"They're looking at it wrong." "Apple products just aren't for everybody." etc.
This is the guy who wanted all media apps to look like the current trend (at the time) brushed metal of stereo gear, but I thought skeuomorphism was dead under new Apple?
I'm a long-time Google Apps user, and my company's domain is on all mail receipents' mail, not "gmail.com". So how can you have implied consent when the sender doesn't know that the mail is being sent through Google?
In this case, the user of Google Apps has volunteered to submit all mail that he's received from all of his correspondents for scanning by Google. That's part of the bargain for Google's rock-bottom pricing. I would think that third-party disclosure parameters would apply to the recipient domain's owners since they can choose to host their e-mail anywhere.
If one unit of carbon is burned, how many units of co2 is created?
One, but you're thinking of tons, not units.
If you take a pure carbon from the ground, that carbon is going to be 12 grams per mole. If you combine it with two oxygens, that's 12+16+16 = 44 grams per mole. So, one ton of C will produce (44/12) = 3.66 tons of CO2.
Not everything that's burned is pure carbon, but if you can figure out the relative atomic weight of the molecules you can get pretty close. And there are very complex functions (still being determined) as to how much of that CO2 remains in the atmosphere vs. being absorbed by increased photosynthesis, so that's not a direct map either.
And anybody please correct my rusty high school chemistry math.
Only if you keep your current governments that are causing this (apparently on purpose to gather power).
We have guys like Branson who say, "I'm going to fund the development of a planet full of integral fast reactors that will safely clean up all of your existing nuclear waste while providing all the carbon-free power we need as a planet for the next century," and the nuclear regulatory agencies (and politicians) won't even talk to him.
And he's only picking up up the ball that Clinton/Kerry/Gore/O'Leary intentionally fumbled... we should be well on our way out of this hole by now, not still slipping into it. Cui bono?
We have a technological fix in hand, but technology can't fix a problem while politics is stopping it. I guess it's like Vietnam - you've got to destroy the planet in order to save it. As long as the psychopaths are in charge, there's little to be hopeful about. As long as we have a psychopath's wet dream of a mechanism in place to regulate society, we have little hope of getting rid of those psychopaths.
Insurances are ready to accept global warming as it will help them adjusting their prices, but that does not mean they will do anything to prevent it, nor even to get it accepted by everyone.
Interesting that you should bring that up. Insurance companies have traditionally been bond market players, and generate a huge chunk of their revenue there (one of the reasons health insurance premiums have skyrocketed since Greenspan's "free money" policies went into effect).
If global warming increases risk, and if the insurance companies are going to have to increase premiums to mitigate that risk, then their total monetary pool - the money they're sitting on between events - is going to be larger. This means more return on the money while it sits, all things being equal.
So, global warming ought to be good for an insurance company (assuming their risks are accurately calculated and they're not stopped by regulators from charging actual costs - a state insurance board can do more damage to an insurance company than Mother Nature).
My take is that if the US just dropped federal flood insurance, you'd see a considerable drop in "climate change induced" extreme weather events and of course, damage from such events.
It almost sounds like you're against the poor inland people subsidizing the insurance on the wealthy's beachfront palaces. Commie.
They exist to help it's customers in times of need, yet it's a for profit business. Those 2 do NOT work together.
All businesses exist to help customers with their needs. Profits are a monetary signal that they're running the business correctly, and the incentive to put up the capital for risk in the first place.
Real insurance is just a collective risk sharing pool with a management fee. Granted, regulatory agencies have made that simple reality as painful as possible.
AMD isn't a certain enough company for game developers to drop nVidia and Intel, and they're not all going to do do yet another port. Does AMD really think MANTLE will kill nVidia? They certainly won't kill Intel (yeah, the macho gamers all buy discrete hardware, but publishers won't give up all the buyers who run the games on integrated hardware).
If AMD is serious about OpenGL being a problem, then they need to take whatever they figured out in the lab about MANTLE and work to get it into OpenGL 5 (or whatever version). Or if Khronos won't listen, fork it, but that seems unlikely.
If AMD tries to take the industry with a proprietary API (ultimately meaning by using "IP" as a weapon) they'll just wind up hurting or killing PC gaming and sell less hardware.
