That was the sound of the joke flying right over your head... until you cut its thrust off and it fell back to Earth in a heap of burning un-funnyness.
Rubbish. If the equations you have don't express the concepts, you're using the wrong equations. A good set of equations will provide all the concepts in a handy, compact form, provided your mathematics is good enough to understand them.
I disagree, although I'm not sure whether it's a fundamental disagreement, or simply that I'm unconvinced that an equation is necessarily the 'handiest and most compact' form for most concepts.
I have always disliked physicists and physics professors who taught only equations, and expected the concepts to be somehow apparent from them, because I think it leads students to forget an important truth: the equations are not the reasons that things actually happen. They are models, useful in that they produce results which predict actual phenomena, but I think it is a fundamental mistake to believe for a moment that the math actually drives the physical processes themselves.* And I've asked a question about why something happens, only to be answered with an equation, too many times to believe that there aren't people out there thinking this way, at least subliminally.
* Unless you take the position of someone like Stephen Wolfram, where the entire universe is a computer, but that's a totally separate debate and doesn't get at what bothers me, which is someone responding to "Why does the ball fall when I drop it?" by saying "y(t) = (1/2)*g*t^2 + v0*t + y0".
I recommend Konqueror, but in order to get it you'll need to install KDE... which I think is a good thing, but other people would probably burn me at the stake for saying so. I like it because it renders almost exactly like Safari does on my Mac (which makes sense, they have the same innards, to a point), and it also acts as a file browser and does some neat stuff in that department as well (in particular it supports fish://, which is pretty neat and lets you browse and edit remote files via SSH as if they were local, without setting up NFS or Samba).
Along with the fact that KDE will do a context-sensitive top-screen menubar, it's the "killer app" that's kept me from switching to Gnome on my Linux box.
True; tests of the OS for server-type tasks have already been done, at least on the PPC side -- people have compared database performance on the Apple XServe when running OS X Server versus Linux, with the same pieces of software and (I think) the same test data, the only thing that was changed between the two was the OS. Result was... Linux wins, although I've never heard a really conclusive explanation as to why. It apparently has something to do with process scheduling, I've heard.
I suppose you could do the same thing with Apache or MySQL on a Mactel, in order to compare OS X versus Windows, but I'm not sure how useful or interesting a comparison it would be, since those machines (consumer laptops) aren't really used for those kinds of tasks very often.
Frankly I think the best measures of desktop performance are ones having to do with UI latency: I don't care how fast a system crunches numbers, if I have to use it and it takes more than a tenth of a second for it to register that I've pressed the mouse button, it's too slow. Program launch times, UI latency, window scrolling and resizing... these are all far more important to real desktop users than how many simultaneous threads it can handle in Apache, or how many queries it can process in a MySQL DB.
I'd actually been wondering if there was a way to do that for a while... pretty neat.
They really need to do something about their voices though. I remember when they brought them out ("Mac-in-talk-pro-english-vic-tor-ia" anyone?) and it seems like they haven't done a bit of work since then.
I've often thought it would be cool if you got a text-to-speech system that was good enough to make a 'poor mans audiobook,' by passing some Project Gutenberg texts into a program and having it spit out MP3s, but I think the voices would drive me crazy in short order. I can't really imagine sitting and listening to Tolstoy from Fred, Agnes, Princess, Junior, or any of the other Apple voices.
Before the advent of modern radios -- before the advent of what we now consider to be basically prehistoric radios, even -- people had transmitters that weren't specific to particular frequencies: they transmit basically on all frequencies, simultaneously. (This isn't precisely true, the geometry of your antenna and other equipment have characteristics that make it more efficient at some frequencies than others, but it's pretty close.)
You can make a hell of a lot of noise with one of those; more than enough to cause front-end overload in all of your neighbors' receivers. And once you do that, it doesn't really matter what sort of fancy frequency-hopping or spread-spectrum stuff they have.
I think the FCC is corrupt as hell; short of maybe that Congressman who got busted with the "bribe menu" a while ago, I can't think of a more thoroughly bought-and-paid-for section of our government. However, it does serve a function, and the radio spectrum (the whole EM spectrum, really) is a public resource; what we need are people who actually believe in protecting it and using it for the greatest good, instead of parceling it off and selling or leasing it to the highest bidder.
What would happen if every house in a city had a wifi router that could communicated with eight nearby houses?
You'd saturate the band's three available non-interfering channels, and have horrible interference problems. The 2.4GHz ISM band just doesn't have enough space on it for municipal WiFi in a mesh networking arrangement, at least not in a high-density situation. It only takes a few people with messy transmitters that put out bad signal or use too much power, and you'll drop the S/N ratio for everyone else trying to use that channel/band-region all over the neighborhood.
I've lived in apartment buildings where every 2nd or 3rd person had a WL gateway set up, and the result was that it was impossible to find an empty channel, and you got far reduced range out of your own equipment because of all the interference. It just raises the noise floor up when you have that many transmitters working in that close proximity to each other, both space-wise and frequency-wise.
