable WEP or, even better, WPA. You can password protect administrative functions. Although the "victim" in this article, Richard Dinon, knew how to secure his access point, he never did. The suspect may well be able to weasel out of a legal mess because of this admission. In the future, I would not be surprised to see law enforcers take action against people running unsecured networks in cases where such networks are used for committing crimes anonymously. (Basically, because running an unsecured access point enables or contributes to a crime.)
I found it interesting that the descriptions of the tools that are listed in the article speak of Packed PCM, and only briefly mention the other name that this technology is known by (MLP, which I understand to stand for "Meridian Lossless Packing"). A while back, I'd submitted some commentary to the Macintouch web site regarding DVD Audio, and apparently I ruffled some feathers because I referred to this technology as Packed PCM (or PPCM to be super-brief).
One respondent reamed me for using that term, and said the "proper" term was Meridian Lossless Packing, or MLP. Of course, it turns out that this guy was somehow associated with or affiliated with the company that owns the trademark on the name and presumably any patents relevant to the technique.
It warms the cockles of my heart to see that I'm not the only person who hates being browbeat into using someone else's trademark. (Then again, there may be a licensing fee associated with the trademark, which may explain why my Technics DVD-A player's manual doesn't even mention MLP, preferring the term "P.PCM." This is probably similar to how Apple charges for the use of the trademarked term Firewire, so Sony calls it i.Link, and everyone else calls it IEEE 1394.)
OK, it just occurred to me that some folks might assume the compiler is more lenient than the language specification is, so just to prove I'm not full of crap, here is the link showing the grammar production for identifiers.
A Java identifier (variable name) must start with a letter, true, but the specification goes on to say:
The Java letters include uppercase and lowercase ASCII Latin letters A-Z (\u0041-\u005a), and a-z (\u0061-\u007a), and, for historical reasons, the ASCII underscore (_, or \u005f) and dollar sign ($, or \u0024). The $ character should be used only in mechanically generated source code or, rarely, to access preexisting names on legacy systems.
you moron....variable name can't start with an underscore ('_') in java. your code won't compile.
Bzzt. Factually incorrect. You could write a simple 5-line Java program and compile it to prove whether or not this works. I could cite the Java specification where it defines what variable names are considered valid, but instead I just took an existing short piece of junk code and changed a variable name to start with the underscore. Guess what? It compiles fine.
import java.util.TimeZone;
public class TimeZoneDumper {
public static void main(String [] args) {
String [] _zoneIDs = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs();
for (int i = 0; i < _zoneIDs.length; i++) {
TimeZone zone = TimeZone.getTimeZone(_zoneIDs[i]);
System.out.println(_zoneIDs[i] + " - offset = " + zone.getRawOffset());
}
} }
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No, I didn't say that at all. I said you didn't comprehend (i.e., understand) what you read. Just because you read something doesn't mean you understood it.
And, for the record, I did read your "five liner," which is why I responded. Considering that the person to whom you responded, prisoner-of-enigma, confirms that my interpretation of his original post was correct (in a sibling post to this one), I think I am in the right on this.
Factually incorrect. Most scholars of Columbus' era were pretty sure the earth was round. Check out Carl Sagan's book Cosmos, or the television show of the same name (which is out on DVD). He tells of how Eratosthenes not only deduced this fact in the 3rd century BCE, but he even calculated the Earth's circumference to within about 10%.
I'm amazed this lie about Columbus' "discovery" that the earth was round is still perpetuated in American schools to this day. (Then again, when my home state of Connecticut declared Leif Erikson Day to commemorate the Viking discovery of North America, which predated Columbus' voyage by a healthy margin, many prominent Italian-Americans got a little upset because a prominent role model had been knocked down a peg. I am an Italian-American, and knowing what I know now about what Columbus did, all I can say is... We need better role models.)
