For what it's worth, your analysis is completely on-target for how I'll be making my next laptop purchase.
I want to be done with Windows (as much as possible). In the hopefully rare case where I need to load Windows, their decision to go with Intel helps.
I want the stability of Unix.
I don't want to be tinkering with Linux. I just want things to work.
That's basically what I've done for my work laptop. I got myself a MacBook, and in terms of specs, it's priced pretty competitively compared to similar machines, but with the advantage of Mac OS. And then I've got Parallels and an old Windows install disk for those Windows business apps that I can't find suitable replacements for (Trados for those interested; non-Windows translation memory / mgmt software that also gracefully handles Japanese is sorely lacking -- any hints or suggestions welcome). Parallels is nice; I got used to VMWare on Linux a few years back, which also helped me cut my teeth on learning networking, and the convenience of not having to reboot to get at the Windows stuff is quite welcome.
Anyway, good luck! I say go for it -- once you've got the budget for a Mac, they're pretty compelling. Not that Apple doesn't have its own shenanigans as just another software corporation (c.f. iTunes DRM silliness and the like), but they seem awfully nicer to the consumer than anything Microsoft has done for some time.
My $0.02 armchair guesstimate is that Vista's resounding belly flop is helping Apple's sales figures. For most of those who yearn to escape Microsoft's bumbling clutches, the Orchard is definitely more inviting than the herring-scented wilds of Linuxland. I've got at least one family member of my own who has looked out through the broken window and found the air under the apple trees to be a very welcome change (and two others are seriously considering it).
It is more difficult for an adult to learn a radically different language (eg Asian vs European) because the adult brain refuses to hear the different phonetics, the adult brain long ago rejected those sounds as irrelevant to language and no longer even hears them in speech.
As someone who has gotten into other languages later in life, after also having seriously gotten into languages earlier, I think a lot of any person's ability to "hear" radically different (or even slightly different) phones has to do at least in part with how sensitive they are to sound systems aside from that used by their mother tongue. Some sounds are radically different -- try the Russian vowel that looks a bit like "bl", or the vowel sound in the Vietnamese noodle dish name "pho" -- and some are slightly different, but notably so nonetheless -- try the Castilian Spanish "s" as heard in the movie Pan's Labyrinth or the slightly retroflex British "sh" as in Room With a View versus their American counterparts. Monoglots may well tend to interpret these sounds as the closest analog in the sound system of their one language, though they might be aware on some level that the sounds are qualitatively different in the different languages. Polyglots already have more than one sound system within the scope of their familiarity, and thus seem more apt to fully perceive when a given phone is different from those in the sound systems they know.
Furthermore, we must recognize the social elements of language acquisition. Adult speakers of only one language, and who have similar monoglots as the core of their social community, actually face numerous disincentives against properly learning another language. For one, adults in general have notably less free time than children. For two, adults are actively discouraged from engaging in behaviours that might be deemed inappropriate, but that are vital to language learning -- such as repeating sounds until they sound "right", or experimenting with different enunciations and different ways of using one's face to make different sounds. (For example, try repetitively enunciating "ba ba ba ba ba" to work on the Chinese non-aspirated bilabial plosive, while sitting on a crowded bus, and see how others react.) Adults are also less likely to engage in conversation if their grammar might be incorrect. Adults face very strong pressures to not be wrong in speech and bearing, certainly much stronger pressures than those children are subject to.
To provide an anecdote regarding Engrish, I've had numerous middle school students in Japan who had impeccable English (note the L) pronunciation, only to devolve into Engrish in high school due to the social pressures of not wanting to appear like they were trying to outdo their Engrish-speaking classmates, or even worse, their Engrish-speaking teachers.
On the flip side, it can also sometimes be a very good thing to have a noticeable accent, as it serves as a cue to others that the speaker is not a native speaker. A friend of mine is Israeli born and raised, and he speaks English without accent, despite not studying it until university. He's actually found his native-level pronunciation to be a liability at times, as people then get very confused when he mistakenly uses the wrong word, or when he does not have the expected cultural literacy (i.e. commonly known television shows, celebrities, events, etc.). If he spoke with an accent, he would be immediately identifiable as non-native, and such minor social gaffs would be much more smoothly overlooked. His case could serve as an example for why sometimes people never quite sound like native speakers in their non-native languages, as there is sometimes a benefit to be had by being obviously foreign.
