While you have a point, I don't think sufficent resources have ever been thrown at the Wine/Cedega project, relative to the scope of what they're trying to accomplish. A Mac version, which could potentially offer a larger userbase than Linux, on a platform where there is a lot of history of users being willing to pay for software (you don't have the "if I wanted to pay for software, I'd run Windows" mentality, or the perception of it, which is just as bad), could do this.
Okay so maybe they'd never be able to achieve full parity with Windows -- there would always be that lag between when some new game comes out that uses DirectX (n+1) where n is the version of DirectX that DarWine supports -- but Mac users are used to version lag. Having a six month delay in order to run a PC game on a Mac is not a deal-breaker. (It sucks, but it's better than an infinite-month lag, which is kinda the current situation.)
Cedega is reasonably good, but (and I say this as a subscriber) I'm not really sure how many people they've got working there. They're funded off of the $5/mo. subscription fees, not off of actual software "sales" in the shrinkwrapped-box sense. I think this is because they feel that an actual boxed version would be a tough sell to the Linux crowd...well, it wouldn't be to Mac users. Even if you just printed, right on the box, which games it would and wouldn't work with, and made no promises whatsoever of future compatibility, I think you'd still move product at $50 a pop.
The other path a company could take, would be marketing a "Mac compatibility kit" for game developers. Game companies aren't stupid -- they don't ignore the Mac platform because of some deep-seated hate of Steve Jobs (at least I don't think they do), it's because porting to the Mac is thought of as too expensive an endeavor for too little return. If you could lower the cost of porting, by essentially having a sort of binary "wrapper" for Windows games, tweaked for performance with that particular game, you could develop a Mac version quite quickly. The end user would never really see the Cedega-like product, it would be all behind-the-scenes. They'd click an icon in Mac OS X, the game would run. Each Mac game would come wrapped in its own little version of DarWine, so you'd never have to worry about hack for game x breaking compatibility for game y. Support development with a per-unit licensing cost on the game sold (which you could pass along to the Mac users, they'll pay extra). The game company gets to make a little money, and Mac users get their version.
Based on what I've read, this feature is not implemented on the chips used in the new iMacs.
At some point in the future, though, it may become an option, but it's not going to help anyone out who's buying a Mac today.
Personally I think that Darwine (or something like it) is really the solution that's going to work best for most people. I use Cedega on a x86 Linux system and it works pretty well, given the limited resources that the Transgaming people have to throw at the problem (compared to the vast resources which Microsoft apparently puts to the task of constantly changing their APIs, and ton of games that people expect to be able to run).
The market for such a product on the Mac is huge. Frankly, if it worked well, and was kept reasonably up-to-date, and had a good GUI and support, the impact it could have on the Macintosh platform in general is far from trivial.
Nobody in their right mind really wants to run Windows on Apple hardware -- what they want is to run Windows applications on their Apple hardware. That's what we should really be holding out the fat purse of cash for -- whoever can produce a binary-compatibility later to run (some specified range or variety of) Windows applications, from within Mac OS X, without rebooting. Everyone has their personal list of "Windows-only apps I wish I could run"...put it to a vote, pick 20 or so, and have that be the goal.
This basically is the answer to the question behind the first ~100 or so posts (mine included).
So it's not an irrecoverable "bricking" problem, but it does get close.
I wonder if it's possible, rather than reformatting the HD, to put it into another machine and just wipe the partition with the bad NVRAM image on it. Not that it really matters in a test environment (which I hope is the only place anyone would ever try this), where you'd probably want to reformat and reinstall anyway, but I just wonder if it's possible.
Yes I was wondering about this also... but I don't think it will work since the computer won't even boot far enough to start reading the hard drive. It's a one-way path, you can't re-flash the NVRAM from the hard drive after you've screwed it up so that it won't boot.
I think the only solution -- and perhaps there's some catch-22 that keeps this from working also -- is to de-solder the NVRAM (I'm assuming here that they're not in sockets...?) and re-flash it manually using a programmer of some sort, or by swapping it into a working Mac.
On a test machine that was going to get used for this a lot, I can imagine it might be worthwhile to install some sort of socket for the NVRAM...if that's even possible.
Seems like the socket ought to be the thing that you'd prefer to destroy, rather than the chip...no?
When I had EEPROMs stuck or glued in sockets -- really stuck -- and we needed what was on the EEPROMs, our solution was to remove the board, desolder and remove the socket from the board, and put the whole socket assembly into the reader/programmer. If you were really desperate to get at the physical chip, or the socket wouldn't fit in the reader, Dremel time. Afterwards, new socket.
I've always found that the worst part of desoldering a part (I'm talking regular DIPs here, not surface-mount crap) was getting the board out and disconnected from everything else. Once you have it laid out on your workbench, provided you have good light, a heatsink, a good desoldering iron and a reasonably steady hand, desoldering itself was always the least of the operation. Of course it probably helped that we had a very nice workbench set up for soldering and desoldering. Doing it on your dining room table with a $15 radioshack iron might be a lot more painful.
That is really a bad example. What happens if someone that is acting like a total idiot on the road loses it and stoves into your car? You might not walk away if you arent wearing your seatbelt.
Well that would be just my goddamn problem then, wouldn't it? It's nobody else's business whether I get myself killed or not.
The only possible justification for seatbelt usage is if somebody could prove that, in the event I drive my car into somebody else's car, that my unrestrained body somehow increases the risk of somebody else getting hurt. And although I don't know the statistics, I'm going to bet that the risk of bystander-hit-by-unrestrained-passenger-in-MVA injuries is pretty low.
I think it's fair that the government mandate that automakers install seatbelts, so that they're available for people to use. Personally, I would use a seatbelt whether they were mandated or not, because I value my life, and even though I'm a safe driver, there are a lot of crazy, stupid people out there. But that doesn't mean I have a right to tell anyone else whether or not to use one, and if I were to drive into somebody else's car, I'd be responsible for their injuries regardless of whether or not they were wearing one (just like I'd be responsible for a person's injuries if I hit them in a crosswalk, regardless of whether they were 95 pounds or 345 pounds and wearing impact-absorbing body armor).
Don't be an idiot. That's not what he was saying -- the actual fact of the matter is that, while the LAPD officers were obviously in the wrong to have beaten the crud out of him, Rodney King was not the saint he's commonly held up to be. He was driving 115MPH while drunk and with two other people in the car.
There's no excuse for what happened, but there seems to be this public misconception that the LAPD just grabbed King out of church one morning to beat the shit out of him.
According to the Wikipedia article, (which based on the usual Wikipedia left-leaning bias, ought to be in his favor) "Since the 1991 incident, King has been arrested several times for drug infractions, spousal abuse, soliciting a prostitute and motoring offenses. Although he received $3.8 million in a civil suit against the LAPD, he is currently bankrupt and living in a drug rehab center."
Should he have gotten beaten up by the police? No. But that doesn't mean that he ought to be canonized along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. If the police had done their job and hadn't greviously violated his civil rights, he'd probably be in jail.
I think that's the point that the GP was trying to make.
I think that we're missing the point by focusing on the "violence" aspect of games. I think the impact of violence on children is mostly overstated, while at the same time nobody wants to go after the real problem: that we as a society (particularly in entertainment) have become fixated recently on the glorification of antisocial behavior.
