Any idea when the Palm will be linux based? I thought they've been saying this for a while. The Tungsten C (which I own) is pretty out of date. I have apps on it like ssh, but (for instance) things are being ported left and right to the pocketpc platform that are not w/ palm anymore . As an example gnugo doesn't seem to exist on palm but a recent version has been ported..
That is not what I am saying at all. I am saying use the equivalent of the timestamp on the mail file to play your random wave file and just use the equivalent of a cron script to watch it. This may be the unix way but the principle is unix independent and is simple. The equivalent of a cron must exist in windows since there are many jobs (like av programs) that run on every X hours/days etc. And obviously the mail program must store the email somewhere so there must be a file or a directory w/ a new filestamp on it. Finally nowhere did I say all good scripts are no more than 5 lines in length, I am saying this would take anyone about 5 minutes to do if they have cygwin installed and would probably the same in windows. Saying windows is completely different so my description is irrelevant is just as stupid as saying giving algorithmic code in c is useless to people who code only in java.
I have no idea what outlooks format is but at the very least the equivalent of/var/spool/mail has got to be a file. (its even easier if you use imap, use perl then). Anyway your script is:
check_every X seconds has mailfile changed if so play wavefile[$randomnumber].
This has got to be a 5 line script in any language of choice.
Incidentally the other great thing about the g5 for fp performance is it has the built in "multiply add." Apple really reintroduced to the community the pwr chip as a replacement for the $1000 node in a beowulf cluster w/ the g5. I'm half convinced IBM saw it as eating into their sales; especially when some of the apple clusters were showing up in the hpc lists..
The other thing that really killed intel for a lot of people is the xeons always ran on ancient memory buses compared to the piv line and two shared the bus btwn two processors. Opteron and the g5 didn't do this..
btw when I benchmarked i was benchmarking g5 compiled w/ gcc versus intel w/ icc. I remember asking ibm about allowing people to use xlc for non-profit use like intel does, they were not happy w/ that suggestion at all:!. In the end i think they saw every person who used a g5 for computing as a lost "high end" ibm sale.
I dont know about that, our Numerical simulation code runs twice as fast on a single processor of a dual g5 1.8 using gcc than on a piv 2.4 ghz using icc. We definitely count flops and do a reasonable job of optimizing the code proper. I believe a lot of it may have to do w/ the blazingly fast memory bus. But for floating point the g5 rocks. From the spec ratings, my understanding is the opteron machines are even better than the g5. The irony of the entire apple/intel switch, is the only reason we started moving over to mac was when ibm started making their chips, so of course they are now switching back. Incidentally I replaced my 3 year old pIII 800 dell laptop for a 1.2 ghz g4, and the g4 was the same speed as the piii for the same code base.
There is a term for capitalistic states mixed with autocratic non-democratic governments aka the corporative state. Its called facism. Its a bit mind-boggling how seemless the transition from extreme left (communism) to extreme right was.
I was curious how the opteron compares to the amd64 so I hunted around a bit. I couldn't find the other tests but I found the specviewperf tests on amd's own site.
While those may be the 8.0 tests as opposed to the 8.0.1 tests, it strikes me that the testing on linuxhardware looks a bit funny. The benchmarks on AMD's site are for the opteron 150 and the piv 3.4 ghz (w/ 1 mb of l2 cache). The ratings are about neck and neck on the amd site but about twice the speed as on linuxhardware's site.
The actual piv that linuxhardware test actually (model 670, piv) has 2 mb of l2 cache and clocks in at 3.8 ghz and for some reason is slower than what AMD got on for a slower chip?
This may be a compiler issue, which at the end of the day says benchmarks are meaningless until you use the right compilers
before anyone responds to this by saying well they used the same compiler so it is a fair benchmark, it is not. That benchmark tells you how long the compiler people spent optimizing for a particular chip in contrast to another chip.
What good is sniffing packets? Have terrorists not heard of ssh? I can see the argument being made for keeping track of destination ip's but even that can be proxied. The whole sniffing packets/echelon weltanschung seems like a lot of money to spend on something that is trivial for the "real bad guys" to get around at no cost to themselves.
