Every US election cycle, I get more proud of Canada.
Funny, with each of our election cycles I get more embarrassed by Canadian politics.
Polarized pitched battles seem to infuse every branch of the US governments, at every level. Quite frankly, it sounds exhausting.
Increasingly, that seems to be the hallmark of Canadian politics. Ideology trumping facts, discrediting people who say things that oppose the beliefs of those in power. What essentially amounts to lying to present your ideas and slandering others.
I fear it's a race to the bottom all around. I don't think we have as much room to stand around smugly and act like our own politics isn't moving in this direction as we like to think.
Seriously, a 80-160 km crater is not giant. Big, okay, they don't form every day, but there are much bigger craters than that. Like Menrva on Titan.
Nobody is saying this is the biggest crater ever created in the solar system.
But, they are saying that anything which creates a crater of that size on Earth is going to make one hell of a mess. From TFA:
"Nothing within a few hundred kilometres of the blast would have survived, but more importantly the climate of the entire Earth would have been changed. It would have filled the atmosphere with so much dust that sunlight would be obscured, possibly for several years, killing a large amount of plant life on which animals obviously rely, thereby causing a global kill event - although perhaps not on the scale of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
"If such an impact occurred now, the majority of the human population would be wiped out, through the consequent reduction in our ability to grow crops," he added.
In this case, "big" is relative. And, me, I'd call this pretty damned big in terms of what it actually signifies.
You can niggle over the fact that Titan has a bigger crater if you like. Me, I wouldn't want to be around when something like this happened. Have you gotten so jaded with this stuff as to lose track of what it actually means?
He has enough clout to push about 8% of consumers to buy overpriced hardware.
And for 100% of tech news sites to discuss about whatever he is talking about. As well as driving a fairly large percentage of people on Slashdot to try to claim that Jobs' has no clout.
Like him or love him, people are paying attention to him -- I'd call that clout.
By way of explanation???, the Clark County Registrar says that when voters choose English instead of Spanish, Reid's Republican opponent, Sharron Reid's name is checked by default.
an explanation? Who cares what language you're using the voting machine in. A voting machine should never have default candidates -- it needs to be explicitly blank until the user makes a selection.
As my wife says, "calculus has not changed much in the last 6 years, but my textbook has gone through 3 revisions in that time!"
I would be curious to know just how much of undergrad calculus has changed in the last sixty years.
While people are doing stuff with it all the time, it seems like (at a minimum) single variable calculus likely hasn't changed in decades. I'm not even sure of much of multivariable calculus would have changed that much.
I mean, what is likely to be new about calculus unless you're into some pretty advanced math that most students will never even see?
Undergrad level calc has not changed in the last 20 years.
In terms of what they teach in most forms of undregrad... is it only 20 years? I got the impression when I took calculus that it might have been way longer than 20 years.
Now, some books might have gotten better at teaching it, so that's a factor. But, generally speaking, I'd say undergraduate calculus must be pretty stable by now.
Institutions are too focused on productizing and profiteering rather than growing the world's best talent.
Sadly, funding and prestige come from the former. The latter is a side-effect.
See, I guess I was expecting that. I got Vista on a brand new box put together by a good local system builder.
With a quad core CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of disk... it's worked pretty well for me. Resources aren't really a problem.:-P
I'm afraid of even trying to upgrade this box to Windows 7 -- in my experience, upgrading a Windows install is a recipe for badness to happen. I don't want to do an install from scratch, and I don't trust the in-place upgrades.
I asked him which programming language was his favorite, expecting it to be something like Lisp or Forth, but he said, "shell script." I was a bit surprised, but he said, "it lets me tie pieces in from everywhere and do it all with the least amount of code."
Having known and learned from some wizened old UNIX geeks... it's actually astounding how much functionality you can slap together with a well crafted bit of UNIX shell scripting.
Now, sometimes it's not so great from a performance perspective -- all of those processes and pipes gets expensive. But, in terms of chewing through some data and performing a bunch of manipulations on it I'd say those old command-line tools that have been around for 30 years or so can be combined to do some remarkable things.
Even if it's not the only thing in your toolkit, you could do worse than having some rudimentary working knowledge of shell scripts and at least grep, sed, tr and a couple of the other basic ones. The tools are stable, and to write the equivalent functionality from scratch would be big, error prone undertaking.
OK, so historically, I'm one of the least likely to ever defend a Microsoft product...
But, what exactly about Vista sucked horribly? It's actually been the OS from Microsoft I've been most happy with.
Granted, I put it on a new machine with loads of resources, but I've found it to be quite stable. And, coming from a UNIX background, the UAC thing to me is a good thing.
