Very cool, but of course there are questions about Google's true motivations behind knowing every site you visit.
Look.. Google's in the advertising and data aggregation business, yes. But... there is a level of suspicion and fear directed at Google that just seems extreme. Has Google actually done something "Evil" that I missed? Or it is just paranoia? I personally think that it's much more likely that OpenDNS or my ISP would do something crazy with this sort of information than Google.
It wouldn't be a derivative work to write a driver if you did so from scratch. But to do so from scratch is... shall we say a "non-trivial problem." It would be better to have a BSD licensed filesystem that could be relicensed as appropriate--GPL for linux, proprietary for Windows and Mac, BSD for.. ahem... BSD, etc.
Like the strip, and it raises a valid point. The bottom line is that kernel development advances more quickly than user interface and applications for the same reason that physics advanced more quickly than say... psychology. That is, because developing a faster kernel is a much easier problem than developing a fun, usable desktop environment. It's easier to write, easier to test, and easier to debug. People tend to gravitate towards problems that they think they can solve--and ignore the problems they don't understand or don't want to deal with.
Personally, I think that the best way forward for Linux on the desktop would be to take GNUstep to the next level. There's a LOT of code there already written, and with a bit more work you might be able to have source-level compatibility with Mac OS X--which would give you access to a bunch of commercial apps. And, most importantly, the ability of the OpenStep API to produce a world class desktop--best in the world in fact--is proven. After 10 years, I don't think that either KDE or GNOME have really done all that much for Linux on the desktop... it's time to try a different approach.
Of course, I'm just kibbitzing, not bringing code. So what right do I have to say anything?
It goes like this. DOS 1 was.. well, it was version 1.0, but it was pretty good for it's time (1981.) Compare it to contemporary versions of CP/M and it was a reasonable OS. Then DOS 2 was an abomination which was promptly replaced with DOS 3. Everyone ran MS-DOS 3.3 for a LONG time--years--and DOS 4.0 was a joke. Then DOS 5 came out and was well loved, while MS-DOS 6 was yet another joke.
It gets a little harder to figure out with Windows though. Windows 95 was DOS 7, as was Windows 98. Windows ME was DOS 8.
I would argue that you can't really place NT kernels prior to XP into this scheme. So, we would then say that XP was the equivalent of DOS 9, Vista was DOS 10, and Windows 7 is DOS 11.
What about the early versions of Window? Well, since they were just "operating environments", not real manly operating systems like MS-DOS, I don't think we can really consider them. (For those grunting at me calling MS-DOS a real operating system: congratulations! You've been taken in by one of my classic pranks! Bazinga!)
The logical conclusion, of course, is that Windows 8 is going to SERIOUSLY suck. As least if you believe in the sunspot cycle and the mayan calendar, anyway.
IANAL. I don't even play one on TV. However, your "constitutional rights" are a list of things that the government may not do to you. While there might be some legal angle based on Verizon's status as a common carrier, public utility, etc., generally speaking a private company has no obligation to enable your freedom of speech. Think about it... does a newspaper have to print your letter to the editor? No. Same deal here.
The problem is that, when you're "on call", your time is not your own. You're expected to be ready and able to drop everything at a moments notice and go to work, immediately. Furthermore, you can be limited as to where you can go, particularly in areas with poor cell phone coverage. Most employers I've worked with have given a day of "comp" time in exchange for a week on-call, although they've sometimes been a bit sketchy on actually doing this and on how you should report it. To me, it should be official, recognized, and fully compensated--but often it just happens at manager's discretion.
I had been avoiding running a Hackintosh out of some latent guilt and a feeling that the Apple hardware really was better anyway. But if it now has no warranty (yes, I'm a smoker, yes it's a horrible disgusting habit, yes, I should quit) then I feel my guilt slowly seeping away. Sorry, but this is ridiculous PC bull.