This is why we need total surveillance by the government in our society. We all know that to achieve the best results, we need that government to have perfect information and perfect law enforcement. If that's what it takes to jail menaces like Woz, then so be it, because society will be better off without any "troublemakers" around.
Just think - if only the law breakers who started the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement and the gay rights movements had been properly surveilled then they could have been stopped early on and not caused so much trouble.
This is the kind of government the American people are clamoring for. At least that's what their representatives say.
I our town, most of the GPS devices route people on a road that hasn't existed for 100 years. The Town Road Crew is frequently pulling people with Mass. plates out of the sand pit where the road used to be. At least with smartphones updates are automatic - with older standalone devices it's subject them buying updates and hooking it up to USB which is even more unlikely.
Dear Laptops Please increase your screen resolution to something usable.
True story: I've looked into building a head-mounted rig to hold an HD phablet 10" from my eyes. The current limitation is the refresh rate possible with screen sharing on 802.11n, but -ac might solve that and is only a year or two out on phablets.
I wound up needing to work on a 6-hour bus ride a few months ago, and was frustrated by the difficulty of seeing the screen in ever-changing light conditions, the power drain of the big screen, the low resolution, and the weirdo in the seat next to me who kept asking me about things on my screen. At first I thought about those polarizing filters, but then figured, why carry a big laptop in the first place when a small compute widget will do fine? My bag can certainly handle a bluetooth keyboard, and a wider one, even, than I can accept on my laptop.
I'd love some goggles that would do it all for me, but those are still made of unobtanium. Occulus VR is on the right track, but their pixel density is too small and it's too close for LCD (windowscreening). Perhaps OLED can fix this. Besides, I don't need stereo.
Need parity files on the disk itself as well as at least mirrored disks.
You need ZFS.:) No, really, it checksums all the writes, which reflects the modern reality. I've got a machine at home in the basement that is effectively just ECC RAM and a bunch of disks (RAID-Z on that one I think, RAID-Z2 at work), to store our home data. It's still cheaper to do it in one spot and then run non-ECC hardware elsewhere, accessing the reliable data over gigabit.
On my laptop, where I have many fewer options, I've just got ZFS running on top of a single LUKS volume. But for the same reasons (and compression helps on the laptop).
Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
Awesome, you found a workload where deeper is better. Now go try costing out a cluster with hardware virtualization and ECC RAM to support several thousand SMP virtual machines and see what you come up with.
Revolutions are nothing new... I just wish they weren't so damned violent and terrifying.
The successful ones aren't anymore. Read up on the Orange and Green Revolutions. Heck, even the Fall of the Soviet Union resulted in fewer than 300 deaths. Who would have ever made that call?
But why then is the KDE user experience so awful??
Many of their defaults have very poor usability. The project has to be willing to listen to people who have HCI training who are not C++ developers for this to get fixed.
Two small examples: 1) hiding the cursor when it's over a text field that's being typed in. 2) allowing for pure alphabetical sorting in file dialogs (not by-inode-type, then alphabetical). Both of these have long-standing bug reports in KDE and are the kind of "little things" that drive people crazy.... Does anyone actually use it?
Yeah, millions. They probably waste a huge amount of time switching defaults. I switched away from GNOME when they started to embrace mono - I felt my bug reporting efforts were better used on something not-GNOME that would eventually be the most popular desktop. It's still not here yet, but the direction is still good.
AMD is very competitive for many-cores workloads. To get an equivalent core count on Intel can be as much as a second AMD system. AMD has gone more wide, Intel has gone more deep. Both have their applications.
There was always the rumor that some things "couldn't be released" because of the patent minefield (that every vendor was certainly infringing on dozens of bogus patents both from other vendors and potential trolls). Perhaps some of those have expired.
It's actually pretty important, due to a design problem with Chromium - the unified search and URL field.
Let's say you want to search. You type 'news for nerds' in the field, and Google auto-completes as it goes. Each keypress you send to Google gives you updated search results. OK, you were going to send it to Google anyway, so you kinda accept that.
Now, instead, you type: s-l-a-s-h-d--o-t-.-o-r-g and those are all sent to Google. Suddenly Google knows about all the *non-Google* websites you're visiting. And if it's not encrypted, NSA's PRISM scoops it up too. They don't have to tap your ISP, they've got it at Google's end. aka, "Dude, you've got Chrome!"