Just curious to know why people actually hated Vista -- despite reading from a lot of people that it's awful, my experience has actually been contrary to that.
Nothing ever is, which is why we like to come to Slashdot to discuss it.;-)
Nearly every mechanical device invented has just been a combination of simple machines in different configurations.
Yes, that's true. And I don't mean to say people never truly invent things because all machines can be reduced to the lever, wheel, ramp, or its other base components. I'm saying that sometimes when it's applied to software, one finds oneself looking at a patent that says "method for doing a well known task with a computer (or wirelessly, or over a network)". Have you "invented" something, or applied technology?
I don't know all of the details of the state of the art at the time or what the patent actually claims, but from what I do know, I don't think this patent falls clearly into either category.
Well, essentially the guy being discussed built this before the patent was filed for, and publicly told lots of other people how to do it.
So, if there was prior art, the patent is null and void. Or, did the guys with the patent actually create something which was non obvious?
Obviously, we here won't settle this conclusively. It's just sometimes difficult to sort out what actually constitutes an "invention" in some cases.
Well, I don't know what the legal threshold for "inventing" is in this case. The guy who did 'invent' it isn't sure he actually invented anything. And he did it before the guy who patented it.
Take any functionality that already existed on a computer in the late 90's, add "wirelessly" to it -- have you "invented" anything? Or extended something that was already well known? I would argue it's a (fairly) predictable application of existing tech -- wireless is just one in a long line of 802.* protocols; does going from 802.3 to 802.11 cause magic to happen?
They didn't invent the router. They didn't invent wireless networking. They just sorta smushed them together, and in a way that is consistent with how you might expect them to be used.
Did Jeff Bezos "invent" one-click purchases? Or did he basically take the well-known concept of "button" and apply it to the well-known concept of "purchase"? Many of us would argue that it's a stupid patent.
This is before the courts, and has to go through a jury trial. It might be a little premature to get all smug and say that you can definitively conclude that this was, in fact, an "invention" or not. If it was so easy, we wouldn't be reading the article and debating what exactly "invent" means in this case.
My own was FreeBSD, so clearly that has no relevance to a patent for something as brilliant as an integrated Linux wireless router.
Actually, in the technical drawings they claim it to be a "Router CPU with UNIX derivative operating system" -- so, your FreeBSD would have violated this patent if it didn't exist before the patent was filed.
I still continue to be baffled by patents. They invented none of "embedded", "wireless", linux" or "router". Doing it for the first time is cool (and mad props to the guys who were doing this and might bust this patent), but assembling well known components to do a well known job, but in a brand new configuration is an application of technology, not an invention.
Every new platform (almost by definition of the term "platform") allows it to be married to myriad other technologies. Unfortunately the USPTO does not seem to understand that each one of these secondary permutations does not (should not) constitute "invention".
And, that's the problem with patenting some of these things. I fail to see how that patent should be allowed to stand.
Routers existed. Linux existed. Wireless existed. Hell, TFA sums it up very nicely:
My mental question remains. Did Greg, Everett and I really invent the embedded Linux based wireless router?
All we did, basically, was take code that already existed, compile a new driver, install a board, make a few cables, and prove such a box could stay running in a world where people trusted IOS. We're just the first people that bothered to plug in a wireless card into a junked PC, boot Linux off of a floppy, run wirelessly 13.1 miles and then publish how to make it work, in plain english, a howto a more general public, and even a patent lawyer, could understand.
Amusingly enough, our little howto hung off the far end of that wireless connection for years, dissipating electrons in the airwaves, for every one of the tens of thousands of hits we ultimately got. Everybody ate from our dogfood, in other words.
They didn't "invent" anything. They did do something new, and then they shared it like nice people. I just fail to see how putting together three existing technologies in what is a fairly logical configuration merits a patent.
I hope this patent gets dismissed. Of course, that would only be one of bazillions of patents which make no sense whatsoever.
"Honestly, why do all of you perpetuate this bullshit that Bill actually designed or wrote anything?"
Look it up.
Well, take this with a grain of salt, but this would indicate he's done some programming. He's believed to have written a BASIC interpreter
I'm pretty sure he isn't credited with actually writing DOS. He didn't invent as much as he marketed. He's not some uber coder who actually created a lot of things.
INTERVIEWER: You obviously have a lot of responsibilities as chief executive officer of Microsoft. Do you still program?
GATES: No, I don’t. I still help design algorithms and basic approaches, and sometimes I look at code. But since I worked on the IBM PC BASIC and the Model 100, I haven’t had a chance to actually create a program myself.
