where does your line come from? Show it to me, please. Credible data from one or more credible sources clearly showing this trend you claim.
Seriously, didn't you just state as fact exactly the thing you're excoriating me for claiming in the post that started this thread?
Did you, per chance, not actually pay any attention to my post before replying, and just assume I must have said something about "anthropogenic" or "greenhouse" or something in there? Because I made no claim at all about carbon emissions, etc. I'm actually not a proponent of anthropogenic global warming, I don't know if it's greenhouse gases, Milankovitch cycles, some other natural trend, or some combination. I'm just saying that the earth's getting warmer. I didn't cite a source because, seriously, like I'm going to try to rehash all available data/sources to prove one side of one of the most contentious issues of our time in a Slashdot post. I was just pointing out that global warming can be consistent with things like increasing snowfall in certain regions, so while this is interesting research, it isn't particularly relevant to the greater issue of global warming. While, in my view, there's significant scientific uncertainty in the factors causing the earth to warm up, I haven't seen any credible science claiming that, for at least the past 20 years or so, there hasn't been some warming trend. And now I'm confused about whether you want data showing the warming trend I claimed in my first post or not, since now you say "we know the earth is getting warmer."
Anyway, here's a link regarding the satellite data.
Great data and interesting if it proves out. But all the "global warming doesn't exist people" are going to jump on this like every bit of news about cold weather to claim it contradicts the idea that there's global warming, which it doesn't.
Global warming is not a powerful enough trend to counteract all other factors- it still get colder in fall and winter in temperate zones, and it's often colder from one day to the next. While the majority of ski resorts have reported a trend of less annual snowfall per year for the past twenty years or so, some individual years buck the trend, and some resorts (like Holiday Valley in New York) have experienced the opposite trend. It's a hugely complex system with a lot of random variation and unknown factors. While the satellite data tells us that the average temperature of the earth is increasing every year, that leaves a lot of room for variation from the mean, and some parts of the world are actually getting colder. Due to the complexities of weather, some areas may experience more snowfall when the temperature rises. So don't make this out to mean more than it is.
But it is very interesting, and could force changes to models claiming rapidly rising sea levels due to global warming.
Claims that we can "measure the value of the Internet" are a bit much.
No, he lays it all out right there for us:
the value of a network equals the net value added to each user's transactions... It... can be used to value any network... even the Internet as a whole
See? So I'll just start adding. Once I get done quantifying the value of every transaction I've ever performed over the internet, I'll start on yours next. So can you email my your entire history of internet usage (including the email itself) and I'll get to it when I finish mine, in about... one hundred years. Following this model, I may finish tabulating the current value of the internet sometime before the heat death of the universe.
There are plenty of treatment in "established medicine" that aren't actually established. Along with all the ones they mention, for decades women's doctors put them on hormone replacement therapy following menopause in part to reduce their risk of heart attacks, where there had NEVER been any evidence that they would do so. And after decades and millions of women on hormone replacement, when someone finally bothered to look into it for the first time, it turns out that hormone replacements increase the risk of heart attack.
But what about the opposite, scientifically proven remedies that have inexplicably shifted into the realm of "home remedies?" A pertinent example is Epsom Salts for curing infections. Soaking wounds and infections in Epsom Salt solutions is a highly effective treatment, and one that used to be prescribed by doctors and used in hospitals. Research has shown it to have great efficacy. But now doctors use antibiotics and even surgery to try to cure things that can be fixed much more safely and painlessly with a $1 box of Epsom salts and a tub of water. Is it just undue influence from pharmaceutical and medical device reps? Another example is just using pressurized air to evacuate and cure oral infections, because most bacteria that colonize mouths are highly susceptible to oxygen poisoning and dehydration. But instead, doctors and dentists rely on courses of powerful antibiotics. There are many more examples. I'm not talking about homeopathic remedies with no scientific trials demonstrating their efficacy, but treatments that are actually shown to be effective. If there's no money in a solution, does it get lost because no one is championing it?
A friend and I have chatted about Mac pricing off and on over the years, and gone to the online stores to configure the closeset head-to-head competitors we could. The conclusion was basically always this: Macs are usually price competitive with the most closely configured computer, but if you don't like that configuration, Apple offers very few options and nothing low-end.
From 10/s7/08:
I remembered that last time you told me to spec a dell vs a mac pro, and I remember the dell being more. And I was thinking about your comment that the mac pro delta has seemingly jumped. I was thinking instead that the Mac Pro, tied to "server/high end workstation class" hardware, seemed to be in the process of being overtaken by low cost gaming gear. Workstation/Mac Pro level hardware always contains those intangibles, like ECC memory and super high io bus speed, raid support, and two processor sockets - changes that always require your entire hardware setup to "jump class" and be redesigned from the ground up.
Looking at the Mac Pro it's running two 2.8Ghz "Harpertown" Xeon's, the Dell site uses different lingo, but I selected the same chip, the E5440. Apple's minimum RAM was 2G, so I matched that on the Dell as well. This is important because ECC 1066 ram is still incredibly expensive.
Dell's version of the Mac Pro instantly rang up as... $3800. A full $1200 more than the Mac Pro.
So, Macs are still way cheaper. By an ever increasing gap. The cheapest online price for an E5440 is $700. That means the two chips in a Mac Pro are $1400 street value, and the Intel s5000XVN motherboard has a street value of about $550. That makes the rest of the computer worth $850 - workstation class graphics card, fully buffered ECC ram, case, psu, os, hard drive. It's dirt cheap. I'm convinced you could bulk buy Mac Pro's at edu discount and make a margin parting them out on ebay.