Not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but that's almost certainly wrong. According to this article:
So if the boiling point of water is 69 degrees Celsius at 260 millibars, it's most assuredly far lower at 10 millibars. Assuming that the surface pressure on Mars is 10 millibars (which is 1 kPa), you can calculate the boiling point there. There's a handy boiling point calculator to assist with this; for 1 kPa of atmospheric pressure, you get just above -11 degrees Celsius as the boiling point of water. (This temperature is well within the typical temperature swing for the planet Mars. You can find the temperature and atmospheric pressure ranges at this site; the temperature ranges from -140 C to 20 C, with the average at -63 C. Pressure varies from 6.8 mbar to 10.8 mbar.)
The boiling point of any liquid is a function of both pressure and temperature, a point which you yourself seemed to make later in your post. Check out this article on phase transitions for more technical discussion. (For yet more info, follow the link in the article pertaining to critical points.)
It's entirely possible for three material phases (solid, liquid, gas) to exist simultaneously for a given substance if you have the right combination of temperature and pressure; this is called the triple point.
I think you misread that. I believe the passage you quoted meant that Europe was already in a downward spiral, and was overpopulated (which contributed to the downward spiral), and the Black Death kicked Europe out of that downward spiral by culling the population. I do not believe the post you're quoting was at all suggesting that the Black Death led to overpopulation.
Granted, the sentence you quoted is awkward, but to me, it's pretty clear that the OP was making the case that if the Black Death hadn't happened, Europe would have continued its "downward spiral" into an "increasingly overpopulated [and] socially stratified Dark Ages II." The second prepositional phrase is intended to modify "downward spiral," rather than the way you read it.
Um, no, that's not what was said.
What is it about abysmal reading comprehension skills that gets my blood boiling? *sigh*
Anyway...
The grandparent poster was, according to my reading, suggesting that Intel's future response is to turn the volume knob to 11 on their marketing, in order to drown out the competition's claims. In other words, the FUD is yet to come. Otellini's response was pretty mealy-mouthed, if you ask me. "Let the market decide" has got to be the most overused line in this industry, and let's face it -- since Intel has engaged in anticompetitive practices, and probably will into the foreseeable future, the "market" isn't going to be a fair metric of merit. Instead, the "market" is only going to be a metric of how well Intel can keep a lock on it through exclusionary tactics.
If Intel is masterful with their PR and marketing, they can spin this refusal to accept AMD's challenge and cast doubt on AMD's claims of greater speed. Nothing suggests that Intel is going to flub this now.
Intel maintains its market position through what I consider to be unfair practices. Sure, they haven't been convicted in a court yet, but so what? Oh, wait... it seems that they did get into hot water in Japan, didn't they? And that is one of the foundations of AMD's lawsuit against Intel.
I'm surprised nobody else has really latched onto this. Intel's statement can be summarized as: "We prefer to let the market do the talking for us." Or, as Otellini put it, "Products are best judged in the marketplace." But saying this presupposes that the market is fair, and that the best products will come out on top.
The market for CPU chips is far from fair. AMD hasn't been able to grow the way Intel has because AMD has been locked out of several lucrative markets for its chips. Time and again, PC manufacturers have been pressured into using Intel-only solutions, or to relegate their AMD offerings to a small percentage of their product lines. So Otellini's words are disingenuous, and propped up by an unspoken logical fallacy.
AMD wants to compete on merit, to see whose product is "best" -- where "best" is apparently defined by whose product is the fastest overall. Intel side-steps this and says, "Hey, let the market decide." But they are shamelessly manipulating the market in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, so they're practically guaranteed to come out on top no matter what. The logical fallacy is the suggestion that greater numbers means better (or suggests a greater degree of "correctness") -- you see this fallacy all the time in a variety of guises. "There are more PCs running Windows than Linux, so Windows must be better." "My nation has more resources, so we're better than you." "More people believe in the tooth fairy than don't, so the tooth fairy must exist."
Intel isn't directly saying their chips are faster. In fact, they're not even suggesting it, at least not with words. As I said before, Intel can spin this so that their refusal to participate will play in the media (and therefore, in people's minds) as a silent rebuke to AMD's claims, and this will cause many to draw the conclusion that Intel's chips are really faster/better/whatever.
