But there are about a dozen car manufacturers to choose from, and they usually have a handful of choices of stereos, from a dozen different vendors between them. Furthermore, if I buy a new stereo for the car, I can sell the old one.
With Windows on laptops, I get no choice at all: Windows is it. And if I install Linux, I can't re-sell the OEM version of Windows.
In order to avoid "paying the Microsoft tax" you're just going to end up paying for someone to specifically take 1% of laptops off the production line
None of that is necessary. Microsoft or Sony should simply reimburse me for the software portion of my purchase if I don't agree to the shrink-wrap license. Right now, the choice I get when I open the box and don't like the license is to pay the money and use the software or pay the money and don't use the software, and that's not fair.
The built-in sound... although this laptop has a Soundblaster compatible card
That's alway tricky.
The built-in modem. It is a WinModem, and there are some Linux drivers for it, but since I use 802.11b 99% of the time and a Linksys 10Mbps PC Card Ethernet adaptor 1% of the time, I didn't care.
WinModems are a lost cause, and they are dangerous (all sorts of weird voltages on some phone lines). Just get a PCMCIA card or a USB travel modem; if it breaks, you don't have to send in the laptop for repairs.
An IBM USB camera... although the laptop knows it is plugged in, I can't seem to get it to work, but once again its not that important.
If it shows up on the USB list of devices, the laptop is working fine; you are probably just missing the camera driver.
very helpful. if you want to bash apple, at least know wtf you're talking about.
I own two Macintoshes. One of them didn't work with my non-Apple AP. Everything else did (Windows, Linux). Apple tech support told me there was nothing they could do--"We don't support connecting to non-Apple 802.11b access points, it may or may not work. You could bring it in to a dealer that has an airport set up to see whether it's a hardware problem."
Yes, Apple tech support is generally good and helpful. Their folks seem to be smarter than those at PC companies. But there are limits to what they support (and what they can support). And they will almost certainly not support Linux on an iBook either.
So, if you want to bash me, at least know WTF you are talking about.
For my next notebook, I'm considering the Fujitsu Lifebook: they are very small and claim to have great battery life. If people have more experience with Linux on those, perhaps they can share it.
There are also a number of 2-4 pound laptops from Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.; that's what I have right now. They are considerably lighter than the iBooks, have comparable or better battery life, and are much, much faster. They often don't include the CD/DVD in the main laptop, but frankly, I prefer that choice; it's easy to plug a bus-powered CD/DVD into the USB2 or FW port.
You will effectively not find a notebook where you don't pay the Windows tax: the big manufacturers just bundle it that way, and if anything goes wrong with the machine, they will have you run stuff under Windows before even accepting it for warranty return (I have been there). Apple is no better: you can't get their HW without their OS, and they won't even support their laptops connecting to a non-Apple wireless access point.
I seriously doubt that those machines are "Microsoft Free": Emperor Linux most likely doesn't have the purchasing power to force Sony and other vendors to sell them machines without Windows licenses. Most likely, all they do is erase the Windows partition for you.
HighLift claims the cost of each elevator launch would be less than 5 per cent of a shuttle or a rocket, making it feasible for a tourist industry to the moon in 20 to 30 years.
Don't shuttle launches cost in the range of $20-30 million? I think $160000 per person is still a lot of money for "tourism". Why should we invest huge amounts of public money so that a few rich people who can afford to blow $160000 on a summer vacation can have their thrills?
or the fact that application developers are still using Tk!
Tcl is a pretty simple scripting language and Tk is a pretty simple GUI toolkit. And that's exactly why people still use them.
What are the alternatives? There isn't much. The most popular is scripting language bindings to Gtk+ or wxWindows or Qt. But those just expose very complex toolkits to a scripting language, rather than creating a simpler, more high-level way of specifying a GUI (and, no, GLADE doesn't do the trick either).
Tcl/Tk clearly needs to be replaced--it is aging and limited. But until something better than scripting language bindings to C/C++ toolkits comes out, Tcl/Tk will continue to be used.
A large fraction of the results in medical and molecular biology research can potentially be used to create biological weapons. Does this mean medical and molecular biology publishing will just stop? Where will we draw the line?
