It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to the standard, may cause loss of life, property, and capital
Surely this is a Bad Thing, but if you're put in the situation where you're trusted with peoples' lives, you shouldn't let them depend on a single spreadsheet anyways.
Capital and property I can see, but until stories start popping up about people dying because of spreadsheet errors, let's tone down the hyperbole, alright?
We can generally show this is true by applying the "grad student algorithm" to compression - i.e., lock a grad student in a room for a week and tell him he can't come out until he gets optimum compression on some data (with breaks for pizza and bathroom), and present the resulting compressed data at the end.
So far this beats out compression produced by a compression program because people are exceedingly clever at finding patterns.
I've heard that somebody already did a software implementation of a grad student. I tried to download the source code but I couldn't open the file: gradstudent.tar.gs
Indeed. A lot of projects are going to be switching to GPLv3 from GPLv2 in the coming weeks and months, are we going to get an article for each one of these projects that change their status? Why is this news?
I can verify that Pockets of Comcast's net are seeing huge increases. In particular, I have seen speeds of 19-22Mb/s burst to testing sites, and almost 2.0MB/s non-bursting.
I've had Comcast and I found their download speeds to be quite usable and the occasionally help of burst speeds like you mentioned is nice as well. However, their home service is still only available with 40kB/s (320kbps) upload bandwidth which is shit. And to make things worse, it seems that the more of that upload bandwidth you use, the less download bandwidth they make available to you. When using the full upload bandwidth the connection becomes almost useless for downloading.
If Apple's goal it to have a sleek, thin, phone, and this means not having a removable battery, then I'm all for it.
I don't see any other company having trouble fitting a removable battery into their slim phones -- even the Razr has a removable battery. Making a battery removable does not add much to the thickness, all it usually requires is three extra layers of plastic, two for the plastic casing around the cell and one to separate the battery compartment from the guts of the phone. When all is said and done that wouldn't even add two millimeters to the thickness of a phone.
Oh, I agree, it's hardly a fatal flaw and I doubt it will have much effect on the iPhone's sales, but that said, I still do believe that it is a clear and glaring problem with the iPhone's design.
As far as the iMac, I really feel the same way. The iMac was popular in spite of it's lack of a floppy drive, I can't count how many original iMacs I saw that had a USB floppy or Zip drive attached to them. People need removable storage and although we all knew at the time that floppy drives were on the way out, nothing had really come in as a good replacement. Now we have USB flash drives, but at the time they were uncommon and expensive as well -- my brother bought a USB thumbdrive around the time the iMac came out, he was the first person I knew who owned one and I believe he paid ~$70 for an 8MB drive!
Seriously -- have the crybabies complaining ever priced a new laptop battery? $100+++, and that's just a simple pop-in replacement.
That's a real apples and oranges comparison there, laptop batteries are a lot larger capacity than cellphone batteries so they're obviously a lot more expensive. The relevant comparison is how expensive it is compared replacing batteries in other phones -- that is, it's a lot more expensive.
Frankly, I think $87 is CHEAP when you consider this battery replacement requires someone skilled enough to disassemble the iPhone, desolder the old battery, install the new one, button it all back up and dispose of the old battery and ship you your product.
I agree that the price doesn't seem out of line for the amount of work it takes to replace the battery, but that's not the point. The point is that if Apple had designed the phone properly with an easily replaceable battery, none of that work would be required and you could be replacing the battery for more like $20-40, not to mention you'd be able to keep extra batteries around to swap around if that's your thing.
I really think that it's absurd that Apple chose to make the battery non-user-replaceable. I mean, there's a reason every phone in the history of cell phones has let you replace the battery yourself, it just makes sense. If this is the "revolution" iPhone fanatics have been talking about, count me out.
My point is that the demand is already there for lower power 3G chips and the fact that Apple wants them now too doesn't change anything. Every phone manufacturer would kill for lower power 3G chips and every 3G chip manufacturer is already trying to deliver them. The incentive is already there -- if some company came out with a 3G chip that used significantly less power they know they would kill all their current competitors as well as increase the market for 3G phones because at present there are a lot of phones that don't include 3G chips specifically because of their power costs (once again, the iPhone is hardly unique in this regard).
