I dont know why but any time there is a major disaster a bunch crackpots come out of the woodwork and start talking about how if we had the magical asbestos everything would have been alright.
Same thing happened on 9/11. They started talking about how supposedly the towers used to have asbestos insulation, but the evil environmentalists took it away, and if only the towers still had the asbestos insulation the steel columns would not have melted and the buildings would not have colapsed.
Of course in reality the towers still had the same asbestos insulation (the evil environmentalists had only sealed it so it does not leak in the air) at the time of the attacks, and that did not help. But on the other hand new yorkers (including me) got to breathe the asbestos laden smoke which is guaranteed to give many of us cancer.
So the moral of the story is -- do not believe anyone who tries to sell you on how helpful and useful asbestos is or could have been.
"Aside from that, blame is also richly deserved on the part of the State and Local morons who wrote their contracts with Diebold and other computer voting firms in such a way that they let them restrict access to this sort of vital information,"
I do not buy the story that the Government is powerless here. The local and state governments can easily obtain these records if they want to. The contracts do not matter much. First of all contracts that obscure voting results can be easily invalidated as against public policy. Secondly even if the contracts were valid, the government can easily break the contracts if they want to. They will be liable for damamges, but since Diebold would not sustain any losses from breaking of the contracts the damages would be only nominal.
So that is all bullshit. The Alaska officials who refuse to reveal the results do so out of their own motives and not because of some silly contracts.
It seems that Quinn was the person that wanted to introduce open document formats in Mass. What happened is that certain senators started cutting the MASS IT budget to the point where the MASS government could not spend anything on IT unless they got the ok of a special commission of senators.
Quinn felt sure that he was the reason the senators were cutting the IT budget. He felt that the whole state was being punished because of him. He believes that the state urgently needs new computer systems to take care of their records (these systems being completely unrelated to the open document controversy) and they will not get them because the senate is cutting the budget.
Since he did not want to see the state and his colleagues in IT getting screwed because of him, he decided to quit.
Yes I agree that Wine or something similar is the best answer, and thats why I thought the original poster was talking about wine.
Of course then you have the problem i mentioned above -- i.e. that reverse engineering the windows libraries is a hard slow process and you are unlikely to get full compatibility.
Sorry I was a alittle bit confused. I thought the original post referred to allowing Windows applications to be natively run by OSX as is don in Wine.
On a second read it seems that the original post refers to running the actual windows OS on top of OSX, like Vmware does. If you do that you do not need to reverse engineer the windows binaries, because you are actually running the windows binaries out of a copy of windows.
But I think this approach is not very elegant. You need a copy of windows, you need to wait for windows to boot up to run any windows application, and the performance will always be singificantly slower than on a native windows box. I think dual booting is better than this approach, since considering you need a windows CD, and need to wait for windows to boot, you may as well dual boot and get the best performance under windows.
And why do you think that OSX will be able to run windows binaries better than WINE and/or Cedega considering that the people at WINE etc. have been trying to reverse engineer the windows libraries for many years now.
Unless Microsoft releases versions of their libraries for OSX (highly unlikely seeing as how Apple is supposed to be competing with them) Apple is pretty much in the same position as WINE, trying to reverse engineer the libraries. But they will have much less experience with this than WINE.
IMO the best option of "windows emulation" for intel macs will be some version of Wine or Cedega repackaged and cpmmercially sold to Apple users.
yeah but any interests in the original grantor goes to his/her heirs once the grantor dies. If the grantor somehow comes back to life he will not have any rights.
There are some states in the US that have completely removed the rule against perpetuities. So that wont be a problem.
The problem will be even more basic -- there is no legal way to create a future interest in someone that is currently dead. So the only way these people can keep their money is to use a intermediary and the intermediary will most likely just keep the money for him/her self in the unlikely chance that the surviving family does take it trough legal action.
It should be noted that credit card offers are very often intentionally misleading and thus they are a pretty challenging test for literacy.
But I would not be surprised if all those college students really had a problem with literacy. I think what is happening is a certain kind of a cultural inflation of the idea of college -- it is becoming a social requirement for kids to go to college, which means that more and more kids do it, even if they are not very smart or do not liek studying, and colleges that want tuition dollars are responding to this by making classes extra easy, which allows more kids to finish college, which reinforces the initial social requirement, etc.
