Might Apple Apple consider migrating Mac to the Cell architecture? Cell's phenomenal media processing capabilities seem to fit Apple's niche market well, while the Cell core is still PPC. Is the core general purpose enough to run a desktop or server OS like OS X? Their relationship with IBM, their current use of IBM's PPC architecture, this news or IBM's opening of the Cell, plus the media processing advantage that Cell would give the Mac platform, all seem to suggest this is something Apple should seriously consider.
Whatever happened to supplying people the facts - obesity is one of the leading indicators of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and your basic miserable life filled with various afflictions, and eating well and exercising regularly prevent it. I hate it when people give up on doing the right thing, or things the right way, or both in this case, b/c they weren't working. Frikkin figure out a way to make them work. Hack the problem and solve it. Don't go running off willy-nilly on some hairbrained scheme like bribing kids with Xboxs and iPods to get them to do this. And besides, giving videogame systems to obese kids to bribe them into exercising? Logical contradictions? Yes we've heard of them somewhere...
I've recently gone to work in IT for an airline, a good one, and there is no way they can outsource IT. Things just move too fast, the industry is too competitive, and survival depends on how fast you can roll out new features, from web booking engine upgrades to CRM techniques to internal business intelligence systems. This company went from $4 million to $300 million in website ticket sales over the past three years due to technology alone, and made the company ridiculously profitable for the first time since deregulation in '78. On the flip side, we lost $500,000 last week b/c our hosted website booking engine went down. Further, almost all new market opportunities are best exploited these days via technology, and whoever rolls out the tech first has a bankable advantage. When you make $1 million per day, that advantage translates into real money. Outsourcing to the other side of the world would introduce an intolerable inefficiency into the system, making outsourcing less likely than in other areas of IT. The competition and sense of urgency really make the job fun too. So my advice to IT pro's looking to stay in their field but concerned about getting outsourced is to identify industries like the airline industry where outsourcing is difficult or impossible, and go to work there. ymmv.
For an opposing opinion on this, here's the Journal's take. Biased? Yes. Worth taking into consideration? Yes. YMMV.
Patriot Act Posturing
How desperate is the ACLU?
Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Several provisions of the Patriot Act come up for renewal this year and debate is already under way in Congress. Today the Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the FBI's subpoena power in terrorism cases, which the Administration wants Congress to expand. It's a closed-door session so that Senators can weigh classified information.
Enter the ACLU. The civil liberties organization is so desperate to derail the Patriot Act that it has gone to the extreme of protesting the closed-door nature of the meeting, saying that "lawmakers are trying to keep legislation to reauthorize the Patriot Act secret." Oh, really? The reason the hearing is closed is because Senators "will discuss actual intelligence operations and how the Patriot Act applies to those operations," a spokesman says.
The subject under discussion is the "administrative subpoena," which would allow the FBI to subpoena documents without first going to a judge in emergency situations involving national security. Congress long ago gave the FBI administrative subpoena power for cases involving narcotics, health-care fraud, child pornography, and a host of other areas in which fast action can make a difference. A party served with an administrative subpoena can challenge it in court if it believes it is unwarranted.
As the ACLU surely knows, one of the reasons the FBI is asking for administrative subpoenas for terrorism cases is customer demand. Since 9/11, hotels, Internet service providers and other businesses have voluntarily cooperated when the FBI has asked for emergency information on terrorist suspects. But in this lawsuit-crazed age, they want the legal cover of being able to say they were complying with a subpoena; it's a way of protecting themselves against liability suits from organizations like the ACLU. Now there's a subject for a Congressional hearing.
This stand-it-up-on-the-side crap might look cool to some people, but it really doesn't fit in to the scheme of most media rooms very well.
That's a very America-centric view. It fits the "media rooms", eg bedrooms, common rooms, etc. of tinier Japanese apartments much better than a horizontal-only console like the original Xbox.
That slideshow could make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.
That quote has always bothered me, and the reason is b/c a parsec is a meaure of distance, not time. But Han clearly refers to it as a measure of time here. I am not an astronomer/cosmologist, etc., but am I missing something here, or was George just bs'ing the audience again?
However, yes, I would argue that profit is a null concept in science, other than the profit of personal discovery. Any practical use is irrelevant to the process, including cures for cancer, most of which research is being conducted in the hopes of making a fucking killing in the marketplace.