Encrypted is better, but only because the NSA is out of the equation (maybe), but Google isn't. If you're going to visit a website you don't want Google to know about, then you better not use Chrome, or find the knowledgebase article about how to disable it. To their credit, it's called out explicitly in their privacy policy, but in reality hardly anybody reads those (perhaps we need a privacy policy taxonomy).
Firefox's approach is better - there's a box where you can tell your search engine stuff, and there's a box where you can put in website addresses without anybody but your ISP and their ISP knowing about it. Well, unless the NSA has that tapped too.
Why would you put a poorly-tested embedded bluetooth stack in a pacemaker that crashes under fuzzing? Crazy, right?
If it's anything like it was when I was in medical software, the FDA is more concerned with process than specifics of implementation. If you're practicing good software development and QA methodologies and you can impress your ISO9001 auditor, then the FDA won't be too tough. Then again, "those were the days", so maybe somebody can update this - last time I flew to FDA for a development seminar was the first time I got wanded by TSA.
Wouldn't it be nice if the west had the entire moral high ground on this?
What high ground does it have?
Oh, right, Iran invaded the Talysh Khanate region in 1826, so it's an imminent threat to the region. Also, there were those poorly-translated speeches in Israeli tabloids from a weak President who is out of office.
Ah, but Iran doesn't participate in the world central banking system, so better get in there and take it over before they do get nukes (the multinational banks can't get their client states to invade counties with nukes), for the sake of the petrodollar. One must ask, "Cui bono?"
At least the CIA overthrew Iran's democratically elected government, to ensure a half century of stability in that country, so we've got that as a base to start from.
Slashdot Mirror
What Would Jobs Have Said?
"They're looking at it wrong." "Apple products just aren't for everybody." etc.
This is the guy who wanted all media apps to look like the current trend (at the time) brushed metal of stereo gear, but I thought skeuomorphism was dead under new Apple?
I'm a long-time Google Apps user, and my company's domain is on all mail receipents' mail, not "gmail.com". So how can you have implied consent when the sender doesn't know that the mail is being sent through Google?
In this case, the user of Google Apps has volunteered to submit all mail that he's received from all of his correspondents for scanning by Google. That's part of the bargain for Google's rock-bottom pricing. I would think that third-party disclosure parameters would apply to the recipient domain's owners since they can choose to host their e-mail anywhere.
If one unit of carbon is burned, how many units of co2 is created?
One, but you're thinking of tons, not units.
If you take a pure carbon from the ground, that carbon is going to be 12 grams per mole. If you combine it with two oxygens, that's 12+16+16 = 44 grams per mole. So, one ton of C will produce (44/12) = 3.66 tons of CO2.
Not everything that's burned is pure carbon, but if you can figure out the relative atomic weight of the molecules you can get pretty close. And there are very complex functions (still being determined) as to how much of that CO2 remains in the atmosphere vs. being absorbed by increased photosynthesis, so that's not a direct map either.
And anybody please correct my rusty high school chemistry math.
Only if you keep your current governments that are causing this (apparently on purpose to gather power).
We have guys like Branson who say, "I'm going to fund the development of a planet full of integral fast reactors that will safely clean up all of your existing nuclear waste while providing all the carbon-free power we need as a planet for the next century," and the nuclear regulatory agencies (and politicians) won't even talk to him.
And he's only picking up up the ball that Clinton/Kerry/Gore/O'Leary intentionally fumbled ... we should be well on our way out of this hole by now, not still slipping into it. Cui bono?
We have a technological fix in hand, but technology can't fix a problem while politics is stopping it. I guess it's like Vietnam - you've got to destroy the planet in order to save it. As long as the psychopaths are in charge, there's little to be hopeful about. As long as we have a psychopath's wet dream of a mechanism in place to regulate society, we have little hope of getting rid of those psychopaths.
Insurances are ready to accept global warming as it will help them adjusting their prices, but that does not mean they will do anything to prevent it, nor even to get it accepted by everyone.
Interesting that you should bring that up. Insurance companies have traditionally been bond market players, and generate a huge chunk of their revenue there (one of the reasons health insurance premiums have skyrocketed since Greenspan's "free money" policies went into effect).
