Why would they use the damn wheel on very short , irregular mountain roads, connected via unstable rope bridges?
Agreed! This should be modded up!
I really get irked by these comments about other civilizations not having the wheel, as if this is some kind of milestone on a time line. You know them Incans didn't have snowshoes even-- so they were even less advanced than Europeans of 10,000 years ago, huh?
Strings hanging off strings hanging off strings? Surely a relational database? It's just as well Codd died before learning that the Incas beat him to 3NF by 500 years.
I'm sure Codd would have been appalled at Incan degree of stringification.
I haven't checked the link yet, but on the basis of the "snobbery of chronology" definition, I would mod this "insightful" if I had points to use at the moment.
Re:Why are we so surprized?
on
Incas Used Binary?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not so impressed that the Incas used a complicated system of tying colored knots on string that *kinda* resembles binary when you consider how much easier it would've been to just write the information down.
Hey, troll, I almost took your bait.
Then I realized that most everyone reading slashdot is bright enough to recognize that a library of strings tied around your waist is a hell of lot easier to carry on mountain trails than the same amount of information packed into clay tablets or animal skins. Or even books (assuming that the local resources would provide a paper analog).
More durable, and easier to store, too. Plus, binary encoded strings (to use the proper name for such a system) could be easily duplicated in quantity by illiterate children.
So perhaps the mystery of how the Incan Empire came to be comes down to their having discovered a method of mass publication, and the use of child labor in their publishing houses.
7-bit though, that's what I find interesting. Wonder where 7 bits comes from. 10 or 5 --that I'd understand.
Who's to say for sure? But what came to my mind is
northward
eastward
southward
westward
earthward
skyward
inward
These directions have been used throughout the Americas for a long, long time, sometimes as a way of communicating what a thing is.
Apologies if this drink seems a little heavier than standard slashdot fare. I'm sure some readers may find it hard to grok for that reason.
I know! I'll leaven the brew with some yeast of the Sacred Chao! I don't know the Incan words, but I know they had this concept.
Now mind that you don't drink all this too fast. The fermentation of these ideas could blow the top of your skull off, but it is a kind of sneaker drunk. You might not realize you've lost your apparent cognitive control until it's too late. It would be a shame if you overheard your friends talking about you:
"Poor guy. Yeah, he seeemed to be pretty together, and then he caught this weird incan/illuminatis mind-virus thing while reading a slashdot comment. It's a shame really."
It's like auto insurance in the USA. If you license a car, you have to buy auto insurance to cover any damage or injury the car might cause. Is this stupid or what? Wouldn't it make more sense to require drivers to carry the insurance? When was the last time you heard about an empty car being the cause of an accident? It doesn't happen very often.
Nevertheless, apparently there are good business or legal reasons why it is the car that is insured, and not the driver. Similarly, there are probably good business or legal reasons why RH bases its billing on the number of machines a client has, rather than some estimate of the probable workload the client will generate.
Another case where business or legal realities are not logical...
I don't think there's a conflict with the GPL. Red Hat is not putting any limitation on the number of instances of installed software.
Instead, they are saying that their charge for support for one instance is $x, and their charge for support for five instances is 5 * $x. And that you agree to allow them to check your count.
I think the real question here is whether this is a good pricing model. If I've got a five employees at five workstations, then this seems reasonable in that I'm likely to need support services roughly five times as often, (assuming that all the employees have the same FUF (uh, that's *Foul* Up Factor, not the other). But if I've got a server farm of 100 identically configured servers doing the same tasks in parallel, then I don't think my support needs will be greater than if I've got a smaller server farm of 20 machines. So I'm not sure that the RH model is always going to be justifiable.
Perhaps RH deals with these kinds of differences with custom contracts. Certainly if I was in the market for Linux support for a server farm or for more than a dozen workstations, I'd be looking beyond the EULA for a written contract (that would take precedence, and might specifically countermand some of the EULA phrases).
---
On re-reading the parent, the phrase "If you buy a product including services," jumped out, and I realized that this might be one of the sources confusion. Is RH selling any product? Or are they just giving the software away as part of your purchase of their services? I think it is really the latter case, since you can legally obtain free-beer RH software very easily.
I should have been more specific. Sorry to cause confusion.