It's not a totally new phenomenon -- I think the anti-hero has always had a strong place in American culture -- but I think there is a difference between the glorification of crime in 'Public Enemy' and in Grand Theft Auto. Or frankly, between any amount of movie violence and a video game which actually puts a person into the position of a criminal, and encourages them to succeed.
I don't think that video games are "crime trainers" in the literal sense, but I think it's leading to an increasingly warped sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Perhaps the games are not the cause, but merely a symptom of a more deep-rooted malaise or cynicism; that's further than I'd care to speculate.
But I think it's pointless to point the finger at violence, as if that's the problem. It's not. Violence -- in and of itself, in an abstract sense -- isn't good or bad, it's just a fact of life, something that exists, like the weather. You can see what I'd consider "violent" things on Animal Planet (find some good uncensored footage of a lion ripping the intestines out of a gazelle and tell me that's not violent). What is a lot more serious is that we've seem to given up on what was always a common tenet througout all the games of 'cops and robbers,' 'cowboys and indians,' (maybe 'SWAT vs Terrorists' today?) that I ever played -- that the good guys are always supposed to win.
That kids are not having the idea instilled in them by society and their peers that there is an inherent moral superiority and rightness to the Good Guys position -- whoever they are -- is in the long run a lot more troubling than whether they see somebody's simulated head get blown apart on a monitor.
As I suggested in an earlier post, one possible route you can take (and perhaps you've already thought of this) is just to use multiple words in the Genre field. So essentially, use it like a Keywords field rather than a specific Genre.
It's not quite as convenient as a iPhoto-style keywords selector would be, but if you've used the particular combination of keywords that you want to enter on another song before, iTunes will auto-complete it. (So if you've typed "Alternative Goth Metal" on another song, iTunes will offer to auto-complete once you've typed enough of the entry so that it's unique).
You'll want to put some thought into which categories you put first, if you actually like to view your music library as a list sorted by Genre (since it will sort based on the first genre in the field), but if you just search and filter by genre, this works well. Typing either "Alternative" or "Goth" or "Metal" will bring up a song that's tagged "Alternative Goth Metal".
This won't work if your songs have ID3 v1 tags, though, since I think those were limited to one byte in length or something. Or rather, if you do this to a song with old tags, iTunes will silently update the file to the new tag format -- only a problem if you have a very old MP3 player or something.
My solution, in iTunes anyway, is just to use multiple Genres in the tag.
So if I'm not sure if a song is (for example) Metal or Alternative, I just tag it "Alternative Metal". That way searching for either "Alternative" or "Metal" in iTunes will bring up the song.
I'm not sure what the character limit is for the Genre field, but it's been enough for me to get several tags in there at once, on my more eclectic songs.
The obvious shortfall of this method is that if you SORT by Genre, as opposed to Filtering/Searching, then the song will only appear once in the sorted list, by whichever genre you put first (so in the above example, it would be Alternative). However I've found that most people, especially once they get a few thousand songs, find it more convenient to filter for a specific genre than sort and scroll for it.
If you wanted to be slightly more anal retentive, just consider the first genre you put down the "primary" one, and then the others as "secondary" ones; therefore having it sorted by its primary genre seems more logical.
I was following you throughout most of your post, but what I don't get is how USB keys change the situation from how it is with a big pile of floppy disks.
You say that the problem would occur when there's a big bin of USB keys, and employees just start using them and not wiping them afterwards. Well, there'd be that same problem with any other kind of rewritable media, including floppy disks. I don't think the situation is new or unique at all. The only thing that's changed is the capacity of the media, but with the corresponding increase in the size of files (write a 10p formatted document in Word, save a few versions, maybe do some track-changes, and look at how big it's gotten) I don't think that people are apt to have much more sensitive data on a USB key than they did 10 years ago on a 3.5" HD-DS floppy.
The problem here isn't technological, it's behavioral. If you can't trust your employees with sensitive data, then it doesn't matter what kind of media you use, you're going to have security problems. Likewise, if you do trust your employees with sensitive data, and provided they're trained in the right procedures, you shouldn't have problems. I.e., if you leave a bin of USB keys sitting around, people need to know not to throw a key back in the bin after they're done with it, without erasing it first. In my opinion, anyone with two brain cells to rub together ought to realize this without being told.
If you can't trust your employees to do something that elementary, then they probably can't be allowed any removable media at all -- whether floppies, USB keys, CD-R/Ws, iPods, or anything else. Probably they shouldn't even have pencils and notebooks, unless you're going to look through them as they enter and exit the building.
I've worked in positions where I've been exposed to a lot of sensitive information, and I've never been patted down at the door for USB keys or floppy disks, or had my iPod inspected. My issued computer had a CD-R/W drive, and there were stacks of blank CD-Rs in the supply room for making backups. There wasn't any attempt made to limit access to things like that, because to do so always has some impact in another area -- people do use USB keys and CD-Rs for useful stuff (taking a powerpoint presentation to a un-networked kiosk, for instance). However everyone was trained in how to deal with sensitive/confidential information. Everyone knew that if you disclosed or leaked info, that you'd be fired, and depending on the information might end up answering some really pointed questions in an uncomfortably well-lit room. In the time I was there, I never heard of an inadvertent loss or disclosure of confidential material, aside from one laptop that was stolen. (And in that case the employee wasn't to blame, he was mugged, or so I heard.)
These sort of kneejerk responses to information-security, like banning USB keys and whatnot, seem symptomatic of institutions that for some reason, have decided that their employees cannot be trusted. And if that's the case, they need to rethink their hiring, firing, and compensation processes, and figure out how to recruit people that are actually trustworthy and can deal with the responsibility of accessing the type of information that their job requires. If you can't trust someone to not copy the Confidential HR Spreadsheet to a USB key and not delete it, then they shouldn't be looking at that spreadsheet in the first place. (Because that's exactly the sort of person that's going to accidentally CC it to the whole company, or something else equally embarassing, given enough time.)
And before you say it, no, winmodems aren't modems no matter how you cut it.
This is so true.
One of the few things that I thought Apple did right, back in the dark Amelio days, was when they brought out their version of what was effectively a Winmodem, they called the "GeoPort Telcom Adaptor;" they didn't actually call it a 'modem.' Frankly I think their nomenclature was about right: it's just a sort of physical adaptor that goes between your phone line and your computer, and the rest is done in software. Very little modifying/demodifying of any significance is going on. It's unfortunate that the Winmodem manufacturers weren't similarly inclined.
I have heard that there are some new Ethernet "cards" (mostly built into motherboards) that have started to take this route; they don't have much intelligence at all, but offload the traditional network-card stuff back to the processor. I've never run across one personally, but it seems like the logical route that a cut-rate PC vendor would go.
Well, I'm glad somebody finally came out and said it. That's been my experience also.
I have a HP Workstation with what I thought was a Linux-compatible WL PCI card in it, of course when I got the card home and out of the box, I read the small print -- this was the "new and improved" version 3, and only versions 1 and 2 were compatible with native Linux drivers.
So I'm stuck using ndiswrapper. Which does work, just not very well or conveniently. Changing from one network to another is a 10-minute process involving multiple "coffee breaks" (click on something, wait several minutes) and a full reboot. That's right, a complete reboot -- on a system which otherwise never, ever gets rebooted. I'm just glad it's not a laptop, at least as a desktop this setup is usable, since the network's SSID never changes.