If global warming increases risk, and if the insurance companies are going to have to increase premiums to mitigate that risk, then their total monetary pool - the money they're sitting on between events - is going to be larger. This means more return on the money while it sits, all things being equal.
So, global warming ought to be good for an insurance company (assuming their risks are accurately calculated and they're not stopped by regulators from charging actual costs - a state insurance board can do more damage to an insurance company than Mother Nature).
My take is that if the US just dropped federal flood insurance, you'd see a considerable drop in "climate change induced" extreme weather events and of course, damage from such events.
It almost sounds like you're against the poor inland people subsidizing the insurance on the wealthy's beachfront palaces. Commie.
<handwave>You don't need a coherent article summary.</handwave>
They exist to help it's customers in times of need, yet it's a for profit business. Those 2 do NOT work together.
All businesses exist to help customers with their needs. Profits are a monetary signal that they're running the business correctly, and the incentive to put up the capital for risk in the first place.
Real insurance is just a collective risk sharing pool with a management fee. Granted, regulatory agencies have made that simple reality as painful as possible.
If you are a embedded and or open hardware enthusiast, you'd be very disappointed by something like the NUC.
But for the embedded case, still happy with a BeagleBone Black.
See: Prenda Law.
That's a good one. Is it not the exception that proves the rule?
California judges have been laying the smack down on patent trolls recently.
Are there others?
AMD isn't a certain enough company for game developers to drop nVidia and Intel, and they're not all going to do do yet another port. Does AMD really think MANTLE will kill nVidia? They certainly won't kill Intel (yeah, the macho gamers all buy discrete hardware, but publishers won't give up all the buyers who run the games on integrated hardware).
If AMD is serious about OpenGL being a problem, then they need to take whatever they figured out in the lab about MANTLE and work to get it into OpenGL 5 (or whatever version). Or if Khronos won't listen, fork it, but that seems unlikely.
If AMD tries to take the industry with a proprietary API (ultimately meaning by using "IP" as a weapon) they'll just wind up hurting or killing PC gaming and sell less hardware.
And the lawyer representing NPS will be lucky if he isn't disbarred.
I like the world you describe and would like to know how to get there. :)
This is why we need total surveillance by the government in our society. We all know that to achieve the best results, we need that government to have perfect information and perfect law enforcement. If that's what it takes to jail menaces like Woz, then so be it, because society will be better off without any "troublemakers" around.
Just think - if only the law breakers who started the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement and the gay rights movements had been properly surveilled then they could have been stopped early on and not caused so much trouble.
This is the kind of government the American people are clamoring for. At least that's what their representatives say.
I our town, most of the GPS devices route people on a road that hasn't existed for 100 years. The Town Road Crew is frequently pulling people with Mass. plates out of the sand pit where the road used to be. At least with smartphones updates are automatic - with older standalone devices it's subject them buying updates and hooking it up to USB which is even more unlikely.
c.f. Jaynes's discussion of Voices of Authority in The Origin of Consciousness.
Dear Laptops
Please increase your screen resolution to something usable.
True story: I've looked into building a head-mounted rig to hold an HD phablet 10" from my eyes. The current limitation is the refresh rate possible with screen sharing on 802.11n, but -ac might solve that and is only a year or two out on phablets.
I wound up needing to work on a 6-hour bus ride a few months ago, and was frustrated by the difficulty of seeing the screen in ever-changing light conditions, the power drain of the big screen, the low resolution, and the weirdo in the seat next to me who kept asking me about things on my screen. At first I thought about those polarizing filters, but then figured, why carry a big laptop in the first place when a small compute widget will do fine? My bag can certainly handle a bluetooth keyboard, and a wider one, even, than I can accept on my laptop.
I'd love some goggles that would do it all for me, but those are still made of unobtanium. Occulus VR is on the right track, but their pixel density is too small and it's too close for LCD (windowscreening). Perhaps OLED can fix this. Besides, I don't need stereo.
Need parity files on the disk itself as well as at least mirrored disks.
You need ZFS. :) No, really, it checksums all the writes, which reflects the modern reality. I've got a machine at home in the basement that is effectively just ECC RAM and a bunch of disks (RAID-Z on that one I think, RAID-Z2 at work), to store our home data. It's still cheaper to do it in one spot and then run non-ECC hardware elsewhere, accessing the reliable data over gigabit.
