People who want "Lifestyle phones" are in a specific demographic. Maybe it's a large demographic, or maybe it's one of the largest demographics, but that still stands. Just because you want this for your phone does not mean everyone does!
Regardless of what you want to do with your phone, the point of a lifestyle device is that it looks good and very quickly and effortlessly performs it's functions without hassle (it does not cause stress or aggravation to your life, it just works). I agree with you only in one class of exceptions: Science and Engineering - people who desire to use a smartphone as a power tool would probably not find a lifestyle phone very attractive. But outside of that very slim demographic (that probably wants quick keypad shortcuts for everything and can tolerate or even desire complex interfaces), I think that everyone benefits from a lifestyle approach, regardless of their usage profiles.
This is why companies like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc have a wide range of offerings to suit different needs. If you don't want a phone that works like a computer than for god's sake don't buy it!
Actually, I disagree. I believe this "shotgun approach" is rooted in something much simpler than attempting to reach different market segments. It is simply the lack of any essential insight into how such devices should be designed to cator to all usage profiles seemlessly. The companies are clueless on how to achieve this and therefore have to resort to verticle market strategies to attempt to get coverage and compete in the different artificial smartphone categories. Even claiming that PDA Phone is a market category that makes sense makes my head spin. Perhaps stylus enabled phones are in a seperate class, but PDA Phones? Come on.
My main point is that the "lifestyle phone" segment is covered by every manufacturer, as is the "PDA phone" segment, as is the "low end" segment, as is the "Music phone" segment, etc, ad infinitum.
And my point is that "lifestyle" should not be a segment at all, but a firm basic requirement of any phone. I can see the need to specialize in certain respects (e.g. power tool phones for developers, engineers, scientists, high end camera phones for photographers, high end media phones with huge batteries for travelers, stylus phones for MBA PHB types, etc...) - however, all of them should resonate style, simplicity and resonance with stress-free living (e.g. lifestyle). Currently, I don't really think anyone has this right. I am holding out some hope that Apple will give us all a clue as to how next generation handheld devices should integrate with our lives. [ crosses fingers ]
Re:Nokia, Motorola, Sony, Samsung, WMobile and iPh
on
Nokia the Next Gizmondo?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I was following you 100% until you claimed the RAZR as an example of a phone that "got it right."
I should have specified, I currently use the RAZR V3i, which has a slightly improved interface, a megapixel camera, iTunes and a much faster processor. The original RAZR was indeed a bit harder to use.
Even so, the RAZR is far from perfect. My point is just that it tends, for me at least, to be quicker and easier than any other phone that I have owned (and I have owned samples from all major smartphone manufacturers).
Nokia, Motorola, Sony, Samsung, WMobile and iPhone
on
Nokia the Next Gizmondo?
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· Score: 3, Informative
The stakes are high, the players are mammoth and everyone is making the same damned mistakes.
Today's smart-phones are actually very stupid; The interfaces are cumbersome, the features over-hyped while underperforming, the battery and performance problems legendary and yet, the mistakes are accumulating rather than being corrected.
In my opinion, the primary problem is that everyone is using the wrong metaphore for these phones. These phones are not mobile computers and should stop being treated as such. They are supposed to be lifestyle devices. Lifestyle devices need to be simple, elegant and stylish. The only manufacturer that has come close, IMHO, is Motorola with the Razor.
Nokia has some nice features, but as the article correctly posits, the interfaces are simply hideous.
Motorola has taken a shotgun approach and has such a wide variety of different offerings that it makes your head scratch. The Razor is a good phone, but it has yet to be seen whether Motorola knows how to parlay that into a spectrum of lifestyle devices of a higher generation.
Sony Ericson makes hideous phones, in my opinion. They may have nice hardware, but the software is simply terrible.
Samsung has a decent compromise in all categories and their phones are quite popular in Asia, but nothing stands out as outstanding.
Windows Mobile? You have to be kidding. I would rather shoot myself in the foot and use the blood to write on big signs that I hold up than navigate through a start menu on my mobile.