When it comes to archiving original flat color work, like scanned images, the product of raytracing software or other graphics, or images from digital cameras, png has advantages. Clearly once editing has begun and the work has started to acquire layers, you'd need something else other than png for the work in progress. Though pngs of color separations and individual raster layers makes sense in some cases.
I expect, though, that when the finished work is converted to gif or jpg, the savvy commercial artist would also make a png archival copy (as an accurate rendering that could be used by a low skilled assistant to quickly reconstruct the gif or jpg, if that is needed later on).
As to Flash vs SVG-- I expect that Flash will become SVG compliant as the SVG standard develops further. Those guys seem pretty bright and I don't think they will miss the boat. What drives the "ideology" of standards like SVG is a pragmatic common sense about what is going to work well for everybody in the long run. That approach is well proven in the general case. The world wide web is but one example.
Aren't there some members of the Flash community involved in the SVG standards? I recall seeing something about that a few months ago, probably in the amaya news groups somewhere.
Anyone who wants to have rotating skulls and burning fire on their script kiddie web page is still welcome to use animated gifs.
What, is this some kind of "real artists don't use poster paints" thing?
It is easy to do trash in animated gifs. If you want to spend your money, and your audience's time on downloads and plug-in overheads, it is also easy to do trash in Flash. I've seen quite a bit of both.
Yet within the limitations of the web (bandwidth, supporting legacy browsers, etc), gif animations for slide shows and the like are a viable alternative in many instances. Just like Picasso sometimes used poster paints to do posters, gif animations can support good art.
Let me give you some of my credentials in the way that you are most likely to understand them: I have spent several hundred dollars on watercolor brushes and supplies, so obviously I Am A Artist and know what I'm talking about. Phlbbt!
I think a lot of graphics artists-- both commercial and semi-pro-- are using png quite a bit in house. And then converting to either gif or jpg in the final production steps, when the work is destined for the web.
There is a lot of inertia in the world of browsers. Making sure the web site is readable in Netscape 4.x and IE 3.x (from around 1997) is still a big concern for many web site designers-- there are a lot of niches where older browsers are still a major part of the audience. I don't think we'll see a major shift from gifs to pngs for another couple of years, but I do expect that pngs will be at least as common as gifs and jpgs in five to seven years.
SVG-- vector graphics-- will take at least as long to become a significant format. And I'm sure that will develop in the same way, where it becomes commonly used in the studio first, but converted to another format before being put out on the web.
All 3 of the graphics programs I use routinely creat PNG's that are larger than gif's,
My experience with Paint Shop Pro says otherwise.
PSP lets me choose various png settings. When I choose settings that are as limited as the gif format (256 colors, single color transparency), the resulting image.png is comparable in size to an image.gif-- the choice of dithering algorithm and colors on the palette then have more to do with the file size than whether png or gif format is used.
I expect that your graphics programs probably have png optimization options that would allow you to achieve the same effects.
That said, even though I now use png (in its full capabilities) as my preferred archival format for raytrace images, I convert to either gif or jpg for web images, as those reach a wider audience without corruption. I expect it will be another 2 years before png makes much more headway on the net-- but I'm pretty sure in 5 years it will be the most common format for non-photographic still images. It has a lot of technical advantages. The browsers just need to catch up.
<One non-programmer corporate analyst has already reviewed the code... >
Big fucking deal. What's a non-programmer going to say about code?
I agree. To spell it out in detail:
Even assuming that the newer code is a copy of the older version, it would take an experienced programmer to judge whether the older version was something original and copyrightable, or whether both are verbatim copies from a known public domain source. As a trivial example, I expect that within every Unix and Linux there is a quicksort routine-- and it wouldn't surprise me too much if the exact same textbook solution, complete with identical comments, showed up time and again across brands. Why risk introducing a bug when there is a public domain wheel ready to roll? And why mess with good documentation if it's already there? Can you really say anything better about quicksort than what Knutt has said?
Another thing-- a non-programmer's assessment that the comments are identical means just that and only that: the comments are identical. If I have a copy of a well documented, successful chunk of code that does what I need to do, I might blow off all the code and use the comments as a guide in writing my original work. Is a non-programmer capable of telling whether the code itself is a knock-off? I don't think so. I don't think a non-programmer would be able to judge whether changes are superficial or whether the core structures used to meet the specifications in the identical comments were different.