To say that Linux wireless is a little "rough around the edges" (this seems to be the party line on a lot of forums) is a bit of an understatement, in my opinion. It's terrible, and while I do blame the manufacturers for producing undocumented products, its the users who end up holding the bag and Linux that ends up looking bad.
Here's my thought for a 'solution,' or at least a stopgap: the problem isn't that Linux-compatible WL cards don't exist, it's that they're very hard to find and poorly marked. (Witness my "v3" problem.) What somebody with a lot of money needs to do, either an enterprising individual or an organization, is find a manufacturer that makes a well-supported WL card (one that uses a Prism chipset, probably) and contract to buy a production run of them in OEM packaging. Call them whatever you want, toss them in a white box with a driver CD, and sell them for $20 more than they cost.
The community doesn't need support for every brand and flavor and revision and chipset of WL card out there. What we need is one card that's available for more than six months that's easy to get ahold of and actually works. The Linux hardware review sites do part of this, but they don't really let you actually buy the part -- you're stuck trying to find a source for the correct version/revision card yourself, and SOL if you can't find it (as is the case with many of the older "known good" Prism cards).
As I've said in other posts, look at the other major non-Windows platform and the reputation it has for wireless connectivity -- the Mac. Macs only have ONE TYPE of wireless card. They avoid the manufacturer issue altogether by just OEMing one or two chipsets, selling it at a ridiculous premium, and building the driver support into the OS. And it works beautifully; I've yet to find a Mac user who doesn't think that their Airport card wasn't worth the $90 they spent on it. (Okay except for some hackers who want the ability to grab raw frames...)
We can blame the manufacturers all we want, but it's obvious that as a group they're going to ignore the Linux platform. However, there's a demand for Linux wireless cards that actually work without hassle or confusion, and they do exist, they're just hard to find. Somebody with the right amount of capital and connections needs to match the two up.
I think if we didn't have patents, the whole legal framework we have surrounding pharmaceuticals would fall apart.
The drug companies would demand a relaxation of disclosure rules, or threaten to simply stop developing new drugs.
It's silly to pursue the argument too far, because it's such a unlikely hypothetical that at a certain point it just becomes a straw man, but I think that if you magically eliminated patents altogether and just watched to see where the pieces would fall, the end result would be a much more secretive pharmaceutical industry. And the government, which not only is paid hugely by the pharmaceutical industry directly, but also realizes that drugs and medicine are one of the few things at which the U.S. is a leader at, and therefore there has a strong national interest in maintaining, would let them do whatever they need to stay in business.
You'd probably end up with some sort of weird compromise, where drugs were tested but with only certain NDA-ed individuals knowing the true compositions. There would still be statistical evidence to prove that a given drug was effective, and given the same pills the trials would be replicable, but the formulation would be secret. In short it would basically be what "pharmaceuticals" were for many hundreds of years -- every producer would have their pet formulations, and some would be known to work better than others, even if nobody really understands how or why. It's still possible to have drug trials without knowing the composition (or method of action) of the drug -- what it really hurts is the development of new drugs, since it shuts down the way we learn how drugs work.
You seem to be regarding the FDA, and laws in general, as fixed and inviolate. I think you'd find that if a large sector of the American economy were about to collapse, those laws would suddenly become a lot more flexible.
At any rate, it's all speculation -- patents aren't going to go away, so it's rather a silly exercise. The best result (IMO) is that there's a serious rethinking of what we allow to be patented, and think about how best to maximize invention and development.
Based on my reading of that story, in California you can apparently petition a board (the "Victim Compensation and Government Claim's Board") for compensation in the event that you're the victim of something. This guy did that, and convinced the Board to award him $100 a day. As I've never heard of that before (and heard of several cases where people were exonerated via DNA and didn't receive a dime), I'm willing to bet that it's some State of California construct. The story doesn't say anything about the person actually suing the state in civil court or anything.
I suppose in theory however it would be possible for a state legislature to pass laws exempting that state's government from immunity to civil suits. I've never heard of it being done, but you'd have to ask a Constitutional law scholar whether a statute like that on the State level would be allowable (i.e. can a State government purposely open itself up to lawsuits which are prohibited via "sovereign immunity" doctrine?). I think the answer would be no, based on the way the USSC has historically interpreted the 11th Amendment (in particular, Hans v. Louisiana, 134 US 1 (1890)).
At any rate, I was speaking in my original post about the Federal government in particular; whether the situation is the same with various State and local governments would probably depend on the local laws.
Re:Patnets brought to their logical conclusion
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Supreme Court spurns RIM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If you think patents are bad, just imagine what the trade secrets would look like if they weren't around. Getting in the door to Pfizer would be like crossing Checkpoint Charlie.
Companies wouldn't stop doing R&D, but they would close up all the doors and windows and try to hang on to their hard-won IP, tooth and nail. You probably wouldn't be able to get a job sweeping the floors or cleaning the fish tanks at any place that did anything significant without signing an NDA and a non-compete. Plus you'd have the heavy stick that are the penalties for de-valuing someone's trade secrets.
Unless your vision of a patentless world also includes provisions for a NDA-less world and a noncompete-less world, it's going to be one hell of an ugly place. And if you're planning on rewriting all of contract law (which is what you'd need, to get rid of non-competes and NDAs), then I'll take a little of whatever you're smoking, because it must be some great shit.
Software patents suck. I'll agree with that; whoever let that one go through should be run out of Washington on a rail. Business process patents suck. The whole concept of "you can patent anything" that seems to be in vogue at the USPTO, sucks. But the concept of patents itself isn't flawed, when considered in the context of our society -- it worked well for almost 200 years, and put the U.S. through a period of unrivaled discovery and scientific/engineering development. Without that, you would have had every major 20th century invention closeted up somewhere until its designer could figure out a way to "black box" it and protect their discovery. Patents give people an assurance that it's OK to publish an idea, because they'll be party to any money that gets made off of it, for a time. Otherwise they'd have to keep their invention secret until they'd personally tried every way they could think of to milk cash from it.
Sure, people made great works of art and invented things before patents. But the market was also a lot different back then -- you didn't have the stock market grinding up and spitting out companies that didn't perform well on a daily basis. Even then, though, there were more trade secrets than there were today; there are paintings and ceramics which even today can't be recreated, because the formulas used to create them were never published because of fear of competition. (One example.) History is full of dead-ends, many only discovered years or centuries later, of people who discovered things but sat on them for one reason or another.
A world without patents would be a pretty ugly place; it would be one where you'd probably never be quite sure what was in that pill you just swallowed or how the epoxied-shut black box on your desk worked. It would be one where joining a company was more like getting sworn in to the Freemasons, and industrial espionage would probably be perpetrated on a scale never before imagined.
There is simply no way that we can get rid of them, without completely rewriting our legal, economic, and probably also social systems. Anybody who says that patents can simply be made to 'go away' is living in a dreamland -- it's like wishing for money to go away, because you don't like being poor. It might fly in a college classroom, or other place equally insulated from the outside world (K5, Slashdot), but it has no value in real life.
Short answer, no. You basically cannot sue the Government or a Government agency directly. It has soverign immunity under the Constitution from most civil suits.
