Basically, I have no problem with what Gore said. It's just as stupid, both in and out of context, as many things folks such as Dan Quayle have said. The annoying thing is that when a liberal such as Gore says something stupid there are a bunch of apologetics trying to make him look less stupid. But when Dan Quayle or George Bush says something stupid it's either evidence of stupidity or an evil conspiracy. It's a double standard.
I make my living talking in front of people, and I know as well as anyone that anybody speaking off the cuff can fluff a word, or stumble on a syllable, or (as Gore did) use ambiguous wording. In fact, it's often an indication of intelligence - bright people's brains and mouths are operating extremely asynchronously. However, nobody with the rudiments of a brain and a modern education would ever come up with a howler such as Quayle's infamous Mars quote. And yes, he really did say that. It was in a press briefing in his role as nominal head of NASA, one of the duties of the VP. (Needless to say, his handlers cut the interview short.)
I don't see a double standard, I see one raving loony and one bright fellow who strongly supported the development of the internet long before it was popularly recognized as a big idea, and used ambiguous wording to say so.
...to say that others are spinning what Gore said is inaccurate.
I can't agree with this statement. Check out this article for a fairly thorough discussion of the topic. It shows the evolution from what was actually said to the distortions that became widely accepted and mocked.
All three of the machines which I updated today report identical results, a newer version than yours:
shiva:~ freq$ openssl version
OpenSSL 0.9.7b 10 Apr 2003
Is it possible you installed your own copy, say in/usr/local/bin, and then forgot about it? Try running "which openssl", and see if it reports something other than/usr/bin/openssl. Alternatively, explicitly run the system's openssl: "/usr/bin/openssl version".
You're falling into the (very common) mistake of thinking that cost determines price. Econ 101 says that price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Cost relative to price yields the profit margin, which influences but is not the same as the supply curve. As such, I'd bet that you're wrong about Apple ignoring internal production / supply chain / distribution process, because those things all affect their profit margin.
Also, how do you know they're not making a profit from iTunes? I haven't seen any figures on what the licensing costs. I'd imagine they must be making _some_ profit on it - they're not stupid.
No, they're not stupid. They take a small loss on each sale, but they plan to make it up on volume.
This is one place where OS X took a step back from NeXTStep/OpenStep. There used to be a folder called/LocalApps, which was where you'd install any non-system apps for shared use. It served the same role as/usr/local/bin in command-line Unix. I've often wondered why they did away with it.
Ion propulsion systems wouldn't be any good for fighter craft. They use very low accelerations, integrated over large periods of time. This makes them a good candidate for interplanetary flight, where you have weeks and months to build up large velocities with the small acceleration, but really crappy for combat where you want to be able to accelerate quickly. Well, maybe you don't, but I do.
I meant that a security related random number generator should not be built to the exclusion of a more traditional random number generator as to do so would render applications such as simulations invalid and useless.
One doesn't exclude the other. I do simulation work, just yesterday I was offered trial access to a prototype hardware board. I declined because a patented hardware generator doesn't meet my needs of portability (for peer review); known distributional properties (I can transform uniform random numbers into anything else I want, but they must be uniformly distributed); and replicability (imagine trying to debug a model where you can't repeat errors! plus there are certain experimental designs which can benefit from re-using pseudo-random numbers (PRNs) in carefully structured ways). Had I installed the board, it wouldn't have interfered with my ability to use software PRN generators. However, while the hardware generator may be the greatest thing since sliced bread for encryption, for me there was no value added and several drawbacks in accepting the board.
Lotus developed Improv on NeXT computers, and then ported it over to Windows. I've heard at conferences that Lotus killed off Improv because sales were eating into 1-2-3, which they considered their bread and butter product.