But alas, we are shown a possible beacon of light in the smartphone race. Can Apple offer us some innovation in the lifestyle smart-phone department? I certainly hope Apple teaches these other companies what style and simplicity actually are. A device that quickly morphs from one purpose to another, represents each purpose flawlessly and innovates outside-the-box. Simply the addition of iChat compatibility over WiFi would put the iPhone in a class by itself.
I have never worried about man in the middle attacks on the internet. To be successful, it requires very good access to my ISP or the backbone carrier's network which is hard to do. Even if they can get that access all they can do is listen to my calls, have a chat with me and the other person or maybe hang up the call. Any attacker listening to my calls is going to get very bored very quickly. If they do the later two, it could cause them to get caught because I'll complain about the problem.
The only security problem I see is if the attacker can learn information that lets him make calls billed to my account. This becomes the VOIP vendors problem anyway. When I notice something wrong with the bill I'll do a chargeback on my credit card for the bill and simply change VOIP providers. If this happens a lot, the VOIP vendor will do something about their security problem.
Or am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing something. If you want to experience man-in-the-middle attacks, stay at a cheap hotel that includes internet in a third-world country such as the philippines. In such places, you have pretty good odds that some form of organized crime has infultrated the hotel network and uses phishing scams to attempt to get your banking and other passwords. These attacks can be very sophisticated and can even include nameserver redirection that will reproduce banking front-ends without SSL for password retrieval - you won't even know it, because the moment the password is fetched, the *middle* will simply post those passwords and redirect you to the correct site. I have seen this firsthand.
These days, if you want to avoid such nonsense, you better be entering https://full-domain/ in your browser when you are on a network that has uncertain security.
Actually, it can be even worse than this (again, mostly in third-world countries where large scale systems have a higher risk of compromise). Again, in the Philippines, it is possible to call your bank from a hotel phone (or even your cellphone) and end up speaking with a fake call-center that is acting as a live man-in-the-middle. These sorts of things are very organized and very sophisticated. You are no-where near as safe as you think you are.
Is everything shooting along while power generation creeps?
It is simply the economics of power. The reason that technology advanced so quickly is that it was profitable to push it along so quickly. Conversely, the reason that alternate energy has not advanced at all is because it is extremely bad on the bottom lines of oil companies.
If you think Microsoft is hard on it's competitors (or percieved future competitors), just imagine an industry thousands of times larger that is run by people thousands of times meaner... That's the energy industry.
If you seriously think that Microsoft doesn't "understand" Open Source, you're an idiot. They understand it but they cannot ever show any support for it because doing so would concede ground and that territory is profit, shareprice and morale (all things that matter to a company). If there was a way to make equivalent money out of GPLed software, you can bet they'd do it. There isn't (they make more doing what they already do), so they don't. It's that simple.
Suggesting that they don't understand free software is a bizarre POV.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft doesn't have employees that understand the nature of OSS. There are some smart guys up in Redmond, we all know that.
I believe the statement being made is that those smart guys are not working in management. Further, that Microsoft management is incapable of the mindset required to understand the motivation of those that make OSS work.
These statements are not bizarre at all. Pursuit of OSS is very altruistic and rooted in geek machismo, but it has little to do with the pursuit of money. Geek machismo is certainly something that Redmond understands, in it's own somewhat colored way (they can do something 1/20th as well as the competition, beat on their chest and declare themselves the winners and generally, they will be right). Altruism is NOT something that Redmond understands (they see giving 100 computers with Microsoft windows to a school district to keep the competition out as altruism).
When Ballmer says he thinks there are interesting business models in OSS, what he is really saying is "We can't yet figure out how to crush it." When he says there is no recognizable technical innovation what he is saying is "It is easy to copy". His dialectic is trivially decoded.
I have been making this case for some time. I actually believe that Apple intends to permanently support fat binaries because it provides them with a mechanism to drift not just between x86 and PPC but to other more advanced architectures as they debut.
So the real question is not why they don't, because for the next 5 years (2 years to complete switch + 3 more years to support PPC products), they clearly will, but the question becomes why they aren't making a big deal out of being processor independent? The answer is clearly negotiation power.
Apple used the switch to negotiate a sweet deal with intel, I am certain of it. When they close in on the final switch-over date, they will be able to use that threat (and their market share should be higher by then) to negotiate a sweet deal with IBM to keep producing some PPC based macs.
