I'd also point out that netbooks do NOT use tons of power and
... It's not the netbook per-se that sucks your wallet dry. It's the power brick. <snip> Your netbook may sip electricity... but the power brick it's connected to is probably nothing more than a transformer with a fat ass capacitor and a half-bridge rectifier in it.
I don't know where you got your netbooks, but the netbooks I've seen have all used switching power adapters. It turns out, all that metal needed for transformers and large capacitors and heat sinks makes them uneconomical for even cheap electronics.
Android and desktop Linux are not really that close. Android has an almost entirely different userspace from desktop Linux, because of Google's allergy to GPL and open development. It uses Bionic instead of GNU libc, it uses Dalvik instead of OpenJDK, it uses SurfaceFlinger instead of X or an existing framebuffer library, it uses Binder instead of DBUS, and wakelocks have been a challenging addition to the Linux kernel. Just off the top of my head.
Apple, obviously, has no problem using the same libraries and Objective C frameworks on MacOS and iOS.
I thought netbooks were destroyed by their attempts to grow. 1 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive, 10" screen, Windows 7, $300 price point, it's basically as expensive as a conventional laptop but smaller and slower. What happened to the $100 laptop? What happened to the small but shock-proof SSD? What happened to 7" or 9" screens? All of that has been ceded to crappy Android laptops.
I thought it was about Tegra, and Optimus, and GeForce, and maybe some bad memories of Nforce. NVIDIA has never before been a friend of open source.
Re:Ballmer's replacement - a possible strategy?
on
Ballmer To Retire
·
· Score: 1
I'm not saying that they're badly positioned to promote a private cloud model. I'm saying that they're not a trustworthy vendor in a post-Snowden world.
Microsoft were always the cheap, crap option. DOS over Unix, Windows over Unix or Mac. I can't think of a single 'really cool thing' they've ever done.
PCs were cheap, crap devices back then. DOS made them easier to use, but the real exciting products were BASIC and Excel. 640kB of RAM was never really enough, but it was certainly easier to get work done using it with DOS than with a complicated multi-user operating system.
For all its failings, Windows did provide an enormous amount of compatibility. Binary programs run on computers from all vendors, and DOS programs can still run on Windows 8, probably. Personally, I think closed-source software is hostile to users, but even open-source software was hard to run on the dominant Unix systems of the time. Back when Windows was released, Unix was sort of crap, too.
I think there is a potential for Microsoft to make cool stuff. You can't build such a huge company without having some good ideas in there. I just think it's unlikely for Microsoft to get them out there.
Re:Ballmer's replacement - a possible strategy?
on
Ballmer To Retire
·
· Score: 1
I've suggested previously, even before the post-Snowden cloud/privacy concerns, that Microsoft could be in a very strong position if they swam across the current a little and promoted private clouds.
That is not a significant strength for Microsoft. There is no philosophical advantage to closed-source infrastructure compared to freedom-respecting software. Microsoft might win a bunch of sales because of their tight integration and simplified controls, but if you're worried about privacy, then Microsoft is not the way to go.
If you're doing a cloud deployment and you're worried about privacy, then the only real solution is to go to someopen-sourcecloudsystem.
Also, newsflash, many major religions support the cause of converting others or killing them. Including Christians and Jews. A clear majority of Muslims think that's an outdated concept just as much as Christians and Jews do too. It's just some relatively tiny sects that still support it (see Westboro Baptist Church).
You're wrong.
Jews do not support the cause of converting or killing non-Jews. As a religion, we don't believe in proselytizing.
I think SJHillman was referring to the Biblical account of how the Israelites came to be in control of Canaan. From a modern, multiculturalist perspective, it does sound an awful lot like genocide, complete with prophets blaming all their problems on their lack of complete devastation.
Not to mention that the modern state of Israel has their own small number of massacres, though the Palestinians have done the most massacres in the last couple decades.
But it would be nice if the alternate choices didn't always have a large dose of crazy with them.
Who says that the incumbents are not crazy?
I say the politicians that the media people like are the crazy ones, but those same media people put themselves in charge of telling us what is normal. The solution is to ignore the mainstream media.
E-mail has never been secure or private? Which court decided that? Oh wait, it was never decided.
