Wouldn't it be nice if some sensible judge would knock these nonsensical suits back to the Stone Age, or at least throw them out and fine the perps a few hundred million for filing frivolous lawsuits?
As semiconductor devices scale smaller and smaller, making features on the chips becomes increasingly expensive as we transcend the range across which past lithography-based fabrication techniques operate effectively. This seems like it might have the potential to produce some features at a much lower cost than via masks and multiple layers of etched handiwork. And it might have room to scale smaller while maintaining the same cost profile. So it's possible that the biggest percentage improvements might be related to cost.
Of course, all that will have to wait for actual engineering experience to know for sure, but it certainly seems like it might have potential in that area.
... this sort of thing is commonplace in business today. Look at the difference between how Rupert Murdock runs his companies (very hands-on, a master/slave relationship) and how Warren Buffett runs his companies (he buys companies that have management he believes in, and he trusts them to run their businesses).
Which one is the stand-out success, viewed as unique in business? Warren Buffett gets the nod. There are a zillion cookie-cutter versions of Rupert Murdock in business. And which one is more successful, using the metric of money? Again, Warren gets the nod.
A pity that more would-be leaders don't look to the successful leaders and try to emulate their success, but they don't.
One would hope that Apple, in its expansion of development staff and facilities, would acquire the guys who produce NeoOffice, or at least hire them as consultants -- as that's already 98% of the way toward what OpenOffice should hope to achieve in a Mac distribution -- and have them guide things, as they already know where the bodies are buried between OpenOffice and OS X.
Lord knows they deserve to get something out of their years of hard work making NeoOffice the svelte speedster it is today.
... wireless, based on a mesh of UWB wireless nodes. The more nodes in the grid, the higher the aggregate bandwidth and the harder it is to take it down.
Of course, due to the difficulty of monitoring and controlling such a system (and the reluctance of the various governments to allow such a thing to exist), it will occur only when it spontaneously emerges from connections between businesses and individuals at a time when UWB wireless is pretty much ubiquitous.
... is that there is an upper limit on the complexity of systems that human beings are capable of designing, especially when the environments the systems operate within are changing faster than either the systems can adapt to, or faster than people can modify them to fit the new operating envelope.
Any Grove seems to recognize this, as his approach relies on streamlining things through simplification as much as possible, and only applies technology to deal with things that are not amenable to procedural simplification, like medical records. I especially like Andy's reluctance to charge into areas that have no clear solution (e.g., national health insurance), preferring to try and simplify an overly complex situation before developing solutions to address it.
Andy Grove is one of the pre-emminent managers in the world, adept in managing complex enterprises and making it all look easy. When he offers advice on managing the country's problems, the country ought to pay attention.
-- when we might be able to image it by placing an array of Hubble-like telescopes in orbit around our sun, and coordinating the images from them to synthesize an aperture the size of the orbit of the Earth (or whatever sized orbit we place these telescopes into). That ought to be large enough to collect enough photons of information to provide useful images, albeit from 20+ years ago.
If such an amplification is possible, then we should be able to gather loads of information about it long before we could ever send a probe to it.
I expect that when we see the first detailed images of the surface, we will find an immense fiery inscription, saying "We apologise for the inconvenience".
"... I'm pretty sure the president appoints the members of the Federal Reserve. As president, he should have acted to reverse their course through whatever means he has as Executive in Chief."
I'm pretty sure that you're wrong.
Yes, the President appoints people to the Federal Reserve Board, but the President cannot change the members of the Federal Reserve at will. They are appointed for 14-year terms that span terms of elected office-holders, and can be removed by the President only "with cause". While Dubya probably thinks that "with cause" means "because I want to", the banking systems and financial markets would likely disagree, plunging the economy into chaos if anything similar to the recent attorney general prosecutor firings were attempted in the Federal Reserve.