I think it cuts both ways. W/ the PPC processor the idea of performance could always be a bit vague. Yes you were paying $2k to $3k for a desktop but because the G5 ran faster on some codes and/on some benchmarks it could be justified. Now that they have switched to intel, they no longer can make the high profit margins. People are willing to pay $100->$200 (maybe) a premium for same performance for a better OS, but the $400->$500 margins are no longer going to work. Dell sells platforms for btwn $300->$1500 for the top of a line, If apple goes much beyond that the obvious question is why pay X extra for an OS that doesn't even run the equivalent amount of software (from a user perspective). Oddly, they seem to be going the route that low end SGI/HP/IBM UNIXers have gone. Intel/AMD/Opteron single or dual processor chips w/ a premium sticker attached to it which comes w/ a Unix that is either the same as what everyone has (Linux) or worse.
Heh a lot of really bad 50's era sci fi (i.e. tom swift style) was written in this manner. Dr. Hansmitter expertly grabbed his model 3A HXF123 frag ray gun, swung over the side rail and deftly sliced through the AF-3 class 3 battleship floating above base station 4A.
One of the funniest examples of this was Marvin Minsky's attempt at fiction the "Turing Option" which actually came out in the 90's I believe.
It probably depends on the city; Cities like DC/Baltimore/Philadelphia/NYC but the suburban halfs of those cities would probably not benefit. I don't mind public high speed net access over wireless but I do wish they would pick a different part of the spectrum so it doesn't take over our already saturated 13 channels of 2.4 ghz.
Is pumping CO2 into the ocean really such a good idea? I There was a recent report that the oceans were becoming more acidic. Primarily due to the uptake of CO2 into the ocean. I would imagine pumping large amounts of CO2 on purpose over and above the natural uptake into the ocean would make this even worse. i.e. H2O + CO2 makes H2CO3 ala high school chemistry. H2CO3 is carbonic acid.
I completely agree w/ the price issue and Amtrak. In many cases its actually cheaper/faster to fly except for ny which has no easy access to their airports other than another $30 cab.
Incidentally, I think train/commuter fare is tax deductable. I do it directly through my work in Philadelphia which gives me a monthly pretax expense account so I can pay for my subway pass/tokens using pretax dollars directly; but my understanding is is this is just a short cut for what you can do on your 1040. (Otherwise it would mean that my work is randomly paying my taxes for me?)
Apologies I wasn't being clear. The $174 price is amtrak regional the $300 price is amtrak accela. Round trip on air tran is btwn $80->$100. I think amtrak regional and accela are worth it for business class travelers (and their kin) between
dc->philly or ny and vice versa philly-> ny ny-> boston
Non business travelers take septa/njtransit between philadelphia and ny which is $34 (as opposed to $100 for amtrak).
I think the "2-3 times the price" is in the ?noise" for the people amtrak caters to, which is fine since thats what makes it profitable but doesn't exactly make it accessible to those of us w/out expense accounts.
I'm not saying there is no point to it; its brilliant to be able to walk onto a train and end up somewhere near the center of the city of choice (or its subway system) instead of spending another $20->$30 for a cab. (Actually boston's airport is on a subway line, philadelphia has its airport on a direct regional train route, ny's airports have always been retarded, i'm not sure how dc works).
I just find it a bit odd that as someone who goes between boston and philly at least once a month (and philly, ny all the time) and used to take amtrak regularly now do not because the plane tickets are so much cheaper. Even w/ the lead/delay time factored in (i.e. taking a cab or a train to the airport and going though security) the plane is both much, much faster and half the cost. That price discount is likely due to a fare discounts between the likes of airtran and usair rather than amtrak.
Between Jetblue and airtran "accessible" long distance travel in the NE has really moved to planes and for those who are really counting their $$, its still greyhound/peter pan. Overall I think is a shame, because amtrak isn't seen as the subway system or regional lines for the masses; its seen as the way business travelers go from midtown A to midtown B.
I'm saying this as someone who hasn't had a car in years and w/ friends who don't own cars in the major metropolitan areas (philly,ny,boston) i.e. we all live in the city, near subways.
They stopped all service. Amtrak is such a disaster. (1) To take accela turns the philly->boston ticket from a $174 friday/sunday fare to a $300 fair. (2) The plane ticket prices between those two cities on a friday/sunday are $100 round. Admittedly you have to plan a bit ahead for that (2 weeks) price but its not even an option with amtrak. I really want amtrak to succeed but they either need to give the same subsidies that they do for roads and airports or just kill the thing off; because its too over specialized for people just doing dc/philly/ny in 1->2 hr hops. For everything else planes are now much cheaper, faster and busses cheaper still.
