And all you closed, patent encumbered codec trolls: please go away now. Your services are no longer required.
The project is also backed by hardware partners such as AMD, ARM, and Nvidia. "Hardware acceleration is extremely important." Sunder Pichai, Google vice president of product management (From TheRegister link).
I loved the part where on the approval committee charged with evaluating textbooks, some positively rated a sample in which every page was blank. That was beautiful.
Slavery is still practiced in the US. Humans are still imported, forced to work, traded as property, beaten, branded, tortured and killed. It's just not legal now. The US slave population may not be close to what it was right before the civil war, but the numbers are still disturbing. It's no longer sanctioned by law. It's now not restricted by race but more by gender - mostly prevalent in the sex worker trade and textile manufacturing, and agriculture. But it persists.
There already are Open textbooks. There are numerous sites where they are indexed, catalogued, advertised and - yes - sold in bound printed formats, collections and whatnot. As you note, there are many print houses that will print a run of books, and their prices can be much more reasonable than buying from traditional publishers. Because YOU are in control of the content, you can order as many or as few as you want. Paperbacks? Books on CD? Another 800 of last year's run? No problem. This breaks the "forced update" model where a school district has to landfill and reorder new books every second year because of spurious "revised editions". Many open textbooks are quite good. They go all the way up to the nearly 2,000 college level courses in MIT OpenCourseWare and beyond. Because the books are free to download, the teachers can choose from a broad selection appropriate to your local culture.
This stuff will sort itself out sooner or later.
I'm hoping that one day soon kids just get their K-16 curriculum on an SDHC card or whatever media is common when they show up at Kindergarten and if they finish it before their education allotment runs out then more power to 'em. I never saw the value in attendance and peer-synchronous education. School is not daycare. Kids are all different. In a normal distribution the fast achievers can save the state money and time that can be used to help those who struggle, and incidentally achieve the accomplishments our future needs from them.
Mod parent up (and this down if you must, since I wrote the parent and I'm asking for an upmod there). I forgot to click the selfmods, and I think the parent post is worthy of them and I don't want it to be missed in the/. dross so I'm following up with this feeble plea.
Of course if you think the parent sucks, mod it down and this post too, but first please read this.
On behalf of everyone with a long term view, let me say: fuck you you ignorant fuck. My apologies to those few readers who are still sensitive to the word "fuck", but this fucking idiot is trying to promote an error that will fucking kill my fourth generation offspring, their progeny, and my hopes for the survival of mankind. Forgive me for being emotional about that, but if you can't get emotional about the Death of Man, you're dead inside already.
The rise of science occurred in an interglacial age that's lasted barely 9000 years. Our written history is barely 5,000 years. The vast majority of who and what we are (our culture) happened in the last 300 years. 10,000 years ago we were barely animals. When it ends the decline will be swift and violent, and for the 100,000 years of ice age that follows we'll be barely animals again if we survive at all. That end is due. It cannot be prevented no matter what we do. It's an Earth orbital thing. The survival of any mammals to the end of that 100KY, let alone Men, is quite questionable.
If our culture is to survive we need to establish a self-sufficent offspring of that culture in some place where our thermonuclear cruise missiles cannot reach them. That place is off of the Earth, and we need to do it now. "Someday later" is too late. A colony here on Earth won't do because in the decline there will be quite a lot of violence and there is no corner on the planet that won't be at risk. Even if a culture survived the Troubles, they would not have the resources to get us off this rock and so would slowly decline until they were extinct. 100,000 years is a long time. The end is the same. The end of terrestrial civilization is certain. It's inevitable. It's only the end of all civilization, science and culture, all that we have learned, potentially the end of the human genome, if we choose to allow it to be. If we choose that, if we listen to your ignorant mumblings, we deserve our fate and you have won, you ignorant fuck. Still, there will be no more NASCAR.
Mankind is it seems the first terrestrial species that has to choose extinction rather than having it thrust upon us. We could escape it if we wished. We could get off this rock if we cared. We could backup our genome and all of our knowledge offsite - if we so chose. But we won't. If we choose extinction then our supposed intelligence has no advantage over the peanut-sized brains of dinosaurs. It's another failed path in the Darwinist exploration of Life's potentials - tried this time and forgotten only to be retried a billion years hence when our mass has been restirred with the galaxy and given time to stew.
Now please find a convenient fire and die in it before you infect someone else with your idiocy.