Never underestimate Steve Job's ability to negotiate. You should also realize that there is a possibility that they worked this strategy out with IBM - by producing x86 boxes, the drive to marketshare may be significant enough that even the PPC business would benefit, assuming Apple still delivers PPC workstations or whatnot.
This is a fairly good idea, actually, and I actively do this myself to throw off data mining programs. The basic idea is, always fill out surveys and any other demographic feedback forms whenever you can with completely fake and contradictory (but positive) information. With enough confusion associated with your digital identity, you become less likely to be singled out for anything as you will not fit basic marketing or actuarial profiles (be it from legitimate sources or not).
now, since our universe appears to be Flat rather than Closed, we're not going to be able to do that... but i can imagine a series of Closed universes each modeling one slightly less Closed, leading to our own Flat universe as a limiting case.
Well, that wouldn't be neccessary. The original Omega Point would be more able to model the flat case than any of it's simulations - cycles are additive at that level, after all.
Even if There is no big crunch, who is to say that event-horizon effects around a black hole could not be harvested in some simliar manner, or some other as-yet-unknown physical effect might do the trick? If it can be proven in one hypothetical physical case, it should be possible to prove it in others.
I really like the Omega-point theory, it provides a very interesting overarching theological breathing space (let's call that room for faith). I especially like the colorful comparisons to heaven and hell such as; If you are tossed out of heaven, you are tossed into the inferno of the big-crunch where you will (from the point of view of those in heaven) burn for all time (but of course, from the point of view of those in hell, they are incinerated instantly and cease to exist).
By the way, you know the universe is flat because?
This would be a lot more interesting if he actually got real Xbox360 hardware instead of the DualG5 kits. As it stands, this article is only causually interesting, insofar as 'the shader performance of our lightshow was great' goes...
Swambots are a great idea - the most useful purpose of which is construction, I would think. But power is a problem. Someone needs to ressurect Tesla's wireless power distribution schemes w/respect to Swarmbots.
This isn't hard to decipher. Just consider the true implications of controling the TLD servers.
Yes. There is a lot more than feeding secondary domain servers going on here and yes, there are very real security interests involved. I have to agree with this decision, as unpopular as that view may be here.
But what I don't get is when you fuse an atom, energy is released, but when you split an atom into two, energy is released as well. How is this not perpetual motion? If fusion energy was possible, couldn't you just take your nuclear waste from fission and split it back into uranium and whatever again.:)
Hehe... I think this was the concept in Star-Wars and it will always remain science fiction. The production of ultra-heavy elements (such as Uranium) does not occur naturally in solar fusion because not even that gravity or heat is enough to overcome the energy barriers required to fuse the nuclei into such heavy compositions. To create such elements, a supernova is required. Conversely, these ultra-heavy elements are reasonably unstable and are therefore somewhat easy (comparitively) to split. Splitting lighter elements is never discussed because imparting the energy required to do such a thing is beyond our means.
Fusion is practical, today, from Hydrogen on up to Tritium-Boron. I believe that the Tokamak at Princeton was able to achieve over unity in controlled tests all the way up to boron-tritium fusion, but was never funded to the level required to make it commercially viable.
One must appreciate the fact that even the new French reactor does not appear to be planned to be a commercial plant. It looks to be an experimental reactor in the same vein as the Tokamak. These torroidal plasma reactors are really for much more than the study of fusion as well; They are very much for the study of high-temperature plasmas and extremely strong magnetic fields (including the elusive torsion fields). Such conditions provide a rich experimental environment for physical phenemona much more exotic than fusion (e.g. gravity research).
For straightforward energy generation, my bet is on focus fusion, but politics are an issue. Focus fusion uses various plasma-guide geometries to force plasma to compress at a point at very high energy producing super-high temperatures where boron-tritium fusion occurs. The resultant fusion highly ionizes and accelerates the plasma linearly where a particle decellerator can directly convert the accelerated charge into current through induction. Focus fusion holds the promise of hand-held fusion for energy production, plasma rifles and extremely efficient propulsion (all a direct result of the accellerated high-energy plasma). But with all such high energy production technologies that could be mass produced, the politics of the big energy companies loosing control of their revenue stream tends to punish funding for research.