To sum up, I really must disagree with your implied statement that the adult brain is somehow incapable of learning different sound systems. Any one particular adult may indeed have more difficulty than another in learning foreign sounds, but this is not due to any inherent neurological inability, rather it is due to social conditioning and personal motivations.
I have to disagree. He's making a valid point that RMS approaches the entire "Open Source/Free Software" debate as not a legal or even ethical issue, but a moral issue. The use of the word "moral" isn't an invention of Linus, that's the word RMS uses to describe it himself. (emphasis added)
How else does one describe a position opposed to theft and getting ripped off? In some ways, the GPLv3 looks to me like a good riposte for the whole DRM ugliness -- essentially, companies using DRM and the DMCA are trying to dictate what we can do with their product after we buy it, and the GPLv3 is doing the same thing back to the companies, only they don't have to lay down any money to use GPL software.
"You're seriously trying to tell me I can't do what I want with my own property that I already bought from you? Fine then, I'll dictate what you can't do with the code you got from me. Tit for tat."
Decry it as "moral" all you like, but from where I sit, it sure looks like the FSF folks are going to bat to try to make sure this game is at least halfway fair, in the midst of blatant and avowed skullduggery by the corporate team. Which side are you rooting for?
The citizens do have the power to stop this bloody mess. As King George III of England found out.
Thank goodness someone else seems to have figured it out! It's a shame though that some things aren't lining up for real change this time around -- 1) this is only George II, and 2) we don't have an elite class that's pissed off enough to galvanize the rest of society into acting. Sure, things in the Americas under George III might not have been golden, but without monied interests pushing for change, I really doubt the sheeple of the time would have had the momentum to carry things through to revolution. And the monied interests now are certainly not pushing for any sort of people empowerment, that's for sure.
Insight Broadband offers 10Mbps which is one of the highest in the nation, behind FiOS.
FWIW, when I moved to Tokyo in 2002 and signed up for bare-bones basic internet service via Yahoo! Japan, 12Mbps was the lowest anyone offered. By the time I left in mid-2005, the lowest anyone offered had risen to 18Mbps.
I don't know about anyone else, but it's sure looking to me like the real issues with lagging internet speeds in the US have exactly jack to do with technology, and everything to do with corruption. And given all the signs in so many different fields that corruption is the new norm here, I find myself ruefully convinced that it's going to be a long time before the US can climb out of this ethics hole and actually compete with the rest of the world. Welcome to the Long Slide...
While there is no personal cost to corporate agents breaking the law, they will continue to break it. They're human, so that's not suprising.
Until there is serious punishment liked docked pay, a firing or prison time (depending on the severity) for blatant lawlessness on the part of the corporations, they will continue to do as they please.
There. Now we've covered both halves of this corrupt equation.
Thanks magarity, but I did rtfa. Note that my reply was to someone talking about the hidden and unconstitutional NSA wiretapping arrangement, which is directly about the feds. Note also that there *were* instances of direct and improper FBI requests:
But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have.
To step beyond the scope of my initial response, the telcos and ISPs simply *providing* such records to law enforcement officials *without being asked* is not so much a matter of extremely poor data security management, as you put, but more a matter of active corporate collusion with government to erode freedoms. Because hey, let's face it, truly free and private consumers are harder to sell to. It's all about the benjamins, in the end.
Compared to the illegal wiretapping that Bush & Co. were/are doing.. this seems relatively small potatoes..
Might not be as major, but certainly worth pursuing, as it's another symptom of this runaway federal power binge that's really picked up steam since George the Second came into power. The FBI oversteps and Bush & Co's power grab are part of the same thing.
Incidentally, there's another George floating around in the Bush family, and he's young enough he might yet go for politics. The last time we had three Georges in power things got a little funny. Things are pretty bad this time around after just two. I'm feeling a little déjà vu for some reason... maybe because we're dealing with roughly the same issue -- "taxation without representation", i.e. the bullies in power overstepping their bounds, ignoring the stated laws / conventions, and claiming we owe them more than we think we do, and us with no real recourse. Hmmm...