(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. {11} There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.
/I'm not prone to cite bible verse, but there you go. All your software patents are invalid. It sez so in the Good Book. The verse itself is an uncited theft of the work of Sophocles c. 429 BCE - himself a synthesist who didn't cite the vast realms of prior art from which he distilled his digests of the written and performed arts into their purest forms. Sophocles was a hack, but we don't have records of the prior art he stole, or today he'd be a pirate. His synthesis though? Timeless art in and of itself. It's good thing for us ancient Greece didn't have DMCA, DRM, and eternal copyright or he'd be Sophowho? To most he already is.
If only ancient Greece, or modern Phoenix, had a sort of distributed Library of Alexandria where one works could not be forgotten - where the wisdom of our fathers and their fathers (and their foolishness too) might be preserved and so remain available to our children and their children. Something like a Google for books. Alas, copyright prevents it and copyright is now eternal in every practical sense. So it is that each new generation, constrained by previously patented and copyrighted art has diminishing realms of imagination to work with - until the lawyers finally abolish imagination altogether and we reach the asymptote where creation ends. So then we lay upon our children the duty to rethink the thoughts we've had, to re-invent our inventions, and to do so in peril of the trolls who lay claim to a third degree ownership of any potential perceived reference to characters or invented places in a brief manuscript published in 100 copies only, 200 years before - and upon their children we lay a logarithmically greater burden.
As patents are the death of invention, copyrights are the death of art. A pity our children must climb these mountains we've built for them without the benefit of a culture, but culture itself is deprecated in this regime in preference to whatever mindless new drivel can escape lawsuits long enough to become popular - and then is itself extinguished in a flurry of lawyers and cocaine.
We might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but now we huddle in fear of lawyers.
Mark put the celery in the plastic bag next to the apples. His mind was elsewhere, but he had the presence of mind to be polite. "It's debit today Cindy." He hoped she liked 'Cindy' - the nametag read "Cynthia". A flicker of a smile came across her face, but she didn't break from her focused barcode laser scanning.
Gabby was going on again about mom & dad, oblivious to his funk. "Your mom said Dick wanted to know about your plans for after." They'd had this talk a dozen times and he didn't want to talk about "after". To talk about "after" was to talk about "the End", and he didn't want to talk about that.
"Ngh" he said, "Did you get peanut butter?"
"It's in the cart already" she replied, her permanent politician's grin twisting a little. There might have been the hint of a raised eyebrow. "Is Greg coming over this weekend?"
He shrugged just as Cynthia called out "Two ninety eight fifty." She flashed another cordial smile, patient as he swiped the card and fumbled with his pin. Gabby was loading the last of the things into the cart.
And so it went: day after day - a distraction. The burden was heavy on him, but not unbearably so. It didn't get worse but it didn't get better. When he thought about it much at all, he considered it just part of the job. "That's what it's like to be America's last manned space mission commander. That's what it costs to sit in that chair" he'd tell himself. And then he'd get about the business of living the days until the End of US manned spaceflight - with vigor, with interest, with zeal - but not without some regret for what might have been.
Jim looked at the old storage with nostalgia. Here were many thousands of virtual machines which once served the grand purpose of moving the enterprise forward. For the most part they were identical smart clones but here and there the user had customized to suit his needs in novel and interesting ways. They might have been notable innovations if anyone cared. But space is space, and nobody had accessed these VMs in a very long time.
So he clicked delete and they were gone - the last Windows desktops. They won't be missed. This is how we gain room for progress: by taking out the trash.
The observation is useful in itself. Hydrogen + Oxygen = water. If you use energy to split the hydrogen from the oxygen in water and combine the hydrogen with carbon you get two things: breatheable oxygen, and hydrocarbons which are useful for many things - and the only known durable storage medium for Hydrogen.
People need to be reminded that (to us) all energy is nuclear energy, and our most common nuclear energy source is that bright ball in the sky. Even Hydro power is derivative of nuclear energy (The sun (nuclear source) warms water in the oceans that falls on mountains that flows down rivers into the aqueduct that feeds the dam that provides power to the Western US.
If common folk find a way to understand the difference between storage media and energy generation, it'll go a long ways toward real progress in green energy.
This is why you pool your media on NAS devices like these. And rip your media to it. And arrange with friends for offsite backups in case of disaster.
