As I have heard it, they weren't just worried about optimization... when they started FORTRAN, the very idea of programming a computer in a naturalistic language (hey, it's all relative) was viewed as artificial intelligence, and nobody really knew whether they could get it to work at all.
Grumble grumble... I got a Sony Clie TH55 with PalmOS, WiFi, and Camera, AND a half-VGA screen over a year ago, all in a fairly small form-factor. Nice piece of hardware. But you know what? Sony withdrew from the market about 2 weeks after I got it, and the software never really stabilized, and the PalmOS wasn't up to the task. Sony had hacked up their own interfaces to the cool onboard gadgets, so there's very little 3rd part software support.
It's also entirely possible to "upsample" a recording to make it more accurately represent the original - if you have out-of-band information. For instance, we "know" what a violin is, and that a violin doesn't make high frequency "popping" noises. So given a sample of a violin with popping, we can use noise reduction on it. The result will not only sound better subjectively, but be closer to the original sound source than the recording from which we're working! Does this violate some rule of information theory? No, because we have prior information about what noises a violin can make.
Now, if you handed me a completely random picture that looked like TV snow, but with a small part cut out, could I regenerate that missing piece? No way. But hand me a picture of George bush's face with a small piece cut out, and I can recreate that piece very accurately. The point is, most data has some structure that we know about, outside of the particular source in question.
This is precisely the same reason why lossless compression is possible. Can FLAC compress arbitrary sounds samples, or png compress arbitrary images? No, of course not. But since (almost) all sounds and images of interest have common properties, we can make alternate representations in which data most likely to be of interest is represented by shorter bitstrings.
I don't think it will help much because of what *really* bugs me, which is that VMWare runs in kernel mode all the time. But thanks for the suggestion, I'll try it.
I suspect that heavy-duty virtualization like IBM's partitioning works well. (I haven't used it, but since they engineer their mainframes for it, maybe it works.)
VMWare on x86, on the other hand, is really trying my patience. I've used it for some time to meet my Microsoft needs on my Linux laptop, but it just doesn't run well. Most annoying is the fact that it nice's itself to -5 automatically, then runs everything (Windows OS and Windows Apps) in Linux kernel mode, so far as I can tell. The result is everything else on the host side runs like crap. On the guest side, things aren't too bad until you try to do significant IO - then it gets slowwwwww.
I'm not just ranting here, what I'm wondering is whether others' experience is as poor as mine? I haven't tried v5 yet, is it any better? The main thing I long for is simply fair multitasking with other apps on the host side. I've taken to launching VMWare from the console so I can background it with ^Z when I want to use my Linux side.
You chose a really bad example up there;-). At least in Europe fraud using manipulated or even completely bogus ATMs is not too infrequent according to police reports
That's exactly why I chose ATMs as an example. It's possible, it has happened, yet it hasn't shaken the public confidence, nor slowed ATM deployment. That's why the ATM example proves that something needn't be perfect in order to be practical and useful.
The point is it shouldn't be too hard to make a machine that can't be modified in software by its users, which you can use to boot up from your own memory device.
Does that mean whoever owns the machine in the cybercafe or hotel couldn't trick you? No. But it means a patron of one of these establishments probably could not, which is good enough.
It's like asking "before entering your PIN, how do you know that's a real ATM?" The answer is, you don't, really, but exploints of this extent are too exotic to worry much about.
How would things be different today if Apple initially offered the Lisa at a substantially lower price just so people experienced the GUI?
Maybe there would be no Apple, because they would have lost their shirts selling expensive hardware at a loss. If comparable hardware could be produced at a reasonable price back then, Lisa would have had much more competition. But most computer makers knew the time wasn't yet right.
I disagree with the basic notion that the Lisa influenced everything to follow because it had a GUI first. Everybody already knew expensive hardware could do more, just not enough to make it worthwhile at the time.
As another example, I don't think the modern game hardware industry owes much to Silicon Graphics - their hardware was ahead of PC hardware for a long time, but at a price most people wouldn't pay. When the time was right, graphics hardware became widespread, but it was no thanks to SGI who were trying to maintain the old prices.
What I think it direly needs is *ratings* of hotels and restaurants. I don't want to know where every restaurant is, I want to find one with the right mix of quality, cost, and travel distance (to be specified by me). Not ratings by the public, either, but from real critics, perhaps from newspapers?
Doesn't China make most of the rest of the word's DVD players? Maybe they'll push to make this the standard here, too, so they don't have to pay so many royalties.
