What surprises me about the lead article in this discussion is that Boston Common Asset Management, which (to my knowledge) is not an official advocate of socially responsible investing, has done such a clearly socially responsible act. Does anyone know of any funds managed by Boston Common Asset Management? I want to invest a significant amount of my 401K monies into those funds.
Like Stanford's Board of Trustees, I too am committed to the cause of human rights. I invest exclusively in socially responsible mutual funds.
By the way, there is a significant and measurable difference between Western society and non-Western society. In the West, you will often see incidents of this kind, where shareholders actually demand that companies support human rights. Cisco will change. Reebok has already changed and is now an official supporter of Amnesty International. Can anyone find examples of such shareholder activism in, say, the Chinese province of Taiwan?
In a report titled "Scientists Discover T. Rex. Soft Tissue" distributed by NBC on its website, scientists have actually obtained the blood samples of the most famous dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus Rex. This fact, coupled with the rapid advances in genetic engineering, suggests interesting possibilities in the future.
Even if scientists cannot extract the entire genetic code of dinosaurs from the blood samples, the scientists could make educated guesses. They then complete what, in their opinion, is the genetic code of a particular dinosaur. They then inject this code into a de-nuclearized egg of, say, a Komodo lizard to create a cloned embryo. Scientists can then use the embryonic fossilized bones to verify whether their guess is accurate. The scientists simply compare the fossilized bones with the bones of the developing embryo. If they are an exact match, then the scientists have likely cloned the genetic code of a particular dinosaur specimen.
The young adults of today are part of "Generation Y", which was discussed in a report
titled "The Echo Boomers" and broadcast by "60 Minutes" in 2004 December. The report states, "
Levine calls the phenomenon visual motor ecstasy, where any cultural accoutrement that doesn't produce instant satisfaction is boring. As echo boomers grow up, they'll have to learn that life is not just a series of headlines and highlight reels".
The main reason that instant messaging (IM) is popular among young adults is that it provides the kind of instant gratification that e-mail cannot provide. IM gives you instant interaction with the other party: friend, girl friend, etc. E-mail responses are usually not instantaneous and depend on whether the recipient of the e-mail note has logged onto her computer and actually read the note.
According to a CNET article, the PSP sports a MIPS R4000 running at 333 MHz. The performance is probably comparable to a Pentium II running at the same speed.
Nokia's choosing Linux is best explained by a recent "Washington Post" article reporting that Motorola, the #2 cell-phone manufacturer, is making aggressive moves in the market for cell phones. The market is cutthroat, and margins are shrinking.
Linux provides a very cost-effective (almost free) solution. The cost is born by the small army of volunteer open-source developers.
Nokia is making the right choice and shall remain the #1 cell-phone manufacturer.
A two-pronged approach to piracy is best. One prong is what Microsoft is doing now. Namely, it is begging pirates to identify themselves.
Begging has limited utility.
Another, more effective approach, is to deliberately distribute 2 versions of each software package: (1) regular and (2) deliberately virus infected (i.e. boobytrapped by Microsoft itself). In conjunction with American law enforcement and Interpol, Microsoft uses plain-dressed folks to deliberately forward copies of the boobytrapped software to various groups in China and other hotbeds of piracy. One possible boobytrap, for example, could be deleteing random files.
After a while, the pirated-software-loving folks who use these boobytrapped packages will suffer huge losses: lost sales (due to spontaneous e-mailing of company data to a competitor), injured patients (due to altered patient data), etc. These huge losses will convince the people to stick with the real McCoy and actually buy the software that they use. They will learn the price of pirating software.
A side benefit is that Linux and other open-source software will become even more popular.
One of the crew members of Discovery is
Soichi Noguchi. He is part of the recently created Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
According to "JAXA eyes moon shuttle by 2025", JAXA plans to create a manned shuttle for trips to the moon.
