No doubt they'll need to do some kind of necropsy to find out what is really going on here. But I have to say that I found the "they died of fright from fireworks" to be almost laughably unconvincing. I hunt a lot, and almost exclusively for ducks and geese. Most recently, over the week between Christmas and New Years, I participated in a couple large group hunts, in which up to seven of us were in a field for geese. As you might expect, this activity involved quite a lot of banging away with large and very loud shotguns. And while a number of geese did drop dead, in every case it was due to actually getting shot. I've also hunted with blackbirds around, and they didn't drop dead from fright when I shot either - they just flew away.
Again, no doubt tests are going to have to be done to find out what happened. But the idea that blackbirds are such delicate flowers that hearing loud noises is enough to kill them? I don't think so.
the garage door opener. Yeah, that's really cool. But am I really going to 1) dedicate a linux box (in my garage, with temps pushing 100F in the summer), 2) buy the needed serial control interface, 3) spend hours hacking around on software, and 4) physically mount up and connect all this stuff, so I can 5) replace the garage door remote that I already have? I don't think so.
Changing the look of your interface is one of the "10 best" hacks? Really?
Overclocking my phone? Yeah, that'll end well.
Running Android on an original iPhone? Given that in the scenario, I've already replaced the old iPhone w/ a new one because I wanted better performance, it seems pretty unlikely that anything useful is going to result from putting Android on it. Besides, this is an iPhone hack, not an Android hack.
Running Ubuntu? Again, not an Android hack. And the article itself points out why this is not likely to be worthwhile.
If these are the best hacks they can come up with, well... color me unimpressed. Seriously, there must be more exciting things you can do with Android than this.
he won't be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone
The analyst may not be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone, but I would be. What on earth would make anyone think they would? There's a reason why the "conventional wisdom" is that Apple sticks to the high end of the market - not only has that been their strategy forever, but Steve J. never misses an opportunity to reinforce the idea that it's their strategy. Right now, Apple customers can count on the fact that whatever Apple puts out is at least going to be well-made. If Apple were to make a cheap, crappy iPhone, that friendly customer perception would be out the window - folks that now instinctively by Apple products would become open to persuasion by other companies.
I can't understand why anyone would think Apple would drop a strategy that's made them so much money. Apple can't be Dell, and doesn't want to be.
The big problem was always that the pumps would develop steam leaks around the seals. This causes problems: 1) heat buildup in the engineering spaces, which leads to shortened watch times for engineering personnel, 2) fuel economy problems - you have to burn oil to replace the lost steam, and 3) poor functioning of the pump itself - as steam leaks around the seals, there's less available to run the pump.
The turbine itself usually didn't have any problems unless your steam got contaminated somehow... but if it did the results were typically catastrophic. Little tiny drops of water entrained in the steam will seriously screw up your blading. This didn't happen all that often, but sometimes.
The net result is that steam turbines were less reliable and more troublesome than electric motors.
Don't make it optional. When you stop printing paper bills in favor of polymer, and remove all the paper bills from circulation as they return to banks (same process that happens now with existing bills), people will use them.
And I have approximately zero sympathy for the argument that we should give up on a solution that's more economical and harder to counterfeit because "people don't like the way they feel".
A couple things: 1) you didn't "replace" steam turbines - you reconditioned them. They're too expensive to just toss. And the reconditioning process was pretty labor intensive. 2) You had to do the maintenance a lot more often for the steam turbines. They were constantly developing little steam leaks, for example.
I spent a number of years in the engineering plant of various steam ships, and believe me, the steam equipment was way, way more trouble than the electric equipment.
Railgun projectiles are not really going to be able to maneuver in flight, so they're not so good for engaging aircraft. Railguns best use is probably in engaging land targets. For the immediate future missiles are going to continue as the anti-air weapon of choice, and further on, laser weapons will do the job.
The rest of the Navy has moved from steam turbines to gas turbines or diesel engines, but a steam generating system is still the most straightforward way to turn a hot nuclear fuel rods into forward motion. So steam is still being used for aircraft carriers in that sense.