That would be fine with me. I'm all for direct importation of Chinese goods without ridiculous markups for the "American" brand-name. (See Nike and Levis). So long as I'm buying goods with my outsourcing-deflated wages, I'd like the opportunity to buy at equally deflated prices. I don't think the greedy American overlords who cut all their American workers add much value anyways.
Is Mozilla's usnet news reader being updated at all? I'm still using the "suite." They still have it on their website, but I can't tell if the browser is kept up to date with firefox, and if the newsreader is updated at all.
Maybe by closing the source, one of their competitors will buy them out and they will have enough money to live on and write open source code.
Maybe, and you can't blame them for changing strategies when status quo fails.
But sometimes I think the authors of popular open-source software see their user base and think "gee, what if I had $59 from each user!"... when in fact, "free" is their main competitive advantage and the only reason they have users in the first place. Charging for software licenses might save them, but it might just wipe them off the map.
No, this time it won't flop because the disks work in ordinary DVD players, so consumers aren't expected to invest in Microsoft's business model.
What's that, you say?
The revolutionary product could be on the market as early as next year, with the new DVD players needed to view them....
A senior source in the company says Microsoft is in talks with the main electronics manufacturers about developing DVD players to play the new discs.
Whoops! DivX, here we come!! (And coincidentally, what idiot wrote that article without even mentioning DivX?)
Google is in a bad position: They have a nuetral product, easily accessable, which shows political divisions. Taiwan shows up on the product, so it needs to be inside or outside a boundry. A diplomat's words can leave it's status undefined, a map cannot.
Bah, diplomacy, that's old fashioned. Google has their own high-tech criticism avoidance mechanism, which should be quick to implement: just label the map "BETA"!
OK, docs are always out of date and make unstated assumptions. Are you telling me these tech support folks will be any different? I predict this tech support line will be an expensive text-to-speech interface for forums.gentoo.org. What else would it be? There's no way a person could learn all the combinations of libraries, applications, configurations, and hardware (many versions of each).
And how am I even supposed to know how much improvement this provides over my current monitor when the article does not provide a screenshot of the new monitor!? Let's face it, there hasn't been any improvement in displays during my lifetime. Every time I see a TV commercial for the latest high-tech TV, its brightness and clarity is at most 50% better than the TV I have now, subjectively, and that just isn't worth my hard-earned cash. Not when I can put the money where it really makes a difference, like expensive wine, high-end audio equipment, and Nike shoes.
Do gmail clients even use SMTP? If so, why? I'm guessing if one gmail user sends a message to another (or to himself, using it as online storage), SMTP is completely out of the picture. It's also not very hard to imagine large webmail providers exchanging email (say, gmail to hotmail) without SMTP. If we're ever able to get away from SMTP that's how it will happen.
There are very few aircraft that can take off OR land purely automatically, and to my knowledge, they are all model aircraft, the largest being a miniature helicopter used for observing volcanoes.
The Soviet Space Shuttle Buran flew entire missions unmanned on autopilot, even landing in a 34 mph crosswind, about 20 years ago.
I don't think takeoff and landing are "very difficult"; if they were there would be more crashes. Now landing on a pitching carrier deck, that's difficult. And there are wave-offs and accidents despite the extreme levels of expertise of the pilots who do it.
I think the Russians will sell the Chinese whatever they want:
Where does China turn when it shops for military weapons? In a word, Russia. According to the Russian Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), China constitutes the largest single importer of post-Soviet Russian arms and military equipment, with purchases ranging between 30% and 50% of Russia's entire annual deliveries.
Without those arms exports to China, Russia would lack the funds to modernize its own military. In fact, in the past Russia has prohibited the export of certain of its military aircraft, or production licenses, to China only to revoke the ban later on.
Slashdot Mirror
As I have heard it, they weren't just worried about optimization... when they started FORTRAN, the very idea of programming a computer in a naturalistic language (hey, it's all relative) was viewed as artificial intelligence, and nobody really knew whether they could get it to work at all.
As I understand it, all the atoms in your body turn over every few years anyways, i.e. little or none of you is "original."
I just switched over to a PocketPC a week ago.
That's not "liability." Software developers can already be fired.
Now, if you handed me a completely random picture that looked like TV snow, but with a small part cut out, could I regenerate that missing piece? No way. But hand me a picture of George bush's face with a small piece cut out, and I can recreate that piece very accurately. The point is, most data has some structure that we know about, outside of the particular source in question.
