You seem not to understand the problem. The problem is that in a very thin device including glass, it will be difficult to design a frame that resists bending enough to prevent breaking the glass.
Also, thin-ness less than perhaps 1/2 inch is a quality that is artificially desirable. Extremely thin designs are only good for people who want to intimidate other people with their "superior" equipment.
Of course, if a fragile device is handled gently enough, it won't break. Thin tablets will require more gentle handling. For those who understand they may have accidents, too thin is very unattractive.
"Haven't fusion reactors been built already but have simply used more energy than they produced?"
That's correct. Hobbyists have built fusion reactors in their garages, and successfully achieved fusion.
There are about 30 Tokamak fusion reactors in the world today. All of them produce fusion. None of them produce more power than they require to run. Why do the ITER managers believe theirs will be different? That I don't know.
Also, there is evidence that the ITER project is badly managed, in my opinion.
A tablet computer is partly a sheet of glass, the touchscreen display. If the entire tablet computer is no thicker than a glass sheet, it will be difficult or impossible to design in such a way that it can resist bending forces.
It will hold any amount of libraries you can imagine, because it is an imaginary product.
Quote from the article: "Microsoft will deliver a touchscreen PC that is 'no thicker than a sheet of glass' within the next three years, according to the company's principal researcher."
In the next 3 years? Do you believe that? That's the most extreme vaporware announcement I've ever seen.
A prediction that considers the physics: If you drop it, it will shatter, because the bending forces will be extreme, and something thin cannot counteract those forces.
"You'd think Intel would just accept they suck at GPUs and buy Nvidia already."
Should Intel buy nVidia? Jen-Hsun Huang, who averages about $23.02 million per year, is not the sort of person who would easily integrate into Intel, and he is important to the leadership of nVidia. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, makes about $14 million.
Soon Intel's integrated graphics will have mid-range speed, leaving only the high range for nVidia. The high range of video adapters is mostly bought by teenagers who want to practice being violent with video games, instead of practicing being involved with other people. That means nVidia will be dependent on buyers who are being self-defeating; eventually there may be a backlash against that.
The high range of video performance will always be needed for architectural drawing and machine design, for example, but the total demand will drop, as the nVidia stock price seems to indicate. So, maybe nVidia is not a good purchase for any company.
Should Intel CEO Paul Otellini be replaced? Another reason Intel should not buy nVidia is that Intel is generally a failure at anything besides making new CPUs and support chips. For the success of Intel and AMD in making CPUs, the world can be extremely thankful; that's enough success for any company.
But Intel in other areas seems amazingly badly managed. Intel marketing seems completely out of control. Is the product confusion at Intel a deliberate, sneaky way to sell slow processors to technically challenged customers, or just stupid?
Quote from the article linked just above: "Sandy Bridge PC processors will keep the CORE-i3, i5, and i7 designations and will be rebranded the "new CORE-i3..." That approach is likely to create confusion among customers about exactly what they're buying, given that the average user likely wouldn't be able to pick a Nehalem i7 from a Westmere i7 or Sandy Bridge i7."
Either Intel's purchase of the inferior security software maker McAfee for a "lofty 60% premium" is a HUGE mistake, or the reasons why it is not a mistake should be explained by Intel marketing. No explanation was given, apparently. McAfee has a 21.9% market share selling software often pre-loaded on a computer to technically challenged buyers.
Quote from the article: " 'We believe security will be most effective when enabled in hardware,' Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a conference call." That seems a particularly wacky statement. "Security software" is needed only because, in my opinion, Microsoft deliberately allows its software to be insecure. Insecure software makes Microsoft more money because people with infected computers often buy another computer. For example, see the New York Times article, Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster. The Apple Mac OS, Linux, and BSD operating systems do not require "security software" because they are made to be secure.