Perhaps, Tokyo should consider using Japan's arsensal high-performance computers to advance the state of the art in fighter aircraft and space vehicles. Designing these devices requires intensive numerical simulations which are ideally suited to such high-performance computers, which have been relegated to more mundane tasks like terrestrial simulations (e.g. weather simulation). Building the precursor to a starship seems to be a tad more interesting than terrestrial simulations.
In creating Godson-2, Beijing had considerable assistance from
the samples of American military processors that Gao Zhan stole and gave to a Chinese military institute. Gao Zhan is the Chinese for whom the American people sacrificed their political and economic capital to "free" from a Chinese prison. The American people were duped by her. She was a spy in the Chinese spy network, and the entire fake Chinese prisonment was part of the game to steal American military technology.
She is currently in the process of being deported.
On a more serious note, Tokyo should focus its future supercomputer development on projects of national importance. One area which is in vital need of improvement is fighter aircraft.
The best fighter that Tokyo has built so far is the F-2. It is based on decades-old technology called the American F-16. The F-2, ironically, is even more expensive than the F-15, another decades-old technology.
Beijing poses a grave threat to Australia, Japan, and other Western nations. In any conflict with Beijing, Tokyo must achieve air superiority. Frankly, the F-2 is unlikely to be adequate for the job even though the F-2 is the pride of the Japanese Self-Defense Force.
Tokyo should apply its incredible arsenal of home-grown computing power to designing the very best all-Japanese fighter. The key is air superiority against any Chinese or Korean threat. Further, the new Japanese jet fighter must be fast enough to intercept any Chinese strike against Australia. A new Japanese aircraft carrier (armed with these new Japanese fighters) patrolling near Australia should do the trick.
These ads in videogames remind me of ads on VHS tapes and DVDs. Before the start of the main feature, VHS tapes usually start with an ad for an up-coming release (on videotape) of a movie. Of course, these ads are annoying, and you can easily skip them by pressing the fast forward button.
The DVDs are more creative -- especially when it is a porn DVD. There is some code (or something) on the DVD that prevents you from doing a chapter skip.
Allow me to explain. I usually watch porn on my laptop, and it is equipped with a DVD player. Once I slam that DVD into the slot, Windows XP recognizes the right software and invokes the DVD player. It has both a fast-forward button and a forward chapter-skip button. Once I see the ad, I try to click on the chapter-skip button so that I can quickly move onto the Vaseline-consuming scenes. However, the chapter-skip button is disabled. The best that I can do is to click on the fast-forward button.
Unfortunately, many porn DVDs are packed with frontend ads, and fast-forwarding through them takes about 1 minute. 1 minute is an eternity when you want to get a porn fix. Guys, you just know what I'm talking about.
HP Unix was distinctly inferior to IBM's AIX, and moving to Linux is a way for HP to (1) jettison its own inferior product and (2) avoid the R&D costs of developing a superior operating system (OS). As for #2, there are 2 aspects: (1) feature development and (2) reliability. The vast army of open-source developers have made Linux a feature-rich OS that rivals (and likely now exceeds) IBM's AIX.
Further, IBM has spent enormous sums of money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM will soon discover that this aspect of Linux is the Achille's heel of open source. By using Linux, HP essentially gets a free ride from IBM and need not spend the money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM has already done the work.
I can already hear the grinding of the reduction-in-force axe at the OS department of HP.
One of the principal markets of Sun Microsystems has been financial services. During the DotCom Boom, finance companies on Wall Street purchased billions of dollars of Sun equipment.
In the post-boom era, those same companies are now buying (mainly) x86 boxes and (secondarily) PowerPC servers running Linux. This phenomenon explains why Sun has failed to achieve profitability and revenue growth while both Dell and IBM have been doing well during the last 2 years of the economic recovery. IBM, especially, has been selling billions of dollars of Linux-powered boxes to finance companies.