Bullshit. "Bias" is just a way to silence people, without sounding like a Nazi. Thats all there is to this unfortunate word.
And dont give me the stupid wining about "they teach marxism and therefore i got a bad grade". First of all I really doubt the sociology courses were as marxist as you say, since (i) i have taken some sociology and have not found that to be true (ii) conservatives see marxism in their alphabet soup.
But lets assume that it is true. Even if it is true it is no excuse not to get a bad grade. If a "brain dead liberal" can understand Marxism and you cannot than you are just dumber than the brain dead liberal. Thats all there is to it. You do not have to agree with a theory to understand it and college classes always test understanding. Thus, you can always say in your exam "According to such and such marxist writer blah blah blah" and you do not need to say "it is my firm belief that blah blah blah". I myself have done this numerous times when I have not agreed with a certain writer.
If you cannot understand a theory because you do not agree with it, then sorry you have not picked up an essential skill that college is supposed to teach you and therefore deserve your bad grade.
It is funny how this neo-fascist practice of ostrasizing teachers that hold unpopular views is espoused by people that are supposedly "pro-capitalism". I am also pro-capitalism and realize that the best solution is to let every professor to do their own scholarship and their own research and let the market decide which professor's views more accurately match the reality of the natural world. After all, science is supposed to describe the natural world and not repeat opinions that are currently popular in congress or on the brain numbing political talk shows. And one would think that in a capitalist country, what is good science, i.e. what best matches the natural world would be decided by allowing every one to form their own opinion and then freely vote with their feet and wallets... by taking or not taking the classes of a certain proffessor, buying or not buying his/her books, reading or not reading his/her research, etc. And the career of any proffessor depends mostly on those things -- how many students take their classes, how much books they sell, and how influencial their papers are.
But instead these "pro-capitalists" would prefer that proffessors they do not like be singled out attacked and ostracised untill the schools that employ them have no choice but to fire them. These people are not pro-capitalists. Capitalism love it or hate it is entirely based on personal freedom. These people wish to enforce tight social control on individual speech and freedom.
If Disney is worth 60 bill and buys pixar for 7 billion then they will still be worth 60 billion. They pay 7 billion and get a company that is presumably worth 7 billion so their total market valuation does not change.
And no Steve will not take over Disney. The corporate culture there is so tight, it is very unlikely they will let any outsider in. Disney shareholders have been trying to get rid of Eisner unsuccesfully for ages.
I do not think it has much to do with design. It has much more to do with inertia.
Back in the day when new architectures were popping up like mushrooms, there just was not as much software out there. Therefore, it would be easier for somebody to come up with a workable system based on a new architecture. But more and more software is being created and the users are getting higher expectations in terms of the software they expect to have running on their systems. It is getting harder and harder to provide the ammount of software sufficient to make users happy.
It seems that free software is a good solution to this problem -- all you have to do is compile a bunch of free software to our new architecture and viola -- you have an operational system. If I were Intel I would compile and provide official Itanic support for every major OS piece of software. This way the major problem Itanic has -- lack of software would be solved.
As somebody that's trying to run a 64 bit linux installation, I must tell you that this software nirvana where the instruction set does not matter is far far away.
Slashdot should really not post simple minded flame-bait like this:
"At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
Yeah the system will offer major advantages and they are the following:
It will work when the the US decides to turn off, or disrupt the GPS. The US has never promised that it will always keep the GPS working, and why should they -- we paid for it with our tax money and the US government will always turn it off or disrupt its operation when suitable for American interests.
For example, the civilian GPS has signal has an intentionally added error in order to prevent it from being used for military purposes. Also, the civilian GPS signal gets further disrupted over war zones (such as iraq) to make it especially useless for anyone that is not the US military. Apparently, the military uses another GPS signal which is not useable by other parties.
And thats the reason why Russia already has their own alternative GPS system in place and the Europeans are building their own. It seems pretty reasonable to me.
When you think about it Michael Dell was almost right. To survive apple had to give up most of its proprietery hardware and software, because they knew both the hardware and software were of a lower quality of that available for PCs and slipping further away.
