My sense being a long time mac user and reluctant PC user is that as far as the operating system went, up until win7, the windows OS was always inferior to the mac. What windows had going for it was better application support , it ran on less expensive gear, and it was the corporate standard (and thus an easy choice for home). Apple almost blew it with the leap from OS 9 to OSX, and by comparison windows OS was coming close. But OSX put some distance back in. XP is a joke compared to OSX.
Finally with win7 I don't see a lot of difference. The application difference is largely erased too. Office looks the same, the browsers are mostly standardized and e-mail clients on both work pleasantly. The Operating system in win7 isn't clunky. In some ways win7 is even better, especially for people who need help using their computers, those context dependent suggestions are nice.
The problem Win7 has now is that there isn't that big a price difference between comparably equipted macs and PCs. (Sure macs cost a bit more but you still have less problems. If you earn more than 30$/hour then it's possible you'll spend more on the PC in terms of lost time. Maybe not. you just don't know for sure when you buy the machine.) And the software is fairly homogenous.
So the reason to choose one over the other is now for ancillary reasons. Will it synch with my iphone or Ipad being the largest one.
My feeling is that give microsft can produce as competitive an os and win7, there's no longer any real competition over OS quality. It has more to do with everything else. Win 8 will probably be as fabulous as win7. But if they stumble, they will loose out on the ecosystem of phones and tablets driving the choice of OS. Corporations will migrate to apples. It will take a lot to recover from that,
Well that's what I said isn't it. "Turning heat into light at high efficiency should not be sustainable." What's interesting here is that while you can create a heat engine that extracts work from heat transfer from a hot bath to a cold bath, I've never seen a case where the energy being sent to the cold bath is highly organized (light) as opposed to heat. I'm not sure that is possible. So in this case what is the cold bath?
This is not violating the first law of thermo (energy conservation). It is getting the energy it needs from it's environment.
However it might possibly be violating the second law of thermo. Turning heat into light at high efficiency should not be sustainable. energy in the form of light has more less entropy than energy in the form of heat.
I could imagine that, in burst mode, that some energy is somehow being stored so that it can when triggered temporarily emit more or seemingly defy entropy. For example perhaps the crystal lattice is disorganizing during emission and then self healing to an organized state over time. This would be taking energy from the environment and shedding entropy to the environment and not neccessarily viloating any laws.
So some game is being played and I'm surprised anyone would publish the findings without an explanation for this.
Now yes people may have had the odd feature that kinda sort looked like an iphone or worked a little like an iphone. but Seriously are you going to argue that apple did not set the standard as it were. Don't you think they have a right to profit from taking that risk, developing thier human interfaces over decades and applying those to the iphone to create such a seamless interface. If not then why did everyone copy it?
I use a jailbroken iphone on t-mobile. T-mobile lets us turn the data plan off and on as i like. even for a few days at a time. So when I travel I turn it on. And 98% of the time it's off. T-mobile is cheap compared to verizon.
The downside of this is the in the boonies t-mobile has less coverage than verizon. it only works on edge not 3g which I don't mind. (I'll find a hot spot if I need something better than checking e-mail). Jailbreaking is annoying because you can't update your phone without jailbreaking it again, and Jailbreaking is never as simple as people say, lots of fiddly steps that mysteriously only work some of the time.
The upside is the low cost, the good t-mobile service if you need it, and you get to use an iphone and they are great.
Presumably there was IP involved that exceeded that in the Dyncam. After all digital imaging itself has been around before the Dyncam, but there's a lot of tricks involved in doing it well.
Agriculture does not consume water it uses water. Virtually all the water is returned to the eco system after use.
However there are different sources of water. Ground water versus surface water. Depletion of ground water is not sustainable as water table levels are dropping. Surface water use is sustainable but also has consequences as stream dry up as they are diverted or become filled with water so contaminated it can't be re-used down stream.
The definition I like came from NASA astrobio asking the question, what would be an observable indication of life on a remote planet. That what might exist in spectra, or surface photos or any remote observation that would be a hallmark of life.
One definition promoted by David Wolpert was the notion of self dissimilarity across scales. Consider that perfectly organized things (crystals) and perfectly disorganized things (gas) are both dead. So a hallmark of life is not entropy. Gas and crystals are dead because as you zoom out on them, their organizational simmilarity does not change (seen a small region of gas or a small region of a crystal, and you can extrapolate or predict all properties of the organization at a larger scale.). On the otherhand life has organizations that change as you zoom out. atoms become become proteins, become complexes, become organelles, become single cells. Single cells become organs. Organs organize into animals. Animals organize into packs. Different kinds of animals form an eco system. And so on.
