It "hits home" when the broken children look a lot like your own. This UN anti-mine advertisement is built on that idea. It's quite a disturbing ad, but I guess there are some things people really need to get disturbed about.
I try very hard to care about all people and look past racial and cultural differences. And I think I generally do pretty good at that. But I cannot deny that, even knowing that it is staged and no one was actually hurt, I find that ad much more disturbing than news reports or statistics about real events that happen to people who do not much resemble the ones that I know, in far away places that do not much resemble my home. But this ad hits especially close to home for me. I happen to have an 8 year old daughter who's in a soccer team that wears very similar looking light blue uniforms. The game in the ad looks like it could be one that she played in. I can hardly bear to watch it.
Does anyone else worry that the USA might use its intelligent services to give its corporate entities an advantage over foreign ones?
No, I don't worry about that. I'm sure our elected officials will be glad to lend a helping hand to any company that funnels adequate money into their pockets, regardless of nationality.
Maybe. But to make any big dent in IE's market share, you have to appeal not to the savvy, but to the image conscious. The MySpace crowd (and that's a BIG crowd) won't be persuaded by better security, better standards support, better reliability, or even better features. But they'll start downloading in droves if they see that it's what the kool people use, and think that it'll make them look kool too.
I believe that this is a large part of the iPod's success. Many will look at the various competing players and will be impressed by their style, features, and competitive pricing. But they'll buy an iPod even if it means settling for a lesser model that lacks the features that they wanted and could have had for the same money from another manufacturer. They'll buy it not because it's the one that is best for their needs, or even best for their wants. They'll buy it because it's the one they most want to be seen with.
In other words if SCO had valid claims to copyright over part of the Linux kernel, and denied anyone the right to distribute that part of the Linux kernel except under propreitary terms, it would be illegal for ANYONE, INCLUDING SCO, to distribute Linux.
Given McBride's venomous rants against free software and Microsoft's early bankrolling of SCO's legal and media attacks on Linux, IBM, etc., I don't think it's too far fetched to think that this is exactly the precident they're trying to set. IMHO, the resurrection of Caldera Linux as an SCO closed-source proprietary product is not just destined to fail due to copyright infringement, but is designed to do so. SCO is a paid fall guy. Darl and a few others will make out like bandits while employees and investors get screwed. And quite likely, at least a few of those investors will not feel screwed at all, as SCO's demise and the damage caused in the process is exactly what they were investing in. I'm sure that won't keep them from claiming it as a loss for tax purposes though.
Your word-processor is 99% idle so surely it doesn't need to be native, but you know that somewhere on this planet, a poor shmuck is staring at an hourglass icon, waiting for a macro to finish. The real question is: who cares? The real question is: who cares? Is that guy's time worth more, or is the programmer's time worth more?
It's always a balance between the two, of course. It obviously makes sense to use the quick to develop but slow to run tools and techniques when the application will be used so few times that shorter run time can never offset the greater development time (and subsequent maintenance) of a "hand built" version. I think everyone here understands that, and I certainly don't disagree with it.
But still, I think that gets used too often as an excuse to take the quick-n-easy way when it really isn't justified, or when it's justified in the short term but leads to an accumulation of bloat and cruft the long term. The thing is, in a philosophical "big picture" way, that guy watching the hourglass while waiting for the macro to finish is the one who's time is worth more. Why? Because saving that guy's time is what justifies the existence of all of this computing technology in the first place.
When I look at modern OS's, GUI's, and high-level development tools compared to much simpler technology from a couple of decades ago, I do marvel at the advancement. And I do marvel at how applications that would have been impossibly complex back then can now be brought into existence with great speed and ease by using high level tools and by putting together and customizing libraries/modules/etc. that have already been developed. Applications that then would have been completely impractical because the development cost would have exceeded the benefit, are now commonplace, and collectively very beneficial.
And yet, I still can't look at all of this without a sense that something has gone horribly wrong. Abstractions built on abstractions built on abstractions. So many layers of abstraction that the correlation between a program and what the underlying machine actually does to execute it is an unfathomable mystery even to the one creating the program. So many layers of abstraction that simple programs that 25 years ago occupied only a few KB and ran on bare hardware with no OS now need MB's of runtimes or VM's, which in turn operate within a software environment (think OS, GUI, and drivers) consisting of hundreds of megabytes on disk and potentially 10's of mb's resident in RAM. There's something really sick about that.
Why, for a given chip, power consumption raises with clock speed? I know there's corelation, but I'd like to know the physical relation between the two variables.
When not changing state, a CMOS device dissipates almost no power. But each CMOS gate has a tiny capacitance that must be charged or discharged each time it changes state. This requires energy. The energy dissipated for each transition is essentially constant, but the number of transitions in a given time can vary. Since power=energy/time, the more transitions per unit of time, the more power is required and the more heat is generated.
Likewise, my Pentium 4 has 16000 times more ram than my first computer (a C64,) and 256 times the ram of my first 486 (side note: how long before someone informs me of the amount of ram my 486 had?)