Not to mention the fact that it continued the practice of totally fouling up the naming conventions for ships. The Seawolf class was the poster child for this: you had USS SEAWOLF, USS CONNECTICUT, and USS JIMMY CARTER. Back in the day, submarines were named for fish. Then it was discovered that fish didn't vote, so they started naming submarines after constituencies: SSNs were named after cities, SSBNs after states. The Seawolf class blew that out of the water (so to speak).
Electrical machinery is about a million times cheaper and easier to maintain than steam machinery. Steam catapults suck up a ton of manhours in maintenance every year, and the Navy would really like not to have to keep doing that.
Steam systems are a nightmare to maintain in any weather conditions - switching from steam to electricity has been an ongoing process in the Navy for decades. The old Charles Adams class DDGs had all-steam propulsion plants - meaning that every oil pump, fuel pump, and every other system ran on some kind of steam. Those guys spent their lives maintaining steam turbines. As time has gone by, the Navy has gotten away from steam in a big way for exactly that reason - all that steam technology required a lot of sailors to keep running, and sailors are expensive. For what it's worth, I'm qualified as a Navy Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW) in 1200 lb steam, so I have some considerable personal experience with this.
I also think that you're likely to get performance improvements from EMALS. So I really doubt that this move has much to do with an anticipated Arctic war - there are big advantages to moving away from steam in any weather conditions.
Maybe what they have built is flexible enough to handle both roles.
It's not. The Navy is working on a separate rail gun system as a weapon. EMALS, because of its physical configuration, would not be capable of launching weaponry.
due to the lack of engines and the resulting need to do backbreaking labour 16 hours a day.
While agriculture requires backbreaking labour, hunter-gatherer societies only worked a couple of days a week. Not that I advocate a return to it, but backbreaking labour all the livelong day was not universal in ancient society.
I believe this is true as far as it goes - hunter-gatherer societies were on average better nourished and did less work than early agricultural societies. But the variance in availability of calories to the hunter-gatherers was a lot higher - to the extent that if you were a hunter-gatherer, you were actually significantly more likely to starve to death during lean times than if you did agriculture.
Unfortunately I can never remember where I read this, so no link.
I think a lot of the frustration the GP feels with philosophers is that they spend a lot of time arguing about these subjects without even coming to a common understanding of what they mean by their terms. If they would start by rigorously defining "be-a" and "has-a" (which in practice is wrapped up in the process of defining the object hierarchy) they could spend a lot less time going in circles. As it is, they're talking past each other.
Another issue is the fundamental untestability of some of the propositions involved. Some of these arguments, at least to the layman, appear to be nothing more than assertions - or at least, assertions rather poorly clothed in reasoning that uses (again) ill-defined terms. And if there's no way to validate the reasoning, what are we really doing here? For example, Plato says that actual objects are just instantiations of true forms (speaking of problems that Computer Science has solved... object-oriented programming, anyone?). Other philosophers say that's not true. So, who's right?
I tend to find these questions interesting myself, but there's certainly appears to be at least an element of mental masturbation involved in some of this.
It does kind of bug me though, that a person who graduates with a degree in mathematics (which is a fairly difficult, hard-nosed subject) gets a wishy-washy BA degree
I think it depends on where you go to school. Where I went, you could get either a BA or BS in math. If you took math + a bunch of liberal arts stuff, you got the BA. If you took math + a bunch of science stuff, you got the BS.
Oh, and your exercise in hippie-punching regarding environmental engineering just makes you look uniformed. There's plenty of biology, chemistry, physics, math, statistics, and geology/oceanography/meteorology involved in that sort of a degree program. It's not all about smoking dope and communing with nature.
Sure, but typically you don't have the option of scanning 300 pithy subject lines. In reality, what you're going to get is a whole lot of subject lines continued in the body. Wouldn't it be better to just give people another couple of words?