Intel CEO Otellini does not seem to have the social sophistication necessary to running a big company. When he made an announcement in 2006 about the Intel Eduwise laptop, he seemed to be intending to have Intel compete with MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) charity program. However, Intel's intention seems to be just to make a market fo
R.I.P. FTP
(2009-07-13, 359 comments) The GoDaddy web site is extremely complicated. Quote: "In that case, why don't more people switch to administering their sites via SFTP instead of FTP? Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it's safe to say that most users won't be switching: 1) Go to the "Hosting" menu and pick 'My Hosting Account.' 2) Next to the name of your website, pick "Manage Account." This will open the Hosting Control Center. 3) In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the "Settings" options. 4) In the "Settings" control panel, click the "SSH" icon. 5) You will see a page saying "SSH is not set up", and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website. 6) You will then see a page which says: Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change -- Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours." [Punctuation and emphasis changed for clarity.]
Registrars Still
Ignoring ICANN Rules (2009-07-22, 122 comments) Quote:
"GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different
problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact
update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They
freely admit it, too."
Brazil is energy self-sufficient! It still exports some oil it cannot
refine, and imports some oil it can refine, but, overall, it is energy
independent.
Brazil has real banking laws. The world-wide economic downturn caused
by corruption in the U.S. financial system lasted only a few months in Brazil.
Brazil only recently passed laws that everyone must be educated
through high school. There are a lot of adults in Brazil who, sadly, have
little education. Little education usually means they will be poor all their
lives.
Compared to the United States, Brazil has poor libraries. Andrew
Carnegie made it fashionable for U.S. cities and towns to have good libraries.
Because of limited libraries, it is difficult for someone in Brazil to educate
himself or herself.
The best book in English about Brazil and the history of Brazilian
politics is The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir by Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, who was president of Brazil for two consecutive terms, from
January 1995 to December 2002.
Brazilians feel a lot of social pressure. They often compare
themselves with other people in an unhealthy way. The culture of individuality
in the U.S. tends to cause people in the U.S. to just be themselves, which is
healthier.
However, people in the U.S. seem relatively unhappy. Brazilians in
general seem much happier with life.
Judging from numerous shocking news stories about the ease of
modifying the results, the electronic voting booths in the U.S. are corrupt.
Brazilian electronic voting seems accurate.
"... I think that the hanzi [Chinese characters] are a wonderful part of Chinese culture..."
If Pinyin is used, the Chinese characters would not disappear. They would just not be used for most writing.
Is the wonder worth the huge amount of effort for every Chinese student to become well-educated? Couldn't young Chinese do something more productive with their time? Are there other reasons to use Chinese characters besides the romantic notions of those who have already done the work to learn?
"We lost all written history overnight." Hasn't the written history been translated? It seems that providing translations is not a big problem.
"... more harm done than benefits."
My understanding is that Turkey is doing very well, and is a strong and positive leader in the region. From the Wikipedia article about Turkey:"Turkey is a founding member of the United Nations (1945), the OECD (1961), the OIC (1969), the OSCE (1973), the ECO (1985), the BSEC (1992) and the G-20 major economies (1999)."
Another quote: "The GDP growth rate from 2002 to 2007 averaged 7.4%, which made Turkey one of the fastest growing economies in the world during that period."
Could you explain more about the harm? Overall, Turkey seems to be doing very, very well.
I know this is a painful subject for some Chinese: Isn't it time that Chinese became an alphabetic language?
I've had Chinese friends and acquaintances who have complained about the complexity of the writing. I've also had Chinese friends and acquaintances who reacted negatively when using an alphabet was suggested; they believe that the Chinese character system is associated with their national identity.
Does Pinyin work? What are the problems with using Pinyin? Quote from the Wikipedia article: "In 1954, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (PRC) created a Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language."
Quote: "Nvidia on the other hand did not do their homework at all. In its usual 'bull in a china shop' way, SemiAccurate was told several times that the officially blessed Nvidia solution to the problem was engineering by screaming at people. Needless to say, while cathartic, it does not change chip design or the laws of physics. It doesn't make you friends either."
"Seriously, before simply docking the laptop and running Nvidia, I was crawling through bugzilla applying patches to the source RPM for the Xorg nvidia driver to fix things as basic as icon corruption."