I think this is a fair question... but I think we need to figure that in the medium term wireless high-speed Internet is going to become (even) more ubiquitous than it currently is. Granted, subways are a challenge, but would it be possible to do a wifi hotspot in the cars? I think people are going to demand this sort of "bandwidth everywhere" for other reasons, I think that smart engineers (and yes, I am an engineer) can make it feasible in the long run, and I think that it will happen. The biggest barrier, of course, is the Telcos/Wireless Companies, who don't want anything that might lesson their ability to milk consumers.
I guess the thing is that I don't think this is a short-term play on Google's part. I think this is part of their 5 year plan, not their 2 year plan. And it may be 10-20 years before the full effects of the move to the cloud become clear. Thing about where the "thin client" was 10 years ago versus where it is today? Ten years ago it was vaporware. Not it's a reality, albeit in a different form.
First of all, this isn't really about businesses. It's about home users, students, and private individuals, at least for the moment. My babysitter is a nursing student, and I was telling her (i.e. flirting with her geek style) about ChromeOS and she was all over it. Why? Nothing to break. She doesn't need anything but a basic word processor, and actually uses Google Docs already as that's used by her school. Likewise, her email is gmail from school. She is a self-described techno-idiot, and loves the idea of a cheap computer with limited moving parts.
Second of all, when and if this sort of thing breaks in the corporate space, it won't replace desktop PC's. It will replace terminals (either traditional dumb terminals or Citrix) in call centers, at least at first. These things literally run one and only one application all day long. Right now, businesses are using Citrix to run a web browser or even a terminal emulator for reliability and ease of maintenance, and it ain't cheap--real example. Imagine when they can replace these with $100 "ChromeOS Boxes". Clear win. As for the politics point, I promise you that the girl in the call center has absolutely no political clout. She'll take what she gets and like it.
The small business users may be the last market to move because they often rely on unusual apps. But I do think that the availability of the Google platform and ChromeOS may push applications that have in the past been PC based onto the cloud. As this becomes more common, Chrome OS starts to make sense. This is a long-term play for Google, and I don't think they expect much uptake overnight.
The real story here, though, is that whether Chrome OS wins or loses, the web has reached the point that Bill Gates feared ten years ago: it is now "the platform" for many apps. Worse, it has got a great, powerful, profitable company in Google, pushing it as a platform from many different angles. It will replace desktop PC's--not in 5 years, maybe not in 10, but in 20? Count on it. It's worth noting, though, that this will be just as bad for Apple as it is for Microsoft. What happens to AppleTV and iTunes store sales when you just stream your movies and music off Amazon when you want to watch them? This technology is already here.
So, way back in the day (1989?) I did a science project whereby I used testing of skin resistance to control a menu on a computer. It was way primitive, and way slow, but it did work--if you carefully trained yourself to be able to control your tension level to raise and lower the needle. Unfortunately, didn't win because nobody but me could make it work. And besides, I didn't have a hypothesis.
So you do everything else... suggest OpenOffice, 7-zip, etc., document the issue, etc., and they still want change. Then what? Simple. Quit, report the bastards to the BSA yourself, and collect a bounty for your trouble. This place is a ticking time bomb that will explode in your face if you stick around. May as well get some money to compensate you for loss of job.
Yeah, right. Next you're going to tell me that NPR isn't part of a vast left-wing conspiracy controlled by Barack Obama and Big Bird! (Big Bird is a euphemism for Bill Clinton.)
Not too long ago, we had a consultant from Sun write a PHP website for us, and he called all his Javascript "Java". The rest of his code lived up to similar standards of quality and technical erudition.
Yes, there's no one diet that's best for everyone. However, is it really 10% of the population that can't tolerate massive amounts of carbohydrate in their diet? Or is it more like 40%, 50%, or even 60%? I've got an obesity epidemic and an epidemic of T2 diabetes that says that these problems are far more prevalent than you're making out that they are.