Let's be clear here. FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt." Intel can't address AMD's challenge head-on because they might lose, so the only weapon they have left is to sow -- you guessed it -- fear, uncertainty, and doubt about AMD's claims and products. So what does Intel do? Talk about the market -- the market that they know they can succeed in because they've done so for as long as they've been in competition with AMD and every other x86 knock-off vendor on the planet. Intel knows they'll win because they don't have to play on a fair, level playing field.
AMD, for its part, has nothing to lose and everything to gain by issuing its challenge, and they're going to spin this refusal as confirmation that Intel knows it can't win on merit alone. So no, technically, AMD isn't e
Well, I apologize. I honestly couldn't tell if you were joking or not. At first, I thought you were... then, I wasn't so sure. The problem is twofold: First, "for all intensive purposes" is apparently a very common mistake, and many people fervently believe this is the correct phrase. Second, you slipped "intensive (ahem)" into your comment at a later point; this really undermines your attempt at humor, and lends the impression that you're being serious.
:-) Strunk and White trumps Kernighan and Ritchie. (The article you linked is interesting, though, because the author points out that hacker-style quotation, or something similar to it, has become the norm in Great Britain. Personally, I think it looks ugly, so I hope that convention doesn't get imported to the States.)
No, really. I can almost see you rolling your eyes at my latter point, but it's true. What you did is use a rhetorical device that's intended to amplify a point through the use of sarcastic or sardonic humor, which can imply that you intended your original point seriously. If you'd omitted the parenthetical "ahem" from your comment, I'd have been laughing along with you instead of going on a tear.
However, you still can't apply the punctuation rules of a programming language to English, much as you'd like to.
So your (bogus) correction should read:
The more I re-read your comment, the more I realize you weren't joking; you were actually seriously trying to correct me. Twit. As one of the sources I quoted in my previous response put it, "Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don't read much."
No, I did not. Unfortunately, I can't tell if you were trying to be funny or not. This entry on Dictionary.com shows that "for all intents and purposes" and "to all intents and purposes" are accepted idioms in the English language. If your "correction" was in fact an attempt at humor, my apologies. If you were actually trying to correct me, then you are sadly mistaken, and I would invite you to take Mark Twain's advice: "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt."
For more on the topic of this badly mangled turn of phrase, see here and here. There's an amusing take here as well.
Back on topic: Yes, it is possible to create a general purpose computing device that is completely silent. If, however, you want something that uses today's mass storage technologies, you'll never get something perfectly silent. Optical drives and hard disks both generate a fair bit of noise. In the absence of fan noise, these sounds are easy to distinguish.
Turns out the "piracy tax" (aka royalty) on blank media I spoke of is handled by the U.S. Copyright Office; they act as the middle-man for the money. The AARC (the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies) disposes monies for the Sound Recordings Fund that the AHRA established. (The AHRA established two "funds" for where this money goes -- they look like escrow accounts to me. The other fund is called the Musical Works Fund, which has to do with the copyrights over musical composition, not recordings.)
Because most consumers use data-grade CD-Rs that they burn on their computers, instead of "Audio/Music CD-R" discs which are only required for consumer-grade CD recorders sold as stereo components. Data-grade CD-Rs play just fine in most standard CD players, and are all you need to burn Red Book compliant audio on a computer.
Consumer-grade CD recorders pretty much failed in the U.S. market because computers do the same job better, with more flexibility. The higher blank media cost didn't exactly help with their adoption, either. And since computers and data-grade CD-recorders are exempted from the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), any Red Book disc burned on a computer doesn't have to include SCMS; the consumer-grade recorders out there, on the other hand, must use SCMS, which insures that you can't make copies of copies.
If you're buying and using CD-R media specifically for music applications, then you are either very principled (in which case, I salute you), or you enjoy pissing your money away needlessly. Or else you're forced to use the media because that's what your recording deck requires, if you actually have one of those.