So all I've learned from the article is that there were some shared comments. This isn't a smoking gun.
So "solid-state" is as ridiculous as the French calling a radio "un transistor" ?
Uh, well, one is french and the other is english. They are different. And I'm not sure what you mean by "ridiculous".
"Solid state" has come into english pretty much in the same way that "astronaut" or "record player" did. Those aren't ridiculous. Languages need new words for new concepts, and putting new words together out of old ones has always seemed to work pretty well.
I read once that the chinese term for "astronaut" translates into english as "super fire bird man"-- perhaps someone who speaks chinese could verify that. If it's true, then chinese has a more powerfully poetic name for that occupation than english does.
In english, "solid state" implies an immunity to damage from bumps and jarrings. i expect that is one of the reasons the term caught on.
Offtopic, but can a native english speaker tell me why exactly semiconductor devices are also called "solid state" devices ?.
The term dates back to the 1960's when transistor radios were first developed. As the signal in a tube radio is processed from the radio spectrum to the audio output at the speaker, there are physical gaps within the tubes where the signal is transferred to radiant energy and sent across a vacuum that is a few millimeters wide. But in a "solid state" radio, the signal remains in solid materials-- wires, semiconductors, etc, for its entire processing.
At the time, the breakthrough of solid state technology was not seen as a matter of quality, but of reliability and portability. A portable tube radio required a car battery or portable generator, a case that would withstand the bumps of travel, spare tubes, and the tools and know-how to do tube replacements in the field. So a hundred pounds or more of delicate equipment to lug around, plus someone trained as the "radio operator". But a solid state transistor radio needed only a pocketful of nine volt batteries and a spare radio if you had to have back-up. Total weight less than a tenth of that of the tube option, and no special training required. Even fishermen in rowboats could now keep up with weather reports. It was a pretty big deal at the time.
I wouldn't say your query was off-topic. I think questions about the words used in a discussion are generally germane to that discussion.
Of course your inquiry did lead to this pedantic reply. But slashdot does no modding down for pedantry-baiting!
I think the Mozilla group should give a long, hard look at what they are doing before continuing with the Firebird name.
I mean, it's sort of an all right name, in a kind of plebian sort of way. But it doesn't come close to something like "Google", which has become a very useful verb.
So, Mozilla, why not re-evaluate, and consider a name with verb potential?
I offer one which will forever remind people that the Mozilla group does care about getting along with others in the Open Source community; and that they have a good sense of humor. And of course there is the all important verbing capability. The name is best approached as an acronym spoken with a phony Canadian accent:
"Browser Without AName, aye?"
Bwana!
Who could hear that and not resist the urge to tell the guys hanging around the Jolt machine that "I just spent the morning bwanaing after some really cool case conversions..." Or taking on the Tarzan role in the cyberjungle, with phrases like "I told Bwana to go there"?
Bwana. Sort of like Google. Sort of like YACC. Sort of like GNU for that matter. A name that could change forever what we now call "browsers".
This post has been brought to you by the letters 'b', 'w', and 'a', and the number 'n'...
I find the fascination with Extra-Terrestrials quite interesting. Is there some need for us to seek for someone outside of ourselves? Has the search for God been replaced by the search for ET? Are we looking for a God replacement?
I can only answer for myself, of course:
Not a need in my case, but a desire that is stronger than the urge to purchase lottery tickets. See below.
No, I continue to seek the gods as well as having an interest in seeking ET sentience. Obtaining a positive answer for one would probably have an impact on how I do the other, but at this point I do not see them as related endeavors. Certainly not as mutually exclusive pursuits.
No, I wouldn't regard any other form of carbon/water based life as being a god substitute. Nor do I regard SETI's activities to be some kind of replacement for spiritual explorations.
The reason I bring this up is that there is a very remote chance that an ET signal will ever be found and an even more remote chance that we will be able to communicate with them (impossible in the foreseeable future). So why spend money when the odds are so very low? What is this fascination?
Agreed: the chances of SETI's success are very small. And the chance of finding that signal would be even more remote if nobody looks for it.