In my experience, it's not the low-carb community that pretends that there is one dietary model that's right for everyone. It's the low-fat community. My doctor, who's a vegetarian, was absolutely sure that I would kill myself with this diet, even as I lost weight like crazy and gained perfect blood sugar control--and only shut up when my blood lipid profile came back and shut him up. And let's not even get into the crap put out by the Physicians Committe for Medical Responsibility, a PETA front group that pushes Veganism at every opportunity. These people have been pushing a low-fat, high-carb diet since the 70's for reasons having nothing to do with health (i.e. for environmental, ethical, and sustainability reasons) without any regard for the fact that they might very well be killing people.. We the American people have been the victims^H^H^H^H^Hobjects of a giant, uncontrolled nutritional experiment, and it's a failure.
Anyway, you need to remember something about the low carb diet books and the low carb community: we're not talking to you, and we're not writing to you. If you can control your weight with portion control, then almost by definition you're probably not carb sensitive and don't have a significant degree of insulin resistance. Perhaps low-carb diet books could make this more clear, but then again they have to go to some lengths to counteract the "OMG fat will kill you" and "pasta can't make you fat" (remember that? 1980's nutritional wisdom) propaganda of the past 30 years.
What I really look forward to is a day when genetic typing will allow doctors to tailor a diet to each individual's metabolism--it might not even be that far off. But, until then, I can say with some certainty that when I see someone with 100 lbs. to lose, they are probably carb sensitive, insulin resistant, and would benefit greatly from a low carb diet.
Again, there's a difference between true famine--where there's simply no food or very very little food available--and malnutrition. We're told by the establishment that a 'calorie is a calorie.' But it's much more complicated than that. Gary Taubes did a great lecture that touches on this. See The Quality of Calories. I
The stuffed belly, yes. The stuffed face and arms, no. See The Quality of Calories. I'm not talking about true famine here, but more marginal cases--thought I made that clear.
Figure that a single SPS MAYBE covers a few square kilometers. Wikipedia tells us that the earth's surface are is 5.1 x 10^8 square kilometers--call it 500 million square kilometers. The amount of extra energy beamed in, when compared to the amount we get from the sun everyday, is unlikely to be significant. Moreover, there are homeostatic processes going on that tend to regulate the earth's temperature in ways that will have a much more important effect on the earth's temperature than any additional input of energy.
I spent years, a decade even, trying to lose weight according to the "eat less, exercise more" assumption. I could never stick to it because I would literally become physically weak at the low calorie levels required, I was always hungry, and the weight loss was sporadic and uninspiring. But I was a good boy and believed the authorities and ate a low-fat "healthy diet." It got me to 420 lbs.
Then I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes and spent ANOTHER 6 months trying to be a good boy and do what the medical establishment told me to do--eat a low-fat, high carb diet. Gained MORE weight, my blood sugars got WORSE, felt like crap. I got disgusted, and found out that a lot of diabetics were going on low-carb diets as a way of controlling their blood sugars. So I decided to try it and went on a diet that had no more than 6g of carbs for breakfast and 12g for lunch and dinner.
Within ONE week, my average blood sugars went from 214 (dangerously high) to 105 (just above normal). After 3 months, my triglycerides went from 633 to 114. My cholesterol went from 233 to 145. And, oh, by the way the least important thing, I lost 60 lbs. I'm never hungry. If I get hungry I eat, just something without carbs in it. I have energy all through the day--I don't feel weak on this diet.
Is it a "miracle." No. It's a hard diet to stick to, especially when eating out. But it WORKS, unless every other diet I ever tried. Do I "eat less" on this diet? Probably. But I don't eat less because I've somehow magically found some new store of "will power." I eat less because I'M NOT HUNGRY. Hunger matters--there's something really sick about telling people not to eat when they're genuinely hungry. There's a better way, and the arrogant establishment (made up mostly of life-long skinny people!) needs to realize that the advice they've been pushing for 40 years now ISN'T WORKING and try something different!
He slipped on icy steps and hit his head. What the Vegan nazi's have done with the poor man's death, invading his privacy and the privacy of his family in an attempt to smear low-carb diets because they can't win on the science is thoroughly despicable.
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Look.. Google's in the advertising and data aggregation business, yes. But ... there is a level of suspicion and fear directed at Google that just seems extreme. Has Google actually done something "Evil" that I missed? Or it is just paranoia? I personally think that it's much more likely that OpenDNS or my ISP would do something crazy with this sort of information than Google.