I really don't like the way that business and science seem to compete and slag each other off over which is more valuable to society. They are both crucial parts of process of the advancement of the human race, and without either that process would be drastically delayed. Science uncovers the fundamental knowledge and makes the theoretical discoveries without which longterm technological advancement cannot occur. Academia and business find ways of turning that new theoretical knowledge into technological advancements, which businesses then turn into valuable new products and services, and efficiently distribute to the public. New wealth is created, some of which is taxed and used to support more scientific research, and some of which is donated or finds its way via other channels back into the scientific discovery process, funding the expensive labs and equipment that is increasingly necessary these days for further research. These fields are depedent upon each other for rapid advancement, and while each field is capable of existing without the other (business can always sell services and manufactured goods like chairs and stuff, and armchair scientists can always tinker), soooo much is gained when they coexist and cooperate as they do in modern society. This arrangement is not without its problems, notably when big business funds scientific research directly and pressures the researchers to support findings that are in the business's immediate interest, but overall it is a very powerful system that does more for the advancement of society than anything else we have ever come up with.
Having spent my career so far in IT, having read/. enough to hear points of view from all ranges of the education continuum, and having dated a cancer research professor (yes I already turned in my geek card), I can also see that one of the problems is that some scientists tend to look down on people not as smart or educated as themselves. Part of the problem is that their minds flit so fast and excitedly from thought to idea to logic and back that dealing with people who can't keep up is immensely frustrating for them. Hence they come to disdain such people.
But what such scientists don't seem to take into account is that they're only gifted as they are by the luck of the draw (or the grace of God, depending on your notions). They could just as well have been born a cretin, or someone reasonably intelligent but not brilliant. Even though they may have made the best use of it, they have done nothing to earn their intelligence, and have no right disdain or to mistreat "underlings" who weren't so lucky in life. There is a place for everyone in life, and everyone should be thankful and humble about whatever talents they were born with, and about what they have been able to achieve in life. It's just random chance that separates any of us down syndrome and the like, and even such unfortunate people have their purpose in life, if only to remind the rest of us that sometimes being a decent human being really is all that matters.
Business people on the other hand value practicality and getting things done, and some tend to look at the "ivory tower" as disconnected, out-of-touch people with too high opions of themselves who sit around thinking about irrelevant abstractions all day and don't actually do anything valuable. Business people tend to be apprehensive of complicated, seemingly incomprehensible theories that look suspiciously like BS. This is unfortunate, b/c often it is just such theories from which valuable practical implementations derive, albeit most of the time too slowly for most people to recognize tht the sour
Of course it's made in India for $200 or less, sold in America for $3000 or more, and tech-supported in India by nice people who try not to sound Indian for more or less a pittance or a king's ransom, depending on your perspective.
I'm reading this while listening to some of John William's Star Wars music - Ep1:PM, Dual of the Fates, Ep3:RotS, Battle of the Heroes, and Ep5:ESB, The Imperial March. How unfortunately appropriate.
Just save it as a PDF. That's 100% enterprise compatible, and for the lamers that aren't (they don't officially count anyway), bundle free Adobe reader with your resume.
Overall though, the biggest complaint was that when you boot up OO all you get is a big blank grey screen with no instructions on where to go from there.
God forbid anyone would actually have work out for themselves clicking the File->New or File->Open menu item to get started using a piece of office software.
And why do we constantly refer to using software as "going" someplace? Before "Your potential, our passion", Microsoft's marketing schpiel was "Where do you want to go today", as if they were a travel booking company. People, you don't *go* anywhere using software or the internet (no, imagination doesn't count), you sit in your chair and *do* things! Why not "What do you want to do today?" and similar comments instead?