Sharing parties are where it's at, don'tcha know. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. The first rule of Ufenet is "don't talk about Ufenet". If it's not online then as far as the RIAA, MPAA and BSA are concerned, it didn't happen.
Until fairly recently I was personally opposed (though tolerant) of media piracy - unwilling to do it myself. Some time ago though I came around. Perhaps it was when they called transcoding DVDs I had bought into a useful media for me to watch it (3gp) stealing that did it. More likely it was the copyright extensions and DMCA. With the DMCA they can self-regulate the expiration of copyright with their DRM and so make us buy the same content over and over. Due to the efforts of the RIAA and the MPAA and their ilk in extending copyright, I now figure they have stolen from me and my heirs far more content than I could take back from them in a hundred lifetimes. I could not possibly even read the titles of the books they've stolen from me while I yet live, let alone the books too. The photos? If I browsed a slideshow from now until the end of my days with every waking hour I could not touch one hundredth of one percent of the photos they've stolen from me. Screw 'em.
Until today I was equally opposed to software piracy, but just now I realized they're working the same tools to the same ends. Their work on software patents is preventing me from getting good progress. Screw them too. If your profits get in the way of Progress, then to hell with you.
If you needed my encouragement, have at it. I am hereby encouraging all of you to pirate any media you desire: audio, video, software, books and other, software and hardware patents too, no matter how current by any means expedient. Until the bastards give back our "limited times" and "fair use" all of their stuff is fair game. Just don't get caught.
I'm trying to figure out if you're serious. Man, those are some ugly control issues you're having. You should have that checked out before it becomes infected.
Remote desktop is only one of the things it can do. It has other uses. If those aren't useful to you in a work environment it's not a tool for you. Personally at work I have no use for a cylinder hone. That doesn't mean a cylinder hone is a toy. You calling iPad a toy is not going to stop others from putting it to work for them. It's a new tool and we're still finding out what work it applies to but it seems to be a good number of uses for some.
Basically, yeah. If you've got a lot of people they can share one computer. And almost everybody who buys an iPad already has a computer anyway. Depending on what your needs are and what your regular PC is running, you don't have to have any additional software except the appropriate RDP client, and I don't think that's very expensive. The iTap RDP client for iPad is $11.99. And it's not some "future" iPad. It works today. They've had this since day 1. RDP runs on the iPod Touch for goodness sake and has for a long time. If it's a home computer you'll probably have to pay your ISP for a "real" IP address.
Sometimes running getting in the pocket and carving some curl can really clear your head - quite the productive work activity. And what is this "clock"?
Don't worry. Those millions of netbooks sold with Windows - which ruined the netbook market - will be available soon on Ebay at incredible discount rates. And they run Linux great, just like they always did. As a bonus, the flash storage they use is much cheaper and has much more capacity than when they were first offerred.
Look into remote desktop packages. With those your iPad becomes a wireless-attached terminal to your normal environment, routing input and display. In that way you can run any app your other computer can - from anywhere with 3G service - including all of your favorite flash and FaceBook games, or even PC games.
With a 3G connection to your Citrix farm and/or whatever RDP host you want to use (including hosted), you can do almost anything a good desktop can do. The iPad isn't necessarily the compute platform you need - think of it as a handy wireless portable terminal, that plays movies. The screen is still a little small - perhaps with the next processor upgrade they'll come out with an iPad+ with 17" or so at 1920x1080.
It' too soon to tell if iPad will crush other products. Since the thing isn't really launched worldwide yet, and the 3G versions were just released and supply is already constrained it's easy to see that the thing is a commercial success. We won't know what demand truly is until it's launched worldwide and supply catches up with it.
How well the Android slates deliver will show the iPad's place in the category it defined, so perhaps by Christmas. I wonder if there will be Moorestown units out by then, and Windows Mobile 7. Probably not with enough scale or buzz to get their peak markets rolling.
What a lot of people seem to be missing is that like the iPod and iPhone the sale doesn't end when you open the box - What His Jobsness has sold you is a store you can carry in your pocket so that you can buy books, music, movies and apps from him any time you so desire. And unlike Best Buy and BlockBuster and Borders, the store never closes - ever. It's right there in your pocket ready to close a deal whenever you are.
The die-offs coincide not with warming periods, but with cooling ones - and those tend to coincide with known asteroid impacts. When you think about it, that too may be "orbital".