When Improv got shut down, a group called Lighthouse Design built a functional workalike called Quantrix. They also made several other excellent apps such as Diagram!, the precursor to OmniGraffle. Lighthouse was bought out by Sun for their expertise in object-oriented design, but Lighthouse threw their licensing keys into the public arena when they stopped shipping. Sadly, Sun owns the rights to the code, and has no interest in releasing it - I say sadly, because I suspect it would be relatively easy for someone to resurrect the apps on OS X.
Improv and Quantrix spoiled me for life - to this day, I can't stomach working in Excel. This is particularly ironic since I'm required to use Excel in several courses I teach.
I still have my NeXTDimension Cube boxed up in the garage, I don't have room to set it up but can't bear the thought of selling it off either. I guess when I die, my grandchildren will dig it out and fire it up to see what computing was like "way back when". Won't they be surprised to see that Excel still hasn't caught up to what Quantrix could do back in the 90's.
Re:it's not like this is really news...
on
Science Faction
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· Score: 2, Informative
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck.
I think Clarke gets credit for this one too. The book "The City and the Stars" opens with Alvin & friends playing a total immersion VR adventure game. They're even doing so using distributed networking, since Alvin doesn't even know where some of his friends live. TC&TS was published in 1953.
It's not necessarily true that companies will prefer to focus on young adults. Its a question of how much bang you get for your advertising buck, how much payoff there is for the effort invested. For instance, if you're a video games sales person working on commission and you've got a mix of people in the store, you'll have a higher hit rate if you target the teens. You'd never know that if you took the raw figures at face value.
NEW YORK, MAY 13, 1999 - Young teens are the biggest users of video game systems - right? Not according to a new survey of home technology from Nielsen Media Research which shows nearly 75% of the 63 million people using video game systems in the U.S. are 18 years old or older (18+). The most recent data show that 25% of video game system users - 15.6 million persons - are teens (persons 12-17), 40% of users - 25.2 million persons - are in the 18 - 34 age bracket, and 34% - 21.4 million persons - are 35+.
You and the article are interpreting the meaning of the Nielsen figures incorrectly, because the cited age categories are of different sizes. They can't be compared head to head the way you've tried to do. Let's see - 15.6M in a group spanning 6 years yields about 2.6M in each year, assuming the population of teens is fairly stable. 25.2M persons in a group spanning 17 years is about 1.5M in each year, again assuming stability. We can't say anything definite about the older adults, since the category is open ended and the assumption of year-to-year population stability fails badly when you get into the older adults. However, based on the first two categories, I'd be willing to bet that the probability of being a video gamer given you're a teen is substantially higher than the probability of being a video gamer given you're an adult. In other words, the proportion of gamers is higher amongst teens than adults. Of course, the actual proportion depends on how big the baseline populations are. But in order for the proportion of teens to be lower than that of adults the number of 12 year olds would have to be more than 40% larger than the number of 34 year olds (to pick the two years farthest apart and therefore likely to have the largest difference in population) to account for the difference in the numerators.
Slashdot Mirror
I make my living talking in front of people, and I know as well as anyone that anybody speaking off the cuff can fluff a word, or stumble on a syllable, or (as Gore did) use ambiguous wording. In fact, it's often an indication of intelligence - bright people's brains and mouths are operating extremely asynchronously. However, nobody with the rudiments of a brain and a modern education would ever come up with a howler such as Quayle's infamous Mars quote. And yes, he really did say that. It was in a press briefing in his role as nominal head of NASA, one of the duties of the VP. (Needless to say, his handlers cut the interview short.)
I don't see a double standard, I see one raving loony and one bright fellow who strongly supported the development of the internet long before it was popularly recognized as a big idea, and used ambiguous wording to say so.
Is it possible you installed your own copy, say in /usr/local/bin, and then forgot about it? Try running "which openssl", and see if it reports something other than /usr/bin/openssl. Alternatively, explicitly run the system's openssl: "/usr/bin/openssl version".
From the Latin roots sub, for below, and poena, for male member. In other words, by the balls.