For something like that to work we'd need more frequencies -- like some of the UHF TV ones, for instance -- but fat chance getting any of them from the FCC. They're going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, just like everything else at that office.
That's a totally valid point/question. I used to use a cassette recorder, pre-Olympus, and in fact I still own several of them, ranging from a very nice Dictaphone (uses full size cassettes, all metal construction, probably cost a fortune when it was new -- glad I bought it used) to some cheapie RadioShack micros. I actually have a thing for analog recorders and electronics, particularly analog tape, so it would satisfy a certain part of me to use one. (Actually I'd love to bring my Sony 1/4" open-reel deck in with some Quantegy 456...)
I have a few reasons for preferring the Olympus: first is storage and archiving. It's a lot easier for me to have everything stored inside my computer than in shoe-boxes of loose cassettes. It only takes one move -- and I seem to be making those about once every 18 months -- to lose or misplace a tape, and it's gone forever. I'm pretty unlikely to misplace my computer, and I'm reasonably careful about backing up the data that's on it (it's mirrored to a remote machine). My father laments the fact that he had recordings of Carl Sagan lectures that got lost somewhere along his way; I want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to anything of mine.
The second is physical robustness. I can beat the living bejesus out of the Olympus because it doesn't have any moving parts. No little tape doors to break off, and I don't have to worry about getting it full of dirt and crud if I leave it in the bottom of my backpack, briefcase, or laptop bag for a while. It's also tiny, not too much bigger in terms of volume than one of those big (15 stick?) packs of gum, although it's longer and skinnier. I can put it in my front shirt pocket without noticing it, most of the time. (Mine is an Olympus DS-330 -- no longer in production, and it seems as though prices on used ones have spiked a bit.)
The major reasons why I like it, though, are because I can listen to the recordings on my iPod and through my big stereo on demand. I could do that with an analog recorder, I suppose, but it would require an extra set of patch cables, and digging out and connecting up the recorder when I want to listen. Not to mention queuing up the tape; with a digital recording it's easy to just open it up, jump 5 minutes in, listen for a while, move 20 minutes more, etc.
So the inconvenience of having to use the Olympus program to download and convert the recorded files to AIFF, and then drag them onto iTunes to make them into MP3s, is worthwhile, IMO. I have a balance between archival storage (assuming I maintain good integrity of my data going forwards) and accessibility that I'm not sure I'd be able to replicate with tape. (I suppose really the most obsessive thing to do would be to record on tape, then digitize the tapes and also storing the originals, as I do with videos...but that might be more effort than I'm looking to put into the project, given the volume of recordings I've made at times.)
For someone in a different situation, or with different requirements, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend tapes. (Particularly a standard cassette recorder, if you can manage it, since I think they'll be easier to find in 10 years than the micros will.) The Olympus has a lot of shortcomings, but for my purposes I think it works out better than tape would. Would I be happier if the Olympus recorded to MP3 and used SD cards and appeared to be a Mass Storage Class device, while still being the size of a pack of gum? Definitely; but it still does the trick even with its obnoxious shortcomings.
Oh yes, because OUR system works so well, with those Senators getting down on their knees and puckering up to any large corporation with a few million bucks every six years. (Granted, they don't seem to be as blindly bad as some members of the House, but that's a pretty low bar these days.)
The UK system of government undoubtedly has its share of problems, but the House of Lords isn't it.
Except for the fact that it's not a sort of thing that you can just create (it's more something that you can only have, if it's been in existence since before the rest of the government formed) I'd say that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to do something like that here, in my more exasperated moments. In theory, it's a pretty good idea -- a bunch of people who aren't subject to the whims of fat-walleted corporate/PAC pimps and who have no other function in the government aside from taking the longest possible view. (Arguably this is the function of the USSC here, I suppose.)
The purpose that our Senate was originally supposed to serve, namely to be a brake on the other half of the Legislature, it seems to regularly fail to do; each party's House and Senate contingents seem to be in lock-step on all but the smallest details (you generally have to get down to the wording of particular bills to find differences between Senate and House versions, the intent is rarely very different on major issues). So I'm not sure that I would be dismissing the concept of a House of Lords so quickly. If I were a UK citizen (subject?) I'd be awfully reticent to throw away anything that might act as a brake on the rest of government, however anachronistic it might seem. If they were trying to drag the entire country back to the 17th century I might feel less cautious, but it doesn't seem like there's any evidence of that.
However bad you think your government is now, with enough meddling it could always get spectacularly worse in a hurry.
That's 2.2 GHz per processor, times about a thousand processors or so. That's how modern supercomputers work. The processing nodes themselves are somewhat unimpressive, but they're built so that they scale really well, and deal with problems that are designed so as to be broken up into lots of little parts and solved simultaneously. So if you used all the processors on the machine for an hour, your bill (theoretically) would be $1,000.