So who other than dell is making a dual xeon workstation?
Last time I checked out GIMP, it didn't have any color management- no CMM, no recognition of ICC profiles. This makes it near impossible to edit photographs for printing or print them with predictability. It was a definite deal killer.
In fact, Linux was out, because I need color management in the OS too. Any progress on these fronts over the past 5 years or so? I'm always interested in Linux and check it out every so often, but so far my graphic arts needs have kept me on Macs.
The Kindle reader doesn't make a copy of the book, it just reads the book using text to speech. It reads it in real time, it doesn't generate a sound file of the whole book as a recording.
If it's illegal to have my computer read a book to me because it violates copyright, is it illegal for my girlfriend to read a book to me? Does it violate copyright if someone reads a children's book out loud to a child? If so, the rights holders to Dr. Suess can sue half the parents in the US. If I'm alone in a room, with no audience, is it illegal for me to read the book out loud to myself? What's the legal difference between me alone in a room reading a book out loud to myself off of the computer screen, and me alone in a room with the computer reading the book out loud to me?
If you made a recording of the kindle reader reading a book and distributed it, it would be illegal, just like making a recording of yourself reading the book and distributing it would be illegal, because those are both unlicensed copies of the book. A text-to-speech program does not contain any copy of any copyrighted work, so how does it violate copyright?
IEEE 1394 S3200 supplies up to 45 watts right now. 1.5 amps at up to 30 volts.
I'm sure this will bring up arguments to the contrary, but as a data transmitter, it's also superior to USB in supporting peer-to-peer device communication and multiple hosts per bus.
The old problem of higher per unit costs due to licensing fees has been resolved, as the fees have been discarded.
Does anyone know what the price difference is for basic Firewire vs. USB chips, connectors, and cables these days? That is, say I wanted to make my device (keyboard, MP3 Player, whatever) use either USB or Firewire; anybody know about what the marginal cost difference per unit might be?
Anyway, any time anybody's complaining about the deficiencies of USB, I suggest that we already have a radically superior alternative before us, which needs only wider adoption to rule. In the future, I'd find it ideal if my computer could have only two kinds of ports in back; a bunch of Firewire ports, and a couple of Display Port ports for monitors. Maybe some day we can get that down to one port.
You're right that the net economic impact of military spending is negative. If everyone cooperates, then it's great not to invest a lot of resources making things that, in the best scenario, never get used for anything, and in the worst scenario are terribly destructive. Of course, from a game theory perspective, it's all about the level of confidence in that cooperation. If one side secretly creates a supreme armada of space weaponry that can dominate over all other nations, the other nations who have been concentrating on other, ideally more useful things, may find the additional progress they've obtained by neglecting military investment to be a hollow accomplishment.
That's not to say it's a bad idea. It just needs to be done carefully. For instance, the way the US and the USSR handled the INF treaty. As Reagan liked to repeat a translated Russian proverb, "trust, but verify." Both sides were completely paranoid of each other, and only accepted the agreements when they included a lot of thorough checks that would make them hard to significantly violate without being caught. History has shown both sides largely abided by the terms of the agreement.
We have to weigh the costs and probability of negative outcomes; say, a successful world-wide genocide by a crazy dictator and world repopulation under a single evil government / ethnic group, or other lesser outcomes such as being bullied around by another country out of fear, against the benefits we stand to gain. As long as we can "verify" enough to keep the chances of significant bad outcomes to a minimum, it sounds like a great idea.
Yeah, I grew up just outside of Columbus, OH, and our circa 1970 rural home had an electric heat pump, and a lot of our neighborhood did. I remember ads in Columbus with a little jingle "The Electric Heat Pump- It Heats, It Cools, and it Saves" airing on network TV and radio through the early 90's. Call up any HVAC contractor in the midwest and ask them what your options are for heating and cooling a new home installation, and they'll probably list heat pumps as an option. It's hardly obscure.
Most people probably don't know about it, the same way most people don't know anything about city water vs. well water, or what AWG wire or what amp circuit breakers are used in their household electrical wiring, or if their basement walls are cinder block or poured concrete, etc. etc. Most people don't know or care about these details of how their homes work, but that doesn't mean there's anything rare about heat pumps, there are millions of them installed all over going back 50 years or more, and they're still widely installed in new homes.
Raising the minimum legal mileage for new cars by one MPG would be a much, much bigger change than me riding a bike to work every day.
Especially if you take something fuel efficient to work, because riding a bicycle has about the same energy footprint as driving a small hybrid car or riding a small motorcycle. That is, unless you were going to exercise anyway and don't do your other exercise because you used your bike to get somewhere. Or if you subsist entirely off low energy food, like you only eat soy beans you buy in 50-lb bags from a local farmer. But if you eat like regular people, and you have to replace the calories you expend peddling a bike, then the very high energy cost of the food in a standard US (I know, I'm assumming you're an American, but it's not very different for most of the first world) diet adds up to about as much energy use (and green-house gas emissions) as just driving something with high fuel efficiency.
Boy, I hope nobody tells them about Ebay Motors or Cars.com or Craigslist. After beating up on their fans and losing them all, they can go after people trying to buy and sell their cars, they all use images of Toyotas in their ads.
And if they're concerned about people having pictures of their cars, they're really going to freak out if they find out that I've seen actual Toyotas just sitting out in people's driveways, parked on the side of the road, and even driving around on the public roads, right where anyone could look at them. I bet none of those people were paying any copyright licensing fees to Toyota for exhibiting the art-that-is-their-cars. It's going to be lawsuit city.
