You know, as much as I hate how Obama continually sets himself and America up for trampling on by all members of the international community, Rio deserves this, and so does Chicago for that matter.
The Olympics belong to the emerging economies, not the first world. Western nations whine so much about the possibility of hosting the Olympics, why on earth should they choose any western nation? London has cried from the get go of how much it'll cost, how other large scale projects have failed miserably, even how much traffic it would bring and how much it would, oh gasp, inconvenience the local populace. F em. Half of Chicagoans didn't even *want* the Olympics hosted there. WTF? Why have it there then? What a welcome!
Contrast the western media's handling of the London bid, the Chicago bid with that of the Beijing games and their exuberance. It was the most spectacular games in history, and they were positively giddy to be hosting it. Contrast Chicago's reception of their own bid with Rio's. You get the feeling that all of Brazil wants to host it, so let them! While I don't think it'll be as big as the Beijing olympics, it will be far more spectacular, optimistic, and inviting than anything any of the other condenders would have been able to muster.
who cares how many potential VMs the "cloud" can host. its methodone for most end users/devs real problems: inefficient code. the "just pitch machines at it until it runs fast!" mentality will catch up to us.
That's not true. We use Amazon's cloud to host some of our servers. The reason we do it is for two main reasons. (1) We don't need to worry about equipment maintenance. Let me repeat that lest you think its not a big deal: We don't need to worry about equipment maintenance! (That is a big deal when you leave your basement but don't necessarily have a dedicated IT staff). (2) We are in a rapid growth phase. We cannot estimate well enough what are computing needs, our storage needs, are going to be 1- 2- 6- months down the road. We also don't have $50k to drop on equipment and storage that may be utilized 6 months from now, but we sure as hell know if we bought it now it wouldn't be used immediately. Amazon's cloud makes it trivial to keep up with our growing demand without paying up front for it. Sure we pay more to "rent" the stuff from Amazon, but its simply the big(O) argument: Amazon's pricing scales worse than the classic alternatives, but the constants out front are tiny.
...but you laud the people close minded enough not to be able to talk about sexuality. How wonderful...
I tip my hat to you for the greatest hypocrisy I have seen in years.
Those people decide not to talk about sexuality to a five year old. Are you a five year old? I tip my hat to you for equating yourself to a five year old.
Frankly I have more faith in the average person then the zealots when it comes down to it.
I, too, put much stock in the belief that, fundamentally, the average person is good and has a strong moral compass. However, that is often not enough to make an informed decision.
For example, take an issue such as abortion. If you ask the average person, "Is it alright to kill babies?" What do you think they'll say? Their gut reaction, which will be nearly universal, is "absolutely not!" But there is more to the issue than that. There is the issue of unwanted pregnancy, rape, and other mitigating factors that need to taken into consideration that, at first glance, may seem like distant, secondary factors when held up against the horror of killing babies.
Or, take the issue of capital punishment. If you ask the average person, "Should we spare the lives of serial killer-rapists?" What do you think the answer will be? But, again, there are mitigating factors, such as the plethora of cases in which condemned men have been found not guilty of their crimes. Some before their execution, but many, unfortunately, afterwards. That may seem like small potatoes compared to the justice that should be given to serial killer-rapists. But not if you're one of the unfortunately condemned.
Good luck getting anyone to vote in this country. We've had some of the lowest rates of voter turnout of any democracy for many, many election cycles now.
For someone to do anything requires some amount of motivation on the part of that person. For voting, that would mean getting to understand the issues and know the candidates, and then to form an opinion one way or another on those issues and where the candidates stand on them. What makes you think it would be a good idea to have unmotivated people vote when they obviously have no interest and, more than likely, no understanding, of the issues involved?
Actually, that is exactly the direction captchas are going, with a more elegant solution. If instead of picking one, in which case you are right - there's a 25% chance a bot will choose correctly, what if it were instead: select which pictures are of a cat? Now, with only 4 images, you have 1+1+4+4+6+6 = 22 different possible outcomes, while having the problem remain trivially easy for a human.