Did you mean "Xorg ATI driver"? Otherwise, I got lost somewhere.
"... if Oracle is to able to stop Google from developing Android, Java will
likely be avoided by any large companies for their new product. And, now this
news that M$ might give up developing.NET any further adds to serve more
confusion."
The advantage of.NET, or any other mostly proprietary language
methods, is that a company wanting a virtual monopoly can drop support for
proprietary methods and put smaller software companies out of business.
Byte-coded languages like the.NET languages and Java are easily
de-compiled. That makes is possible for coders from a software company that
wants to keep a virtual monopoly to discover how smaller companies have solved
problems.
I understand that there was an order from Sun top management that no
Sun products be developed in Java.
Remember, Microsoft stopped developing FoxPro, and didn't provide any
escape path. At one time, Microsoft said there were 1,500,000 FoxPro
developers. A few years later, Microsoft stopped developing FoxPro.
Microsoft killed the XBase languages by competing successfully with
them, putting quirky features into FoxPro that were not part of XBase, and
then killing FoxPro without providing libraries so that FoxPro programs could
be moved to C++.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a serious, but honest mistake. That mistake was due to mismanagement, but not extreme mismanagement.
"... Intel's long history of doing things badly..."
What other incidents are on your list of Intel doing things badly?
You seem not to understand the problem. The problem is that in a very thin device including glass, it will be difficult to design a frame that resists bending enough to prevent breaking the glass.
Also, thin-ness less than perhaps 1/2 inch is a quality that is artificially desirable. Extremely thin designs are only good for people who want to intimidate other people with their "superior" equipment.
Of course, if a fragile device is handled gently enough, it won't break. Thin tablets will require more gentle handling. For those who understand they may have accidents, too thin is very unattractive.
"Haven't fusion reactors been built already but have simply used more energy than they produced?"
That's correct. Hobbyists have built fusion reactors in their garages, and successfully achieved fusion.
There are about 30 Tokamak fusion reactors in the world today. All of them produce fusion. None of them produce more power than they require to run. Why do the ITER managers believe theirs will be different? That I don't know.
Also, there is evidence that the ITER project is badly managed, in my opinion.
A tablet computer is partly a sheet of glass, the touchscreen display. If the entire tablet computer is no thicker than a glass sheet, it will be difficult or impossible to design in such a way that it can resist bending forces.
"But how many Libraries will it hold?"
It will hold any amount of libraries you can imagine, because it is an imaginary product.
Quote from the article: "Microsoft will deliver a touchscreen PC that is 'no thicker than a sheet of glass' within the next three years, according to the company's principal researcher."
In the next 3 years? Do you believe that? That's the most extreme vaporware announcement I've ever seen.
A prediction that considers the physics: If you drop it, it will shatter, because the bending forces will be extreme, and something thin cannot counteract those forces.
The usual: Bad Slashdot summary. The facts: Police said the e-mail to the US president was full of abusive language.
"You'd think Intel would just accept they suck at GPUs and buy Nvidia already."
Should Intel buy nVidia? Jen-Hsun Huang, who averages about $23.02 million per year, is not the sort of person who would easily integrate into Intel, and he is important to the leadership of nVidia. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, makes about $14 million.
Soon Intel's integrated graphics will have mid-range speed, leaving only the high range for nVidia. The high range of video adapters is mostly bought by teenagers who want to practice being violent with video games, instead of practicing being involved with other people. That means nVidia will be dependent on buyers who are being self-defeating; eventually there may be a backlash against that.
The high range of video performance will always be needed for architectural drawing and machine design, for example, but the total demand will drop, as the nVidia stock price seems to indicate. So, maybe nVidia is not a good purchase for any company.
Should Intel CEO Paul Otellini be replaced? Another reason Intel should not buy nVidia is that Intel is generally a failure at anything besides making new CPUs and support chips. For the success of Intel and AMD in making CPUs, the world can be extremely thankful; that's enough success for any company.
