> A lot of very ugly hacks were used to make uTorrent so micro.
I'd love to see the source so I can port it directly to linux. Where did you see the source?
The new research proves that Chinook is invincible in the traditional game of checkers. But in most tournament play, a match starts with three moves chosen at random. In solving the traditional game, the researchers have also solved 21 of the 156 three-move openings, leaving a crack of hope for humans, at least for now.
OK, now you seem to have abandoned your previous argument. Earlier you were saying "Some of the genetic pool has to remain, some has to get lost," and "stopping evolution and keeping the worst of the genetic pool on it is bad for us." Now you seem to have admitted that you protect yourself from 'evolution' in the form of nasty diseases. So I'm having trouble understanding why you still think it's bad to eradicate diseases, which is what the Gates Foundation does.
You claim a person "is on his own, besides the normal cares the society takes for everyone." What is the "normal care"? What makes that level of care "good," and the level of care that tries to eradicate polio and tuberculosis "bad"? I'm trying to keep an open mind here, but your argument is completely different now than is was before. Your new argument also raises lots of questions; here are a few.
You say "That's precisely the point: I'm not saying we should let him die, or let him live, because we shoudln't 'let' him a damn thing. That's the point. We shouldn't prevent him from living, and we shoudln't prevent him from dying." OK, fair enough. But suppose there is this whole group of thousands of people who live on decent land, but they keep on suffering from diseases like malaria and river blindness. Suppose I have resources that could eradicate these diseases, and allow these people to become farmers and businessmen and raise healthy educated children. Should I pretend I don't have those resources and that power? Is it a bad thing to enable these people to become healthy and prosperous? Why or why not, or in which cases is it bad to help people in this way? Did you raise yourself from nothing, or did you get help from your whole society? If your society wants to help people on another continent, why not?
Then you say "The point is: We should have vaccines." But you also say that it's OK to get vaccines if you are "good enough... [to] go to the Public hospital and fill in a form so you can get them..." Explain about this 'good enough.' If you live in sub-Saharan Africa, the nearest 'Public hospital' may be 4000Km away. It seems the definition of 'good enough' involves how near you live to a 'Public hospital.' And so maybe it follows that if a charity puts the equivalent of a 'Public hospital' nearer to poor people, then that suddenly makes the poor people 'good enough' to merit vaccines. I can't figure out what you mean by 'good enough,' but is it a bad thing if a charity makes more people 'good enough' to deserve medicine?
I worked for five years for a research cardiologist, and he was certainly convinced that nicotine could cause arterial disease. According to this anti-smoking source in 2002 the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reported arterial damage from nicotine nasal spray as well as from cigarettes.
There's also a solid statistical correlation between smoking and heart disease. One source for such data is the multi-generation Framingham Study. For example, see this from 2006 or this from 2005.
You don't like the Framingham Study? Try ARIC (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities). See this and then read abstracts from some of the many articles that cite it. Here's a nice one from 2006.
Now, it's also clear that using nicotine replacement therapy as a way to quit smoking is good for your life expectancy. what's not so well studied is what happens to people who've never smoked and who start to use nicotine. In other words, in the published literature, the dangers of nicotine may be masked by the benefits of smoking cessation. This remains to be seen.
The evidence against nicotine is that it causes arterial damage. The statistical correlations from Framingham & ARIC are between smoking and coronary heart disease (not to mention cancer,but I'm focusing on CHD).
The guy I worked for was all about studying arterial damage to predict odds of heart attack and stroke. You see, the damaged artery tends to become sclerotic and develop plaques. Vulnerable plaques can break off, enter the blood stream, and then get stuck in a small blood vessel, blocking it and starving some region of tissue for blood. If that tissue is in the heart, you have a miocardial infarction. If it's in the brain, you have one form of stroke. Nicotine also raises blood pressure, increasing the risk of the other form of stroke (the two kinds of stroke are blockage and bleed).
In other words, there is good reason to believe that nicotine has some harmful effects. The real question is in which cases its benefits outweigh its harm.
I see. In your logic, in order to strengthen the genetic pool, it's wrong to fight disease. So in your personal life, at least your adult life, I can assume you have never had a vaccine? Never taken an antibiotic? Never had a dentist treat tooth decay? Never had an operation? Never taken medicine for colds or coughs or fever or anything else? Because of course you wouldn't want to pass weak genes on into the gene pool, would you? You would consider every medical condition a chance to prove your genes are tough.