While we are on the subject of exotic physics, some of you might find this interesting...
Actually, no. The panels would block solar radiation and generate electricity. While the use of that electricity would generate some heat on Earth, the amount of solar radiation being blocked would far exceed the heat generated by the consumption of the generated electricity.
Really? They're going to take a hit when some bored hobbyist cracks the protection scheme and puts the solution up on some P2P site? You really think that many people who are seriously interested in the simplicity, stability, interface, and power of Apple products are suddenly going to learn how to scrounge through P2P sites and use custom machines to save a couple hundred bucks? Of course some people will, but that'll probably be made up for just as well by people who do it to test OS X and then make their next purchase an Apple PC with it OS X pre-installed.
They will be stamped onto a DVD and distributed for $3 everywhere in Asia. This would be a real nightmare for Apple (or would it?). Microsoft attained a mighty amount of it's marketshare by turning it's head to piracy until the users were hooked.
But, I am not so certain it really can be done. The sort of hardware cryptographic red/light green/light DRM that Intel and Microsoft have been working on is performing the bulk of the work in hardware, not software. And the software is supposed to be made dependant on that hardware. So what we have to wait and see is if the OS kernel and libraries really are heavily dependant on that hardware to function.
The paper actually states "they [Ashkenazi jews] score 0.7 to 1 standard deviation above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115..... although a recent reviews concludes that the advantage is slightly less, only half a standard deviation."
Doing the math, the paper is obviously assuming that the European average is 100 with a 15 point standard deviation. This means that 112 =.7 and 115 = 1 standard deviation. So 1/2 standard deviation should be around 108.
If you look here, you will see that Germans have a mean IQ of 109.3 with a standard deviation of 22.4
Given this data, one can safely assume two things:
(1) The guy that wrote this is on crack, because northern Europeans have an IQ that corresponds almost exactly with his data on Ashkanazi jews.
(2) Ashkanazi jews very well may be this intellegent because they have interbred with Northern Europeans.
Yea, I probably should do more than breeze through it. So you are saying the paper presents the assertion that an Ashkanazi and a non Ashkanazi coupling will in general produce offspring that are less intelligent than either? That the non-ashkanazi must have a much higher intelligence than the ashkanazi in order to produce offspring that is normal?
That is pretty bizarre. If true, then this gene actually reduces the intelligence of offspring with non-jews (unless it is with an exceptionally bright non-jew parent), but increases intelligence with another jewish parent.
Are you sure you read that right?
I think it says that a particular set of Ashkenazi Jews will have really smart children if they have sex with non-Ashkenazi jews, but their children will have hereditary diseases if they have sex with Ashkenazi jews.
Since 80% of the jewish population is thought to be derived from Ashenazi jewish origins (according to Wikipedia), what this study is really trying to say is that jewish people need to marry and have children with non-jewish people or their children will be diseased. Even worse, it is saying that they will be rewarded for this behavior by having really smart children.
This situation would seem to be even worsened by the fact that many (if not all) jewish people subscribe to the belief that to be jewish you must have a jewish mother and a jewish father. In a fashion, this study just condemmened such behavior to a hereditary curse while incenting breaking jewish traditions (and falling out of pure-blood status) with the gift of brilliant children.
Eventually there will be "universal" computers that will be able to run *any* software that has ever been written.
I think, as evidenced by technologies such as this, that you are absolutely correct. We are only a handful of hardware generations away from having the kind of horsepower required to emulate large portions of mammalian nervous systems.
As we approach these power watersheds, the only users who will still care about performance will be scientists and engineers that need to simulate far more complex things (in other words, the same damned slashdot crowd).
I have a suspicion that Apple may be making a move on your "unversal computer". It is just a suspicion, mind you, but it has some legs I think.
Ahhh, but scientists don't argue with professors of Theology. It's a waste of time. Tipler's not just quoting from the bible, he's asserting that it provides evidence for his argument.
Really? Is this your theory? If you bothered to read anything he links to on his page, you will see math and physics in one set of links and theology and philosophy in another. It is very traditional for well respected scientists to address philosophy and sometimes theology (which is a form of philosophy) when pondering profound topics. But he is certainly not using theological arguments to form a foundation for his arguments, that is a mistake in your perceptions.