Regardless, when the temp rises by 8C in 1000 years and given the normal cycles it's perfectly normal for two spans of a hundred years to warm by 1.4C, bridged by a century gap of little or no warming at all. That the current cycle lines up with the centuries of our calendar may be nothing more than happenstance. This rate of warming is not "unprecedented". It's not even unusual.
The normal climate of the Earth is inhospitable to humans. We've only come to dominate in a warm period that is not the norm. The ultimate outcome is inevitable. We need to get off this rock while we can.
About 10K years ago the Earth was in an ice age and had been for about 100,000 years. Then in about 1000 years temperatures rose from about 8C below the present average to what they are today. This increase in temperature allowed for all of the expansion of mankind that is present history - all of it. It hit the "holocene optimum" or maximum temperature and had been declining since, until about 1800. We were getting occasional warnings of the impending ice age as the temperatures declined. The ice core records seem to indicate that when this cooling cycle switch happens, it happens very quickly and drops to about 8C below present and then fluctuates a little around that "new normal".
There were not enough Men present on the Earth 9000 years ago to create an 8C increase in temperature so something else caused it and we aren't sure what but orbital variations are a popular theory. The Earth has these temperate periods of 10-20 thousand years, roughly every hundred thousand years - and then they end. That was 8C. The AGW claimed here is about 1.5C, and it seems to have stopped for now.
There seems to be a point on the temperature graph that represents a complete lack of resistance to change. When temperatures in the record dip below about 2.5C less than they are now they tend to drop to ice age temps and stay there for a very long time. Obviously for us that would be very bad.
Warm, though? We can deal with warm. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and it didn't self destruct. Some people will have to move, but they won't have to run - the change happens very slowly.
We live in an interglacial age. It will go for a while and then it will end and most of humanity will die off at that time. We'd best enjoy it while it lasts. As for making a cause of halting climage change, well that's hubris there. We could no more prevent climate change than we could stop time or travel faster than the speed of light. The climate changed before mankind appeared on this planet and it will be changing long after we're gone.
You guys enjoy your flamewar. I'm gonna go grill some steaks.
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, welcome our new open codec overlords.
Woohoo! Much good will come of this.
And all you closed, patent encumbered codec trolls: please go away now. Your services are no longer required.
The project is also backed by hardware partners such as AMD, ARM, and Nvidia. "Hardware acceleration is extremely important." Sunder Pichai, Google vice president of product management (From TheRegister link).
I loved the part where on the approval committee charged with evaluating textbooks, some positively rated a sample in which every page was blank. That was beautiful.
Slavery is still practiced in the US. Humans are still imported, forced to work, traded as property, beaten, branded, tortured and killed. It's just not legal now. The US slave population may not be close to what it was right before the civil war, but the numbers are still disturbing. It's no longer sanctioned by law. It's now not restricted by race but more by gender - mostly prevalent in the sex worker trade and textile manufacturing, and agriculture. But it persists.
Sometimes my fellow Americans disgust me.
Yours is to serve as a warning to others.
There already are Open textbooks. There are numerous sites where they are indexed, catalogued, advertised and - yes - sold in bound printed formats, collections and whatnot. As you note, there are many print houses that will print a run of books, and their prices can be much more reasonable than buying from traditional publishers. Because YOU are in control of the content, you can order as many or as few as you want. Paperbacks? Books on CD? Another 800 of last year's run? No problem. This breaks the "forced update" model where a school district has to landfill and reorder new books every second year because of spurious "revised editions". Many open textbooks are quite good. They go all the way up to the nearly 2,000 college level courses in MIT OpenCourseWare and beyond. Because the books are free to download, the teachers can choose from a broad selection appropriate to your local culture.
This stuff will sort itself out sooner or later.
I'm hoping that one day soon kids just get their K-16 curriculum on an SDHC card or whatever media is common when they show up at Kindergarten and if they finish it before their education allotment runs out then more power to 'em. I never saw the value in attendance and peer-synchronous education. School is not daycare. Kids are all different. In a normal distribution the fast achievers can save the state money and time that can be used to help those who struggle, and incidentally achieve the accomplishments our future needs from them.
Mod parent up (and this down if you must, since I wrote the parent and I'm asking for an upmod there). I forgot to click the selfmods, and I think the parent post is worthy of them and I don't want it to be missed in the /. dross so I'm following up with this feeble plea.
Of course if you think the parent sucks, mod it down and this post too, but first please read this.
No.