Somehow I doubt it. Somehow I suspect that you take advantage of modern medicine just like everyone else who can afford it. So I bet your 'gene pool' argument doesn't apply to yourself. And if you're not willing to live that argument, then, my friend, you haven't earned the right to argue it.
But just for the sake of argument, let me assume for a moment that you live like a 'Christian Scientist,' one of those people who eschew medicine for religious or philosophical reasons. Even so, I still say your 'strengthen the gene pool' argument is wrong. Because the thing that makes a gene pool strong is diversity. And medical science preserves diversity in the gene pool. When you allow large groups of people to die off, you're eliminating variety from the gene pool, and that's a dangerous thing. Let me give you an example: sickle cell anemia. It's well known http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_anemia that if you inherit both genes for sickle cell, you'll have a shortened, 'weaker' life. So why isn't it eliminated from the gene pool? Because the sickle cell gene carries malaria resistance. The diversity of sickle cell is useful for fighting malaria. And it just so happens that Africa is our biggest pool of genetic diversity https://www.genographic.com/. So if you really wanted to strengthen the gene pool, you would be working to maintain diversity, not arguing to eliminate it.
I have one other argument; it concerns what kinds of traits are you trying to strengthen. Your approach, letting nasty diseases kill people, only selects for immune system strength, and maybe overall physical health. But we as a race are more and more dependent on intellectual strengths. Stephen Hawking is physically a failure, but intellectually he's a genius among geniuses. Your argument would let him die because of his physical weakness without considering his towering intellectual strengths. That's just plain dumb.
Actually, the Gates Foundation tends to concentrate on the eradication of diseases, especially in the third world. But I suppose in your opinion, if a person is stupid enough to get born in an area where Guinea Worm disease or tuberculosis is rampant, then it's just their fault for catching the disease. Gate's idea may be that a safer, more disease-free environment is a better place for businesses to develop, but I'm sure you know better. They are spending $900 million to eradicate TB. Please explain why this is wrong and why people should keep catching TB.
How much has Slim given to charity? One difference that separates Gates from his fellow super-rich is the amount (or percent) he has given to charity, specifically to the Gates Foundation. He gave the foundation $20 billion in either 2000 or 2001. At the time I believe it was over a third of his net worth. Had Gates been trying to win the "richest man" contest, he shouldn't have given so much money. I don't believe Slim has made any comperable donation. Even Warren Buffet's $30+ billion commitment to the Gates Foundation is 5% per year spread out over 20 years.
According to http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/FactShe et/, the Gates Foundation's current endowment is $33.4, and they made grant payments of $1.56 billion in 2006 (a U.S. charitable foundation must grant a minimum 5% of its net worth each year.) Think what you will about Microsoft, but few people have given as large a percentage of their wealth at as young an age as Gates did.
OK, I'm willing to assume, for the sake of argument, that the mid-air mouse is better than the mouse I'm using now. Even so, will this really re-invent computing in any significant way? Does it really belong in the same category as quantum computing or a data-centric network? I don't think so. A better mouse is nice, but it doesn't precipitate any kind of paradigm shift that I can see. If I'm wrong about this, feel free to explain.
True speech input with language understanding might bring about a major shift, but I can't see it for just a better mouse.
Me too! My new desktop box has matrix RAID. My volume 0 is RAID-1 (mirrored); I've got two bootable OSs there. My volume 1 is RAID-0 (striped); I use it as a very large scratch area. If I had an HTPC I'd format it similarly: mirror the OS part and stripe the area where video is stored.
A few things to note: qtparted and some other partition editors cannot see matrix RAID. To them your pair of physical disks appears to be a pair of physical disks. fdisk can see them either way:
The big bonus of this layout is that you get to choose exactly how much of your disk will be devoted to redundancy. As a small added bonus, the mirrored portion of the disks is slightly faster to access because it'll choose whichever disk head is nearest the cylinder you want to access.
One of the big issues with off-grid power is how does the power generator behave under partial load; i.e. does efficiency get lousy when you only need 25% or 50% of rated output? For example, one poster points out that in a co-generation system, diesel can hit 90%. This is at higher loads where the diesel is most efficient. I'm wondering because you have to devote some energy to keeping the 'solid oxide' (AKA catalyst?) hot.
By the way, from Acumentrics FAQ:
How is Acumentrics technology different from its competitors?