So now all I have to do is remember four randomly chosen words... for each of the dozens of websites I use that require a password. That'll be no problem.
Look, the users may be dumb, but that's only part of the problem. Even if all users were as smart as you, no one can remember the 20 or 30 passwords required just to go about your normal life on the web, especially when you consider that you don't use all of them on a daily basis. And there are no really good tools to help you keep your passwords straight. As you say, OpenID has issues. I recently purchased 1Password for the same purpose, and it's been excruciating - trying to change a password to something secure, and then have 1Password remember and be able to accurately fill the password into the website has been incredibly painful, particularly when there's anything not absolutely standard about the way the website handles password entry (I just spent no less than 15 minutes trying to change my online bank password, requiring multiple rounds of "I've lost my password" with the site, because to change your password you have to go to a different page than the login screen and 1Password was unable to figure out how to match the order of entries on the "change password" screen to that on the logon screen).
The situation as a whole is just a mess, and it's not fair to blame all of it on dumb users.
I provide basically zero contact data on mine. Because after all, do you really trust Zuckerberg with your personal info? If people find me on FB and want to contact me, they can send me a Facebook message.
My favorite: web sites that force on you a password that's so ludicrously complex that there's no possible way to remember it, and then allow you to recover/reset by providing your mother's maiden name. There's one site I have to use a few times a year that I literally have to reset the password every time I use it, because the passwords are so ludicrous that even if I could remember them, I'd practically never actually be able to type them without making an error. But that's ok, because I (or anyone else) can just get access by knowing my mother's maiden name.
... in these people's lives? While I'm not the world's biggest geek, I'm far from a non-tech user, and I can't keep my logon details straight either. I use dozens of secured websites, each of which has slightly different rules for constructing the username: is it my e-mail address? Which e-mail account did I use? Or is this the one that allows underscores but not periods? Was this the site where I could only have a 9 character username... etc. Passwords are just as bad: is the site that limited me to 8 characters, or the one that required 15 characters including 1 lowercase letter, 1 uppercase letter, 1 number, and 1 special character?
Sure, there are a lot of dumb people out there. But remembering all these usernames and passwords is legitimately hard.
I've got maybe 12 or 15 keys on my ring, all bound together to form one not too large of an object. It's easy to keep track of where it is and keep watch over it. But if my key ring had several dozen keys on it, and if I had to take keys off the ring and hand them to someone else to get various doors open, and oh by the way, I had to make the keys myself (with more secure keys being larger, heavier, and more difficult to make than less secure keys), then you'd see the same problems with physical keys as you do with passwords.
The problem is less that people don't understand the concept of secure passwords, and more that developing and remembering secure passwords for the myriad of sites people use is very difficult. I personally understand the concept quite well, and yet I reuse a handful of passwords over and over... because I simply can't remember a secure password for a site that I might visit once or twice a month. I've recently thrown up my hands and bought a copy of 1Password, because I just can't keep track of all the passwords I'm expected to.
It would help if Slashdot didn't limit the subject line to something ludicrously short. I've often had to result to continuing the subject line in the body, because I couldn't come up with something sufficiently pithy for Slashdot's subject line policies. I have to admit, though, that breaking a word between the subject line and body is a crime against nature.
... in the unlikely event this wasn't meant to be a joke: IPv6 would provide sufficient addresses to provide each of the 7 billion people on earth 5 x 10^28 addresses. I've also heard it said that IPv6 would provide enough addresses to assign one to every atom in the observable universe (can't confirm that one, though).
So, to answer your first question: IPv6 addresses will be sufficient for pretty much forever.
... at least on a Mac. For one thing, the interface is a little difficult to figure out if you're not already familiar with it, and if you try to access the help... instant crash, every time. For starters, I was trying to figure out how to indicate that my parents were, you know, married to each other at the time of my birth, and that proved to be a lot more difficult than you'd think. And the auto-crashing help was no help at all. Also, there are lots of weird little problems: I found that when I tried to enter birthdays, various number keys would mysteriously become mapped to keyboard shortcuts - so, for example, when I tried to enter my brother's birthdate, which is in 1970, I could get as far as 197... but the "0" had become mapped to the "Go" menu item, so then the only choice was to use the combobox tool to scroll the year all the way from 197 AD to 1970 AD... which is tedious, to say the least. The problem would be temporarily cured by exiting and restarting the program, but then it would come back. I also had problems with the "1" key becoming mapped.