In 2000 and 2001, folks from the marketing and tech-marketing departments at Sun would spend hours each day on writing condemnations of IBM in SlashDot forums. In particular, one of the Sun talking (actually, "condemnation") points is that IBM supports multiple operating systems (OSes) whereas Sun supports only a single unified OS across all Sun platforms. Now, Sun supports 3 OSes: Solaris, Linux, and (gasp!) Windows. My. My. The times have changed.
Now, where are these talking heads? They have been fired (or euphemistically, "laid off"), reprimanded, or demoted.
The phrase "unprecedented accuracy" seems to imply that this technique can detect very minute underwater sounds. Would this technology also be applicable to detecting the barely detectable sounds of underwater nuclear submarines?
Yet, IBM loves it and is now, apparently, committing to it. Once IBM backs an open-source product (e.g. Linux) and ships it to customers, then IBM ensures that the product performs flawlessly. Who can doubt that IBM is a significant contributor to the high-reliability of today's Linux build? The strength of IBM is its commitment to its customers.
What is interesting is that, from a business perspective, there is no need for Harmony to be fully compliant with Sun's closed Java standards. The route to divergence is to (1) define a new language called "Harmony", (2) place it with a standards body, (3) maintain full compatibility with only the current version of Java (in order to support all of IBM's current customers and developers) but deliberately diverge from compatibility for future versions of Java, (4) arrange for IBM to jettison use of future versions of Java and to fully utilize Harmony, (5) generously borrow the best concepts from Java while ensuring that the word "Java" is never used (in order to avoid a lawsuit), and (6) build support for Harmony in GCC. This strategy could work.
C# is a ripoff of Java and is quite popular.
There is nothing magical about the Java name. Just consistently use the name, "Harmony", on this proposed Java variant. Everyone will know that "Harmony" is Java -- plus additional stuff. Even if "Harmony" is only 98% compatible with future versions of Java, "Harmony" could grab the software development if the open-source community backs it.
A more profound question is the following. What is the point of amateur radio when the Internet has connected most of the globe?
On the Internet, you can talk to almost anyone, anywhere as long as you have paid your monthly fee to the Internet service provider (ISP). The charge for talking via the Internet is free, once you have paid your fee to the ISP.
Quantum Consciousness, Not Size, Counts
on
Humanoid Robot HR-2
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The Swedes have done a terrific job. The next step is to construct microtubes that can use quantum states to "perform" consciousness. The Penrose-Hameroff Model explains how quantum states provide the basis of consciousness.
If the Swedes can integrate the microtubes into the neural network controlling this robot, then the Swedes will achieve a sentient cybernetic device. Such an achievement would qualify for a Nobel Prize in physics.
"Impressive. Most Impressive." utters a human-machine hybrid in Star War V.
Movies are shared experiences. Most people watch movies as a group so that they can laugh together or cry together, at each entertaining scene that unfolds on their television or the silver screen.
When the video cassette recorder (VCR) became popular and economical, theater owners issued dire warnings that the end of the theater was at hand. These warnings were wrong. People go to the theater for reasons beyond just viewing the latest movie. People patronize the theater for social reasons; it is a place to enjoy a shared experience with your friends.
For this reason, the video iPod will not rival the success of the audio iPod. Music is something that many people enjoy by themselves. Witness all the cars equipped with stereos: the lone occupant of the car listens to music on her way to and from work.
The only exception to the above reasoning is pornography. Many people do, indeed, watch pornographic movies alone.
Here's an idea. To spur sales of the video iPod, Apple could offer 10 free jars of Vaselino for each purchase of a video iPod.
Although we should not sacrifice American lives to defend the morally bankrupt Taiwanese, we should keep in mind the lengths to which the Chinese would be willing to wage war against us Americans.
Most people are not technically savy like the SlashDot crowd. The average American likes Windows because it is relatively simple to install and to connect to the Internet.
Note that AOL builds an ISP dialup client only for Windows, not Linux.
If we expect Linux to make a dent in the desktop market, Linux distributions must change radically. They must be as simple to install as MacOS X, a very-simple-to-install UNIX variant. We need the ISPs to board the Linux train by building dialup clients. Yes. Much of America still uses dial, and in the dialup market, AOL is still #1.