Bill Gates is a business man with a grounding in tech, and has been around while most of it was created so has a lot of perspective. But, I think his actual "hands on" coding is more limited than people think.
The point is, you don't have to pay for the Linux kernal, so it's not a commercial product, which (in my mind at least) means it isn't an advert. You have to pay for a Mac.
And, AMD Radeon video cards as well. It's not like Slashdot doesn't review hardware.
Whining that it's an ad for Apple basically glosses over every other product story we see which is essentially an "ad".
Unless we're going to try to say that hardware stories are good unless they're about Apple.
The tech is cool and has a number of really novel applications, but 'home use' and 'performance' are probably not among them unless you're some kind of super nerd.
*laugh* I'm running two VMs right now on my home machine with VMWare workstation. I occasionally run as many as three at the same time. VMWare is always running on this machine -- that was part of what I bought it for.
Buy a big honking machine with obscene amounts of RAM and disk space, and VMs are a pretty sweet thing. I use 'em at home for the same reasons I use them at work if I can -- it's a separate sandbox you can use for testing and development and not screw up your main machine.
You can buy what used to be a data-center sized machine for remarkably little money nowadays. I highly recommend it -- it's quite fun. =)
For workstations it's a bit less clearcut. Generally you want a primary OS in your workstation where you do most of your work, and secondary OS that you boot up in a virtualized environment. The three primary choises are KVM, XEN and OpenVS.
Don't forget VMWare workstation. That's what I run at home (for almost two years now). I wouldn't want to do without it now.
maintaining virtualization infrastructure isn't an especially fun task
Depending on what you're doing, VMWare Workstation doesn't have a whole lot of maintenance involved in it. Start and stop machines, make backups/snapshots. Occasionally apply an update.
If you're doing much more exotic than that, then I can't say much on the topic.:-P
I must say I am pleasantly surprised that State Farm paid Innes, instead of finding him at fault.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, he likely saved them a truck-load of money, as well as the life of someone they insure.
So, if the unconscious guy in the runaway truck had created the expected mayhem and crashed into someone, they would have had to pay out that settlement. And, if he died and had life insurance, they'd have to pay that.
I'm pretty sure this was overall a far better result than would have otherwise been expected. I suspect they would have a hard time finding the engineer at fault -- I'm sure some form of good samaritan law would apply as well... "yes your honour, I did smash up both cars, but I was doing it to save lives". At least, you'd like to hope that the law would be on his side.
I'd just recommemd you stay away from virtualization if you're just a desktop user.
I'd recommend the exact opposite.
Virtualization rocks for keeping things separate. My personal machine has a quad core CPU with 8GB of RAM. I've got 2-3 VMs running most of the time so I can keep things separated and do different things. It also lets me have Linux, FreeBSD and Windows guests without the power/space requirements of multiple machines.
VMWare workstation is only about $200 or so (maybe even $150), and I gather Server is free (but at the time running it on Vista 64 wasn't very easy). The ability to snapshot machines or sandbox things is really awesome. It also allows me to have multiple dev environments set up which don't interfere with each other, and a quick linked clone of a machine gives me a disposable test-bed in about 3 minutes if I think I need something new and isolated.
The only thing I regret is that my CPU is one notch down from being able to do 64-bit guests because I wasn't aware of that at the time.
For me, a big machine with loads of RAM and disk and VMWare makes for a really sweet setup. If you've got the resources on the box, it really does make some things easy. Soon I'll migrate my second physical box (an old XP machine) into a VM so I can keep some legacy software installs going without worrying about an aging machine.
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Funny, with each of our election cycles I get more embarrassed by Canadian politics.
Increasingly, that seems to be the hallmark of Canadian politics. Ideology trumping facts, discrediting people who say things that oppose the beliefs of those in power. What essentially amounts to lying to present your ideas and slandering others.
I fear it's a race to the bottom all around. I don't think we have as much room to stand around smugly and act like our own politics isn't moving in this direction as we like to think.
Nobody is saying this is the biggest crater ever created in the solar system.
But, they are saying that anything which creates a crater of that size on Earth is going to make one hell of a mess. From TFA:
In this case, "big" is relative. And, me, I'd call this pretty damned big in terms of what it actually signifies.
You can niggle over the fact that Titan has a bigger crater if you like. Me, I wouldn't want to be around when something like this happened. Have you gotten so jaded with this stuff as to lose track of what it actually means?
And for 100% of tech news sites to discuss about whatever he is talking about. As well as driving a fairly large percentage of people on Slashdot to try to claim that Jobs' has no clout.