And people seem to forget the economic shock that Nixon's wage and price controls brought to the system in the wake of the surge of inflation that was the result of a variety of economic events, including abandoning the gold standard to let the dollar float freely, and the ending of the Viet Nam War, but mostly due to the Arab Oil Embargo, when the price of crude oil shot up four-fold overnight. While Nixon was a formidable presence in the foreign policy arena, opening relations with China and extracting us from the quagmire of Viet Nam, he was an economic disaster. I can still remember seeing TV news footage of farmers burning trays of live chicks because they were losing so much money raising them. Think about what it would mean to you to have your income capped, with economic dislocations eating away at you and nothing you could do about it. Or as a businessman, being forced to hold prices constant regardless of how your business was performing. Consider how well the owners of pickups and SUVs would take to being able to buy gas on assigned days via rationing. Nixon effectively attempted to replace the American free-market economy with the USSR's planned economy, a fantastic bit of irony for this legendary anti-Communist.
Carter, in an interesting bit of historical irony, was exactly the opposite, doing what it took to bring the economy back to stability (basically installing Paul Volcker at the helm of the Fed and allowing him to deliver the harsh medicine the economy needed) regardless of the political costs to himself, but was as bad at foreign policy as Dubya (but in entirely different ways).
Mr Schroeder is EXACTLY correct -- Camino uses the same Gecko core as Firefox, but eschews the Firefox plugin madness in favor of OS X integration, supporting the OS X Services menu, Keychain, and all the other things that tie an OS X application into the body of OS X.
If a person wants to use the same browser across Windows, OS X, and Linux -- or has the desire to customize the hell out of it via plugins, then Firefox is the way to go. If a person wants a lean browser that takes advantage of the feature-rich environment of OS X, then Camino is the right answer.
But if a person wants a lean, fully-integrated-with-OSX browser that looks and behaves like Firefox and supports a zoo of customizing plugins, they're in a world of hurt, as they are looking for the same thing as those seeking a rich, sugary, calorie-laden diet that they can lose weight with.
The whole notion of Firefox is to make the best cross-platform browser possible. By definition, this means not tying it to the feature set of any particular platform. However, to permit users to tailor their own favorite features into Firefox, they have an excellent plugin system of extensions.
The idea of Camino is to take the excellent Gecko core from Firefox, and tie it into a particular feature-rich environment (i.e., OS X), making it as fast and powerful as possible. You don't do that by allowing the user to load it down with a bunch of plugins.
The problem posed by the topic has already been solved. If the Firefox developers want to make it better for OS X users, they should ask the Camino developers (metaphorically across the aisle) what they would like to see changed in Firefox to make Camino development better. Camino IS the end result of optimizing Firefox for OS X.
I have a Hitachi 42" plasma HDTV, supporting 1080i and 720p formats, downscaled to the 1000x1000 physical pixel layout of the device. Yeah, it's not your typical uber-video 1080p whiz-bang HDTV, but it still blows me away.
For the several years I've been using an el gato http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV HTDV gizmo to record over-the-air HD content to disk, and then (lacking any means of directly driving the Hitachi HDTV from the server) burning the programs to DVD for playback on the better screen via the set-top DVD player. Packing HD content onto a standard DVD is a learning experience in itself, as it's all to easy to put more bandwidth into the DVD than the player will handle, with subsequent artifacts and other nonsense.
So when the AppleTV was announced, I leaped at it, and have been getting accustomed to the device over the past few weeks. My goal has been (and is) to use the server in the next room as a media server, streaming content to the Apple TV for playback on the Hitachi plasma HDTV. In this, my intent has been to put DVDs and recorded broadcast content on the server, taking advantage of the rapid decline in cost of hard drives.
I've had most success using Handbrake to rip DVDs to bits-on-a-disk in MP4 form, then using VisualHub to fine-tune the conversion to AppleTV format, transcoding to H.264 and 1280x720, 24 fps for DVDs. For broadcast content, I go directly from eyeTV to an AppleTV-compatible format (960x540, 29.97 fps, single-pass H.264). The AppleTV-formatted content is then added to iTunes and streamed to the AppleTV via 802.11n wifi. I find that streaming gives me better results than syncing, especially if the content has longer playback times. In all cases, I maintain the max playback bandwidth at close to 5 Mbps, the published limits of the AppleTV.
The reason I go for the 960x540 format for broadcast content is that it's gonna end up that way anyhow, due to the content provider's (that would be the studio, not Apple) inclusion of the ICT http://broadcastengineering.com/mag/broadcasting_c pr_redefined/(Image Constraint Tag) in the video stream, so that higher-resolution video thusly tagged gets knocked back to 960x540. If you just let QuickTime do the conversion via their AppleTV menu choice in QuickTime Pro, you also get the bandwidth throttled back to 4 Mbps.
