I agree, the Kindle DX is great. However, it misses one important functionality: split screen. More often than not, I need to pin a definition, a theorem etc... in one section of the screen, and to scroll through the remaining pages (e.g. proofs, additional remarks etc.), in the other section. Looking at both parts simultaneously is very convenient, when you don't have paper and pencil at hand (e.g. when you're traveling). But save for that, yes, I love the Kindle DX.
We can have that again: Simply abandon our industry and technology.
How would you create enough food for 10 billion people to consume without technology (hint: farming is already a very technical enterprise, even though it doesn't look like it)? How do you distribute said food without logistics... which require technology like cooling chains, trucks, roads, etc? We're already too many on this planet to go back technologically without starving a substantial part of Earth's population to death.
It's actually a shame that perfectly working machines are being destroyed this way... while in Asia, Africa etc. people (schools e.g.) would be more than happy to use those machines for 5 to 10 more years, at least.
Before destroying those SunFire servers, please put them on eBay for us SPARC devs. It's increasingly hard to get decent equipment for that platform, now that big evil Oracle has swallowed Sun.
That/Microsoft/ suggests this is kind of ironic, isn't it? But even without the irony, there's no excuse for power-inefficient servers nowadays (no matter what OS they run). Sure, every computer and every piece of electronics will be well below 100% efficiency, energy-wise, but c'mon, are they even trying to inch closer at all? Maybe electricity bills are still too low to justify the R&D needed to get better hardware (like, say, ARM servers)?
Sure, right now, malware is used to spew spam, steal credit card data etc... but one has to recognize that it is very resilient against all efforts to eradicate it. Fast forward a few years or in other regions, where Government wants to assume total control of the 'Net. Wouldn't malware be the only piece of distributed p2p software being able to resist total censorship? Let's not dismiss malware just because it is being used for nefarious purposes now: it could come very handy in the not too soon dystopian future.
Maybe they're not storing everything on computers? Or maybe they didn't trust a US-based closed-source software vendor with their secrets and preferred to use a harder-to-hack OS instead?
While MIT used Scheme as an introductory programming language, as seen in the legendary Wizard Book, in 2011 Stanford have dumbed down CS introductory classes to... what? JavaScript? Sad, just sad.
That's precisely the kind of situations were you need a system that encrypts multiple (possibly interleaved) partitions with different keys. When forced to relinquish a pass phrase, just give the one with partition A, and have them nose around. When doing real work, use the pass phrase for partition B.
Some have it, some don't have it... the Real Stuff it takes to have been on the Moon. This piece of fabric clearly didn't, and was consequently left behind.
C'mon guys, Sweden adopted Copyright as its new Religion of State. Can't have a totally competing one, right? The King of Sweden is officially "Copyright Defensor" and reports to Biden, the Supreme Pope of Copyright in the US Whitehouse. Sure, like every religion, there are extremists, but the Copyright Taliban haven't killed anybody... yet... right? Right?
I love the simple and functional design of the Casio F-91W too. Using it for ages, and just got a replacement. Just one thing: if you travel to the US, better leave it at home to avoid trouble. They're pretty nervous over there with that model.
The rest of the world will learn to simply route around the damage zone known as the USA. Bad US laws seem like a long term giveaway to aspirants like China and the BRIC.
If only it were true. The US has lobbied, bullied, coerced, cajoled, and convinced most other countries in the world (including third world countries!) to adopt its own Copyright-style laws. I'm afraid that the US, in this case, is more like a environment polluter, spilling and spreading its conception of maximalist, taliban-style copyright elsewhere too. I hope we won't say in a few years: first the US invented the Internet, then the US destroyed it.
In former Eastern Germany, their communist regime provided retail stores only for foreigners (or specially privileged East Germans with western money). This made people there very resentful of their government... and eventually, they got rid of it. China's communists should be careful not to rise the ire of their citizens too much if they want to remain in power. Then again, why not? China could really need a breath of fresh air, at least politically.
And politicians who are used to compromises let it all happen because they think the content industry will meet them half way.
The original sin was to invent copyright in the first place. If you grand some rights to anybody or any entity, you can't expect that entity to compromise on it: they'll want it enforced, no matter what, because the moment you granted them that right, you've always sold the farm. All WE can do, is to heat up the pressure on the politicians to limit copyright again. But I highly doubt that I'll see this in my lifetime. Maybe a new generation, accustomed to file sharing will eventually, but it takes at least one generation to phase out the current breed of politicians. And even then, it's not sure we'll be there eventually: just look at current youngsters who keep parroting stuff like "sharing is stealing." They've took the RIAA/MPAA bait hook, line, and sinker. I'm not very optimistic.
Linux' ISA to PCI forced upgrade is peanuts, compared to the costs of replacing big iron enterprise-class sun4u servers with newer gear. Especially if you have big farms of those servers in data centers all round the world. Yes, companies write off servers all the time, but still, let's not compare apples to oranges.
It could also be that Oracle is having problems maintaining compatibility to old-ish hardware because they've either lost key developers and/or given them the boot during the merger and later. And they'll have a hard time to find SPARC-savvy developers in the future, because they aren't cultivating the necessary ecosystem for them (e.g. there's not a single affordable SPARC T3 workstation out there for developers, only overpriced commercial servers starting at $18K+). Sooner than later, Oracle will run into big problems, because even with support contracts, they won't have the necessary work force to service all their customers.