On my laptop, where I have many fewer options, I've just got ZFS running on top of a single LUKS volume. But for the same reasons (and compression helps on the laptop).
Tell that to Tomshardware and others who use x87 benchmarks and games like skyrim showing an AMD 8 core being handed a smackdown by an i3?
Awesome, you found a workload where deeper is better. Now go try costing out a cluster with hardware virtualization and ECC RAM to support several thousand SMP virtual machines and see what you come up with.
Revolutions are nothing new... I just wish they weren't so damned violent and terrifying.
The successful ones aren't anymore. Read up on the Orange and Green Revolutions. Heck, even the Fall of the Soviet Union resulted in fewer than 300 deaths. Who would have ever made that call?
But why then is the KDE user experience so awful??
Many of their defaults have very poor usability. The project has to be willing to listen to people who have HCI training who are not C++ developers for this to get fixed.
Two small examples: 1) hiding the cursor when it's over a text field that's being typed in. 2) allowing for pure alphabetical sorting in file dialogs (not by-inode-type, then alphabetical). Both of these have long-standing bug reports in KDE and are the kind of "little things" that drive people crazy. ... Does anyone actually use it?
Yeah, millions. They probably waste a huge amount of time switching defaults. I switched away from GNOME when they started to embrace mono - I felt my bug reporting efforts were better used on something not-GNOME that would eventually be the most popular desktop. It's still not here yet, but the direction is still good.
AMD is very competitive for many-cores workloads. To get an equivalent core count on Intel can be as much as a second AMD system. AMD has gone more wide, Intel has gone more deep. Both have their applications.
+ other internal pressures
There was always the rumor that some things "couldn't be released" because of the patent minefield (that every vendor was certainly infringing on dozens of bogus patents both from other vendors and potential trolls). Perhaps some of those have expired.
You're incredibly naive if you believe that bit.
You just missed all of those Android users being branded as 'linux zealots'. Oh, wait...
It's actually pretty important, due to a design problem with Chromium - the unified search and URL field.
Let's say you want to search. You type 'news for nerds' in the field, and Google auto-completes as it goes. Each keypress you send to Google gives you updated search results. OK, you were going to send it to Google anyway, so you kinda accept that.
Now, instead, you type: s-l-a-s-h-d--o-t-.-o-r-g and those are all sent to Google. Suddenly Google knows about all the *non-Google* websites you're visiting. And if it's not encrypted, NSA's PRISM scoops it up too. They don't have to tap your ISP, they've got it at Google's end. aka, "Dude, you've got Chrome!"
Encrypted is better, but only because the NSA is out of the equation (maybe), but Google isn't. If you're going to visit a website you don't want Google to know about, then you better not use Chrome, or find the knowledgebase article about how to disable it. To their credit, it's called out explicitly in their privacy policy, but in reality hardly anybody reads those (perhaps we need a privacy policy taxonomy).
Firefox's approach is better - there's a box where you can tell your search engine stuff, and there's a box where you can put in website addresses without anybody but your ISP and their ISP knowing about it. Well, unless the NSA has that tapped too.
Why would you put a poorly-tested embedded bluetooth stack in a pacemaker that crashes under fuzzing? Crazy, right?
If it's anything like it was when I was in medical software, the FDA is more concerned with process than specifics of implementation. If you're practicing good software development and QA methodologies and you can impress your ISO9001 auditor, then the FDA won't be too tough. Then again, "those were the days", so maybe somebody can update this - last time I flew to FDA for a development seminar was the first time I got wanded by TSA.
Wouldn't it be nice if the west had the entire moral high ground on this?
What high ground does it have?
Oh, right, Iran invaded the Talysh Khanate region in 1826, so it's an imminent threat to the region. Also, there were those poorly-translated speeches in Israeli tabloids from a weak President who is out of office.
Ah, but Iran doesn't participate in the world central banking system, so better get in there and take it over before they do get nukes (the multinational banks can't get their client states to invade counties with nukes), for the sake of the petrodollar. One must ask, "Cui bono?"
At least the CIA overthrew Iran's democratically elected government, to ensure a half century of stability in that country, so we've got that as a base to start from.