Jobs said he's not going to do 3G until they can get 3G chips that use less power. Who wants to bet Apple is arranging to have exactly that available by the fall?
I'll take that bet. If chip companies could make lower power 3G chips, they would. It's not like Apple's the only company that wants 3G chips that consume less power, in fact, they're one of the smaller companies (in terms of the production volume of their phones) that wants chips like that.
3G chips need more power than EDGE chips, it's just a fact and although there may be advances so that they require less power than they do now, no amount of "arrangement" by Apple is going to speed that up.
What did everyone think takes over when you swipe that Amex or Visa card at the convenience store? A PC running some OTS operating system like Linux, BSD or Windows?
While they're certainly running on mainframes, that doesn't mean they're not using Linux. IIRC, Citigroup's credit card processing is done on Linux mainframes and I'd imagine Linux mainframes have found their way into plenty of other "critical" areas as well.
I found that number a little weird too. I looked around and found this site, which collects approval ratings polls from various sources. According to them, you're about right, the lowest rating they have on there is 26% (from a Newsweek poll in June). The polls for last month range from 26-34%.
Polls and statistics are of course not totally accurate or anything, so I could imagine that somewhere there was a recent poll that gave an approval rating of only 18%. Maybe it was a regional poll?
Not likely, that would almost certainly make the macbooks thicker as well as waste a lot of space them. Motherboards in laptops can't get a whole lot thinner than they currently so you're going to be adding on maybe a little less than a centimeter of thickness to the lid and moving the motherboard to the lid isn't going to make the base any thinner, because it still needs to fit the hard drive and optical drive. Plus, setting it up like that would basically leave a bunch of open space in the top and bottom parts of the laptop.
I suppose they could move the hard drive and optical drive up to the lid with the motherboard and leave only the keyboard/touchpad on the bottom half, but that would make it awfully top-heavy, almost assuring that it would flip over when you used it.
So no, I really can't imagine that they would ever do that.
I agree with you, I love trackpoints and that's one reason I have trouble picturing myself buying a macbook, but I also know that a lot of people disagree (sometimes because of ignorance, but I digress). The solution I've found is including both a trackpoint and a touchpad as some Lenovo thinkpads do as well as most non-Lenovo laptops with trackpoints do. For people that dig trackpoints, they can disable the touchpad, for people that prefer touchpads, they can ignore or disable the trackpoint. It's a win win.
Whichever interface you prefer, there's a core group of people who prefer the other, so why shut the other side out? In particular, to the touchpad people, it's not like adding a trackpoint would get in your way.
I've been thinking about why there isn't a mac tablet a lot lately and the conclusion I came to was that surely they must be considering one and it's just a matter of time (a couple of years or less) that they come out with one. However, I was also searching around the web for something unrelated recently and happened across several posts from 3 or 4 years ago with people jabbering on about how a mac tablet was imminent and they would almost surely announce one at the next developer's conference in a couple months. That put it into perspective for me, just because I think they have the market for it, doesn't mean they're going to do it. So although I'd like to think that they'll make one, who knows? I mean, it's not like Apple is known for having a particularly diverse selection of products, they don't have a huge market base so they just can't support the insane variety of hardware that PCs do and maybe tablets just don't fit into what they want to do.
I understand that the GPL and LGPL require this, but honestly if that's the only issue, why is this getting posted? The implication is that they have modified it, which there is no proof of or even a reason to suspect. If the only problem here is that they're being slow giving out a copy of their unmodified Wine library source then what's the big deal as long as they get it out eventually? I mean, it's not like them being slow providing source is causing anybody any problems -- you can still easily get your hands on the Wine source anyways. Honestly, this is a pretty esoteric portion of the GPL/LGPL anyways, there are a lot of open source projects (particularly small linux distros) that are unaware of this requirement and don't provide their own copies of GPL source code they use. Don't get me wrong, I agree that it should be in the GPL in the rare case that the original provider of the source code stops making their code (or old versions thereof) that is used in other products unavailable, but this is not a big deal.