It wouldn't be a derivative work to write a driver if you did so from scratch. But to do so from scratch is... shall we say a "non-trivial problem." It would be better to have a BSD licensed filesystem that could be relicensed as appropriate--GPL for linux, proprietary for Windows and Mac, BSD for .. ahem ... BSD, etc.
Like the strip, and it raises a valid point. The bottom line is that kernel development advances more quickly than user interface and applications for the same reason that physics advanced more quickly than say ... psychology. That is, because developing a faster kernel is a much easier problem than developing a fun, usable desktop environment. It's easier to write, easier to test, and easier to debug. People tend to gravitate towards problems that they think they can solve--and ignore the problems they don't understand or don't want to deal with.
Personally, I think that the best way forward for Linux on the desktop would be to take GNUstep to the next level. There's a LOT of code there already written, and with a bit more work you might be able to have source-level compatibility with Mac OS X--which would give you access to a bunch of commercial apps. And, most importantly, the ability of the OpenStep API to produce a world class desktop--best in the world in fact--is proven. After 10 years, I don't think that either KDE or GNOME have really done all that much for Linux on the desktop... it's time to try a different approach.
Of course, I'm just kibbitzing, not bringing code. So what right do I have to say anything?
It goes like this. DOS 1 was.. well, it was version 1.0, but it was pretty good for it's time (1981.) Compare it to contemporary versions of CP/M and it was a reasonable OS. Then DOS 2 was an abomination which was promptly replaced with DOS 3. Everyone ran MS-DOS 3.3 for a LONG time--years--and DOS 4.0 was a joke. Then DOS 5 came out and was well loved, while MS-DOS 6 was yet another joke.
It gets a little harder to figure out with Windows though. Windows 95 was DOS 7, as was Windows 98. Windows ME was DOS 8.
I would argue that you can't really place NT kernels prior to XP into this scheme. So, we would then say that XP was the equivalent of DOS 9, Vista was DOS 10, and Windows 7 is DOS 11.
What about the early versions of Window? Well, since they were just "operating environments", not real manly operating systems like MS-DOS, I don't think we can really consider them. (For those grunting at me calling MS-DOS a real operating system: congratulations! You've been taken in by one of my classic pranks! Bazinga!)
The logical conclusion, of course, is that Windows 8 is going to SERIOUSLY suck. As least if you believe in the sunspot cycle and the mayan calendar, anyway.
IANAL. I don't even play one on TV. However, your "constitutional rights" are a list of things that the government may not do to you. While there might be some legal angle based on Verizon's status as a common carrier, public utility, etc., generally speaking a private company has no obligation to enable your freedom of speech. Think about it... does a newspaper have to print your letter to the editor? No. Same deal here.
The problem is that, when you're "on call", your time is not your own. You're expected to be ready and able to drop everything at a moments notice and go to work, immediately. Furthermore, you can be limited as to where you can go, particularly in areas with poor cell phone coverage. Most employers I've worked with have given a day of "comp" time in exchange for a week on-call, although they've sometimes been a bit sketchy on actually doing this and on how you should report it. To me, it should be official, recognized, and fully compensated--but often it just happens at manager's discretion.
I had been avoiding running a Hackintosh out of some latent guilt and a feeling that the Apple hardware really was better anyway. But if it now has no warranty (yes, I'm a smoker, yes it's a horrible disgusting habit, yes, I should quit) then I feel my guilt slowly seeping away. Sorry, but this is ridiculous PC bull.
I think this is a fair question... but I think we need to figure that in the medium term wireless high-speed Internet is going to become (even) more ubiquitous than it currently is. Granted, subways are a challenge, but would it be possible to do a wifi hotspot in the cars? I think people are going to demand this sort of "bandwidth everywhere" for other reasons, I think that smart engineers (and yes, I am an engineer) can make it feasible in the long run, and I think that it will happen. The biggest barrier, of course, is the Telcos/Wireless Companies, who don't want anything that might lesson their ability to milk consumers.