The end result is that the viewing experience is very close to set-top DVD playback, but less than over-the-air HDTV. All in all, a "good enough" experience, especially for only $320 (including the HDMI-to-HDMI cabling).
In my initial testing of the device, I predicted that there would be a chasm between two groups of users -- those who love the AppleTV, and see it as a significant advance in bringing computer-controlled TVs into the living room, vs those who see it as an abject failure. The difference between these two camps is largely one born out of expectations. The people who hate it wanted effortless 1080p quality video, a built-in DVD player and HD receiver, and were shocked to discover that it actually was a little less than Steve Jobs pitched it to be, instead of a lot more. Maybe a second- or third-generation model will come closer to their dreams, but if so, it will be because the studios have loosened up in what they will permit such a device to do, and because the internet providers have boosted the available bandwidth to permit downloading of multi-gigabyte files in a reasonable time (hint: an hour of HD MPEG2 video takes around 5 GB to store on the hard drive).
Today's limitations on what can be done with connecting the internet to HDTV are constrained mostly by the available bandwidth and the studios' restrictions on how much fidelity they allow in downloaded content. When the Xbox HD content-via-the-web becomes available, I expect that it will be similarly hobbled.
So long as you don't have over-the-top expectations, y
Now if Intel will just ramp up their phase-change memory alternative to flash, and get it out in a comparable size, the issues regarding cycling limits will be dealt with.
Strange that it takes an Act of Congress for you to get up an hour earlier.
Myself, I favor YEAR-ROUND DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!
Why mess around with half-way measures? Go the whole nine yards!
For those enamored with the notion of changing all the clocks in their lives, they can still change them, 12 hours forward immediately followed by 12 hours back!
Whatever the benefits of extended DST actually are, wouldn't things be better with a full year of them?
... on sexual harrassment policies, or export regulations?
One would think that if corporations have no difficulty "educating" employees on interpersonal relationships or export legal issues, that they would have someone from legal get up to speed on the various types of open source licensing and "educate" the managers and developers on the subject, and when it is required to include attribution comments (why not do that ALWAYS? Seems like it would improve the documentation).
I suppose this is what keeps the corporations firmly in the IE camp, with its associated higher support costs.
Switching to use a "free" product like Firefox that works better with fewer problems, and actually tries to conform to a published standard of web interpretation, must seem like endorsing theft -- when in fact, by sticking with a product from a company that is stealing them blind by continuing to sell it year after year with the same litany of flaws and security holes, they are endorsing true thievery, the thievery that comes from knowingly selling defective products.
And we don't need to look very far to find examples of nations that have taken this path, and see where they are today.
Take, for instance, the USSR, which squandered its future in a hopeless game of economic chicken, pouring more and more of their nation's resources into military resources, until eventually their economy imploded and shattered the country into the previous nations.
And we can look at what kind of governments the fragments of the USSR have today -- in particular, Russia. The pattern of assassination and rule by intimidation follows very closely the path taken by the brown shirts in 1930's Germany. And Vladimir Putin is the envy of Dubya, who wishes devoutly that he could run the US the way his good buddy Vlad runs Russia (before you rise to lynch me, go back and review history).
I can certainly imagine the US fracturing along the lines of red and blue states, with the reds arriving at a charismatic, fundamentalist leader eager to bring on the Resurrection and Armageddon. In a nation where most of the people do not believe in Evolution, where skills in the sciences are plummeting in comparison to the rest of the world, this is a VERY believable scenario.
Believe me, killer asteroids are pretty far down the list of things that could wipe out humanity. All of the most likely spots on the list are events due only to the actions of humanity.
Re:Artificial intelligence and intellectual proper
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Indeed. Just imagine for a moment, that trees were sentient and could communicate with each other, operating on a time scale where what are days to us are mere seconds to them. How would we ever have a chance of figuring out that they were thinking beings? And they would surely see us as some sort of plague or natural disaster. So now imagine an AI, operating a couple of orders of magnitude faster than we think -- how are the two ever going to connect?