...rambling about privacy of communication...
This is why many technologists have libertarian leanings. The law doesn't matter. It's the technology.
Email has never been secure or private because it was never designed to be secure or private. It's just not a part of the technology. Everybody who has worked with email servers knows this. A little bit of privacy was bolted on using SSL, but that is far from bulletproof. The fundamental problem is that the server that you use to receive the email has to have access to important parts of the message, and it usually reads all of the message. Possession is nine tenths of the law, so it's a small step from receiving the email to handing the email to the NSA.
Email is easier to copy than other communications. Pre-digital phone lines, you had to find the specific line and add a physical device to tap it. Snail mail, you need lots of labor to steam open letters and close them again without damage. Paper hospital records needed already overworked people to bring them to a copy machine.
Only postcards came close, because passersby can read postcards accidentally just by being near them. These days, the post office digitally scans the post card as part of the sorting process. That's why the PGP community has used post cards to describe conventional email, and enveloped letters to describe email with PGP. The first problem is that PGP and S/MIME are not mandatory parts of email, so they are very little used, and they are extremely inconvenient in mobile devices. The other problem is that PGP and S/MIME cannot encrypt the headers, so they cannot prevent important information from being read.
The only solution is to abandon the SMTP model of email. Phil Zimmermann of PGP recommends his Silent Circle secure texting and video/phone service, but it costs $120/year with a 1-year subscription. It will be challenging for a secure message service to gain the critical mass to be widely adopted. Email was successful because it was widely used (and free of charge) before the Internet was even invented. Skype used to be secure-ish, but Microsoft bought it and wiped out that part of it. If you want secure communications now, you have to work at it and put up with fragmented communities. It's not fun.
Actually, I personally believe they're Bush/Cheney thugs that Obama can't get rid of.
Then you personally are part of the problem. This mess is bipartisan. The guy on top changes for entertaining reasons every few years, but the substance never changes.
When Clinton was building the security apparatus, the Republicans were making a fuss. Then they quieted down while Bush built it even more. The Democrats made lots of noise, but they quieted down in turn when Obama was elected. That's just what I noticed since I was big enough to understand what was going on. I'm sure this has been going on since before I was born.
The whole thing is corrupt. The politicians. The party officials who choose the politicians. The administrators who run the government agencies. The media executives who sell the public in exchange for privileged access and a steady stream of vapid entertainment. But I suspect that the real problem goes deeper. I think it's just not possible to have a government over this many people with this much power, without it being corrupt. The United States needs to be dismantled.
If your vote really could count, and you wanted it to count, then you would not be voting for any of these corrupt Democrats or Republicans.
Too slow for games, you know. Better to run Windows 98SE.
Win2k was too slow for games? Got a citation for this? XP was built on the same NT-kernel as W2k and had the same DirectX-support IIRC.
Come to think of it, mainly people didn't use Windows 2000 because it was expensive and PCs came with either Windows 98SE or Windows ME. Also, those were earlier days for DirectX. Windows XP had newer DirectX. I don't think Windows 2000 came with DirectX.
I've never been much of a gamer. Google gives me this reference for benchmarks where 98SE ran better than 2k. Apparently, the main problem was driver support, again.
Actually, Vista SP1 fixed the file copy issue. It was a bit of a disconnect between theory and reality, when somebody was trying to get Windows Explorer to copy files without thrashing the disk cache. (Solution: Thrash the disk cache.) And the excessive UAC was due mostly to programmers being used to XP and everybody having Administrative rights.
I still find Vista more annoying than 7, but with service packs, I think it's definitely usable.
Historically, in absolute numbers, there are more people that like Windows than like MacOS.
Oh. I see my mistake. I still stand by the statement that people don't like Windows, and that's why Apple makes money off stylish.
The small populations of people who truly like Windows are spread out over far more OEMs than the number of companies making Macs (just Apple). These people are actually bad for the stylish PC business, because people who like Windows have hideous taste. You must be familiar with gaming computers with tinted windows and garish lights. They're buying parts from weirdos, not PCs from OEMs.
The fact that you saw flaws in Windows OSes, doesn't mean that people didn't like them. Some people disliking an OS while others like it is not only possible, it is reality.