Tolerant of repeated thermal cycling (over 100 v. fewer than 15 for others)
That means you can shut it down about 100 times. Any more shutdowns and you may start to damage your unit. So if your nighttime load is near zero, sorry unlike a diesel, no cutover to batteries. You gotta keep the generator hot. This is gonna adversely affect the efficiency of home use.
Mitsubishi has a similar coffee table thing they call diamondtouch . It can handle two hands per user and the version I saw allowed 4 users. Oh yeah, and it was first publicized in 2001!
Yeah, but thinwire was available by then. And the effectiveness of an appletalk network depends on how many machines are on it. 20 or 30 machines; not a problem. But there were buildings at MIT with 60 machines or more per floor, and the campus-wide Athena network had hundreds of machines and dozens of servers. Appletalk was adequate for small islands of connectivity, but not a building-wide network; much less campus-wide.
I've always wondered where patent cross licensing enters the debate. Almost certainly, Microsoft and IBM have cross licensing agreements that give MS access to all IBM patents and vice versa. That means that IBM, a Linux distributor, probably already has access to all of MS's patents including the the alleged 228 or 235 or whatever allegedly infringed but unidentified patents. So maybe IBM owes MS some percentage of the revenue on its sales of Linux. Oh yeah, I'll bet MS is more than welcome to half of the zero dollars IBM collects from Linux sales. Ha ha! IBM's Linux money comes from support contracts; something MS has no patents on. I'm sure there's an error in my logic somewhere -- I hope the slashdot community is not too shy to help identify it.
Here's a libertarian approach to privacy: treat personal information like material property. And give each individual absolute property rights over his or her personal information. If you wanna do anything with my personal information, even just stamp it on a magazine sticker to mail me a subscription, you gotta get my permission. Just like if it was a trademark, or an article I copyrighted. And I, only I, have the right to rent out my personal information. Just like if it was my car. See? Libertarianism is not incompatible with protection of privacy. Look, we already treat credit card numbers like personal property: we pass them out to be used for a single specific purpose, and not to be shared. Everyone understands the contract. Misuse a credit card number and go to jail!
Personally, I find the libertarian approach to privacy too draconian, but I wanted to point out that it's really quite doable.
Exactly. Gates was acting as Salesman-in-Chief when he made these remarks. So the real question is how much product did he push with his remarks. Or, if you wanted to put him in context, you could compare Gates' predictions for the future with his CEO peers such as Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, and Larry Ellison. My guess is Gates would come out on top in that comparison.
Amusing aside: my first experience with Steve Jobs' famous "reality distortion field" was a talk he gave at MIT in the early eighties around the time of the Fat Mac. I remember him saying something to the effect that "it turns out for networking all you need is about 150K/sec." He was trying to tell us that Appletalk was adequate and that ethernet was overkill. So powerful was the reality distortion field that nobody even called him on it!
Oooh yes, FIOS is nice. We used to have a comcast cable modem. I can't recall what the peak download speed was supposed to be, but it was basically unrealizable because the upload speed was too low. You would saturate the upload bandwidth with 'acknowledge' packets before you could saturate the download bandwidth. With FIOS, they claim 15Mbit/sec down and 2Mbit/sec up. I have certainly gotten closer to these claims than to Comcast's claims. Also, troubleshooting is better on FIOS. The only time I ever had connection trouble, I called in and they said "we're showing that your optical network termination box is running on battery power" or words to that effect. Then I knew there was a power problem in my basement. Much more informative than Comcast troubleshooting.
If Apple owned AMD, the Apple would be stuck with slower hotter AMD chips!
Right now, Apple sells better features and style to price-insensitive buyers. Right now, AMD sells cheaper slower hotter chips to price-conscious buyers. Now Steve Jobs is a great salesman, but do you really think he wants to even try to convince Apple fans that they should avoid computers with those 45nm 3.33GHz quadcore CPUs that everyone else will soon be shipping? I have my doubts...
My main claim to expertise here is that one summer long ago as a teenager, I operated a "cracker & fanner" at a chocolate factory. This machine takes the shells off roasted cocoa beans, prior to the step of grinding nibs into chocolate liquor. I love chocolate and I am happy to spend some extra money to buy what I consider "good chocolate." In my personal idiosyncratic definition, good chocolate tastes like the smell of that factory I worked long ago.