The problem is not the AT command set but the crappy implementation. It strictly should only respond to AT commands from originating side of the modem but instead the modem is responding to AT commands on both sides. Most modems did not do this, but I do remember doing this on an equivalent of IRC in 1994-1995 which I believe is pre winmodems but may not be..
why not just string cat6 or unidirection wireless from point to point and normal wireless in each building w/ the gateway in the main building... Everything will route itself out. As far as I can tell there is no other real way of doing it since you need some connection between the buildings so its either wireless or wired.. since you dont need to cover everything make it uni directional wireless or just spend the day burying some cable between each building..
this is what I've used to make sure our cluster was cooling properly.. you can even do it in perl.. Of course this won't check to make sure any of your memory is okay or anything else.. but is a simple, straightforward and easy enough to implement.. main() { a = 0; for (;;) {
double a;
a *= 1.00001; } }
This is the kind of political bullshit that finally drove me to drop the subscription after 6 or 7 years of it, and it's a shame. Nobody "slashed" the NSF budget, they just didn't increase it as much as you wanted. There is a major difference, and the way that you say it makes a large difference on the perception.
Maybe you should stop watching fox news and actually look at the facts facts I am including the national council report on the current omibus NSF bill. If you take a look at it from Fiscal year 2004 the budget was cut a total of 100 million dollars or - 1.9 \%. No it did not increase less rapidly but it was actually decreased. Here is a report on the actual final budget that was passed. The cut was 2% from FY2004. Here is the actual NSF page on the matter:
I quote:
"The National Science Foundation (NSF), suffering its first budget cut in years, will operate at 1.9% below FY 04 spending levels. The Foundation is funded at $5.47 billion, $105 million below last year and $232 million below the FY 05 request.
The budget cut affects the two major NSF accounts: Research & Related Activities (R&RA) and Education and Human Resources (EHR). The R&RA Account, which funds NSF's core research directorates and programs, falls to $4,220.56, $30.8 million (0.7%) below FY 04 funding levels and $200.95 million below the FY 05 request level. Funding decisions by directorate and program will be left to the discretion of NSF, pending Congressional approval. The EHR Account drops $97.56 million, or 10.4%, below FY 04 spending levels to $841.4 million."
This sounds like a good idea, but any such system would surely require that the user definitely erases the HD on any machine they sell. Perhaps Microsoft should include an option, like 'Prepare this computer for resale,' which utterly destroys all data."
Not to reply to myself but if people used the wonderful magic otherwise known as encrypted file systems this would not be an issue and have the obvious advantage that it would no longer matter as much if your computer got stolen as well (w/ the obvious hope that you keep backups )
Someone pointed out to me that it seems a bit odd that when berkeley got their laptop stolen w/ everyone's computer data that apparantly berkeley can't be bothered to do what nearly everyone who uses a laptop on a mac and anything vaguely "sensitive" (typically quicken data etc) takes for granted: Encrypted file system. On a mac this is as easy to do as clicking "security" from system preferences and hitting filevault on. Given the number of times Los Alamos, CIA, colleges keep losing sensitive info on laptops there's got to be an equivalent on windows? (My understanding is its something called EFS) Does anyone here use it? I am curious why this isn't enabled by default on laptops or administrators of laptops in universities, feds etc etc etc. On a mac its trivial to turn this on (its AES 128 bit). Linux has cryptfs which is blowfish 128 bit. Surely this is in place in the windows world at this point?
NYC for a long time suffered from the ring city syndrome that most american cities are currently suffered from before those of us who actually don't feel like leaching off the city that is sustaining us moved back into the city. For a long time NYC proper was a big giant ghetto and everyone moved to jersey, LI, westchester, teaneck, connecticut etc etc etc. What happened was everyone actually *lived* outside the city depriving it of a tax base but worked in the city. This is why stereotypically "inner city" schools always sucked. Because the poor were there and everyone rich moved outside into an enclave outside the tax base. If you really think your job, income livelihood doesn't depend on the city proper then I dont think you should use the city for your income. It makes absolute sense to have a commuter tax as it is not fair to those people who live in the city as they are being penalized and the city is actually giving people incentive to move out. Generically all the car driving american cities are currently suffering from the same problem because the burbs are "outside" the city proper and have their own tax base, yet their wealth and land value is completely derived from the fact of their proximity to the city proper just in the same way jersey city w/out nyc would be newark.