For communication to occur, the parties must be thinking at about the same speed to begin with.
And then there is the experiential basis for consciousness, the framework that each of us has developed within. This is an easier problem than the time differential one, as witness the ability of Helen Keller to learn to communicate despite being blind and deaf. But even she had the commonality of the basic structure, a brain that was the same as others, and the other senses -- touch, taste and smell. An AI would have none of this.
So if we're going to build an AI, we must build a series of them, one that is designed to mimic a human being, in order that we might have a ghost of a chance of communicating with it, and then a series of other AIs, each a step closer to the true electronic consciousness that we will never have a chance of communicating directly with, instead having to pass messages through the series of intermediates, with all the mis-communication and mis-interpretation that occurs in the grade school game of message-passing.
... the single-disc version of LOTR (all 3 films, plus extras) arrives. I don't think it's going to fit on HD-DVD. Also the potential of putting entire seasons of TV shows on a single disc.
... that Verizon's FIOS wins and at&t's trailing-edge DSL fades into insignificance?
Not so long as we lack free markets where Verizon and at&t can compete head-to-head.
But it would seem that Verizon's customers might reap the benefits of cheap, high-quality fiber transmission, and Verizon will certainly be able to reap higher profits while charging less than the competition (what little competition there is in the USofA telecom markets).
"If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems."
If we knew enough about the problems to do all the categorizations you suggest, then we would be pretty well on the way to solving them. But you're right about the so-called "database" of problems maintained by the UIA. They seem to be missing a description of the problem in many cases. I guess they confuse a name with a description.
The Wikipedia list of unsolved problems is categorized by the discipline of science that they are (apparently) most pertinent to. In some cases, the same problem is listed multiple times. I find it to be a nice set of problems, but curiously brief. If these are all of the big unsolved problems, then we have a distinct lack of imagination.
As to how one would go about ranking them as to difficulty, if you can do that even with problems that we know the answers to, you're a better man than I.
In fact, I think that the question of how to rank problems by the difficulty they present is yet another unsolved problem. It very likely encompasses the framework of logic used to describe and solve the problem, with some problems that are quite simple in a sufficiently complex world-view being conundrums in a simpler world view.
... it would seem that it might be possible to improve a lot on the image resolution of the best optical telescopes.
From the admittedly simplified diagram of the components, it would not seem to be out of the question for this notion to be included in future orbiting camera platforms, whether for scientific or spying purposes. Imagine if the Mars Orbiter had this sort of image resolution capability, or even the Hubble Space Telescope (or its replacement).
In every complex activity, there are limits to the envelope formed by the boundaries of complexity, time available, and changes per unit time. Like juggling 3, then 6, then 21, then 317 bowling pins while ice dancing to reggae.
What makes software so difficult is that the profit motive drives people to operate on the other side of that envelope. That, and managers are too fscking stoopid to understand that those boundaries exist, preferring those time-honored management techniques of allowing customers to massage the design long after construction is well under way, and throwing bodies at the resulting late project.
I was a vendor SE who had occasion to visit R. L. Polk. There are customers who are "bleeding edge" customers, always looking for ways that the latest and greatest technology can give them an advantage in their business operations, and there are customers who are "junkyard" customers, who see everything as an expense, and only have the cheapest, oldest junk on the floors in their data centers.
Cost is the only metric for such customers, of whom R. L. Polk was one such (a long time ago, and it's possible that they have changed, but I doubt it, as it takes tremendous capital investment to dig oneself out of that sort of hole, and that's exactly the thing that these sort of companies will simply *not* do).
Given that as ancient hardware decays, the maintenance costs soar, I'm not surprised that a "junkyard" operation would find that aging mainframes are better replaced by a room full of PCs. But as to the performance improvements, I suspect that most of the credit there goes to the rewrite of the old mainframe apps written in COBOL, PL/I and assembler -- and if they had performed a rewrite in place, the observed performance improvements would have occurred on the mainframe as well.
This is a recurring problem with evaluating many of the mainframe-to-PC conversions. In the process of converting to run in the new environment, application programs that are several decades old benefit enormously from the rewrite necessary to operate in the new environment. The fact that they were converting assembler programs tells you something about the age of their software base. The fact that they were converting COBOL tells you something about the likely efficiency of their software.