But it's all about the units. If c is expressed in light-seconds/second rather than meters per second, or worse yet light-years/second then the "logic" of that argument is exposed as just hype. So the real issue comes down not to the equation e=mc^2 itself, but the selection of the units that e, m and c are expressed in. Use a different unit and, as I try to show above, the whole thing breaks down.
I think you are making the mistake that, for example, a 4-slice pizza is smaller than an 8-slice pizza, because, as everyone knows, 4 is less than 8. However, the pizzas are exactly the same size, it is just that the slices are larger in a 4-slice pizza.
Is there some science behind the selection of the units involved that allows this equation to be so simple, or are we to believe that some serendipitous magic just allows this to be an exact equation and the units somehow just happen to match up?
Yes, there is a very challenging derivation of this simple relationship. It is just math, and it is not magic. I won't do the derivation, but I will show that the units do, indeed, make sense:
Energy is a force acting through a distance: F x d
Force is a mass undergoing an acceleration: F = m x a
Acceleration is a change in velocity over a change in time: A = deltaV/deltaT, whose units are length/time x 1/time. Let's use metric. That would be m/s x 1/s.
Substituting the units back into the general energy equation, we get:
E = F x d = m x A x d = kg x (m/s x 1/s) x m. If we pair the 1/s with the meter from "Force acting over a distance" The units are:
E = kg x (m/s) x (m/s), which are the same units as Einstein's famous relation. So, yes, the units do make sense, it is not serendipitous that this works out, and the reason it is so famous is because it is so simple.
You use Sega, for example, but fail to note that the forces that killed Sega (commoditization) hasn't killed Nintendo (Gameboy Advance, Gameboy DS) and hasn't killed Sony (Playstation, Playstation 2).
The Playstation was the primary impetus behind Nintendo's fall from grace. They can sustain a massive amount of financial pressure and undersell Nintendo at every turn because they have a tremendous amount of other sources of income. Nintendo has their game console. It is hard to undersell on your only source of income.
You bring up SGI, but then can't account for the fact that commoditization hasn't killed IBM
Commoditization is precisely what killed IBM in the PC field. They used to make PCs, you know, but got killed by low-cost IBM-clones. They used to make hard drives, and then sold that failing enterprise to Hitachi. Big Blue is still around because they have so many other sources of income, but they are no longer in the PC market.
What we are seeing is Apple diversifying, and doing so profitably.
Good for Apple! I never once even insinuated that they were going to go bankrupt. I simply said that they are done with the computer market. It is over for them.
We have seen this time and time again in the computer industry: commodity hardware puts niche makers out of business. SGI toyed with Intel architecture, about a month before going belly up. DEC Alphas. Sega couldn't compete in the console market, and instead turned their efforts into porting their trademarks (e.g. Sonic) to other systems. Nintendo will soon follow, or die. Apple is just the latest in a very long list to have their hardware market commoditized right out from under them. They have some very cool software products that many people seem to like (iTunes notwithstanding). Maybe they can turn into a software only company, or a services-oriented company that gives their software away for free.
When you look at copyrights like a government regulation that controlls how people use information, rather than some kind of "property" right. Then it becomes clear that Linux is truely more accountable to free market paradigms, and in the information age - as information becomes commoditized, that will be even more so - as the companies that treat unrestricted copying over the internet like a threat will loose, and those that treat it like an advantage will win.
This is wrong on so many levels. Google uses linux because they don't give a shit about having to give back modifications to the OS. They aren't in the OS business. They are in the search business. And if you cannot understand this in the context of your "information is free" paradigm, just ask Google to kindly explain to you the details of their search algorithms. I'm sure they'll be eager to oblige you.
