The Falcon I development is funded in part by the Defense Dept.'s Office of Force Transformation because the Pentagon believes if SpaceX is successful, it could have a major "transformational effect" on how military space operations are launched.
This is definately being santioned by the government.
You might be surprised to know that TiVo is recording this Teleworld Infomercial program, because it's never directly displayed in the user interface. You also might think that TiVo is kidnapping some of your diskspace... but in fact they're saving the ad content to the "reserved section" of TiVo's funky Linux-based OS. You never had access to that disk volume, and they already subtracted this space from the advertised hour-wise capacity of a unit. If you upgrade your TiVo's HD size, all of the additional space created goes to user recordings, the reserved space stays the same size.
This is simply not true. TiVO has kidnapped my programming time. When I added an 80 gig hard drive to my original 14 hour TiVO, some if it was lost to this.
I think that this is questionable morally. TiVO is forcing me to record content I don't want, using my resources, and causing wear and tear on my machine.
One irony is that the original Apple II came with a schematic of all the circuits.
Apple was very innovative, but made a number of large mistakes that really hurt them in the market. While software for the IBM PC focused on business applications (DBASE and Lotus), the Mac focused on paint programs. It is no surprise that today artists still like Macs.
Apple made some very questionable hardware decisions. They made the original Mac non expandable (no slots, you even needed a special tool to open the case, didn't change until the Mac II), even though expansion was a key to the Apple II's success (they totally ignored their hacker roots). They did thing like use a self ejecting floppy drive, which was patented by Sony and drove up the price. They had a one button mouse and a keyboard where a lot of keys were unsupported (including the forward delete key). They made their own networking hardware (localtalk) which although cheaper was slow, and had connectors which were non-locking (causing endless technical support problems).
Sure, you could go into a store and by Mac bits, and they would all work, but that is because they had a lock on the hardware and the software. The Mac has had its share of low level problems and incompatibilities. Some of the famous ones include a bad virtual memory implementation (which was so bad most users turned it off) and 28 bit vs. 32 bit addressing (it broke a lot of badly written software so there was a switch to turn it off). Imagine using a machine where you had no virutal memory, and running out of memory becuase you opened and closed programs in a certain order.
In the beginning (pre 1995), Apple had a better operating system than Windows. They innovated the GUI, and they had technical advantages, such as things like a flat address space. But Windows caught up and overtook the Macintosh, both in terms of user interface and developer tools. Before OS 10, the mac was still mostly 68k assembly, and was very difficult to program and debug on. Also, until OS 10 there was no protected memory, meaning it was easy for one badley behaved program to take down the system.
When Apple moved to the Power PC in about 1995, instead of porting their operating system, they ran most of it in emulation. Which ment slower speeds and more difficult debugging for developers.
While Apple patched and limped along, Microsoft built Windows NT from the ground up, written mostly in C (so it was portable). While previous Microsoft operating systems were more like the Mac, NT had protected memory and preemptive multitasking, two features that are critical to a modern, stable operating system.
So while Apple had the early lead, they had a wealth of technical problems and poor hardware choices which hurt their platform.
Disney is also a major pirate (besides Pirates of the Carribean). It is ironic that Disney lobbied to have the copyright lengths lengthened. Disney themselves made a mint by plundering the public domain (Snow White, Pinnochio, etc).
Don't get me wrong. I think Eolas is scum. The idea was trivial, and only extended the natural trend that things like mime types and gopher were doing. Plus plug-ins being used in much other software.
But, if Eolas was SCO, they would be suing end users for infringing on their browser technology. They would claim you would owe them $6.99 every time you accessed a page with a plugin. They would be saying that the mozilla developers were theives, and that javascript plugin detection code is unconstitutional.
On the USA today story I got the following related links. Someone should tell USA today that this was an anti-telemarketing story. And I love the last link, no confusion with www.donotcall.gov.
