Electron flow speed has nothing to do with how fast electronic circuits can perform operations
Bzzzt. Wrong. A basic unit of a MOS transister is the transit time of electrons in a gate. This is related to the mobility of the charge carriers (electrons/holes).
To quote "Introduction to VLSI Systems" (Mead/Conway):
"We shall see that the transit time is the fundamental unit of the entire integrated system."
A ruling last year stated that police need a warrant to track individuals in a similar fashion.
That was a ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court (the state I live in) and I remember reading about it. This ruling has no effect in the other 49 states or on the Feds. While the ruling may influence other judges, the Washington State Constitution generally has more citizen friendly rules on privacy and related matters than the U. S. Constitution or most state constitutions, which may narrow the applicability of the reasoning in this case to other judicial venues.
There are really no details on what will be in the Microsoft 2006 release. Probably a case of shipping whatever is ready to go out when mid-2006 rolls around.
So WinFS, the searchable file system, won't be there? Well Slashdot recently had a story about Linux based efforts to provide this. Apple is talking about this for OS X 10.4 due out in 2005. And there's been speculation that Google might do something like this.
Is it possible that the other players (Linux/Apple/Google) who tend to release upgrades on a regular, incremental basis could get way ahead of MS? An interesting possiblity.
There is an easy answer to this problem: work in the public domain, giving your work freely to everyone, and then accept voluntary donations (gifts) from those that appreciate or build on it. Ask the street corner musician who plays for everyone and lives off of the gifts from those that appreciate his work... It works.
What planet do you live on? Not earth, obviously. How many street corner musicians who play other peoples's songs pay the original author? None. Would the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books be the richest woman in England if she put her books in the public domain? Fuck no! Time Warner or Disney or whoever would have made movies and do you think they'd have paid her a single quid? Dream on, dude.
Every argument that RMS makes about software applies equally to books, movies, magazines, etc. He is basically saying that the people who create something have no right to earn a living from creating. This is good?
Seriously enough I saw an episode of that one show from last year (can't remember the name but it's a crime drama about national security) where this one terrorist killed a guy in another country, then came to the US with the guy's fingers in baggies strapped around his waist.
The terrorist should have done a google search to find much simpler ways to fake fingerprints.
I have personal stories from both sides of the argument.
Apple once sued Microsoft and HP for stealing their GUI (I know, most people do not remember that HP was involved in the lawsuit, but they were). One of the specific claims in Apple's suit related to "overlapping windows". I happened to have worked in a research group that had bought (in 1981) an Apollo workstation which had overlapping windows (not a GUI, each window had a UNIX(tm) style shell). I told one of the defendants about this and later heard that HP (which had bought Apollo) went to the Computer Museum in Boston to video tape this as evidence in the case.
Later I was working for a little company that had been bought out by a mega company. They sent out one of their patent lawyers to tell us to try to patent everything. The story he told was of a group of lawyers from an Incredibly Big Monopoly (figure the acronym for yourself) swooping down on a smaller computer company claiming they'd infringed on a dozen patents and demandibg payment. The smaller company's techies made a spirited defense that they hadn't infriged but the lawyers for the Incredibly Big Monopoly said, "We have tens of thousand of patents and thousands of lawyers. We'll find something". The smaller company wrote a check that day.
Many postings have pointed out that IE is not likely to support XHTML2 and CSS2 any time soon and quite possibly not until Longhorn in 2006 (maybe).
If MS waits for Longhorn then they''re unlikely to upgrade IE on Win XP or earlier. Longhorn will take some time to be adopted. As a point of reference, Google's June zeitgeist shows Wiin XP with 51% of Google requests - this is about three years after it came out.
Unless MS upgrades current IE or Longhorn is adopted much faster than XP or compliant browsers are adopted at a much faster rate it could easily be 4 to 6 years before XHTML2+CSS2 have 50% market share.
There is already are breeds for people with alergies. on
this web page:
Among the hypoallergenic breeds to choose from: the Standard Poodle, Giant Schnauzer, Afghan Hound, Irish Water Spaniel, Komondor, Miniature Poodle, Standard Schnauzer, Portuguese Water Dog, Puli, Soft-coated Wheaten Terrier, Kerry Blue and Bedlington Terriers, Toy Poodle, Miniature Schnauzer, Bichon Frise, Mexican Hairless and Chinese Crested Dog.
"Hypoallergenic" is the fancy way to say "doesn't affect people with allergies".
HP recognized that they couldn't play the custom processor game
Read as: HP thought they could win the server market by buying Compaq so they could kill Alpha. Oh, sure, Alpha was EOLed before the agreement was announced, but it's not like they hadn't been talking for months beforehand.
You've got the timeline wrong. HP went to bed with Intel on the processor now known as Itanium long before they bought Compaq. And Alpha, as much as it was beloved by techies, had been on life support ever since Compaq bought DEC.