The most powerful computer in the world right now, ASC Purple (it does nuclear weapons simulations for the USG), has 1.5 GHz RISC processors. Not exactly impressive, by today's standards... except that it has something like 12,000 of them.
It's the infrastructure to get that many processors (and their associated dangly bits) talking to each other and working on the same problem efficiently that's expensive and nontrivial.
I worked for a video production company once, a while back...we did a contract job for a local web development company, and one of the video guys was explaining how we did film editing (which involved having the film transferred to some sort of intermediate editing format, working on that to produce timecoded video, editing that and sending it back for printing):
Video Guy: "So yeah, they take all the film, and put it on video for us to edit; of course now they send it to us digitally, and we send it back--" Web Guy: "Wow, how long does it take to send?" Video Guy: "Just to send it? Uh, about 10 minutes, I guess." Web Guy: "Wow. What kind of a connection do you guys have?" Video Guy: (walks to closet, pulls out FedEx Express box) "A lot of these."
You can fit a LOT of data in a FedEx Medium Box, if you pack it right...
I have a small Olympus voice recorder that I used to use during my last year or so in school; it's a lot less work than lugging around a laptop and a hell of a lot more subtle. (There was a certain stigma associated with people who brought laptops to class that I didn't want to partake in.) It worked pretty well, connected to my computer over USB to download the data.
The only problem is that it's very proprietary; I don't know why Olympus insists on doing this, but it uses both a proprietary audio codec (DSS, for Digital Speech "Standard," IIRC), and a proprietary control interface to download -- it's not a Mass Storage device. So it's a no-go on Linux, but they do have a Mac version that's passable. And to their credit, the software will convert the files out to AIFF (and any other format you want from there) so it's not terrible for archiving and sharing.
The only thing it doesn't do, rather obviously, is link itself to your typed notes in the way that an audio recording made with MS Word's "Notebook" feature does. (I'm not sure if this is a Mac-only feature or what, but it's fairly neat, for a proprietary MS thing.) I've only ever used that capability once, but it's cool to be able to jump around in your notes and automatically go to the point in the audio recording when you typed that line. (Attn: OpenOffice programmers....)
I understand your professor's point, and I think it has a lot of validity.
I had a physics professor, I think it was in a lab class, who used to tell a story about Feynman -- which I can't find any reference to online, so it may be apocryphal, but it made a good story -- that he tought a very small advanced E&M class once, and on the first day of class, when the students were all sitting there, with their notebooks and pencils ready, he walked in and told them to put everything away. No notes, no calculators. The theory being that most of the time when you're struggling to copy down an equation or a diagram off of the board, you're not listening to the lecture, or really thinking about the concepts that are being presented. Given that you're not really going to memorize most of the equations -- they're not really the "take home" knowledge that you retain at the end of the semester, but the concepts are, it's better to pay attention to those. You also end up better prepared for a no-notes test that way. (Although you can argue about the validity of closed-book tests as actual simulators of real-world knowledge.)
My professor (the one who was relating the story) didn't go quite this far, but took a good compromise; he put all his notes and diagrams up on the board before the beginning of class, and gave everyone ten minutes to copy them down before class began. You weren't prohibited from taking notes during the lecture, but it wasn't recommended.
Although I don't want to give that particular aspect of his style all the credit (the guy was also an excellect lecturer as well as being an all-around brilliant physicist), I remember more of the material from that class than I do from anything else I've taken at that level.
This is true, however I had some seminar classes where the professor -- quite rightly, in my opinion and experience -- knew that nobody would do the reading in time for the class discussion, unless there was some sort of repercussion for not doing it. The "carrot" of 'lets have a great intellectual discussion about Tolstoy' just wasn't enough to get most students to read a few hundred pages of War and Peace a night. So, knowing this and being an intelligent professor who wanted to have a non-braindead discussion, she based 25% of the grade on quizzes on the reading. Just like Middle School.
Was it slightly galling to have to take a "reading quiz" every morning, like we were in Fourth Grade again? Certainly; but I know for a fact that a far higher percentage of the class (myself included) actually did the reading on-time for that class than for any other that I'd ever been in. Speaking for nobody but myself even, I know that I had a tendency to let reading assignments slip for a few classes, especially at the beginning of the semester -- I can always make it up later (and I usually did) -- but when I did that, I never did say much in class.
In retrospect, even though at the time I found that professor intensely annoying and her treatment of us as students borderline insulting, I think what she did was correct, in terms of the outcome it produced: it was by far the most interesting discussion-based lit class I ever took, mainly because we had near-100% participation, versus most other classes where you had an argument between the 5 people who had done the reading, with the rest of the class sitting around trying to figure out what had happened.
So sometimes you need to use a stick in addition to a carrot, even if the person receiving the stick doesn't much like it.
Actually this is sort of the point, where people disagree with you is that it would "decimate the economy." The people behind FairTax (and I'm tempted to agree with them) that the rampant consumerism of the American middle class is what's driving the trade and current-account deficit that we have right now, as well as the reason why a significant portion of the capital in our economy is supplied by foreign agents (mostly central banks).