The bottom line is that I'm finding this to be all but unusable on the Mac. I do like the idea of an open source genealogy program, though, so I may give it a try on the Ubuntu box and see if it's any better.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt they'll need to do some kind of necropsy to find out what is really going on here. But I have to say that I found the "they died of fright from fireworks" to be almost laughably unconvincing. I hunt a lot, and almost exclusively for ducks and geese. Most recently, over the week between Christmas and New Years, I participated in a couple large group hunts, in which up to seven of us were in a field for geese. As you might expect, this activity involved quite a lot of banging away with large and very loud shotguns. And while a number of geese did drop dead, in every case it was due to actually getting shot. I've also hunted with blackbirds around, and they didn't drop dead from fright when I shot either - they just flew away.
Again, no doubt tests are going to have to be done to find out what happened. But the idea that blackbirds are such delicate flowers that hearing loud noises is enough to kill them? I don't think so.
A couple examples:
If these are the best hacks they can come up with, well... color me unimpressed. Seriously, there must be more exciting things you can do with Android than this.
The analyst may not be surprised if Apple ships a cheap iPhone, but I would be. What on earth would make anyone think they would? There's a reason why the "conventional wisdom" is that Apple sticks to the high end of the market - not only has that been their strategy forever, but Steve J. never misses an opportunity to reinforce the idea that it's their strategy. Right now, Apple customers can count on the fact that whatever Apple puts out is at least going to be well-made. If Apple were to make a cheap, crappy iPhone, that friendly customer perception would be out the window - folks that now instinctively by Apple products would become open to persuasion by other companies.
I can't understand why anyone would think Apple would drop a strategy that's made them so much money. Apple can't be Dell, and doesn't want to be.
The big problem was always that the pumps would develop steam leaks around the seals. This causes problems: 1) heat buildup in the engineering spaces, which leads to shortened watch times for engineering personnel, 2) fuel economy problems - you have to burn oil to replace the lost steam, and 3) poor functioning of the pump itself - as steam leaks around the seals, there's less available to run the pump.
The turbine itself usually didn't have any problems unless your steam got contaminated somehow... but if it did the results were typically catastrophic. Little tiny drops of water entrained in the steam will seriously screw up your blading. This didn't happen all that often, but sometimes.
The net result is that steam turbines were less reliable and more troublesome than electric motors.
Don't make it optional. When you stop printing paper bills in favor of polymer, and remove all the paper bills from circulation as they return to banks (same process that happens now with existing bills), people will use them.
And I have approximately zero sympathy for the argument that we should give up on a solution that's more economical and harder to counterfeit because "people don't like the way they feel".
Weed. The new currency for the 21st century.
A couple things: 1) you didn't "replace" steam turbines - you reconditioned them. They're too expensive to just toss. And the reconditioning process was pretty labor intensive. 2) You had to do the maintenance a lot more often for the steam turbines. They were constantly developing little steam leaks, for example.
I spent a number of years in the engineering plant of various steam ships, and believe me, the steam equipment was way, way more trouble than the electric equipment.
Railgun projectiles are not really going to be able to maneuver in flight, so they're not so good for engaging aircraft. Railguns best use is probably in engaging land targets. For the immediate future missiles are going to continue as the anti-air weapon of choice, and further on, laser weapons will do the job.
The rest of the Navy has moved from steam turbines to gas turbines or diesel engines, but a steam generating system is still the most straightforward way to turn a hot nuclear fuel rods into forward motion. So steam is still being used for aircraft carriers in that sense.