You're not a native speaker of English, are you? When someone uses a vague grouping term like "people," they generally mean, "Everybody who matters. Individuals who collectively form what I think of as normal people."
People also don't like being tied up with chains and whipped. A few people like it. Windows is BDSM.
No president can repeal Roe v. Wade at all actually. It's a Supreme Court decision, not a law.
My goodness, you don't think presidents can unilaterally repeal laws, do you? That's Congress's job. The president only signs or vetoes the bills from Congress, and Congress can override the veto. Then the president is in charge of carrying it out.
The president can affect whether Roe v. Wade stands. The Supreme Court decides whether to overturn past Supreme Court rulings. And the President appoints justices to the Supreme Court (subject to approval from the Senate). So, in theory, a long succession of ultra-conservative presidents and a whole lot of conservative Senators can wait out the current Supreme Court justices and replace them with new Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. I think this is incredibly unlikely.
What is also unlikely, is that somebody would go through the effort to convince Congress and a whole lot of state legislatures to pass a constitutional amendment so that the Constitution actually does say something about privacy, instead of it being vaguely implied. That doesn't involve the president, but it is another way to get around the Supreme Court ruling.
I used Windows 3.1. It really felt like a program running on top of DOS, not an operating system on its own. Not to mention that IRQ and DMA allocations were so much fun. And the 8.3 file name limits were a blast from the past.
People loved 2000.
I thought it ran nicely, but nobody else had it. Too slow for games, you know. Better to run Windows 98SE.
People loved XP.
It's more than 10 years after XP was released. People got used to it. High school freshmen barely remember a world without Windows XP. But I remember when XP came out and people were decrying its resource usage and its "Fisher Price" themes. I never did bother learning which categories a random control panel belongs to.
People love 7.
See "brief historical exceptions." I think people were more sold on the concept of Windows 7 than the actual product of Windows 7, because of its visual break with Vista while being just a technical evolution of Vista.
MAC OS isnt available to license, what are you talking about?
Well, the availability of the license is extremely limited.
Back in the 90's, Apple tried selling conventional licenses. Very few companies were willing to pay Apple for the license, and switch suppliers for their most expensive chips, unless they were already invested in the Macintosh ecosystem. Though, I wonder how much Microsoft and Intel's predatory licenses contributed to that reluctance.
These days, if you want to sell a different computer with a legal MacOS license, essentially you have to buy a Mac and mod it. That's what Modbook, Inc. does.
The recent releases of the Mac OS (post Snow Leopard) have been weird and much less useful. Everything is animated, you can't turn the animations off and often, you are forced to wait for the animations to finish.
I think that's all releases of MacOS X.
Also, there has been this push to push UI metaphors from iOS on to the desktop. THIS IS TERRIBLE. On my 17" Macbook, in Lion, my scroll bars became the width of a quarter.
I don't know what quarters are like where you come from, but my peeve with Lion is that the scroll bars have become only slightly wider than the letter "I." And if you're on a "touch" device, like a MacBook Pro or an iMac with a Magic Trackpad, then the scroll bars disappear entirely. This was especially annoying when I was diagnosing somebody's Mail.app, looking at error messages and then accidentally discovered: Hey! There are more error messages. The scroll bar was just invisible!
Also, auto termination of apps, where the app isn't really auto terminated, but just the UI is? All to save 5 MB of RAM?
Yeah, this is bad. Maybe there is a way to turn it off. I'm not being facetious; I actually want to see if it works.
Sandboxing. This is the WRONG way to do security. I don't know what the right way is, but this is a royal PITA.
To me, sandboxing sounds like a great idea. It's defense in depth. The trick is seeing if they can execute it well.
Look at iTunes 11 (fugly) vs. iTunes 10 (crisp).
I think all iTunes releases have been ugly and bloated.
And no more 17" MBP? Look. We're all getting older and cramming more pixels into a smaller space isn't going to make the screen easier to read.
We're not all getting older. You're getting older, and a new generation is growing up around you. Besides, have you seen a Retina MacBook Pro? That's how I want all laptops in the future to be.