I guess the thing is that I don't think this is a short-term play on Google's part. I think this is part of their 5 year plan, not their 2 year plan. And it may be 10-20 years before the full effects of the move to the cloud become clear. Thing about where the "thin client" was 10 years ago versus where it is today? Ten years ago it was vaporware. Not it's a reality, albeit in a different form.
You must be new here.
First of all, this isn't really about businesses. It's about home users, students, and private individuals, at least for the moment. My babysitter is a nursing student, and I was telling her (i.e. flirting with her geek style) about ChromeOS and she was all over it. Why? Nothing to break. She doesn't need anything but a basic word processor, and actually uses Google Docs already as that's used by her school. Likewise, her email is gmail from school. She is a self-described techno-idiot, and loves the idea of a cheap computer with limited moving parts.
Second of all, when and if this sort of thing breaks in the corporate space, it won't replace desktop PC's. It will replace terminals (either traditional dumb terminals or Citrix) in call centers, at least at first. These things literally run one and only one application all day long. Right now, businesses are using Citrix to run a web browser or even a terminal emulator for reliability and ease of maintenance, and it ain't cheap--real example. Imagine when they can replace these with $100 "ChromeOS Boxes". Clear win. As for the politics point, I promise you that the girl in the call center has absolutely no political clout. She'll take what she gets and like it.
The small business users may be the last market to move because they often rely on unusual apps. But I do think that the availability of the Google platform and ChromeOS may push applications that have in the past been PC based onto the cloud. As this becomes more common, Chrome OS starts to make sense. This is a long-term play for Google, and I don't think they expect much uptake overnight.
The real story here, though, is that whether Chrome OS wins or loses, the web has reached the point that Bill Gates feared ten years ago: it is now "the platform" for many apps. Worse, it has got a great, powerful, profitable company in Google, pushing it as a platform from many different angles. It will replace desktop PC's--not in 5 years, maybe not in 10, but in 20? Count on it. It's worth noting, though, that this will be just as bad for Apple as it is for Microsoft. What happens to AppleTV and iTunes store sales when you just stream your movies and music off Amazon when you want to watch them? This technology is already here.
After all, he's not George Bush either. Or perhaps it's that he's not Bill Gates. *snark*
So, way back in the day (1989?) I did a science project whereby I used testing of skin resistance to control a menu on a computer. It was way primitive, and way slow, but it did work--if you carefully trained yourself to be able to control your tension level to raise and lower the needle. Unfortunately, didn't win because nobody but me could make it work. And besides, I didn't have a hypothesis.
Truly, I wasn't thinking that. I was thinking something more like, "wow, wait until the 2012 and peak oil numbskulls come out."
So you do everything else... suggest OpenOffice, 7-zip, etc., document the issue, etc., and they still want change. Then what? Simple. Quit, report the bastards to the BSA yourself, and collect a bounty for your trouble. This place is a ticking time bomb that will explode in your face if you stick around. May as well get some money to compensate you for loss of job.
Yeah, right. Next you're going to tell me that NPR isn't part of a vast left-wing conspiracy controlled by Barack Obama and Big Bird! (Big Bird is a euphemism for Bill Clinton.)
It is YOU who find you are mistaken. About a great. many. thingssss.
Your pal,
Darth Sidious
Not too long ago, we had a consultant from Sun write a PHP website for us, and he called all his Javascript "Java". The rest of his code lived up to similar standards of quality and technical erudition.
Umm... actually it's the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. My bad.
Yes, there's no one diet that's best for everyone. However, is it really 10% of the population that can't tolerate massive amounts of carbohydrate in their diet? Or is it more like 40%, 50%, or even 60%? I've got an obesity epidemic and an epidemic of T2 diabetes that says that these problems are far more prevalent than you're making out that they are.