Not to mention the fact that it continued the practice of totally fouling up the naming conventions for ships. The Seawolf class was the poster child for this: you had USS SEAWOLF, USS CONNECTICUT, and USS JIMMY CARTER. Back in the day, submarines were named for fish. Then it was discovered that fish didn't vote, so they started naming submarines after constituencies: SSNs were named after cities, SSBNs after states. The Seawolf class blew that out of the water (so to speak).
Electrical machinery is about a million times cheaper and easier to maintain than steam machinery. Steam catapults suck up a ton of manhours in maintenance every year, and the Navy would really like not to have to keep doing that.
Steam systems are a nightmare to maintain in any weather conditions - switching from steam to electricity has been an ongoing process in the Navy for decades. The old Charles Adams class DDGs had all-steam propulsion plants - meaning that every oil pump, fuel pump, and every other system ran on some kind of steam. Those guys spent their lives maintaining steam turbines. As time has gone by, the Navy has gotten away from steam in a big way for exactly that reason - all that steam technology required a lot of sailors to keep running, and sailors are expensive. For what it's worth, I'm qualified as a Navy Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW) in 1200 lb steam, so I have some considerable personal experience with this.
I also think that you're likely to get performance improvements from EMALS. So I really doubt that this move has much to do with an anticipated Arctic war - there are big advantages to moving away from steam in any weather conditions.
It's not. The Navy is working on a separate rail gun system as a weapon. EMALS, because of its physical configuration, would not be capable of launching weaponry.
I believe this is true as far as it goes - hunter-gatherer societies were on average better nourished and did less work than early agricultural societies. But the variance in availability of calories to the hunter-gatherers was a lot higher - to the extent that if you were a hunter-gatherer, you were actually significantly more likely to starve to death during lean times than if you did agriculture.
Unfortunately I can never remember where I read this, so no link.
I think a lot of the frustration the GP feels with philosophers is that they spend a lot of time arguing about these subjects without even coming to a common understanding of what they mean by their terms. If they would start by rigorously defining "be-a" and "has-a" (which in practice is wrapped up in the process of defining the object hierarchy) they could spend a lot less time going in circles. As it is, they're talking past each other.
Another issue is the fundamental untestability of some of the propositions involved. Some of these arguments, at least to the layman, appear to be nothing more than assertions - or at least, assertions rather poorly clothed in reasoning that uses (again) ill-defined terms. And if there's no way to validate the reasoning, what are we really doing here? For example, Plato says that actual objects are just instantiations of true forms (speaking of problems that Computer Science has solved... object-oriented programming, anyone?). Other philosophers say that's not true. So, who's right?
I tend to find these questions interesting myself, but there's certainly appears to be at least an element of mental masturbation involved in some of this.
I think it depends on where you go to school. Where I went, you could get either a BA or BS in math. If you took math + a bunch of liberal arts stuff, you got the BA. If you took math + a bunch of science stuff, you got the BS.
Oh, and your exercise in hippie-punching regarding environmental engineering just makes you look uniformed. There's plenty of biology, chemistry, physics, math, statistics, and geology/oceanography/meteorology involved in that sort of a degree program. It's not all about smoking dope and communing with nature.
Sure, but typically you don't have the option of scanning 300 pithy subject lines. In reality, what you're going to get is a whole lot of subject lines continued in the body. Wouldn't it be better to just give people another couple of words?
So now all I have to do is remember four randomly chosen words... for each of the dozens of websites I use that require a password. That'll be no problem.
Look, the users may be dumb, but that's only part of the problem. Even if all users were as smart as you, no one can remember the 20 or 30 passwords required just to go about your normal life on the web, especially when you consider that you don't use all of them on a daily basis. And there are no really good tools to help you keep your passwords straight. As you say, OpenID has issues. I recently purchased 1Password for the same purpose, and it's been excruciating - trying to change a password to something secure, and then have 1Password remember and be able to accurately fill the password into the website has been incredibly painful, particularly when there's anything not absolutely standard about the way the website handles password entry (I just spent no less than 15 minutes trying to change my online bank password, requiring multiple rounds of "I've lost my password" with the site, because to change your password you have to go to a different page than the login screen and 1Password was unable to figure out how to match the order of entries on the "change password" screen to that on the logon screen).