As you suggest, the meat of the issue is a budgetary problem. If SETI is successful, reception of that first message would have as much impact on science, art, and religion as the Copernican revolution. It would be like winning the lottery, but bigger. So how cheap does the lottery ticket need to be before it makes sense to buy one every month? I think SETI is cheap enough to budget for.
But SETI is unlike the lottery in one important way: if signals are not found in a reasonable length of time, that will tell me something useful. For instance, if the NASA Manned Mars Mission Proposal includes US$1 billion to develop a death ray to deal with inimical aliens, I would use SETI's negative findings to argue against such a pork barrel.
In short, growth will stop when we hit the luddites and the elderly.
I partly disagree.
One of the fastest growing segments of the PC market a couple of years ago was sales to retirees. Gramps and Grannies were buying computers to use email to stay in touch with families and friends. And to explore armchair hobbies like geneology, model railroading, recipe exchange clubs, fantasy baseball teams, and the like. I don't think that's changed.
About the luddites, you have a point. The antitechies will always be among us, I guess. But most members of the granny generation seem to be taking to computer usage with the same enthusiasm in which they embraced all the other new technologies they have seen. Like camcorders. Cheap air travel. Air conditioning. Microwave cooking. Stereo music! (That was a BIG thing for them! Much better than even Hi-Fi!) Plastics. Pushbutton phones. Rotary dial phones (and now we're coming full circle on that one-- I can now push a button on my cell phone and when it asks for the number I can say "Grandma's home", and it works, just like it used to when she was little and the operator knew her voice, along with that of every other kid in town.)
Microsoft reports a major surge in new installations of its flagship product, Microsoft Office.
Frankly, we're astounded," reports a high level source at Microsoft. "We thought our market penetration had reached the point where new registrations of this fine product would be tapering off. But this week we've found we need to shift more of our corporate resources into handling all these new registration requests. Apparently there was a lot of pent up demand for our product."
"It is really quite gratifying to see this proof that the world does appreciate a fine software product."
Microsoft Office is a suite of office productivity tools that increase the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of engineers, physicians, lawyers, and other highly trained personnel, as well as their ancillary staff. It is equally well suited to the Board Room, the R&D Facility, and the Day Care Center, where "Clippy" is a well liked playmate of many a toddler.
Actually, you are wrong in your assumption; the article was intended for me. I'm a subscriber to the NYT, you see. You are also wrongheaded in your opinions and you are setting yourself up for a hard lesson or two. But what the fuck. You'll either get smarter or earn an early darwin award.
Chatting with you has been... interesting. Goodbye now.
I was very disappointed in the article. I couldn't get past that bit about "2 dimensional spheres". This is either a piece of topological technical jargon that needed an explanation when it was introduced or the article is so screwed up I can't give it any credence.
Is anyone aware of any better written popular (non-technical) reporting on this?
Not to worry. Cringely et al are simplifying things to keep their point clear, that's all.
As with any other major physical corporate asset, Google's servers are taxed items that are depreciated over their service life. Google has probably set their service life very short-- on the order of 2 years instead of 5 or 7 which is the standard. They can justify this to IRS if they show that it is less costly for them to swap out entire racks periodically than to troubleshoot repairs. It means putting emphasis on MTBF when making purchasing decisions, but they would be doing that anyway.
So why fuss with replacing individual servers if it is more effective to replace them a rack at a time on a regular schedule? You can keep your technicians focused on the real problems, and make a McJob out of routine maintenance chores.
Another case where the effective business model is counter-intuitive to the techie mind.
Firstly, around half the species with interstellar capability have adopted a left hand axial orientation, so for them it is the Y-axis that points to Galactic Center. Visit POV-Ray for more info on this fascinating issue (unofficial motto: "Ray tracing by aliens, for aliens"). It's all in the thumbs. And, err, finger curl.
But mostly everyone orienting with their artificial gravity generators in the same plane is just common courtesy. Even if you are about to loose your entire forward phaser bank on his weapons array, it's considered gauche to be so slovenly in your ship maneuvers that you slosh the coffee out of the other captain's cup. Nobody thinks a lapful of hot coffee is funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would they use the damn wheel on very short , irregular mountain roads, connected via unstable rope bridges?