Electronics are on a 50+ year run of continuously shrinking, but you can't do much more shrinking with our current user interface schemes. You could make an iPhone as thin as a credit card, but that's only a few "doublings" away from its current state, and then what? Making it smaller in either of the other two dimensions is just going to decrease its functionality.
But eyeglasses can have a heads up display. And in the magical world of tomorrow, maybe contact lenses can have a wireless interface and a high-resolution superimposed display. And of course there's wireless headphones. So those are potential conduits of information from machines to us, but how do we talk to the machines? If we're walking around, how do we dial the phone or ask for directions or tell the computer what YouTube clip we want to watch, if the heart of the thing can be the size of a penny?
I think it's going to be verbal. Short of the development of neural interface implants or that sort of thing, I think verbal's going to become a primary interface for mobile electronics. I think the chip that stores everything and wirelessly talks to the outside world and "makes it go" can be anywhere- wristwatch, glasses, tie clip, belt buckle. Whatever. But the thing's going to have to listen to you, so it can understand when you say "Show me the closest three book stores. Do any of them have a physical copy of Into The Nano Era, Moore's Law Beyond Planar Silicon?" Or "play my running playlist on random," or that sort of thing. Not strong AI, but good voice recognition coupled with really dramatically improved ability to parse and interpret commands from speech. I'm sure we'd need a couple of buttons or a knob or slider or such somewhere for things like volume that you just don't want to do with voice. But it strikes me that most of what people do on their iPhones, except for playing games, could be done quite well via voice, and then you don't need to lug around and pull out some physical gadget and stare at its screen and peck at it with your fingers.
The Mirage optical illusion is pretty amazing. I have it, and a Levitron, and while they're both really amazing for a while, there's not a lot of stuff to keep doing with them.
Those electronics kits from Radio Shack and other places with the resistors, diodes, etc and little springs and wires to use for breadboarding are pretty cool and educational. If he actually digs into those, it's pretty cheap to buy a real breadboard and a power supply and a bunch of real components and he can start making real stuff. If he graduates beyond the lessons in the book that comes with the electronics kit, pick him up a copy of Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics, and let him get started with real stuff.
I think they're over your price range, but Lego Mindstorms are great.
You can always get him started with elementary computer programming. If "real" languages seem too challenging, HyperCard is great for starting programming, especially since pretty soon you start to find stuff you want to do but can't, and then find out that HyperTalk is a real programming language that you can start adding in piecemeal to your project, gradually learning programming.
If there are local scout troops, building and racing Pinewood Derby cars can be great if you get serious about going for either style or speed.
A basic model rocketry kit can be fun. It's cool to see it launch.
There are lots of cool science related toys/kits/gadgets here.
I agree that iTunes has a bunch of features that the other players don't have that are more important than the "missing" features he listed. But one might also point out that iTunes isn't even really missing these features.
It's missing, extensions, monitor folders, and themes?
Re: watch folders- OSX has folder actions, and comes with Automator. Making a watch folder for any application is trivial. It took me less than 30 seconds to turn a random folder into an iTunes watch folder. You can make as many of them as you want for as many applications as you want in seconds.
And you may want to explain the fact that iTunes doesn't have themes to some of the guys who write iTunesthemes?
OK, on the last count, it's not fully them-able and there aren't many themes out there, but seriously, this is OSX. User interface consistency is (supposedly) a hallmark of the platform- hardly anything has skins, instead they have standard looks and user-interface guidelines, and that's supposed to be a feature.
That's sad news, and odd timing for me, because I just found his website with his speeches a few days ago, and then got State Of Fear out of the library yesterday.
His speeches are not too long and are really great reads. There are some mistakes and things I disagree with, but they provide a lot of interesting information and a lot to think about. I particularly like Aliens Cause Global Warming.
Ahh, breaking news. When I started writing this post, his website was working fine... now it's already timing out. News travels fast these days.
Don't tell me about that fantastic game that you used to play on the C64 and have never been able to recreate the excitement on a PC. It's because you were a kid discovering video-games, not the Commode64.
Well, I'm going to tell you about it, because you're wrong. Lode Runner on C-64 is one of the greatest games I've ever played.
You're right that the C-64 has been totally, radically surpassed in every capacity by modern machines, but how fun a video is game isn't directly proportional to the quality of the computer language it's written in or the speed of the hardware it's run on. Today's Flash games are a good proof of that. The best games I've played lately are Desktop Tower Defense and Fantastic Contraption, even though the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 probably surpass a flash-window in a web browser much the way they surpass the C-64.
And it's not just findness for "the good old days" and my excitement as a kid discovering the game. I know that for sure because I downloaded a C-64 emulator and the exact same Lode Runner game I'd remembered as being great from when I was 10 years old, and it was still an absolutely fabulous game when I was 30 years old. It simply has very clever mechanics and level design that really make you think to get through the levels.
I certainly suspect that this is true that Linux supports more devices than other OS's. But I do wonder, when they were counting devices OSX supports, if they counted all the devices it supports because the Linux drivers also work in OSX, like Gutenprint, HPIJS, Macam, etc. It's conceivable that some day most Linux drivers would also have a framework that allows the same drivers to work under OSX, plus OSX would have the random devices that only have proprietary support from the vendors.