In many ways the SPARC is technically better than the x86. Unfourtunately for Sun they don't (and never could) have the sheer volume of silicon coming out of the fabs to compete with Intel. Intel can invest huge amounts of money in design and spread the cost over many more chips. Sun's SPARC strategy was doomed.
HP recognized that they couldn't play the custom processor game and teamed up with Intel for what is now called Itanium, which has not turned out well for HP.
It remains to be seen whether IBM's POWER series can survive. IBM, unlike Sun, can at least leverage their investment with other customers such as Apple and reportedly Microsoft's XBOX 2.
Looking at my email inbox, I see a ton of junk generated by the Windows virus/worm of the week.
Yeah, I cleaned out my junk mail folder about two and a half hours ago and thought I'd take a look. Of the 42 messages OS X Mail correctly identified as junk 35 were from Windows viruses with attachments with extensions like.exe,.bat, and.pif.
I cranked my firewall up to shut off everything, partly because it was silly to look at logs that showed probes for IIS exploits every couple of minutes.
I guess you can make the statistics lead to any conclusion you want, but it'll be a hard sell to convince me that *BSD/OS X/Linux are less secure than Windows.
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window.
What's his problem with this? I tab pages by theme, not "not subpages of the same web site". For example, I keep a weather window open. I prefer one website's forecast page, two overlapping doppler radar pages on other sites, and a local temperature page from another site.
People will choose to use or abuse his precious metaphors and he should get over it.
The article states:
"By 2034, we'll finally get decent computer displays, with a resolution of about 20,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels (as opposed to the miserly 2048 pixels by 1536 pixels on my current monitor). Although welcomed, my predicted improvement factor of 200 here is relatively small; history shows that display technology has the most dismal improvement curve of any computer technology, except possibly batteries."
He may be wrong on this one. By writing directly on the retina (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2004/0 411/cover.html has a non technical intro, you'll find terms to Google in the article) we may be using up to the entire field of vision.
From the article: Programmers cannot invoke parsers, analyzers, or code generators selectively, or insert custom modules to change how programs are processed
He should try looking at Python. From the Python docs:
imp -- Access the import internals This module provides an interface to the mechanisms used to implement the import statement.
codeop -- Compile Python code
As for extensibility, if a Python class T has the internal function for add defined then you can take two objects t1 and t2 of class T and write t1 + t2 and the compiler will generate the code for it.
Oh, so it will just erase all of my 100s of hours of work but not the reinstallable OS? What a relief!
No one should never do 100s of hours of work between backups. If someone does it indicates either that they really don't care if they lose it or that they're stupid.
Back around 1990 I went to a party given by this computer guy who had just bought a 58 inch (or so) projection TV and had rented the movie "Aliens" to show off his new toy. Most of the guests were computer people. After we got appropriately wasted we gathered in his living room and started watching it.
There's an early scene where the crew is coming out of hibernation and a computer screen is slowly scrolling text. One of the partygores said, "One hundred years from now and they still haven't done anything about how slow Windows boots up?"
Someone piped up, "Of course they've done something - they're shipping a hibernation unit with each copy!"
Slashdot Mirror
Bzzzt. Wrong. A basic unit of a MOS transister is the transit time of electrons in a gate. This is related to the mobility of the charge carriers (electrons/holes).
To quote "Introduction to VLSI Systems" (Mead/Conway):
That was a ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court (the state I live in) and I remember reading about it. This ruling has no effect in the other 49 states or on the Feds. While the ruling may influence other judges, the Washington State Constitution generally has more citizen friendly rules on privacy and related matters than the U. S. Constitution or most state constitutions, which may narrow the applicability of the reasoning in this case to other judicial venues.
Why's that ironic? They compete with Microsoft, don't they?
So WinFS, the searchable file system, won't be there? Well Slashdot recently had a story about Linux based efforts to provide this. Apple is talking about this for OS X 10.4 due out in 2005. And there's been speculation that Google might do something like this.
Is it possible that the other players (Linux/Apple/Google) who tend to release upgrades on a regular, incremental basis could get way ahead of MS? An interesting possiblity.
What planet do you live on? Not earth, obviously. How many street corner musicians who play other peoples's songs pay the original author? None. Would the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books be the richest woman in England if she put her books in the public domain? Fuck no! Time Warner or Disney or whoever would have made movies and do you think they'd have paid her a single quid? Dream on, dude.
Every argument that RMS makes about software applies equally to books, movies, magazines, etc. He is basically saying that the people who create something have no right to earn a living from creating. This is good?
The terrorist should have done a google search to find much simpler ways to fake fingerprints.
Apple once sued Microsoft and HP for stealing their GUI (I know, most people do not remember that HP was involved in the lawsuit, but they were). One of the specific claims in Apple's suit related to "overlapping windows". I happened to have worked in a research group that had bought (in 1981) an Apollo workstation which had overlapping windows (not a GUI, each window had a UNIX(tm) style shell). I told one of the defendants about this and later heard that HP (which had bought Apollo) went to the Computer Museum in Boston to video tape this as evidence in the case.