However, those consumer-grade CD recorders (the ones that look and feel like stereo components, because that's what they're intended to be) implement something called SCMS. That's Serial Copy Management System. These recorders also mandate the use of higher-cost recordable CD media (CD-R "for music" discs, instead of CD-R "for data"); a portion of that higher cost goes to pay a "piracy tax" to the RIAA, I believe. (It might be another recording industry body which manages those funds, but you get the idea.)
SCMS insures that you can copy a CD, but you can't make a copy of a copy. So yeah, Philips and Sony make decks that can dub from one disc to another. But you'll never see mass piracy being committed with these devices.
SCMS is mandated by the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act (in the United States, at least). However, computers, hard drives, MP3 players, and computer optical media drives are exempted from the AHRA. So most consumers buy the unrestricted technology (computers with CD-R/W drives or DVD-/+R drives) and use that preferentially. And guess what? Data CDs burned with Red Book audio play just fine in most standard CD players. Since the hardware used to burn these discs doesn't have to include SCMS, it doesn't, so piracy becomes an issue.
Philips and Sony would like you to buy these dubbing decks, because at least then, they know they can keep a cap on piracy. (They'll never expect the rate to go to zero, but it would plateau at a level these companies consider "tolerable.") Consumers just don't want such recording appliances when their computers do a much better job for less money, and don't hobble them with any restrictions.
Factually incorrect. (You weren't suckered by that April Fool's Day article on CodePoetry, were you?) The only time Apple ever flirted with bankruptcy was back in the 1995/96 time frame, when the company was undergoing restructuring due to some bad quarterly losses. The events you're thinking of occurred in 1997, and this was in no way a "bail-out."
Here's what really happened: Microsoft agreed to pay a certain amount of money ($150 million) to Apple in exchange for essentially two things: some non-voting shares of stock (which Microsoft has subsequently sold off for a tidy profit), and a resolution of some still-pending lawsuits by Apple against Microsoft. For its part, Apple got a modest amount of money and a promise from Microsoft to continue supporting the Mac with new versions of Office and Internet Explorer for several years to come.
$150 million is chump-change to Microsoft, and would have been insufficient to "bail out" Apple if it were indeed bankrupt at the time.
Of course, I fail to understand how your response logically follows from the grandparent poster's comments which you quoted, but it certainly doesn't help that you cite a fictitious turn of events.
Yeah, it's common in contemporary English to use "literally" when one really should use "practically." As in, this PC generates "practically no noise" -- i.e., for all intents and purposes, it's as close as you're going to get and remain practical.
Just to clarify, this vulnerability was reported to Cisco many months before Mr. Lynn made his presentation at the Black Hat conference. (I think it was six months prior.) In addition, Cisco supposedly patched this particular vulnerability over three months ago; the problem is, not every vulnerable router has been patched.
So please, don't go insinuating that Mr. Lynn did something improper. Cisco had plenty of warning about this vulnerability, and supposedly has taken action to fix it. Mr. Lynn only presented new exploits (or expanded versions of existing exploits) for this vulnerability.
Factually incorrect. HDMI and DVI(-D) are pin- and signal-compatible. (For the purposes of this discussion, I mean "pin-compatible" in the sense that every pin in DVI has its correlate in HDMI, not that the connectors themselves are the same.) HDMI merely packs the pins into a smaller space and adds pins that carry digital audio information.
Both DVI and HDMI in the consumer electronics world support HDCP. Cables are readily available to connect one to the other. And any HDCP-compliant monitor/TV will treat the video portion of HDMI the same as the signal from a DVI output.
As my sibling poster has suggested, I think you misinterpreted TFA.
TFA specifically talks about analog video being coerced to 480p max. That's an entirely different matter. The upshot of this is that people with HDTVs that only have analog component video inputs won't be able to view HD content on HD-DVDs in high def (which by definition is 720p or higher res).
Incidentally, you might think that only older CRT-based HDTVs might be affected by this, but in reality, I have seen several current-model HDTVs with analog-only inputs. I've even seen a 30" LCD HD monitor from Philips at Ultimate Electronics which, although Ultimate's promo material claims it has HDMI input, seemed to have some kind of kludgy interface instead that looks like a 15-pin VGA connector with a converter cable that breaks out into female component video inputs. Weird. The sales rep couldn't find the supposed HDMI input on the jack panel when I challenged him to find it.