As a side not (and I don't mean to be rude - it is just an observation), you sound like my bible-beater sister who will make wild claims without bothering to do any research whatsoever. Her claims sound just like yours, except they are typically directed at scientsts (which word she uses with the same scorn that you attach to theologeans).
You do understand the difference between a bible-beater and a professor of theology, right? It is much like the difference between a slashdotter and a well published physics professor, such as Tipler;-)
Yeah, I'm going to take aguy seriously who starts quoting the bible only two paragraphs in.
Read more carefully. Tipler is a physicist, not a priest. He has constructed arguments that can be argued with other scientists and with professors of Theology. He is attempting to show that there may be reason to believe that religious mythology could be explained by a possible real phenomena.
If you are not willing to critically examine work like this, then your *faith* in your own bais is no different than that which you clearly despise. Be prepared if you do dig in, this is not religious gobbledygook...
It also occurs to me - another point that I'm sure others have already thought of - that this may be why they are forced to switch to Intel. They can't get chips small enough for a Powerbook G5 line.
Well, if you consider this plus this, you certainly can see that the recipe is there for Apple to produce a laptop using intel chips that is much faster than a G4 laptop using OS X compiled for x86 and yet applications compiled for the PPC.
Read carefully. Do the research. It sounds nuts, but this might just be the key to this craziness.
I have heard rumors that Apple has been talking to Transitive Technologies about Quick Transit which is a code translation system that can re-map system calls on the fly as well as do very fast optimized recompilation of native code. Think of it as a JIT for processor emulation.
If the claims about Quick Transit are true, and there is no reason to believe that they are false as evidenced by the product's success runix MIPS code on Itaniums (see here),
then we should actually see a performance increase for PPC applications (not recompiled) running on OS X x86.
If you were Steve and your apps (as well as everyone elses) ran unmodified on intel hardware faster than it ran on your own, you would probably build some boxes based on intel as well.
There may actually be no need for developers to recompile anything. With Quick Transit built into the OS (let's assume it becomes part of OS X), it would be possible to target x86, PPC or even other architectures and yet run at essentially full speed on any deployment architecture. I know this sounds a bit wicked. It did to me as well. I am sure there will be a bit of a performance and memory hit when your applications are not native, but those hits may be completely overwhelmed by silicon horsepower.
If done properly, this could be a very good move for Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I disagree. I believe this "shotgun approach" is rooted in something much simpler than attempting to reach different market segments. It is simply the lack of any essential insight into how such devices should be designed to cator to all usage profiles seemlessly. The companies are clueless on how to achieve this and therefore have to resort to verticle market strategies to attempt to get coverage and compete in the different artificial smartphone categories. Even claiming that PDA Phone is a market category that makes sense makes my head spin. Perhaps stylus enabled phones are in a seperate class, but PDA Phones? Come on.
And my point is that "lifestyle" should not be a segment at all, but a firm basic requirement of any phone. I can see the need to specialize in certain respects (e.g. power tool phones for developers, engineers, scientists, high end camera phones for photographers, high end media phones with huge batteries for travelers, stylus phones for MBA PHB types, etc...) - however, all of them should resonate style, simplicity and resonance with stress-free living (e.g. lifestyle). Currently, I don't really think anyone has this right. I am holding out some hope that Apple will give us all a clue as to how next generation handheld devices should integrate with our lives. [ crosses fingers ]
Even so, the RAZR is far from perfect. My point is just that it tends, for me at least, to be quicker and easier than any other phone that I have owned (and I have owned samples from all major smartphone manufacturers).
The stakes are high, the players are mammoth and everyone is making the same damned mistakes.
Today's smart-phones are actually very stupid; The interfaces are cumbersome, the features over-hyped while underperforming, the battery and performance problems legendary and yet, the mistakes are accumulating rather than being corrected.
In my opinion, the primary problem is that everyone is using the wrong metaphore for these phones. These phones are not mobile computers and should stop being treated as such. They are supposed to be lifestyle devices. Lifestyle devices need to be simple, elegant and stylish. The only manufacturer that has come close, IMHO, is Motorola with the Razor.