If the reason this article was posted is solely because they're not distributing copies of unmodified source code, why is no mention made of the two other LGPL libraries they use which they are also neglecting to provide source for? The implication (if not from the wiki then from the slashdot posting) is that they have modified the source and not released their modifications which doesn't seem to be true at all.
I just searched through the wine site as well as the wine mailing lists and it seems the only mention of this problem is the one wiki entry that was linked to. Until I see some evidence otherwise, I'm going to assume that there were no modifications and this was just some overzealous Wine user who doesn't understand the LGPL and made a wiki posting about it. I mean, that licensing page from SWSoft lists two other LGPL packages they use as well, one would hope that they understand the LGPL if they're using so much LGPL code.
Can anyone confirm that there's evidence they modified this library? The Wine Wiki page that's linked doesn't actually say anywhere that they were or why they believe they were. If there are no modifications, they don't have to release the code, that's the point of the LGPL. So if anybody has a link to evidence that they modified them then please post up.
I seem to recall a few years ago Prince went on tour and gave away a copy of his new album "free" with every ticket sale. The purpose of this was to game the music charts -- every one of those CDs was counted by Nielson Soundscan as a sale, causing the album to debut high up on the billboard charts. I think there's at least a possibility that this is a similar stunt.
Gumstix now has a PXA270 based board that has USB host. As far as video, I think the best you could probably do is either a USB video device (assuming you can get a driver working) or the onboard LCD controller (which is picky to say the least because LCDs are evil).
You don't really get 54mbps with 802.11a or 802.11g, the most you'll realistically get is 20mbps give or take a few mb. Then that gets even worse if you've got bad reception or a lot of people using the AP at the same time. So while that's not terrible for most things, it'd be a royal pain for transferring large files -- a few gigs will start to take over an hour and that sucks, I've been there, backing up a 30GB hard drive over 10 Base T.
Furthermore, Communism does not have to equate directly to censorship.
Technically true, but show me an example of a communist government that doesn't have serious issues with censorship. The idea of Communist government doesn't require censorship, but the reality is that sustaining a communist government generally does.
They talked mostly about bring plug-in hybrids to market which is a notable difference from current hybrid cars. Regular hybrid cars don't make a whole lot of sense economically and whether they make sense environmentally is arguable (i.e. does the reduction in emissions make up for the emissions/waste from manufacturing and disposing of the battery packs they use?). Plug-in hybrids, on the other hand, are essentially full-on electric cars that also have gasoline engine of some sort in them, so they're really a different beast in many ways.
At current, one of the biggest problems with making a mass-market electric car is that they take too long to charge up. You can easily make an electric car with a range that matches a car with a full tank of gas, but once that power is used up, it takes too long to charge up. Even if you build a car with lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries which charge faster than standard NiMH batteries (and are also more expensive and don't age as well) the charge time is still a decent amount of time. Plug-in hybrids could potentially solve this allowing you to run your car as an electric car for your everyday driving around stuff and then being able to run on gas in situations where you wouldn't want or be able to spend the time to charge up your car. This would provide a way to get electric cars on the road and in wide use without waiting for other technologies to develop (i.e. better batteries, smaller/denser ultracapacitors, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.).
When the new Congress came in it had broad support, but then failed to either end the war or impeach. Now its popularity rating has dropped below even Bush's.
Did you really expect them to be able to do either of those things? For the president to be removed from office by impeachment requires a 2/3rds majority vote in the Senate which would be almost impossible. Furthermore, even if the president were impeached, that would make Dick Cheney president -- not much different. Now, Cheney could also be impeached but besides being similarly unlikely, it would be a legal grey area because no vice president has ever been impeached before and the vice president is usually the one who presides over impeachment trials.
As for ending the war in Iraq, that was also extremely unlikely for pretty much the same reason -- the president said he would veto any bill that stated a timetable for troop withdrawel meaning the only way to get such a bill passed would be to override his veto requiring the same 2/3rds majority vote in congress.
In both cases, there was no way it was going to happen. Assuming all 49 Democratic senators and both independant senators in congress would vote in favor (which isn't certain, BTW) they would still need 15 Republican senators, almost a third of the party, to defect and also vote in favor.
Honestly, you're lucky the democrats even bothered trying to pass a bill with a timetable for withdrawal in it -- I think that's about the best you could hope for.