Actually, the "planet" that the characters in Pitch Black crash-landed on was probably a large moon, judging from the way the large gas giant that appeared in the sky managed to eclipse one of the three suns. There's a scene in the movie where the characters find a working model of the solar system they're in, and they use the model (along with dates on geologic samples) to determine that they're in for another imminent eclipse period. I'd have to go watch the film again to be absolutely sure, but the parallels between this news story and the movie Pitch Black are far stronger than any Star Wars parallels.
If you look at the CNN article cited, there's an artist's rendition of what the solar system would look like from the vantage point of a rocky moon orbiting the gas giant, and it looks remarkably similar to one of the scenes from Pitch Black, not to mention several color plates in Carl Sagan's book Cosmos.
Actually, the rule is a little more complicated than that. Another sibling respondent already quoted from Strunk and White (The Elements of Style), so I'll just add what s/he didn't: Possessive forms of proper nouns that are biblical and/or ancient typically omit the additional "s," but contemporary proper nouns keep it. This is by convention, so not all writers may adhere to this, but most style manuals seem to be in consensus on this.
So, Moses' and Jesus' are correct possessive forms of Moses and Jesus, but Jobs's is considered to be the currently correct form, not Jobs'.
(Then again, I recall growing up that the rules for lists of items, and whether you should use a comma prior to the last item in a list, have changed every decade or so. In the 1970s, you would write "The plane, the train, and the automobile are all forms of transportation," whereas in the 1980s, the preferred form was "The plane, the train and the automobile are..." I always found the omission of the last comma to be troublesome, so I always used it. Luckily, in the 1990s, grammarians decided that the trend was swinging back toward keeping all the commas, so I felt vindicated.)
Just to further stir the pot, there are varying rules of style and grammar depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you reside on. In the UK, for example, corporations are treated as plural, whereas in the US, they are treated as singular. Thus, in UK publications, you might see "Microsoft are suing..." whereas in the US you would see "Microsoft is suing..." I guess my point is that natural language isn't as cut and dried as computer languages are, so you shouldn't expect everything to be neat and tidy. Grammar Nazism tends to devolve into hair-splitting bordering on the religious, if not the absurd.
This argument only holds water if you consider your time to be worthless. After several instances of repairing a Windows PC by uninstalling Spyware, Adware, and removing viruses, the costs in terms of human labor could easily exceed the cost of a brand new computer.
Personally, I get tired of getting roped into fixing Windows machines for friends, so I either charge them for my services now, or I make them get a Mac.
Except that the person to whom you are responding clearly stated that he was steering people away from Windows computers and toward the Mac Mini, which runs Mac OS X, not Windows. Therefore, there is no "Microsoft tax" or "Windows tax" to be paid.
It really helps to pay attention to what people have to say instead of responding blindly.
Claria/Gator integrated into the OS? That would be truly horrific! Scary, though -- I think this is not entirely out of the realm of possibility.
:-)
Just one nit to pick -- the correct idiomatic expression is "cut off their nose to spite their face." Although your version is funnier.
This is one of the few cases where I actually agree with Dvorak. Will wonders never cease?
It's just too damned easy to accidentally connect to someone else's wireless AP.
Word! I ran into a bit of trouble with Honeywell once upon a time, because I was working in an office that was right next to a Honeywell satellite office, and one of the Honeywell employees set up an unauthorized access point, wide open.
I discovered this access point when I brought my iBook in to work; Mac OS X automatically connected to the access point as soon as I woke the laptop from sleep. Once I realized it was a Honeywell access point, I continued using it because I thought they had set it up as a public access point for visitors. (This practice is becoming more and more common with large businesses.) My theory was that nobody at Honeywell would be stupid enough to run an access point with no security unless it were set up in a DMZ on their network.