Of course, Michael Dell was incorrect in saying they would not survive but the way they survived showed that Jobs grudgingly agreed with Dell. They gave up all proprietery hardware, used open source stuff as their kernel and limited proprietery development to one narrow but high impact area -- the window manager.
Now many people seem to believe that the Power processors were specifically designed for Apple, but that is not the case -- they were designed for high-end IBM servers and workstations and they were mostly used for that purpose. Incidently thats why the whole problem with power consumption emerged -- since most power PCs were going into ibm servers and workstations, IBM did not care much about designing the architecture to have lower power consumption.
All the other hardware on an apple computer is more or less standard PC stuff which has been slightly modified so Apple can overcharge its customers. And of course pretty soon even the CPU will be a standard PC CPU only slightly modified so that it can be more expensive.
Re:5000 times the size of a full moon?
on
New Galactic Neighbor
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well they said the area was 5000 times the size of a full moon. I.e. they are comparing the two dimensional visible area of the galaxy with that of the moon.
The measurements you offered for the degrees of the moon concerns of course only one dimesnion of the moon.
Now, suppose we assume that that galaxy is roughly squarish, we just need to take the square root of 5000 and we get roughly 70 which means that in the sky the galaxy is 70 times bigger than the moon in any one dimension (lets say width).
Therefore, assuming your other calculations are correct, then the galaxy is about 70x0.5= 35 degrees in the sky. Which is pretty big if you think about it.
"When Apple designed Front Row, they realised that because they have visual cues all over the screen, each of the six buttons can have several functions depending on the context. They just need enough buttons to navigate a menu system, and everything else is done on the screen."
I am not sure if this is better. For a TV system, I would personally prefer to have extra buttons than to have to go through menus to figure out everything. For example if I want to turn on closed captioning it would be far simpler to press a button marked "closed captioning" than to have to hunt through a bunch of menus to find where the closed captioning option is.
"There were shops along Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, the main shopping area, that openly sold pirated movies, software and music. Every underground crosswalk had kiosks selling CDs full of stuff and the police neither noticed or cared. I heard that at that time, 2001, there were no real laws against it."
Dont be too surprised. You can see the same thing on Canal street in New York.
But I do not think that China actually prevents piracy. There are large parts of the chinese population that do not have dvd players or computers and do not care much about consuming western culture pirated or not. So presumably there will be markets which are targeted for those people and those markets will not have much pirated stuff.
So there is no significant difference in how russia/china governments treat piracy. I think the difference is much to do with geo-politics.
The west (especially the US) is very cold towards Russia, while being warm towards China. You can see it in everything. So there is some reason for that, although i am not exactly sure what. Maybe it is because they recognize that russia is still quite a viable military power. Maybe it is because China is more willing to accept foreign ownership within its borders, so that the "free trade" between china and the US is actually mostly performed by US companies and their own subsidiaries.
I have not read the book, but from everything I have read about it (from both supporters and detractors) it seems to be pure male adolescent neo-fascism. Which of course will do great because the latest hollywood movie we had that was adolescent neofascism was starship troopers and that was a huge success.
Of course the maker of starship troopers, was not a fascist... he was a bleeding heart european liberal trying to make some kind of an ironic statement. Imagine his surprise when not only did no-one see the irony and humor but the public embraced the movie at face value and made it one of the biggest best sellers. I wonder how he felt... scared as hell I bet.
The Ender's game movie will be probably the same except that here the makers are not even trying to be ironic... they are trying to be serious. Which of course means that the movie will probably be much funnier and cheesier than starship troopers.
It is all the better, because I am sure I will have to see it sometime. One cannot escape these kinds of movies nowadays. But it may be for the better, it is always useful to know what kind of violent fantasies teenagers are having nowadays.
You make a good point. I should only add that several years ago Bono worked hard to make pres. Bush look good when he went on a "educational" trip to "help" africa with someone from Bush's cabinet (I think it was the secretary of commerce). He got himself and Bush some very good press while Bush was working hard to screw over third world countries in WTO negotiations.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont know why but any time there is a major disaster a bunch crackpots come out of the woodwork and start talking about how if we had the magical asbestos everything would have been alright.