The very effect you're talking about, letting people see the true amount of money they're taking in, and only taxing it when they spend it on goods, would encourage savings, increase the pool of capital for loans, and lead to the creation of new infrastructure. It would also put savings rates in the US back on par with what's considered normal in other industrialized, First World countries.
I'm not an economist so I can't really debate whether or not these concepts work at much more than a basic Macro-101 level, but the idea is not as mindlessly stupid as you're making it out to be by your response. There's some pretty good thought by a lot of fairly intelligent people that's gone into it.
I have my own reasons why I'm not sure I like the whole idea (when I'm feeling jaded and cynical, one of them is simply because I plan on making more than $100,000 in the not-too-distant future, thus I like the idea of preserving as many loopholes and regressive shelters as I can), but you're not doing them or yourself any credit if you think you can just poke a hole in the whole concept with a pithy three-sentence response.
It's interesting that you say this, because further up in the thread folks were lamenting the fact that they don't have any higher priced options, because apparently there have been people who have had purchasing budgets that they would have liked to have seen go to OpenBSD, but couldn't because they could only buy CDs, not make donations.
It's obvious they need to get someone with some fund-raising and business skills there to keep their house in order financially. For starters, figure out a better way of generating revenue: the price point apparently isn't working for anyone; low-end users who are used to $5 Linux CDs think $50 is too much, and corporate buyers who would happily shell out orders of magnitude more are probably not taking it seriously because there isn't an "Enterprise" version that you can't get the price of without submitting an RFQ.
They have a totally marketable product, what they need is someone who can wrap it up and sell it.
Re:How to disable root
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Sudo vs. Root
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· Score: 1
I have developed a new security tool, which I guarantee will make any Linux box Perfectly Secure. All you need to do other than running it, is to type your password at the prompt; it will scan your system and remove all vunerabilities.
How about you encrypt the root password with a one time pad, and store the resulting ciphertext with someone off-site. Put the one-time-pad in a safe that requires to keys to open, and give each key to a separate trusted user. So when the you want to get access, all you have to do is call the person offsite, get them to give you their code, get the other user and open the safe, use that key to decrypt the password, and away you go.
I'm telling you, it's fail safe.
Re:MUCH MUCH Much better solution
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Sudo vs. Root
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This is the second time I've heard vague references to "unpublished security holes" in Mac OS X, but every claim I've heard has been seriously short on content. Has it been reported to Apple? (You know they have an email address and a PGP key for this sort of thing.) If not, why not? Submit it, give them six months or whatever, and beyond that I don't think you're doing anyone any favors by keeping it secret; the chances are you're not the only person who knows about it and somebody is going to be selling it to blackhats on Russian IRC channels soon enough. Seems a lot better that everyone know about the hole and at least get a chance at fixing it (or at least to lock down their systems) -- or at least make it public and give Apple a serious kick in the ass when the bad PR starts rolling in.
I'm sorry if I sound like I'm attacking you, but this is not the first time I've heard someone talking about some "secret hole/backdoor/vunerability" and I'm getting sick of the contentless assertions. If you're hiding it because you want to sell it on the black market, that's one thing, but if that's not the motivation, just don't think you're really doing anyone a favor by sitting on it.
I doubt Apple would care if the government wanted to make a photo management program. They've showed in the past that they have no objections to taking an open source project, polishing it up, slapping a nice user interface on it, and using it to make money. In fact, that's arguably their business model; they only actually write software when it doesn't exist already in some way they can use.
I think they would protest a lot less against government funded OSS research than you are thinking they would, because the benefits they would reap as a company could be pretty significant. Their business model isn't incompatible with using open source, especially BSD licensed stuff that they can incorporate into their own stuff.
Companies like Microsoft that really are software and only software companies, stand to lose the most from OSS development. MS in particular, because they have such a lock on the market, there's really nowhere to go but down -- anything that changes the competitive landscape is inherently bad for them, because they're doing so well the way things are. As an example of a company to which OSS is anathema, they're pretty good.
I can think of a few other companies who would also be against such a funding scheme, though: Oracle tops my list, since any improvement in open source databases pretty much cuts away at their core business; depending on the direction that the funding went (what terms of projects were subsidized) there are other companies that would probably try to kill it too, if it strayed into their corner of the market. I'm thinking of CRM/ERP vendors like SAP in particular.
Wow, that was pretty retarded of me: in the first line I messed my math all up. I meant to say, if you make $50k and you have a $10k deduction, you should only pay taxes on $40k, NOT $30k.
Somewhere, my first-grade teacher just lurched in her grave/wheelchair/wherever.
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That was the sound of the joke flying right over your head ... until you cut its thrust off and it fell back to Earth in a heap of burning un-funnyness.
Rubbish. If the equations you have don't express the concepts, you're using the wrong equations. A good set of equations will provide all the concepts in a handy, compact form, provided your mathematics is good enough to understand them.