Agreed! This should be modded up!
I really get irked by these comments about other civilizations not having the wheel, as if this is some kind of milestone on a time line. You know them Incans didn't have snowshoes even-- so they were even less advanced than Europeans of 10,000 years ago, huh?
Strings hanging off strings hanging off strings? Surely a relational database? It's just as well Codd died before learning that the Incas beat him to 3NF by 500 years.
I'm sure Codd would have been appalled at Incan degree of stringification.
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist.)
Ooh! Prior art! I love it!
Well, at a minimum this means that binary encoded string data is a little older than ENIAC or Lady Lovelace's work.
I haven't checked the link yet, but on the basis of the "snobbery of chronology" definition, I would mod this "insightful" if I had points to use at the moment.
I'm not so impressed that the Incas used a complicated system of tying colored knots on string that *kinda* resembles binary when you consider how much easier it would've been to just write the information down.
Hey, troll, I almost took your bait.
Then I realized that most everyone reading slashdot is bright enough to recognize that a library of strings tied around your waist is a hell of lot easier to carry on mountain trails than the same amount of information packed into clay tablets or animal skins. Or even books (assuming that the local resources would provide a paper analog).
More durable, and easier to store, too. Plus, binary encoded strings (to use the proper name for such a system) could be easily duplicated in quantity by illiterate children.
So perhaps the mystery of how the Incan Empire came to be comes down to their having discovered a method of mass publication, and the use of child labor in their publishing houses.
</tongue-in-cheek>
7-bit though, that's what I find interesting. Wonder where 7 bits comes from. 10 or 5 --that I'd understand.
Who's to say for sure? But what came to my mind is
These directions have been used throughout the Americas for a long, long time, sometimes as a way of communicating what a thing is.
Apologies if this drink seems a little heavier than standard slashdot fare. I'm sure some readers may find it hard to grok for that reason.
I know! I'll leaven the brew with some yeast of the Sacred Chao! I don't know the Incan words, but I know they had this concept.
Now mind that you don't drink all this too fast. The fermentation of these ideas could blow the top of your skull off, but it is a kind of sneaker drunk. You might not realize you've lost your apparent cognitive control until it's too late. It would be a shame if you overheard your friends talking about you:
"Poor guy. Yeah, he seeemed to be pretty together, and then he caught this weird incan/illuminatis mind-virus thing while reading a slashdot comment. It's a shame really."
All is <fnord>, and that <fnord> is all.
Agreed, it is a little confusing.
It's like auto insurance in the USA. If you license a car, you have to buy auto insurance to cover any damage or injury the car might cause. Is this stupid or what? Wouldn't it make more sense to require drivers to carry the insurance? When was the last time you heard about an empty car being the cause of an accident? It doesn't happen very often.
Nevertheless, apparently there are good business or legal reasons why it is the car that is insured, and not the driver. Similarly, there are probably good business or legal reasons why RH bases its billing on the number of machines a client has, rather than some estimate of the probable workload the client will generate.
Another case where business or legal realities are not logical...
I don't think there's a conflict with the GPL. Red Hat is not putting any limitation on the number of instances of installed software.
Instead, they are saying that their charge for support for one instance is $x, and their charge for support for five instances is 5 * $x. And that you agree to allow them to check your count.
I think the real question here is whether this is a good pricing model. If I've got a five employees at five workstations, then this seems reasonable in that I'm likely to need support services roughly five times as often, (assuming that all the employees have the same FUF (uh, that's *Foul* Up Factor, not the other). But if I've got a server farm of 100 identically configured servers doing the same tasks in parallel, then I don't think my support needs will be greater than if I've got a smaller server farm of 20 machines. So I'm not sure that the RH model is always going to be justifiable.
Perhaps RH deals with these kinds of differences with custom contracts. Certainly if I was in the market for Linux support for a server farm or for more than a dozen workstations, I'd be looking beyond the EULA for a written contract (that would take precedence, and might specifically countermand some of the EULA phrases).
---
On re-reading the parent, the phrase "If you buy a product including services," jumped out, and I realized that this might be one of the sources confusion. Is RH selling any product? Or are they just giving the software away as part of your purchase of their services? I think it is really the latter case, since you can legally obtain free-beer RH software very easily.