However, there is an exception, called the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows people to sue the Government for negligence in some situations:
The FTCA provides a limited waiver of the federal government's sovereign immunity when its employees are negligent within the scope of their employment. Under the FTCA, the government can only be sued 'under circumstances where the United States, if a private person, would be liable to the claimant in accordance with the law of the place where the act or omission occurred.' 28 U.S.C. S 1346(b). Thus, the FTCA does not apply to conduct that is uniquely governmental, that is, incapable of performance by a private individual.
The Government would have a pretty easy argument in this case that the USPTO's function is "uniquely governmental" in that it enforces a duty of the Government that's enumerated in the Constitution (that whole "useful arts" bit that always gets dragged up). Whether or not they do their job well doesn't enter into it -- the intended method of influencing the Government's performance is through the ballot box, not the jury box.
This is also the reason why you can't sue the Government if you were wrongly accused of murder and held in prison for 20 years before being exonerated by DNA evidence or something. The Government was doing its job (however poorly), therefore you can't sue it/them.
I guess I'm a "casual" WoW player, at least in comparison to others here (which might be like saying that one is a 'casual' junkie, in relation to the people in the lobby of a detox facility), but I find the jargon used in chat very confusing. It's not exactly transparent -- the acronyms mostly make sense, it doesn't take a genius to figure most of them out -- but there are some times when I wish there was a dictionary. Perhaps someone has created one, somewhere.
I'm posting this in response to your post, because I saw you use the word "nerf," which I've now seen a bunch of times and can't figure out. I understand it refers to a change in the game by the developer that adversely impacts a person's character...? It's not something like an acronym where the meaning can be easily backed out of the word.
Anyway, more generally my point is just that I don't think experienced players are aware of how steep the 'social learning curve' is for new players. Given the emphasis on teamwork in WoW in particular, this is a bit off-putting when you're new.
Also, I think if a person started watching TV at the expense of going to work or doing social activities, it wouldn't be classified as "TV addiction," they'd just be "depressed." And probably get some medication and counseling.
However a person that plays a computer game for an equivalent amount of time is just viewed as socially retarded.
I'm going to disagree with you, just as a personal opinion.
I prefer the light from the modern compact fluorescents to incandescents -- I find that rooms just seem a lot "sunnier" when lit with the higher-color-temperature lamps. I'm not talking about the old greenish/blue-white ones, they're pretty disgusting, but the last few "warm fluorescent" ones I picked up at Home Depot are a lot nicer than the incandescent lights I replaced. I think they're around 4000-5000K, and going back to 2800K (typical incandescents) isn't even an option. They just seem too yellow now.
Granted, I don't have much in the way of direct lighting -- I have mostly torchiers and 3-lamp 'pole lights' aimed up at the walls and/or cieling, so perhaps if you had nothing but direct light it wouldn't work as well. I also can't stand being in a dimly lit room; I have what would be the incandescent equivalent of 750W of lighting in about 250 square feet. If it was actually all incandescent, not only would I be broke from the power bill, but the room would probably be uncomfortably warm. (And possibly it would be a fire hazard as well.)
But since installing the CFL bulbs I've noticed I'm just a lot less tired, and less dependent on the weather outside -- it used to be that if it was a really dark, overcast day outside that the room would be noticably more dim; with more lighting I can just close the blinds and have basically the same illumination available as if it was a sunny day outside.
I also wouldn't want a TV that required a manual power switch on the front to turn it on and off. I have several TVs in odd positions (on top of book cases, etc.) throughout my house, and they would be a lot more of a pain to use if I had to touch them in order to start using them. If they didn't have standby, I'd probably just switch them to the DVD player's "screen saver" when I wasn't using them instead of turning them off.
Anyway, I'm not arguing with you, just offering a contrary opinion. To each his own, I suppose.
IIRC, "instant on" in the context of vacuum tubes means keeping the tube heaters running constantly, but not anything else. Since the tube heaters are usually run off of a separate tap on the main power transformer, without any rectification, it's pretty easy to design the system so that they're switched separately. Once they're heated up, you can start using them pretty much immediately.
This also lengthens the life of the tubes, since what kills them is usually related to heating and cooling cycles more than anything else. Some of the longest-lived vacuum tubes you'll find are in applications where they're never turned off. (Someplace on the net I read that the standing record for a single vacuum tube is from the output stage of some VHF TV station's amplifier in California; it ran 24/7 for upwards of a decade. I can't find the link now, though.)
Plus, you get that nice warm glow out of the back of the case when you leave them on at night.:)
The only difference is the AMD laptop chips use more power, but you can always plug in somewhere and recharge so really this is no disadvantage.
Just because someone further up in the thread was discussing the MacBook, I thought I'd point out that this attitude may not hold with Mac users at all. Apple laptops have never been speed demons (at least not recently -- once upon a time they were the fastest notebooks around, but that was a while ago) but they've always had really good battery life.
I got issued a company PC notebook, and was absolutely appalled by the battery life. I'm used to being able to take my iBook out and get at least 3 hours out of it, and it's not very new. And that's with WiFi turned on, doing things that access the hard drive, etc. My Intel notebook, which I've been told is pretty typical, runs hotter than a pancake griddle and won't run for an hour from a full charge, if you're using WiFi and doing anything that involves disk I/O.
I've noticed different usage habits in PC notebook users as well -- most people seem to use them not as "laptop" computers, but really as "portable desktops." They move from one outlet to another, nomad-style. Mac users seem more willing to just pop it open and start working on any flat surface, or just right on their laps.
I didn't pay for my PC laptop, so I'm not really in a position to complain one way or the other, but I find its performance -- and the mindset that goes behind designing something like it -- unacceptable. When I buy a portable computer, it better damn well be able to last three hours under normal usage without being plugged in, and by 'normal,' I mean full clock speed, WiFi, and disk use. That mainstream consumers have gotten used to anything less is unfortunate, but I don't think Mac users have.
Therefore I think that one reason why Intel may still be the mobile architecture of choice to a company like Apple has a lot to do with power consumption, perhaps moreso than it does with performance.
To be less cynical, it DID look like a good concept for a certain period of time -- people saw digital as this "clean slate" where they could wipe clean about 50 years of photographic history; digital means smaller sensors, that means less glass, so in theory cheaper lenses -- oh, and let's just have one mount, so anybody's lenses will fit any camera. You could have a Minolta body and use Pentax or Canon lenses -- how cool would that be? No vendor lock-in, ever.
It was a great idea, except that Canon and Nikon were basically uninterested; after all, they had a lot of customers heavily invested in their existing lens mounts, and who cared more about backwards-compatibility with their existing equipment than they did with vendor-neutrality going forward. If memory serves, the only companies who really got behind the new-format DSLR lenses were Minolta and Pentax (and probably Sigma, but they pretty much make any lens mount in existence). That wasn't enough to save it, and in the meantime it really alienated Minolta's existing film customers. ("What, you mean I'll have to buy new lenses when you do get a DSLR to market? Screw it, I'll buy a Nikon then.")
It would have been interesting if the whole plan had worked out -- I remember a lot of trade publications were just gushing over the concept when it was first introduced -- but in the end I think it will be remembered as one of the major missteps that killed Minolta.