I learned that there are two flavor components to chocolate: (1) the cocoa -- originally the hard cell wall in a cocoa bean; and (2) the the cocoa butter -- the fat stored in the cocoa bean cells. Chocolate requires extra cocoa butter, which makes cocoa powder a by-product of chocolate manufacture.
My concern is that if manufacturers are allowed to substitute alternate fats for the cocoa butter, then one of the flavor components of chocolate may be diluted or entirely missing, and I will have no way of determining this before buying the product. To take an extreme case, white chocolate gets all its chocolate flavor from cocoa butter; there is no cocoa component. If you remove the cocoa butter from white chocolate, the remaining product will be sugar mixed with flavorless fat and a white colorant.
I frequently buy candybars as well as boxed candy. I frequently read the labels of the candy I buy. If the label says, e.g. "cocoa, sugar, and fractionated palm kernel oil" then I know the candy is missing cocoa butter. If the label says "chocolate," then I know the candy has all the components necessary for chocolate flavor. It may turn out to be lousy chocolate, but at least it is basic information before I spend my money. I particularly like the labeling I find on some European dark chocolate (presumably voluntary) that says "65% dark" or words to that effect. This labeling gives me an even better idea of what I'm buying.
If the definition of chocolate is changed in the USA, then I will be even less able to judge whether American candy will taste good to me without the risk of spending money. Since the Europeans are not changing the definition of chocolate, their labeling will be more informative than the labeling on American candy, and I will be more likely to buy the European products.
You beat me to the punch! Yes indeed, the article and most of the slashdot discussion assumes that linepair tests are the last word on human visual acuity. While line pairs are important, they don't tell you everything. Vernier scales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernier allow our eyes to resolve differences up to 10 times smaller than linepair measurements would indicate.
Now I'm not trying to claim that HDTVs need 200 megapixels; I'm just underlining the parent post in saying that if you only measure line pairs you will miss important visual abilities.
I'm not an MS fanboy and I only run Windows when I have to. My desktop has been Redhat since 6.1. And
I'll agree that MS's applications are rarely innovative. But there are
other areas for innovation. For example, in spreadsheets, Excel beat Lotus 123 because Excel was ready for mice and windows while Excel was
still trying to make the transition from key-press menus. That's a user
interface innovation, though rather antique at this point (but Winer says MS "never was" an innovator). BTW, this MS press release also claims MS invented the toolbar (maybe they mean a detachable one) http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/05-07tim e.mspx.
Then there's the WinFS file system that was pulled from Longhorn. I don't know if it's better, but it sounds innovative.
One MS project that really interests me is PhotoSynth. http://labs.live.com/photosynth/. Anybody out there willing to argue it's not a truly innovative application?
One other area of innovation I'm willing to give MS credit for:
building large systems. It's almost impossible to build software
on the scale of Office and Windows. Tens of thousands of developers,
millions of lines of code, thousands of different software &
hardware environments to test in. Not to mention all the backward compatibility. I'm guessing here, but I bet MS innovated in large software project managment.
I second the suggestion of linear algebra. Here's how I would do it:
1 semester of graphics. While teaching graphics, make sure to emphasize the matrices. Students will get concrete visual examples of what matrix multiplication can do: rotation, scaling, general affine transforms. Graphics is useful in itself, and becomes a stepping stone to linear algebra.
Then 1 semester of linear algebra, with lots of practical examples. Linear algebra is the stepping stone to data mining. it also leads other important statistical techniques used in pattern recognition and machine learning.
Delving into those statistical techniques is graduate level work, but by knowing linear algebra, a CS student has the tools to learn the basics from a book.
Lemme put it like this: If your student wants to work for Google or similar cutting edge companies, she should be familiar with linear algebra. If she wants to spend her career translating sales records from one database format to another, she can probably skip the linear algebra.
Fine points. Lemme just add (IANAL) that not all monopolies are illegal. It depends on how the company got to its monopoly position and what it's doing with it. You can make a pretty good case that MS got its OS monopoly position legally. The Office monopoly is more questionable, but if you want to re-try it in court, you prolly need new facts; all the old stuff has been tried once already. I believe that monopoly behavior is a criminal case, so double jeopardy applies (i.e. prosecutors can't just keep on re-prosecuting the same case if they don't get the result they want in the previous trial).
Slashdot Mirror
> A lot of very ugly hacks were used to make uTorrent so micro. I'd love to see the source so I can port it directly to linux. Where did you see the source?