I guess the 17" MBP was a casualty of product line simplification. Apple can't source enough 17" 3840x2400 screens to make it affordable for them, and they didn't want a high-end 17" laptop with a lower resolution than the high-end 15" laptop.
there was some demand at the time for stylish PC's. Alienware started in the 90's and some computer makers did release nice looking computers.
See, this is why Apple makes money off of stylish. Companies like Sony and Alienware made very pretty computer cases, but inside was the same old rectangular box running Windows. Even all-in-ones were boring rectangular boxes. People buy Macs for MacOS, not just for the hardware. With brief historical exceptions, people don't like Windows.
But Windows helps sell the computer, because nobody buys a computer that can't run programs. Witness the $900 million write-off that Microsoft just did. Most companies can't afford to license MacOS, and Microsoft makes predatory licensing deals, so for a long time they were stuck with Windows.
Let's see how things go, now that Android is such a major operating system.
Thats not prophetic. That's mocking those that thought things could change for the better. Apparently, her solution is despair and continuation of policies regardless of their merit. I love that campain slogan "Everthing sucks, and nothing will ever change!" Its kind of goth.
As funny as that would be, actually she was mocking people who hoped that voting for Obama would lead to major change.
I've always been partial to the idea of having government officials selected from a lottery drawing of any citizen, similar to a draft.
At the minimum, I wouldn't mind seeing term limits in Congress.
And then the real power of Congress would be centered on the Congressional staffers and lobbyists. They already do a lot of the stuff of substance in Congress. (What, did you think any elected Congressional official actually read the PATRIOT Act?) With the insanely complicated government that we have, only dedicated professionals can keep it running.
Of course, the problem is that the federal government is too complicated and does too many things. If we downsized it so a Congress can run it with 2-year rotations, that would be a major change in the country.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
So it's better to never vote at all?
I have never seen a candidate with whom I agree with 100%, so every candidate is somewhat "evil" in that he's not completely in agreement with my principles.
That's an extremely broad concept of "evil." As in, invalid.
As we have most recently seen with Obama, the positions he takes when he's in power are not the positions he takes when he's campaigning. I didn't vote for him in 2008 because as soon as he was nominated, he selected Joe Biden as his running mate. That was a strong signal that he was going to preserve the status quo on structural issues. I think Obama-care was the most significant difference with the Republican candidate, so we'll see how that goes.
You should vote for a person based on non-evil decision-making. Realistically, no one president is going to be able to repeal Roe v Wade. No one president is going to dismantle the military. NASA is not building a base on the moon. So vote for the candidate that, when faced with decisions that he can make, will probably make good decisions. I voted for Obama in the 2008 primary because of a quirk of California voting law and because he was campaigning on Change, and I really think the country needs to change. (Then he revealed Biden, and I realized: Nope, no major change.) I trust the third-party candidates more because they're upfront about the ideological basis of their decision-making.
I don't think there's a good way to quantify alignment with ideals. That leads to all sorts of problems with statistical weighting and evaluating how true the candidate is to the ideal. In my short adult life, I've thought that all the major candidates were less than 50% aligned with my interests. Also, writing yourself in is a silly protest. You need to vote for a team of delegates to the Electoral College.
in Python... several minutes later it became obvious that I would need something faster. Ported the code over to C++, I think it finished in about 90s.
The obvious solution is NumPy & SciPy. Get much of the ease of programming in Python with the speed of optimized C.
I find it telling that Liotta (the author from TFA) is not mentioned in any IEEE RFCs, except in RFC 5345 to say that he makes claims with no real-world measurements. But that's just appealing to authority.
The most troubling part of his proposal, I think, is the elimination of Postel's Law. The Telco-oriented people have been telling the Internet community people all along that what we need is an intelligent network that provides QoS guarantees. The Internet community rejected that, with the result being an Internet that grows in speed and adapts to countless unforeseen applications. Liotta uses the human autonomic nervous system as metaphor, but the fatal flaw is that the human autonomic system has only one brain. The Internet doesn't work with a single controlling entity.