Also, I wonder when they were counting support for Windows, if they count everything with a driver on any version of Windows as being "supported by Windows?" Because that'll exaggerate Window's compatibility, there's stuff out there with Windows 95 drivers that don't run under Vista.
Another interesting thing I'd like to see is which operating system has the most supported devices that were manufactured in the past two years... in which case, I suspect it's Windows. Although I don't know, he does say they asked hardware vendors what shipping products they have without Linux drivers, and they came back with nothing. Although I wonder if that's truly because Linux supports every single last thing out there, or because they hardware vendors didn't really bother to check all that thoroughly. Can anyone name currently shipping products with Linux support that don't have Windows drivers?
No matter what, I don't want to diminish the amazing job the Linux community's done writing drivers. I've got my share of old hardware that I abandoned because it wouldn't run on OSX that I know is supported in Linux, and some of the best drivers for OSX were developed because of Linux. I'm just interested in the details.
This new "100% Compatible" logo is/exactly/ what he (and the store clerks) needs.
It's true, but "100% Compatible" would probably have caught on much better with consumers if they weren't already familiar with what it meant when the music industry sold stuff under the tag "Plays For Sure."
Why on earth would you be expecting the the Core 3 to follow the progression of:
Core
Core Duo
Core2 Duo
The correct answer should be the 2Core2 Duo, or the Core2 Duo Dos, or the BiCore2Duo. Maybe the DuoCore2 Duo? Anyway, follow the pattern- keep adding things that mean "2." In several years, we should have had BiDuo2Core2DoubleDuo Dos MarkII.
Instead, it looks we're heading for the e8, or the pi9, or the ln10, or maybe the 11!. Except for that they'll change the pattern again, because now everyone's expecting math terms.
What does the future hold?
on
The Gym Arcade
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· Score: 1
Wow, technology's finally invented a way you can exercise and compete at the same time, and how hard you exercise affects how well you do in the game. That's pretty cool. it sounds totally revolutionary. Maybe the next step will be networked FPS, where, for instance, you ride your exercise bike against someone else, each with gun-buttons in the handle bars. Or in Tron, where how fast you pedal determines the speed of your bike.
And then after they've got games where you exercise while competing head-to-head against another person, they'll set it up so that you can find people locally to compete against, so you can know the person and both work on your game and maybe develop a friendship and combine social interaction with your workout and competition.
And maybe, some day in the future, if technology allows it, they can skip the screen and invent some sort of game where you exercise while actually competing against another person physically, interactively, in real-time. Maybe they could even find a way to combine multiple players in multiple positions working together on teams, sort of like Counter Strike or Quake Team Fortress, but with people exercising while competing against each other in real time in the same physical space. I can't even imagine what that would look like, but it would be awesome.
Sorry, I'm using the wrong terminology. Not "early" Christian. I guess I just meant "old," as in, for example, Russian Orthodox churches from, I think. about 1400-1800. For example, St. Theodosius Cathedral isn't that old, but it's modeled after, and includes many artifacts from, churches from that time. The religious iconography is so dense you could probably pick any square yard of wall, ceiling, window, or carvings and write a 30-page treatise on the meanings contained within, both hidden and overt, and still not touch on everything. That sort of thing. The Cloisters in Manhattan are full of other old Christian art and artifacts with similarly dense symbolism.
As far as architecture, I didn't mean the archeological meaning, just the colloquial (or architectural) definition of "classical" architecture as opposed to modern architecture. For example, Ida Noyes Hall at The University of Chicago was designed to be a woman's center, and the architecture reflects that in a hundred subtle ways, from the patterns in the crown molding to the murals on the walls of the theater to the overall floor plan and the look of the building. Huge amounts of thought went into every detail. The architecture of The 1893 Columbian Exposition was like that, too. Everything stood for something; often the same thing stood for many different things, like on the coin.
This guy is a master of symbolic design. He's the modern heir of the artistic geniuses who did all the dense symbolic religious iconography in early christian churches and for secret societies. It's perfectly fitting, since architecture, particularly classical architecture, is loaded with design secrets and hidden meanings, and the coin is about architecture. This coin being loaded with dense symbolism and being about architecture, I hope there's something masonic hidden on it somewhere. I assume the masons were active in The Netherlands?
My question is - did he just use open-source on principle, or did it confer an advantage on doing this project over the commercial alternatives? Or was it harder to do it with the open source software? Clearly it involved a lot of custom scripting. Did he go as far as to look at the source code to accomplish this, or dig into the software in other ways that couldn't be done with closed source? Anybody know?
Slashdot Mirror
We know the earth is getting warmer.
OK, how, do we know the earth is getting warmer?
where does your line come from? Show it to me, please. Credible data from one or more credible sources clearly showing this trend you claim.
Seriously, didn't you just state as fact exactly the thing you're excoriating me for claiming in the post that started this thread?
Did you, per chance, not actually pay any attention to my post before replying, and just assume I must have said something about "anthropogenic" or "greenhouse" or something in there? Because I made no claim at all about carbon emissions, etc. I'm actually not a proponent of anthropogenic global warming, I don't know if it's greenhouse gases, Milankovitch cycles, some other natural trend, or some combination. I'm just saying that the earth's getting warmer. I didn't cite a source because, seriously, like I'm going to try to rehash all available data/sources to prove one side of one of the most contentious issues of our time in a Slashdot post. I was just pointing out that global warming can be consistent with things like increasing snowfall in certain regions, so while this is interesting research, it isn't particularly relevant to the greater issue of global warming. While, in my view, there's significant scientific uncertainty in the factors causing the earth to warm up, I haven't seen any credible science claiming that, for at least the past 20 years or so, there hasn't been some warming trend. And now I'm confused about whether you want data showing the warming trend I claimed in my first post or not, since now you say "we know the earth is getting warmer." Anyway, here's a link regarding the satellite data.