I absolutely admire Linux, and if my ISP would provide the same kind of support, for Linux, that my ISP provides for Window, I would switch my AMD-powered desktop over to Linux. Otherwise, I'll wait for the Apple x86 box and switch from Linux to FreeBSD. I prefer Linux; it's got the cooler icon: the penguin.
By the way, some hackers will likely provide the necessary software patch to enable x86 MacOS to run on any IBM PC clone. If the Apple x86 box garners 10% or more of the market, then most of the ISPs will gleefully provide support for UNIX connectivity. Perhaps, the title of this article should be "Simplicity & Connectivity & A Matter of Time for the UNIX Juggernaut called Apple".
Given that most developers develop on a Windows platform, the 56% is likely due to these developers installing Cygwin. It provides an outstanding development environment by virtual of the fact that Cygwin emulates the entire UNIX environment. The alternative is that you must pay big bucks to a commercial company to buy a package of UNIX tools (e.g. ls, grep, sh, and the like) written for Windows. Yet, Cygwin is free. Why would any fool pay the commercial company when she can just download Cygwin?
Cygwin is not a toy. I develop on it all day. My productivity in Cygwin is much higher than my productivity in raw Windows.
You raise some good points, but Taiwan is allied with China, economically if not politically. The Taiwanese joined the Chinese in exporting weapons technology to Iran. This matter was noted by the 2005 Federal Register of the American government. Washington has slapped economic sanctions against the offending Taiwanese company.
On another note, the Taiwanese actually accelerated investments into China when we tried to slap sanctions against Beijing to punish it for the Tiananmen Square Incident. The Taiwanese aren't friends. We should not sacrifice our lives to defend these Taiwanese.
The American military faced the following three choices just before the end of the war in the Pacific.
Case I (which actually happened): Drop the 2 A-bombs. Washington terminates the war immediately. (1) The suffering of the Asians brutalized by the Japanese ends immediately. (2) American lives are spared. (3) The Japanese bear the cost of the human lives in the final stages of the war.
Case II (what might have happened): Do not use the 2 A-bombs. Washington allows the war to drag on for 6 more months. (1) The suffering of the Asians brutalized by the Japanese continues for 6 more months. (2) Many Americans lives are lost in an invasion of Japan. (3) The Japanese share the cost, in human lives, with the Americans.
Case III (what might have happened): Do not use the 2 A-bombs. Washington allows the war to drag on for 6 more months. (1) The suffering of the Asians brutalized by the Japanese continues for 6 more months. (2) Few Americans lives are lost as the they blockade the island and use conventional bombs to destroy what is left of Japan. (3) The Japanese bear the cost of the human lives in the final stages of the war as they either starve to death from the blockade or die from the rain of bombs.
Case I is the optimum choice because it minimizes the overall suffering for everyone: Japanese (though relatively more Japanese, compared to other Asians and the Americans, die and suffer in Case I), other Asians, and the Americans. Advocates of Case II or Case III ignore the fact that the war was not merely between Japan and the USA. Rather, the war was also between Japan and Asia -- the exception being Taiwan. Advocates of Case III are probably right in that the least number of Japanese and Americans would die in Case III, but the advocates ignore the suffering of the Asians -- of whom many were languishing in the biological labs maintained by the Japanese.
War is horrible. There is no clean and tidy way to end it.
Today, the nation that most resembles pre-World-War-II Japan is China. Its population is highly nationalistic, and the majority of Chinese support the occupation of Tibet. The matter is not an issue of government censorship, for both Chinese students in the USA and the general population in Hong Kong have full access to Western media and still support the occupation of Tibet.