Likewise, his illustration of the Youtube clip is not entirely accurate. Companies like Google and Netflix are making colocation deals with a bunch of the Internet Service Providers, so that most videos don't have to travel through the backbone, Time Warner Cable aside.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also point out that netbooks do NOT use tons of power and
... It's not the netbook per-se that sucks your wallet dry. It's the power brick. <snip> Your netbook may sip electricity... but the power brick it's connected to is probably nothing more than a transformer with a fat ass capacitor and a half-bridge rectifier in it.
I don't know where you got your netbooks, but the netbooks I've seen have all used switching power adapters. It turns out, all that metal needed for transformers and large capacitors and heat sinks makes them uneconomical for even cheap electronics.
Android and desktop Linux are not really that close. Android has an almost entirely different userspace from desktop Linux, because of Google's allergy to GPL and open development. It uses Bionic instead of GNU libc, it uses Dalvik instead of OpenJDK, it uses SurfaceFlinger instead of X or an existing framebuffer library, it uses Binder instead of DBUS, and wakelocks have been a challenging addition to the Linux kernel. Just off the top of my head.
Apple, obviously, has no problem using the same libraries and Objective C frameworks on MacOS and iOS.
I thought netbooks were destroyed by their attempts to grow. 1 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive, 10" screen, Windows 7, $300 price point, it's basically as expensive as a conventional laptop but smaller and slower. What happened to the $100 laptop? What happened to the small but shock-proof SSD? What happened to 7" or 9" screens? All of that has been ceded to crappy Android laptops.
I thought it was about Tegra, and Optimus, and GeForce, and maybe some bad memories of Nforce. NVIDIA has never before been a friend of open source.
I'm not saying that they're badly positioned to promote a private cloud model. I'm saying that they're not a trustworthy vendor in a post-Snowden world.
Microsoft started out making really cool things
Like what? DOS?
Microsoft were always the cheap, crap option. DOS over Unix, Windows over Unix or Mac. I can't think of a single 'really cool thing' they've ever done.
PCs were cheap, crap devices back then. DOS made them easier to use, but the real exciting products were BASIC and Excel. 640kB of RAM was never really enough, but it was certainly easier to get work done using it with DOS than with a complicated multi-user operating system.
For all its failings, Windows did provide an enormous amount of compatibility. Binary programs run on computers from all vendors, and DOS programs can still run on Windows 8, probably. Personally, I think closed-source software is hostile to users, but even open-source software was hard to run on the dominant Unix systems of the time. Back when Windows was released, Unix was sort of crap, too.
I think there is a potential for Microsoft to make cool stuff. You can't build such a huge company without having some good ideas in there. I just think it's unlikely for Microsoft to get them out there.
I've suggested previously, even before the post-Snowden cloud/privacy concerns, that Microsoft could be in a very strong position if they swam across the current a little and promoted private clouds.
That is not a significant strength for Microsoft. There is no philosophical advantage to closed-source infrastructure compared to freedom-respecting software. Microsoft might win a bunch of sales because of their tight integration and simplified controls, but if you're worried about privacy, then Microsoft is not the way to go.
If you're doing a cloud deployment and you're worried about privacy, then the only real solution is to go to some open-source cloud system.
Also, newsflash, many major religions support the cause of converting others or killing them. Including Christians and Jews. A clear majority of Muslims think that's an outdated concept just as much as Christians and Jews do too. It's just some relatively tiny sects that still support it (see Westboro Baptist Church).
You're wrong.
Jews do not support the cause of converting or killing non-Jews. As a religion, we don't believe in proselytizing.
I think SJHillman was referring to the Biblical account of how the Israelites came to be in control of Canaan. From a modern, multiculturalist perspective, it does sound an awful lot like genocide, complete with prophets blaming all their problems on their lack of complete devastation.
Not to mention that the modern state of Israel has their own small number of massacres, though the Palestinians have done the most massacres in the last couple decades.
But it would be nice if the alternate choices didn't always have a large dose of crazy with them.
Who says that the incumbents are not crazy?
I say the politicians that the media people like are the crazy ones, but those same media people put themselves in charge of telling us what is normal. The solution is to ignore the mainstream media.
E-mail has never been secure or private? Which court decided that? Oh wait, it was never decided.
This is why many technologists have libertarian leanings. The law doesn't matter. It's the technology.