If it wasn't for the state thing, I think nyc should have the right to annex its metropolitin area. Somewhat oddly this is one thing Texas does right which is allow cities to annex its burbs w/out requiring permission of the burbs.
As an aside I actually used to do a weird commute down the 1/9 to the wt to jersey city every other night so thats not really true;). Jersey city is actually pretty cool or was anyway:) Besides the same "manhattanites" who wouldn't venture out to jersey are the same "manhattanites" who wouldn't venture out to queens which is, technically, you know, actually part of nyc:)
anyway nyc's land value is crazy high because nyc was the first city that rerealized being in the city proper is much cooler than hiding in the burbs. I think the same thing is going on elsewhere (i am in philly now) so this stupid leach off the city syndrome will go away. That said, and you still haven't responded, if bloomberg did get rid of the commuter tax, and still never reinstated it, (and i think he hasn't) he's an idiot.
W/ regards to labor force, nyc's unemployment rate is actually still, I believe above the national average. after 9/11 it was up to 8%, though I think its like 6% now. Supplying a "labor" force isn't really a benefit. If those people who are the labor force all lived in nyc i.e. the bits of queens that still haven't gentrified or the bronx nyc would see even more benefit. Why not setup our tax incentives to actually encourage this instead of actually give people discounts to leave the city?
I thought bloomberg got rid of the commuter tax? Everyone keeps asking for it. I think it makes no sense to give the bridge an tunnel crowd who use all the public resources (PATCO/subways/roads) a free ride for those who are essentially using the accident the the jersey burbs are "outside" the city and outside the state pay no tax. Getting rid of the commuter tax encourages everyone to move to the burbs, worse the burbs of jersey. How about this? We wont have commuter tax but we charge anyone who comes into the city and leaves more than 3 times a week a $500 entry fee each time they visit? Let me put it another way, NYC can live out the burbs and jersey and LI, connecticut etc, but would any of those areas have the property values they do w/out NYC? I dont think so..
I am a bit surprised as I have run xlc on aix running on the 200 mhz ppc chip (the brief moment when mac allowed clones, so we bought a slew of mac clones and installed aix on them.. ) I believe this support issue is just a support rather than an intrinsic compiler issue actually as aix on the g3 chip has xlc supported so it shouldn't really be that hard to port over at least if apple was receptive to the idea. Regardless they could use the equivalent of a fat binary if they wanted to and have different run paths for g3 versus g4/g5 it would not be that hard to setup.
I don't think having a different compile platform for the OS versus apps is that big of a deal (do all people use the same compiler in the windows world? let alone microsofts?), though I do think it would be in apple's best interest to buy some sort of license for the xl* compiler and/or give away to some of the performane intensive benchmarking apps out there like photoshop..
As an aside what would be brilliant would be to try to convince ibm to do what intel did which is make the compiler free for GPL compatible apps..
I guess in the grand scheme of things if you get a minimum 10% speed boost, turning a 2.5 ghz machine into a free 2.75 ghz equivalent isn't anything to sneeze at, and given some of the speed gains turning a 2.5 ghz box into a 3.75 ghz box would be fantastic, especially since its practically free and carries over as the chip speeds actually increase..
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Any idea when the Palm will be linux based? I thought they've been saying this for a while. The Tungsten C (which I own) is pretty out of date. I have apps on it like ssh, but (for instance) things are being ported left and right to the pocketpc platform that are not w/ palm anymore . As an example gnugo doesn't seem to exist on palm but a recent version has been ported..
That is not what I am saying at all. I am saying use the equivalent of the timestamp on the mail file to play your random wave file and just use the equivalent of a cron script to watch it. This may be the unix way but the principle is unix independent and is simple. The equivalent of a cron must exist in windows since there are many jobs (like av programs) that run on every X hours/days etc. And obviously the mail program must store the email somewhere so there must be a file or a directory w/ a new filestamp on it. Finally nowhere did I say all good scripts are no more than 5 lines in length, I am saying this would take anyone about 5 minutes to do if they have cygwin installed and would probably the same in windows. Saying windows is completely different so my description is irrelevant is just as stupid as saying giving algorithmic code in c is useless to people who code only in java.
check_every X seconds has mailfile changed if so play wavefile[$randomnumber].