On another note, every time someone proposes to replace batteries with capacitors, I wonder how they make up for the huge variation of voltage that a capacitor delivers. Basically, the voltage of a capacitor is proportional to the amount of charge stored, whereas a battery provides more or less constant voltage.
Actually, the energy stored in a capacitor is proportional to the square of the voltage. For examlple, if your capacitor powered device has drained half the capacitor's voltage, it has used 3/4 of the stored energy. So, while capacitor-fed power supplies will necessesarily waste some of the bottom end of the capacitor's voltage curve, there's really not much energy to be had there anyway.
As another poster already pointed out, modern switching power supply circuits achieve very high efficiencies. They can also be remarkably small. And some can operate over a surprisingly wide range of input voltage, so I'd bet that it will not be difficult to beat the 50% voltage / 75% energy in my example using only currently available technology. Also, the cost and size of these switching supplies isn't really much of a factor because nearly all reasonably high-tech battery powered devices already incorporate one or more of them.
Google. Essentially "read only", users are not submitting the content/editing the pages, just receiving results/maps/whatever.
Yeah, no user submissions. Just that silly "googlebot" thing. I think that it occasionally submits a little something. About 18.7 billion little somethings so far.
What does pay? Perhaps research, (which Vernor Vinge called "Search & Analysis," and noted was at "the heart of the economy,") perhaps technology, perhaps being a system administrator, or being a mechanic, or something like that. Perhaps being a business person or a manager. I wouldn't really know; I've not asked the question "How do I make more money?" deeply enough.
That's an easy one. This is what our society values above all else.
The reason why you got modded down, I'm sure, is simply because you just had to throw a Bush attack into something he isn't remotely responsible for.
I don't think he was meaning to imply that Bush is responsible for it, but rather that Bush's presence in the Whitehouse is indicative of the anti-intellectualism that pervades the electorate that put him there. And that is very relevant.
Knocking down theories is a big part of what science is about. The difference is that in science it's done using evidence and sound reasoning. Not by flinging ideological feces at it like these ID monkeys are doing.
I'd have no objection to ISP's blocking outgoing SMTP by default, but with a policy to unblock upon request. Better yet if they provided a means for users to block/unblock at will.
The course of action thus far has been to build more protections into the information itself that prevents it from being copied easily. Will the same thing happen with actual replicators when they are invented?
If the current trend holds, we'll DRM the hell out of everything, be it physical or virtual, creating artificial scarcity to replace natural scarcity.
Perhaps the current trend will not hold in the long run. But it could still be very ugly for a while. As I see it, the fundamental problem is that no current economic system is designed to deal with goods that have no natural scarcity.
Capitalism is about competing to get a bigger piece of the pie, and letting this motivate the pie's production.
Communism is about distributing the pie evenly, with production being centrally planned and dictated.
Most economies in the real world have some elements of both.
All assume that there's either not enough pie to satisfy all desire, or at least that the cost of doing so is prohibitive. But when people can make for themselves all the pie they want at almost no cost or effort, the system breaks down. The problem is that while it may take practically no effort or expense to reproduce pie, it still takes considerable effort to develop new kinds of pie. Especially really good pie.
We need a different economic model. But in the mean time, we'll keep trying to force an increasing number of non-scarce goods into the existing scarcity-based models. Which is very unfortunate, as this simply cannot be done other than by reducing freedom.
While working in Alaska, an oil worker from Texas decides he wants to try to fit in and be accepted by the locals. So, while at a bar, he asks what he would have to do to be considered a real Alaskan. A local fella tells him that there are three steps. First, he has to drink a pint of Alaskan whisky in a single draught. Second, he has to shoot a polar bear. And third, he has to make love to an Eskimo woman.
After downing the whisky, he wobbles out of the bar, banging into the door frame on the way out. In a few hours he returns with one boot, shredded clothing, bloody scrapes and gouges from head to toe, and missing an ear. He looks around then asks, "Now where's that Eskimo woman I'm supposed to shoot?".
An interesting and somewhat rare one in the portable's category is the Commodore SX-64. This would would be a great historic machine to have on display.
Bonus points if you can explain why 100 years advanced military technology isn't being used in Iraq right now.
It is. They're using 300 years advanced Romulan technology to hide it. You can trust me on this because I got it straight from Elvis. He's in a great position to investigate these things because no one suspects him since they all think he's dead.
Given that he posted this on Slashdot it's a perfectly practical suggestion for the target audience. I've been using this particular hosts file for a while with great results. I keep it updated on my wife's and daughter's computers as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It "hits home" when the broken children look a lot like your own. This UN anti-mine advertisement is built on that idea. It's quite a disturbing ad, but I guess there are some things people really need to get disturbed about.
I try very hard to care about all people and look past racial and cultural differences. And I think I generally do pretty good at that. But I cannot deny that, even knowing that it is staged and no one was actually hurt, I find that ad much more disturbing than news reports or statistics about real events that happen to people who do not much resemble the ones that I know, in far away places that do not much resemble my home. But this ad hits especially close to home for me. I happen to have an 8 year old daughter who's in a soccer team that wears very similar looking light blue uniforms. The game in the ad looks like it could be one that she played in. I can hardly bear to watch it.