Moves like these are based solely on the expected demand from consumers for these consoles. If consumers are frothing at the mouth to get their hands on the new xbox 360, then peripheral manufacturers are going to be frothing at the mouth to supply them with whiz-bang accessories. MS wins: a good business decision.
However, the opposite was true of Nintendo after their fatal decision to stick with cartriges for N64. For years, Nintendo dominated the console market, and for that, they required that all games were authorized by them and I believe even manufactured at one of their own sites. They could do this solely because there was incredible demand for their consoles. When Sony entered the market and support for Nintendo waned, all of a sudden they needed to offer game producers incentives to keep making games for Nintendo consoles.
The only thing that this sort of decision by Microsoft is saying is that they believe very strongly that their next gaming platform is going to be massively successful. And to me, that isn't really such a bad thing.
It is not that open source software can outperform professionally-written software. It is most often the case that a piece of nice commercial software is written and the open source community tries to replicate it for free. The reason that they can come up with so many quality, open source alternatives is because they have no timeline. Nobody bats an eye that it took the open source community 5 years to come up with a competitor to IE6. Nobody cares about that (it's free, after all, quit complaining!).
Rather, it is the case that code that is well written, only needs to be written once. Take the gecko rendering engine, for instance. How many open source browsers use it? And once a quality piece of core software is written, it doesn't need to be written again! So, it may take the open source community years to come up with a solution, but once it's there, it isn't going anywhere.
You can see this happening with kde and gnome, too. They aren't quite as user-friendly or as stable as their commercial counterparts, but once they get there, unless the desktop paradigm changes, then the OSS community will have their free desktop alternative.
Yeah, there's a VAT tax, and it replaces an income tax. Smart idea, I'd like to do that here
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on Earth, the EU has some of the highest income tax rates, in addition to the astronomical VAT:
UK: up to 40%
Sweden: Between 33% and 60%
Spain: 18%-48%
Germany: 15%-42%
Denmark: 44%-63%
source
But, yeah, a VAT or sales tax is a great idea, but not in addition to an income tax! Tax it coming in, or tax it coming out, but don't shave off the value of my dollar twice.
I'm glad that firefox is putting pressure - whether real or imagined - on microsoft, as this certainly prevents them from resting on their laurels.
IE 7 is bound to maintain microsoft's dominance over the browser market. However, this will at least keep them on top with a (desperately needed!) much improved browser.
The problem with errors is that detecting all errors all the time is absolutely impossible. Think back to your intro theory cs class and to Turing Recognizability. Think halting problem. Now, reduce the problem of finding all errors to the halting problem:
if (my_design_contains_any_errors) while(1);
else exit;
Feed this into a program that halts on all input and see what happens. You can't, because we know it is impossible for it to always return an answer. QED: errors are unavoidable. No need to sniff derisively in the direction of NASA's "middle management". Let's see if YOU can do a better job!
On top of that, they might not have a bunch of communications giants (Cox Communications, Charter Communications, AOL-Time Warner, Sprint (DSL), Verizon (DSL) and Aldelphia, to name a few) fighting for customers left and right. When you have a fairly large country in size with a ton of providers offering different types of services at different prices it's harder to achieve a goal like "Broadband for Everyone".
No. Having a bunch of providers is exactly what will spur higher bandwidths and lower prices. It is called the free market system.
Alan Stern said, "wouldn't deny a chihauhau a place among dogs because it is too small"
yeah, no kidding. But if the definition of a dog included, "must not weigh less than 30lbs" then yes, a chihauhau would most certainly not be dog.
I know there is no such definitive critereon for planets, but jeeze...a simple webster's definition includes the phrase "...large heavenly bodies..." (emph mine). Any reasonable defintion of large would probably exclude pluto, just as any reasonable definition of "large dog" would most certainly exclude the lowly chihauhau
I have a hunch that this is because programs like Kazaa are devious. Even when you think you're not sharing anything, you are. So, there are probably many many people who think they are only downloading music, not sharing it, too. For instance, only the most clever will point their shared folder to an empty directory, so as not to share anything. But only the cleverest of the clever realize that your download directory is automatically shared, so that each and every file you download is shared, unless you move it out! Ooops! Combine that with Kazaa's infamous difficulty to actually close, and you've got plenty of unwitting file sharers out there.