Slashdot Mirror
While you have a point, I don't think sufficent resources have ever been thrown at the Wine/Cedega project, relative to the scope of what they're trying to accomplish. A Mac version, which could potentially offer a larger userbase than Linux, on a platform where there is a lot of history of users being willing to pay for software (you don't have the "if I wanted to pay for software, I'd run Windows" mentality, or the perception of it, which is just as bad), could do this.
Okay so maybe they'd never be able to achieve full parity with Windows -- there would always be that lag between when some new game comes out that uses DirectX (n+1) where n is the version of DirectX that DarWine supports -- but Mac users are used to version lag. Having a six month delay in order to run a PC game on a Mac is not a deal-breaker. (It sucks, but it's better than an infinite-month lag, which is kinda the current situation.)
Cedega is reasonably good, but (and I say this as a subscriber) I'm not really sure how many people they've got working there. They're funded off of the $5/mo. subscription fees, not off of actual software "sales" in the shrinkwrapped-box sense. I think this is because they feel that an actual boxed version would be a tough sell to the Linux crowd...well, it wouldn't be to Mac users. Even if you just printed, right on the box, which games it would and wouldn't work with, and made no promises whatsoever of future compatibility, I think you'd still move product at $50 a pop.
The other path a company could take, would be marketing a "Mac compatibility kit" for game developers. Game companies aren't stupid -- they don't ignore the Mac platform because of some deep-seated hate of Steve Jobs (at least I don't think they do), it's because porting to the Mac is thought of as too expensive an endeavor for too little return. If you could lower the cost of porting, by essentially having a sort of binary "wrapper" for Windows games, tweaked for performance with that particular game, you could develop a Mac version quite quickly. The end user would never really see the Cedega-like product, it would be all behind-the-scenes. They'd click an icon in Mac OS X, the game would run. Each Mac game would come wrapped in its own little version of DarWine, so you'd never have to worry about hack for game x breaking compatibility for game y. Support development with a per-unit licensing cost on the game sold (which you could pass along to the Mac users, they'll pay extra). The game company gets to make a little money, and Mac users get their version.
Based on what I've read, this feature is not implemented on the chips used in the new iMacs.
At some point in the future, though, it may become an option, but it's not going to help anyone out who's buying a Mac today.
Personally I think that Darwine (or something like it) is really the solution that's going to work best for most people. I use Cedega on a x86 Linux system and it works pretty well, given the limited resources that the Transgaming people have to throw at the problem (compared to the vast resources which Microsoft apparently puts to the task of constantly changing their APIs, and ton of games that people expect to be able to run).
The market for such a product on the Mac is huge. Frankly, if it worked well, and was kept reasonably up-to-date, and had a good GUI and support, the impact it could have on the Macintosh platform in general is far from trivial.
Nobody in their right mind really wants to run Windows on Apple hardware -- what they want is to run Windows applications on their Apple hardware. That's what we should really be holding out the fat purse of cash for -- whoever can produce a binary-compatibility later to run (some specified range or variety of) Windows applications, from within Mac OS X, without rebooting. Everyone has their personal list of "Windows-only apps I wish I could run"...put it to a vote, pick 20 or so, and have that be the goal.
Concetrating on dual-booting is a red herring.
Mod parent up.
This basically is the answer to the question behind the first ~100 or so posts (mine included).
So it's not an irrecoverable "bricking" problem, but it does get close.
I wonder if it's possible, rather than reformatting the HD, to put it into another machine and just wipe the partition with the bad NVRAM image on it. Not that it really matters in a test environment (which I hope is the only place anyone would ever try this), where you'd probably want to reformat and reinstall anyway, but I just wonder if it's possible.
Yes I was wondering about this also ... but I don't think it will work since the computer won't even boot far enough to start reading the hard drive. It's a one-way path, you can't re-flash the NVRAM from the hard drive after you've screwed it up so that it won't boot.
I think the only solution -- and perhaps there's some catch-22 that keeps this from working also -- is to de-solder the NVRAM (I'm assuming here that they're not in sockets...?) and re-flash it manually using a programmer of some sort, or by swapping it into a working Mac.
On a test machine that was going to get used for this a lot, I can imagine it might be worthwhile to install some sort of socket for the NVRAM...if that's even possible.
Seems like the socket ought to be the thing that you'd prefer to destroy, rather than the chip...no?
When I had EEPROMs stuck or glued in sockets -- really stuck -- and we needed what was on the EEPROMs, our solution was to remove the board, desolder and remove the socket from the board, and put the whole socket assembly into the reader/programmer. If you were really desperate to get at the physical chip, or the socket wouldn't fit in the reader, Dremel time. Afterwards, new socket.
I've always found that the worst part of desoldering a part (I'm talking regular DIPs here, not surface-mount crap) was getting the board out and disconnected from everything else. Once you have it laid out on your workbench, provided you have good light, a heatsink, a good desoldering iron and a reasonably steady hand, desoldering itself was always the least of the operation. Of course it probably helped that we had a very nice workbench set up for soldering and desoldering. Doing it on your dining room table with a $15 radioshack iron might be a lot more painful.
That is really a bad example. What happens if someone that is acting like a total idiot on the road loses it and stoves into your car? You might not walk away if you arent wearing your seatbelt.
Well that would be just my goddamn problem then, wouldn't it? It's nobody else's business whether I get myself killed or not.
The only possible justification for seatbelt usage is if somebody could prove that, in the event I drive my car into somebody else's car, that my unrestrained body somehow increases the risk of somebody else getting hurt. And although I don't know the statistics, I'm going to bet that the risk of bystander-hit-by-unrestrained-passenger-in-MVA injuries is pretty low.
I think it's fair that the government mandate that automakers install seatbelts, so that they're available for people to use. Personally, I would use a seatbelt whether they were mandated or not, because I value my life, and even though I'm a safe driver, there are a lot of crazy, stupid people out there. But that doesn't mean I have a right to tell anyone else whether or not to use one, and if I were to drive into somebody else's car, I'd be responsible for their injuries regardless of whether or not they were wearing one (just like I'd be responsible for a person's injuries if I hit them in a crosswalk, regardless of whether they were 95 pounds or 345 pounds and wearing impact-absorbing body armor).
Don't be an idiot. That's not what he was saying -- the actual fact of the matter is that, while the LAPD officers were obviously in the wrong to have beaten the crud out of him, Rodney King was not the saint he's commonly held up to be. He was driving 115MPH while drunk and with two other people in the car.
There's no excuse for what happened, but there seems to be this public misconception that the LAPD just grabbed King out of church one morning to beat the shit out of him.
According to the Wikipedia article, (which based on the usual Wikipedia left-leaning bias, ought to be in his favor) "Since the 1991 incident, King has been arrested several times for drug infractions, spousal abuse, soliciting a prostitute and motoring offenses. Although he received $3.8 million in a civil suit against the LAPD, he is currently bankrupt and living in a drug rehab center."
Should he have gotten beaten up by the police? No. But that doesn't mean that he ought to be canonized along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. If the police had done their job and hadn't greviously violated his civil rights, he'd probably be in jail.
I think that's the point that the GP was trying to make.
Well said.
I think that we're missing the point by focusing on the "violence" aspect of games. I think the impact of violence on children is mostly overstated, while at the same time nobody wants to go after the real problem: that we as a society (particularly in entertainment) have become fixated recently on the glorification of antisocial behavior.