On behalf of everyone with a long term view, let me say: fuck you you ignorant fuck. My apologies to those few readers who are still sensitive to the word "fuck", but this fucking idiot is trying to promote an error that will fucking kill my fourth generation offspring, their progeny, and my hopes for the survival of mankind. Forgive me for being emotional about that, but if you can't get emotional about the Death of Man, you're dead inside already.
The rise of science occurred in an interglacial age that's lasted barely 9000 years. Our written history is barely 5,000 years. The vast majority of who and what we are (our culture) happened in the last 300 years. 10,000 years ago we were barely animals. When it ends the decline will be swift and violent, and for the 100,000 years of ice age that follows we'll be barely animals again if we survive at all. That end is due. It cannot be prevented no matter what we do. It's an Earth orbital thing. The survival of any mammals to the end of that 100KY, let alone Men, is quite questionable.
If our culture is to survive we need to establish a self-sufficent offspring of that culture in some place where our thermonuclear cruise missiles cannot reach them. That place is off of the Earth, and we need to do it now . "Someday later" is too late. A colony here on Earth won't do because in the decline there will be quite a lot of violence and there is no corner on the planet that won't be at risk. Even if a culture survived the Troubles, they would not have the resources to get us off this rock and so would slowly decline until they were extinct. 100,000 years is a long time. The end is the same. The end of terrestrial civilization is certain. It's inevitable. It's only the end of all civilization, science and culture, all that we have learned, potentially the end of the human genome, if we choose to allow it to be. If we choose that, if we listen to your ignorant mumblings, we deserve our fate and you have won, you ignorant fuck. Still, there will be no more NASCAR.
Mankind is it seems the first terrestrial species that has to choose extinction rather than having it thrust upon us. We could escape it if we wished. We could get off this rock if we cared. We could backup our genome and all of our knowledge offsite - if we so chose. But we won't. If we choose extinction then our supposed intelligence has no advantage over the peanut-sized brains of dinosaurs. It's another failed path in the Darwinist exploration of Life's potentials - tried this time and forgotten only to be retried a billion years hence when our mass has been restirred with the galaxy and given time to stew.
Now please find a convenient fire and die in it before you infect someone else with your idiocy.
(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. {11} There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.
citation
/I'm not prone to cite bible verse, but there you go. All your software patents are invalid. It sez so in the Good Book. The verse itself is an uncited theft of the work of Sophocles c. 429 BCE - himself a synthesist who didn't cite the vast realms of prior art from which he distilled his digests of the written and performed arts into their purest forms. Sophocles was a hack, but we don't have records of the prior art he stole, or today he'd be a pirate. His synthesis though? Timeless art in and of itself. It's good thing for us ancient Greece didn't have DMCA, DRM, and eternal copyright or he'd be Sophowho? To most he already is.
If only ancient Greece, or modern Phoenix, had a sort of distributed Library of Alexandria where one works could not be forgotten - where the wisdom of our fathers and their fathers (and their foolishness too) might be preserved and so remain available to our children and their children. Something like a Google for books. Alas, copyright prevents it and copyright is now eternal in every practical sense. So it is that each new generation, constrained by previously patented and copyrighted art has diminishing realms of imagination to work with - until the lawyers finally abolish imagination altogether and we reach the asymptote where creation ends. So then we lay upon our children the duty to rethink the thoughts we've had, to re-invent our inventions, and to do so in peril of the trolls who lay claim to a third degree ownership of any potential perceived reference to characters or invented places in a brief manuscript published in 100 copies only, 200 years before - and upon their children we lay a logarithmically greater burden.
As patents are the death of invention, copyrights are the death of art. A pity our children must climb these mountains we've built for them without the benefit of a culture, but culture itself is deprecated in this regime in preference to whatever mindless new drivel can escape lawsuits long enough to become popular - and then is itself extinguished in a flurry of lawyers and cocaine.
We might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but now we huddle in fear of lawyers.
Mark put the celery in the plastic bag next to the apples. His mind was elsewhere, but he had the presence of mind to be polite. "It's debit today Cindy." He hoped she liked 'Cindy' - the nametag read "Cynthia". A flicker of a smile came across her face, but she didn't break from her focused barcode laser scanning.
Gabby was going on again about mom & dad, oblivious to his funk. "Your mom said Dick wanted to know about your plans for after." They'd had this talk a dozen times and he didn't want to talk about "after". To talk about "after" was to talk about "the End", and he didn't want to talk about that.