Did anyone notice the repeated Chinese demands for apologies from Japan even though Tokyo apologized numerous times and even though
the Beijing has never apologized to the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the North Korean refugees (whom Beijing deports back to Pyongyang to certain death and/or imprisonment), and all other direct victims of Chinese brutality. Yet, Beijing continues to accelerate the expansion of its military forces when Beijing has no enemies
That "'misleading figures and surveys are muddying the waters''" is easily explained by a recent SlashDot article: "Study Shows One Third of All Studies Are Nonsense". We need an unbiased but authoritative organization to do a reliable study of Linux versus Windows. The best choice is probably the computer department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU).
They have a herd of poorly paid but diligent slaves (a.k.a. graduate students studying for a Ph.D.). They do excellent work in voluminous quantities and would surely produce an accurate analysis of Linux versus Windows.
Why does IBM think they have the inside track all of a sudden?
IBM has a lock on the next-generation game consoles. "Computer Business Review" reports that
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (MNS) are collaborating with IBM to build the next-generation processors for game consoles.
"PC World" reports that MNS will incorporate IBM processors in their next-generation game consoles.
The hidden sub-text is that the future IBM processors will be excellent for pornographic games, providing life-like flesh tones and smooth-motion "thrusting", "quivering", and "wiggling". Pornography has traditionally be a significant driver of video-processing technology.
Part of AMD's claims is outrageous. Why would AMD expect its competitor, Intel, to write software that supports AMD's own products? We would not expect IBM to modify AIX or any other IBM software package to run on SPARC, which is a poorly designed processor. Sun Microsystems can surely whine about IBM's tactics, and Sun has definitely whined. However, IBM is well within its rights to withhold software support.
On a related note, is there any way by which the authors of the GNU compiler collection (GCC) would limit the range of x86 instructions generated by GCC compilers? Some instructions are simply too complex and could actually be replaced by sequences of simpler instructions, and each such sequence would actually run faster than the original, more complex instruction. A simplified subset of the x86 instructions is sufficient for compiling all computer programs.
By restricting the GCC compilers to generating only a simple but fast subset of instructions, we could encourage both AMD and Intel to deprecate and, ultimately, eliminate the more complex x86 instructions. Linux and the bulk of open-source software use the GCC compilers and would provide a critical mass of support for a new streamlined transistor-count-reduced x86 chips. Here, I am thinking, "shockingly reduced in power due to using 1/3 of the transistors."
Slashdot Mirror
Yet, are there things that are more important than money?
Fortunately, many of my peers in the United States of America feel that some things are more important than money. Consider the case of Stanford University. It is probably the most commercial of the elite universities and has strong ties to industry. Yet, Stanford University recently divested its investments in Chinese companies like PetroChina, which is commited to indifference to the Sudanese victims of human-rights abuses.
What surprises me about the lead article in this discussion is that Boston Common Asset Management, which (to my knowledge) is not an official advocate of socially responsible investing, has done such a clearly socially responsible act. Does anyone know of any funds managed by Boston Common Asset Management? I want to invest a significant amount of my 401K monies into those funds.
Like Stanford's Board of Trustees, I too am committed to the cause of human rights. I invest exclusively in socially responsible mutual funds.
By the way, there is a significant and measurable difference between Western society and non-Western society. In the West, you will often see incidents of this kind, where shareholders actually demand that companies support human rights. Cisco will change. Reebok has already changed and is now an official supporter of Amnesty International. Can anyone find examples of such shareholder activism in, say, the Chinese province of Taiwan?
Even if scientists cannot extract the entire genetic code of dinosaurs from the blood samples, the scientists could make educated guesses. They then complete what, in their opinion, is the genetic code of a particular dinosaur. They then inject this code into a de-nuclearized egg of, say, a Komodo lizard to create a cloned embryo. Scientists can then use the embryonic fossilized bones to verify whether their guess is accurate. The scientists simply compare the fossilized bones with the bones of the developing embryo. If they are an exact match, then the scientists have likely cloned the genetic code of a particular dinosaur specimen.
The main reason that instant messaging (IM) is popular among young adults is that it provides the kind of instant gratification that e-mail cannot provide. IM gives you instant interaction with the other party: friend, girl friend, etc. E-mail responses are usually not instantaneous and depend on whether the recipient of the e-mail note has logged onto her computer and actually read the note.