At each scale, the organization observed remains predictable for a while as you zoom then it abruptly shifts to a new one. The idea is that a hallmark of life is that if you look how each scale can be predicted from the scales below it, that this predictcablilty, perhaps measured as information surprisal, is nearly constant over a range, and then abruptly goes to zero at some scale.
You should therefore look for this same scaling phenomena in spectra or sand dunes or whatever you can remotely observe. A planet that displays anomolies in this probably has some sort of activity that is partially organizing it.
What might be the prop sects of someone writing a firefox plugin to raid together 100 google accounts? that would make it usable in size and also prevent google from mining your data. I wonder how the latency would be. One could go raid10 for better stability I suppose.
This solves a major problem with mag recording. Readback head have always been way smaller than write head. You can read back with just a tiny permalloy head but to write you need large currents and loops of wire. So miniaturization has been limited by the write head size not the read head. This solves the write-head size problem but may have created a new read head problem. But that's very promising.
Wow this same story keeps happening. Apple elects to go with 2G edge instead of 3G. Gets ridiculed. The all the 3G phones have connection problems and drain their batteries. Apple delays 4G. Gets pilloried. Oops the 4G phones are suck and regret. It's not that apple is always later to the party. Indeed they are a realtively early adopter (dynamic memory, graphic printers,.... ) and an early dropper of obsolete tech (floppies, zip drives, ports...).
Like Paul Mason, they only serve their wine when it is time.
the lifespan of well treated chlorphyll bearing protein is about 30 minutes. the chlorphyl molecule resides in an equistly (qunatum) tuned environment to achieve it's meager effieiciency in cells. I strongly doubt anything recovered form grass shavings will be of lasting use.
I'm a research scientist I haven't physically been in a library in 8 years. No need. At first I did miss all the old articles but those are now online too. Even reference books have been replaced. I never did use the library for text books and now those are on ipads and OLPC and Kindle.
Any stolen Computers would be obsolete by now.
And desks are not that hard to replace. Even makeshift sawhorse desks work great for studying. That's what I used in grad school.
And the labs. Well perhaps some of that could have been recycled. But it's also a chance to update them. Thus the start up costs seem like the real issue. Most of the legacy stuff was due to be replaced and good riddance. But replacing it all at once may be a strain.
It is legal for companies to put agreements not to work for a competitor in a contract. While having a similar net effect, it's open. This is different because its collusion in restraint of fair employment. However a lot of these anti trust laws are predicated on the size of the companies involved.
so does e-pub include DRM then? If it does not I don't see how this is the case. But perhaps it does. I don't know.
In any event, I'm curious about a statement made in the article:
"authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand."
Why is it not as simple as running Word text through a filter? Word has headings and sections and footnotes and tables of contents. So what is missing?
you could run a nightly script to find duplicates and then deduplicate them.
an example of this would be find all new files since the last run, checksum them and compare this to the checksum of all previously examined files. Once you find the likely duplicates you can decide how careful you want to be about verifying identity of both data and meta data. For example, do you want to preserve the attribute dates if the data is identical? for some programs the creator dates matter. Likewise file permissions might be different.
once you find the duplicate then just erase one of them and create a hard link to the other if it's on the same filesystem or, if you dare, a softlink to the file on another filesystem.
This is not hard, and it very closely approximates what Netapp and Apple TimeMachine do.
Alternatively, if what you are really trying to do is not elminate duplicates in an active file system but merely keep snapshots for backup then the problem is much simpler.
on BSD unix: ms snapshot oldsnapshot mkdir snapshot cd snapshot find -d../oldsnapshot | cpio -dpl - rsync -aE source/./
where../oldsnapshot is the old backup of your data snapshot is the new backup source is the thing you want to backup.
voila you have an endless set of snapshots in which no file is ever duplicated. However, metadata like file ownership and unix flags are not preserved in the old snapshots.
Slashdot Mirror
or the Butthead Lawyer
And put up an apostrophe, it will be pronounced the same in cockney.
the `obbit
My sense being a long time mac user and reluctant PC user is that as far as the operating system went, up until win7, the windows OS was always inferior to the mac. What windows had going for it was better application support , it ran on less expensive gear, and it was the corporate standard (and thus an easy choice for home). Apple almost blew it with the leap from OS 9 to OSX, and by comparison windows OS was coming close. But OSX put some distance back in. XP is a joke compared to OSX.
Finally with win7 I don't see a lot of difference. The application difference is largely erased too. Office looks the same, the browsers are mostly standardized and e-mail clients on both work pleasantly. The Operating system in win7 isn't clunky. In some ways win7 is even better, especially for people who need help using their computers, those context dependent suggestions are nice.