You claim a person "is on his own, besides the normal cares the society takes for everyone." What is the "normal care"? What makes that level of care "good," and the level of care that tries to eradicate polio and tuberculosis "bad"? I'm trying to keep an open mind here, but your argument is completely different now than is was before. Your new argument also raises lots of questions; here are a few.
You say "That's precisely the point: I'm not saying we should let him die, or let him live, because we shoudln't 'let' him a damn thing. That's the point. We shouldn't prevent him from living, and we shoudln't prevent him from dying." OK, fair enough. But suppose there is this whole group of thousands of people who live on decent land, but they keep on suffering from diseases like malaria and river blindness. Suppose I have resources that could eradicate these diseases, and allow these people to become farmers and businessmen and raise healthy educated children. Should I pretend I don't have those resources and that power? Is it a bad thing to enable these people to become healthy and prosperous? Why or why not, or in which cases is it bad to help people in this way? Did you raise yourself from nothing, or did you get help from your whole society? If your society wants to help people on another continent, why not?
Then you say "The point is: We should have vaccines." But you also say that it's OK to get vaccines if you are "good enough ... [to] go to the Public hospital and fill in a form so you can get them ..." Explain about this 'good enough.' If you live in sub-Saharan Africa, the nearest 'Public hospital' may be 4000Km away. It seems the definition of 'good enough' involves how near you live to a 'Public hospital.' And so maybe it follows that if a charity puts the equivalent of a 'Public hospital' nearer to poor people, then that suddenly makes the poor people 'good enough' to merit vaccines. I can't figure out what you mean by 'good enough,' but is it a bad thing if a charity makes more people 'good enough' to deserve medicine?
There's also a solid statistical correlation between smoking and heart disease. One source for such data is the multi-generation Framingham Study. For example, see this from 2006 or this from 2005. You don't like the Framingham Study? Try ARIC (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities). See this and then read abstracts from some of the many articles that cite it. Here's a nice one from 2006.
Now, it's also clear that using nicotine replacement therapy as a way to quit smoking is good for your life expectancy. what's not so well studied is what happens to people who've never smoked and who start to use nicotine. In other words, in the published literature, the dangers of nicotine may be masked by the benefits of smoking cessation. This remains to be seen.
The evidence against nicotine is that it causes arterial damage. The statistical correlations from Framingham & ARIC are between smoking and coronary heart disease (not to mention cancer,but I'm focusing on CHD). The guy I worked for was all about studying arterial damage to predict odds of heart attack and stroke. You see, the damaged artery tends to become sclerotic and develop plaques. Vulnerable plaques can break off, enter the blood stream, and then get stuck in a small blood vessel, blocking it and starving some region of tissue for blood. If that tissue is in the heart, you have a miocardial infarction. If it's in the brain, you have one form of stroke. Nicotine also raises blood pressure, increasing the risk of the other form of stroke (the two kinds of stroke are blockage and bleed).
In other words, there is good reason to believe that nicotine has some harmful effects. The real question is in which cases its benefits outweigh its harm.
Somehow I doubt it. Somehow I suspect that you take advantage of modern medicine just like everyone else who can afford it. So I bet your 'gene pool' argument doesn't apply to yourself. And if you're not willing to live that argument, then, my friend, you haven't earned the right to argue it.
But just for the sake of argument, let me assume for a moment that you live like a 'Christian Scientist,' one of those people who eschew medicine for religious or philosophical reasons. Even so, I still say your 'strengthen the gene pool' argument is wrong. Because the thing that makes a gene pool strong is diversity. And medical science preserves diversity in the gene pool. When you allow large groups of people to die off, you're eliminating variety from the gene pool, and that's a dangerous thing. Let me give you an example: sickle cell anemia. It's well known http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_anemia that if you inherit both genes for sickle cell, you'll have a shortened, 'weaker' life. So why isn't it eliminated from the gene pool? Because the sickle cell gene carries malaria resistance. The diversity of sickle cell is useful for fighting malaria. And it just so happens that Africa is our biggest pool of genetic diversity https://www.genographic.com/. So if you really wanted to strengthen the gene pool, you would be working to maintain diversity, not arguing to eliminate it.
I have one other argument; it concerns what kinds of traits are you trying to strengthen. Your approach, letting nasty diseases kill people, only selects for immune system strength, and maybe overall physical health. But we as a race are more and more dependent on intellectual strengths. Stephen Hawking is physically a failure, but intellectually he's a genius among geniuses. Your argument would let him die because of his physical weakness without considering his towering intellectual strengths. That's just plain dumb.
