Mid-to-late 80's, everyone was all over Audi's problems with sudden acceleration. The stories were clearly bogus -- couldn't stop a _manual_transmission_ car for instance. Much press coverage, "in depth reporting" on various newsmagazine shows, etc.
It's the exact same stories all over again.
People crash cars all the time. They often do it for stupid reasons, like confusing the gas peddle and brake. In the past, most would admit to themselves that this is what happened. But in today's "nothings my fault" era, you sue. And the press is just waiting to hear from you.
> Unfortunately for Apple, the iPhone4 hasn't really killed Android
Was anyone outside the US's tech boiler-room really expecting this?
Here in the GWN all of the major carriers, and their fighter brands, carry the iPhone. That's been true since Bell and Telus switched to the GSM stack late last year, just as Android was really coming out.
Since then I have seen exactly three Android devices in use, and one of them lies dormant in a drawer for 99.9% of its life. I don't believe this is a particularly biased sample. RIM and Apple completely own the mobile market here. I have not seen a single one in use in the UK, although that is a slightly more biased sample (two weeks does not make for a strong numbers base).
Does anyone really think that Android would have got the foothold it has if the iPhone was available on CDMA? I don't. It's different now that it's out there in the wild, but I don't believe it's success is anything other than Apple's failure to get onto Verizon.
> since there is so little attention to the Unix environment
Which is the interesting point here, IMHO. Given the "its so easy to fix" implications you've used with these problems, then the fact that they're not fixed says a whole lot about how important these are to the target market. Basically, not at all.
And why would they? Can you imagine the average computer user getting upset about "fsync() semantics are broken"? Geez.
All big-iron database engines that most people are familiar with were written in an era when 210 MB was a large HD and 2 MB was a lot of RAM. As a result, they make many design decisions that are simply not useful any more -- the very idea of an index makes very little sense if the entire table fits in RAM.
In spite of five or six doublings of Moore's Law, every DB book I've seen is still written as if it were the 1990s. They'll tell you to normalize your tables, never use insert-time as an index, use multi-part indexes, etc.
All of it is wrong. Generally speaking, on any normal data problem you can simply insert every single object into a single large table in the order they are created and that will be the most efficient way to get the data back. That's because the DB designers have spent the last 20 years making their DBs work the way most DB programs use them.
I experiment with every design decision. With modern tools I can built a temp table, populate it with millions of rows, index it, benchmark it and drop it again in a few minutes. When that doesn't tell me what I want to know, I go to the forums.
Don't be afraid to experiment!
Maury
I use forums when I run into particular problems. I
> I did my thesis in Word, even though LaTeX was the standard to use at my lab
All of these arguments are based on a false dichotomy. Anyone remember FullWrite? Taste? Even Pages would be great for this if it had MathML support.
Word became the standard that it is today due to market forces. You could get all of Office for about the same price as just WordPerfect. All the money in the office app market evaporated and so did all the competition along with it. So when Word didn't cut it, you had to use some even worse tool, like LaTex.
Sad really. Here's a great game: ask someone to enumerate the layout that LaTeX does that supposedly makes for those greatly superior looking documents they always go on about. Invariably it's paragraph layout and a few other concepts long ago subsumed into every other WP.
> but very few people seem to be aware of the full extent of what Apple is doing
I'm sure that includes yourself. Yet none of us know what apps MS rejects for the XB360, or Sony on the PS3, etc. This just generates more flamage because the haters can't figure out why no one cares about this except themselves.
> political cartoon apps being blocked, or the Ulysses app
All of these were released.
> arbitrary nature of what Apple decides to reject
It's not arbitrary at all. The people that enforce it sometimes are.
This is no different than any other aspect of life. The police give out or ignore speeders with equally random behavior.
Snow is a reason to want to move to Canada, not a detraction.
No really, it's not. I say that as an avid skier. As great as snow is in parks and ski hills, shoveling it off the sidewalk and the slush damage to my shoes simply isn't worth it.
But then, there's Vancouver. Pretty much no snow, and just over an hours drive to Whistler, widely considered the best ski resort on the planet (I concur). Of course everyone wants to live there, so there's the prices issue...
Yes, this is a lot like universal healthcare: it's a government unreasonably telling private people what transactions they CANNOT engage in (private insurance in Canada is illegal).
Ahhh yes, the famed quote... was this the Cato Institute or PRI, I can't recall?