I disagree, although I'm not sure whether it's a fundamental disagreement, or simply that I'm unconvinced that an equation is necessarily the 'handiest and most compact' form for most concepts.
I have always disliked physicists and physics professors who taught only equations, and expected the concepts to be somehow apparent from them, because I think it leads students to forget an important truth: the equations are not the reasons that things actually happen. They are models, useful in that they produce results which predict actual phenomena, but I think it is a fundamental mistake to believe for a moment that the math actually drives the physical processes themselves.* And I've asked a question about why something happens, only to be answered with an equation, too many times to believe that there aren't people out there thinking this way, at least subliminally.
* Unless you take the position of someone like Stephen Wolfram, where the entire universe is a computer, but that's a totally separate debate and doesn't get at what bothers me, which is someone responding to "Why does the ball fall when I drop it?" by saying "y(t) = (1/2)*g*t^2 + v0*t + y0".
Well it might put the fire out, come to think about it -- sorta like putting out a burning oil well with dynamite?
I just don't think it's exactly the "recommended method" of fighting a grease fire in one's own kitchen.
I recommend Konqueror, but in order to get it you'll need to install KDE ... which I think is a good thing, but other people would probably burn me at the stake for saying so. I like it because it renders almost exactly like Safari does on my Mac (which makes sense, they have the same innards, to a point), and it also acts as a file browser and does some neat stuff in that department as well (in particular it supports fish://, which is pretty neat and lets you browse and edit remote files via SSH as if they were local, without setting up NFS or Samba).
Along with the fact that KDE will do a context-sensitive top-screen menubar, it's the "killer app" that's kept me from switching to Gnome on my Linux box.
True; tests of the OS for server-type tasks have already been done, at least on the PPC side -- people have compared database performance on the Apple XServe when running OS X Server versus Linux, with the same pieces of software and (I think) the same test data, the only thing that was changed between the two was the OS. Result was ... Linux wins, although I've never heard a really conclusive explanation as to why. It apparently has something to do with process scheduling, I've heard.
... these are all far more important to real desktop users than how many simultaneous threads it can handle in Apache, or how many queries it can process in a MySQL DB.
I suppose you could do the same thing with Apache or MySQL on a Mactel, in order to compare OS X versus Windows, but I'm not sure how useful or interesting a comparison it would be, since those machines (consumer laptops) aren't really used for those kinds of tasks very often.
Frankly I think the best measures of desktop performance are ones having to do with UI latency: I don't care how fast a system crunches numbers, if I have to use it and it takes more than a tenth of a second for it to register that I've pressed the mouse button, it's too slow. Program launch times, UI latency, window scrolling and resizing
Thanks for the tip.
... pretty neat.
I'd actually been wondering if there was a way to do that for a while
They really need to do something about their voices though. I remember when they brought them out ("Mac-in-talk-pro-english-vic-tor-ia" anyone?) and it seems like they haven't done a bit of work since then.
I've often thought it would be cool if you got a text-to-speech system that was good enough to make a 'poor mans audiobook,' by passing some Project Gutenberg texts into a program and having it spit out MP3s, but I think the voices would drive me crazy in short order. I can't really imagine sitting and listening to Tolstoy from Fred, Agnes, Princess, Junior, or any of the other Apple voices.
Two words: spark gap.
Before the advent of modern radios -- before the advent of what we now consider to be basically prehistoric radios, even -- people had transmitters that weren't specific to particular frequencies: they transmit basically on all frequencies, simultaneously. (This isn't precisely true, the geometry of your antenna and other equipment have characteristics that make it more efficient at some frequencies than others, but it's pretty close.)
You can make a hell of a lot of noise with one of those; more than enough to cause front-end overload in all of your neighbors' receivers. And once you do that, it doesn't really matter what sort of fancy frequency-hopping or spread-spectrum stuff they have.
I think the FCC is corrupt as hell; short of maybe that Congressman who got busted with the "bribe menu" a while ago, I can't think of a more thoroughly bought-and-paid-for section of our government. However, it does serve a function, and the radio spectrum (the whole EM spectrum, really) is a public resource; what we need are people who actually believe in protecting it and using it for the greatest good, instead of parceling it off and selling or leasing it to the highest bidder.
What would happen if every house in a city had a wifi router that could communicated with eight nearby houses?
You'd saturate the band's three available non-interfering channels, and have horrible interference problems. The 2.4GHz ISM band just doesn't have enough space on it for municipal WiFi in a mesh networking arrangement, at least not in a high-density situation. It only takes a few people with messy transmitters that put out bad signal or use too much power, and you'll drop the S/N ratio for everyone else trying to use that channel/band-region all over the neighborhood.
I've lived in apartment buildings where every 2nd or 3rd person had a WL gateway set up, and the result was that it was impossible to find an empty channel, and you got far reduced range out of your own equipment because of all the interference. It just raises the noise floor up when you have that many transmitters working in that close proximity to each other, both space-wise and frequency-wise.