Great data and interesting if it proves out. But all the "global warming doesn't exist people" are going to jump on this like every bit of news about cold weather to claim it contradicts the idea that there's global warming, which it doesn't.
Global warming is not a powerful enough trend to counteract all other factors- it still get colder in fall and winter in temperate zones, and it's often colder from one day to the next. While the majority of ski resorts have reported a trend of less annual snowfall per year for the past twenty years or so, some individual years buck the trend, and some resorts (like Holiday Valley in New York) have experienced the opposite trend. It's a hugely complex system with a lot of random variation and unknown factors. While the satellite data tells us that the average temperature of the earth is increasing every year, that leaves a lot of room for variation from the mean, and some parts of the world are actually getting colder. Due to the complexities of weather, some areas may experience more snowfall when the temperature rises. So don't make this out to mean more than it is.
But it is very interesting, and could force changes to models claiming rapidly rising sea levels due to global warming.
Claims that we can "measure the value of the Internet" are a bit much.
No, he lays it all out right there for us:
the value of a network equals the net value added to each user's transactions... It... can be used to value any network... even the Internet as a whole
See? So I'll just start adding. Once I get done quantifying the value of every transaction I've ever performed over the internet, I'll start on yours next. So can you email my your entire history of internet usage (including the email itself) and I'll get to it when I finish mine, in about... one hundred years. Following this model, I may finish tabulating the current value of the internet sometime before the heat death of the universe.
There are plenty of treatment in "established medicine" that aren't actually established. Along with all the ones they mention, for decades women's doctors put them on hormone replacement therapy following menopause in part to reduce their risk of heart attacks, where there had NEVER been any evidence that they would do so. And after decades and millions of women on hormone replacement, when someone finally bothered to look into it for the first time, it turns out that hormone replacements increase the risk of heart attack.
But what about the opposite, scientifically proven remedies that have inexplicably shifted into the realm of "home remedies?" A pertinent example is Epsom Salts for curing infections. Soaking wounds and infections in Epsom Salt solutions is a highly effective treatment, and one that used to be prescribed by doctors and used in hospitals. Research has shown it to have great efficacy. But now doctors use antibiotics and even surgery to try to cure things that can be fixed much more safely and painlessly with a $1 box of Epsom salts and a tub of water. Is it just undue influence from pharmaceutical and medical device reps? Another example is just using pressurized air to evacuate and cure oral infections, because most bacteria that colonize mouths are highly susceptible to oxygen poisoning and dehydration. But instead, doctors and dentists rely on courses of powerful antibiotics. There are many more examples. I'm not talking about homeopathic remedies with no scientific trials demonstrating their efficacy, but treatments that are actually shown to be effective. If there's no money in a solution, does it get lost because no one is championing it?
A friend and I have chatted about Mac pricing off and on over the years, and gone to the online stores to configure the closeset head-to-head competitors we could. The conclusion was basically always this: Macs are usually price competitive with the most closely configured computer, but if you don't like that configuration, Apple offers very few options and nothing low-end.
From 10/s7/08:
I remembered that last time you told me to spec a dell vs a mac pro, and I
remember the dell being more. And I was thinking about your comment that
the mac pro delta has seemingly jumped. I was thinking instead that the
Mac Pro, tied to "server/high end workstation class" hardware, seemed to
be in the process of being overtaken by low cost gaming gear.
Workstation/Mac Pro level hardware always contains those intangibles, like
ECC memory and super high io bus speed, raid support, and two processor
sockets - changes that always require your entire hardware setup to "jump
class" and be redesigned from the ground up.
So I went out again to price a comparable Dell.
www.dell.com/precision/
http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/precndt?c=us&l=en&s=bsd
Looking at the Mac Pro it's running two 2.8Ghz "Harpertown" Xeon's, the
Dell site uses different lingo, but I selected the same chip, the E5440.
Apple's minimum RAM was 2G, so I matched that on the Dell as well. This is
important because ECC 1066 ram is still incredibly expensive.
Dell's version of the Mac Pro instantly rang up as... $3800. A full $1200
more than the Mac Pro.
So, Macs are still way cheaper. By an ever increasing gap. The cheapest
online price for an E5440 is $700. That means the two chips in a Mac Pro
are $1400 street value, and the Intel s5000XVN motherboard has a street
value of about $550. That makes the rest of the computer worth $850 -
workstation class graphics card, fully buffered ECC ram, case, psu, os,
hard drive. It's dirt cheap. I'm convinced you could bulk buy Mac Pro's at
edu discount and make a margin parting them out on ebay.