Slashdot Mirror
Lawsuit Invokes DMCA to Force DRM Adoption http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/12 48219
Wouldn't it be nice if some sensible judge would knock these nonsensical suits back to the Stone Age, or at least throw them out and fine the perps a few hundred million for filing frivolous lawsuits?
Paul Thurrott.
http://www.winsupersite.com/
... but how much CHEAPER is it?
As semiconductor devices scale smaller and smaller, making features on the chips becomes increasingly expensive as we transcend the range across which past lithography-based fabrication techniques operate effectively. This seems like it might have the potential to produce some features at a much lower cost than via masks and multiple layers of etched handiwork. And it might have room to scale smaller while maintaining the same cost profile. So it's possible that the biggest percentage improvements might be related to cost.
Of course, all that will have to wait for actual engineering experience to know for sure, but it certainly seems like it might have potential in that area.
... this sort of thing is commonplace in business today. Look at the difference between how Rupert Murdock runs his companies (very hands-on, a master/slave relationship) and how Warren Buffett runs his companies (he buys companies that have management he believes in, and he trusts them to run their businesses).
Which one is the stand-out success, viewed as unique in business? Warren Buffett gets the nod. There are a zillion cookie-cutter versions of Rupert Murdock in business. And which one is more successful, using the metric of money? Again, Warren gets the nod.
A pity that more would-be leaders don't look to the successful leaders and try to emulate their success, but they don't.
One would hope that Apple, in its expansion of development staff and facilities, would acquire the guys who produce NeoOffice, or at least hire them as consultants -- as that's already 98% of the way toward what OpenOffice should hope to achieve in a Mac distribution -- and have them guide things, as they already know where the bodies are buried between OpenOffice and OS X.
Lord knows they deserve to get something out of their years of hard work making NeoOffice the svelte speedster it is today.
... wireless, based on a mesh of UWB wireless nodes. The more nodes in the grid, the higher the aggregate bandwidth and the harder it is to take it down.
Of course, due to the difficulty of monitoring and controlling such a system (and the reluctance of the various governments to allow such a thing to exist), it will occur only when it spontaneously emerges from connections between businesses and individuals at a time when UWB wireless is pretty much ubiquitous.
... is that there is an upper limit on the complexity of systems that human beings are capable of designing, especially when the environments the systems operate within are changing faster than either the systems can adapt to, or faster than people can modify them to fit the new operating envelope.
Any Grove seems to recognize this, as his approach relies on streamlining things through simplification as much as possible, and only applies technology to deal with things that are not amenable to procedural simplification, like medical records. I especially like Andy's reluctance to charge into areas that have no clear solution (e.g., national health insurance), preferring to try and simplify an overly complex situation before developing solutions to address it.
Andy Grove is one of the pre-emminent managers in the world, adept in managing complex enterprises and making it all look easy. When he offers advice on managing the country's problems, the country ought to pay attention.
If such an amplification is possible, then we should be able to gather loads of information about it long before we could ever send a probe to it.
I expect that when we see the first detailed images of the surface, we will find an immense fiery inscription, saying "We apologise for the inconvenience".
I'm pretty sure that you're wrong.
Yes, the President appoints people to the Federal Reserve Board, but the President cannot change the members of the Federal Reserve at will. They are appointed for 14-year terms that span terms of elected office-holders, and can be removed by the President only "with cause". While Dubya probably thinks that "with cause" means "because I want to", the banking systems and financial markets would likely disagree, plunging the economy into chaos if anything similar to the recent attorney general prosecutor firings were attempted in the Federal Reserve.
And people seem to forget the economic shock that Nixon's wage and price controls brought to the system in the wake of the surge of inflation that was the result of a variety of economic events, including abandoning the gold standard to let the dollar float freely, and the ending of the Viet Nam War, but mostly due to the Arab Oil Embargo, when the price of crude oil shot up four-fold overnight. While Nixon was a formidable presence in the foreign policy arena, opening relations with China and extracting us from the quagmire of Viet Nam, he was an economic disaster. I can still remember seeing TV news footage of farmers burning trays of live chicks because they were losing so much money raising them. Think about what it would mean to you to have your income capped, with economic dislocations eating away at you and nothing you could do about it. Or as a businessman, being forced to hold prices constant regardless of how your business was performing. Consider how well the owners of pickups and SUVs would take to being able to buy gas on assigned days via rationing. Nixon effectively attempted to replace the American free-market economy with the USSR's planned economy, a fantastic bit of irony for this legendary anti-Communist.