This has got to be a 5 line script in any language of choice.
The other thing that really killed intel for a lot of people is the xeons always ran on ancient memory buses compared to the piv line and two shared the bus btwn two processors. Opteron and the g5 didn't do this..
btw when I benchmarked i was benchmarking g5 compiled w/ gcc versus intel w/ icc. I remember asking ibm about allowing people to use xlc for non-profit use like intel does, they were not happy w/ that suggestion at all
ack I dont know how that happened. Our numerical code basically numerical integration code and is here
I dont know about that, our Numerical simulation code runs twice as fast on a single processor of a dual g5 1.8 using gcc than on a piv 2.4 ghz using icc. We definitely count flops and do a reasonable job of optimizing the code proper. I believe a lot of it may have to do w/ the blazingly fast memory bus. But for floating point the g5 rocks. From the spec ratings, my understanding is the opteron machines are even better than the g5. The irony of the entire apple/intel switch, is the only reason we started moving over to mac was when ibm started making their chips, so of course they are now switching back. Incidentally I replaced my 3 year old pIII 800 dell laptop for a 1.2 ghz g4, and the g4 was the same speed as the piii for the same code base.
There is a term for capitalistic states mixed with autocratic non-democratic governments aka the corporative state. Its called facism. Its a bit mind-boggling how seemless the transition from extreme left (communism) to extreme right was.
While those may be the 8.0 tests as opposed to the 8.0.1 tests, it strikes me that the testing on linuxhardware looks a bit funny. The benchmarks on AMD's site are for the opteron 150 and the piv 3.4 ghz (w/ 1 mb of l2 cache). The ratings are about neck and neck on the amd site but about twice the speed as on linuxhardware's site.
The actual piv that linuxhardware test actually (model 670, piv) has 2 mb of l2 cache and clocks in at 3.8 ghz and for some reason is slower than what AMD got on for a slower chip?
This may be a compiler issue, which at the end of the day says benchmarks are meaningless until you use the right compilers
before anyone responds to this by saying well they used the same compiler so it is a fair benchmark, it is not. That benchmark tells you how long the compiler people spent optimizing for a particular chip in contrast to another chip.
What good is sniffing packets? Have terrorists not heard of ssh? I can see the argument being made for keeping track of destination ip's but even that can be proxied. The whole sniffing packets/echelon weltanschung seems like a lot of money to spend on something that is trivial for the "real bad guys" to get around at no cost to themselves.
I think it cuts both ways. W/ the PPC processor the idea of performance could always be a bit vague. Yes you were paying $2k to $3k for a desktop but because the G5 ran faster on some codes and/on some benchmarks it could be justified. Now that they have switched to intel, they no longer can make the high profit margins. People are willing to pay $100->$200 (maybe) a premium for same performance for a better OS, but the $400->$500 margins are no longer going to work. Dell sells platforms for btwn $300->$1500 for the top of a line, If apple goes much beyond that the obvious question is why pay X extra for an OS that doesn't even run the equivalent amount of software (from a user perspective). Oddly, they seem to be going the route that low end SGI/HP/IBM UNIXers have gone. Intel/AMD/Opteron single or dual processor chips w/ a premium sticker attached to it which comes w/ a Unix that is either the same as what everyone has (Linux) or worse.
Heh a lot of really bad 50's era sci fi (i.e. tom swift style) was written in this manner. Dr. Hansmitter expertly grabbed his model 3A HXF123 frag ray gun, swung over the side rail and deftly sliced through the AF-3 class 3 battleship floating above base station 4A.
One of the funniest examples of this was Marvin Minsky's attempt at fiction the "Turing Option" which actually came out in the 90's I believe.
It probably depends on the city; Cities like DC/Baltimore/Philadelphia/NYC but the suburban halfs of those cities would probably not benefit. I don't mind public high speed net access over wireless but I do wish they would pick a different part of the spectrum so it doesn't take over our already saturated 13 channels of 2.4 ghz.