In either event, it's complete BS: http://www.chsrf.ca/mythbusters/html/myth18_e.php
This will, of course, increase the cost of cell phones
So to back up your clearly counter-factual claim, you talk about cell phone prices, claiming they're higher because they're lower. Huh.
There are valid reasons to hate C-32, but that's not one of them.
There are a few reasons, but not that many. The more I read about it, the more I think it's probably one of the best bills we might expect.
I think a lot of the complaints people do have could be addressed by inverting the digital locks language. Right now it says "illegal except when..." but it should really say "legal except when......the aim is to circumvent copyright law". That would mean you wouldn't need exceptions for linux or the blind, that would be legal by default, yet it would still be illegal to remove a lock if you did so to use material without obtaining it from the copyright holder.
In the meantime I'd like a rider to allow lock removal when the content is in the public domain. I'd also like the Crown Copyright to be amended in the same way.
Essentially the US is letting other countries write the laws for us.
As someone who lives in another country, let me assure you it's exactly the other way around. Many of the proposals in the leaked document come directly from US law, and are being pushed down everyone else's throat with the threat of being blacklisted if we don't agree to it. For instance, Canada's new law that forbids breaking DRM, lobbied for by US groups, pressured for by the US ambassador, and written up by RIAA.
> The inverter, wiring, mounts to hook the panels to a roof, to name the primary ones.
Panels are 2.30 wholesale in skid quantities. Inverters are around 65 cents. Everything else put together is another 50 cents or so.
Panels are, by far, the majority of the material costs. Depending on where you are, overhead and installation is another 25 to 100% of material costs.
> North Dakota would be better off renting land in Nevada and running some long power lines
No way, ND has excellent sunlight. Best-case production in NV is ~6 peak hours on average over the year, ND is ~4.5. You get the same amount of sunlight as the upper half of California.
But if you want to run lines, run them north. SaskPower is sitting on multiple GW of hydro that they haven't developed because they don't have anyone to sell it to. 24 hours, 365 days, and a lot closer than NV!
2: An archival grade SSD that can hold data for hundreds, if not thousands of years before so many electrons escape the cells to make a 1 or a zero impossible to tell apart. I don't know any media that can last for more than 10 years reliably. Yes, maybe a CD-R or two may last that long, but it is more of a matter of luck than anything else.
Meh. Copy it off and back on every five years.
The main problem with long term data on SSD is charge leakage. That does not cause mechanical wear (unlike lots of writes). If you archive data to an SSD, then periodically re-write it, its perfectly fresh again. Doing so will give you decades of safe storage without ever getting near the write limits. And doing so will not take much time due to the inherent speed of the media, and will get both faster and cheaper "for free" as the systems improve over time -- that SSD you're safeing offsite will take less time and effort to refresh 5 years from now than it does today. Let Iron Mountain do this and charge you for it.
> Because ICF has a present term, valuable application, that of nuclear explosion modeling
You need to read a lot more on this topic. NIF has *very* little utility in nuclear explosion modelling. The #1 reason they're building it so the PhD's at LLNL won't leave and get jobs in industry.
> Solar and wind is great but the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day, and the wind doesn't blow every day
Again, solar + wind + hydro + gas peakers + (a national grid) = all the power you need for totally reasonable prices.
What is "totally reasonable prices"? Well the most expensive of those is wind at $13 a watt installed, the rest scale down with solar ~$4, hydro around $2 and gas at about $1.2. Net cost across all sources is maybe $5, about the same as existing nuclear plants (USD).
Obviously, an ideal power generation technology would be one that neatly scales from "smart dust" to "dyson sphere" and everything in between; but we are still waiting for the magic pony to deliver that one.
Solar cells do that. DSSC's on the low end and conventional aSi on the big end. Having no moving parts makes things scale a little more easily.
> The problem is every environmental nut that is around goes "OH NOES NUKLEAR
No, the problem is it doesn't work. Fusion does not work. Repeat this, many times.
Fission works, but isn't great. Installed costs for the ACR at Darlington was over $8 a watt. You can install _residential_ solar for less than that, and industrial scale systems for around $4.
Coal is $2, so if price is your only consideration you do that. But if it's not, if you actually want to get rid of GHG emissions, then this isn't a useful option.
Hydro is around the same cost as coal, maybe a little more. There's LOTS of hydro left in Canada if the US will agree to buy it off us. Hydro plus wind ($13 a watt) plus solar *can* meet our energy needs, without the need for fission, fusion, or anything else.