"Ngh" he said, "Did you get peanut butter?"
"It's in the cart already" she replied, her permanent politician's grin twisting a little. There might have been the hint of a raised eyebrow. "Is Greg coming over this weekend?"
He shrugged just as Cynthia called out "Two ninety eight fifty." She flashed another cordial smile, patient as he swiped the card and fumbled with his pin. Gabby was loading the last of the things into the cart.
And so it went: day after day - a distraction. The burden was heavy on him, but not unbearably so. It didn't get worse but it didn't get better. When he thought about it much at all, he considered it just part of the job. "That's what it's like to be America's last manned space mission commander. That's what it costs to sit in that chair" he'd tell himself. And then he'd get about the business of living the days until the End of US manned spaceflight - with vigor, with interest, with zeal - but not without some regret for what might have been.
Jim looked at the old storage with nostalgia. Here were many thousands of virtual machines which once served the grand purpose of moving the enterprise forward. For the most part they were identical smart clones but here and there the user had customized to suit his needs in novel and interesting ways. They might have been notable innovations if anyone cared. But space is space, and nobody had accessed these VMs in a very long time.
So he clicked delete and they were gone - the last Windows desktops. They won't be missed. This is how we gain room for progress: by taking out the trash.
The observation is useful in itself. Hydrogen + Oxygen = water. If you use energy to split the hydrogen from the oxygen in water and combine the hydrogen with carbon you get two things: breatheable oxygen, and hydrocarbons which are useful for many things - and the only known durable storage medium for Hydrogen.
People need to be reminded that (to us) all energy is nuclear energy, and our most common nuclear energy source is that bright ball in the sky. Even Hydro power is derivative of nuclear energy (The sun (nuclear source) warms water in the oceans that falls on mountains that flows down rivers into the aqueduct that feeds the dam that provides power to the Western US.
If common folk find a way to understand the difference between storage media and energy generation, it'll go a long ways toward real progress in green energy.
This is why you pool your media on NAS devices like these. And rip your media to it. And arrange with friends for offsite backups in case of disaster.
Sharing parties are where it's at, don'tcha know. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. The first rule of Ufenet is "don't talk about Ufenet". If it's not online then as far as the RIAA, MPAA and BSA are concerned, it didn't happen.
Until fairly recently I was personally opposed (though tolerant) of media piracy - unwilling to do it myself. Some time ago though I came around. Perhaps it was when they called transcoding DVDs I had bought into a useful media for me to watch it (3gp) stealing that did it. More likely it was the copyright extensions and DMCA. With the DMCA they can self-regulate the expiration of copyright with their DRM and so make us buy the same content over and over. Due to the efforts of the RIAA and the MPAA and their ilk in extending copyright, I now figure they have stolen from me and my heirs far more content than I could take back from them in a hundred lifetimes. I could not possibly even read the titles of the books they've stolen from me while I yet live, let alone the books too. The photos? If I browsed a slideshow from now until the end of my days with every waking hour I could not touch one hundredth of one percent of the photos they've stolen from me. Screw 'em.
Until today I was equally opposed to software piracy, but just now I realized they're working the same tools to the same ends. Their work on software patents is preventing me from getting good progress. Screw them too. If your profits get in the way of Progress, then to hell with you.
If you needed my encouragement, have at it. I am hereby encouraging all of you to pirate any media you desire: audio, video, software, books and other, software and hardware patents too, no matter how current by any means expedient. Until the bastards give back our "limited times" and "fair use" all of their stuff is fair game. Just don't get caught.
So tell me again... what peril am I in?
It's a storage medium. TANSTAAFL.
I'm trying to figure out if you're serious. Man, those are some ugly control issues you're having. You should have that checked out before it becomes infected.
Remote desktop is only one of the things it can do. It has other uses. If those aren't useful to you in a work environment it's not a tool for you. Personally at work I have no use for a cylinder hone. That doesn't mean a cylinder hone is a toy. You calling iPad a toy is not going to stop others from putting it to work for them. It's a new tool and we're still finding out what work it applies to but it seems to be a good number of uses for some.
Basically, yeah. If you've got a lot of people they can share one computer. And almost everybody who buys an iPad already has a computer anyway. Depending on what your needs are and what your regular PC is running, you don't have to have any additional software except the appropriate RDP client, and I don't think that's very expensive. The iTap RDP client for iPad is $11.99. And it's not some "future" iPad. It works today. They've had this since day 1. RDP runs on the iPod Touch for goodness sake and has for a long time. If it's a home computer you'll probably have to pay your ISP for a "real" IP address.