With nuclear research, the raw materials are exceptionally dangerous and pretty hard to obtain in large quantities. For for biological work, the raw materials are ubiquitous, and it's pretty easy to keep things safe for research purposes. And a lot of really important publications are about making it simpler and cheaper to manipulate DNA sequences.
As an analogy, think of programming. It used to involve toggling switches, now you can write a Perl script that grinds through gigabytes of data without thinking twice about it. Or, you can get little embedded chips for a couple of dollars for computations that used to require computers filling rooms. Well, it's going to be the same for molecular biology, except that you don't even need the investment chip fabs and cleanrooms.
We better figure out how we can deal with the idea that anybody reasonably intelligent and with access to a library will be able to cook up deadly viruses in their spare time--this technology is not controllable or containable.
The IRS (and state tax boards) should really provide tax forms in XML format. Furthermore, tax laws are a good place to start translating fuzzy legal language into clear mathematical and programmatic rules, and those rules should not be coded up by a bunch of private companies, they should be supplied by the IRS. Then, the function of tax software would be to be a user interface to the IRS-supplied XML forms and rules.
Analog tax forms don't perform error checking, and clerical errors are both frequent and can be very costly. Analog tax forms also don't warn you if you exceed some of those obscure limits and constraints that the IRS imposes, and they don't give you a probability of getting audited.
Of course, if all you have to fill in is a 1040EZ, the paper form should be fine. But a 1040 with several supplementary forms is an entirely different matter.
In the graphical languages, connections that don't work don't get made - the 'IDE' won't allow the line to connect or component to be placed,
And the IDE for a programming language like Java will not let you compile programs with syntax errors or type errors.
There aren't IDEs or compilers that flag bad algorithms.
But the error checking that exists for programming languages is still vastly superior than anything that exists for hardware or circuit programming: making circuits work correctly is still a lot harder than making equivalent software work correctly.
Pretty much all of those ideas have been discussed for many years; spam and unwanted E-mail are not something that just started in the 21st century. For example:
"Turing tests" (more accurately, reverse Turing tests, since it's a person, not a machine, required to prove that he is human) have been used for a long time to guard against spam; for example, comments like "Send mail to foo at bar-snip.com; snip off the snip to reach me." are reverse Turing tests because they are beyond the abilities of current natural language understanding systems.
Being able to charge for E-mails also was one of the first proposals for digital cash, but it never materialized (note that one of the researchers was involved in that before joining MS Research).
CPU-based schemes have generally faltered because you don't want to make it impossible for people to send you mail because they happen to be on a Palm right now.
I hope Microsoft doesn't add injury to insult by patenting this stuff.
Also there is no such thing as a syntax error, since its all graphical wiringing, no typiing, thus it is very safe for industrial control of dangerous instruments.
Ummm--that's kind of the equivalent of the panic glasses from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: they turn dark when there is anything dangerous around that might frighten you.
When you get an error in a programming language, that's a good thing: it means that the language detected something you were trying to do that doesn't make sense. Error detection isn't perfect, but it's there for a reason. If you want as little error detection as possible, program in assembly language.
FPGAs are probably one of the worst ways in which you could try to build reliable systems: they are hard to program and they lack error checking. Your best bet for building reliable systems is a very mature, simple microprocessor running a bulletproof, verified language implementation that has extensive built-in error checking and support for error recovery.
I looked at this site several years ago, and thought, "whoa, cool idea, FPGAs would make a really fast computer." Then for two years, nothing to show for this idea. And after I programmed some FPGAs, I realized (at least partly) why: they're too slow to program. It takes on the order of milliseconds to reprogram even a moderate-sized FPGA.
"This site" is hardly the forerunner in reconfigurable computing. Look for "reconfigurable computing" on Google, and you will find that academic research labs have been looking at it for as long as there have been FPGAs.
There are probably better tradeoffs than FPGAs for reconfigurable computing: rather than reconfiguring gates, it may make sense to reconfigure arithmetic circuits. There has been some work in that area. The point is that FPGAs are nice because they are commodity hardware, but they are probably a pretty suboptimal choice for reconfigurable computing.