Or am I missing something here?
I should have been more specific. Sorry to cause confusion.
When it comes to archiving original flat color work, like scanned images, the product of raytracing software or other graphics, or images from digital cameras, png has advantages. Clearly once editing has begun and the work has started to acquire layers, you'd need something else other than png for the work in progress. Though pngs of color separations and individual raster layers makes sense in some cases.
I expect, though, that when the finished work is converted to gif or jpg, the savvy commercial artist would also make a png archival copy (as an accurate rendering that could be used by a low skilled assistant to quickly reconstruct the gif or jpg, if that is needed later on).
As to Flash vs SVG-- I expect that Flash will become SVG compliant as the SVG standard develops further. Those guys seem pretty bright and I don't think they will miss the boat. What drives the "ideology" of standards like SVG is a pragmatic common sense about what is going to work well for everybody in the long run. That approach is well proven in the general case. The world wide web is but one example.
Aren't there some members of the Flash community involved in the SVG standards? I recall seeing something about that a few months ago, probably in the amaya news groups somewhere.
Anyone who wants to have rotating skulls and burning fire on their script kiddie web page is still welcome to use animated gifs.
What, is this some kind of "real artists don't use poster paints" thing?
It is easy to do trash in animated gifs. If you want to spend your money, and your audience's time on downloads and plug-in overheads, it is also easy to do trash in Flash. I've seen quite a bit of both.
Yet within the limitations of the web (bandwidth, supporting legacy browsers, etc), gif animations for slide shows and the like are a viable alternative in many instances. Just like Picasso sometimes used poster paints to do posters, gif animations can support good art.
Let me give you some of my credentials in the way that you are most likely to understand them: I have spent several hundred dollars on watercolor brushes and supplies, so obviously I Am A Artist and know what I'm talking about. Phlbbt!
I think a lot of graphics artists-- both commercial and semi-pro-- are using png quite a bit in house. And then converting to either gif or jpg in the final production steps, when the work is destined for the web.
There is a lot of inertia in the world of browsers. Making sure the web site is readable in Netscape 4.x and IE 3.x (from around 1997) is still a big concern for many web site designers-- there are a lot of niches where older browsers are still a major part of the audience. I don't think we'll see a major shift from gifs to pngs for another couple of years, but I do expect that pngs will be at least as common as gifs and jpgs in five to seven years.
SVG-- vector graphics-- will take at least as long to become a significant format. And I'm sure that will develop in the same way, where it becomes commonly used in the studio first, but converted to another format before being put out on the web.
All 3 of the graphics programs I use routinely creat PNG's that are larger than gif's,
My experience with Paint Shop Pro says otherwise.
PSP lets me choose various png settings. When I choose settings that are as limited as the gif format (256 colors, single color transparency), the resulting image.png is comparable in size to an image.gif-- the choice of dithering algorithm and colors on the palette then have more to do with the file size than whether png or gif format is used.
I expect that your graphics programs probably have png optimization options that would allow you to achieve the same effects.
That said, even though I now use png (in its full capabilities) as my preferred archival format for raytrace images, I convert to either gif or jpg for web images, as those reach a wider audience without corruption. I expect it will be another 2 years before png makes much more headway on the net-- but I'm pretty sure in 5 years it will be the most common format for non-photographic still images. It has a lot of technical advantages. The browsers just need to catch up.
<One non-programmer corporate analyst has already reviewed the code ... >
Big fucking deal. What's a non-programmer going to say about code?
I agree. To spell it out in detail:
Even assuming that the newer code is a copy of the older version, it would take an experienced programmer to judge whether the older version was something original and copyrightable, or whether both are verbatim copies from a known public domain source. As a trivial example, I expect that within every Unix and Linux there is a quicksort routine-- and it wouldn't surprise me too much if the exact same textbook solution, complete with identical comments, showed up time and again across brands. Why risk introducing a bug when there is a public domain wheel ready to roll? And why mess with good documentation if it's already there? Can you really say anything better about quicksort than what Knutt has said?