Slashdot Mirror
pffft...AT&T (of all companies) nailed the future in 1993! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8
You know, as much as I hate how Obama continually sets himself and America up for trampling on by all members of the international community, Rio deserves this, and so does Chicago for that matter.
The Olympics belong to the emerging economies, not the first world. Western nations whine so much about the possibility of hosting the Olympics, why on earth should they choose any western nation? London has cried from the get go of how much it'll cost, how other large scale projects have failed miserably, even how much traffic it would bring and how much it would, oh gasp, inconvenience the local populace. F em. Half of Chicagoans didn't even *want* the Olympics hosted there. WTF? Why have it there then? What a welcome!
Contrast the western media's handling of the London bid, the Chicago bid with that of the Beijing games and their exuberance. It was the most spectacular games in history, and they were positively giddy to be hosting it. Contrast Chicago's reception of their own bid with Rio's. You get the feeling that all of Brazil wants to host it, so let them! While I don't think it'll be as big as the Beijing olympics, it will be far more spectacular, optimistic, and inviting than anything any of the other condenders would have been able to muster.
who cares how many potential VMs the "cloud" can host. its methodone for most end users/devs real problems: inefficient code. the "just pitch machines at it until it runs fast!" mentality will catch up to us.
That's not true. We use Amazon's cloud to host some of our servers. The reason we do it is for two main reasons. (1) We don't need to worry about equipment maintenance. Let me repeat that lest you think its not a big deal: We don't need to worry about equipment maintenance! (That is a big deal when you leave your basement but don't necessarily have a dedicated IT staff). (2) We are in a rapid growth phase. We cannot estimate well enough what are computing needs, our storage needs, are going to be 1- 2- 6- months down the road. We also don't have $50k to drop on equipment and storage that may be utilized 6 months from now, but we sure as hell know if we bought it now it wouldn't be used immediately. Amazon's cloud makes it trivial to keep up with our growing demand without paying up front for it. Sure we pay more to "rent" the stuff from Amazon, but its simply the big(O) argument: Amazon's pricing scales worse than the classic alternatives, but the constants out front are tiny.
...but you laud the people close minded enough not to be able to talk about sexuality. How wonderful...
I tip my hat to you for the greatest hypocrisy I have seen in years.
Those people decide not to talk about sexuality to a five year old. Are you a five year old? I tip my hat to you for equating yourself to a five year old.
I was going to friend you after I read this, but then I realized: I already had.
Frankly I have more faith in the average person then the zealots when it comes down to it.
I, too, put much stock in the belief that, fundamentally, the average person is good and has a strong moral compass. However, that is often not enough to make an informed decision.
For example, take an issue such as abortion. If you ask the average person, "Is it alright to kill babies?" What do you think they'll say? Their gut reaction, which will be nearly universal, is "absolutely not!" But there is more to the issue than that. There is the issue of unwanted pregnancy, rape, and other mitigating factors that need to taken into consideration that, at first glance, may seem like distant, secondary factors when held up against the horror of killing babies.
Or, take the issue of capital punishment. If you ask the average person, "Should we spare the lives of serial killer-rapists?" What do you think the answer will be? But, again, there are mitigating factors, such as the plethora of cases in which condemned men have been found not guilty of their crimes. Some before their execution, but many, unfortunately, afterwards. That may seem like small potatoes compared to the justice that should be given to serial killer-rapists. But not if you're one of the unfortunately condemned.
Good luck getting anyone to vote in this country. We've had some of the lowest rates of voter turnout of any democracy for many, many election cycles now.