So who other than dell is making a dual xeon workstation?
http://www.swt.com/cgi-bin/calc_linux?hdc=x802&cpu=x28&xxcpu=x440&s8fram1=f2k&scsicard=no&fsaraid=no&hd1=sat1&hd2=no&hd3=no&hd4=no&hd5=no&hd6=no&hd7=no&hd8=no&cdmult=dvd&pevideo=onb&ipmi3=no&monitor=no&monito2=no&fd=no&pen1=no&x8case=atx&x8rail=no&multi_mouse=none&multi_keybd=none&spkm=nospkr&printers=no&modem=none&netcard=none&wirel=no&firew=no&tuner=no&taped1=none&taped2=none&power_protect=none&lxx=fe&Quote=Calculate+total%2C+keep+price+increment+information
Base price: Dual Xeon Workstation: $1599.00
Two Xeon E5440 quad-core CPUs, 2.83GHz, 12MB, 1333MHz FSB, 80W:
+=$1295.00
Supermicro X7DWA-N dual Xeon motherboard w/ 2 Gbit LAN ports
IO port: 6 x USB, 1 x Parallel, 2 x Serial, 2 x PS2
2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 FB-DIMM, 2 DIMMs
80GB SATA 3Gb/s drive
Total price: $2894.00 (plus shipping)
So a shit-label linux part
Last time I checked out GIMP, it didn't have any color management- no CMM, no recognition of ICC profiles. This makes it near impossible to edit photographs for printing or print them with predictability. It was a definite deal killer.
In fact, Linux was out, because I need color management in the OS too. Any progress on these fronts over the past 5 years or so? I'm always interested in Linux and check it out every so often, but so far my graphic arts needs have kept me on Macs.
The Kindle reader doesn't make a copy of the book, it just reads the book using text to speech. It reads it in real time, it doesn't generate a sound file of the whole book as a recording.
If it's illegal to have my computer read a book to me because it violates copyright, is it illegal for my girlfriend to read a book to me? Does it violate copyright if someone reads a children's book out loud to a child? If so, the rights holders to Dr. Suess can sue half the parents in the US. If I'm alone in a room, with no audience, is it illegal for me to read the book out loud to myself? What's the legal difference between me alone in a room reading a book out loud to myself off of the computer screen, and me alone in a room with the computer reading the book out loud to me?
If you made a recording of the kindle reader reading a book and distributed it, it would be illegal, just like making a recording of yourself reading the book and distributing it would be illegal, because those are both unlicensed copies of the book. A text-to-speech program does not contain any copy of any copyrighted work, so how does it violate copyright?
Seconds on Innumeracy.
Also, I can't say it goes "in depth" on a topic, but "Aha! Insight" is very fun and engaging while teaching some tricky and useful math.
IEEE 1394 S3200 supplies up to 45 watts right now. 1.5 amps at up to 30 volts.
I'm sure this will bring up arguments to the contrary, but as a data transmitter, it's also superior to USB in supporting peer-to-peer device communication and multiple hosts per bus.
The old problem of higher per unit costs due to licensing fees has been resolved, as the fees have been discarded.
Does anyone know what the price difference is for basic Firewire vs. USB chips, connectors, and cables these days? That is, say I wanted to make my device (keyboard, MP3 Player, whatever) use either USB or Firewire; anybody know about what the marginal cost difference per unit might be?
Anyway, any time anybody's complaining about the deficiencies of USB, I suggest that we already have a radically superior alternative before us, which needs only wider adoption to rule. In the future, I'd find it ideal if my computer could have only two kinds of ports in back; a bunch of Firewire ports, and a couple of Display Port ports for monitors. Maybe some day we can get that down to one port.
You're right that the net economic impact of military spending is negative. If everyone cooperates, then it's great not to invest a lot of resources making things that, in the best scenario, never get used for anything, and in the worst scenario are terribly destructive. Of course, from a game theory perspective, it's all about the level of confidence in that cooperation. If one side secretly creates a supreme armada of space weaponry that can dominate over all other nations, the other nations who have been concentrating on other, ideally more useful things, may find the additional progress they've obtained by neglecting military investment to be a hollow accomplishment.
That's not to say it's a bad idea. It just needs to be done carefully. For instance, the way the US and the USSR handled the INF treaty. As Reagan liked to repeat a translated Russian proverb, "trust, but verify." Both sides were completely paranoid of each other, and only accepted the agreements when they included a lot of thorough checks that would make them hard to significantly violate without being caught. History has shown both sides largely abided by the terms of the agreement.
We have to weigh the costs and probability of negative outcomes; say, a successful world-wide genocide by a crazy dictator and world repopulation under a single evil government / ethnic group, or other lesser outcomes such as being bullied around by another country out of fear, against the benefits we stand to gain. As long as we can "verify" enough to keep the chances of significant bad outcomes to a minimum, it sounds like a great idea.
"allows any machine to boot into the Sugar environment"
Yes, when I read that, I wondered, "so, what are the system requirements for 'any machine?'"
Will it boot my PPC Mac? My iPod? A 486? My ultrasonic thickness gauge?
Surely there is some requirement besides "any machine" with a USB port.
Yeah, I grew up just outside of Columbus, OH, and our circa 1970 rural home had an electric heat pump, and a lot of our neighborhood did. I remember ads in Columbus with a little jingle "The Electric Heat Pump- It Heats, It Cools, and it Saves" airing on network TV and radio through the early 90's. Call up any HVAC contractor in the midwest and ask them what your options are for heating and cooling a new home installation, and they'll probably list heat pumps as an option. It's hardly obscure.
Most people probably don't know about it, the same way most people don't know anything about city water vs. well water, or what AWG wire or what amp circuit breakers are used in their household electrical wiring, or if their basement walls are cinder block or poured concrete, etc. etc. Most people don't know or care about these details of how their homes work, but that doesn't mean there's anything rare about heat pumps, there are millions of them installed all over going back 50 years or more, and they're still widely installed in new homes.
Raising the minimum legal mileage for new cars by one MPG would be a much, much bigger change than me riding a bike to work every day.