Nokia has some nice features, but as the article correctly posits, the interfaces are simply hideous.
Motorola has taken a shotgun approach and has such a wide variety of different offerings that it makes your head scratch. The Razor is a good phone, but it has yet to be seen whether Motorola knows how to parlay that into a spectrum of lifestyle devices of a higher generation.
Sony Ericson makes hideous phones, in my opinion. They may have nice hardware, but the software is simply terrible.
Samsung has a decent compromise in all categories and their phones are quite popular in Asia, but nothing stands out as outstanding.
Windows Mobile? You have to be kidding. I would rather shoot myself in the foot and use the blood to write on big signs that I hold up than navigate through a start menu on my mobile.
But alas, we are shown a possible beacon of light in the smartphone race. Can Apple offer us some innovation in the lifestyle smart-phone department? I certainly hope Apple teaches these other companies what style and simplicity actually are. A device that quickly morphs from one purpose to another, represents each purpose flawlessly and innovates outside-the-box. Simply the addition of iChat compatibility over WiFi would put the iPhone in a class by itself.
But anyhow, let the arguments begin.
These days, if you want to avoid such nonsense, you better be entering https://full-domain/ in your browser when you are on a network that has uncertain security.
Actually, it can be even worse than this (again, mostly in third-world countries where large scale systems have a higher risk of compromise). Again, in the Philippines, it is possible to call your bank from a hotel phone (or even your cellphone) and end up speaking with a fake call-center that is acting as a live man-in-the-middle. These sorts of things are very organized and very sophisticated. You are no-where near as safe as you think you are.
Be careful out there.
If you think Microsoft is hard on it's competitors (or percieved future competitors), just imagine an industry thousands of times larger that is run by people thousands of times meaner... That's the energy industry.
I believe the statement being made is that those smart guys are not working in management. Further, that Microsoft management is incapable of the mindset required to understand the motivation of those that make OSS work.
These statements are not bizarre at all. Pursuit of OSS is very altruistic and rooted in geek machismo, but it has little to do with the pursuit of money. Geek machismo is certainly something that Redmond understands, in it's own somewhat colored way (they can do something 1/20th as well as the competition, beat on their chest and declare themselves the winners and generally, they will be right). Altruism is NOT something that Redmond understands (they see giving 100 computers with Microsoft windows to a school district to keep the competition out as altruism).
When Ballmer says he thinks there are interesting business models in OSS, what he is really saying is "We can't yet figure out how to crush it." When he says there is no recognizable technical innovation what he is saying is "It is easy to copy". His dialectic is trivially decoded.
I have been making this case for some time. I actually believe that Apple intends to permanently support fat binaries because it provides them with a mechanism to drift not just between x86 and PPC but to other more advanced architectures as they debut.
So the real question is not why they don't, because for the next 5 years (2 years to complete switch + 3 more years to support PPC products), they clearly will, but the question becomes why they aren't making a big deal out of being processor independent? The answer is clearly negotiation power.
Apple used the switch to negotiate a sweet deal with intel, I am certain of it. When they close in on the final switch-over date, they will be able to use that threat (and their market share should be higher by then) to negotiate a sweet deal with IBM to keep producing some PPC based macs.
Never underestimate Steve Job's ability to negotiate. You should also realize that there is a possibility that they worked this strategy out with IBM - by producing x86 boxes, the drive to marketshare may be significant enough that even the PPC business would benefit, assuming Apple still delivers PPC workstations or whatnot.
This is a fairly good idea, actually, and I actively do this myself to throw off data mining programs. The basic idea is, always fill out surveys and any other demographic feedback forms whenever you can with completely fake and contradictory (but positive) information. With enough confusion associated with your digital identity, you become less likely to be singled out for anything as you will not fit basic marketing or actuarial profiles (be it from legitimate sources or not).
now, since our universe appears to be Flat rather than Closed, we're not going to be able to do that... but i can imagine a series of Closed universes each modeling one slightly less Closed, leading to our own Flat universe as a limiting case.
Well, that wouldn't be neccessary. The original Omega Point would be more able to model the flat case than any of it's simulations - cycles are additive at that level, after all.