But Intel in other areas seems amazingly badly managed. Intel marketing seems completely out of control. Is the product confusion at Intel a deliberate, sneaky way to sell slow processors to technically challenged customers, or just stupid?
Quote from the article linked just above: "Sandy Bridge PC processors will keep the CORE-i3, i5, and i7 designations and will be rebranded the "new CORE-i3..." That approach is likely to create confusion among customers about exactly what they're buying, given that the average user likely wouldn't be able to pick a Nehalem i7 from a Westmere i7 or Sandy Bridge i7."
Either Intel's purchase of the inferior security software maker McAfee for a "lofty 60% premium" is a HUGE mistake, or the reasons why it is not a mistake should be explained by Intel marketing. No explanation was given, apparently. McAfee has a 21.9% market share selling software often pre-loaded on a computer to technically challenged buyers.
Quote from the article: " 'We believe security will be most effective when enabled in hardware,' Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a conference call." That seems a particularly wacky statement. "Security software" is needed only because, in my opinion, Microsoft deliberately allows its software to be insecure. Insecure software makes Microsoft more money because people with infected computers often buy another computer. For example, see the New York Times article, Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster. The Apple Mac OS, Linux, and BSD operating systems do not require "security software" because they are made to be secure.
Intel CEO Otellini does not seem to have the social sophistication necessary to running a big company. When he made an announcement in 2006 about the Intel Eduwise laptop, he seemed to be intending to have Intel compete with MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) charity program. However, Intel's intention seems to be just to make a market fo
What domain registrar do you recommend?
Here are the stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot since July of 2008:
KnujOn Updates Top 10 Spam-Friendly Registrars List (2009-02-06, 80 comments) GoDaddy is on the list.
R.I.P. FTP (2009-07-13, 359 comments) The GoDaddy web site is extremely complicated. Quote: "In that case, why don't more people switch to administering their sites via SFTP instead of FTP? Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it's safe to say that most users won't be switching: 1) Go to the "Hosting" menu and pick 'My Hosting Account.' 2) Next to the name of your website, pick "Manage Account." This will open the Hosting Control Center. 3) In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the "Settings" options. 4) In the "Settings" control panel, click the "SSH" icon. 5) You will see a page saying "SSH is not set up", and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website. 6) You will then see a page which says: Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change -- Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours." [Punctuation and emphasis changed for clarity.]
Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules (2009-07-22, 122 comments) Quote: "GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too."
GoDaddy Wants Your Root Password (2010-02-24, 236 comments)
Massive Number of GoDaddy WordPress Blogs Hacked (2010-04-26, 112 comments)
GoDaddy Up For Auction (2010-09-11, 122 comments)
Here are some stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26) That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)
Those are just the stories until July of 2008.
Linux Support for the ARM Architecture
Quote: "Guess it's just as well I'm not depending on Adobe for anything important."
It seems to me that there are many indications that Adobe is not managed well in recent years.
"Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government..."
What could they possibly be doing for Virginia that should cost $2.6 billion?
SQL Antipatterns may interest you. As one of the reviews says, "An excellent guide to database design tradeoffs".
Facts about Brazil:
Brazil is energy self-sufficient! It still exports some oil it cannot refine, and imports some oil it can refine, but, overall, it is energy independent.
Brazil has real banking laws. The world-wide economic downturn caused by corruption in the U.S. financial system lasted only a few months in Brazil.
Brazil only recently passed laws that everyone must be educated through high school. There are a lot of adults in Brazil who, sadly, have little education. Little education usually means they will be poor all their lives.
Compared to the United States, Brazil has poor libraries. Andrew Carnegie made it fashionable for U.S. cities and towns to have good libraries. Because of limited libraries, it is difficult for someone in Brazil to educate himself or herself.
The best book in English about Brazil and the history of Brazilian politics is The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was president of Brazil for two consecutive terms, from January 1995 to December 2002.
Brazilians feel a lot of social pressure. They often compare themselves with other people in an unhealthy way. The culture of individuality in the U.S. tends to cause people in the U.S. to just be themselves, which is healthier.