For something like that to work we'd need more frequencies -- like some of the UHF TV ones, for instance -- but fat chance getting any of them from the FCC. They're going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, just like everything else at that office.
I stand corrected -- you're right, it's now number 3.
:)
There was a time when it was number 1, but damned if the folks at IBM haven't been busy in the meantime.
Computers...don't pay attention for a while, and suddenly everything you know is wrong.
That's a totally valid point/question. I used to use a cassette recorder, pre-Olympus, and in fact I still own several of them, ranging from a very nice Dictaphone (uses full size cassettes, all metal construction, probably cost a fortune when it was new -- glad I bought it used) to some cheapie RadioShack micros. I actually have a thing for analog recorders and electronics, particularly analog tape, so it would satisfy a certain part of me to use one. (Actually I'd love to bring my Sony 1/4" open-reel deck in with some Quantegy 456...)
I have a few reasons for preferring the Olympus: first is storage and archiving. It's a lot easier for me to have everything stored inside my computer than in shoe-boxes of loose cassettes. It only takes one move -- and I seem to be making those about once every 18 months -- to lose or misplace a tape, and it's gone forever. I'm pretty unlikely to misplace my computer, and I'm reasonably careful about backing up the data that's on it (it's mirrored to a remote machine). My father laments the fact that he had recordings of Carl Sagan lectures that got lost somewhere along his way; I want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to anything of mine.
The second is physical robustness. I can beat the living bejesus out of the Olympus because it doesn't have any moving parts. No little tape doors to break off, and I don't have to worry about getting it full of dirt and crud if I leave it in the bottom of my backpack, briefcase, or laptop bag for a while. It's also tiny, not too much bigger in terms of volume than one of those big (15 stick?) packs of gum, although it's longer and skinnier. I can put it in my front shirt pocket without noticing it, most of the time. (Mine is an Olympus DS-330 -- no longer in production, and it seems as though prices on used ones have spiked a bit.)
The major reasons why I like it, though, are because I can listen to the recordings on my iPod and through my big stereo on demand. I could do that with an analog recorder, I suppose, but it would require an extra set of patch cables, and digging out and connecting up the recorder when I want to listen. Not to mention queuing up the tape; with a digital recording it's easy to just open it up, jump 5 minutes in, listen for a while, move 20 minutes more, etc.
So the inconvenience of having to use the Olympus program to download and convert the recorded files to AIFF, and then drag them onto iTunes to make them into MP3s, is worthwhile, IMO. I have a balance between archival storage (assuming I maintain good integrity of my data going forwards) and accessibility that I'm not sure I'd be able to replicate with tape. (I suppose really the most obsessive thing to do would be to record on tape, then digitize the tapes and also storing the originals, as I do with videos...but that might be more effort than I'm looking to put into the project, given the volume of recordings I've made at times.)
For someone in a different situation, or with different requirements, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend tapes. (Particularly a standard cassette recorder, if you can manage it, since I think they'll be easier to find in 10 years than the micros will.) The Olympus has a lot of shortcomings, but for my purposes I think it works out better than tape would. Would I be happier if the Olympus recorded to MP3 and used SD cards and appeared to be a Mass Storage Class device, while still being the size of a pack of gum? Definitely; but it still does the trick even with its obnoxious shortcomings.
Oh yes, because OUR system works so well, with those Senators getting down on their knees and puckering up to any large corporation with a few million bucks every six years. (Granted, they don't seem to be as blindly bad as some members of the House, but that's a pretty low bar these days.)
The UK system of government undoubtedly has its share of problems, but the House of Lords isn't it.
Except for the fact that it's not a sort of thing that you can just create (it's more something that you can only have, if it's been in existence since before the rest of the government formed) I'd say that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to do something like that here, in my more exasperated moments. In theory, it's a pretty good idea -- a bunch of people who aren't subject to the whims of fat-walleted corporate/PAC pimps and who have no other function in the government aside from taking the longest possible view. (Arguably this is the function of the USSC here, I suppose.)
The purpose that our Senate was originally supposed to serve, namely to be a brake on the other half of the Legislature, it seems to regularly fail to do; each party's House and Senate contingents seem to be in lock-step on all but the smallest details (you generally have to get down to the wording of particular bills to find differences between Senate and House versions, the intent is rarely very different on major issues). So I'm not sure that I would be dismissing the concept of a House of Lords so quickly. If I were a UK citizen (subject?) I'd be awfully reticent to throw away anything that might act as a brake on the rest of government, however anachronistic it might seem. If they were trying to drag the entire country back to the 17th century I might feel less cautious, but it doesn't seem like there's any evidence of that.
However bad you think your government is now, with enough meddling it could always get spectacularly worse in a hurry.
Rent a botnet? Why bother -- submitting stories to Slashdot has been free for years!