People have been trying to use FPGAs for general purpose computing for as long as there have been FPGAs. Reconfigurable computing turns out to be pretty hard--it's hard to program these kinds of machines.
Now, maybe someone will be able to make this go. But this company doesn't look like it. If you manage to get to their web site and look at the programming language "Viva" they have designed, it looks like you are drawing circuit diagrams. Imagine programming a complex algorithm with that.
There are already better approaches to programming FPGAs (here, here, here). Look for "reconfigurable computing" on Google and browse around.
Just to be clear: God got a little carried away on this one; when all was said and done, there ended up being about 12 orders of magnitude more than that.
Terraforming Mars amounts to making "gods out of geeks," as one critic put it.
"Hmmm. Let's see. I'll make this big universe, and then I'll put billions of huge fusion reactors into it. Oh, let's make some red ones, some green ones, and some blue ones. And, wow, look at those galaxies collide. I wonder what would happen if I squeeze some of those things down into black holes. Wow, look at that explosion--that was fun. Let's see: some critters would be fun, too. What about putting in some little guys that kind of look like I do and that pray and sacrifice to me?"
I dunno, God sounds pretty geeky to me. And what's wrong with that anyway?
Solution: Hardware makers create upgradeable devices able to handle any changing standards.
Buying an HDTV that is upgradable via FPGA programming is utter folly: five years from now, when you finally get around to upgrading your hardware, the vendor won't have any software for doing so, or means by which you can load the software into your HDTV.
The way HDTVs are upgradable is by putting the HDTV decoder into one box and have a standard analog or digital interface to the video part (plasma, projector, CRT). That's solid, sound engineering for change.
So, upgradable hardware is good. Modular hardware is good. FPGA-upgradable hardware is (usually) bad.
So, we have meteorites that contain molecules and chiral mixtures that are indicative of life. On the other hand, those mixtures do not correspond to anything terrestrial life forms would be expected to produce.
One logical conclusion seems to be that the meteorite contained extraterrestrial life, or perhaps a complex network of biochemical reactions that isn't quite life but a precursor. Those may have existed briefly in space and ceased long ago, or it may have been destroyed when the rock fell to earth, or we may simply not recognize it. I mean, if it doesn't have distinct membranes or other structural features, we wouldn't easily recognize life or close precursors of life at all with our current technology.
Every time I hear this I get rather angry. Are these people really so arrogant as to be absolutely certain that we have already found and identified ALL amino acids,
That's why it says "not found", not "non-existent".
What matters for the meteorite is whether these amino acids are common enough on earth to have contaminated the meteorite, and the answer to that is clearly "no".
They simply believe that they are entitled to the products they want, for the price they want to pay for them (or for many products: free).
There is probably some of that. I think the position of librarians and lawyers who complain about this is different, though. They view the on-line databases as the only complete repository of US legal opinion. If you take that as a given, then the debate really does come down to how that database should be made public.
This is similar to eminent domain: if you own a piece of property that's in the way of an important government project, a government can take your land and compensate you for it. Certainly, the same principle could be applied when a company has managed to entrench itself in an important public function, like holding the definitive database of legal opinions. And the existence of the company is related to the absence of public records: because the company has offered its services in the past, the public mechanisms didn't get created; once everybody started depending on their services, they could raise prices. Keep in mind that companies like West didn't start out as the financial and legal powerhouses they are today. It's classic monopoly-building.
Again, I don't think that forcing the legal publishers to open their databases is the best way of proceeding. I think any case law that cannot be retrieved from court records, case law that only exists in private on-line databases, should be erased from the books (how do we know West entered it correctly?). Furthermore, I think West's copyright on page numbers is unreasonable should be struck down.
Note that this has worked before: patents used to be available on-line only through expensive search services, but now you can get them over the Internet from the USPTO (and you can order republishable CD-ROMs).
"The Linux APIs [...] are mature and scalable to small devices, and Linux itself is as well."
Uh, no. The ELKS project, for one, is a near reimplementation of Linux for 16-bit x86 CPUs. Linux itself does not readily support anything less than 32-bit processors. Neither does gcc, which is why ELKS uses a different compiler.