Within an hour I was back in business with Feisty Fawn, Office 2003 (with full service packs) and IE6. Not a problem in the world during install.:) Hate to smile in light of your frustrations, but I'm a happy man.
No worries, this just makes me want to upgrade from Edgy to Feisty.:) I'm curious though, did you have to install IE6 before MSO, or does the installation order matter? I tried to install MSO without messing at all with IE, so that might be one part of my issue.
I'm just thankful that MS named it [WGA] properly and doesn't get really shady.
Just wait. I'm fully expecting some asshat there to decide that WGA should now be regarded (and renamed) as one of the many "critical system updates" that MS sends out, and blammo -- everyone's got it. New, Improved! It's Microsoft Clap(TM)!
Maybe you could clue me in then. I tried installing MSO2003 on the latest wine available for Ubuntu Edgy not too long ago, and the installer failed out. Digging around seemed to suggest that the "solution" such as it was as rather ugly, so I gave up (still got XP on a different machine). Any chance you could point me to the 3 steps per install directions you found?
I thought the key to getting good mileage with a hybrid was understanding how to drive it properly and, when that was done, folks were getting close to the listed mileage.
Just for the record, we bought a 2005 Prius in June '05, and have had plenty of time to learn how to drive it. And we're getting pretty much exactly the revised mileage figures, and *not* the older 60-55mpg EPA estimates. Frankly, I've never seen a full-tank average of better than 52mpg, and that we got on a road trip when we spent the bulk of one full day driving gradually downhill from altitude. Most regular in-town driving gives us full-tank averages of ~45mpg.
One oddity that makes me scratch my head is how it takes a while for the engine to "warm up". I'll be toodling around and spending a lot of time on the electric, getting 50+mpg, but as soon as I turn the engine off and turn it back on, even if it's just off and on again immediately, the computer control system likes to run heavy on the gas for about 5-10 minutes before I'll start seeing more time using the electric again. This sure doesn't look like any temperature issue, but more something to do with how the computer parameters are set up.
Hm, memory is clearly failing me somewhere.:) Is it the magnetic moment then that's opposite, like what's found between neutrons and antineutrons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antineutron)? I have a distinct recollection that the difference between electrons and positrons is more than just reversed charge, or otherwise chargeless particle and anti-particle pairs like for neutrons wouldn't work...
Forgive me, but your post read a bit differently for me --
The enormous pressures in the core would crush the crude, macroscopic proteins in the chocolate into their component molecules, then heat and pressure would eventually overwhlem the degeneracy pressure, causing the entire gooey mass to break down into a seething mass of elementary particles. This event also causes observable evidence, in the form of a huge burst of...
...flatulence. At least, that's what the "fondant filling" in those durn Cadbury Creme Eggs always does to me.:-o
My recollection's a bit fuzzy, but I seem to remember reading that all matter has "spin" to it. I put "spin" in quotes, as the sources I've read described it not so much as spin like what you get with a top, since elemental particles seem to approach true points, and therefore have no circumference that could spin around a center.
Anyway, I digress. The point I have is that everything has "spin". So does the anti-everything. If an electron has a spin of 1/2, then a positron would have the opposite of that -- or a spin of -1/2. This touches somewhat on the zero-sum idea, but as you've nicely pointed out, while the spins cancel, there is an awful lot of energy released.
As to why most things in this universe tend to spin one way and not the other (i.e. why we have more matter than antimatter), one idea I've run across is the notion that the universe itself has spin, thus establishing the bias.
For those more interested in spin as it pertains to particle and quantum mechanics, Wikipedia seems to have a decent article on the subject.
IIRC, copyright was originally set up roughly along the same lines as patents, i.e. 17 years from initial publishing. So what's this "modern" BS about so many years from death of the publisher? Why in the devil's briefcase has this been allowed in the ostensible public good?
Perhaps that's one more thing that should be taught more in schools, the original terms and thinking behind copyrights. How many bets any effort to do so is squashed under metric kilo-buttloads of self-serving corporate effluvium...