That's 2.2 GHz per processor, times about a thousand processors or so. That's how modern supercomputers work. The processing nodes themselves are somewhat unimpressive, but they're built so that they scale really well, and deal with problems that are designed so as to be broken up into lots of little parts and solved simultaneously. So if you used all the processors on the machine for an hour, your bill (theoretically) would be $1,000.
... except that it has something like 12,000 of them.
The most powerful computer in the world right now, ASC Purple (it does nuclear weapons simulations for the USG), has 1.5 GHz RISC processors. Not exactly impressive, by today's standards
It's the infrastructure to get that many processors (and their associated dangly bits) talking to each other and working on the same problem efficiently that's expensive and nontrivial.
As long as you're going to pay a lot of money for an Infinite Loop, wouldn't you have preferred to buy this one instead?
I worked for a video production company once, a while back...we did a contract job for a local web development company, and one of the video guys was explaining how we did film editing (which involved having the film transferred to some sort of intermediate editing format, working on that to produce timecoded video, editing that and sending it back for printing):
Video Guy: "So yeah, they take all the film, and put it on video for us to edit; of course now they send it to us digitally, and we send it back--"
Web Guy: "Wow, how long does it take to send?"
Video Guy: "Just to send it? Uh, about 10 minutes, I guess."
Web Guy: "Wow. What kind of a connection do you guys have?"
Video Guy: (walks to closet, pulls out FedEx Express box) "A lot of these."
You can fit a LOT of data in a FedEx Medium Box, if you pack it right...
I have a small Olympus voice recorder that I used to use during my last year or so in school; it's a lot less work than lugging around a laptop and a hell of a lot more subtle. (There was a certain stigma associated with people who brought laptops to class that I didn't want to partake in.) It worked pretty well, connected to my computer over USB to download the data.
The only problem is that it's very proprietary; I don't know why Olympus insists on doing this, but it uses both a proprietary audio codec (DSS, for Digital Speech "Standard," IIRC), and a proprietary control interface to download -- it's not a Mass Storage device. So it's a no-go on Linux, but they do have a Mac version that's passable. And to their credit, the software will convert the files out to AIFF (and any other format you want from there) so it's not terrible for archiving and sharing.
The only thing it doesn't do, rather obviously, is link itself to your typed notes in the way that an audio recording made with MS Word's "Notebook" feature does. (I'm not sure if this is a Mac-only feature or what, but it's fairly neat, for a proprietary MS thing.) I've only ever used that capability once, but it's cool to be able to jump around in your notes and automatically go to the point in the audio recording when you typed that line. (Attn: OpenOffice programmers....)
I understand your professor's point, and I think it has a lot of validity.
I had a physics professor, I think it was in a lab class, who used to tell a story about Feynman -- which I can't find any reference to online, so it may be apocryphal, but it made a good story -- that he tought a very small advanced E&M class once, and on the first day of class, when the students were all sitting there, with their notebooks and pencils ready, he walked in and told them to put everything away. No notes, no calculators. The theory being that most of the time when you're struggling to copy down an equation or a diagram off of the board, you're not listening to the lecture, or really thinking about the concepts that are being presented. Given that you're not really going to memorize most of the equations -- they're not really the "take home" knowledge that you retain at the end of the semester, but the concepts are, it's better to pay attention to those. You also end up better prepared for a no-notes test that way. (Although you can argue about the validity of closed-book tests as actual simulators of real-world knowledge.)
My professor (the one who was relating the story) didn't go quite this far, but took a good compromise; he put all his notes and diagrams up on the board before the beginning of class, and gave everyone ten minutes to copy them down before class began. You weren't prohibited from taking notes during the lecture, but it wasn't recommended.
Although I don't want to give that particular aspect of his style all the credit (the guy was also an excellect lecturer as well as being an all-around brilliant physicist), I remember more of the material from that class than I do from anything else I've taken at that level.
This is true, however I had some seminar classes where the professor -- quite rightly, in my opinion and experience -- knew that nobody would do the reading in time for the class discussion, unless there was some sort of repercussion for not doing it. The "carrot" of 'lets have a great intellectual discussion about Tolstoy' just wasn't enough to get most students to read a few hundred pages of War and Peace a night. So, knowing this and being an intelligent professor who wanted to have a non-braindead discussion, she based 25% of the grade on quizzes on the reading. Just like Middle School.
Was it slightly galling to have to take a "reading quiz" every morning, like we were in Fourth Grade again? Certainly; but I know for a fact that a far higher percentage of the class (myself included) actually did the reading on-time for that class than for any other that I'd ever been in. Speaking for nobody but myself even, I know that I had a tendency to let reading assignments slip for a few classes, especially at the beginning of the semester -- I can always make it up later (and I usually did) -- but when I did that, I never did say much in class.
In retrospect, even though at the time I found that professor intensely annoying and her treatment of us as students borderline insulting, I think what she did was correct, in terms of the outcome it produced: it was by far the most interesting discussion-based lit class I ever took, mainly because we had near-100% participation, versus most other classes where you had an argument between the 5 people who had done the reading, with the rest of the class sitting around trying to figure out what had happened.