Email has never been secure or private because it was never designed to be secure or private. It's just not a part of the technology. Everybody who has worked with email servers knows this. A little bit of privacy was bolted on using SSL, but that is far from bulletproof. The fundamental problem is that the server that you use to receive the email has to have access to important parts of the message, and it usually reads all of the message. Possession is nine tenths of the law, so it's a small step from receiving the email to handing the email to the NSA.
Email is easier to copy than other communications. Pre-digital phone lines, you had to find the specific line and add a physical device to tap it. Snail mail, you need lots of labor to steam open letters and close them again without damage. Paper hospital records needed already overworked people to bring them to a copy machine.
Only postcards came close, because passersby can read postcards accidentally just by being near them. These days, the post office digitally scans the post card as part of the sorting process. That's why the PGP community has used post cards to describe conventional email, and enveloped letters to describe email with PGP. The first problem is that PGP and S/MIME are not mandatory parts of email, so they are very little used, and they are extremely inconvenient in mobile devices. The other problem is that PGP and S/MIME cannot encrypt the headers, so they cannot prevent important information from being read.
The only solution is to abandon the SMTP model of email. Phil Zimmermann of PGP recommends his Silent Circle secure texting and video/phone service, but it costs $120/year with a 1-year subscription. It will be challenging for a secure message service to gain the critical mass to be widely adopted. Email was successful because it was widely used (and free of charge) before the Internet was even invented. Skype used to be secure-ish, but Microsoft bought it and wiped out that part of it. If you want secure communications now, you have to work at it and put up with fragmented communities. It's not fun.
Actually, I personally believe they're Bush/Cheney thugs that Obama can't get rid of.
Then you personally are part of the problem. This mess is bipartisan. The guy on top changes for entertaining reasons every few years, but the substance never changes.
When Clinton was building the security apparatus, the Republicans were making a fuss. Then they quieted down while Bush built it even more. The Democrats made lots of noise, but they quieted down in turn when Obama was elected. That's just what I noticed since I was big enough to understand what was going on. I'm sure this has been going on since before I was born.
The whole thing is corrupt. The politicians. The party officials who choose the politicians. The administrators who run the government agencies. The media executives who sell the public in exchange for privileged access and a steady stream of vapid entertainment. But I suspect that the real problem goes deeper. I think it's just not possible to have a government over this many people with this much power, without it being corrupt. The United States needs to be dismantled.
If your vote really could count, and you wanted it to count, then you would not be voting for any of these corrupt Democrats or Republicans.
Too slow for games, you know. Better to run Windows 98SE.
Win2k was too slow for games? Got a citation for this? XP was built on the same NT-kernel as W2k and had the same DirectX-support IIRC.
Come to think of it, mainly people didn't use Windows 2000 because it was expensive and PCs came with either Windows 98SE or Windows ME. Also, those were earlier days for DirectX. Windows XP had newer DirectX. I don't think Windows 2000 came with DirectX.
I've never been much of a gamer. Google gives me this reference for benchmarks where 98SE ran better than 2k. Apparently, the main problem was driver support, again.
Actually, Vista SP1 fixed the file copy issue. It was a bit of a disconnect between theory and reality, when somebody was trying to get Windows Explorer to copy files without thrashing the disk cache. (Solution: Thrash the disk cache.) And the excessive UAC was due mostly to programmers being used to XP and everybody having Administrative rights.
I still find Vista more annoying than 7, but with service packs, I think it's definitely usable.
Historically, in absolute numbers, there are more people that like Windows than like MacOS.
Oh. I see my mistake. I still stand by the statement that people don't like Windows, and that's why Apple makes money off stylish.
The small populations of people who truly like Windows are spread out over far more OEMs than the number of companies making Macs (just Apple). These people are actually bad for the stylish PC business, because people who like Windows have hideous taste. You must be familiar with gaming computers with tinted windows and garish lights. They're buying parts from weirdos, not PCs from OEMs.
The fact that you saw flaws in Windows OSes, doesn't mean that people didn't like them. Some people disliking an OS while others like it is not only possible, it is reality.
You're not a native speaker of English, are you? When someone uses a vague grouping term like "people," they generally mean, "Everybody who matters. Individuals who collectively form what I think of as normal people."