I'd forgotten that was ol' Abe's middle name: Abraham Fucking Lincoln. I'd like that middle name! Pimpin! Just so long as you don't read it as a sentence, with one guy named Abraham and the other one Lincoln. That's not quite so much fun. Or maybe it is, if that's your thing.:)
Good Christmas, people, and how much of that almost half a BEELYUN dollars has been *borrowed*? Sheesh. Talk about priorities. Somebody cut off this clown's credit.
This sounds truly fascinating. How far along is anybody in building an actual working system along these lines? Or is this all still at the drawing board phase, awaiting the required horsepower to really take off? Where should I look to find out more (for a complete layman, at that)?
Slashdot Mirror
That's basically what I've done for my work laptop. I got myself a MacBook, and in terms of specs, it's priced pretty competitively compared to similar machines, but with the advantage of Mac OS. And then I've got Parallels and an old Windows install disk for those Windows business apps that I can't find suitable replacements for (Trados for those interested; non-Windows translation memory / mgmt software that also gracefully handles Japanese is sorely lacking -- any hints or suggestions welcome). Parallels is nice; I got used to VMWare on Linux a few years back, which also helped me cut my teeth on learning networking, and the convenience of not having to reboot to get at the Windows stuff is quite welcome.
Anyway, good luck! I say go for it -- once you've got the budget for a Mac, they're pretty compelling. Not that Apple doesn't have its own shenanigans as just another software corporation (c.f. iTunes DRM silliness and the like), but they seem awfully nicer to the consumer than anything Microsoft has done for some time.
Cheers,
My $0.02 armchair guesstimate is that Vista's resounding belly flop is helping Apple's sales figures. For most of those who yearn to escape Microsoft's bumbling clutches, the Orchard is definitely more inviting than the herring-scented wilds of Linuxland. I've got at least one family member of my own who has looked out through the broken window and found the air under the apple trees to be a very welcome change (and two others are seriously considering it).
Cheers,
...so long as MS is against the wall. Blindfolds or not, I don't care.
As someone who has gotten into other languages later in life, after also having seriously gotten into languages earlier, I think a lot of any person's ability to "hear" radically different (or even slightly different) phones has to do at least in part with how sensitive they are to sound systems aside from that used by their mother tongue. Some sounds are radically different -- try the Russian vowel that looks a bit like "bl", or the vowel sound in the Vietnamese noodle dish name "pho" -- and some are slightly different, but notably so nonetheless -- try the Castilian Spanish "s" as heard in the movie Pan's Labyrinth or the slightly retroflex British "sh" as in Room With a View versus their American counterparts. Monoglots may well tend to interpret these sounds as the closest analog in the sound system of their one language, though they might be aware on some level that the sounds are qualitatively different in the different languages. Polyglots already have more than one sound system within the scope of their familiarity, and thus seem more apt to fully perceive when a given phone is different from those in the sound systems they know.
Furthermore, we must recognize the social elements of language acquisition. Adult speakers of only one language, and who have similar monoglots as the core of their social community, actually face numerous disincentives against properly learning another language. For one, adults in general have notably less free time than children. For two, adults are actively discouraged from engaging in behaviours that might be deemed inappropriate, but that are vital to language learning -- such as repeating sounds until they sound "right", or experimenting with different enunciations and different ways of using one's face to make different sounds. (For example, try repetitively enunciating "ba ba ba ba ba" to work on the Chinese non-aspirated bilabial plosive, while sitting on a crowded bus, and see how others react.) Adults are also less likely to engage in conversation if their grammar might be incorrect. Adults face very strong pressures to not be wrong in speech and bearing, certainly much stronger pressures than those children are subject to.
To provide an anecdote regarding Engrish, I've had numerous middle school students in Japan who had impeccable English (note the L) pronunciation, only to devolve into Engrish in high school due to the social pressures of not wanting to appear like they were trying to outdo their Engrish-speaking classmates, or even worse, their Engrish-speaking teachers.