Same thing happened on 9/11. They started talking about how supposedly the towers used to have asbestos insulation, but the evil environmentalists took it away, and if only the towers still had the asbestos insulation the steel columns would not have melted and the buildings would not have colapsed.
Of course in reality the towers still had the same asbestos insulation (the evil environmentalists had only sealed it so it does not leak in the air) at the time of the attacks, and that did not help. But on the other hand new yorkers (including me) got to breathe the asbestos laden smoke which is guaranteed to give many of us cancer.
So the moral of the story is -- do not believe anyone who tries to sell you on how helpful and useful asbestos is or could have been.
"Aside from that, blame is also richly deserved on the part of the State and Local morons who wrote their contracts with Diebold and other computer voting firms in such a way that they let them restrict access to this sort of vital information,"
I do not buy the story that the Government is powerless here. The local and state governments can easily obtain these records if they want to. The contracts do not matter much. First of all contracts that obscure voting results can be easily invalidated as against public policy. Secondly even if the contracts were valid, the government can easily break the contracts if they want to. They will be liable for damamges, but since Diebold would not sustain any losses from breaking of the contracts the damages would be only nominal.
So that is all bullshit. The Alaska officials who refuse to reveal the results do so out of their own motives and not because of some silly contracts.
One can easily figure out what these motives are.
It seems that Quinn was the person that wanted to introduce open document formats in Mass. What happened is that certain senators started cutting the MASS IT budget to the point where the MASS government could not spend anything on IT unless they got the ok of a special commission of senators.
Quinn felt sure that he was the reason the senators were cutting the IT budget. He felt that the whole state was being punished because of him. He believes that the state urgently needs new computer systems to take care of their records (these systems being completely unrelated to the open document controversy) and they will not get them because the senate is cutting the budget.
Since he did not want to see the state and his colleagues in IT getting screwed because of him, he decided to quit.
Yes I agree that Wine or something similar is the best answer, and thats why I thought the original poster was talking about wine.
Of course then you have the problem i mentioned above -- i.e. that reverse engineering the windows libraries is a hard slow process and you are unlikely to get full compatibility.
Sorry I was a alittle bit confused. I thought the original post referred to allowing Windows applications to be natively run by OSX as is don in Wine.
On a second read it seems that the original post refers to running the actual windows OS on top of OSX, like Vmware does. If you do that you do not need to reverse engineer the windows binaries, because you are actually running the windows binaries out of a copy of windows.
But I think this approach is not very elegant. You need a copy of windows, you need to wait for windows to boot up to run any windows application, and the performance will always be singificantly slower than on a native windows box. I think dual booting is better than this approach, since considering you need a windows CD, and need to wait for windows to boot, you may as well dual boot and get the best performance under windows.
And why do you think that OSX will be able to run windows binaries better than WINE and/or Cedega considering that the people at WINE etc. have been trying to reverse engineer the windows libraries for many years now.
Unless Microsoft releases versions of their libraries for OSX (highly unlikely seeing as how Apple is supposed to be competing with them) Apple is pretty much in the same position as WINE, trying to reverse engineer the libraries. But they will have much less experience with this than WINE.
IMO the best option of "windows emulation" for intel macs will be some version of Wine or Cedega repackaged and cpmmercially sold to Apple users.
I read it in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy first :)
But good reference.
yeah, these guys could inspire a dozen twilight zone episodes.
yeah but any interests in the original grantor goes to his/her heirs once the grantor dies. If the grantor somehow comes back to life he will not have any rights.
There are some states in the US that have completely removed the rule against perpetuities. So that wont be a problem.
The problem will be even more basic -- there is no legal way to create a future interest in someone that is currently dead. So the only way these people can keep their money is to use a intermediary and the intermediary will most likely just keep the money for him/her self in the unlikely chance that the surviving family does take it trough legal action.
It should be noted that credit card offers are very often intentionally misleading and thus they are a pretty challenging test for literacy.
But I would not be surprised if all those college students really had a problem with literacy. I think what is happening is a certain kind of a cultural inflation of the idea of college -- it is becoming a social requirement for kids to go to college, which means that more and more kids do it, even if they are not very smart or do not liek studying, and colleges that want tuition dollars are responding to this by making classes extra easy, which allows more kids to finish college, which reinforces the initial social requirement, etc.