This is precisely the same reason why lossless compression is possible. Can FLAC compress arbitrary sounds samples, or png compress arbitrary images? No, of course not. But since (almost) all sounds and images of interest have common properties, we can make alternate representations in which data most likely to be of interest is represented by shorter bitstrings.
But you have to admit, the issue of administrative control over the Internet is completely relevant to slashdot.
I don't think it will help much because of what *really* bugs me, which is that VMWare runs in kernel mode all the time. But thanks for the suggestion, I'll try it.
VMWare on x86, on the other hand, is really trying my patience. I've used it for some time to meet my Microsoft needs on my Linux laptop, but it just doesn't run well. Most annoying is the fact that it nice's itself to -5 automatically, then runs everything (Windows OS and Windows Apps) in Linux kernel mode, so far as I can tell. The result is everything else on the host side runs like crap. On the guest side, things aren't too bad until you try to do significant IO - then it gets slowwwwww.
I'm not just ranting here, what I'm wondering is whether others' experience is as poor as mine? I haven't tried v5 yet, is it any better? The main thing I long for is simply fair multitasking with other apps on the host side. I've taken to launching VMWare from the console so I can background it with ^Z when I want to use my Linux side.
Does that mean whoever owns the machine in the cybercafe or hotel couldn't trick you? No. But it means a patron of one of these establishments probably could not, which is good enough.
It's like asking "before entering your PIN, how do you know that's a real ATM?" The answer is, you don't, really, but exploints of this extent are too exotic to worry much about.
I disagree with the basic notion that the Lisa influenced everything to follow because it had a GUI first. Everybody already knew expensive hardware could do more, just not enough to make it worthwhile at the time.
As another example, I don't think the modern game hardware industry owes much to Silicon Graphics - their hardware was ahead of PC hardware for a long time, but at a price most people wouldn't pay. When the time was right, graphics hardware became widespread, but it was no thanks to SGI who were trying to maintain the old prices.
What I think it direly needs is *ratings* of hotels and restaurants. I don't want to know where every restaurant is, I want to find one with the right mix of quality, cost, and travel distance (to be specified by me). Not ratings by the public, either, but from real critics, perhaps from newspapers?
That would be fine with me. I'm all for direct importation of Chinese goods without ridiculous markups for the "American" brand-name. (See Nike and Levis). So long as I'm buying goods with my outsourcing-deflated wages, I'd like the opportunity to buy at equally deflated prices. I don't think the greedy American overlords who cut all their American workers add much value anyways.
Is Mozilla's usnet news reader being updated at all? I'm still using the "suite." They still have it on their website, but I can't tell if the browser is kept up to date with firefox, and if the newsreader is updated at all.
But sometimes I think the authors of popular open-source software see their user base and think "gee, what if I had $59 from each user!"... when in fact, "free" is their main competitive advantage and the only reason they have users in the first place. Charging for software licenses might save them, but it might just wipe them off the map.
I was referring to the article itself rather than the slashdot synopsis.
What's that, you say?
Whoops! DivX, here we come!! (And coincidentally, what idiot wrote that article without even mentioning DivX?)I sure hope they prove me wrong but I don't see what else it could be.
I leave an encrypted backup DVD with my parents twice a year when I visit, making this whole issue moot.
OK, docs are always out of date and make unstated assumptions. Are you telling me these tech support folks will be any different? I predict this tech support line will be an expensive text-to-speech interface for forums.gentoo.org. What else would it be? There's no way a person could learn all the combinations of libraries, applications, configurations, and hardware (many versions of each).
And how am I even supposed to know how much improvement this provides over my current monitor when the article does not provide a screenshot of the new monitor!? Let's face it, there hasn't been any improvement in displays during my lifetime. Every time I see a TV commercial for the latest high-tech TV, its brightness and clarity is at most 50% better than the TV I have now, subjectively, and that just isn't worth my hard-earned cash. Not when I can put the money where it really makes a difference, like expensive wine, high-end audio equipment, and Nike shoes.
Do gmail clients even use SMTP? If so, why? I'm guessing if one gmail user sends a message to another (or to himself, using it as online storage), SMTP is completely out of the picture. It's also not very hard to imagine large webmail providers exchanging email (say, gmail to hotmail) without SMTP. If we're ever able to get away from SMTP that's how it will happen.
I don't think takeoff and landing are "very difficult"; if they were there would be more crashes. Now landing on a pitching carrier deck, that's difficult. And there are wave-offs and accidents despite the extreme levels of expertise of the pilots who do it.