On the flip side, it can also sometimes be a very good thing to have a noticeable accent, as it serves as a cue to others that the speaker is not a native speaker. A friend of mine is Israeli born and raised, and he speaks English without accent, despite not studying it until university. He's actually found his native-level pronunciation to be a liability at times, as people then get very confused when he mistakenly uses the wrong word, or when he does not have the expected cultural literacy (i.e. commonly known television shows, celebrities, events, etc.). If he spoke with an accent, he would be immediately identifiable as non-native, and such minor social gaffs would be much more smoothly overlooked. His case could serve as an example for why sometimes people never quite sound like native speakers in their non-native languages, as there is sometimes a benefit to be had by being obviously foreign.
To sum up, I really must disagree with your implied statement that the adult brain is somehow incapable of learning different sound systems. Any one particular adult may indeed have more difficulty than another in learning foreign sounds, but this is not due to any inherent neurological inability, rather it is due to social conditioning and personal motivations.
Cheers,
How else does one describe a position opposed to theft and getting ripped off? In some ways, the GPLv3 looks to me like a good riposte for the whole DRM ugliness -- essentially, companies using DRM and the DMCA are trying to dictate what we can do with their product after we buy it, and the GPLv3 is doing the same thing back to the companies, only they don't have to lay down any money to use GPL software.
"You're seriously trying to tell me I can't do what I want with my own property that I already bought from you? Fine then, I'll dictate what you can't do with the code you got from me. Tit for tat."
Decry it as "moral" all you like, but from where I sit, it sure looks like the FSF folks are going to bat to try to make sure this game is at least halfway fair, in the midst of blatant and avowed skullduggery by the corporate team. Which side are you rooting for?
Cheers,
Thank goodness someone else seems to have figured it out! It's a shame though that some things aren't lining up for real change this time around -- 1) this is only George II, and 2) we don't have an elite class that's pissed off enough to galvanize the rest of society into acting. Sure, things in the Americas under George III might not have been golden, but without monied interests pushing for change, I really doubt the sheeple of the time would have had the momentum to carry things through to revolution. And the monied interests now are certainly not pushing for any sort of people empowerment, that's for sure.
<sigh.>
Go Richmond! I went to school there...
FWIW, when I moved to Tokyo in 2002 and signed up for bare-bones basic internet service via Yahoo! Japan, 12Mbps was the lowest anyone offered. By the time I left in mid-2005, the lowest anyone offered had risen to 18Mbps.
I don't know about anyone else, but it's sure looking to me like the real issues with lagging internet speeds in the US have exactly jack to do with technology, and everything to do with corruption. And given all the signs in so many different fields that corruption is the new norm here, I find myself ruefully convinced that it's going to be a long time before the US can climb out of this ethics hole and actually compete with the rest of the world. Welcome to the Long Slide...
And allow me to rephrase that for you:
There. Now we've covered both halves of this corrupt equation.
Thanks magarity, but I did rtfa. Note that my reply was to someone talking about the hidden and unconstitutional NSA wiretapping arrangement, which is directly about the feds. Note also that there *were* instances of direct and improper FBI requests:
To step beyond the scope of my initial response, the telcos and ISPs simply *providing* such records to law enforcement officials *without being asked* is not so much a matter of extremely poor data security management, as you put, but more a matter of active corporate collusion with government to erode freedoms. Because hey, let's face it, truly free and private consumers are harder to sell to. It's all about the benjamins, in the end.
Might not be as major, but certainly worth pursuing, as it's another symptom of this runaway federal power binge that's really picked up steam since George the Second came into power. The FBI oversteps and Bush & Co's power grab are part of the same thing.
Incidentally, there's another George floating around in the Bush family, and he's young enough he might yet go for politics. The last time we had three Georges in power things got a little funny. Things are pretty bad this time around after just two. I'm feeling a little déjà vu for some reason... maybe because we're dealing with roughly the same issue -- "taxation without representation", i.e. the bullies in power overstepping their bounds, ignoring the stated laws / conventions, and claiming we owe them more than we think we do, and us with no real recourse. Hmmm...
Hell, it already is -- somehow my boss's very whims turn into tasks for me to perform. No real difference here... :-P
Well, I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the lead. :)
No worries, this just makes me want to upgrade from Edgy to Feisty. :) I'm curious though, did you have to install IE6 before MSO, or does the installation order matter? I tried to install MSO without messing at all with IE, so that might be one part of my issue.