Carter, in an interesting bit of historical irony, was exactly the opposite, doing what it took to bring the economy back to stability (basically installing Paul Volcker at the helm of the Fed and allowing him to deliver the harsh medicine the economy needed) regardless of the political costs to himself, but was as bad at foreign policy as Dubya (but in entirely different ways).
mod the parent posting up!
Mr Schroeder is EXACTLY correct -- Camino uses the same Gecko core as Firefox, but eschews the Firefox plugin madness in favor of OS X integration, supporting the OS X Services menu, Keychain, and all the other things that tie an OS X application into the body of OS X.
If a person wants to use the same browser across Windows, OS X, and Linux -- or has the desire to customize the hell out of it via plugins, then Firefox is the way to go. If a person wants a lean browser that takes advantage of the feature-rich environment of OS X, then Camino is the right answer.
But if a person wants a lean, fully-integrated-with-OSX browser that looks and behaves like Firefox and supports a zoo of customizing plugins, they're in a world of hurt, as they are looking for the same thing as those seeking a rich, sugary, calorie-laden diet that they can lose weight with.
The whole notion of Firefox is to make the best cross-platform browser possible. By definition, this means not tying it to the feature set of any particular platform. However, to permit users to tailor their own favorite features into Firefox, they have an excellent plugin system of extensions.
The idea of Camino is to take the excellent Gecko core from Firefox, and tie it into a particular feature-rich environment (i.e., OS X), making it as fast and powerful as possible. You don't do that by allowing the user to load it down with a bunch of plugins.
The problem posed by the topic has already been solved. If the Firefox developers want to make it better for OS X users, they should ask the Camino developers (metaphorically across the aisle) what they would like to see changed in Firefox to make Camino development better. Camino IS the end result of optimizing Firefox for OS X.
"Insects FEARED me..."
And yet, in the end, the worms will have their way with you.
For the several years I've been using an el gato http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV HTDV gizmo to record over-the-air HD content to disk, and then (lacking any means of directly driving the Hitachi HDTV from the server) burning the programs to DVD for playback on the better screen via the set-top DVD player. Packing HD content onto a standard DVD is a learning experience in itself, as it's all to easy to put more bandwidth into the DVD than the player will handle, with subsequent artifacts and other nonsense.
So when the AppleTV was announced, I leaped at it, and have been getting accustomed to the device over the past few weeks. My goal has been (and is) to use the server in the next room as a media server, streaming content to the Apple TV for playback on the Hitachi plasma HDTV. In this, my intent has been to put DVDs and recorded broadcast content on the server, taking advantage of the rapid decline in cost of hard drives.
I've had most success using Handbrake to rip DVDs to bits-on-a-disk in MP4 form, then using VisualHub to fine-tune the conversion to AppleTV format, transcoding to H.264 and 1280x720, 24 fps for DVDs. For broadcast content, I go directly from eyeTV to an AppleTV-compatible format (960x540, 29.97 fps, single-pass H.264). The AppleTV-formatted content is then added to iTunes and streamed to the AppleTV via 802.11n wifi. I find that streaming gives me better results than syncing, especially if the content has longer playback times. In all cases, I maintain the max playback bandwidth at close to 5 Mbps, the published limits of the AppleTV.
The reason I go for the 960x540 format for broadcast content is that it's gonna end up that way anyhow, due to the content provider's (that would be the studio, not Apple) inclusion of the ICT http://broadcastengineering.com/mag/broadcasting_c pr_redefined/(Image Constraint Tag) in the video stream, so that higher-resolution video thusly tagged gets knocked back to 960x540. If you just let QuickTime do the conversion via their AppleTV menu choice in QuickTime Pro, you also get the bandwidth throttled back to 4 Mbps.