Bullshit. "Bias" is just a way to silence people, without sounding like a Nazi. Thats all there is to this unfortunate word.
... by taking or not taking the classes of a certain proffessor, buying or not buying his/her books, reading or not reading his/her research, etc. And the career of any proffessor depends mostly on those things -- how many students take their classes, how much books they sell, and how influencial their papers are.
And dont give me the stupid wining about "they teach marxism and therefore i got a bad grade". First of all I really doubt the sociology courses were as marxist as you say, since (i) i have taken some sociology and have not found that to be true (ii) conservatives see marxism in their alphabet soup.
But lets assume that it is true. Even if it is true it is no excuse not to get a bad grade. If a "brain dead liberal" can understand Marxism and you cannot than you are just dumber than the brain dead liberal. Thats all there is to it. You do not have to agree with a theory to understand it and college classes always test understanding. Thus, you can always say in your exam "According to such and such marxist writer blah blah blah" and you do not need to say "it is my firm belief that blah blah blah". I myself have done this numerous times when I have not agreed with a certain writer.
If you cannot understand a theory because you do not agree with it, then sorry you have not picked up an essential skill that college is supposed to teach you and therefore deserve your bad grade.
It is funny how this neo-fascist practice of ostrasizing teachers that hold unpopular views is espoused by people that are supposedly "pro-capitalism". I am also pro-capitalism and realize that the best solution is to let every professor to do their own scholarship and their own research and let the market decide which professor's views more accurately match the reality of the natural world. After all, science is supposed to describe the natural world and not repeat opinions that are currently popular in congress or on the brain numbing political talk shows. And one would think that in a capitalist country, what is good science, i.e. what best matches the natural world would be decided by allowing every one to form their own opinion and then freely vote with their feet and wallets
But instead these "pro-capitalists" would prefer that proffessors they do not like be singled out attacked and ostracised untill the schools that employ them have no choice but to fire them. These people are not pro-capitalists. Capitalism love it or hate it is entirely based on personal freedom. These people wish to enforce tight social control on individual speech and freedom.
If Disney is worth 60 bill and buys pixar for 7 billion then they will still be worth 60 billion. They pay 7 billion and get a company that is presumably worth 7 billion so their total market valuation does not change.
And no Steve will not take over Disney. The corporate culture there is so tight, it is very unlikely they will let any outsider in. Disney shareholders have been trying to get rid of Eisner unsuccesfully for ages.
No there is no irony here. Just an persistent eagerness to mention apple in every slashdot story no matter how unrelated.
People should start moderating these offtopic.
I do not think it has much to do with design. It has much more to do with inertia.
Back in the day when new architectures were popping up like mushrooms, there just was not as much software out there. Therefore, it would be easier for somebody to come up with a workable system based on a new architecture. But more and more software is being created and the users are getting higher expectations in terms of the software they expect to have running on their systems. It is getting harder and harder to provide the ammount of software sufficient to make users happy.
It seems that free software is a good solution to this problem -- all you have to do is compile a bunch of free software to our new architecture and viola -- you have an operational system. If I were Intel I would compile and provide official Itanic support for every major OS piece of software. This way the major problem Itanic has -- lack of software would be solved.
As somebody that's trying to run a 64 bit linux installation, I must tell you that this software nirvana where the instruction set does not matter is far far away.
I agree, that article was obvious flamebait.
Slashdot should really not post simple minded flame-bait like this:
"At a cost of over $4 Billion, is this system really going to offer any major advantages over GPS, or is it merely a politicised 'anything you can do we can do better' by the European Space Agency?"
Yeah the system will offer major advantages and they are the following:
It will work when the the US decides to turn off, or disrupt the GPS. The US has never promised that it will always keep the GPS working, and why should they -- we paid for it with our tax money and the US government will always turn it off or disrupt its operation when suitable for American interests.
For example, the civilian GPS has signal has an intentionally added error in order to prevent it from being used for military purposes. Also, the civilian GPS signal gets further disrupted over war zones (such as iraq) to make it especially useless for anyone that is not the US military. Apparently, the military uses another GPS signal which is not useable by other parties.
And thats the reason why Russia already has their own alternative GPS system in place and the Europeans are building their own. It seems pretty reasonable to me.