However, people in the U.S. seem relatively unhappy. Brazilians in general seem much happier with life.
Judging from numerous shocking news stories about the ease of modifying the results, the electronic voting booths in the U.S. are corrupt. Brazilian electronic voting seems accurate.
You said, "Parent is a quaint breed of reactionary and has no clue what he is talking about."
Did you mean to say, "Grandparent..."? Because mine was the parent comment, and I was only asking for a description of any harm done.
"... I think that the hanzi [Chinese characters] are a wonderful part of Chinese culture..."
If Pinyin is used, the Chinese characters would not disappear. They would just not be used for most writing.
Is the wonder worth the huge amount of effort for every Chinese student to become well-educated? Couldn't young Chinese do something more productive with their time? Are there other reasons to use Chinese characters besides the romantic notions of those who have already done the work to learn?
Mod parent up. Very interesting.
"We lost all written history overnight." Hasn't the written history been translated? It seems that providing translations is not a big problem.
"... more harm done than benefits."
My understanding is that Turkey is doing very well, and is a strong and positive leader in the region. From the Wikipedia article about Turkey: "Turkey is a founding member of the United Nations (1945), the OECD (1961), the OIC (1969), the OSCE (1973), the ECO (1985), the BSEC (1992) and the G-20 major economies (1999)."
Another quote: "The GDP growth rate from 2002 to 2007 averaged 7.4%, which made Turkey one of the fastest growing economies in the world during that period."
Could you explain more about the harm? Overall, Turkey seems to be doing very, very well.
I know this is a painful subject for some Chinese: Isn't it time that Chinese became an alphabetic language?
I've had Chinese friends and acquaintances who have complained about the complexity of the writing. I've also had Chinese friends and acquaintances who reacted negatively when using an alphabet was suggested; they believe that the Chinese character system is associated with their national identity.
Does Pinyin work? What are the problems with using Pinyin? Quote from the Wikipedia article: "In 1954, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (PRC) created a Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language."
"... if NVidia dies..."
What SemiAccurate article indicates that nVidia may die? This one?
Nvidia's Fermi GTX480 is broken and unfixable -- Hot, slow, late and unmanufacturable.
Quote: "Nvidia on the other hand did not do their homework at all. In its usual 'bull in a china shop' way, SemiAccurate was told several times that the officially blessed Nvidia solution to the problem was engineering by screaming at people. Needless to say, while cathartic, it does not change chip design or the laws of physics. It doesn't make you friends either."
Interesting.
Isn't there something wrong with this paragraph?
"Seriously, before simply docking the laptop and running Nvidia, I was crawling through bugzilla applying patches to the source RPM for the Xorg nvidia driver to fix things as basic as icon corruption."
Did you mean "Xorg ATI driver"? Otherwise, I got lost somewhere.
"... SQL Server 2008 (the core has a dependency, while the additional services are also largely .Net based these days, including Reporting Services)."
.NET, such as ADO.NET, or are there large parts of SQL Server programmed with .NET?
Does just a minor part of SQL Server 2008 use
"... if Oracle is to able to stop Google from developing Android, Java will likely be avoided by any large companies for their new product. And, now this news that M$ might give up developing .NET any further adds to serve more
confusion."
.NET, or any other mostly proprietary language
methods, is that a company wanting a virtual monopoly can drop support for
proprietary methods and put smaller software companies out of business.
.NET languages and Java are easily
de-compiled. That makes is possible for coders from a software company that
wants to keep a virtual monopoly to discover how smaller companies have solved
problems.
The advantage of
Byte-coded languages like the
I understand that there was an order from Sun top management that no Sun products be developed in Java.
Remember, Microsoft stopped developing FoxPro, and didn't provide any escape path. At one time, Microsoft said there were 1,500,000 FoxPro developers. A few years later, Microsoft stopped developing FoxPro.
Microsoft killed the XBase languages by competing successfully with them, putting quirky features into FoxPro that were not part of XBase, and then killing FoxPro without providing libraries so that FoxPro programs could be moved to C++.