I agree that Linux doesn't scale down well to 16bit CPUs; no single codebase does. Berkeley UNIX, too, was forked into 2BSD (16bit PDP-11) and 4BSD (32bit VAX). The UNIX APIs, however, do work well across a wide range of word sizes.
But the "small devices" we are talking about here are next generation cell phones. They will be 32bit machines with megabytes of memory. In different words, they are more powerful than the kinds of machines that 4BSD and Linux first were developed for. On the other hand, they are tiny compared to the 2+GHz, 1+GByte machines people are buying now.
We are talking about what is necessary to make a democracy work, and access to law (and case law) for everybody is part of that.
Now, yes, these companies have spent money on creating those databases. That's fine. The government doesn't have the right to just take the products of their work for free. Perhaps the solution to the problem, a solution that would respect their property rights, would be for the tax payer to pay for scanning and capturing the old case law from original paper copies again.
But those companies are screaming bloody murder everytime solutions are proposed. West Publishing has made the ridiculous claim that they hold a coyright on the page numbers that are used to reference legal opinion, even though assigning page numbers clearly is not a creative process.
The "entitlement-oriented attitude" that predates Slashdot by a long time is that companies that have carved out a market niche think they are entitled to having that market niche protected, even if technology makes them completey obsolete. The "whine fest" is on the part of companies that can't deal with the fact that they have become obsolete and their business model doesn't work anymore. Those companies "whine" by trying to take undue influence on the political process. And because the business practices of those companies are in basic conflict with the principles of democracy, that kind of whining needs to be put a stop to.
So, again, let those electronic publishers keep their "rights"--they have a right not to have their work appropriated by the government. But they have no right to have their market protected. The government should invest the money to scan and publish all case law for free on the Internet, just like we do for patents. Technology has made that really cheap now.
The all important indexing information and page numbers are assigned by WestLaw and they claim that those are copyrighted. You can't effectively conduct legal research without being able to figure out the references.
Slashdot Mirror
With Windows on laptops, I get no choice at all: Windows is it. And if I install Linux, I can't re-sell the OEM version of Windows.
None of that is necessary. Microsoft or Sony should simply reimburse me for the software portion of my purchase if I don't agree to the shrink-wrap license. Right now, the choice I get when I open the box and don't like the license is to pay the money and use the software or pay the money and don't use the software, and that's not fair.
That's alway tricky.
The built-in modem. It is a WinModem, and there are some Linux drivers for it, but since I use 802.11b 99% of the time and a Linksys 10Mbps PC Card Ethernet adaptor 1% of the time, I didn't care.
WinModems are a lost cause, and they are dangerous (all sorts of weird voltages on some phone lines). Just get a PCMCIA card or a USB travel modem; if it breaks, you don't have to send in the laptop for repairs.
An IBM USB camera... although the laptop knows it is plugged in, I can't seem to get it to work, but once again its not that important.
If it shows up on the USB list of devices, the laptop is working fine; you are probably just missing the camera driver.
I own two Macintoshes. One of them didn't work with my non-Apple AP. Everything else did (Windows, Linux). Apple tech support told me there was nothing they could do--"We don't support connecting to non-Apple 802.11b access points, it may or may not work. You could bring it in to a dealer that has an airport set up to see whether it's a hardware problem."
Yes, Apple tech support is generally good and helpful. Their folks seem to be smarter than those at PC companies. But there are limits to what they support (and what they can support). And they will almost certainly not support Linux on an iBook either.
So, if you want to bash me, at least know WTF you are talking about.
There are also a number of 2-4 pound laptops from Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.; that's what I have right now. They are considerably lighter than the iBooks, have comparable or better battery life, and are much, much faster. They often don't include the CD/DVD in the main laptop, but frankly, I prefer that choice; it's easy to plug a bus-powered CD/DVD into the USB2 or FW port.
You will effectively not find a notebook where you don't pay the Windows tax: the big manufacturers just bundle it that way, and if anything goes wrong with the machine, they will have you run stuff under Windows before even accepting it for warranty return (I have been there). Apple is no better: you can't get their HW without their OS, and they won't even support their laptops connecting to a non-Apple wireless access point.