I don't know what I think about this law. I found out recently that a guy I knew way back in high school hooked up with a 17 year old girl when he was 26. Her father caught them, pressed charges, and he was convicted and put on the sex offender registry. Now you can even look him up on the state's sex offender website. However, it was a mutual thing between them, and kids are having sex around 12 or 13 these days anyway, with many girls being as sexually free and aggressive as guys, and at least as interested in older guys as they are in guys their same age. Heck, I met a 14 year old girl a few months ago who looked at least 20, was partying at the beach with her 29-year old friend, and hitting on guys without regard to any age difference, as long as they were hot. As a guy you really have to be careful these days, since things are so much more open, free, and unrestricted between the sexes, but certain laws have not consequently evolved to take this into account. It makes me question whether these sex-offender laws have become too anachronistic and need to be revised to better reflect modern society. There are certainly messed-up sexual predators about that need to be restrained and punished *cough*MichealJackson*cough*, but neither do I want to see kids playing around treated like pedofiles under the law and tracked with GPS devices the rest of their lives. Not sure how to make the ideal legal distinction, but I think it's something that needs to be considered.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful [as the Babelfish] could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Yes, but as you pointed out it casts significant doubt over the veracity of the bible, hence their problem with it. And if I may observe the obvious, the scientific method that allowed humanity to finally become something more than a bunch of stick-wielding, depth-perceiving, talking animals requires hypotheses and theories to be proved before being accepted as truth, rather than disproved before being accepted as untrue.
Don't under-estimate networking from 'elite' schools, its more powerful than a quality education.
The networking helps, but the name is worth its weight in gold. Much more valuable than something so relatively pedantic as whether to major in hardware or software. The Ivy (and MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Duke, Berkely, Chicago, etc.) names usually prove to prospective employers that you have a rigorous work ethic and the ability to learn and do anything quickly and well. If you can reach 80% of the competency of a specialist with just 20% of the training time and cost (for example, on-the-job learning vs. a multi-year degree program), then you're golden. In this rapidly-fluctuating competitive business environment, that's much more valuable to employers than whether you're a specialist in some field. Having the name of top university on your resume is essentially an official certification of exactly that.
Slashdot Mirror
Might Apple Apple consider migrating Mac to the Cell architecture? Cell's phenomenal media processing capabilities seem to fit Apple's niche market well, while the Cell core is still PPC. Is the core general purpose enough to run a desktop or server OS like OS X? Their relationship with IBM, their current use of IBM's PPC architecture, this news or IBM's opening of the Cell, plus the media processing advantage that Cell would give the Mac platform, all seem to suggest this is something Apple should seriously consider.
Whatever happened to supplying people the facts - obesity is one of the leading indicators of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and your basic miserable life filled with various afflictions, and eating well and exercising regularly prevent it. I hate it when people give up on doing the right thing, or things the right way, or both in this case, b/c they weren't working. Frikkin figure out a way to make them work. Hack the problem and solve it. Don't go running off willy-nilly on some hairbrained scheme like bribing kids with Xboxs and iPods to get them to do this. And besides, giving videogame systems to obese kids to bribe them into exercising? Logical contradictions? Yes we've heard of them somewhere...
I've recently gone to work in IT for an airline, a good one, and there is no way they can outsource IT. Things just move too fast, the industry is too competitive, and survival depends on how fast you can roll out new features, from web booking engine upgrades to CRM techniques to internal business intelligence systems. This company went from $4 million to $300 million in website ticket sales over the past three years due to technology alone, and made the company ridiculously profitable for the first time since deregulation in '78. On the flip side, we lost $500,000 last week b/c our hosted website booking engine went down. Further, almost all new market opportunities are best exploited these days via technology, and whoever rolls out the tech first has a bankable advantage. When you make $1 million per day, that advantage translates into real money. Outsourcing to the other side of the world would introduce an intolerable inefficiency into the system, making outsourcing less likely than in other areas of IT. The competition and sense of urgency really make the job fun too. So my advice to IT pro's looking to stay in their field but concerned about getting outsourced is to identify industries like the airline industry where outsourcing is difficult or impossible, and go to work there. ymmv.
For an opposing opinion on this, here's the Journal's take. Biased? Yes. Worth taking into consideration? Yes. YMMV.
Patriot Act Posturing
How desperate is the ACLU?
Thursday, May 19, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Several provisions of the Patriot Act come up for renewal this year and debate is already under way in Congress. Today the Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the FBI's subpoena power in terrorism cases, which the Administration wants Congress to expand. It's a closed-door session so that Senators can weigh classified information.
Enter the ACLU. The civil liberties organization is so desperate to derail the Patriot Act that it has gone to the extreme of protesting the closed-door nature of the meeting, saying that "lawmakers are trying to keep legislation to reauthorize the Patriot Act secret." Oh, really? The reason the hearing is closed is because Senators "will discuss actual intelligence operations and how the Patriot Act applies to those operations," a spokesman says.