Like him or love him, people are paying attention to him -- I'd call that clout.
Apparently, no.
How is:
an explanation? Who cares what language you're using the voting machine in. A voting machine should never have default candidates -- it needs to be explicitly blank until the user makes a selection.
In what way? Not being flippant, I'm genuinely unsure as to what about calculus has changed in the last 50 years.
I'm betting my books from 20 years ago still have the exact same stuff in it -- hell, I bet they're still using an edition of Stewart in some places.
I would be curious to know just how much of undergrad calculus has changed in the last sixty years.
While people are doing stuff with it all the time, it seems like (at a minimum) single variable calculus likely hasn't changed in decades. I'm not even sure of much of multivariable calculus would have changed that much.
I mean, what is likely to be new about calculus unless you're into some pretty advanced math that most students will never even see?
In terms of what they teach in most forms of undregrad ... is it only 20 years? I got the impression when I took calculus that it might have been way longer than 20 years.
Now, some books might have gotten better at teaching it, so that's a factor. But, generally speaking, I'd say undergraduate calculus must be pretty stable by now.
Sadly, funding and prestige come from the former. The latter is a side-effect.
Ever heard of Alberto Gonzales? Look hard enough, and you can get a yes-man who will sign off on anything.
That guy would have stripped any and all provisions in the constitution under the provision of "we're allowed to because we say so".
Well, the last few flights I took lasted hours. I've been on literally dozens of flights that have lasted hours.
"Hours" is probably one of the least useful metrics you could have included there. Hundreds of hours? Thousands of hours? One Million Hours?
I mean, anybody who has done a fair amount of travel has been aloft for easily a hundred hours -- I'm damned sure I have.
See, I guess I was expecting that. I got Vista on a brand new box put together by a good local system builder.
With a quad core CPU, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of disk ... it's worked pretty well for me. Resources aren't really a problem. :-P
I'm afraid of even trying to upgrade this box to Windows 7 -- in my experience, upgrading a Windows install is a recipe for badness to happen. I don't want to do an install from scratch, and I don't trust the in-place upgrades.
Having known and learned from some wizened old UNIX geeks ... it's actually astounding how much functionality you can slap together with a well crafted bit of UNIX shell scripting.
Now, sometimes it's not so great from a performance perspective -- all of those processes and pipes gets expensive. But, in terms of chewing through some data and performing a bunch of manipulations on it I'd say those old command-line tools that have been around for 30 years or so can be combined to do some remarkable things.
Even if it's not the only thing in your toolkit, you could do worse than having some rudimentary working knowledge of shell scripts and at least grep, sed, tr and a couple of the other basic ones. The tools are stable, and to write the equivalent functionality from scratch would be big, error prone undertaking.
OK, so historically, I'm one of the least likely to ever defend a Microsoft product ...
But, what exactly about Vista sucked horribly? It's actually been the OS from Microsoft I've been most happy with.
Granted, I put it on a new machine with loads of resources, but I've found it to be quite stable. And, coming from a UNIX background, the UAC thing to me is a good thing.
Just curious to know why people actually hated Vista -- despite reading from a lot of people that it's awful, my experience has actually been contrary to that.
Nothing ever is, which is why we like to come to Slashdot to discuss it. ;-)
Yes, that's true. And I don't mean to say people never truly invent things because all machines can be reduced to the lever, wheel, ramp, or its other base components. I'm saying that sometimes when it's applied to software, one finds oneself looking at a patent that says "method for doing a well known task with a computer (or wirelessly, or over a network)". Have you "invented" something, or applied technology?
Well, essentially the guy being discussed built this before the patent was filed for, and publicly told lots of other people how to do it.
So, if there was prior art, the patent is null and void. Or, did the guys with the patent actually create something which was non obvious?
Obviously, we here won't settle this conclusively. It's just sometimes difficult to sort out what actually constitutes an "invention" in some cases.
Well, I don't know what the legal threshold for "inventing" is in this case. The guy who did 'invent' it isn't sure he actually invented anything. And he did it before the guy who patented it.
Built? Sure. Assembled? Fine. Extended someting? Absolutely. Invented? I honestly don't know.
Take any functionality that already existed on a computer in the late 90's, add "wirelessly" to it -- have you "invented" anything? Or extended something that was already well known? I would argue it's a (fairly) predictable application of existing tech -- wireless is just one in a long line of 802.* protocols; does going from 802.3 to 802.11 cause magic to happen?
They didn't invent the router. They didn't invent wireless networking. They just sorta smushed them together, and in a way that is consistent with how you might expect them to be used.