Especially if you take something fuel efficient to work, because riding a bicycle has about the same energy footprint as driving a small hybrid car or riding a small motorcycle. That is, unless you were going to exercise anyway and don't do your other exercise because you used your bike to get somewhere. Or if you subsist entirely off low energy food, like you only eat soy beans you buy in 50-lb bags from a local farmer. But if you eat like regular people, and you have to replace the calories you expend peddling a bike, then the very high energy cost of the food in a standard US (I know, I'm assumming you're an American, but it's not very different for most of the first world) diet adds up to about as much energy use (and green-house gas emissions) as just driving something with high fuel efficiency.
Boy, I hope nobody tells them about Ebay Motors or Cars.com or Craigslist. After beating up on their fans and losing them all, they can go after people trying to buy and sell their cars, they all use images of Toyotas in their ads.
And if they're concerned about people having pictures of their cars, they're really going to freak out if they find out that I've seen actual Toyotas just sitting out in people's driveways, parked on the side of the road, and even driving around on the public roads, right where anyone could look at them. I bet none of those people were paying any copyright licensing fees to Toyota for exhibiting the art-that-is-their-cars. It's going to be lawsuit city.
Electronics are on a 50+ year run of continuously shrinking, but you can't do much more shrinking with our current user interface schemes. You could make an iPhone as thin as a credit card, but that's only a few "doublings" away from its current state, and then what? Making it smaller in either of the other two dimensions is just going to decrease its functionality.
But eyeglasses can have a heads up display. And in the magical world of tomorrow, maybe contact lenses can have a wireless interface and a high-resolution superimposed display. And of course there's wireless headphones. So those are potential conduits of information from machines to us, but how do we talk to the machines? If we're walking around, how do we dial the phone or ask for directions or tell the computer what YouTube clip we want to watch, if the heart of the thing can be the size of a penny?
I think it's going to be verbal. Short of the development of neural interface implants or that sort of thing, I think verbal's going to become a primary interface for mobile electronics. I think the chip that stores everything and wirelessly talks to the outside world and "makes it go" can be anywhere- wristwatch, glasses, tie clip, belt buckle. Whatever. But the thing's going to have to listen to you, so it can understand when you say "Show me the closest three book stores. Do any of them have a physical copy of Into The Nano Era, Moore's Law Beyond Planar Silicon?" Or "play my running playlist on random," or that sort of thing. Not strong AI, but good voice recognition coupled with really dramatically improved ability to parse and interpret commands from speech. I'm sure we'd need a couple of buttons or a knob or slider or such somewhere for things like volume that you just don't want to do with voice. But it strikes me that most of what people do on their iPhones, except for playing games, could be done quite well via voice, and then you don't need to lug around and pull out some physical gadget and stare at its screen and peck at it with your fingers.
The Mirage optical illusion is pretty amazing. I have it, and a Levitron, and while they're both really amazing for a while, there's not a lot of stuff to keep doing with them.
Those electronics kits from Radio Shack and other places with the resistors, diodes, etc and little springs and wires to use for breadboarding are pretty cool and educational. If he actually digs into those, it's pretty cheap to buy a real breadboard and a power supply and a bunch of real components and he can start making real stuff. If he graduates beyond the lessons in the book that comes with the electronics kit, pick him up a copy of Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics, and let him get started with real stuff.
I think they're over your price range, but Lego Mindstorms are great.
You can always get him started with elementary computer programming. If "real" languages seem too challenging, HyperCard is great for starting programming, especially since pretty soon you start to find stuff you want to do but can't, and then find out that HyperTalk is a real programming language that you can start adding in piecemeal to your project, gradually learning programming.
If there are local scout troops, building and racing Pinewood Derby cars can be great if you get serious about going for either style or speed.
A basic model rocketry kit can be fun. It's cool to see it launch.
There are lots of cool science related toys/kits/gadgets here.
I agree that iTunes has a bunch of features that the other players don't have that are more important than the "missing" features he listed. But one might also point out that iTunes isn't even really missing these features.
It's missing, extensions, monitor folders, and themes?
Then how come I'm listening to an Ogg Vorbis file in iTunes via xiph, while watching it in the Ultragroovalicious iTunes Visualizer?
Re: watch folders- OSX has folder actions, and comes with Automator. Making a watch folder for any application is trivial. It took me less than 30 seconds to turn a random folder into an iTunes watch folder. You can make as many of them as you want for as many applications as you want in seconds.
And you may want to explain the fact that iTunes doesn't have themes to some of the guys who write iTunes themes?
OK, on the last count, it's not fully them-able and there aren't many themes out there, but seriously, this is OSX. User interface consistency is (supposedly) a hallmark of the platform- hardly anything has skins, instead they have standard looks and user-interface guidelines, and that's supposed to be a feature.
That's sad news, and odd timing for me, because I just found his website with his speeches a few days ago, and then got State Of Fear out of the library yesterday.
His speeches are not too long and are really great reads. There are some mistakes and things I disagree with, but they provide a lot of interesting information and a lot to think about. I particularly like Aliens Cause Global Warming.
Ahh, breaking news. When I started writing this post, his website was working fine... now it's already timing out. News travels fast these days.
Don't tell me about that fantastic game that you used to play on the C64 and have never been able to recreate the excitement on a PC. It's because you were a kid discovering video-games, not the Commode64.
Well, I'm going to tell you about it, because you're wrong. Lode Runner on C-64 is one of the greatest games I've ever played.
