What makes them different is time-sensitivity. Voice packets can't be delayed, even for a quarter-second, without making talking really annoying. Sure voice packets should still use the same protocol, but they need higher priority, and you would expect to pay less for lower priority stuff that isn't interactive - even streaming video can easily be buffered for a half-second to mask jitter.
Ok, you make a good point about gestures on the trackpad being are touch-based. I use my MacBook pro about 75% docked with a keyboard and mouse and 25% as a laptop with the trackpad, and just use alternate ways to do things like raise Mission Control. So in that sense Apple has started on convergence somewhat.
I must admit, everything is moving in the direction of ubiquitous connectivity and data location transparency. I still think many businesses will end up hosting private clouds. But at the consumer level, there aren't enough of us who care, and are able to handle it ourselves, to matter at all.
Ever tried connecting a Surface Pro to your company's Active Directory and implementing GPO?
Wait, does the Surface Pro not run Windows 8, or does Windows 8 not do that? I would have thought Microsoft would nail Enterprise integration before anything else.
But then your data is spread out across multiple devices, or worse yet, stuck in some proprietary Cloud. Secondly, if you look at the hardware in the Surface Pro 3, the pricing isn't crazy. It's no $500 laptop. An i7 in a device less than 1cm thick is impressive (although that one is almost $2K).
Don't think iPad. Think Macbook Air with a detachable keyboard.
That's a good starting point but not the hard part. The basic the problem with that is how to converge the touch-based and pointer-based (mouse/trackpad) paradigms. Apple hasn't even started yet. Microsoft took the plunge with Windows 8 and has taken a lot of bruises. Maybe it can't be done well; maybe Microsoft will make all the investment and then Apple will swoop in and beat Microsoft over the finish line with a breakthrough product. Or maybe Microsoft's convergence strategy will win. But sticking a keyboard on a touch device full of apps all designed around touch does not work well, and the same goes for sticking a touchscreen on a pointer-based OS and applications. They are fundamentally different because touch is less precise and so much slower to enter text.
I think the Surface Pro version of Office should have two modes: (1) "real" Office applications (not a re-write) for use with a keyboard and trackpad/mouse, and (2) Office Apps for viewing and light editing. Documents should open with the right one based on whether the keyboard is plugged in, and could get fancy about switching when the keyboard is folded out, etc. Other applications should follow this pattern.
Does anyone have thoughts on Google spinning this out as a not for profit and make public backbones that are truly ubiquitous and marginalized?
My thoughts are (A) why would they do that instead of turning a buck on it and (B) would I want them to; ultimately some company WILL be doing the day-to-day work of operating the network and arguing for rates, and they might be more like AT&T than google. Granted, I am happy with my municipal water, electricity, gas, and sewers - they just work, don't cost too much, and aren't weasels always nickle-and-diming and raising prices like Comcast. But I am skeptical about fiber reaching that point in the next 20 years.
My neighbor just put them up and figures payoff in 5 years. That is with heavy subsidies though, so I do think the GP's figures are too optimistic for now. But again, look at the numbers in that link. It is happening.
It is not clear from the article whether or not this is ultimately an inertial system, but if so it's a huge leap beyond the current ones:
It's a great deal more accurate than the current method used by submariners, which relies on accelerometers to pick up a vessel's movement while underwater. The accuracy difference is enough that a vessel surfacing after a day could be within three feet of its intended position--rather than up to a mile off.
It sounds potentially very exciting. (Yet once again, 99% of the slashdot comments are debating the phrasing of the clickbait headline, instead of talking about the technology itself and potential impacts. It's really disappointing.)
Actually average SAT math scores are as high as they've ever been in the US (at least going back to the 1960s) after a big dip in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, which is actually very impressive since the percentage of students taking the SATs has gone way up. So as far as that goes, if the US is declining relative to other nations it is because of improvement on their part.
According to the linked article, one place that is nosediving in the US is California. Whether that is more due to immigration or per-student spending dropping behind the US average due mainly to referendums on property taxes, I don't know.