Even if true, detonations are a release of fusion energy, hence, the experience is indeed a fusion energy experiment as advertised.
Incorrect.
The term "fusion energy experiment" is a very specific one that refers only to experiments, like ITERs, who's purpose is to develop power producing reactors. NIF is not working towards producing power, is not a stepping stone in that direction, and provides no useful information toward that goal. Therefore NIF is not a "fusion energy experiment".
Nor is it advertised as such. LLNL likes to put up crap about "unlimited source of energy" and such, but talk to anyone working on the project and they'll immediately, and happily, tell you that's just marketing. And yes, I have. And yes, they do.
The problem here is that you are 100% wrong. There is not a single application included in the stock software that serves an ad. Every single ad-laden app on an Apple-produced product got there because the owner/user downloaded it.
If by "Worked on MS" you mean file a lawsuit, go to trial, present mounds of evidence, win a judgement, have the Judge threaten to break the company into two, yeah, ok, THEN they'll get scared.
No, by "worked on MS" I mean get sued, get scared, stop acting like a monopolist.
Say what you will about MS (it's Dooooomed!), most of their recent work has been much more open than in the past. It's no longer about embrace and extend. The actual outcome of this change on the wider world may be limited, but that's a statement about MS's ability to generate working products, not the way they go about planning them.
Slashdot Mirror
Mid-to-late 80's, everyone was all over Audi's problems with sudden acceleration. The stories were clearly bogus -- couldn't stop a _manual_transmission_ car for instance. Much press coverage, "in depth reporting" on various newsmagazine shows, etc.
It's the exact same stories all over again.
People crash cars all the time. They often do it for stupid reasons, like confusing the gas peddle and brake. In the past, most would admit to themselves that this is what happened. But in today's "nothings my fault" era, you sue. And the press is just waiting to hear from you.
Maury
> else why isn't *EVERY* Joe Sickpack with an Internet connection these days using a Mac
Ummm, because..
> I find a PC works well and is easy to use - and much cheaper
It's the "much cheaper" part, which YOU used as a point.
Really, your sophistry needs some work.
Maury
> Unfortunately for Apple, the iPhone4 hasn't really killed Android
Was anyone outside the US's tech boiler-room really expecting this?
Here in the GWN all of the major carriers, and their fighter brands, carry the iPhone. That's been true since Bell and Telus switched to the GSM stack late last year, just as Android was really coming out.
Since then I have seen exactly three Android devices in use, and one of them lies dormant in a drawer for 99.9% of its life. I don't believe this is a particularly biased sample. RIM and Apple completely own the mobile market here. I have not seen a single one in use in the UK, although that is a slightly more biased sample (two weeks does not make for a strong numbers base).
Does anyone really think that Android would have got the foothold it has if the iPhone was available on CDMA? I don't. It's different now that it's out there in the wild, but I don't believe it's success is anything other than Apple's failure to get onto Verizon.
Maury
> since there is so little attention to the Unix environment
Which is the interesting point here, IMHO. Given the "its so easy to fix" implications you've used with these problems, then the fact that they're not fixed says a whole lot about how important these are to the target market. Basically, not at all.
And why would they? Can you imagine the average computer user getting upset about "fsync() semantics are broken"? Geez.
Maury
All big-iron database engines that most people are familiar with were written in an era when 210 MB was a large HD and 2 MB was a lot of RAM. As a result, they make many design decisions that are simply not useful any more -- the very idea of an index makes very little sense if the entire table fits in RAM.
In spite of five or six doublings of Moore's Law, every DB book I've seen is still written as if it were the 1990s. They'll tell you to normalize your tables, never use insert-time as an index, use multi-part indexes, etc.
All of it is wrong. Generally speaking, on any normal data problem you can simply insert every single object into a single large table in the order they are created and that will be the most efficient way to get the data back. That's because the DB designers have spent the last 20 years making their DBs work the way most DB programs use them.
I experiment with every design decision. With modern tools I can built a temp table, populate it with millions of rows, index it, benchmark it and drop it again in a few minutes. When that doesn't tell me what I want to know, I go to the forums.
Don't be afraid to experiment!
Maury
I use forums when I run into particular problems. I
> Also, Wikipedia uses TeX to process all tags
To everyone's general complaints. There are widespread efforts to ditch it in favour of MathML.
As someone who actually writes on the Wikipedia (aprox 7000 articles) I would prefer troff.