As it turned out, the person who set up the access point knew enough to change the SSID, but not enough to enable WEP or WPA, nor did he think to password-protect the access point. He lost his job, and Honeywell tried to pressure my employer into firing me until I defused the situation by offering to have Honeywell image my laptop's hard drive. (This served as a show of good faith, and proof that I didn't use my access to retrieve any sensitive data.)
That's when I discovered that the access point was not only behind their corporate firewall, but that it had full access to all of their protected network facilities (including file system shares). Of course, I knew none of this because all I ever used their access point for was outbound web access and a software update.
It's a scary situation to be in. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and legal action was averted. The lesson I learned was to never assume that an access point is left wide open by intent, just as I should never assume that a wide open door is an invitation to entry. Reading the original St. Petersburg Times article, it's pretty clear that the perpetrator in this case was intentionally stealing service for potentially fraudulent purposes (i.e., committing some kind of crime beyond theft of service).
One could argue that by continuing to use the unapproved Honeywell access point, I crossed the line from unintentional theft of service to intentional theft of service. However, the fact that many access points are run wide open with the intent that anyone can use them makes this a murky issue. That existing operating systems and network software can automatically connect to such networks upon discovery, and without user interaction, makes this issue even murkier. All it takes is one invalid assumption (such as the one I made) to cross a very fine line.
There has to be some reasonable expectation that people will secure their wireless networks from intruders, just as there is a reasonable expectation that a homeowner will employ locks to secure their doors. As people become more technology-savvy, and as this sort of crime becomes more common, I predict that you'll see less sympathy from the police for people who don't secure their networks. As my lawyer explained to me, it's still breaking and entering if you walk into someone's house when the front door is wide open, but you aren't likely to expect much sympathy from cops if you tell them that you left your front door ajar and came home to find your valuables missing.
And it's so easy to secure the wireless network. You can turn off SSID broadcasting. You can enable WEP or, even better, WPA. You can password protect administrative functions. Although the "victim" in this article, Richard Dinon, knew how to secure his access point, he never did. The suspect may well be able to weasel out of a legal mess because of this admission. In the future, I would not be surprised to see law enforcers take action against people running unsecured networks in cases where such networks are used for committing crimes anonymously. (Basically, because running an unsecured access point enables or contributes to a crime.)
I found it interesting that the descriptions of the tools that are listed in the article speak of Packed PCM, and only briefly mention the other name that this technology is known by (MLP, which I understand to stand for "Meridian Lossless Packing"). A while back, I'd submitted some commentary to the Macintouch web site regarding DVD Audio, and apparently I ruffled some feathers because I referred to this technology as Packed PCM (or PPCM to be super-brief).
One respondent reamed me for using that term, and said the "proper" term was Meridian Lossless Packing, or MLP. Of course, it turns out that this guy was somehow associated with or affiliated with the company that owns the trademark on the name and presumably any patents relevant to the technique.
It warms the cockles of my heart to see that I'm not the only person who hates being browbeat into using someone else's trademark. (Then again, there may be a licensing fee associated with the trademark, which may explain why my Technics DVD-A player's manual doesn't even mention MLP, preferring the term "P.PCM." This is probably similar to how Apple charges for the use of the trademarked term Firewire, so Sony calls it i.Link, and everyone else calls it IEEE 1394.)
A Java identifier (variable name) must start with a letter, true, but the specification goes on to say:
Bzzt. Factually incorrect. You could write a simple 5-line Java program and compile it to prove whether or not this works. I could cite the Java specification where it defines what variable names are considered valid, but instead I just took an existing short piece of junk code and changed a variable name to start with the underscore. Guess what? It compiles fine.
import java.util.TimeZone;
public class TimeZoneDumper {
public static void main(String [] args) {
String [] _zoneIDs = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs();
for (int i = 0; i < _zoneIDs.length; i++) {
TimeZone zone = TimeZone.getTimeZone(_zoneIDs[i]);
System.out.println(_zoneIDs[i] + " - offset = " + zone.getRawOffset());
}
}
}