People also don't like being tied up with chains and whipped. A few people like it. Windows is BDSM.
No president can repeal Roe v. Wade at all actually. It's a Supreme Court decision, not a law.
My goodness, you don't think presidents can unilaterally repeal laws, do you? That's Congress's job. The president only signs or vetoes the bills from Congress, and Congress can override the veto. Then the president is in charge of carrying it out.
The president can affect whether Roe v. Wade stands. The Supreme Court decides whether to overturn past Supreme Court rulings. And the President appoints justices to the Supreme Court (subject to approval from the Senate). So, in theory, a long succession of ultra-conservative presidents and a whole lot of conservative Senators can wait out the current Supreme Court justices and replace them with new Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. I think this is incredibly unlikely.
What is also unlikely, is that somebody would go through the effort to convince Congress and a whole lot of state legislatures to pass a constitutional amendment so that the Constitution actually does say something about privacy, instead of it being vaguely implied. That doesn't involve the president, but it is another way to get around the Supreme Court ruling.
People loved Windows 3.1.
I used Windows 3.1. It really felt like a program running on top of DOS, not an operating system on its own. Not to mention that IRQ and DMA allocations were so much fun. And the 8.3 file name limits were a blast from the past.
People loved 2000.
I thought it ran nicely, but nobody else had it. Too slow for games, you know. Better to run Windows 98SE.
People loved XP.
It's more than 10 years after XP was released. People got used to it. High school freshmen barely remember a world without Windows XP. But I remember when XP came out and people were decrying its resource usage and its "Fisher Price" themes. I never did bother learning which categories a random control panel belongs to.
People love 7.
See "brief historical exceptions." I think people were more sold on the concept of Windows 7 than the actual product of Windows 7, because of its visual break with Vista while being just a technical evolution of Vista.
MAC OS isnt available to license, what are you talking about?
Well, the availability of the license is extremely limited.
Back in the 90's, Apple tried selling conventional licenses. Very few companies were willing to pay Apple for the license, and switch suppliers for their most expensive chips, unless they were already invested in the Macintosh ecosystem. Though, I wonder how much Microsoft and Intel's predatory licenses contributed to that reluctance.
These days, if you want to sell a different computer with a legal MacOS license, essentially you have to buy a Mac and mod it. That's what Modbook, Inc. does.
I call shenanigans.
The recent releases of the Mac OS (post Snow Leopard) have been weird and much less useful. Everything is animated, you can't turn the animations off and often, you are forced to wait for the animations to finish.
I think that's all releases of MacOS X.
Also, there has been this push to push UI metaphors from iOS on to the desktop. THIS IS TERRIBLE. On my 17" Macbook, in Lion, my scroll bars became the width of a quarter.
I don't know what quarters are like where you come from, but my peeve with Lion is that the scroll bars have become only slightly wider than the letter "I." And if you're on a "touch" device, like a MacBook Pro or an iMac with a Magic Trackpad, then the scroll bars disappear entirely. This was especially annoying when I was diagnosing somebody's Mail.app, looking at error messages and then accidentally discovered: Hey! There are more error messages. The scroll bar was just invisible!
Also, auto termination of apps, where the app isn't really auto terminated, but just the UI is? All to save 5 MB of RAM?
Yeah, this is bad. Maybe there is a way to turn it off. I'm not being facetious; I actually want to see if it works.
Sandboxing. This is the WRONG way to do security. I don't know what the right way is, but this is a royal PITA.
To me, sandboxing sounds like a great idea. It's defense in depth. The trick is seeing if they can execute it well.
Look at iTunes 11 (fugly) vs. iTunes 10 (crisp).
I think all iTunes releases have been ugly and bloated.
And no more 17" MBP? Look. We're all getting older and cramming more pixels into a smaller space isn't going to make the screen easier to read.
We're not all getting older. You're getting older, and a new generation is growing up around you. Besides, have you seen a Retina MacBook Pro? That's how I want all laptops in the future to be.
I guess the 17" MBP was a casualty of product line simplification. Apple can't source enough 17" 3840x2400 screens to make it affordable for them, and they didn't want a high-end 17" laptop with a lower resolution than the high-end 15" laptop.
there was some demand at the time for stylish PC's. Alienware started in the 90's and some computer makers did release nice looking computers.