It's not a totally new phenomenon -- I think the anti-hero has always had a strong place in American culture -- but I think there is a difference between the glorification of crime in 'Public Enemy' and in Grand Theft Auto. Or frankly, between any amount of movie violence and a video game which actually puts a person into the position of a criminal, and encourages them to succeed.
I don't think that video games are "crime trainers" in the literal sense, but I think it's leading to an increasingly warped sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Perhaps the games are not the cause, but merely a symptom of a more deep-rooted malaise or cynicism; that's further than I'd care to speculate.
But I think it's pointless to point the finger at violence, as if that's the problem. It's not. Violence -- in and of itself, in an abstract sense -- isn't good or bad, it's just a fact of life, something that exists, like the weather. You can see what I'd consider "violent" things on Animal Planet (find some good uncensored footage of a lion ripping the intestines out of a gazelle and tell me that's not violent). What is a lot more serious is that we've seem to given up on what was always a common tenet througout all the games of 'cops and robbers,' 'cowboys and indians,' (maybe 'SWAT vs Terrorists' today?) that I ever played -- that the good guys are always supposed to win.
That kids are not having the idea instilled in them by society and their peers that there is an inherent moral superiority and rightness to the Good Guys position -- whoever they are -- is in the long run a lot more troubling than whether they see somebody's simulated head get blown apart on a monitor.
As I suggested in an earlier post, one possible route you can take (and perhaps you've already thought of this) is just to use multiple words in the Genre field. So essentially, use it like a Keywords field rather than a specific Genre.
It's not quite as convenient as a iPhoto-style keywords selector would be, but if you've used the particular combination of keywords that you want to enter on another song before, iTunes will auto-complete it. (So if you've typed "Alternative Goth Metal" on another song, iTunes will offer to auto-complete once you've typed enough of the entry so that it's unique).
You'll want to put some thought into which categories you put first, if you actually like to view your music library as a list sorted by Genre (since it will sort based on the first genre in the field), but if you just search and filter by genre, this works well. Typing either "Alternative" or "Goth" or "Metal" will bring up a song that's tagged "Alternative Goth Metal".
This won't work if your songs have ID3 v1 tags, though, since I think those were limited to one byte in length or something. Or rather, if you do this to a song with old tags, iTunes will silently update the file to the new tag format -- only a problem if you have a very old MP3 player or something.
My solution, in iTunes anyway, is just to use multiple Genres in the tag.
So if I'm not sure if a song is (for example) Metal or Alternative, I just tag it "Alternative Metal". That way searching for either "Alternative" or "Metal" in iTunes will bring up the song.
I'm not sure what the character limit is for the Genre field, but it's been enough for me to get several tags in there at once, on my more eclectic songs.
The obvious shortfall of this method is that if you SORT by Genre, as opposed to Filtering/Searching, then the song will only appear once in the sorted list, by whichever genre you put first (so in the above example, it would be Alternative). However I've found that most people, especially once they get a few thousand songs, find it more convenient to filter for a specific genre than sort and scroll for it.
If you wanted to be slightly more anal retentive, just consider the first genre you put down the "primary" one, and then the others as "secondary" ones; therefore having it sorted by its primary genre seems more logical.
I was following you throughout most of your post, but what I don't get is how USB keys change the situation from how it is with a big pile of floppy disks.
You say that the problem would occur when there's a big bin of USB keys, and employees just start using them and not wiping them afterwards. Well, there'd be that same problem with any other kind of rewritable media, including floppy disks. I don't think the situation is new or unique at all. The only thing that's changed is the capacity of the media, but with the corresponding increase in the size of files (write a 10p formatted document in Word, save a few versions, maybe do some track-changes, and look at how big it's gotten) I don't think that people are apt to have much more sensitive data on a USB key than they did 10 years ago on a 3.5" HD-DS floppy.
The problem here isn't technological, it's behavioral. If you can't trust your employees with sensitive data, then it doesn't matter what kind of media you use, you're going to have security problems. Likewise, if you do trust your employees with sensitive data, and provided they're trained in the right procedures, you shouldn't have problems. I.e., if you leave a bin of USB keys sitting around, people need to know not to throw a key back in the bin after they're done with it, without erasing it first. In my opinion, anyone with two brain cells to rub together ought to realize this without being told.
If you can't trust your employees to do something that elementary, then they probably can't be allowed any removable media at all -- whether floppies, USB keys, CD-R/Ws, iPods, or anything else. Probably they shouldn't even have pencils and notebooks, unless you're going to look through them as they enter and exit the building.
I've worked in positions where I've been exposed to a lot of sensitive information, and I've never been patted down at the door for USB keys or floppy disks, or had my iPod inspected. My issued computer had a CD-R/W drive, and there were stacks of blank CD-Rs in the supply room for making backups. There wasn't any attempt made to limit access to things like that, because to do so always has some impact in another area -- people do use USB keys and CD-Rs for useful stuff (taking a powerpoint presentation to a un-networked kiosk, for instance). However everyone was trained in how to deal with sensitive/confidential information. Everyone knew that if you disclosed or leaked info, that you'd be fired, and depending on the information might end up answering some really pointed questions in an uncomfortably well-lit room. In the time I was there, I never heard of an inadvertent loss or disclosure of confidential material, aside from one laptop that was stolen. (And in that case the employee wasn't to blame, he was mugged, or so I heard.)
These sort of kneejerk responses to information-security, like banning USB keys and whatnot, seem symptomatic of institutions that for some reason, have decided that their employees cannot be trusted. And if that's the case, they need to rethink their hiring, firing, and compensation processes, and figure out how to recruit people that are actually trustworthy and can deal with the responsibility of accessing the type of information that their job requires. If you can't trust someone to not copy the Confidential HR Spreadsheet to a USB key and not delete it, then they shouldn't be looking at that spreadsheet in the first place. (Because that's exactly the sort of person that's going to accidentally CC it to the whole company, or something else equally embarassing, given enough time.)
And before you say it, no, winmodems aren't modems no matter how you cut it.
This is so true.
One of the few things that I thought Apple did right, back in the dark Amelio days, was when they brought out their version of what was effectively a Winmodem, they called the "GeoPort Telcom Adaptor;" they didn't actually call it a 'modem.' Frankly I think their nomenclature was about right: it's just a sort of physical adaptor that goes between your phone line and your computer, and the rest is done in software. Very little modifying/demodifying of any significance is going on. It's unfortunate that the Winmodem manufacturers weren't similarly inclined.
I have heard that there are some new Ethernet "cards" (mostly built into motherboards) that have started to take this route; they don't have much intelligence at all, but offload the traditional network-card stuff back to the processor. I've never run across one personally, but it seems like the logical route that a cut-rate PC vendor would go.
Well, I'm glad somebody finally came out and said it. That's been my experience also.
I have a HP Workstation with what I thought was a Linux-compatible WL PCI card in it, of course when I got the card home and out of the box, I read the small print -- this was the "new and improved" version 3, and only versions 1 and 2 were compatible with native Linux drivers.