State Telemarketing Lists
Autodialer Lists for each of the 50 states and Washington DC
www.telsearch.com
Telemarketing
Business to Business Telemarketing High Quality and Very Affordable
http://www.unicallinc.com
Tele-SalesForce.com
World Class Telesales People, World Class Results!
www.Tele-SalesForce.com
Looking for More Clients?
Find shared, dedicated or colocated web hosting prospects Now!
www.webhostingprospector.com
Block Telemarketers
Take back your home phone with the TeleZapper. 40% off the TV price
www.donotcalllisthelp.com
I was starting to go through SCO withdrawl. What with the hearing being delayed until February 6th, I thought there might be an entire day without SCO on Slashdot.
In this case, "go fsck yourself" might be more appropriate, but I am sure SCO has copyrighted that utilities name, and they will be contacting me soon to license their valuable IP for this post.
You say that "There is recourse through justice against SCO". I would submit that through our corrupt congress (they serve money, not the people), and through corruption of our judicial branch, there may in fact be no recourse through justice against SCO.
Also, if our only recourse is to sue SCO, and filing lawsuits can cost thousands of dollars and take years, I say that for most of us there is actually no recourse.
It doesn't matter what he says about the GPL, because that is his *opinion*, not the law. Linus could say the GPL was illegal and it wouldn't matter.
The problem is that this battle is being waged in the court of public opinion (apparently SCO's prefered venue), where statements like this matter very much.
In fact, unless reversible computing is achieved, computer chips are expected to reach their maximum performance capabilities within the next three decades, effectively halting the rapid advances in speed that have driven the information technology revolution, Frank said. "Reversible computing is absolutely the only possible way to beat this limit," he said.
Anyone who is this emphatic about his own technology, and that it is the "only possible way" is trying to pump stock prices, plain and simple.
All technologies have a serious risk of failure, and even sound technology might fail due to uncontrolable forces. And there is never just one way to accomplish anything.
This is exactly what Microsoft is going to do with their DRM technology. You won't be able to run code on their systems unless it is signed with their tools, costing developers significant money.
The TiVO series 2 does this now. The linux kernel and all applications are signed. You can't run your own software.
...SCO announced it was dropping all lawsuits and putting the Unix V source into the public domain. Also, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would be releasing documentation for all file formats for the companies products. Finally, the patent office today revoked the Amazon one click buying patent.
When I was fresh out of college in 1991, I interviewed at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture, I believe). They showed me the typing room where all the secretaries were typing things. I thought it was a little primative.
When I talked to the partner, I asked where his computer was. He said that he had one sent up if he needed to do a presentation or something.
I own a Hybrid Civic, and the price difference between Hybrid and normal is no where near $5,000.
You have to remember that the Civic Hybrid has a lot of features that are only available in a Civic EX, including antilock breaks (which save on insurance), side airbags, and alloy wheels. Also, the hybrid has a few features which the Civic EX doesn't, including folding side mirrors, climate control, and a nicer interior. The only thing that the Hybrid is missing that the Civic EX has is a moon roof.
The difference in cost between the Civic Hybrid and the Civic EX list is currently $2,800.
We had customers complain that they couldn't connect to our streaming application. After much head scratching and wasted time, we discovered that the customers MR814 wireless router wasn't working properly.
After a lot of research on the internet, I discovered that this was a well known problem with the MR814, fixed with an update to its firmware. It was strange because I asked the user if he had updated his firmware, which he said he did.
It turns out that the firmware was only released on the Austrilian version of the NetGear website. Downloading and installing that version fixed the users problem.
I sent a polite note to NetGear technical support informing them of this on April 7th. I got back a note on 4/8 saying that it would be forwarded to the appropriate people. On April 17th I sent a more harshly worded note. On April 20th I got back a note saying again that my request would be forwarded to engineering.
I gave up. It wasn't worth it.
Just for fun on May 13th I checked their site again. They had finally updated the software.