-bloo
I completely agree w/ the price issue and Amtrak. In many cases its actually cheaper/faster to fly except for ny which has no easy access to their airports other than another $30 cab.
Incidentally, I think train/commuter fare is tax deductable. I do it directly through my work in Philadelphia which gives me a monthly pretax expense account so I can pay for my subway pass/tokens using pretax dollars directly; but my understanding is is this is just a short cut for what you can do on your 1040. (Otherwise it would mean that my work is randomly paying my taxes for me?)
Apologies I wasn't being clear. The $174 price is amtrak regional the $300 price is amtrak accela. Round trip on air tran is btwn $80->$100. I think amtrak regional and accela are worth it for business class travelers (and their kin) between
dc->philly or ny and vice versa
philly-> ny
ny-> boston
Non business travelers take septa/njtransit between philadelphia
and ny which is $34 (as opposed to $100 for amtrak).
I think the "2-3 times the price" is in the ?noise" for the people
amtrak caters to, which is fine since thats what makes it
profitable but doesn't exactly make it accessible to those
of us w/out expense accounts.
I'm not saying there is no point to it; its brilliant to be able
to walk onto a train and end up somewhere near the center of the city of choice (or its subway system) instead of spending another $20->$30 for a cab. (Actually boston's airport is on a subway line, philadelphia has its airport on a direct regional train route, ny's airports have always been retarded, i'm not sure how dc works).
I just find it a bit odd that as someone who goes between boston and philly at least once a month (and philly, ny all the time) and used to take amtrak regularly now do not because the plane tickets are so much cheaper. Even w/ the lead/delay time factored in (i.e. taking a cab or a train to the airport and going though security) the plane is both much, much faster and half the cost. That price discount is likely due to a fare discounts between the likes of airtran and usair rather than amtrak.
Between Jetblue and airtran "accessible" long distance travel in the NE has really moved to planes and for those who are really counting their $$, its still greyhound/peter pan. Overall I think is a shame, because amtrak isn't seen as the subway system or regional lines for the masses; its seen as the way business travelers go from midtown A to midtown B.
I'm saying this as someone who hasn't had a car in years and w/ friends who don't own cars in the major metropolitan areas (philly,ny,boston) i.e. we all live in the city, near subways.
They stopped all service. Amtrak is such a disaster. (1) To take accela turns the philly->boston ticket from a $174 friday/sunday
fare to a $300 fair. (2) The plane ticket prices between those two cities on a friday/sunday are $100 round. Admittedly you have to plan a bit ahead for that (2 weeks) price but its not even an option with amtrak. I really want amtrak to succeed but they either need to give the same subsidies that they do for roads and airports or just kill the thing off; because its too over specialized for people just doing dc/philly/ny in 1->2 hr hops. For everything else planes are now much cheaper, faster and busses cheaper still.
The problem is not the AT command set but the crappy implementation. It strictly should only respond to AT commands from originating side of the modem but instead the modem is responding to AT commands on both sides. Most modems did not do this, but I do remember doing this on an equivalent of IRC in 1994-1995 which I believe is pre winmodems but may not be..
why not just string cat6 or unidirection wireless from point to point and normal wireless in each building w/ the gateway in the main building... Everything will route itself out. As far as I can tell there is no other real way of doing it since you need some connection between the buildings so its either wireless or wired.. since you dont need to cover everything make it uni directional wireless or just spend the day burying some cable between each building..
this is what I've used to make sure our cluster was cooling properly.. you can even do it in perl.. Of course this won't check to make sure any of your memory is okay or anything else.. but is a simple, straightforward and easy enough to implement..
main() {
a = 0;
for (;;) {
double a;
a *= 1.00001;
}
}
Maybe you should stop watching fox news and actually look at the facts facts I am including the national council report on the current omibus NSF bill. If you take a look at it from Fiscal year 2004 the budget was cut a total of 100 million dollars or - 1.9 \%. No it did not increase less rapidly but it was actually decreased. Here is a report on the actual final budget that was passed. The cut was 2% from FY2004. Here is the actual NSF page on the matter
I quote:
"The National Science Foundation (NSF), suffering its first budget cut in years, will operate at 1.9% below FY 04 spending levels. The Foundation is funded at $5.47 billion, $105 million below last year and $232 million below the FY 05 request.