The end result is that the viewing experience is very close to set-top DVD playback, but less than over-the-air HDTV. All in all, a "good enough" experience, especially for only $320 (including the HDMI-to-HDMI cabling).
In my initial testing of the device, I predicted that there would be a chasm between two groups of users -- those who love the AppleTV, and see it as a significant advance in bringing computer-controlled TVs into the living room, vs those who see it as an abject failure. The difference between these two camps is largely one born out of expectations. The people who hate it wanted effortless 1080p quality video, a built-in DVD player and HD receiver, and were shocked to discover that it actually was a little less than Steve Jobs pitched it to be, instead of a lot more. Maybe a second- or third-generation model will come closer to their dreams, but if so, it will be because the studios have loosened up in what they will permit such a device to do, and because the internet providers have boosted the available bandwidth to permit downloading of multi-gigabyte files in a reasonable time (hint: an hour of HD MPEG2 video takes around 5 GB to store on the hard drive).
Today's limitations on what can be done with connecting the internet to HDTV are constrained mostly by the available bandwidth and the studios' restrictions on how much fidelity they allow in downloaded content. When the Xbox HD content-via-the-web becomes available, I expect that it will be similarly hobbled.
So long as you don't have over-the-top expectations, y
Now if Intel will just ramp up their phase-change memory alternative to flash, and get it out in a comparable size, the issues regarding cycling limits will be dealt with.
"I'd go for double daylight savings if I could."
Strange that it takes an Act of Congress for you to get up an hour earlier.
Myself, I favor YEAR-ROUND DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME!
Why mess around with half-way measures? Go the whole nine yards!
For those enamored with the notion of changing all the clocks in their lives, they can still change them, 12 hours forward immediately followed by 12 hours back!
Whatever the benefits of extended DST actually are, wouldn't things be better with a full year of them?
... on sexual harrassment policies, or export regulations?
One would think that if corporations have no difficulty "educating" employees on interpersonal relationships or export legal issues, that they would have someone from legal get up to speed on the various types of open source licensing and "educate" the managers and developers on the subject, and when it is required to include attribution comments (why not do that ALWAYS? Seems like it would improve the documentation).
I suppose this is what keeps the corporations firmly in the IE camp, with its associated higher support costs.
Switching to use a "free" product like Firefox that works better with fewer problems, and actually tries to conform to a published standard of web interpretation, must seem like endorsing theft -- when in fact, by sticking with a product from a company that is stealing them blind by continuing to sell it year after year with the same litany of flaws and security holes, they are endorsing true thievery, the thievery that comes from knowingly selling defective products.
EXACTLY!
And we don't need to look very far to find examples of nations that have taken this path, and see where they are today.
Take, for instance, the USSR, which squandered its future in a hopeless game of economic chicken, pouring more and more of their nation's resources into military resources, until eventually their economy imploded and shattered the country into the previous nations.
And we can look at what kind of governments the fragments of the USSR have today -- in particular, Russia. The pattern of assassination and rule by intimidation follows very closely the path taken by the brown shirts in 1930's Germany. And Vladimir Putin is the envy of Dubya, who wishes devoutly that he could run the US the way his good buddy Vlad runs Russia (before you rise to lynch me, go back and review history).
I can certainly imagine the US fracturing along the lines of red and blue states, with the reds arriving at a charismatic, fundamentalist leader eager to bring on the Resurrection and Armageddon. In a nation where most of the people do not believe in Evolution, where skills in the sciences are plummeting in comparison to the rest of the world, this is a VERY believable scenario.
Believe me, killer asteroids are pretty far down the list of things that could wipe out humanity. All of the most likely spots on the list are events due only to the actions of humanity.
Indeed. Just imagine for a moment, that trees were sentient and could communicate with each other, operating on a time scale where what are days to us are mere seconds to them. How would we ever have a chance of figuring out that they were thinking beings? And they would surely see us as some sort of plague or natural disaster. So now imagine an AI, operating a couple of orders of magnitude faster than we think -- how are the two ever going to connect?
For communication to occur, the parties must be thinking at about the same speed to begin with.
And then there is the experiential basis for consciousness, the framework that each of us has developed within. This is an easier problem than the time differential one, as witness the ability of Helen Keller to learn to communicate despite being blind and deaf. But even she had the commonality of the basic structure, a brain that was the same as others, and the other senses -- touch, taste and smell. An AI would have none of this.