This runaround was all to just make a solution to a problem that they had already fixed available. Imagine the hassle trying to get them to actually fix a problem?
While I don't believe having an advanced degree is a conscious negative to people hiring, perhaps there is a subconscious bias.
I have been interviewing a lot of people lately, and I notice I will be especially hard on people with advanced degrees that don't know basic concepts.
Also, my wife got her MBA recently, then tried to find an entry level marketing position. She spent six months and couldn't. One person I knew in marketing said sort of jokingly that he wouldn't hire her because she had more education than him, and would take his job.
Finally, I wonder about peoples motivations to get advanced degrees. Sure, it is external validation, and makes you an elite. But does it actually mean you are better at getting a job done? I would probably prefer a candidate that has four more years real world experience if I was hiring developers than a candidate with a PhD and no real world experience.
One can use more and more powerful computers and algorithms to reduce the number of mistakes, perhaps to the point that it will get things right most of the time. But the thing that is needed for a computer to translate as accurately as a human is AI. Context and understanding of the actual meaning of the sentence, as well as some creativity, are required to translate a text like a human.
I completely disagree with this. People thought they would need artificial intelligence to beat a chess grandmaster. But IBM did it with brute force.
People also thought we would need artificial intelligence for computers to invent things. But university researchers are doing it now with genetic algorithms.
You make a very valid point, but why limit yourself to only using the modem? If we have an ISP at one end, and an end user with a PC (using a modem) at the other, could you not simply grab the data from the web at the ISP side, compress the entire file (be it html, jpeg, gif, zip) and then send the compressed version over the phone lines to the end user where the PC does the decompression (not the modem)??? Sure some things compress better than others, and streaming media such as audio and video could not use this technique, but the speed at which modem users could browse the web could be vastly improved.
This has been done. By many people. See here for one example.
According to this, Overture currently provides the related links on MSN. So instead of fostering competition with MSN, this deal means that MSN and Yahoo are business partners.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
The Falcon I development is funded in part by the Defense Dept.'s Office of Force Transformation because the Pentagon believes if SpaceX is successful, it could have a major "transformational effect" on how military space operations are launched.
This is definately being santioned by the government.
You might be surprised to know that TiVo is recording this Teleworld Infomercial program, because it's never directly displayed in the user interface. You also might think that TiVo is kidnapping some of your diskspace... but in fact they're saving the ad content to the "reserved section" of TiVo's funky Linux-based OS. You never had access to that disk volume, and they already subtracted this space from the advertised hour-wise capacity of a unit. If you upgrade your TiVo's HD size, all of the additional space created goes to user recordings, the reserved space stays the same size.
This is simply not true. TiVO has kidnapped my programming time. When I added an 80 gig hard drive to my original 14 hour TiVO, some if it was lost to this.
I think that this is questionable morally. TiVO is forcing me to record content I don't want, using my resources, and causing wear and tear on my machine.
One irony is that the original Apple II came with a schematic of all the circuits.
Apple was very innovative, but made a number of large mistakes that really hurt them in the market. While software for the IBM PC focused on business applications (DBASE and Lotus), the Mac focused on paint programs. It is no surprise that today artists still like Macs.
Apple made some very questionable hardware decisions. They made the original Mac non expandable (no slots, you even needed a special tool to open the case, didn't change until the Mac II), even though expansion was a key to the Apple II's success (they totally ignored their hacker roots). They did thing like use a self ejecting floppy drive, which was patented by Sony and drove up the price. They had a one button mouse and a keyboard where a lot of keys were unsupported (including the forward delete key). They made their own networking hardware (localtalk) which although cheaper was slow, and had connectors which were non-locking (causing endless technical support problems).
Sure, you could go into a store and by Mac bits, and they would all work, but that is because they had a lock on the hardware and the software. The Mac has had its share of low level problems and incompatibilities. Some of the famous ones include a bad virtual memory implementation (which was so bad most users turned it off) and 28 bit vs. 32 bit addressing (it broke a lot of badly written software so there was a switch to turn it off). Imagine using a machine where you had no virutal memory, and running out of memory becuase you opened and closed programs in a certain order.