Not true, even according to just the part I quoted: "We may use information collected using third party cookies." In other words, once the tracking information is collected, it is bought and sold among companies so they can correlate all your activities. (Just it can also be bought by the government, or demanded with a warrant).
So, civilian "collateral damage" in Iraq and Pakistan is OK then?
I didn't say it was always justified, or often justified, I just gave one extreme example in which it was justified. For what it's worth I think the Iraq war was a big sham, and also huge mistake even from a purely selfish (for the US as a whole) perspective.
And, are you suggesting mass murder is OK as long as you accomplish something?
Your question is paradoxical only because of how you phrased it, since we only call something "murder" after we judge it to be unjustified.
But I guess the basic answer is "yes," or in other words, I am not quite a pacifist. For example I cannot blame Russia for violently resisting German invasion in WWII.
A basic calculus for this would be whether the killings (e.g. bombing an invading army) will save more lives than it costs. A more messy but more reasonable calculus also must weigh the guilt or innocence of the people likely to perish, or at least the merit of the causes those people are fighting for (since individuals generally have very little choice which side they fight for.)
I don't follow your logic. Let's assume you're right about Obama and Bush. How does that make McVeigh a great patriot? What you do you think he accomplished?
That's not my experience, we watch Netflix and Amazon Prime all the time on my Sony smart TV with no complaints.
As for being tracked, it is sad, but there are no (legal) options for watching on-demand programming without be tracked. Let's check out Roku's (so-called) Privacy Policy, shall we? "Cookies enable Roku and others to track usage patterns and deliver customized content, marketing, and advertising to you.... We may use information collected using third party cookies and Web beacons on Roku Sites and in our emails to deliver Roku advertising displayed to you on third party sites..." etc etc. Read the rest of it and tell me if you think it limits them in any significant way at all?
(Unless you call timeshifting broadcast TV "on demand").
Yeah, nobody sane is going to sympathize with Timothy McVeigh.
His reference to solitary confinement caught my attention. There was a recent Frontline on solitary confinement. It is scary. It is a modern-day dungeon. These guys are so messed up there is nothing to do but lock them up and throw away the key, which messes them up even further. The convicts certainly aren't blameless to begin with, but we are over-doing it. I non-violent hacker (if that's what "weev" is/was) should not be there.
On slashdot, downmodding trolls serves the purpose of filtering out the messages you they are mostly invisible if you don't want to see them. I call that a benefit.
Word for the day: solipsism. We don't really know that other people are intelligent or even exist, only that we perceive them to be so. So this will never be resolved.
Nobody knows how much computational work a neuron does. A simulation of an entire CPU that modeled every transistor at a detailed electrical level would be fantastically slow (as slow as you want to make it, since you can always run a higher-fidelity simulation!) A neural simulation is the same. How much of what neurons do accomplishes work? One obvious fact is that it is task-dependent. Compared to a computer, the brain is horribly inefficient at arithmetic and wonderfully efficient at object recognition.
That was a great scene. People often think they've outgrown the other in a relationship, but not quite like that.
Another reference I don't see mentioned in here is Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Marvin is afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a "brain the size of a planet"[1] which he is seldom, if ever, given the chance to use. Indeed, the true horror of Marvin's existence is that no task he could be given would occupy even the tiniest fraction of his vast intellect...
When kidnapped by the bellicose Krikkit robots and tied to the interfaces of their intelligent war computer, Marvin simultaneously manages to plan the entire planet's military strategy, solve "all of the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except his own, three times over," and compose a number of lullabies.
(wikipedia)
Now that I think about it, I am wondering why nobody asked Marvin to question the answer 42.
It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?
Well, not so long as it used to be. I recently got a Macbook Pro and under "About This Mac / Processor" it says "2.3 GHz Intel Core i7" - the same thing it says on a Macbook Pro I got 3 years ago. The CPU is not actually identical of course - it has much-improved battery life, which is good. But the performance increase, if any, is not noticeable. Times really have changed.