Later I was working for a little company that had been bought out by a mega company. They sent out one of their patent lawyers to tell us to try to patent everything. The story he told was of a group of lawyers from an Incredibly Big Monopoly (figure the acronym for yourself) swooping down on a smaller computer company claiming they'd infringed on a dozen patents and demandibg payment. The smaller company's techies made a spirited defense that they hadn't infriged but the lawyers for the Incredibly Big Monopoly said, "We have tens of thousand of patents and thousands of lawyers. We'll find something". The smaller company wrote a check that day.
Draw whatever conclusion you want.
If MS waits for Longhorn then they''re unlikely to upgrade IE on Win XP or earlier. Longhorn will take some time to be adopted. As a point of reference, Google's June zeitgeist shows Wiin XP with 51% of Google requests - this is about three years after it came out.
Unless MS upgrades current IE or Longhorn is adopted much faster than XP or compliant browsers are adopted at a much faster rate it could easily be 4 to 6 years before XHTML2+CSS2 have 50% market share.
When a real letter comes from my bank, it is printed on letterhead with a prominent bank logo.
Every snail mail I get from my bank is done with a laser printer - pretty easy to fake the bank logo.
"When RSS Feeders Attack".. DDOS on the hour every hour.
Among the hypoallergenic breeds to choose from: the Standard Poodle, Giant Schnauzer, Afghan Hound, Irish Water Spaniel, Komondor, Miniature Poodle, Standard Schnauzer, Portuguese Water Dog, Puli, Soft-coated Wheaten Terrier, Kerry Blue and Bedlington Terriers, Toy Poodle, Miniature Schnauzer, Bichon Frise, Mexican Hairless and Chinese Crested Dog.
"Hypoallergenic" is the fancy way to say "doesn't affect people with allergies".
You've got the timeline wrong. HP went to bed with Intel on the processor now known as Itanium long before they bought Compaq. And Alpha, as much as it was beloved by techies, had been on life support ever since Compaq bought DEC.
HP recognized that they couldn't play the custom processor game and teamed up with Intel for what is now called Itanium, which has not turned out well for HP.
It remains to be seen whether IBM's POWER series can survive. IBM, unlike Sun, can at least leverage their investment with other customers such as Apple and reportedly Microsoft's XBOX 2.
You believe wrong. Fischer did not forfeit any games during his match with Spassky.
????? On a cost per byte basis hard drives are less expensive than flash.
Yeah, I cleaned out my junk mail folder about two and a half hours ago and thought I'd take a look. Of the 42 messages OS X Mail correctly identified as junk 35 were from Windows viruses with attachments with extensions like .exe, .bat, and .pif.
I cranked my firewall up to shut off everything, partly because it was silly to look at logs that showed probes for IIS exploits every couple of minutes.
I guess you can make the statistics lead to any conclusion you want, but it'll be a hard sell to convince me that *BSD/OS X/Linux are less secure than Windows.
I just got: Forbidden You don't have permission to access /index.html on this server.
So their website has DRM too?
Sometimes they even abuse the physical metaphor of tabbed browsing by opening multiple pages - not subpages of the same web site! - in multiple tabs of a browser window.
What's his problem with this? I tab pages by theme, not "not subpages of the same web site". For example, I keep a weather window open. I prefer one website's forecast page, two overlapping doppler radar pages on other sites, and a local temperature page from another site.
People will choose to use or abuse his precious metaphors and he should get over it.
The article states: "By 2034, we'll finally get decent computer displays, with a resolution of about 20,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels (as opposed to the miserly 2048 pixels by 1536 pixels on my current monitor). Although welcomed, my predicted improvement factor of 200 here is relatively small; history shows that display technology has the most dismal improvement curve of any computer technology, except possibly batteries." He may be wrong on this one. By writing directly on the retina (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2004/0 411/cover.html has a non technical intro, you'll find terms to Google in the article) we may be using up to the entire field of vision.
Programmers cannot invoke parsers, analyzers, or code generators selectively, or insert custom modules to change how programs are processed
He should try looking at Python. From the Python docs:
- imp -- Access the import internals
- codeop -- Compile Python code
As for extensibility, if a Python class T has the internal function for add defined then you can take two objects t1 and t2 of class T and write t1 + t2 and the compiler will generate the code for it.This module provides an interface to the mechanisms used to implement the import statement.
No one should never do 100s of hours of work between backups. If someone does it indicates either that they really don't care if they lose it or that they're stupid.
There is One True Operating System, but Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Linus Torvalds disagree on what it is.
There's an early scene where the crew is coming out of hibernation and a computer screen is slowly scrolling text. One of the partygores said, "One hundred years from now and they still haven't done anything about how slow Windows boots up?"
Someone piped up, "Of course they've done something - they're shipping a hibernation unit with each copy!"
"Ha Ha!"
Nelson, various Simpsons episodes