Even if There is no big crunch, who is to say that event-horizon effects around a black hole could not be harvested in some simliar manner, or some other as-yet-unknown physical effect might do the trick? If it can be proven in one hypothetical physical case, it should be possible to prove it in others.
I really like the Omega-point theory, it provides a very interesting overarching theological breathing space (let's call that room for faith). I especially like the colorful comparisons to heaven and hell such as; If you are tossed out of heaven, you are tossed into the inferno of the big-crunch where you will (from the point of view of those in heaven) burn for all time (but of course, from the point of view of those in hell, they are incinerated instantly and cease to exist).
By the way, you know the universe is flat because?
This would be a lot more interesting if he actually got real Xbox360 hardware instead of the DualG5 kits. As it stands, this article is only causually interesting, insofar as 'the shader performance of our lightshow was great' goes...
Swambots are a great idea - the most useful purpose of which is construction, I would think. But power is a problem. Someone needs to ressurect Tesla's wireless power distribution schemes w/respect to Swarmbots.
This isn't hard to decipher. Just consider the true implications of controling the TLD servers.
Yes. There is a lot more than feeding secondary domain servers going on here and yes, there are very real security interests involved. I have to agree with this decision, as unpopular as that view may be here.
But what I don't get is when you fuse an atom, energy is released, but when you split an atom into two, energy is released as well. How is this not perpetual motion? If fusion energy was possible, couldn't you just take your nuclear waste from fission and split it back into uranium and whatever again. :)
Hehe... I think this was the concept in Star-Wars and it will always remain science fiction. The production of ultra-heavy elements (such as Uranium) does not occur naturally in solar fusion because not even that gravity or heat is enough to overcome the energy barriers required to fuse the nuclei into such heavy compositions. To create such elements, a supernova is required. Conversely, these ultra-heavy elements are reasonably unstable and are therefore somewhat easy (comparitively) to split. Splitting lighter elements is never discussed because imparting the energy required to do such a thing is beyond our means.
Fusion is practical, today, from Hydrogen on up to Tritium-Boron. I believe that the Tokamak at Princeton was able to achieve over unity in controlled tests all the way up to boron-tritium fusion, but was never funded to the level required to make it commercially viable.
One must appreciate the fact that even the new French reactor does not appear to be planned to be a commercial plant. It looks to be an experimental reactor in the same vein as the Tokamak. These torroidal plasma reactors are really for much more than the study of fusion as well; They are very much for the study of high-temperature plasmas and extremely strong magnetic fields (including the elusive torsion fields). Such conditions provide a rich experimental environment for physical phenemona much more exotic than fusion (e.g. gravity research).
For straightforward energy generation, my bet is on focus fusion, but politics are an issue. Focus fusion uses various plasma-guide geometries to force plasma to compress at a point at very high energy producing super-high temperatures where boron-tritium fusion occurs. The resultant fusion highly ionizes and accelerates the plasma linearly where a particle decellerator can directly convert the accelerated charge into current through induction. Focus fusion holds the promise of hand-held fusion for energy production, plasma rifles and extremely efficient propulsion (all a direct result of the accellerated high-energy plasma). But with all such high energy production technologies that could be mass produced, the politics of the big energy companies loosing control of their revenue stream tends to punish funding for research.
While we are on the subject of exotic physics, some of you might find this interesting...
Actually, no. The panels would block solar radiation and generate electricity. While the use of that electricity would generate some heat on Earth, the amount of solar radiation being blocked would far exceed the heat generated by the consumption of the generated electricity.
But, I am not so certain it really can be done. The sort of hardware cryptographic red/light green/light DRM that Intel and Microsoft have been working on is performing the bulk of the work in hardware, not software. And the software is supposed to be made dependant on that hardware. So what we have to wait and see is if the OS kernel and libraries really are heavily dependant on that hardware to function.
The paper actually states "they [Ashkenazi jews] score 0.7 to 1 standard deviation above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115. .... although a recent reviews concludes that the advantage is slightly less, only half a standard deviation."
.7 and 115 = 1 standard deviation. So 1/2 standard deviation should be around 108.