So I'm stuck using ndiswrapper. Which does work, just not very well or conveniently. Changing from one network to another is a 10-minute process involving multiple "coffee breaks" (click on something, wait several minutes) and a full reboot. That's right, a complete reboot -- on a system which otherwise never, ever gets rebooted. I'm just glad it's not a laptop, at least as a desktop this setup is usable, since the network's SSID never changes.
To say that Linux wireless is a little "rough around the edges" (this seems to be the party line on a lot of forums) is a bit of an understatement, in my opinion. It's terrible, and while I do blame the manufacturers for producing undocumented products, its the users who end up holding the bag and Linux that ends up looking bad.
Here's my thought for a 'solution,' or at least a stopgap: the problem isn't that Linux-compatible WL cards don't exist, it's that they're very hard to find and poorly marked. (Witness my "v3" problem.) What somebody with a lot of money needs to do, either an enterprising individual or an organization, is find a manufacturer that makes a well-supported WL card (one that uses a Prism chipset, probably) and contract to buy a production run of them in OEM packaging. Call them whatever you want, toss them in a white box with a driver CD, and sell them for $20 more than they cost.
The community doesn't need support for every brand and flavor and revision and chipset of WL card out there. What we need is one card that's available for more than six months that's easy to get ahold of and actually works. The Linux hardware review sites do part of this, but they don't really let you actually buy the part -- you're stuck trying to find a source for the correct version/revision card yourself, and SOL if you can't find it (as is the case with many of the older "known good" Prism cards).
As I've said in other posts, look at the other major non-Windows platform and the reputation it has for wireless connectivity -- the Mac. Macs only have ONE TYPE of wireless card. They avoid the manufacturer issue altogether by just OEMing one or two chipsets, selling it at a ridiculous premium, and building the driver support into the OS. And it works beautifully; I've yet to find a Mac user who doesn't think that their Airport card wasn't worth the $90 they spent on it. (Okay except for some hackers who want the ability to grab raw frames...)
We can blame the manufacturers all we want, but it's obvious that as a group they're going to ignore the Linux platform. However, there's a demand for Linux wireless cards that actually work without hassle or confusion, and they do exist, they're just hard to find. Somebody with the right amount of capital and connections needs to match the two up.
I think if we didn't have patents, the whole legal framework we have surrounding pharmaceuticals would fall apart.
The drug companies would demand a relaxation of disclosure rules, or threaten to simply stop developing new drugs.
It's silly to pursue the argument too far, because it's such a unlikely hypothetical that at a certain point it just becomes a straw man, but I think that if you magically eliminated patents altogether and just watched to see where the pieces would fall, the end result would be a much more secretive pharmaceutical industry. And the government, which not only is paid hugely by the pharmaceutical industry directly, but also realizes that drugs and medicine are one of the few things at which the U.S. is a leader at, and therefore there has a strong national interest in maintaining, would let them do whatever they need to stay in business.
You'd probably end up with some sort of weird compromise, where drugs were tested but with only certain NDA-ed individuals knowing the true compositions. There would still be statistical evidence to prove that a given drug was effective, and given the same pills the trials would be replicable, but the formulation would be secret. In short it would basically be what "pharmaceuticals" were for many hundreds of years -- every producer would have their pet formulations, and some would be known to work better than others, even if nobody really understands how or why. It's still possible to have drug trials without knowing the composition (or method of action) of the drug -- what it really hurts is the development of new drugs, since it shuts down the way we learn how drugs work.
You seem to be regarding the FDA, and laws in general, as fixed and inviolate. I think you'd find that if a large sector of the American economy were about to collapse, those laws would suddenly become a lot more flexible.
At any rate, it's all speculation -- patents aren't going to go away, so it's rather a silly exercise. The best result (IMO) is that there's a serious rethinking of what we allow to be patented, and think about how best to maximize invention and development.
Useful link, thanks. Oddly for all the time I spend on it, I didn't think to search Wikipedia for MMORPG slang. Naturally, it's all in there.
Based on my reading of that story, in California you can apparently petition a board (the "Victim Compensation and Government Claim's Board") for compensation in the event that you're the victim of something. This guy did that, and convinced the Board to award him $100 a day. As I've never heard of that before (and heard of several cases where people were exonerated via DNA and didn't receive a dime), I'm willing to bet that it's some State of California construct. The story doesn't say anything about the person actually suing the state in civil court or anything.
b nk21.htm
I suppose in theory however it would be possible for a state legislature to pass laws exempting that state's government from immunity to civil suits. I've never heard of it being done, but you'd have to ask a Constitutional law scholar whether a statute like that on the State level would be allowable (i.e. can a State government purposely open itself up to lawsuits which are prohibited via "sovereign immunity" doctrine?). I think the answer would be no, based on the way the USSC has historically interpreted the 11th Amendment (in particular, Hans v. Louisiana, 134 US 1 (1890)).
At any rate, I was speaking in my original post about the Federal government in particular; whether the situation is the same with various State and local governments would probably depend on the local laws.
Those interested in the concept of "sovereign immunity" might find this page interesting, although it has an obvious axe to grind, and deals particularly with bankruptcy law:
http://touchngo.com/lglcntr/usdc/bnkrptcy/briefs/
If you think patents are bad, just imagine what the trade secrets would look like if they weren't around. Getting in the door to Pfizer would be like crossing Checkpoint Charlie.
Companies wouldn't stop doing R&D, but they would close up all the doors and windows and try to hang on to their hard-won IP, tooth and nail. You probably wouldn't be able to get a job sweeping the floors or cleaning the fish tanks at any place that did anything significant without signing an NDA and a non-compete. Plus you'd have the heavy stick that are the penalties for de-valuing someone's trade secrets.
Unless your vision of a patentless world also includes provisions for a NDA-less world and a noncompete-less world, it's going to be one hell of an ugly place. And if you're planning on rewriting all of contract law (which is what you'd need, to get rid of non-competes and NDAs), then I'll take a little of whatever you're smoking, because it must be some great shit.
Software patents suck. I'll agree with that; whoever let that one go through should be run out of Washington on a rail. Business process patents suck. The whole concept of "you can patent anything" that seems to be in vogue at the USPTO, sucks. But the concept of patents itself isn't flawed, when considered in the context of our society -- it worked well for almost 200 years, and put the U.S. through a period of unrivaled discovery and scientific/engineering development. Without that, you would have had every major 20th century invention closeted up somewhere until its designer could figure out a way to "black box" it and protect their discovery. Patents give people an assurance that it's OK to publish an idea, because they'll be party to any money that gets made off of it, for a time. Otherwise they'd have to keep their invention secret until they'd personally tried every way they could think of to milk cash from it.
Sure, people made great works of art and invented things before patents. But the market was also a lot different back then -- you didn't have the stock market grinding up and spitting out companies that didn't perform well on a daily basis. Even then, though, there were more trade secrets than there were today; there are paintings and ceramics which even today can't be recreated, because the formulas used to create them were never published because of fear of competition. (One example.) History is full of dead-ends, many only discovered years or centuries later, of people who discovered things but sat on them for one reason or another.
A world without patents would be a pretty ugly place; it would be one where you'd probably never be quite sure what was in that pill you just swallowed or how the epoxied-shut black box on your desk worked. It would be one where joining a company was more like getting sworn in to the Freemasons, and industrial espionage would probably be perpetrated on a scale never before imagined.