According to a CNET article, the PSP sports a MIPS R4000 running at 333 MHz. The performance is probably comparable to a Pentium II running at the same speed.
In other words, the performance is good.
Linux provides a very cost-effective (almost free) solution. The cost is born by the small army of volunteer open-source developers.
Nokia is making the right choice and shall remain the #1 cell-phone manufacturer.
Begging has limited utility.
Another, more effective approach, is to deliberately distribute 2 versions of each software package: (1) regular and (2) deliberately virus infected (i.e. boobytrapped by Microsoft itself). In conjunction with American law enforcement and Interpol, Microsoft uses plain-dressed folks to deliberately forward copies of the boobytrapped software to various groups in China and other hotbeds of piracy. One possible boobytrap, for example, could be deleteing random files.
After a while, the pirated-software-loving folks who use these boobytrapped packages will suffer huge losses: lost sales (due to spontaneous e-mailing of company data to a competitor), injured patients (due to altered patient data), etc. These huge losses will convince the people to stick with the real McCoy and actually buy the software that they use. They will learn the price of pirating software.
A side benefit is that Linux and other open-source software will become even more popular.
Perhaps, Tokyo should consider using Japan's arsensal high-performance computers to advance the state of the art in fighter aircraft and space vehicles. Designing these devices requires intensive numerical simulations which are ideally suited to such high-performance computers, which have been relegated to more mundane tasks like terrestrial simulations (e.g. weather simulation). Building the precursor to a starship seems to be a tad more interesting than terrestrial simulations.
She is currently in the process of being deported.
The best fighter that Tokyo has built so far is the F-2. It is based on decades-old technology called the American F-16. The F-2, ironically, is even more expensive than the F-15, another decades-old technology.
Beijing poses a grave threat to Australia, Japan, and other Western nations. In any conflict with Beijing, Tokyo must achieve air superiority. Frankly, the F-2 is unlikely to be adequate for the job even though the F-2 is the pride of the Japanese Self-Defense Force.
Tokyo should apply its incredible arsenal of home-grown computing power to designing the very best all-Japanese fighter. The key is air superiority against any Chinese or Korean threat. Further, the new Japanese jet fighter must be fast enough to intercept any Chinese strike against Australia. A new Japanese aircraft carrier (armed with these new Japanese fighters) patrolling near Australia should do the trick.
The DVDs are more creative -- especially when it is a porn DVD. There is some code (or something) on the DVD that prevents you from doing a chapter skip.
Allow me to explain. I usually watch porn on my laptop, and it is equipped with a DVD player. Once I slam that DVD into the slot, Windows XP recognizes the right software and invokes the DVD player. It has both a fast-forward button and a forward chapter-skip button. Once I see the ad, I try to click on the chapter-skip button so that I can quickly move onto the Vaseline-consuming scenes. However, the chapter-skip button is disabled. The best that I can do is to click on the fast-forward button.
Unfortunately, many porn DVDs are packed with frontend ads, and fast-forwarding through them takes about 1 minute. 1 minute is an eternity when you want to get a porn fix. Guys, you just know what I'm talking about.
Further, IBM has spent enormous sums of money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM will soon discover that this aspect of Linux is the Achille's heel of open source. By using Linux, HP essentially gets a free ride from IBM and need not spend the money to ensure that Linux is reliable. IBM has already done the work.
I can already hear the grinding of the reduction-in-force axe at the OS department of HP.
In the post-boom era, those same companies are now buying (mainly) x86 boxes and (secondarily) PowerPC servers running Linux. This phenomenon explains why Sun has failed to achieve profitability and revenue growth while both Dell and IBM have been doing well during the last 2 years of the economic recovery. IBM, especially, has been selling billions of dollars of Linux-powered boxes to finance companies.