Actually, the Gates Foundation tends to concentrate on the eradication of diseases, especially in the third world. But I suppose in your opinion, if a person is stupid enough to get born in an area where Guinea Worm disease or tuberculosis is rampant, then it's just their fault for catching the disease. Gate's idea may be that a safer, more disease-free environment is a better place for businesses to develop, but I'm sure you know better. They are spending $900 million to eradicate TB. Please explain why this is wrong and why people should keep catching TB.
According to http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/FactShe et/, the Gates Foundation's current endowment is $33.4, and they made grant payments of $1.56 billion in 2006 (a U.S. charitable foundation must grant a minimum 5% of its net worth each year.) Think what you will about Microsoft, but few people have given as large a percentage of their wealth at as young an age as Gates did.
True speech input with language understanding might bring about a major shift, but I can't see it for just a better mouse.
A few things to note: qtparted and some other partition editors cannot see matrix RAID. To them your pair of physical disks appears to be a pair of physical disks. fdisk can see them either way:
sudo
sudo
sudo
Disk
sudo
Disk
The big bonus of this layout is that you get to choose exactly how much of your disk will be devoted to redundancy. As a small added bonus, the mirrored portion of the disks is slightly faster to access because it'll choose whichever disk head is nearest the cylinder you want to access.
By the way, from Acumentrics FAQ:
That means you can shut it down about 100 times. Any more shutdowns and you may start to damage your unit. So if your nighttime load is near zero, sorry unlike a diesel, no cutover to batteries. You gotta keep the generator hot. This is gonna adversely affect the efficiency of home use.Mitsubishi has a similar coffee table thing they call diamondtouch . It can handle two hands per user and the version I saw allowed 4 users. Oh yeah, and it was first publicized in 2001!
Yeah, but thinwire was available by then. And the effectiveness of an appletalk network depends on how many machines are on it. 20 or 30 machines; not a problem. But there were buildings at MIT with 60 machines or more per floor, and the campus-wide Athena network had hundreds of machines and dozens of servers. Appletalk was adequate for small islands of connectivity, but not a building-wide network; much less campus-wide.
I've always wondered where patent cross licensing enters the debate. Almost certainly, Microsoft and IBM have cross licensing agreements that give MS access to all IBM patents and vice versa. That means that IBM, a Linux distributor, probably already has access to all of MS's patents including the the alleged 228 or 235 or whatever allegedly infringed but unidentified patents. So maybe IBM owes MS some percentage of the revenue on its sales of Linux. Oh yeah, I'll bet MS is more than welcome to half of the zero dollars IBM collects from Linux sales. Ha ha! IBM's Linux money comes from support contracts; something MS has no patents on. I'm sure there's an error in my logic somewhere -- I hope the slashdot community is not too shy to help identify it.
Personally, I find the libertarian approach to privacy too draconian, but I wanted to point out that it's really quite doable.
Amusing aside: my first experience with Steve Jobs' famous "reality distortion field" was a talk he gave at MIT in the early eighties around the time of the Fat Mac. I remember him saying something to the effect that "it turns out for networking all you need is about 150K/sec." He was trying to tell us that Appletalk was adequate and that ethernet was overkill. So powerful was the reality distortion field that nobody even called him on it!
Oooh yes, FIOS is nice. We used to have a comcast cable modem. I can't recall what the peak download speed was supposed to be, but it was basically unrealizable because the upload speed was too low. You would saturate the upload bandwidth with 'acknowledge' packets before you could saturate the download bandwidth. With FIOS, they claim 15Mbit/sec down and 2Mbit/sec up. I have certainly gotten closer to these claims than to Comcast's claims. Also, troubleshooting is better on FIOS. The only time I ever had connection trouble, I called in and they said "we're showing that your optical network termination box is running on battery power" or words to that effect. Then I knew there was a power problem in my basement. Much more informative than Comcast troubleshooting.
Bush & co: "We're for states rights." Execpt when they're not...
If Apple owned AMD, the Apple would be stuck with slower hotter AMD chips! Right now, Apple sells better features and style to price-insensitive buyers. Right now, AMD sells cheaper slower hotter chips to price-conscious buyers. Now Steve Jobs is a great salesman, but do you really think he wants to even try to convince Apple fans that they should avoid computers with those 45nm 3.33GHz quadcore CPUs that everyone else will soon be shipping? I have my doubts...