In the beginning (pre 1995), Apple had a better operating system than Windows. They innovated the GUI, and they had technical advantages, such as things like a flat address space. But Windows caught up and overtook the Macintosh, both in terms of user interface and developer tools. Before OS 10, the mac was still mostly 68k assembly, and was very difficult to program and debug on. Also, until OS 10 there was no protected memory, meaning it was easy for one badley behaved program to take down the system.
When Apple moved to the Power PC in about 1995, instead of porting their operating system, they ran most of it in emulation. Which ment slower speeds and more difficult debugging for developers.
While Apple patched and limped along, Microsoft built Windows NT from the ground up, written mostly in C (so it was portable). While previous Microsoft operating systems were more like the Mac, NT had protected memory and preemptive multitasking, two features that are critical to a modern, stable operating system.
So while Apple had the early lead, they had a wealth of technical problems and poor hardware choices which hurt their platform.
Disney is also a major pirate (besides Pirates of the Carribean). It is ironic that Disney lobbied to have the copyright lengths lengthened. Disney themselves made a mint by plundering the public domain (Snow White, Pinnochio, etc).
Don't get me wrong. I think Eolas is scum. The idea was trivial, and only extended the natural trend that things like mime types and gopher were doing. Plus plug-ins being used in much other software.
But, if Eolas was SCO, they would be suing end users for infringing on their browser technology. They would claim you would owe them $6.99 every time you accessed a page with a plugin. They would be saying that the mozilla developers were theives, and that javascript plugin detection code is unconstitutional.
So it could be a whole lot worse.
I was at a Honda dealer trying to get service for my car, and when they asked for my address, I told them I didn't want any junk mail.
They were flustered. They said there was no way to put me into the system without getting on a marketing list. Eventually I gave them a fake address.
Go Canada. Stop this abuse.
I was starting to go through SCO withdrawl. What with the hearing being delayed until February 6th, I thought there might be an entire day without SCO on Slashdot.
In this case, "go fsck yourself" might be more appropriate, but I am sure SCO has copyrighted that utilities name, and they will be contacting me soon to license their valuable IP for this post.
You say that "There is recourse through justice against SCO". I would submit that through our corrupt congress (they serve money, not the people), and through corruption of our judicial branch, there may in fact be no recourse through justice against SCO.
Also, if our only recourse is to sue SCO, and filing lawsuits can cost thousands of dollars and take years, I say that for most of us there is actually no recourse.
It doesn't matter what he says about the GPL, because that is his *opinion*, not the law. Linus could say the GPL was illegal and it wouldn't matter.
The problem is that this battle is being waged in the court of public opinion (apparently SCO's prefered venue), where statements like this matter very much.
All technologies have a serious risk of failure, and even sound technology might fail due to uncontrolable forces. And there is never just one way to accomplish anything.
This is exactly what Microsoft is going to do with their DRM technology. You won't be able to run code on their systems unless it is signed with their tools, costing developers significant money.
The TiVO series 2 does this now. The linux kernel and all applications are signed. You can't run your own software.
...SCO announced it was dropping all lawsuits and putting the Unix V source into the public domain. Also, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft would be releasing documentation for all file formats for the companies products. Finally, the patent office today revoked the Amazon one click buying patent.
Stay tuned to this program for more details.
When I was fresh out of college in 1991, I interviewed at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture, I believe). They showed me the typing room where all the secretaries were typing things. I thought it was a little primative.
When I talked to the partner, I asked where his computer was. He said that he had one sent up if he needed to do a presentation or something.
I could tell he just didn't get it.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job.
The Civic EX has a sticker price of $18770.
The Civic Hybrid has a sticker price of $21110.
I got my Civic Hybrid for $19,500.