In 2000 and 2001, folks from the marketing and tech-marketing departments at Sun would spend hours each day on writing condemnations of IBM in SlashDot forums. In particular, one of the Sun talking (actually, "condemnation") points is that IBM supports multiple operating systems (OSes) whereas Sun supports only a single unified OS across all Sun platforms. Now, Sun supports 3 OSes: Solaris, Linux, and (gasp!) Windows. My. My. The times have changed.
Now, where are these talking heads? They have been fired (or euphemistically, "laid off"), reprimanded, or demoted.
For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for Sun.
The phrase "unprecedented accuracy" seems to imply that this technique can detect very minute underwater sounds. Would this technology also be applicable to detecting the barely detectable sounds of underwater nuclear submarines?
Yet, IBM loves it and is now, apparently, committing to it. Once IBM backs an open-source product (e.g. Linux) and ships it to customers, then IBM ensures that the product performs flawlessly. Who can doubt that IBM is a significant contributor to the high-reliability of today's Linux build? The strength of IBM is its commitment to its customers.
What is interesting is that, from a business perspective, there is no need for Harmony to be fully compliant with Sun's closed Java standards. The route to divergence is to (1) define a new language called "Harmony", (2) place it with a standards body, (3) maintain full compatibility with only the current version of Java (in order to support all of IBM's current customers and developers) but deliberately diverge from compatibility for future versions of Java, (4) arrange for IBM to jettison use of future versions of Java and to fully utilize Harmony, (5) generously borrow the best concepts from Java while ensuring that the word "Java" is never used (in order to avoid a lawsuit), and (6) build support for Harmony in GCC. This strategy could work.
C# is a ripoff of Java and is quite popular.
There is nothing magical about the Java name. Just consistently use the name, "Harmony", on this proposed Java variant. Everyone will know that "Harmony" is Java -- plus additional stuff. Even if "Harmony" is only 98% compatible with future versions of Java, "Harmony" could grab the software development if the open-source community backs it.
On the Internet, you can talk to almost anyone, anywhere as long as you have paid your monthly fee to the Internet service provider (ISP). The charge for talking via the Internet is free, once you have paid your fee to the ISP.
If the Swedes can integrate the microtubes into the neural network controlling this robot, then the Swedes will achieve a sentient cybernetic device. Such an achievement would qualify for a Nobel Prize in physics.
"Impressive. Most Impressive." utters a human-machine hybrid in Star War V.
When the video cassette recorder (VCR) became popular and economical, theater owners issued dire warnings that the end of the theater was at hand. These warnings were wrong. People go to the theater for reasons beyond just viewing the latest movie. People patronize the theater for social reasons; it is a place to enjoy a shared experience with your friends.
For this reason, the video iPod will not rival the success of the audio iPod. Music is something that many people enjoy by themselves. Witness all the cars equipped with stereos: the lone occupant of the car listens to music on her way to and from work.
The only exception to the above reasoning is pornography. Many people do, indeed, watch pornographic movies alone.
Here's an idea. To spur sales of the video iPod, Apple could offer 10 free jars of Vaselino for each purchase of a video iPod.
Although we should not sacrifice American lives to defend the morally bankrupt Taiwanese, we should keep in mind the lengths to which the Chinese would be willing to wage war against us Americans.
Note that AOL builds an ISP dialup client only for Windows, not Linux.
If we expect Linux to make a dent in the desktop market, Linux distributions must change radically. They must be as simple to install as MacOS X, a very-simple-to-install UNIX variant. We need the ISPs to board the Linux train by building dialup clients. Yes. Much of America still uses dial, and in the dialup market, AOL is still #1.
I absolutely admire Linux, and if my ISP would provide the same kind of support, for Linux, that my ISP provides for Window, I would switch my AMD-powered desktop over to Linux. Otherwise, I'll wait for the Apple x86 box and switch from Linux to FreeBSD. I prefer Linux; it's got the cooler icon: the penguin.