For someone to do anything requires some amount of motivation on the part of that person. For voting, that would mean getting to understand the issues and know the candidates, and then to form an opinion one way or another on those issues and where the candidates stand on them. What makes you think it would be a good idea to have unmotivated people vote when they obviously have no interest and, more than likely, no understanding, of the issues involved?
So, Iraqis should be ecstatic, right?
Actually, that is exactly the direction captchas are going, with a more elegant solution. If instead of picking one, in which case you are right - there's a 25% chance a bot will choose correctly, what if it were instead: select which pictures are of a cat? Now, with only 4 images, you have 1+1+4+4+6+6 = 22 different possible outcomes, while having the problem remain trivially easy for a human.
I hear there's a 1 in 5 chance this article's crap.
They should call it the Power Pen. It's so bad.
I think you are making the mistake that, for example, a 4-slice pizza is smaller than an 8-slice pizza, because, as everyone knows, 4 is less than 8. However, the pizzas are exactly the same size, it is just that the slices are larger in a 4-slice pizza.
Is there some science behind the selection of the units involved that allows this equation to be so simple, or are we to believe that some serendipitous magic just allows this to be an exact equation and the units somehow just happen to match up?Yes, there is a very challenging derivation of this simple relationship. It is just math, and it is not magic. I won't do the derivation, but I will show that the units do, indeed, make sense:
Energy is a force acting through a distance: F x d
Force is a mass undergoing an acceleration: F = m x a
Acceleration is a change in velocity over a change in time: A = deltaV/deltaT, whose units are length/time x 1/time. Let's use metric. That would be m/s x 1/s.
Substituting the units back into the general energy equation, we get:
E = F x d = m x A x d = kg x (m/s x 1/s) x m. If we pair the 1/s with the meter from "Force acting over a distance" The units are:
E = kg x (m/s) x (m/s), which are the same units as Einstein's famous relation. So, yes, the units do make sense, it is not serendipitous that this works out, and the reason it is so famous is because it is so simple.
Oh, wait....
The Playstation was the primary impetus behind Nintendo's fall from grace. They can sustain a massive amount of financial pressure and undersell Nintendo at every turn because they have a tremendous amount of other sources of income. Nintendo has their game console. It is hard to undersell on your only source of income.
You bring up SGI, but then can't account for the fact that commoditization hasn't killed IBMCommoditization is precisely what killed IBM in the PC field. They used to make PCs, you know, but got killed by low-cost IBM-clones. They used to make hard drives, and then sold that failing enterprise to Hitachi. Big Blue is still around because they have so many other sources of income, but they are no longer in the PC market.
What we are seeing is Apple diversifying, and doing so profitably.Good for Apple! I never once even insinuated that they were going to go bankrupt. I simply said that they are done with the computer market. It is over for them.
We have seen this time and time again in the computer industry: commodity hardware puts niche makers out of business. SGI toyed with Intel architecture, about a month before going belly up. DEC Alphas. Sega couldn't compete in the console market, and instead turned their efforts into porting their trademarks (e.g. Sonic) to other systems. Nintendo will soon follow, or die. Apple is just the latest in a very long list to have their hardware market commoditized right out from under them. They have some very cool software products that many people seem to like (iTunes notwithstanding). Maybe they can turn into a software only company, or a services-oriented company that gives their software away for free.
This is wrong on so many levels. Google uses linux because they don't give a shit about having to give back modifications to the OS. They aren't in the OS business. They are in the search business. And if you cannot understand this in the context of your "information is free" paradigm, just ask Google to kindly explain to you the details of their search algorithms. I'm sure they'll be eager to oblige you.
Moves like these are based solely on the expected demand from consumers for these consoles. If consumers are frothing at the mouth to get their hands on the new xbox 360, then peripheral manufacturers are going to be frothing at the mouth to supply them with whiz-bang accessories. MS wins: a good business decision.