The budget cut affects the two major NSF accounts: Research & Related Activities (R&RA) and Education and Human Resources (EHR). The R&RA Account, which funds NSF's core research directorates and programs, falls to $4,220.56, $30.8 million (0.7%) below FY 04 funding levels and $200.95 million below the FY 05 request level. Funding decisions by directorate and program will be left to the discretion of NSF, pending Congressional approval. The EHR Account drops $97.56 million, or 10.4%, below FY 04 spending levels to $841.4 million."
This sounds like a good idea, but any such system would surely require that the user definitely erases the HD on any machine they sell. Perhaps Microsoft should include an option, like 'Prepare this computer for resale,' which utterly destroys all data."
Not to reply to myself but if people used the wonderful magic otherwise known as encrypted file systems this would not be an issue and have the obvious advantage that it would no longer matter as much if your computer got stolen as well (w/ the obvious hope that you keep backups )
-bloo
Someone pointed out to me that it seems a bit odd that when berkeley got their laptop stolen w/ everyone's computer data that apparantly berkeley can't be bothered to do what nearly everyone who uses a laptop on a mac and anything vaguely "sensitive" (typically quicken data etc) takes for granted: Encrypted file system. On a mac this is as easy to do as clicking "security" from system preferences and hitting filevault on. Given the number of times Los Alamos, CIA, colleges keep losing sensitive info on laptops there's got to be an equivalent on windows? (My understanding is its something called EFS) Does anyone here use it? I am curious why this isn't enabled by default on laptops or administrators of laptops in universities, feds etc etc etc. On a mac its trivial to turn this on (its AES 128 bit). Linux has cryptfs which is blowfish 128 bit. Surely this is in place in the windows world at this point?
-bloo
If it wasn't for the state thing, I think nyc should have the right to annex its metropolitin area. Somewhat oddly this is one thing Texas does right which is allow cities to annex its burbs w/out requiring permission of the burbs.
As an aside I actually used to do a weird commute down the 1/9 to the wt to jersey city every other night so thats not really true
anyway nyc's land value is crazy high because nyc was the first city that rerealized being in the city proper is much cooler than hiding in the burbs. I think the same thing is going on elsewhere (i am in philly now) so this stupid leach off the city syndrome will go away. That said, and you still haven't responded, if bloomberg did get rid of the commuter tax, and still never reinstated it, (and i think he hasn't) he's an idiot.
W/ regards to labor force, nyc's unemployment rate is actually still, I believe above the national average. after 9/11 it was up to 8%, though I think its like 6% now. Supplying a "labor" force isn't really a benefit. If those people who are the labor force all lived in nyc i.e. the bits of queens that still haven't gentrified or the bronx nyc would see even more benefit. Why not setup our tax incentives to actually encourage this instead of actually give people discounts to leave the city?
-bloo
-avi
I thought bloomberg got rid of the commuter tax? Everyone keeps asking for it. I think it makes no sense to give the bridge an tunnel crowd who use all the public resources (PATCO/subways/roads) a free ride for those who are essentially using the accident the the jersey burbs are "outside" the city and outside the state pay no tax. Getting rid of the commuter tax encourages everyone to move to the burbs, worse the burbs of jersey. How about this? We wont have commuter tax but we charge anyone who comes into the city and leaves more than 3 times a week a $500 entry fee each time they visit? Let me put it another way, NYC can live out the burbs and jersey and LI, connecticut etc, but would any of those areas have the property values they do w/out NYC? I dont think so..
-bloo
I don't think having a different compile platform for the OS versus apps is that big of a deal (do all people use the same compiler in the windows world? let alone microsofts?), though I do think it would be in apple's best interest to buy some sort of license for the xl* compiler and/or give away to some of the performane intensive benchmarking apps out there like photoshop..
As an aside what would be brilliant would be to try to convince ibm to do what intel did which is make the compiler free for GPL compatible apps..
I guess in the grand scheme of things if you get a minimum 10% speed boost, turning a 2.5 ghz machine into a free 2.75 ghz equivalent isn't anything to sneeze at, and given some of the speed gains turning a 2.5 ghz box into a 3.75 ghz box would be fantastic, especially since its practically free and carries over as the chip speeds actually increase..
-bloo