The situation as a whole is just a mess, and it's not fair to blame all of it on dumb users.
I provide basically zero contact data on mine. Because after all, do you really trust Zuckerberg with your personal info? If people find me on FB and want to contact me, they can send me a Facebook message.
My favorite: web sites that force on you a password that's so ludicrously complex that there's no possible way to remember it, and then allow you to recover/reset by providing your mother's maiden name. There's one site I have to use a few times a year that I literally have to reset the password every time I use it, because the passwords are so ludicrous that even if I could remember them, I'd practically never actually be able to type them without making an error. But that's ok, because I (or anyone else) can just get access by knowing my mother's maiden name.
... in these people's lives? While I'm not the world's biggest geek, I'm far from a non-tech user, and I can't keep my logon details straight either. I use dozens of secured websites, each of which has slightly different rules for constructing the username: is it my e-mail address? Which e-mail account did I use? Or is this the one that allows underscores but not periods? Was this the site where I could only have a 9 character username... etc. Passwords are just as bad: is the site that limited me to 8 characters, or the one that required 15 characters including 1 lowercase letter, 1 uppercase letter, 1 number, and 1 special character?
Sure, there are a lot of dumb people out there. But remembering all these usernames and passwords is legitimately hard.
I've got maybe 12 or 15 keys on my ring, all bound together to form one not too large of an object. It's easy to keep track of where it is and keep watch over it. But if my key ring had several dozen keys on it, and if I had to take keys off the ring and hand them to someone else to get various doors open, and oh by the way, I had to make the keys myself (with more secure keys being larger, heavier, and more difficult to make than less secure keys), then you'd see the same problems with physical keys as you do with passwords.
The problem is less that people don't understand the concept of secure passwords, and more that developing and remembering secure passwords for the myriad of sites people use is very difficult. I personally understand the concept quite well, and yet I reuse a handful of passwords over and over... because I simply can't remember a secure password for a site that I might visit once or twice a month. I've recently thrown up my hands and bought a copy of 1Password, because I just can't keep track of all the passwords I'm expected to.
It would help if Slashdot didn't limit the subject line to something ludicrously short. I've often had to result to continuing the subject line in the body, because I couldn't come up with something sufficiently pithy for Slashdot's subject line policies. I have to admit, though, that breaking a word between the subject line and body is a crime against nature.
... in the unlikely event this wasn't meant to be a joke: IPv6 would provide sufficient addresses to provide each of the 7 billion people on earth 5 x 10^28 addresses. I've also heard it said that IPv6 would provide enough addresses to assign one to every atom in the observable universe (can't confirm that one, though).
So, to answer your first question: IPv6 addresses will be sufficient for pretty much forever.
... at least on a Mac. For one thing, the interface is a little difficult to figure out if you're not already familiar with it, and if you try to access the help... instant crash, every time. For starters, I was trying to figure out how to indicate that my parents were, you know, married to each other at the time of my birth, and that proved to be a lot more difficult than you'd think. And the auto-crashing help was no help at all. Also, there are lots of weird little problems: I found that when I tried to enter birthdays, various number keys would mysteriously become mapped to keyboard shortcuts - so, for example, when I tried to enter my brother's birthdate, which is in 1970, I could get as far as 197... but the "0" had become mapped to the "Go" menu item, so then the only choice was to use the combobox tool to scroll the year all the way from 197 AD to 1970 AD... which is tedious, to say the least. The problem would be temporarily cured by exiting and restarting the program, but then it would come back. I also had problems with the "1" key becoming mapped.
The bottom line is that I'm finding this to be all but unusable on the Mac. I do like the idea of an open source genealogy program, though, so I may give it a try on the Ubuntu box and see if it's any better.