The problem Win7 has now is that there isn't that big a price difference between comparably equipted macs and PCs. (Sure macs cost a bit more but you still have less problems. If you earn more than 30$/hour then it's possible you'll spend more on the PC in terms of lost time. Maybe not. you just don't know for sure when you buy the machine.) And the software is fairly homogenous.
So the reason to choose one over the other is now for ancillary reasons. Will it synch with my iphone or Ipad being the largest one.
My feeling is that give microsft can produce as competitive an os and win7, there's no longer any real competition over OS quality. It has more to do with everything else. Win 8 will probably be as fabulous as win7. But if they stumble, they will loose out on the ecosystem of phones and tablets driving the choice of OS. Corporations will migrate to apples. It will take a lot to recover from that,
everyone dies at 40.
Well that's what I said isn't it. "Turning heat into light at high efficiency should not be sustainable." What's interesting here is that while you can create a heat engine that extracts work from heat transfer from a hot bath to a cold bath, I've never seen a case where the energy being sent to the cold bath is highly organized (light) as opposed to heat. I'm not sure that is possible. So in this case what is the cold bath?
This is not violating the first law of thermo (energy conservation). It is getting the energy it needs from it's environment.
However it might possibly be violating the second law of thermo. Turning heat into light at high efficiency should not be sustainable. energy in the form of light has more less entropy than energy in the form of heat.
I could imagine that, in burst mode, that some energy is somehow being stored so that it can when triggered temporarily emit more or seemingly defy entropy. For example perhaps the crystal lattice is disorganizing during emission and then self healing to an organized state over time. This would be taking energy from the environment and shedding entropy to the environment and not neccessarily viloating any laws.
So some game is being played and I'm surprised anyone would publish the findings without an explanation for this.
Everyone who whines about the design and interface patents that Apple is enforcing needs to look at this photo of "smart" phones before and after the iphone introduction:
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/24/photo-of-phones-before-and-aft.html
Now yes people may have had the odd feature that kinda sort looked like an iphone or worked a little like an iphone. but Seriously are you going to argue that apple did not set the standard as it were. Don't you think they have a right to profit from taking that risk, developing thier human interfaces over decades and applying those to the iphone to create such a seamless interface. If not then why did everyone copy it?
... is Cheetos
I use a jailbroken iphone on t-mobile. T-mobile lets us turn the data plan off and on as i like. even for a few days at a time. So when I travel I turn it on. And 98% of the time it's off. T-mobile is cheap compared to verizon.
The downside of this is the in the boonies t-mobile has less coverage than verizon. it only works on edge not 3g which I don't mind. (I'll find a hot spot if I need something better than checking e-mail). Jailbreaking is annoying because you can't update your phone without jailbreaking it again, and Jailbreaking is never as simple as people say, lots of fiddly steps that mysteriously only work some of the time.
The upside is the low cost, the good t-mobile service if you need it, and you get to use an iphone and they are great.
Kodak manufactured the Apple-branded Quicktake.
And apple designed it.
Presumably there was IP involved that exceeded that in the Dyncam. After all digital imaging itself has been around before the Dyncam, but there's a lot of tricks involved in doing it well.
Agriculture does not consume water it uses water. Virtually all the water is returned to the eco system after use.
However there are different sources of water. Ground water versus surface water. Depletion of ground water is not sustainable as water table levels are dropping. Surface water use is sustainable but also has consequences as stream dry up as they are diverted or become filled with water so contaminated it can't be re-used down stream.
OK, so software running on a computer is alive then?
it's a sign of life. Something created that software and computer. Whether one wants to say computer themselves are alive is another discussion,
The definition I like came from NASA astrobio asking the question, what would be an observable indication of life on a remote planet. That what might exist in spectra, or surface photos or any remote observation that would be a hallmark of life.
One definition promoted by David Wolpert was the notion of self dissimilarity across scales. Consider that perfectly organized things (crystals) and perfectly disorganized things (gas) are both dead. So a hallmark of life is not entropy. Gas and crystals are dead because as you zoom out on them, their organizational simmilarity does not change (seen a small region of gas or a small region of a crystal, and you can extrapolate or predict all properties of the organization at a larger scale.). On the otherhand life has organizations that change as you zoom out. atoms become become proteins, become complexes, become organelles, become single cells. Single cells become organs. Organs organize into animals. Animals organize into packs. Different kinds of animals form an eco system. And so on.
At each scale, the organization observed remains predictable for a while as you zoom then it abruptly shifts to a new one. The idea is that a hallmark of life is that if you look how each scale can be predicted from the scales below it, that this predictcablilty, perhaps measured as information surprisal, is nearly constant over a range, and then abruptly goes to zero at some scale.