By the way, some hackers will likely provide the necessary software patch to enable x86 MacOS to run on any IBM PC clone. If the Apple x86 box garners 10% or more of the market, then most of the ISPs will gleefully provide support for UNIX connectivity. Perhaps, the title of this article should be "Simplicity & Connectivity & A Matter of Time for the UNIX Juggernaut called Apple".
Cygwin is not a toy. I develop on it all day. My productivity in Cygwin is much higher than my productivity in raw Windows.
On another note, the Taiwanese actually accelerated investments into China when we tried to slap sanctions against Beijing to punish it for the Tiananmen Square Incident. The Taiwanese aren't friends. We should not sacrifice our lives to defend these Taiwanese.
Case I (which actually happened): Drop the 2 A-bombs. Washington terminates the war immediately. (1) The suffering of the Asians brutalized by the Japanese ends immediately. (2) American lives are spared. (3) The Japanese bear the cost of the human lives in the final stages of the war.
Case II (what might have happened): Do not use the 2 A-bombs. Washington allows the war to drag on for 6 more months. (1) The suffering of the Asians brutalized by the Japanese continues for 6 more months. (2) Many Americans lives are lost in an invasion of Japan. (3) The Japanese share the cost, in human lives, with the Americans.
Case III (what might have happened): Do not use the 2 A-bombs. Washington allows the war to drag on for 6 more months. (1) The suffering of the Asians brutalized by the Japanese continues for 6 more months. (2) Few Americans lives are lost as the they blockade the island and use conventional bombs to destroy what is left of Japan. (3) The Japanese bear the cost of the human lives in the final stages of the war as they either starve to death from the blockade or die from the rain of bombs.
Case I is the optimum choice because it minimizes the overall suffering for everyone: Japanese (though relatively more Japanese, compared to other Asians and the Americans, die and suffer in Case I), other Asians, and the Americans. Advocates of Case II or Case III ignore the fact that the war was not merely between Japan and the USA. Rather, the war was also between Japan and Asia -- the exception being Taiwan. Advocates of Case III are probably right in that the least number of Japanese and Americans would die in Case III, but the advocates ignore the suffering of the Asians -- of whom many were languishing in the biological labs maintained by the Japanese.
War is horrible. There is no clean and tidy way to end it.
Today, the nation that most resembles pre-World-War-II Japan is China. Its population is highly nationalistic, and the majority of Chinese support the occupation of Tibet. The matter is not an issue of government censorship, for both Chinese students in the USA and the general population in Hong Kong have full access to Western media and still support the occupation of Tibet.
Did anyone notice the repeated Chinese demands for apologies from Japan even though Tokyo apologized numerous times and even though
They have a herd of poorly paid but diligent slaves (a.k.a. graduate students studying for a Ph.D.). They do excellent work in voluminous quantities and would surely produce an accurate analysis of Linux versus Windows.
IBM has a lock on the next-generation game consoles. "Computer Business Review" reports that Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (MNS) are collaborating with IBM to build the next-generation processors for game consoles. "PC World" reports that MNS will incorporate IBM processors in their next-generation game consoles.
The hidden sub-text is that the future IBM processors will be excellent for pornographic games, providing life-like flesh tones and smooth-motion "thrusting", "quivering", and "wiggling". Pornography has traditionally be a significant driver of video-processing technology.
On a related note, is there any way by which the authors of the GNU compiler collection (GCC) would limit the range of x86 instructions generated by GCC compilers? Some instructions are simply too complex and could actually be replaced by sequences of simpler instructions, and each such sequence would actually run faster than the original, more complex instruction. A simplified subset of the x86 instructions is sufficient for compiling all computer programs.
By restricting the GCC compilers to generating only a simple but fast subset of instructions, we could encourage both AMD and Intel to deprecate and, ultimately, eliminate the more complex x86 instructions. Linux and the bulk of open-source software use the GCC compilers and would provide a critical mass of support for a new streamlined transistor-count-reduced x86 chips. Here, I am thinking, "shockingly reduced in power due to using 1/3 of the transistors."