In my experience, it's not the low-carb community that pretends that there is one dietary model that's right for everyone. It's the low-fat community. My doctor, who's a vegetarian, was absolutely sure that I would kill myself with this diet, even as I lost weight like crazy and gained perfect blood sugar control--and only shut up when my blood lipid profile came back and shut him up. And let's not even get into the crap put out by the Physicians Committe for Medical Responsibility, a PETA front group that pushes Veganism at every opportunity. These people have been pushing a low-fat, high-carb diet since the 70's for reasons having nothing to do with health (i.e. for environmental, ethical, and sustainability reasons) without any regard for the fact that they might very well be killing people.. We the American people have been the victims^H^H^H^H^Hobjects of a giant, uncontrolled nutritional experiment, and it's a failure.
Anyway, you need to remember something about the low carb diet books and the low carb community: we're not talking to you, and we're not writing to you. If you can control your weight with portion control, then almost by definition you're probably not carb sensitive and don't have a significant degree of insulin resistance. Perhaps low-carb diet books could make this more clear, but then again they have to go to some lengths to counteract the "OMG fat will kill you" and "pasta can't make you fat" (remember that? 1980's nutritional wisdom) propaganda of the past 30 years.
What I really look forward to is a day when genetic typing will allow doctors to tailor a diet to each individual's metabolism--it might not even be that far off. But, until then, I can say with some certainty that when I see someone with 100 lbs. to lose, they are probably carb sensitive, insulin resistant, and would benefit greatly from a low carb diet.
Again, there's a difference between true famine--where there's simply no food or very very little food available--and malnutrition. We're told by the establishment that a 'calorie is a calorie.' But it's much more complicated than that. Gary Taubes did a great lecture that touches on this. See The Quality of Calories. I
The stuffed belly, yes. The stuffed face and arms, no. See The Quality of Calories. I'm not talking about true famine here, but more marginal cases--thought I made that clear.
Figure that a single SPS MAYBE covers a few square kilometers. Wikipedia tells us that the earth's surface are is 5.1 x 10^8 square kilometers--call it 500 million square kilometers. The amount of extra energy beamed in, when compared to the amount we get from the sun everyday, is unlikely to be significant. Moreover, there are homeostatic processes going on that tend to regulate the earth's temperature in ways that will have a much more important effect on the earth's temperature than any additional input of energy.
The article specifically addressed the question of "afterburn." There is no "afterburn"--you don't burn calories after exercise is over.
I spent years, a decade even, trying to lose weight according to the "eat less, exercise more" assumption. I could never stick to it because I would literally become physically weak at the low calorie levels required, I was always hungry, and the weight loss was sporadic and uninspiring. But I was a good boy and believed the authorities and ate a low-fat "healthy diet." It got me to 420 lbs.
Then I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes and spent ANOTHER 6 months trying to be a good boy and do what the medical establishment told me to do--eat a low-fat, high carb diet. Gained MORE weight, my blood sugars got WORSE, felt like crap. I got disgusted, and found out that a lot of diabetics were going on low-carb diets as a way of controlling their blood sugars. So I decided to try it and went on a diet that had no more than 6g of carbs for breakfast and 12g for lunch and dinner.
Within ONE week, my average blood sugars went from 214 (dangerously high) to 105 (just above normal). After 3 months, my triglycerides went from 633 to 114. My cholesterol went from 233 to 145. And, oh, by the way the least important thing, I lost 60 lbs. I'm never hungry. If I get hungry I eat, just something without carbs in it. I have energy all through the day--I don't feel weak on this diet.
Is it a "miracle." No. It's a hard diet to stick to, especially when eating out. But it WORKS, unless every other diet I ever tried. Do I "eat less" on this diet? Probably. But I don't eat less because I've somehow magically found some new store of "will power." I eat less because I'M NOT HUNGRY. Hunger matters--there's something really sick about telling people not to eat when they're genuinely hungry. There's a better way, and the arrogant establishment (made up mostly of life-long skinny people!) needs to realize that the advice they've been pushing for 40 years now ISN'T WORKING and try something different!
He slipped on icy steps and hit his head. What the Vegan nazi's have done with the poor man's death, invading his privacy and the privacy of his family in an attempt to smear low-carb diets because they can't win on the science is thoroughly despicable.