I seriously doubt that those machines are "Microsoft Free": Emperor Linux most likely doesn't have the purchasing power to force Sony and other vendors to sell them machines without Windows licenses. Most likely, all they do is erase the Windows partition for you.
Don't shuttle launches cost in the range of $20-30 million? I think $160000 per person is still a lot of money for "tourism". Why should we invest huge amounts of public money so that a few rich people who can afford to blow $160000 on a summer vacation can have their thrills?
Tcl is a pretty simple scripting language and Tk is a pretty simple GUI toolkit. And that's exactly why people still use them.
What are the alternatives? There isn't much. The most popular is scripting language bindings to Gtk+ or wxWindows or Qt. But those just expose very complex toolkits to a scripting language, rather than creating a simpler, more high-level way of specifying a GUI (and, no, GLADE doesn't do the trick either).
Tcl/Tk clearly needs to be replaced--it is aging and limited. But until something better than scripting language bindings to C/C++ toolkits comes out, Tcl/Tk will continue to be used.
With nuclear research, the raw materials are exceptionally dangerous and pretty hard to obtain in large quantities. For for biological work, the raw materials are ubiquitous, and it's pretty easy to keep things safe for research purposes. And a lot of really important publications are about making it simpler and cheaper to manipulate DNA sequences.
As an analogy, think of programming. It used to involve toggling switches, now you can write a Perl script that grinds through gigabytes of data without thinking twice about it. Or, you can get little embedded chips for a couple of dollars for computations that used to require computers filling rooms. Well, it's going to be the same for molecular biology, except that you don't even need the investment chip fabs and cleanrooms.
We better figure out how we can deal with the idea that anybody reasonably intelligent and with access to a library will be able to cook up deadly viruses in their spare time--this technology is not controllable or containable.
The IRS (and state tax boards) should really provide tax forms in XML format. Furthermore, tax laws are a good place to start translating fuzzy legal language into clear mathematical and programmatic rules, and those rules should not be coded up by a bunch of private companies, they should be supplied by the IRS. Then, the function of tax software would be to be a user interface to the IRS-supplied XML forms and rules.
Of course, if all you have to fill in is a 1040EZ, the paper form should be fine. But a 1040 with several supplementary forms is an entirely different matter.
And the IDE for a programming language like Java will not let you compile programs with syntax errors or type errors.
There aren't IDEs or compilers that flag bad algorithms.
But the error checking that exists for programming languages is still vastly superior than anything that exists for hardware or circuit programming: making circuits work correctly is still a lot harder than making equivalent software work correctly.
I hope Microsoft doesn't add injury to insult by patenting this stuff.
Ummm--that's kind of the equivalent of the panic glasses from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: they turn dark when there is anything dangerous around that might frighten you.
When you get an error in a programming language, that's a good thing: it means that the language detected something you were trying to do that doesn't make sense. Error detection isn't perfect, but it's there for a reason. If you want as little error detection as possible, program in assembly language.
FPGAs are probably one of the worst ways in which you could try to build reliable systems: they are hard to program and they lack error checking. Your best bet for building reliable systems is a very mature, simple microprocessor running a bulletproof, verified language implementation that has extensive built-in error checking and support for error recovery.
"This site" is hardly the forerunner in reconfigurable computing. Look for "reconfigurable computing" on Google, and you will find that academic research labs have been looking at it for as long as there have been FPGAs.
There are probably better tradeoffs than FPGAs for reconfigurable computing: rather than reconfiguring gates, it may make sense to reconfigure arithmetic circuits. There has been some work in that area. The point is that FPGAs are nice because they are commodity hardware, but they are probably a pretty suboptimal choice for reconfigurable computing.
Now, maybe someone will be able to make this go. But this company doesn't look like it. If you manage to get to their web site and look at the programming language "Viva" they have designed, it looks like you are drawing circuit diagrams. Imagine programming a complex algorithm with that.
There are already better approaches to programming FPGAs (here, here, here). Look for "reconfigurable computing" on Google and browse around.
Just to be clear: God got a little carried away on this one; when all was said and done, there ended up being about 12 orders of magnitude more than that.
I dunno, God sounds pretty geeky to me. And what's wrong with that anyway?