Cheers,
Just wait. I'm fully expecting some asshat there to decide that WGA should now be regarded (and renamed) as one of the many "critical system updates" that MS sends out, and blammo -- everyone's got it. New, Improved! It's Microsoft Clap(TM)!
Maybe you could clue me in then. I tried installing MSO2003 on the latest wine available for Ubuntu Edgy not too long ago, and the installer failed out. Digging around seemed to suggest that the "solution" such as it was as rather ugly, so I gave up (still got XP on a different machine). Any chance you could point me to the 3 steps per install directions you found?
Cheers,
Just for the record, we bought a 2005 Prius in June '05, and have had plenty of time to learn how to drive it. And we're getting pretty much exactly the revised mileage figures, and *not* the older 60-55mpg EPA estimates. Frankly, I've never seen a full-tank average of better than 52mpg, and that we got on a road trip when we spent the bulk of one full day driving gradually downhill from altitude. Most regular in-town driving gives us full-tank averages of ~45mpg.
One oddity that makes me scratch my head is how it takes a while for the engine to "warm up". I'll be toodling around and spending a lot of time on the electric, getting 50+mpg, but as soon as I turn the engine off and turn it back on, even if it's just off and on again immediately, the computer control system likes to run heavy on the gas for about 5-10 minutes before I'll start seeing more time using the electric again. This sure doesn't look like any temperature issue, but more something to do with how the computer parameters are set up.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
Hm, memory is clearly failing me somewhere. :) Is it the magnetic moment then that's opposite, like what's found between neutrons and antineutrons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antineutron)? I have a distinct recollection that the difference between electrons and positrons is more than just reversed charge, or otherwise chargeless particle and anti-particle pairs like for neutrons wouldn't work...
Forgive me, but your post read a bit differently for me --
...flatulence. At least, that's what the "fondant filling" in those durn Cadbury Creme Eggs always does to me. :-o
It's a bit like dancing, really. :)
My recollection's a bit fuzzy, but I seem to remember reading that all matter has "spin" to it. I put "spin" in quotes, as the sources I've read described it not so much as spin like what you get with a top, since elemental particles seem to approach true points, and therefore have no circumference that could spin around a center.
Anyway, I digress. The point I have is that everything has "spin". So does the anti-everything. If an electron has a spin of 1/2, then a positron would have the opposite of that -- or a spin of -1/2. This touches somewhat on the zero-sum idea, but as you've nicely pointed out, while the spins cancel, there is an awful lot of energy released.
As to why most things in this universe tend to spin one way and not the other (i.e. why we have more matter than antimatter), one idea I've run across is the notion that the universe itself has spin, thus establishing the bias.
For those more interested in spin as it pertains to particle and quantum mechanics, Wikipedia seems to have a decent article on the subject.
These look like they'd be quite useful. Does anyone out there know of something similar, only for PostgreSQL instead of MySQL?
IIRC, copyright was originally set up roughly along the same lines as patents, i.e. 17 years from initial publishing. So what's this "modern" BS about so many years from death of the publisher? Why in the devil's briefcase has this been allowed in the ostensible public good?
Perhaps that's one more thing that should be taught more in schools, the original terms and thinking behind copyrights. How many bets any effort to do so is squashed under metric kilo-buttloads of self-serving corporate effluvium...
I'd forgotten that was ol' Abe's middle name: Abraham Fucking Lincoln. I'd like that middle name! Pimpin! Just so long as you don't read it as a sentence, with one guy named Abraham and the other one Lincoln. That's not quite so much fun. Or maybe it is, if that's your thing. :)
Good Christmas, people, and how much of that almost half a BEELYUN dollars has been *borrowed*? Sheesh. Talk about priorities. Somebody cut off this clown's credit.
And yes, Let's get back on topic. Please!
Good on you, vladilinsky -- thank goodness some cattlemen seem to be figuring things out.
Cheers,
This sounds truly fascinating. How far along is anybody in building an actual working system along these lines? Or is this all still at the drawing board phase, awaiting the required horsepower to really take off? Where should I look to find out more (for a complete layman, at that)?
Cheers,