So if we're going to build an AI, we must build a series of them, one that is designed to mimic a human being, in order that we might have a ghost of a chance of communicating with it, and then a series of other AIs, each a step closer to the true electronic consciousness that we will never have a chance of communicating directly with, instead having to pass messages through the series of intermediates, with all the mis-communication and mis-interpretation that occurs in the grade school game of message-passing.
... the single-disc version of LOTR (all 3 films, plus extras) arrives. I don't think it's going to fit on HD-DVD. Also the potential of putting entire seasons of TV shows on a single disc.
... that Verizon's FIOS wins and at&t's trailing-edge DSL fades into insignificance?
Not so long as we lack free markets where Verizon and at&t can compete head-to-head.
But it would seem that Verizon's customers might reap the benefits of cheap, high-quality fiber transmission, and Verizon will certainly be able to reap higher profits while charging less than the competition (what little competition there is in the USofA telecom markets).
If we knew enough about the problems to do all the categorizations you suggest, then we would be pretty well on the way to solving them. But you're right about the so-called "database" of problems maintained by the UIA. They seem to be missing a description of the problem in many cases. I guess they confuse a name with a description.
The Wikipedia list of unsolved problems is categorized by the discipline of science that they are (apparently) most pertinent to. In some cases, the same problem is listed multiple times. I find it to be a nice set of problems, but curiously brief. If these are all of the big unsolved problems, then we have a distinct lack of imagination.
As to how one would go about ranking them as to difficulty, if you can do that even with problems that we know the answers to, you're a better man than I. In fact, I think that the question of how to rank problems by the difficulty they present is yet another unsolved problem. It very likely encompasses the framework of logic used to describe and solve the problem, with some problems that are quite simple in a sufficiently complex world-view being conundrums in a simpler world view.
... most CIOs are NOT "smart, hardworking, supremely aware"?
... it would seem that it might be possible to improve a lot on the image resolution of the best optical telescopes.
From the admittedly simplified diagram of the components, it would not seem to be out of the question for this notion to be included in future orbiting camera platforms, whether for scientific or spying purposes. Imagine if the Mars Orbiter had this sort of image resolution capability, or even the Hubble Space Telescope (or its replacement).
PIGS IN SPAaace ...
... here's one more:
In every complex activity, there are limits to the envelope formed by the boundaries of complexity, time available, and changes per unit time. Like juggling 3, then 6, then 21, then 317 bowling pins while ice dancing to reggae.
What makes software so difficult is that the profit motive drives people to operate on the other side of that envelope. That, and managers are too fscking stoopid to understand that those boundaries exist, preferring those time-honored management techniques of allowing customers to massage the design long after construction is well under way, and throwing bodies at the resulting late project.
It's not so difficult to understand.
... a long time ago, in a galaxy ...
I was a vendor SE who had occasion to visit R. L. Polk. There are customers who are "bleeding edge" customers, always looking for ways that the latest and greatest technology can give them an advantage in their business operations, and there are customers who are "junkyard" customers, who see everything as an expense, and only have the cheapest, oldest junk on the floors in their data centers.
Cost is the only metric for such customers, of whom R. L. Polk was one such (a long time ago, and it's possible that they have changed, but I doubt it, as it takes tremendous capital investment to dig oneself out of that sort of hole, and that's exactly the thing that these sort of companies will simply *not* do).
Given that as ancient hardware decays, the maintenance costs soar, I'm not surprised that a "junkyard" operation would find that aging mainframes are better replaced by a room full of PCs. But as to the performance improvements, I suspect that most of the credit there goes to the rewrite of the old mainframe apps written in COBOL, PL/I and assembler -- and if they had performed a rewrite in place, the observed performance improvements would have occurred on the mainframe as well.
This is a recurring problem with evaluating many of the mainframe-to-PC conversions. In the process of converting to run in the new environment, application programs that are several decades old benefit enormously from the rewrite necessary to operate in the new environment. The fact that they were converting assembler programs tells you something about the age of their software base. The fact that they were converting COBOL tells you something about the likely efficiency of their software.