Why is this not modded funny?
Sometimes running getting in the pocket and carving some curl can really clear your head - quite the productive work activity. And what is this "clock"?
Don't worry. Those millions of netbooks sold with Windows - which ruined the netbook market - will be available soon on Ebay at incredible discount rates. And they run Linux great, just like they always did. As a bonus, the flash storage they use is much cheaper and has much more capacity than when they were first offerred.
Look into remote desktop packages. With those your iPad becomes a wireless-attached terminal to your normal environment, routing input and display. In that way you can run any app your other computer can - from anywhere with 3G service - including all of your favorite flash and FaceBook games, or even PC games.
I can't wait to see the screenshots of W7 through RDP on an iPad. Here's Windows Home Server.
With a 3G connection to your Citrix farm and/or whatever RDP host you want to use (including hosted), you can do almost anything a good desktop can do. The iPad isn't necessarily the compute platform you need - think of it as a handy wireless portable terminal, that plays movies. The screen is still a little small - perhaps with the next processor upgrade they'll come out with an iPad+ with 17" or so at 1920x1080.
So don't worry. Once you have the iPad you'll find a grand selection of stylish attire with pockets that fit it.
It' too soon to tell if iPad will crush other products. Since the thing isn't really launched worldwide yet, and the 3G versions were just released and supply is already constrained it's easy to see that the thing is a commercial success. We won't know what demand truly is until it's launched worldwide and supply catches up with it.
How well the Android slates deliver will show the iPad's place in the category it defined, so perhaps by Christmas. I wonder if there will be Moorestown units out by then, and Windows Mobile 7. Probably not with enough scale or buzz to get their peak markets rolling.
What a lot of people seem to be missing is that like the iPod and iPhone the sale doesn't end when you open the box - What His Jobsness has sold you is a store you can carry in your pocket so that you can buy books, music, movies and apps from him any time you so desire. And unlike Best Buy and BlockBuster and Borders, the store never closes - ever. It's right there in your pocket ready to close a deal whenever you are.
The die-offs coincide not with warming periods, but with cooling ones - and those tend to coincide with known asteroid impacts. When you think about it, that too may be "orbital".
Regardless, when the temp rises by 8C in 1000 years and given the normal cycles it's perfectly normal for two spans of a hundred years to warm by 1.4C, bridged by a century gap of little or no warming at all. That the current cycle lines up with the centuries of our calendar may be nothing more than happenstance. This rate of warming is not "unprecedented". It's not even unusual.
The normal climate of the Earth is inhospitable to humans. We've only come to dominate in a warm period that is not the norm. The ultimate outcome is inevitable. We need to get off this rock while we can.
About 10K years ago the Earth was in an ice age and had been for about 100,000 years. Then in about 1000 years temperatures rose from about 8C below the present average to what they are today. This increase in temperature allowed for all of the expansion of mankind that is present history - all of it. It hit the "holocene optimum" or maximum temperature and had been declining since, until about 1800. We were getting occasional warnings of the impending ice age as the temperatures declined. The ice core records seem to indicate that when this cooling cycle switch happens, it happens very quickly and drops to about 8C below present and then fluctuates a little around that "new normal".
There were not enough Men present on the Earth 9000 years ago to create an 8C increase in temperature so something else caused it and we aren't sure what but orbital variations are a popular theory. The Earth has these temperate periods of 10-20 thousand years, roughly every hundred thousand years - and then they end. That was 8C. The AGW claimed here is about 1.5C, and it seems to have stopped for now.
There seems to be a point on the temperature graph that represents a complete lack of resistance to change. When temperatures in the record dip below about 2.5C less than they are now they tend to drop to ice age temps and stay there for a very long time. Obviously for us that would be very bad.
Warm, though? We can deal with warm. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and it didn't self destruct. Some people will have to move, but they won't have to run - the change happens very slowly.
We live in an interglacial age. It will go for a while and then it will end and most of humanity will die off at that time. We'd best enjoy it while it lasts. As for making a cause of halting climage change, well that's hubris there. We could no more prevent climate change than we could stop time or travel faster than the speed of light. The climate changed before mankind appeared on this planet and it will be changing long after we're gone.
You guys enjoy your flamewar. I'm gonna go grill some steaks.