You're falling into the (very common) mistake of thinking that cost determines price. Econ 101 says that price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand. Cost relative to price yields the profit margin, which influences but is not the same as the supply curve. As such, I'd bet that you're wrong about Apple ignoring internal production / supply chain / distribution process, because those things all affect their profit margin.
This is one place where OS X took a step back from NeXTStep/OpenStep. There used to be a folder called /LocalApps, which was where you'd install any non-system apps for shared use. It served the same role as /usr/local/bin in command-line Unix. I've often wondered why they did away with it.
Ion propulsion systems wouldn't be any good for fighter craft. They use very low accelerations, integrated over large periods of time. This makes them a good candidate for interplanetary flight, where you have weeks and months to build up large velocities with the small acceleration, but really crappy for combat where you want to be able to accelerate quickly. Well, maybe you don't, but I do.
One doesn't exclude the other. I do simulation work, just yesterday I was offered trial access to a prototype hardware board. I declined because a patented hardware generator doesn't meet my needs of portability (for peer review); known distributional properties (I can transform uniform random numbers into anything else I want, but they must be uniformly distributed); and replicability (imagine trying to debug a model where you can't repeat errors! plus there are certain experimental designs which can benefit from re-using pseudo-random numbers (PRNs) in carefully structured ways). Had I installed the board, it wouldn't have interfered with my ability to use software PRN generators. However, while the hardware generator may be the greatest thing since sliced bread for encryption, for me there was no value added and several drawbacks in accepting the board.
When Improv got shut down, a group called Lighthouse Design built a functional workalike called Quantrix. They also made several other excellent apps such as Diagram!, the precursor to OmniGraffle. Lighthouse was bought out by Sun for their expertise in object-oriented design, but Lighthouse threw their licensing keys into the public arena when they stopped shipping. Sadly, Sun owns the rights to the code, and has no interest in releasing it - I say sadly, because I suspect it would be relatively easy for someone to resurrect the apps on OS X.
Improv and Quantrix spoiled me for life - to this day, I can't stomach working in Excel. This is particularly ironic since I'm required to use Excel in several courses I teach.
I still have my NeXTDimension Cube boxed up in the garage, I don't have room to set it up but can't bear the thought of selling it off either. I guess when I die, my grandchildren will dig it out and fire it up to see what computing was like "way back when". Won't they be surprised to see that Excel still hasn't caught up to what Quantrix could do back in the 90's.
I think Clarke gets credit for this one too. The book "The City and the Stars" opens with Alvin & friends playing a total immersion VR adventure game. They're even doing so using distributed networking, since Alvin doesn't even know where some of his friends live. TC&TS was published in 1953.
It's not necessarily true that companies will prefer to focus on young adults. Its a question of how much bang you get for your advertising buck, how much payoff there is for the effort invested. For instance, if you're a video games sales person working on commission and you've got a mix of people in the store, you'll have a higher hit rate if you target the teens. You'd never know that if you took the raw figures at face value.
You and the article are interpreting the meaning of the Nielsen figures incorrectly, because the cited age categories are of different sizes. They can't be compared head to head the way you've tried to do. Let's see - 15.6M in a group spanning 6 years yields about 2.6M in each year, assuming the population of teens is fairly stable. 25.2M persons in a group spanning 17 years is about 1.5M in each year, again assuming stability. We can't say anything definite about the older adults, since the category is open ended and the assumption of year-to-year population stability fails badly when you get into the older adults. However, based on the first two categories, I'd be willing to bet that the probability of being a video gamer given you're a teen is substantially higher than the probability of being a video gamer given you're an adult. In other words, the proportion of gamers is higher amongst teens than adults. Of course, the actual proportion depends on how big the baseline populations are. But in order for the proportion of teens to be lower than that of adults the number of 12 year olds would have to be more than 40% larger than the number of 34 year olds (to pick the two years farthest apart and therefore likely to have the largest difference in population) to account for the difference in the numerators.