Did Jeff Bezos "invent" one-click purchases? Or did he basically take the well-known concept of "button" and apply it to the well-known concept of "purchase"? Many of us would argue that it's a stupid patent.
This is before the courts, and has to go through a jury trial. It might be a little premature to get all smug and say that you can definitively conclude that this was, in fact, an "invention" or not. If it was so easy, we wouldn't be reading the article and debating what exactly "invent" means in this case.
Or, a really big needle.
Actually, in the technical drawings they claim it to be a "Router CPU with UNIX derivative operating system" -- so, your FreeBSD would have violated this patent if it didn't exist before the patent was filed.
I still continue to be baffled by patents. They invented none of "embedded", "wireless", linux" or "router". Doing it for the first time is cool (and mad props to the guys who were doing this and might bust this patent), but assembling well known components to do a well known job, but in a brand new configuration is an application of technology, not an invention.
And, that's the problem with patenting some of these things. I fail to see how that patent should be allowed to stand.
Routers existed. Linux existed. Wireless existed. Hell, TFA sums it up very nicely:
They didn't "invent" anything. They did do something new, and then they shared it like nice people. I just fail to see how putting together three existing technologies in what is a fairly logical configuration merits a patent.
I hope this patent gets dismissed. Of course, that would only be one of bazillions of patents which make no sense whatsoever.
Well, take this with a grain of salt, but this would indicate he's done some programming. He's believed to have written a BASIC interpreter
I'm pretty sure he isn't credited with actually writing DOS. He didn't invent as much as he marketed. He's not some uber coder who actually created a lot of things.
He even said as much in 1986:
Bill Gates is a business man with a grounding in tech, and has been around while most of it was created so has a lot of perspective. But, I think his actual "hands on" coding is more limited than people think.
And, AMD Radeon video cards as well. It's not like Slashdot doesn't review hardware.
Whining that it's an ad for Apple basically glosses over every other product story we see which is essentially an "ad".
Unless we're going to try to say that hardware stories are good unless they're about Apple.
Now that is funny.
God, I miss the days when all machines had fun names. Now it's all descriptive names so you can find it easily -- where's the fun in that?
*laugh* I'm running two VMs right now on my home machine with VMWare workstation. I occasionally run as many as three at the same time. VMWare is always running on this machine -- that was part of what I bought it for.
Buy a big honking machine with obscene amounts of RAM and disk space, and VMs are a pretty sweet thing. I use 'em at home for the same reasons I use them at work if I can -- it's a separate sandbox you can use for testing and development and not screw up your main machine.
You can buy what used to be a data-center sized machine for remarkably little money nowadays. I highly recommend it -- it's quite fun. =)
Don't forget VMWare workstation. That's what I run at home (for almost two years now). I wouldn't want to do without it now.
Depending on what you're doing, VMWare Workstation doesn't have a whole lot of maintenance involved in it. Start and stop machines, make backups/snapshots. Occasionally apply an update.
If you're doing much more exotic than that, then I can't say much on the topic. :-P
As has been pointed out elsewhere, he likely saved them a truck-load of money, as well as the life of someone they insure.
So, if the unconscious guy in the runaway truck had created the expected mayhem and crashed into someone, they would have had to pay out that settlement. And, if he died and had life insurance, they'd have to pay that.
I'm pretty sure this was overall a far better result than would have otherwise been expected. I suspect they would have a hard time finding the engineer at fault -- I'm sure some form of good samaritan law would apply as well ... "yes your honour, I did smash up both cars, but I was doing it to save lives". At least, you'd like to hope that the law would be on his side.
I'd recommend the exact opposite.
Virtualization rocks for keeping things separate. My personal machine has a quad core CPU with 8GB of RAM. I've got 2-3 VMs running most of the time so I can keep things separated and do different things. It also lets me have Linux, FreeBSD and Windows guests without the power/space requirements of multiple machines.
VMWare workstation is only about $200 or so (maybe even $150), and I gather Server is free (but at the time running it on Vista 64 wasn't very easy). The ability to snapshot machines or sandbox things is really awesome. It also allows me to have multiple dev environments set up which don't interfere with each other, and a quick linked clone of a machine gives me a disposable test-bed in about 3 minutes if I think I need something new and isolated.
The only thing I regret is that my CPU is one notch down from being able to do 64-bit guests because I wasn't aware of that at the time.
For me, a big machine with loads of RAM and disk and VMWare makes for a really sweet setup. If you've got the resources on the box, it really does make some things easy. Soon I'll migrate my second physical box (an old XP machine) into a VM so I can keep some legacy software installs going without worrying about an aging machine.