This reporting seems to be spreading the idea that getting a paper rejected is abnormal. For most of us, it's entirely normal. Normal, decent computer science conferences/journals (the ones you never even hear about unless you're in the field) have a rejection rate of 2/3 to 3/4. In other words, MOST papers are criticized heavily in review, and rejected. In some fields (like philosophy) it's more like 90-95% rejection rate.
To Comcast there's no difference whether it's Comcast or BitTorrent anyways. The least attractive customer to Comcast would be somebody who uses lots of bandwidth, and who buys bare Internet service without an expensive cable channel package. People who use a lot of Netflix, or Bittorrent, or both, fit that description.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes them different is time-sensitivity. Voice packets can't be delayed, even for a quarter-second, without making talking really annoying. Sure voice packets should still use the same protocol, but they need higher priority, and you would expect to pay less for lower priority stuff that isn't interactive - even streaming video can easily be buffered for a half-second to mask jitter.
Ok, you make a good point about gestures on the trackpad being are touch-based. I use my MacBook pro about 75% docked with a keyboard and mouse and 25% as a laptop with the trackpad, and just use alternate ways to do things like raise Mission Control. So in that sense Apple has started on convergence somewhat.
Nope, like I already said above, a trackpad is a pointer-based interface. Positioning and clicking are two separate actions.
I must admit, everything is moving in the direction of ubiquitous connectivity and data location transparency. I still think many businesses will end up hosting private clouds. But at the consumer level, there aren't enough of us who care, and are able to handle it ourselves, to matter at all.
Wait, does the Surface Pro not run Windows 8, or does Windows 8 not do that? I would have thought Microsoft would nail Enterprise integration before anything else.
But then your data is spread out across multiple devices, or worse yet, stuck in some proprietary Cloud. Secondly, if you look at the hardware in the Surface Pro 3, the pricing isn't crazy. It's no $500 laptop. An i7 in a device less than 1cm thick is impressive (although that one is almost $2K).
That's a good starting point but not the hard part. The basic the problem with that is how to converge the touch-based and pointer-based (mouse/trackpad) paradigms. Apple hasn't even started yet. Microsoft took the plunge with Windows 8 and has taken a lot of bruises. Maybe it can't be done well; maybe Microsoft will make all the investment and then Apple will swoop in and beat Microsoft over the finish line with a breakthrough product. Or maybe Microsoft's convergence strategy will win. But sticking a keyboard on a touch device full of apps all designed around touch does not work well, and the same goes for sticking a touchscreen on a pointer-based OS and applications. They are fundamentally different because touch is less precise and so much slower to enter text.
I think the Surface Pro version of Office should have two modes: (1) "real" Office applications (not a re-write) for use with a keyboard and trackpad/mouse, and (2) Office Apps for viewing and light editing. Documents should open with the right one based on whether the keyboard is plugged in, and could get fancy about switching when the keyboard is folded out, etc. Other applications should follow this pattern.
My thoughts are (A) why would they do that instead of turning a buck on it and (B) would I want them to; ultimately some company WILL be doing the day-to-day work of operating the network and arguing for rates, and they might be more like AT&T than google. Granted, I am happy with my municipal water, electricity, gas, and sewers - they just work, don't cost too much, and aren't weasels always nickle-and-diming and raising prices like Comcast. But I am skeptical about fiber reaching that point in the next 20 years.
My neighbor just put them up and figures payoff in 5 years. That is with heavy subsidies though, so I do think the GP's figures are too optimistic for now. But again, look at the numbers in that link. It is happening.
It sounds potentially very exciting. (Yet once again, 99% of the slashdot comments are debating the phrasing of the clickbait headline, instead of talking about the technology itself and potential impacts. It's really disappointing.)
According to the linked article, one place that is nosediving in the US is California. Whether that is more due to immigration or per-student spending dropping behind the US average due mainly to referendums on property taxes, I don't know.