Doing the math, the paper is obviously assuming that the European average is 100 with a 15 point standard deviation. This means that 112 =
If you look here, you will see that Germans have a mean IQ of 109.3 with a standard deviation of 22.4
Given this data, one can safely assume two things:
(1) The guy that wrote this is on crack, because northern Europeans have an IQ that corresponds almost exactly with his data on Ashkanazi jews.
(2) Ashkanazi jews very well may be this intellegent because they have interbred with Northern Europeans.
YMMV
Yea, I probably should do more than breeze through it. So you are saying the paper presents the assertion that an Ashkanazi and a non Ashkanazi coupling will in general produce offspring that are less intelligent than either? That the non-ashkanazi must have a much higher intelligence than the ashkanazi in order to produce offspring that is normal? That is pretty bizarre. If true, then this gene actually reduces the intelligence of offspring with non-jews (unless it is with an exceptionally bright non-jew parent), but increases intelligence with another jewish parent. Are you sure you read that right?
I think it says that a particular set of Ashkenazi Jews will have really smart children if they have sex with non-Ashkenazi jews, but their children will have hereditary diseases if they have sex with Ashkenazi jews.
Since 80% of the jewish population is thought to be derived from Ashenazi jewish origins (according to Wikipedia), what this study is really trying to say is that jewish people need to marry and have children with non-jewish people or their children will be diseased. Even worse, it is saying that they will be rewarded for this behavior by having really smart children.
This situation would seem to be even worsened by the fact that many (if not all) jewish people subscribe to the belief that to be jewish you must have a jewish mother and a jewish father. In a fashion, this study just condemmened such behavior to a hereditary curse while incenting breaking jewish traditions (and falling out of pure-blood status) with the gift of brilliant children.
Damn. This study really is politically incorrect.
As we approach these power watersheds, the only users who will still care about performance will be scientists and engineers that need to simulate far more complex things (in other words, the same damned slashdot crowd).
I have a suspicion that Apple may be making a move on your "unversal computer". It is just a suspicion, mind you, but it has some legs I think.
As a side not (and I don't mean to be rude - it is just an observation), you sound like my bible-beater sister who will make wild claims without bothering to do any research whatsoever. Her claims sound just like yours, except they are typically directed at scientsts (which word she uses with the same scorn that you attach to theologeans).
You do understand the difference between a bible-beater and a professor of theology, right? It is much like the difference between a slashdotter and a well published physics professor, such as Tipler
Yeah, I'm going to take aguy seriously who starts quoting the bible only two paragraphs in.
Read more carefully. Tipler is a physicist, not a priest. He has constructed arguments that can be argued with other scientists and with professors of Theology. He is attempting to show that there may be reason to believe that religious mythology could be explained by a possible real phenomena.
If you are not willing to critically examine work like this, then your *faith* in your own bais is no different than that which you clearly despise. Be prepared if you do dig in, this is not religious gobbledygook...
Read carefully. Do the research. It sounds nuts, but this might just be the key to this craziness.
These may just be Apple negotiations tactics - rumors originating with Apple to light the fire under IBM's ass.
Or, as I pointed out in a previous post, Apple may have a real ace up it's sleeve.
I have heard rumors that Apple has been talking to Transitive Technologies about Quick Transit which is a code translation system that can re-map system calls on the fly as well as do very fast optimized recompilation of native code. Think of it as a JIT for processor emulation.
If the claims about Quick Transit are true, and there is no reason to believe that they are false as evidenced by the product's success runix MIPS code on Itaniums (see here), then we should actually see a performance increase for PPC applications (not recompiled) running on OS X x86.
If you were Steve and your apps (as well as everyone elses) ran unmodified on intel hardware faster than it ran on your own, you would probably build some boxes based on intel as well.
There may actually be no need for developers to recompile anything. With Quick Transit built into the OS (let's assume it becomes part of OS X), it would be possible to target x86, PPC or even other architectures and yet run at essentially full speed on any deployment architecture. I know this sounds a bit wicked. It did to me as well. I am sure there will be a bit of a performance and memory hit when your applications are not native, but those hits may be completely overwhelmed by silicon horsepower.
If done properly, this could be a very good move for Apple.