I learned that there are two flavor components to chocolate: (1) the cocoa -- originally the hard cell wall in a cocoa bean; and (2) the the cocoa butter -- the fat stored in the cocoa bean cells. Chocolate requires extra cocoa butter, which makes cocoa powder a by-product of chocolate manufacture.
My concern is that if manufacturers are allowed to substitute alternate fats for the cocoa butter, then one of the flavor components of chocolate may be diluted or entirely missing, and I will have no way of determining this before buying the product. To take an extreme case, white chocolate gets all its chocolate flavor from cocoa butter; there is no cocoa component. If you remove the cocoa butter from white chocolate, the remaining product will be sugar mixed with flavorless fat and a white colorant.
I frequently buy candybars as well as boxed candy. I frequently read the labels of the candy I buy. If the label says, e.g. "cocoa, sugar, and fractionated palm kernel oil" then I know the candy is missing cocoa butter. If the label says "chocolate," then I know the candy has all the components necessary for chocolate flavor. It may turn out to be lousy chocolate, but at least it is basic information before I spend my money. I particularly like the labeling I find on some European dark chocolate (presumably voluntary) that says "65% dark" or words to that effect. This labeling gives me an even better idea of what I'm buying.
If the definition of chocolate is changed in the USA, then I will be even less able to judge whether American candy will taste good to me without the risk of spending money. Since the Europeans are not changing the definition of chocolate, their labeling will be more informative than the labeling on American candy, and I will be more likely to buy the European products.
Great! OLED has a better color gamut than LCD or plasma
Now I'm not trying to claim that HDTVs need 200 megapixels; I'm just underlining the parent post in saying that if you only measure line pairs you will miss important visual abilities.
The Office 2007 touts some kind of new UI improvement on toolbars. MS claims enough interest in the new UI to offer licensing http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/n ov06/11-21officeui.mspx
. I'd call that a UI innovation.
Then there's the WinFS file system that was pulled from Longhorn. I don't know if it's better, but it sounds innovative.
One MS project that really interests me is PhotoSynth. http://labs.live.com/photosynth/. Anybody out there willing to argue it's not a truly innovative application?
One other area of innovation I'm willing to give MS credit for: building large systems. It's almost impossible to build software on the scale of Office and Windows. Tens of thousands of developers, millions of lines of code, thousands of different software & hardware environments to test in. Not to mention all the backward compatibility. I'm guessing here, but I bet MS innovated in large software project managment.
1 semester of graphics. While teaching graphics, make sure to emphasize the matrices. Students will get concrete visual examples of what matrix multiplication can do: rotation, scaling, general affine transforms. Graphics is useful in itself, and becomes a stepping stone to linear algebra.
Then 1 semester of linear algebra, with lots of practical examples. Linear algebra is the stepping stone to data mining. it also leads other important statistical techniques used in pattern recognition and machine learning.
Delving into those statistical techniques is graduate level work, but by knowing linear algebra, a CS student has the tools to learn the basics from a book.
Lemme put it like this: If your student wants to work for Google or similar cutting edge companies, she should be familiar with linear algebra. If she wants to spend her career translating sales records from one database format to another, she can probably skip the linear algebra.
Fine points. Lemme just add (IANAL) that not all monopolies are illegal. It depends on how the company got to its monopoly position and what it's doing with it. You can make a pretty good case that MS got its OS monopoly position legally. The Office monopoly is more questionable, but if you want to re-try it in court, you prolly need new facts; all the old stuff has been tried once already. I believe that monopoly behavior is a criminal case, so double jeopardy applies (i.e. prosecutors can't just keep on re-prosecuting the same case if they don't get the result they want in the previous trial).
Josh Marshall, at Talkingpointsmemo http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ has a pointer http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001944.php to the google cache version http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:chTn88IH384J: www.conquestgroup.com/ContactUs/Contact.cfm+%22con quest+communications%22+and+contact&hl=en&gl=us&ct =clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a
of Conquest Communications' contact page. When I called 804-358-0560, I got an electronic voice giving a list of two digit extensions counting up from around 24. I picked a random one, politely gave my (real) name and (real) phone number, said I had heard about the robocalling and wondered if they guy had any comment. I hope he calls me back!