There is simply no way that we can get rid of them, without completely rewriting our legal, economic, and probably also social systems. Anybody who says that patents can simply be made to 'go away' is living in a dreamland -- it's like wishing for money to go away, because you don't like being poor. It might fly in a college classroom, or other place equally insulated from the outside world (K5, Slashdot), but it has no value in real life.
However, there is an exception, called the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows people to sue the Government for negligence in some situations:
The Government would have a pretty easy argument in this case that the USPTO's function is "uniquely governmental" in that it enforces a duty of the Government that's enumerated in the Constitution (that whole "useful arts" bit that always gets dragged up). Whether or not they do their job well doesn't enter into it -- the intended method of influencing the Government's performance is through the ballot box, not the jury box.
This is also the reason why you can't sue the Government if you were wrongly accused of murder and held in prison for 20 years before being exonerated by DNA evidence or something. The Government was doing its job (however poorly), therefore you can't sue it/them.
I guess I'm a "casual" WoW player, at least in comparison to others here (which might be like saying that one is a 'casual' junkie, in relation to the people in the lobby of a detox facility), but I find the jargon used in chat very confusing. It's not exactly transparent -- the acronyms mostly make sense, it doesn't take a genius to figure most of them out -- but there are some times when I wish there was a dictionary. Perhaps someone has created one, somewhere.
I'm posting this in response to your post, because I saw you use the word "nerf," which I've now seen a bunch of times and can't figure out. I understand it refers to a change in the game by the developer that adversely impacts a person's character...? It's not something like an acronym where the meaning can be easily backed out of the word.
Anyway, more generally my point is just that I don't think experienced players are aware of how steep the 'social learning curve' is for new players. Given the emphasis on teamwork in WoW in particular, this is a bit off-putting when you're new.
Its more than just a dungeon, its a whole region of evil (which is currently flowing back into the exsisting world)
So...basically they worked New Jersey into the game? Neat.
Also, I think if a person started watching TV at the expense of going to work or doing social activities, it wouldn't be classified as "TV addiction," they'd just be "depressed." And probably get some medication and counseling.
However a person that plays a computer game for an equivalent amount of time is just viewed as socially retarded.
I'm going to disagree with you, just as a personal opinion.
I prefer the light from the modern compact fluorescents to incandescents -- I find that rooms just seem a lot "sunnier" when lit with the higher-color-temperature lamps. I'm not talking about the old greenish/blue-white ones, they're pretty disgusting, but the last few "warm fluorescent" ones I picked up at Home Depot are a lot nicer than the incandescent lights I replaced. I think they're around 4000-5000K, and going back to 2800K (typical incandescents) isn't even an option. They just seem too yellow now.
Granted, I don't have much in the way of direct lighting -- I have mostly torchiers and 3-lamp 'pole lights' aimed up at the walls and/or cieling, so perhaps if you had nothing but direct light it wouldn't work as well. I also can't stand being in a dimly lit room; I have what would be the incandescent equivalent of 750W of lighting in about 250 square feet. If it was actually all incandescent, not only would I be broke from the power bill, but the room would probably be uncomfortably warm. (And possibly it would be a fire hazard as well.)
But since installing the CFL bulbs I've noticed I'm just a lot less tired, and less dependent on the weather outside -- it used to be that if it was a really dark, overcast day outside that the room would be noticably more dim; with more lighting I can just close the blinds and have basically the same illumination available as if it was a sunny day outside.
I also wouldn't want a TV that required a manual power switch on the front to turn it on and off. I have several TVs in odd positions (on top of book cases, etc.) throughout my house, and they would be a lot more of a pain to use if I had to touch them in order to start using them. If they didn't have standby, I'd probably just switch them to the DVD player's "screen saver" when I wasn't using them instead of turning them off.
Anyway, I'm not arguing with you, just offering a contrary opinion. To each his own, I suppose.
IIRC, "instant on" in the context of vacuum tubes means keeping the tube heaters running constantly, but not anything else. Since the tube heaters are usually run off of a separate tap on the main power transformer, without any rectification, it's pretty easy to design the system so that they're switched separately. Once they're heated up, you can start using them pretty much immediately.
:)
This also lengthens the life of the tubes, since what kills them is usually related to heating and cooling cycles more than anything else. Some of the longest-lived vacuum tubes you'll find are in applications where they're never turned off. (Someplace on the net I read that the standing record for a single vacuum tube is from the output stage of some VHF TV station's amplifier in California; it ran 24/7 for upwards of a decade. I can't find the link now, though.)
Plus, you get that nice warm glow out of the back of the case when you leave them on at night.
The only difference is the AMD laptop chips use more power, but you can always plug in somewhere and recharge so really this is no disadvantage.
Just because someone further up in the thread was discussing the MacBook, I thought I'd point out that this attitude may not hold with Mac users at all. Apple laptops have never been speed demons (at least not recently -- once upon a time they were the fastest notebooks around, but that was a while ago) but they've always had really good battery life.
I got issued a company PC notebook, and was absolutely appalled by the battery life. I'm used to being able to take my iBook out and get at least 3 hours out of it, and it's not very new. And that's with WiFi turned on, doing things that access the hard drive, etc. My Intel notebook, which I've been told is pretty typical, runs hotter than a pancake griddle and won't run for an hour from a full charge, if you're using WiFi and doing anything that involves disk I/O.
I've noticed different usage habits in PC notebook users as well -- most people seem to use them not as "laptop" computers, but really as "portable desktops." They move from one outlet to another, nomad-style. Mac users seem more willing to just pop it open and start working on any flat surface, or just right on their laps.
I didn't pay for my PC laptop, so I'm not really in a position to complain one way or the other, but I find its performance -- and the mindset that goes behind designing something like it -- unacceptable. When I buy a portable computer, it better damn well be able to last three hours under normal usage without being plugged in, and by 'normal,' I mean full clock speed, WiFi, and disk use. That mainstream consumers have gotten used to anything less is unfortunate, but I don't think Mac users have.
Therefore I think that one reason why Intel may still be the mobile architecture of choice to a company like Apple has a lot to do with power consumption, perhaps moreso than it does with performance.
Yeah, exactly.
To be less cynical, it DID look like a good concept for a certain period of time -- people saw digital as this "clean slate" where they could wipe clean about 50 years of photographic history; digital means smaller sensors, that means less glass, so in theory cheaper lenses -- oh, and let's just have one mount, so anybody's lenses will fit any camera. You could have a Minolta body and use Pentax or Canon lenses -- how cool would that be? No vendor lock-in, ever.
It was a great idea, except that Canon and Nikon were basically uninterested; after all, they had a lot of customers heavily invested in their existing lens mounts, and who cared more about backwards-compatibility with their existing equipment than they did with vendor-neutrality going forward. If memory serves, the only companies who really got behind the new-format DSLR lenses were Minolta and Pentax (and probably Sigma, but they pretty much make any lens mount in existence). That wasn't enough to save it, and in the meantime it really alienated Minolta's existing film customers. ("What, you mean I'll have to buy new lenses when you do get a DSLR to market? Screw it, I'll buy a Nikon then.")
It would have been interesting if the whole plan had worked out -- I remember a lot of trade publications were just gushing over the concept when it was first introduced -- but in the end I think it will be remembered as one of the major missteps that killed Minolta.