Another thing-- a non-programmer's assessment that the comments are identical means just that and only that: the comments are identical. If I have a copy of a well documented, successful chunk of code that does what I need to do, I might blow off all the code and use the comments as a guide in writing my original work. Is a non-programmer capable of telling whether the code itself is a knock-off? I don't think so. I don't think a non-programmer would be able to judge whether changes are superficial or whether the core structures used to meet the specifications in the identical comments were different.
So all I've learned from the article is that there were some shared comments. This isn't a smoking gun.
So "solid-state" is as ridiculous as the French calling a radio "un transistor" ?
Uh, well, one is french and the other is english. They are different. And I'm not sure what you mean by "ridiculous".
"Solid state" has come into english pretty much in the same way that "astronaut" or "record player" did. Those aren't ridiculous. Languages need new words for new concepts, and putting new words together out of old ones has always seemed to work pretty well.
I read once that the chinese term for "astronaut" translates into english as "super fire bird man"-- perhaps someone who speaks chinese could verify that. If it's true, then chinese has a more powerfully poetic name for that occupation than english does.
In english, "solid state" implies an immunity to damage from bumps and jarrings. i expect that is one of the reasons the term caught on.
I think now we are off topic.
Offtopic, but can a native english speaker tell me why exactly semiconductor devices are also called "solid state" devices ?.
The term dates back to the 1960's when transistor radios were first developed. As the signal in a tube radio is processed from the radio spectrum to the audio output at the speaker, there are physical gaps within the tubes where the signal is transferred to radiant energy and sent across a vacuum that is a few millimeters wide. But in a "solid state" radio, the signal remains in solid materials-- wires, semiconductors, etc, for its entire processing.
At the time, the breakthrough of solid state technology was not seen as a matter of quality, but of reliability and portability. A portable tube radio required a car battery or portable generator, a case that would withstand the bumps of travel, spare tubes, and the tools and know-how to do tube replacements in the field. So a hundred pounds or more of delicate equipment to lug around, plus someone trained as the "radio operator". But a solid state transistor radio needed only a pocketful of nine volt batteries and a spare radio if you had to have back-up. Total weight less than a tenth of that of the tube option, and no special training required. Even fishermen in rowboats could now keep up with weather reports. It was a pretty big deal at the time.
I wouldn't say your query was off-topic. I think questions about the words used in a discussion are generally germane to that discussion.
Of course your inquiry did lead to this pedantic reply. But slashdot does no modding down for pedantry-baiting!
pedantically yours...
I think the Mozilla group should give a long, hard look at what they are doing before continuing with the Firebird name.
I mean, it's sort of an all right name, in a kind of plebian sort of way. But it doesn't come close to something like "Google", which has become a very useful verb.
So, Mozilla, why not re-evaluate, and consider a name with verb potential?
I offer one which will forever remind people that the Mozilla group does care about getting along with others in the Open Source community; and that they have a good sense of humor. And of course there is the all important verbing capability. The name is best approached as an acronym spoken with a phony Canadian accent:
"Browser Without A Name, aye?"
Bwana!
Who could hear that and not resist the urge to tell the guys hanging around the Jolt machine that "I just spent the morning bwanaing after some really cool case conversions..." Or taking on the Tarzan role in the cyberjungle, with phrases like "I told Bwana to go there"?
Bwana. Sort of like Google. Sort of like YACC. Sort of like GNU for that matter. A name that could change forever what we now call "browsers".
This post has been brought to you by the letters 'b', 'w', and 'a', and the number 'n'...
I find the fascination with Extra-Terrestrials quite interesting. Is there some need for us to seek for someone outside of ourselves? Has the search for God been replaced by the search for ET? Are we looking for a God replacement?
I can only answer for myself, of course:
The reason I bring this up is that there is a very remote chance that an ET signal will ever be found and an even more remote chance that we will be able to communicate with them (impossible in the foreseeable future). So why spend money when the odds are so very low? What is this fascination?
Agreed: the chances of SETI's success are very small. And the chance of finding that signal would be even more remote if nobody looks for it.
As you suggest, the meat of the issue is a budgetary problem. If SETI is successful, reception of that first message would have as much impact on science, art, and religion as the Copernican revolution. It would be like winning the lottery, but bigger. So how cheap does the lottery ticket need to be before it makes sense to buy one every month? I think SETI is cheap enough to budget for.