However, the opposite was true of Nintendo after their fatal decision to stick with cartriges for N64. For years, Nintendo dominated the console market, and for that, they required that all games were authorized by them and I believe even manufactured at one of their own sites. They could do this solely because there was incredible demand for their consoles. When Sony entered the market and support for Nintendo waned, all of a sudden they needed to offer game producers incentives to keep making games for Nintendo consoles.
The only thing that this sort of decision by Microsoft is saying is that they believe very strongly that their next gaming platform is going to be massively successful. And to me, that isn't really such a bad thing.
It is not that open source software can outperform professionally-written software. It is most often the case that a piece of nice commercial software is written and the open source community tries to replicate it for free. The reason that they can come up with so many quality, open source alternatives is because they have no timeline. Nobody bats an eye that it took the open source community 5 years to come up with a competitor to IE6. Nobody cares about that (it's free, after all, quit complaining!).
Rather, it is the case that code that is well written, only needs to be written once. Take the gecko rendering engine, for instance. How many open source browsers use it? And once a quality piece of core software is written, it doesn't need to be written again! So, it may take the open source community years to come up with a solution, but once it's there, it isn't going anywhere.
You can see this happening with kde and gnome, too. They aren't quite as user-friendly or as stable as their commercial counterparts, but once they get there, unless the desktop paradigm changes, then the OSS community will have their free desktop alternative.
Yeah, there's a VAT tax, and it replaces an income tax. Smart idea, I'd like to do that here
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on Earth, the EU has some of the highest income tax rates, in addition to the astronomical VAT:UK: up to 40%
Sweden: Between 33% and 60%
Spain: 18%-48%
Germany: 15%-42%
Denmark: 44%-63%
source
But, yeah, a VAT or sales tax is a great idea, but not in addition to an income tax! Tax it coming in, or tax it coming out, but don't shave off the value of my dollar twice.
Then we can enact a 25% tax on all food sold online to fight obesity! Next we can enact a 25% tax on gun-friendly sites to fight domestic violence...
Your heros in Europe already do this. It is called the VAT, although it is not done online.I'm glad that firefox is putting pressure - whether real or imagined - on microsoft, as this certainly prevents them from resting on their laurels.
IE 7 is bound to maintain microsoft's dominance over the browser market. However, this will at least keep them on top with a (desperately needed!) much improved browser.
The problem with errors is that detecting all errors all the time is absolutely impossible. Think back to your intro theory cs class and to Turing Recognizability. Think halting problem. Now, reduce the problem of finding all errors to the halting problem:
if (my_design_contains_any_errors) while(1);
else exit;
Feed this into a program that halts on all input and see what happens. You can't, because we know it is impossible for it to always return an answer. QED: errors are unavoidable. No need to sniff derisively in the direction of NASA's "middle management". Let's see if YOU can do a better job!
No. Having a bunch of providers is exactly what will spur higher bandwidths and lower prices. It is called the free market system.
Alan Stern said, "wouldn't deny a chihauhau a place among dogs because it is too small"
yeah, no kidding. But if the definition of a dog included, "must not weigh less than 30lbs" then yes, a chihauhau would most certainly not be dog.
I know there is no such definitive critereon for planets, but jeeze...a simple webster's definition includes the phrase "...large heavenly bodies..." (emph mine). Any reasonable defintion of large would probably exclude pluto, just as any reasonable definition of "large dog" would most certainly exclude the lowly chihauhau
I have a hunch that this is because programs like Kazaa are devious. Even when you think you're not sharing anything, you are. So, there are probably many many people who think they are only downloading music, not sharing it, too. For instance, only the most clever will point their shared folder to an empty directory, so as not to share anything. But only the cleverest of the clever realize that your download directory is automatically shared, so that each and every file you download is shared, unless you move it out! Ooops! Combine that with Kazaa's infamous difficulty to actually close, and you've got plenty of unwitting file sharers out there.