Slashdot Mirror
Capital and property I can see, but until stories start popping up about people dying because of spreadsheet errors, let's tone down the hyperbole, alright?
Indeed. A lot of projects are going to be switching to GPLv3 from GPLv2 in the coming weeks and months, are we going to get an article for each one of these projects that change their status? Why is this news?
Oh, I agree, it's hardly a fatal flaw and I doubt it will have much effect on the iPhone's sales, but that said, I still do believe that it is a clear and glaring problem with the iPhone's design.
As far as the iMac, I really feel the same way. The iMac was popular in spite of it's lack of a floppy drive, I can't count how many original iMacs I saw that had a USB floppy or Zip drive attached to them. People need removable storage and although we all knew at the time that floppy drives were on the way out, nothing had really come in as a good replacement. Now we have USB flash drives, but at the time they were uncommon and expensive as well -- my brother bought a USB thumbdrive around the time the iMac came out, he was the first person I knew who owned one and I believe he paid ~$70 for an 8MB drive!
I really think that it's absurd that Apple chose to make the battery non-user-replaceable. I mean, there's a reason every phone in the history of cell phones has let you replace the battery yourself, it just makes sense. If this is the "revolution" iPhone fanatics have been talking about, count me out.
My point is that the demand is already there for lower power 3G chips and the fact that Apple wants them now too doesn't change anything. Every phone manufacturer would kill for lower power 3G chips and every 3G chip manufacturer is already trying to deliver them. The incentive is already there -- if some company came out with a 3G chip that used significantly less power they know they would kill all their current competitors as well as increase the market for 3G phones because at present there are a lot of phones that don't include 3G chips specifically because of their power costs (once again, the iPhone is hardly unique in this regard).
3G chips need more power than EDGE chips, it's just a fact and although there may be advances so that they require less power than they do now, no amount of "arrangement" by Apple is going to speed that up.
I found that number a little weird too. I looked around and found this site, which collects approval ratings polls from various sources. According to them, you're about right, the lowest rating they have on there is 26% (from a Newsweek poll in June). The polls for last month range from 26-34%.
Polls and statistics are of course not totally accurate or anything, so I could imagine that somewhere there was a recent poll that gave an approval rating of only 18%. Maybe it was a regional poll?
I don't have a link, but somewhere out there on the web someone figured out how to mod OSX to throw up a windows BSoD when it kernel panics.
Not likely, that would almost certainly make the macbooks thicker as well as waste a lot of space them. Motherboards in laptops can't get a whole lot thinner than they currently so you're going to be adding on maybe a little less than a centimeter of thickness to the lid and moving the motherboard to the lid isn't going to make the base any thinner, because it still needs to fit the hard drive and optical drive. Plus, setting it up like that would basically leave a bunch of open space in the top and bottom parts of the laptop.
I suppose they could move the hard drive and optical drive up to the lid with the motherboard and leave only the keyboard/touchpad on the bottom half, but that would make it awfully top-heavy, almost assuring that it would flip over when you used it.
So no, I really can't imagine that they would ever do that.
I agree with you, I love trackpoints and that's one reason I have trouble picturing myself buying a macbook, but I also know that a lot of people disagree (sometimes because of ignorance, but I digress). The solution I've found is including both a trackpoint and a touchpad as some Lenovo thinkpads do as well as most non-Lenovo laptops with trackpoints do. For people that dig trackpoints, they can disable the touchpad, for people that prefer touchpads, they can ignore or disable the trackpoint. It's a win win.
Whichever interface you prefer, there's a core group of people who prefer the other, so why shut the other side out? In particular, to the touchpad people, it's not like adding a trackpoint would get in your way.
I've been thinking about why there isn't a mac tablet a lot lately and the conclusion I came to was that surely they must be considering one and it's just a matter of time (a couple of years or less) that they come out with one. However, I was also searching around the web for something unrelated recently and happened across several posts from 3 or 4 years ago with people jabbering on about how a mac tablet was imminent and they would almost surely announce one at the next developer's conference in a couple months. That put it into perspective for me, just because I think they have the market for it, doesn't mean they're going to do it. So although I'd like to think that they'll make one, who knows? I mean, it's not like Apple is known for having a particularly diverse selection of products, they don't have a huge market base so they just can't support the insane variety of hardware that PCs do and maybe tablets just don't fit into what they want to do.