You should therefore look for this same scaling phenomena in spectra or sand dunes or whatever you can remotely observe. A planet that displays anomolies in this probably has some sort of activity that is partially organizing it.
Fool! passwords need to be 8 digits at least. Mine is 1234567891011 It goes to 11, for extra security.
What might be the prop sects of someone writing a firefox plugin to raid together 100 google accounts? that would make it usable in size and also prevent google from mining your data. I wonder how the latency would be. One could go raid10 for better stability I suppose.
This is the data equivalent of freezing Walt Disney and assuming that someday we'll figure out how to thaw and revive him. Write now, read someday.
This solves a major problem with mag recording. Readback head have always been way smaller than write head. You can read back with just a tiny permalloy head but to write you need large currents and loops of wire. So miniaturization has been limited by the write head size not the read head. This solves the write-head size problem but may have created a new read head problem. But that's very promising.
Wow this same story keeps happening. Apple elects to go with 2G edge instead of 3G. Gets ridiculed. The all the 3G phones have connection problems and drain their batteries. Apple delays 4G. Gets pilloried. Oops the 4G phones are suck and regret. It's not that apple is always later to the party. Indeed they are a realtively early adopter (dynamic memory, graphic printers, .... ) and an early dropper of obsolete tech (floppies, zip drives, ports...).
Like Paul Mason, they only serve their wine when it is time.
the lifespan of well treated chlorphyll bearing protein is about 30 minutes. the chlorphyl molecule resides in an equistly (qunatum) tuned environment to achieve it's meager effieiciency in cells. I strongly doubt anything recovered form grass shavings will be of lasting use.
I'm a research scientist I haven't physically been in a library in 8 years. No need. At first I did miss all the old articles but those are now online too. Even reference books have been replaced. I never did use the library for text books and now those are on ipads and OLPC and Kindle.
Any stolen Computers would be obsolete by now.
And desks are not that hard to replace. Even makeshift sawhorse desks work great for studying. That's what I used in grad school.
And the labs. Well perhaps some of that could have been recycled. But it's also a chance to update them. Thus the start up costs seem like the real issue. Most of the legacy stuff was due to be replaced and good riddance. But replacing it all at once may be a strain.
If students didn't have them or smart phones, they'd be doodling, spacing out, sleeping in class as well. It is just a diversion.
Dude it has been shown that doodling enhances absorption and recall on information, but distracted multi tasking decreases it.
Also since when do we say notebook in a headline and have everyone read it and think laptop not paper notebook.
It is legal for companies to put agreements not to work for a competitor in a contract. While having a similar net effect, it's open. This is different because its collusion in restraint of fair employment. However a lot of these anti trust laws are predicated on the size of the companies involved.
so does e-pub include DRM then? If it does not I don't see how this is the case. But perhaps it does. I don't know.
In any event, I'm curious about a statement made in the article:
"authoring standards-compliant e-books (despite some promises to the contrary) is not as simple as running a Word document of a manuscript through a filter. The current state of software tools continues to frustrate authors and publishers alike, with several authors telling Ars that they wish Apple or some other vendor would make a simple app that makes the process as easy as creating a song in GarageBand."
Why is it not as simple as running Word text through a filter? Word has headings and sections and footnotes and tables of contents. So what is missing?
you could run a nightly script to find duplicates and then deduplicate them.
an example of this would be find all new files since the last run, checksum them and compare this to the checksum of all previously examined files. Once you find the likely duplicates you can decide how careful you want to be about verifying identity of both data and meta data. For example, do you want to preserve the attribute dates if the data is identical? for some programs the creator dates matter. Likewise file permissions might be different.
once you find the duplicate then just erase one of them and create a hard link to the other if it's on the same filesystem or, if you dare, a softlink to the file on another filesystem.
This is not hard, and it very closely approximates what Netapp and Apple TimeMachine do.
Alternatively, if what you are really trying to do is not elminate duplicates in an active file system but merely keep snapshots for backup then the problem is much simpler.
on BSD unix: ../oldsnapshot | cpio -dpl - ./
ms snapshot oldsnapshot
mkdir snapshot
cd snapshot
find -d
rsync -aE source/
where ../oldsnapshot is the old backup of your data
snapshot is the new backup
source is the thing you want to backup.
voila you have an endless set of snapshots in which no file is ever duplicated. However, metadata like file ownership and unix flags are not preserved in the old snapshots.
The really strange thing in all these pictures is there are not Chairs and almost no tables. I think this might be an abandoned site.