Maury
> I did my thesis in Word, even though LaTeX was the standard to use at my lab
All of these arguments are based on a false dichotomy. Anyone remember FullWrite? Taste? Even Pages would be great for this if it had MathML support.
Word became the standard that it is today due to market forces. You could get all of Office for about the same price as just WordPerfect. All the money in the office app market evaporated and so did all the competition along with it. So when Word didn't cut it, you had to use some even worse tool, like LaTex.
Sad really. Here's a great game: ask someone to enumerate the layout that LaTeX does that supposedly makes for those greatly superior looking documents they always go on about. Invariably it's paragraph layout and a few other concepts long ago subsumed into every other WP.
Maury
> Ah yes, the reliable old joke: all X people who care will be
> happy, where X is a humorously small number. Classic!
Ok, starting out by bashing the idea of antidotal evidence.
> I have many times read discussion board
And then going on to use antidotal evidence.
Sweet.
Maury
> but very few people seem to be aware of the full extent of what Apple is doing
I'm sure that includes yourself. Yet none of us know what apps MS rejects for the XB360, or Sony on the PS3, etc. This just generates more flamage because the haters can't figure out why no one cares about this except themselves.
> political cartoon apps being blocked, or the Ulysses app
All of these were released.
> arbitrary nature of what Apple decides to reject
It's not arbitrary at all. The people that enforce it sometimes are.
This is no different than any other aspect of life. The police give out or ignore speeders with equally random behavior.
Maury
Snow is a reason to want to move to Canada, not a detraction.
No really, it's not. I say that as an avid skier. As great as snow is in parks and ski hills, shoveling it off the sidewalk and the slush damage to my shoes simply isn't worth it.
But then, there's Vancouver. Pretty much no snow, and just over an hours drive to Whistler, widely considered the best ski resort on the planet (I concur). Of course everyone wants to live there, so there's the prices issue...
Maury
Yes, this is a lot like universal healthcare: it's a government unreasonably telling private people what transactions they CANNOT engage in (private insurance in Canada is illegal).
Ahhh yes, the famed quote... was this the Cato Institute or PRI, I can't recall?
In either event, it's complete BS: http://www.chsrf.ca/mythbusters/html/myth18_e.php
This will, of course, increase the cost of cell phones
So to back up your clearly counter-factual claim, you talk about cell phone prices, claiming they're higher because they're lower. Huh.
Maury
There are valid reasons to hate C-32, but that's not one of them.
There are a few reasons, but not that many. The more I read about it, the more I think it's probably one of the best bills we might expect.
I think a lot of the complaints people do have could be addressed by inverting the digital locks language. Right now it says "illegal except when..." but it should really say "legal except when... ...the aim is to circumvent copyright law". That would mean you wouldn't need exceptions for linux or the blind, that would be legal by default, yet it would still be illegal to remove a lock if you did so to use material without obtaining it from the copyright holder.
In the meantime I'd like a rider to allow lock removal when the content is in the public domain. I'd also like the Crown Copyright to be amended in the same way.
Maury
Essentially the US is letting other countries write the laws for us.
As someone who lives in another country, let me assure you it's exactly the other way around. Many of the proposals in the leaked document come directly from US law, and are being pushed down everyone else's throat with the threat of being blacklisted if we don't agree to it. For instance, Canada's new law that forbids breaking DRM, lobbied for by US groups, pressured for by the US ambassador, and written up by RIAA.
Maury
> The inverter, wiring, mounts to hook the panels to a roof, to name the primary ones.
Panels are 2.30 wholesale in skid quantities.
Inverters are around 65 cents.
Everything else put together is another 50 cents or so.
Panels are, by far, the majority of the material costs. Depending on where you are, overhead and installation is another 25 to 100% of material costs.
> North Dakota would be better off renting land in Nevada and running some long power lines
No way, ND has excellent sunlight. Best-case production in NV is ~6 peak hours on average over the year, ND is ~4.5. You get the same amount of sunlight as the upper half of California.
But if you want to run lines, run them north. SaskPower is sitting on multiple GW of hydro that they haven't developed because they don't have anyone to sell it to. 24 hours, 365 days, and a lot closer than NV!
Maury
2: An archival grade SSD that can hold data for hundreds, if not thousands of years before so many electrons escape the cells to make a 1 or a zero impossible to tell apart. I don't know any media that can last for more than 10 years reliably. Yes, maybe a CD-R or two may last that long, but it is more of a matter of luck than anything else.