You're right that the C-64 has been totally, radically surpassed in every capacity by modern machines, but how fun a video is game isn't directly proportional to the quality of the computer language it's written in or the speed of the hardware it's run on. Today's Flash games are a good proof of that. The best games I've played lately are Desktop Tower Defense and Fantastic Contraption, even though the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 probably surpass a flash-window in a web browser much the way they surpass the C-64.
And it's not just findness for "the good old days" and my excitement as a kid discovering the game. I know that for sure because I downloaded a C-64 emulator and the exact same Lode Runner game I'd remembered as being great from when I was 10 years old, and it was still an absolutely fabulous game when I was 30 years old. It simply has very clever mechanics and level design that really make you think to get through the levels.
I certainly suspect that this is true that Linux supports more devices than other OS's. But I do wonder, when they were counting devices OSX supports, if they counted all the devices it supports because the Linux drivers also work in OSX, like Gutenprint, HPIJS, Macam, etc. It's conceivable that some day most Linux drivers would also have a framework that allows the same drivers to work under OSX, plus OSX would have the random devices that only have proprietary support from the vendors.
Also, I wonder when they were counting support for Windows, if they count everything with a driver on any version of Windows as being "supported by Windows?" Because that'll exaggerate Window's compatibility, there's stuff out there with Windows 95 drivers that don't run under Vista.
Another interesting thing I'd like to see is which operating system has the most supported devices that were manufactured in the past two years... in which case, I suspect it's Windows. Although I don't know, he does say they asked hardware vendors what shipping products they have without Linux drivers, and they came back with nothing. Although I wonder if that's truly because Linux supports every single last thing out there, or because they hardware vendors didn't really bother to check all that thoroughly. Can anyone name currently shipping products with Linux support that don't have Windows drivers?
No matter what, I don't want to diminish the amazing job the Linux community's done writing drivers. I've got my share of old hardware that I abandoned because it wouldn't run on OSX that I know is supported in Linux, and some of the best drivers for OSX were developed because of Linux. I'm just interested in the details.
This new "100% Compatible" logo is /exactly/ what he (and the store clerks) needs.
It's true, but "100% Compatible" would probably have caught on much better with consumers if they weren't already familiar with what it meant when the music industry sold stuff under the tag "Plays For Sure."
Why on earth would you be expecting the the Core 3 to follow the progression of:
Core
Core Duo
Core2 Duo
The correct answer should be the 2Core2 Duo, or the Core2 Duo Dos, or the BiCore2Duo. Maybe the DuoCore2 Duo? Anyway, follow the pattern- keep adding things that mean "2." In several years, we should have had BiDuo2Core2DoubleDuo Dos MarkII.
Instead, it looks we're heading for the e8, or the pi9, or the ln10, or maybe the 11!. Except for that they'll change the pattern again, because now everyone's expecting math terms.
Wow, technology's finally invented a way you can exercise and compete at the same time, and how hard you exercise affects how well you do in the game. That's pretty cool. it sounds totally revolutionary. Maybe the next step will be networked FPS, where, for instance, you ride your exercise bike against someone else, each with gun-buttons in the handle bars. Or in Tron, where how fast you pedal determines the speed of your bike.
And then after they've got games where you exercise while competing head-to-head against another person, they'll set it up so that you can find people locally to compete against, so you can know the person and both work on your game and maybe develop a friendship and combine social interaction with your workout and competition.
And maybe, some day in the future, if technology allows it, they can skip the screen and invent some sort of game where you exercise while actually competing against another person physically, interactively, in real-time. Maybe they could even find a way to combine multiple players in multiple positions working together on teams, sort of like Counter Strike or Quake Team Fortress, but with people exercising while competing against each other in real time in the same physical space. I can't even imagine what that would look like, but it would be awesome.
Sorry, I'm using the wrong terminology. Not "early" Christian. I guess I just meant "old," as in, for example, Russian Orthodox churches from, I think. about 1400-1800. For example, St. Theodosius Cathedral isn't that old, but it's modeled after, and includes many artifacts from, churches from that time. The religious iconography is so dense you could probably pick any square yard of wall, ceiling, window, or carvings and write a 30-page treatise on the meanings contained within, both hidden and overt, and still not touch on everything. That sort of thing. The Cloisters in Manhattan are full of other old Christian art and artifacts with similarly dense symbolism.
As far as architecture, I didn't mean the archeological meaning, just the colloquial (or architectural) definition of "classical" architecture as opposed to modern architecture. For example, Ida Noyes Hall at The University of Chicago was designed to be a woman's center, and the architecture reflects that in a hundred subtle ways, from the patterns in the crown molding to the murals on the walls of the theater to the overall floor plan and the look of the building. Huge amounts of thought went into every detail. The architecture of The 1893 Columbian Exposition was like that, too. Everything stood for something; often the same thing stood for many different things, like on the coin.
This guy is a master of symbolic design. He's the modern heir of the artistic geniuses who did all the dense symbolic religious iconography in early christian churches and for secret societies. It's perfectly fitting, since architecture, particularly classical architecture, is loaded with design secrets and hidden meanings, and the coin is about architecture. This coin being loaded with dense symbolism and being about architecture, I hope there's something masonic hidden on it somewhere. I assume the masons were active in The Netherlands?
My question is - did he just use open-source on principle, or did it confer an advantage on doing this project over the commercial alternatives? Or was it harder to do it with the open source software? Clearly it involved a lot of custom scripting. Did he go as far as to look at the source code to accomplish this, or dig into the software in other ways that couldn't be done with closed source? Anybody know?