Maybe. But to make any big dent in IE's market share, you have to appeal not to the savvy, but to the image conscious. The MySpace crowd (and that's a BIG crowd) won't be persuaded by better security, better standards support, better reliability, or even better features. But they'll start downloading in droves if they see that it's what the kool people use, and think that it'll make them look kool too. I believe that this is a large part of the iPod's success. Many will look at the various competing players and will be impressed by their style, features, and competitive pricing. But they'll buy an iPod even if it means settling for a lesser model that lacks the features that they wanted and could have had for the same money from another manufacturer. They'll buy it not because it's the one that is best for their needs, or even best for their wants. They'll buy it because it's the one they most want to be seen with.
But still, I think that gets used too often as an excuse to take the quick-n-easy way when it really isn't justified, or when it's justified in the short term but leads to an accumulation of bloat and cruft the long term. The thing is, in a philosophical "big picture" way, that guy watching the hourglass while waiting for the macro to finish is the one who's time is worth more. Why? Because saving that guy's time is what justifies the existence of all of this computing technology in the first place.
When I look at modern OS's, GUI's, and high-level development tools compared to much simpler technology from a couple of decades ago, I do marvel at the advancement. And I do marvel at how applications that would have been impossibly complex back then can now be brought into existence with great speed and ease by using high level tools and by putting together and customizing libraries/modules/etc. that have already been developed. Applications that then would have been completely impractical because the development cost would have exceeded the benefit, are now commonplace, and collectively very beneficial.
And yet, I still can't look at all of this without a sense that something has gone horribly wrong. Abstractions built on abstractions built on abstractions. So many layers of abstraction that the correlation between a program and what the underlying machine actually does to execute it is an unfathomable mystery even to the one creating the program. So many layers of abstraction that simple programs that 25 years ago occupied only a few KB and ran on bare hardware with no OS now need MB's of runtimes or VM's, which in turn operate within a software environment (think OS, GUI, and drivers) consisting of hundreds of megabytes on disk and potentially 10's of mb's resident in RAM. There's something really sick about that.
A bit of this would be great at one of those thousand-dollars-a-plate political fundraising dinners.
As another poster already pointed out, modern switching power supply circuits achieve very high efficiencies. They can also be remarkably small. And some can operate over a surprisingly wide range of input voltage, so I'd bet that it will not be difficult to beat the 50% voltage / 75% energy in my example using only currently available technology. Also, the cost and size of these switching supplies isn't really much of a factor because nearly all reasonably high-tech battery powered devices already incorporate one or more of them.
This can happen with leased equipment too. Lease agreements for anything substantial will typically require insurance, though.
Knocking down theories is a big part of what science is about. The difference is that in science it's done using evidence and sound reasoning. Not by flinging ideological feces at it like these ID monkeys are doing.
I'd have no objection to ISP's blocking outgoing SMTP by default, but with a policy to unblock upon request. Better yet if they provided a means for users to block/unblock at will.
Perhaps the current trend will not hold in the long run. But it could still be very ugly for a while. As I see it, the fundamental problem is that no current economic system is designed to deal with goods that have no natural scarcity.
Capitalism is about competing to get a bigger piece of the pie, and letting this motivate the pie's production.
Communism is about distributing the pie evenly, with production being centrally planned and dictated.
Most economies in the real world have some elements of both.
All assume that there's either not enough pie to satisfy all desire, or at least that the cost of doing so is prohibitive. But when people can make for themselves all the pie they want at almost no cost or effort, the system breaks down. The problem is that while it may take practically no effort or expense to reproduce pie, it still takes considerable effort to develop new kinds of pie. Especially really good pie.
We need a different economic model. But in the mean time, we'll keep trying to force an increasing number of non-scarce goods into the existing scarcity-based models. Which is very unfortunate, as this simply cannot be done other than by reducing freedom.
That reminds me of a joke I heard long ago.
While working in Alaska, an oil worker from Texas decides he wants to try to fit in and be accepted by the locals. So, while at a bar, he asks what he would have to do to be considered a real Alaskan. A local fella tells him that there are three steps. First, he has to drink a pint of Alaskan whisky in a single draught. Second, he has to shoot a polar bear. And third, he has to make love to an Eskimo woman.
After downing the whisky, he wobbles out of the bar, banging into the door frame on the way out. In a few hours he returns with one boot, shredded clothing, bloody scrapes and gouges from head to toe, and missing an ear. He looks around then asks, "Now where's that Eskimo woman I'm supposed to shoot?".
An interesting and somewhat rare one in the portable's category is the Commodore SX-64. This would would be a great historic machine to have on display.
Because "EFF" isn't a verb.
Given that he posted this on Slashdot it's a perfectly practical suggestion for the target audience. I've been using this particular hosts file for a while with great results. I keep it updated on my wife's and daughter's computers as well.