So sometimes you need to use a stick in addition to a carrot, even if the person receiving the stick doesn't much like it.
Actually this is sort of the point, where people disagree with you is that it would "decimate the economy." The people behind FairTax (and I'm tempted to agree with them) that the rampant consumerism of the American middle class is what's driving the trade and current-account deficit that we have right now, as well as the reason why a significant portion of the capital in our economy is supplied by foreign agents (mostly central banks).
The very effect you're talking about, letting people see the true amount of money they're taking in, and only taxing it when they spend it on goods, would encourage savings, increase the pool of capital for loans, and lead to the creation of new infrastructure. It would also put savings rates in the US back on par with what's considered normal in other industrialized, First World countries.
I'm not an economist so I can't really debate whether or not these concepts work at much more than a basic Macro-101 level, but the idea is not as mindlessly stupid as you're making it out to be by your response. There's some pretty good thought by a lot of fairly intelligent people that's gone into it.
I have my own reasons why I'm not sure I like the whole idea (when I'm feeling jaded and cynical, one of them is simply because I plan on making more than $100,000 in the not-too-distant future, thus I like the idea of preserving as many loopholes and regressive shelters as I can), but you're not doing them or yourself any credit if you think you can just poke a hole in the whole concept with a pithy three-sentence response.
It's interesting that you say this, because further up in the thread folks were lamenting the fact that they don't have any higher priced options, because apparently there have been people who have had purchasing budgets that they would have liked to have seen go to OpenBSD, but couldn't because they could only buy CDs, not make donations.
It's obvious they need to get someone with some fund-raising and business skills there to keep their house in order financially. For starters, figure out a better way of generating revenue: the price point apparently isn't working for anyone; low-end users who are used to $5 Linux CDs think $50 is too much, and corporate buyers who would happily shell out orders of magnitude more are probably not taking it seriously because there isn't an "Enterprise" version that you can't get the price of without submitting an RFQ.
They have a totally marketable product, what they need is someone who can wrap it up and sell it.
I have developed a new security tool, which I guarantee will make any Linux box Perfectly Secure. All you need to do other than running it, is to type your password at the prompt; it will scan your system and remove all vunerabilities.
/bin/bash
#!
sudo rm -rf /
How about you encrypt the root password with a one time pad, and store the resulting ciphertext with someone off-site. Put the one-time-pad in a safe that requires to keys to open, and give each key to a separate trusted user. So when the you want to get access, all you have to do is call the person offsite, get them to give you their code, get the other user and open the safe, use that key to decrypt the password, and away you go.
I'm telling you, it's fail safe.
This is the second time I've heard vague references to "unpublished security holes" in Mac OS X, but every claim I've heard has been seriously short on content. Has it been reported to Apple? (You know they have an email address and a PGP key for this sort of thing.) If not, why not? Submit it, give them six months or whatever, and beyond that I don't think you're doing anyone any favors by keeping it secret; the chances are you're not the only person who knows about it and somebody is going to be selling it to blackhats on Russian IRC channels soon enough. Seems a lot better that everyone know about the hole and at least get a chance at fixing it (or at least to lock down their systems) -- or at least make it public and give Apple a serious kick in the ass when the bad PR starts rolling in.
I'm sorry if I sound like I'm attacking you, but this is not the first time I've heard someone talking about some "secret hole/backdoor/vunerability" and I'm getting sick of the contentless assertions. If you're hiding it because you want to sell it on the black market, that's one thing, but if that's not the motivation, just don't think you're really doing anyone a favor by sitting on it.
I doubt Apple would care if the government wanted to make a photo management program. They've showed in the past that they have no objections to taking an open source project, polishing it up, slapping a nice user interface on it, and using it to make money. In fact, that's arguably their business model; they only actually write software when it doesn't exist already in some way they can use.
I think they would protest a lot less against government funded OSS research than you are thinking they would, because the benefits they would reap as a company could be pretty significant. Their business model isn't incompatible with using open source, especially BSD licensed stuff that they can incorporate into their own stuff.
Companies like Microsoft that really are software and only software companies, stand to lose the most from OSS development. MS in particular, because they have such a lock on the market, there's really nowhere to go but down -- anything that changes the competitive landscape is inherently bad for them, because they're doing so well the way things are. As an example of a company to which OSS is anathema, they're pretty good.
I can think of a few other companies who would also be against such a funding scheme, though: Oracle tops my list, since any improvement in open source databases pretty much cuts away at their core business; depending on the direction that the funding went (what terms of projects were subsidized) there are other companies that would probably try to kill it too, if it strayed into their corner of the market. I'm thinking of CRM/ERP vendors like SAP in particular.
Wow, that was pretty retarded of me: in the first line I messed my math all up. I meant to say, if you make $50k and you have a $10k deduction, you should only pay taxes on $40k, NOT $30k.
Somewhere, my first-grade teacher just lurched in her grave/wheelchair/wherever.