See, this is why Apple makes money off of stylish. Companies like Sony and Alienware made very pretty computer cases, but inside was the same old rectangular box running Windows. Even all-in-ones were boring rectangular boxes. People buy Macs for MacOS, not just for the hardware. With brief historical exceptions, people don't like Windows.
But Windows helps sell the computer, because nobody buys a computer that can't run programs. Witness the $900 million write-off that Microsoft just did. Most companies can't afford to license MacOS, and Microsoft makes predatory licensing deals, so for a long time they were stuck with Windows.
Let's see how things go, now that Android is such a major operating system.
Thats not prophetic. That's mocking those that thought things could change for the better. Apparently, her solution is despair and continuation of policies regardless of their merit. I love that campain slogan "Everthing sucks, and nothing will ever change!" Its kind of goth.
As funny as that would be, actually she was mocking people who hoped that voting for Obama would lead to major change.
I've always been partial to the idea of having government officials selected from a lottery drawing of any citizen, similar to a draft.
At the minimum, I wouldn't mind seeing term limits in Congress.
And then the real power of Congress would be centered on the Congressional staffers and lobbyists. They already do a lot of the stuff of substance in Congress. (What, did you think any elected Congressional official actually read the PATRIOT Act?) With the insanely complicated government that we have, only dedicated professionals can keep it running.
Of course, the problem is that the federal government is too complicated and does too many things. If we downsized it so a Congress can run it with 2-year rotations, that would be a major change in the country.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
So it's better to never vote at all?
I have never seen a candidate with whom I agree with 100%, so every candidate is somewhat "evil" in that he's not completely in agreement with my principles.
That's an extremely broad concept of "evil." As in, invalid.
As we have most recently seen with Obama, the positions he takes when he's in power are not the positions he takes when he's campaigning. I didn't vote for him in 2008 because as soon as he was nominated, he selected Joe Biden as his running mate. That was a strong signal that he was going to preserve the status quo on structural issues. I think Obama-care was the most significant difference with the Republican candidate, so we'll see how that goes.
You should vote for a person based on non-evil decision-making. Realistically, no one president is going to be able to repeal Roe v Wade. No one president is going to dismantle the military. NASA is not building a base on the moon. So vote for the candidate that, when faced with decisions that he can make, will probably make good decisions. I voted for Obama in the 2008 primary because of a quirk of California voting law and because he was campaigning on Change, and I really think the country needs to change. (Then he revealed Biden, and I realized: Nope, no major change.) I trust the third-party candidates more because they're upfront about the ideological basis of their decision-making.
I don't think there's a good way to quantify alignment with ideals. That leads to all sorts of problems with statistical weighting and evaluating how true the candidate is to the ideal. In my short adult life, I've thought that all the major candidates were less than 50% aligned with my interests. Also, writing yourself in is a silly protest. You need to vote for a team of delegates to the Electoral College.
in Python... several minutes later it became obvious that I would need something faster. Ported the code over to C++, I think it finished in about 90s.
The obvious solution is NumPy & SciPy. Get much of the ease of programming in Python with the speed of optimized C.
I find it telling that Liotta (the author from TFA) is not mentioned in any IEEE RFCs, except in RFC 5345 to say that he makes claims with no real-world measurements. But that's just appealing to authority.
The most troubling part of his proposal, I think, is the elimination of Postel's Law. The Telco-oriented people have been telling the Internet community people all along that what we need is an intelligent network that provides QoS guarantees. The Internet community rejected that, with the result being an Internet that grows in speed and adapts to countless unforeseen applications. Liotta uses the human autonomic nervous system as metaphor, but the fatal flaw is that the human autonomic system has only one brain. The Internet doesn't work with a single controlling entity.
Likewise, his illustration of the Youtube clip is not entirely accurate. Companies like Google and Netflix are making colocation deals with a bunch of the Internet Service Providers, so that most videos don't have to travel through the backbone, Time Warner Cable aside.
There are problems with the current Internet and projects to redo the basis of networking, but Liotta's proposals remind me of those fantasy "cities of the future" fiction that I used to read when I was a kid.