Not true, even according to just the part I quoted: "We may use information collected using third party cookies." In other words, once the tracking information is collected, it is bought and sold among companies so they can correlate all your activities. (Just it can also be bought by the government, or demanded with a warrant).
I didn't say it was always justified, or often justified, I just gave one extreme example in which it was justified. For what it's worth I think the Iraq war was a big sham, and also huge mistake even from a purely selfish (for the US as a whole) perspective.
Your question is paradoxical only because of how you phrased it, since we only call something "murder" after we judge it to be unjustified.
But I guess the basic answer is "yes," or in other words, I am not quite a pacifist. For example I cannot blame Russia for violently resisting German invasion in WWII.
A basic calculus for this would be whether the killings (e.g. bombing an invading army) will save more lives than it costs. A more messy but more reasonable calculus also must weigh the guilt or innocence of the people likely to perish, or at least the merit of the causes those people are fighting for (since individuals generally have very little choice which side they fight for.)
I don't follow your logic. Let's assume you're right about Obama and Bush. How does that make McVeigh a great patriot? What you do you think he accomplished?
As for being tracked, it is sad, but there are no (legal) options for watching on-demand programming without be tracked. Let's check out Roku's (so-called) Privacy Policy, shall we? "Cookies enable Roku and others to track usage patterns and deliver customized content, marketing, and advertising to you.... We may use information collected using third party cookies and Web beacons on Roku Sites and in our emails to deliver Roku advertising displayed to you on third party sites..." etc etc. Read the rest of it and tell me if you think it limits them in any significant way at all?
(Unless you call timeshifting broadcast TV "on demand").
His reference to solitary confinement caught my attention. There was a recent Frontline on solitary confinement. It is scary. It is a modern-day dungeon. These guys are so messed up there is nothing to do but lock them up and throw away the key, which messes them up even further. The convicts certainly aren't blameless to begin with, but we are over-doing it. I non-violent hacker (if that's what "weev" is/was) should not be there.
On slashdot, downmodding trolls serves the purpose of filtering out the messages you they are mostly invisible if you don't want to see them. I call that a benefit.
Word for the day: solipsism. We don't really know that other people are intelligent or even exist, only that we perceive them to be so. So this will never be resolved.
Nobody knows how much computational work a neuron does. A simulation of an entire CPU that modeled every transistor at a detailed electrical level would be fantastically slow (as slow as you want to make it, since you can always run a higher-fidelity simulation!) A neural simulation is the same. How much of what neurons do accomplishes work? One obvious fact is that it is task-dependent. Compared to a computer, the brain is horribly inefficient at arithmetic and wonderfully efficient at object recognition.
Another reference I don't see mentioned in here is Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
(wikipedia)
Now that I think about it, I am wondering why nobody asked Marvin to question the answer 42.
You are stunningly misinformed. In fact the percent of Americans who are public employees is the smallest it has been since 1968.
It makes you wonder where people get these ideas and why they feel so free to spout off without knowing anything. We have google, where is the disconnect coming from?
Well, not so long as it used to be. I recently got a Macbook Pro and under "About This Mac / Processor" it says "2.3 GHz Intel Core i7" - the same thing it says on a Macbook Pro I got 3 years ago. The CPU is not actually identical of course - it has much-improved battery life, which is good. But the performance increase, if any, is not noticeable. Times really have changed.
This reporting seems to be spreading the idea that getting a paper rejected is abnormal. For most of us, it's entirely normal. Normal, decent computer science conferences/journals (the ones you never even hear about unless you're in the field) have a rejection rate of 2/3 to 3/4. In other words, MOST papers are criticized heavily in review, and rejected. In some fields (like philosophy) it's more like 90-95% rejection rate.
To Comcast there's no difference whether it's Comcast or BitTorrent anyways. The least attractive customer to Comcast would be somebody who uses lots of bandwidth, and who buys bare Internet service without an expensive cable channel package. People who use a lot of Netflix, or Bittorrent, or both, fit that description.