The subject under discussion is the "administrative subpoena," which would allow the FBI to subpoena documents without first going to a judge in emergency situations involving national security. Congress long ago gave the FBI administrative subpoena power for cases involving narcotics, health-care fraud, child pornography, and a host of other areas in which fast action can make a difference. A party served with an administrative subpoena can challenge it in court if it believes it is unwarranted.
As the ACLU surely knows, one of the reasons the FBI is asking for administrative subpoenas for terrorism cases is customer demand. Since 9/11, hotels, Internet service providers and other businesses have voluntarily cooperated when the FBI has asked for emergency information on terrorist suspects. But in this lawsuit-crazed age, they want the legal cover of being able to say they were complying with a subpoena; it's a way of protecting themselves against liability suits from organizations like the ACLU. Now there's a subject for a Congressional hearing.
Yeah, Steve, whatever you and Bill say. While you're at it, dance monkeyboy!
Credibility? We've heard of it somewhere...
Perhaps I speak for others as well when I ask, just WTF is Internet Hunting?
Yes I know I can look it up, but that's not my point...
Indian culture is vegetarian
No, they eat plenty of lamb meat, but just not their sacred cows.
This stand-it-up-on-the-side crap might look cool to some people, but it really doesn't fit in to the scheme of most media rooms very well.
That's a very America-centric view. It fits the "media rooms", eg bedrooms, common rooms, etc. of tinier Japanese apartments much better than a horizontal-only console like the original Xbox.
Someone will come up with a non-slashdottable web server.
Done.
That slideshow could make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.
That quote has always bothered me, and the reason is b/c a parsec is a meaure of distance, not time. But Han clearly refers to it as a measure of time here. I am not an astronomer/cosmologist, etc., but am I missing something here, or was George just bs'ing the audience again?
Profit is a null concept in science
/. enough to hear points of view from all ranges of the education continuum, and having dated a cancer research professor (yes I already turned in my geek card), I can also see that one of the problems is that some scientists tend to look down on people not as smart or educated as themselves. Part of the problem is that their minds flit so fast and excitedly from thought to idea to logic and back that dealing with people who can't keep up is immensely frustrating for them. Hence they come to disdain such people.
However, yes, I would argue that profit is a null concept in science, other than the profit of personal discovery. Any practical use is irrelevant to the process, including cures for cancer, most of which research is being conducted in the hopes of making a fucking killing in the marketplace.
I really don't like the way that business and science seem to compete and slag each other off over which is more valuable to society. They are both crucial parts of process of the advancement of the human race, and without either that process would be drastically delayed. Science uncovers the fundamental knowledge and makes the theoretical discoveries without which longterm technological advancement cannot occur. Academia and business find ways of turning that new theoretical knowledge into technological advancements, which businesses then turn into valuable new products and services, and efficiently distribute to the public. New wealth is created, some of which is taxed and used to support more scientific research, and some of which is donated or finds its way via other channels back into the scientific discovery process, funding the expensive labs and equipment that is increasingly necessary these days for further research. These fields are depedent upon each other for rapid advancement, and while each field is capable of existing without the other (business can always sell services and manufactured goods like chairs and stuff, and armchair scientists can always tinker), soooo much is gained when they coexist and cooperate as they do in modern society. This arrangement is not without its problems, notably when big business funds scientific research directly and pressures the researchers to support findings that are in the business's immediate interest, but overall it is a very powerful system that does more for the advancement of society than anything else we have ever come up with.
Having spent my career so far in IT, having read
But what such scientists don't seem to take into account is that they're only gifted as they are by the luck of the draw (or the grace of God, depending on your notions). They could just as well have been born a cretin, or someone reasonably intelligent but not brilliant. Even though they may have made the best use of it, they have done nothing to earn their intelligence, and have no right disdain or to mistreat "underlings" who weren't so lucky in life. There is a place for everyone in life, and everyone should be thankful and humble about whatever talents they were born with, and about what they have been able to achieve in life. It's just random chance that separates any of us down syndrome and the like, and even such unfortunate people have their purpose in life, if only to remind the rest of us that sometimes being a decent human being really is all that matters.