But SETI is unlike the lottery in one important way: if signals are not found in a reasonable length of time, that will tell me something useful. For instance, if the NASA Manned Mars Mission Proposal includes US$1 billion to develop a death ray to deal with inimical aliens, I would use SETI's negative findings to argue against such a pork barrel.
In short, growth will stop when we hit the luddites and the elderly.
I partly disagree.
One of the fastest growing segments of the PC market a couple of years ago was sales to retirees. Gramps and Grannies were buying computers to use email to stay in touch with families and friends. And to explore armchair hobbies like geneology, model railroading, recipe exchange clubs, fantasy baseball teams, and the like. I don't think that's changed.
About the luddites, you have a point. The antitechies will always be among us, I guess. But most members of the granny generation seem to be taking to computer usage with the same enthusiasm in which they embraced all the other new technologies they have seen. Like camcorders. Cheap air travel. Air conditioning. Microwave cooking. Stereo music! (That was a BIG thing for them! Much better than even Hi-Fi!) Plastics. Pushbutton phones. Rotary dial phones (and now we're coming full circle on that one-- I can now push a button on my cell phone and when it asks for the number I can say "Grandma's home", and it works, just like it used to when she was little and the operator knew her voice, along with that of every other kid in town.)
Microsoft reports a major surge in new installations of its flagship product, Microsoft Office.
Frankly, we're astounded," reports a high level source at Microsoft. "We thought our market penetration had reached the point where new registrations of this fine product would be tapering off. But this week we've found we need to shift more of our corporate resources into handling all these new registration requests. Apparently there was a lot of pent up demand for our product."
"It is really quite gratifying to see this proof that the world does appreciate a fine software product."
Microsoft Office is a suite of office productivity tools that increase the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of engineers, physicians, lawyers, and other highly trained personnel, as well as their ancillary staff. It is equally well suited to the Board Room, the R&D Facility, and the Day Care Center, where "Clippy" is a well liked playmate of many a toddler.
Thank you for the information.
Actually, you are wrong in your assumption; the article was intended for me. I'm a subscriber to the NYT, you see. You are also wrongheaded in your opinions and you are setting yourself up for a hard lesson or two. But what the fuck. You'll either get smarter or earn an early darwin award.
Chatting with you has been... interesting. Goodbye now.
Oh, your welcome. It really wasn't any problem; I'm really good at repeating stuff.
I was very disappointed in the article. I couldn't get past that bit about "2 dimensional spheres". This is either a piece of topological technical jargon that needed an explanation when it was introduced or the article is so screwed up I can't give it any credence.
Is anyone aware of any better written popular (non-technical) reporting on this?
So does this also mean that slashdot has to
After all, the whole thing with AC is disguising the source of the post.
Worrisome, this is.
[note to moderators: Don't mod as "funny". This is truly serious tinfoil hat stuff. Think about it.]
Not to worry. Cringely et al are simplifying things to keep their point clear, that's all.
As with any other major physical corporate asset, Google's servers are taxed items that are depreciated over their service life. Google has probably set their service life very short-- on the order of 2 years instead of 5 or 7 which is the standard. They can justify this to IRS if they show that it is less costly for them to swap out entire racks periodically than to troubleshoot repairs. It means putting emphasis on MTBF when making purchasing decisions, but they would be doing that anyway.
So why fuss with replacing individual servers if it is more effective to replace them a rack at a time on a regular schedule? You can keep your technicians focused on the real problems, and make a McJob out of routine maintenance chores.
Another case where the effective business model is counter-intuitive to the techie mind.
Naw, that's not it.
Firstly, around half the species with interstellar capability have adopted a left hand axial orientation, so for them it is the Y-axis that points to Galactic Center. Visit POV-Ray for more info on this fascinating issue (unofficial motto: "Ray tracing by aliens, for aliens"). It's all in the thumbs. And, err, finger curl.
But mostly everyone orienting with their artificial gravity generators in the same plane is just common courtesy. Even if you are about to loose your entire forward phaser bank on his weapons array, it's considered gauche to be so slovenly in your ship maneuvers that you slosh the coffee out of the other captain's cup. Nobody thinks a lapful of hot coffee is funny.