Buying an HDTV that is upgradable via FPGA programming is utter folly: five years from now, when you finally get around to upgrading your hardware, the vendor won't have any software for doing so, or means by which you can load the software into your HDTV.
The way HDTVs are upgradable is by putting the HDTV decoder into one box and have a standard analog or digital interface to the video part (plasma, projector, CRT). That's solid, sound engineering for change.
So, upgradable hardware is good. Modular hardware is good. FPGA-upgradable hardware is (usually) bad.
One logical conclusion seems to be that the meteorite contained extraterrestrial life, or perhaps a complex network of biochemical reactions that isn't quite life but a precursor. Those may have existed briefly in space and ceased long ago, or it may have been destroyed when the rock fell to earth, or we may simply not recognize it. I mean, if it doesn't have distinct membranes or other structural features, we wouldn't easily recognize life or close precursors of life at all with our current technology.
That's why it says "not found", not "non-existent".
What matters for the meteorite is whether these amino acids are common enough on earth to have contaminated the meteorite, and the answer to that is clearly "no".
There is probably some of that. I think the position of librarians and lawyers who complain about this is different, though. They view the on-line databases as the only complete repository of US legal opinion. If you take that as a given, then the debate really does come down to how that database should be made public.
This is similar to eminent domain: if you own a piece of property that's in the way of an important government project, a government can take your land and compensate you for it. Certainly, the same principle could be applied when a company has managed to entrench itself in an important public function, like holding the definitive database of legal opinions. And the existence of the company is related to the absence of public records: because the company has offered its services in the past, the public mechanisms didn't get created; once everybody started depending on their services, they could raise prices. Keep in mind that companies like West didn't start out as the financial and legal powerhouses they are today. It's classic monopoly-building.
Again, I don't think that forcing the legal publishers to open their databases is the best way of proceeding. I think any case law that cannot be retrieved from court records, case law that only exists in private on-line databases, should be erased from the books (how do we know West entered it correctly?). Furthermore, I think West's copyright on page numbers is unreasonable should be struck down.
Note that this has worked before: patents used to be available on-line only through expensive search services, but now you can get them over the Internet from the USPTO (and you can order republishable CD-ROMs).
Uh, no. The ELKS project, for one, is a near reimplementation of Linux for 16-bit x86 CPUs. Linux itself does not readily support anything less than 32-bit processors. Neither does gcc, which is why ELKS uses a different compiler.
I agree that Linux doesn't scale down well to 16bit CPUs; no single codebase does. Berkeley UNIX, too, was forked into 2BSD (16bit PDP-11) and 4BSD (32bit VAX). The UNIX APIs, however, do work well across a wide range of word sizes.
But the "small devices" we are talking about here are next generation cell phones. They will be 32bit machines with megabytes of memory. In different words, they are more powerful than the kinds of machines that 4BSD and Linux first were developed for. On the other hand, they are tiny compared to the 2+GHz, 1+GByte machines people are buying now.
Now, yes, these companies have spent money on creating those databases. That's fine. The government doesn't have the right to just take the products of their work for free. Perhaps the solution to the problem, a solution that would respect their property rights, would be for the tax payer to pay for scanning and capturing the old case law from original paper copies again.
But those companies are screaming bloody murder everytime solutions are proposed. West Publishing has made the ridiculous claim that they hold a coyright on the page numbers that are used to reference legal opinion, even though assigning page numbers clearly is not a creative process.
The "entitlement-oriented attitude" that predates Slashdot by a long time is that companies that have carved out a market niche think they are entitled to having that market niche protected, even if technology makes them completey obsolete. The "whine fest" is on the part of companies that can't deal with the fact that they have become obsolete and their business model doesn't work anymore. Those companies "whine" by trying to take undue influence on the political process. And because the business practices of those companies are in basic conflict with the principles of democracy, that kind of whining needs to be put a stop to.
So, again, let those electronic publishers keep their "rights"--they have a right not to have their work appropriated by the government. But they have no right to have their market protected. The government should invest the money to scan and publish all case law for free on the Internet, just like we do for patents. Technology has made that really cheap now.
The all important indexing information and page numbers are assigned by WestLaw and they claim that those are copyrighted. You can't effectively conduct legal research without being able to figure out the references.