Business people on the other hand value practicality and getting things done, and some tend to look at the "ivory tower" as disconnected, out-of-touch people with too high opions of themselves who sit around thinking about irrelevant abstractions all day and don't actually do anything valuable. Business people tend to be apprehensive of complicated, seemingly incomprehensible theories that look suspiciously like BS. This is unfortunate, b/c often it is just such theories from which valuable practical implementations derive, albeit most of the time too slowly for most people to recognize tht the sour
Of course it's made in India for $200 or less, sold in America for $3000 or more, and tech-supported in India by nice people who try not to sound Indian for more or less a pittance or a king's ransom, depending on your perspective.
I'm reading this while listening to some of John William's Star Wars music - Ep1:PM, Dual of the Fates, Ep3:RotS, Battle of the Heroes, and Ep5:ESB, The Imperial March. How unfortunately appropriate.
Isn't that sort of like saying "Need to learn Spanish so I can move to the US"?
No, b/c French isn't the majority language in Canada.
Just save it as a PDF. That's 100% enterprise compatible, and for the lamers that aren't (they don't officially count anyway), bundle free Adobe reader with your resume.
Overall though, the biggest complaint was that when you boot up OO all you get is a big blank grey screen with no instructions on where to go from there.
God forbid anyone would actually have work out for themselves clicking the File->New or File->Open menu item to get started using a piece of office software.
And why do we constantly refer to using software as "going" someplace? Before "Your potential, our passion", Microsoft's marketing schpiel was "Where do you want to go today", as if they were a travel booking company. People, you don't *go* anywhere using software or the internet (no, imagination doesn't count), you sit in your chair and *do* things! Why not "What do you want to do today?" and similar comments instead?
You know you want one, and so do I.
So what are you waiting for, go build one already! Sheeeesshh, and you call yourself a geek.
That's 80 GB of source code,.......provided on CD
Too bad IBM didn't think to provide it on 5.25" floppies. Now that would have been truly nasty.
Or just reply with fake automatic vacation responses.
We live in a time of extreme change, much of it precipitated by an avalanche of information that otherwise threatens to swallow us whole.
EEEEEEKK!!! Run for your lives!!!
I don't know what I think about this law. I found out recently that a guy I knew way back in high school hooked up with a 17 year old girl when he was 26. Her father caught them, pressed charges, and he was convicted and put on the sex offender registry. Now you can even look him up on the state's sex offender website. However, it was a mutual thing between them, and kids are having sex around 12 or 13 these days anyway, with many girls being as sexually free and aggressive as guys, and at least as interested in older guys as they are in guys their same age. Heck, I met a 14 year old girl a few months ago who looked at least 20, was partying at the beach with her 29-year old friend, and hitting on guys without regard to any age difference, as long as they were hot. As a guy you really have to be careful these days, since things are so much more open, free, and unrestricted between the sexes, but certain laws have not consequently evolved to take this into account. It makes me question whether these sex-offender laws have become too anachronistic and need to be revised to better reflect modern society. There are certainly messed-up sexual predators about that need to be restrained and punished *cough*MichealJackson*cough*, but neither do I want to see kids playing around treated like pedofiles under the law and tracked with GPS devices the rest of their lives. Not sure how to make the ideal legal distinction, but I think it's something that needs to be considered.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful [as the Babelfish] could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Evolution does not disprove the existence of God.
Yes, but as you pointed out it casts significant doubt over the veracity of the bible, hence their problem with it. And if I may observe the obvious, the scientific method that allowed humanity to finally become something more than a bunch of stick-wielding, depth-perceiving, talking animals requires hypotheses and theories to be proved before being accepted as truth, rather than disproved before being accepted as untrue.
And step 4:
/. after reading this article.
4) #$@%&!!!
Which represents
Don't under-estimate networking from 'elite' schools, its more powerful than a quality education.
The networking helps, but the name is worth its weight in gold. Much more valuable than something so relatively pedantic as whether to major in hardware or software. The Ivy (and MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Duke, Berkely, Chicago, etc.) names usually prove to prospective employers that you have a rigorous work ethic and the ability to learn and do anything quickly and well. If you can reach 80% of the competency of a specialist with just 20% of the training time and cost (for example, on-the-job learning vs. a multi-year degree program), then you're golden. In this rapidly-fluctuating competitive business environment, that's much more valuable to employers than whether you're a specialist in some field. Having the name of top university on your resume is essentially an official certification of exactly that.