I did my shopping over the internet and had some people quote me list price, but I was able to save a bundle by shopping around.
So yes, there are dealers willing to deal on Hybrids.
I own a Hybrid Civic, and the price difference between Hybrid and normal is no where near $5,000.
You have to remember that the Civic Hybrid has a lot of features that are only available in a Civic EX, including antilock breaks (which save on insurance), side airbags, and alloy wheels. Also, the hybrid has a few features which the Civic EX doesn't, including folding side mirrors, climate control, and a nicer interior. The only thing that the Hybrid is missing that the Civic EX has is a moon roof.
The difference in cost between the Civic Hybrid and the Civic EX list is currently $2,800.
Plus the Hybrid gets a $2,000 tax deduction.
So for me the difference was about $2,200.
Q4: What are some other applications that need more power?
Look at the whole proactive computing model, where computers will anticipate our needs and sometimes take action on our behalf. That's one.
When he said this, all I could think of was, yeah, computers need more power to run the heavy virus workload and still make them usable.
We had customers complain that they couldn't connect to our streaming application. After much head scratching and wasted time, we discovered that the customers MR814 wireless router wasn't working properly.
After a lot of research on the internet, I discovered that this was a well known problem with the MR814, fixed with an update to its firmware. It was strange because I asked the user if he had updated his firmware, which he said he did.
It turns out that the firmware was only released on the Austrilian version of the NetGear website. Downloading and installing that version fixed the users problem.
I sent a polite note to NetGear technical support informing them of this on April 7th. I got back a note on 4/8 saying that it would be forwarded to the appropriate people. On April 17th I sent a more harshly worded note. On April 20th I got back a note saying again that my request would be forwarded to engineering.
I gave up. It wasn't worth it.
Just for fun on May 13th I checked their site again. They had finally updated the software.
This runaround was all to just make a solution to a problem that they had already fixed available. Imagine the hassle trying to get them to actually fix a problem?
While I don't believe having an advanced degree is a conscious negative to people hiring, perhaps there is a subconscious bias.
I have been interviewing a lot of people lately, and I notice I will be especially hard on people with advanced degrees that don't know basic concepts.
Also, my wife got her MBA recently, then tried to find an entry level marketing position. She spent six months and couldn't. One person I knew in marketing said sort of jokingly that he wouldn't hire her because she had more education than him, and would take his job.
Finally, I wonder about peoples motivations to get advanced degrees. Sure, it is external validation, and makes you an elite. But does it actually mean you are better at getting a job done? I would probably prefer a candidate that has four more years real world experience if I was hiring developers than a candidate with a PhD and no real world experience.
You are forgetting that you would have to build your own power adapter for these. They won't have an obvious way to recharge them.
Probably not worth the effort for $10.
One can use more and more powerful computers and algorithms to reduce the number of mistakes, perhaps to the point that it will get things right most of the time. But the thing that is needed for a computer to translate as accurately as a human is AI. Context and understanding of the actual meaning of the sentence, as well as some creativity, are required to translate a text like a human.
I completely disagree with this. People thought they would need artificial intelligence to beat a chess grandmaster. But IBM did it with brute force.
People also thought we would need artificial intelligence for computers to invent things. But university researchers are doing it now with genetic algorithms.
Translating language is probably no different.
You make a very valid point, but why limit yourself to only using the modem? If we have an ISP at one end, and an end user with a PC (using a modem) at the other, could you not simply grab the data from the web at the ISP side, compress the entire file (be it html, jpeg, gif, zip) and then send the compressed version over the phone lines to the end user where the PC does the decompression (not the modem)??? Sure some things compress better than others, and streaming media such as audio and video could not use this technique, but the speed at which modem users could browse the web could be vastly improved.
This has been done. By many people. See here for one example.
...for some cool open source!
According to this, Overture currently provides the related links on MSN. So instead of fostering competition with MSN, this deal means that MSN and Yahoo are business partners.