I understand that the GPL and LGPL require this, but honestly if that's the only issue, why is this getting posted? The implication is that they have modified it, which there is no proof of or even a reason to suspect. If the only problem here is that they're being slow giving out a copy of their unmodified Wine library source then what's the big deal as long as they get it out eventually? I mean, it's not like them being slow providing source is causing anybody any problems -- you can still easily get your hands on the Wine source anyways. Honestly, this is a pretty esoteric portion of the GPL/LGPL anyways, there are a lot of open source projects (particularly small linux distros) that are unaware of this requirement and don't provide their own copies of GPL source code they use. Don't get me wrong, I agree that it should be in the GPL in the rare case that the original provider of the source code stops making their code (or old versions thereof) that is used in other products unavailable, but this is not a big deal.
If the reason this article was posted is solely because they're not distributing copies of unmodified source code, why is no mention made of the two other LGPL libraries they use which they are also neglecting to provide source for? The implication (if not from the wiki then from the slashdot posting) is that they have modified the source and not released their modifications which doesn't seem to be true at all.
I just searched through the wine site as well as the wine mailing lists and it seems the only mention of this problem is the one wiki entry that was linked to. Until I see some evidence otherwise, I'm going to assume that there were no modifications and this was just some overzealous Wine user who doesn't understand the LGPL and made a wiki posting about it. I mean, that licensing page from SWSoft lists two other LGPL packages they use as well, one would hope that they understand the LGPL if they're using so much LGPL code.
Can anyone confirm that there's evidence they modified this library? The Wine Wiki page that's linked doesn't actually say anywhere that they were or why they believe they were. If there are no modifications, they don't have to release the code, that's the point of the LGPL. So if anybody has a link to evidence that they modified them then please post up.
I seem to recall a few years ago Prince went on tour and gave away a copy of his new album "free" with every ticket sale. The purpose of this was to game the music charts -- every one of those CDs was counted by Nielson Soundscan as a sale, causing the album to debut high up on the billboard charts. I think there's at least a possibility that this is a similar stunt.
Gumstix now has a PXA270 based board that has USB host. As far as video, I think the best you could probably do is either a USB video device (assuming you can get a driver working) or the onboard LCD controller (which is picky to say the least because LCDs are evil).
They talked mostly about bring plug-in hybrids to market which is a notable difference from current hybrid cars. Regular hybrid cars don't make a whole lot of sense economically and whether they make sense environmentally is arguable (i.e. does the reduction in emissions make up for the emissions/waste from manufacturing and disposing of the battery packs they use?). Plug-in hybrids, on the other hand, are essentially full-on electric cars that also have gasoline engine of some sort in them, so they're really a different beast in many ways.
At current, one of the biggest problems with making a mass-market electric car is that they take too long to charge up. You can easily make an electric car with a range that matches a car with a full tank of gas, but once that power is used up, it takes too long to charge up. Even if you build a car with lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries which charge faster than standard NiMH batteries (and are also more expensive and don't age as well) the charge time is still a decent amount of time. Plug-in hybrids could potentially solve this allowing you to run your car as an electric car for your everyday driving around stuff and then being able to run on gas in situations where you wouldn't want or be able to spend the time to charge up your car. This would provide a way to get electric cars on the road and in wide use without waiting for other technologies to develop (i.e. better batteries, smaller/denser ultracapacitors, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.).
As for ending the war in Iraq, that was also extremely unlikely for pretty much the same reason -- the president said he would veto any bill that stated a timetable for troop withdrawel meaning the only way to get such a bill passed would be to override his veto requiring the same 2/3rds majority vote in congress.
In both cases, there was no way it was going to happen. Assuming all 49 Democratic senators and both independant senators in congress would vote in favor (which isn't certain, BTW) they would still need 15 Republican senators, almost a third of the party, to defect and also vote in favor.
Honestly, you're lucky the democrats even bothered trying to pass a bill with a timetable for withdrawal in it -- I think that's about the best you could hope for.