When you think about it Michael Dell was almost right. To survive apple had to give up most of its proprietery hardware and software, because they knew both the hardware and software were of a lower quality of that available for PCs and slipping further away.
Of course, Michael Dell was incorrect in saying they would not survive but the way they survived showed that Jobs grudgingly agreed with Dell. They gave up all proprietery hardware, used open source stuff as their kernel and limited proprietery development to one narrow but high impact area -- the window manager.
Now many people seem to believe that the Power processors were specifically designed for Apple, but that is not the case -- they were designed for high-end IBM servers and workstations and they were mostly used for that purpose. Incidently thats why the whole problem with power consumption emerged -- since most power PCs were going into ibm servers and workstations, IBM did not care much about designing the architecture to have lower power consumption.
All the other hardware on an apple computer is more or less standard PC stuff which has been slightly modified so Apple can overcharge its customers. And of course pretty soon even the CPU will be a standard PC CPU only slightly modified so that it can be more expensive.
Well they said the area was 5000 times the size of a full moon. I.e. they are comparing the two dimensional visible area of the galaxy with that of the moon.
The measurements you offered for the degrees of the moon concerns of course only one dimesnion of the moon.
Now, suppose we assume that that galaxy is roughly squarish, we just need to take the square root of 5000 and we get roughly 70 which means that in the sky the galaxy is 70 times bigger than the moon in any one dimension (lets say width).
Therefore, assuming your other calculations are correct, then the galaxy is about 70x0.5= 35 degrees in the sky. Which is pretty big if you think about it.
"that Apple's one-button mousey was superior"
It is actually quite inferior.
"When Apple designed Front Row, they realised that because they have visual cues all over the screen, each of the six buttons can have several functions depending on the context. They just need enough buttons to navigate a menu system, and everything else is done on the screen."
I am not sure if this is better. For a TV system, I would personally prefer to have extra buttons than to have to go through menus to figure out everything. For example if I want to turn on closed captioning it would be far simpler to press a button marked "closed captioning" than to have to hunt through a bunch of menus to find where the closed captioning option is.
"There were shops along Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, the main shopping area, that openly sold pirated movies, software and music. Every underground crosswalk had kiosks selling CDs full of stuff and the police neither noticed or cared. I heard that at that time, 2001, there were no real laws against it."
Dont be too surprised. You can see the same thing on Canal street in New York.
But I do not think that China actually prevents piracy. There are large parts of the chinese population that do not have dvd players or computers and do not care much about consuming western culture pirated or not. So presumably there will be markets which are targeted for those people and those markets will not have much pirated stuff.
So there is no significant difference in how russia/china governments treat piracy. I think the difference is much to do with geo-politics.
The west (especially the US) is very cold towards Russia, while being warm towards China. You can see it in everything. So there is some reason for that, although i am not exactly sure what. Maybe it is because they recognize that russia is still quite a viable military power. Maybe it is because China is more willing to accept foreign ownership within its borders, so that the "free trade" between china and the US is actually mostly performed by US companies and their own subsidiaries.
I have not read the book, but from everything I have read about it (from both supporters and detractors) it seems to be pure male adolescent neo-fascism. Which of course will do great because the latest hollywood movie we had that was adolescent neofascism was starship troopers and that was a huge success.
... he was a bleeding heart european liberal trying to make some kind of an ironic statement. Imagine his surprise when not only did no-one see the irony and humor but the public embraced the movie at face value and made it one of the biggest best sellers. I wonder how he felt ... scared as hell I bet.
... they are trying to be serious. Which of course means that the movie will probably be much funnier and cheesier than starship troopers.
Of course the maker of starship troopers, was not a fascist
The Ender's game movie will be probably the same except that here the makers are not even trying to be ironic
It is all the better, because I am sure I will have to see it sometime. One cannot escape these kinds of movies nowadays. But it may be for the better, it is always useful to know what kind of violent fantasies teenagers are having nowadays.
You make a good point. I should only add that several years ago Bono worked hard to make pres. Bush look good when he went on a "educational" trip to "help" africa with someone from Bush's cabinet (I think it was the secretary of commerce). He got himself and Bush some very good press while Bush was working hard to screw over third world countries in WTO negotiations.