Meh. Copy it off and back on every five years.
The main problem with long term data on SSD is charge leakage. That does not cause mechanical wear (unlike lots of writes). If you archive data to an SSD, then periodically re-write it, its perfectly fresh again. Doing so will give you decades of safe storage without ever getting near the write limits. And doing so will not take much time due to the inherent speed of the media, and will get both faster and cheaper "for free" as the systems improve over time -- that SSD you're safeing offsite will take less time and effort to refresh 5 years from now than it does today. Let Iron Mountain do this and charge you for it.
Maury
I doubt there's much point in trying to develop a 'bigger' H-bomb 'cause well, it a fucking H-bomb.
The point is to make *smaller* ones. Ones without fission triggers.
Maury
> NIF is expected to release 20 MJ of energy.
But requires 400 MJ to set up that shot.
I don't care how fast you fire, you're not _producing_ any energy.
Maury
> Because ICF has a present term, valuable application, that of nuclear explosion modeling
You need to read a lot more on this topic. NIF has *very* little utility in nuclear explosion modelling. The #1 reason they're building it so the PhD's at LLNL won't leave and get jobs in industry.
What, you don't believe me?
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/21/science/vast-laser-plan-would-further-fusion-and-keep-bomb-experts.html
Maury
> Solar and wind is great but the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day, and the wind doesn't blow every day
Again, solar + wind + hydro + gas peakers + (a national grid) = all the power you need for totally reasonable prices.
What is "totally reasonable prices"? Well the most expensive of those is wind at $13 a watt installed, the rest scale down with solar ~$4, hydro around $2 and gas at about $1.2. Net cost across all sources is maybe $5, about the same as existing nuclear plants (USD).
Maury
Obviously, an ideal power generation technology would be one that neatly scales from "smart dust" to "dyson sphere" and everything in between; but we are still waiting for the magic pony to deliver that one.
Solar cells do that. DSSC's on the low end and conventional aSi on the big end. Having no moving parts makes things scale a little more easily.
Maury
Ahhh ha, you ARE still alive!
I still think the best argument against fusion is the one we came up with in the discussion page that time...
> Going from indirect to direct drive alone gives you
> a TENFOLD irradiation intensity for capsule drive
And two orders of magnitudes less homogeneity. Reserve judgement until they actually try one of the polar targets in 2015 or so.
Maury
> The problem is every environmental nut that is around goes "OH NOES NUKLEAR
No, the problem is it doesn't work. Fusion does not work. Repeat this, many times.
Fission works, but isn't great. Installed costs for the ACR at Darlington was over $8 a watt. You can install _residential_ solar for less than that, and industrial scale systems for around $4.
Coal is $2, so if price is your only consideration you do that. But if it's not, if you actually want to get rid of GHG emissions, then this isn't a useful option.
Hydro is around the same cost as coal, maybe a little more. There's LOTS of hydro left in Canada if the US will agree to buy it off us. Hydro plus wind ($13 a watt) plus solar *can* meet our energy needs, without the need for fission, fusion, or anything else.
Maury
NIF is not a fusion energy experiment.
Even if true, detonations are a release of fusion energy, hence, the experience is indeed a fusion energy experiment as advertised.
Incorrect.
The term "fusion energy experiment" is a very specific one that refers only to experiments, like ITERs, who's purpose is to develop power producing reactors. NIF is not working towards producing power, is not a stepping stone in that direction, and provides no useful information toward that goal. Therefore NIF is not a "fusion energy experiment".
Nor is it advertised as such. LLNL likes to put up crap about "unlimited source of energy" and such, but talk to anyone working on the project and they'll immediately, and happily, tell you that's just marketing. And yes, I have. And yes, they do.
Maury
The problem here is that you are 100% wrong. There is not a single application included in the stock software that serves an ad. Every single ad-laden app on an Apple-produced product got there because the owner/user downloaded it.
Bingo!
If by "Worked on MS" you mean file a lawsuit, go to trial, present mounds of evidence, win a judgement, have the Judge threaten to break the company into two, yeah, ok, THEN they'll get scared.
No, by "worked on MS" I mean get sued, get scared, stop acting like a monopolist.
Say what you will about MS (it's Dooooomed!), most of their recent work has been much more open than in the past. It's no longer about embrace and extend. The actual outcome of this change on the wider world may be limited, but that's a statement about MS's ability to generate working products, not the way they go about planning them.
Maury