I'm using FreeBSD/sparc64 on UltraSPARC IIIi-based SunBlades (single and dual processors), and it's running just fine. I've also installed OpenBSD/sparc64 on some of them, and Debian Squeeze for sparc is running fine too (though I never found out how to netboot that one). It's sad the OpenIndiana hasn't produced a SPARC-release yet out of the frozen IllumOS code-base, but I hope they will eventually be there. As for Oracle as the steward of Solaris, let's forget 'em: they're the abomination they turned out to be the first day they took over.
In an alternate universe where I missed theoretical CS lectures, I wanted to build a (Universal) Turing Machine from scratch... but soon ran out of tape. Then I wanted to build a Register Machine from scratch, but ran out of memory before realizing that it was equivalent in power to the Turing Machine I couldn't build. Then I got hold of an Oracle (sadly not the company), but this Oracle-augmented machine STILL had limitations and couldn't compute EVERY imaginable function. Every time I wanted to showcase those machine, someone came with a diagonalized function that wasn't supported. Then I gave up building computers from scratch altogether.
You must be very young. The ARPANET was invented by people working for BBN, Rand Corporation, etc... and one of the three first nodes was at SDC, a corporation (the other two at Berkeley and MIT).
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I agree, the Kindle DX is great. However, it misses one important functionality: split screen. More often than not, I need to pin a definition, a theorem etc... in one section of the screen, and to scroll through the remaining pages (e.g. proofs, additional remarks etc.), in the other section. Looking at both parts simultaneously is very convenient, when you don't have paper and pencil at hand (e.g. when you're traveling). But save for that, yes, I love the Kindle DX.
How would you create enough food for 10 billion people to consume without technology (hint: farming is already a very technical enterprise, even though it doesn't look like it)? How do you distribute said food without logistics... which require technology like cooling chains, trucks, roads, etc? We're already too many on this planet to go back technologically without starving a substantial part of Earth's population to death.
It's actually a shame that perfectly working machines are being destroyed this way... while in Asia, Africa etc. people (schools e.g.) would be more than happy to use those machines for 5 to 10 more years, at least.
Before destroying those SunFire servers, please put them on eBay for us SPARC devs. It's increasingly hard to get decent equipment for that platform, now that big evil Oracle has swallowed Sun.
That /Microsoft/ suggests this is kind of ironic, isn't it? But even without the irony, there's no excuse for power-inefficient servers nowadays (no matter what OS they run). Sure, every computer and every piece of electronics will be well below 100% efficiency, energy-wise, but c'mon, are they even trying to inch closer at all? Maybe electricity bills are still too low to justify the R&D needed to get better hardware (like, say, ARM servers)?
Sure, right now, malware is used to spew spam, steal credit card data etc... but one has to recognize that it is very resilient against all efforts to eradicate it. Fast forward a few years or in other regions, where Government wants to assume total control of the 'Net. Wouldn't malware be the only piece of distributed p2p software being able to resist total censorship? Let's not dismiss malware just because it is being used for nefarious purposes now: it could come very handy in the not too soon dystopian future.
Maybe they're not storing everything on computers? Or maybe they didn't trust a US-based closed-source software vendor with their secrets and preferred to use a harder-to-hack OS instead?
There's nothing like playing with simulated old gear, e.g. with simh, using old operating systems; but playing with old Unices also has its charm.
While MIT used Scheme as an introductory programming language, as seen in the legendary Wizard Book, in 2011 Stanford have dumbed down CS introductory classes to ... what? JavaScript? Sad, just sad.
That's precisely the kind of situations were you need a system that encrypts multiple (possibly interleaved) partitions with different keys. When forced to relinquish a pass phrase, just give the one with partition A, and have them nose around. When doing real work, use the pass phrase for partition B.
Some have it, some don't have it... the Real Stuff it takes to have been on the Moon. This piece of fabric clearly didn't, and was consequently left behind.
C'mon guys, Sweden adopted Copyright as its new Religion of State. Can't have a totally competing one, right? The King of Sweden is officially "Copyright Defensor" and reports to Biden, the Supreme Pope of Copyright in the US Whitehouse. Sure, like every religion, there are extremists, but the Copyright Taliban haven't killed anybody... yet... right? Right?
How about an hourglass? Looks analog enough to me. Just not very practical to carry around on your wrist.
Not all clocks move clockwise.
I love the simple and functional design of the Casio F-91W too. Using it for ages, and just got a replacement. Just one thing: if you travel to the US, better leave it at home to avoid trouble. They're pretty nervous over there with that model.
If only it were true. The US has lobbied, bullied, coerced, cajoled, and convinced most other countries in the world (including third world countries!) to adopt its own Copyright-style laws. I'm afraid that the US, in this case, is more like a environment polluter, spilling and spreading its conception of maximalist, taliban-style copyright elsewhere too. I hope we won't say in a few years: first the US invented the Internet, then the US destroyed it.
An idle supercomputer means running a whole lot of endless loops in under 2 seconds each... in parallel!
In former Eastern Germany, their communist regime provided retail stores only for foreigners (or specially privileged East Germans with western money). This made people there very resentful of their government... and eventually, they got rid of it. China's communists should be careful not to rise the ire of their citizens too much if they want to remain in power. Then again, why not? China could really need a breath of fresh air, at least politically.
The original sin was to invent copyright in the first place. If you grand some rights to anybody or any entity, you can't expect that entity to compromise on it: they'll want it enforced, no matter what, because the moment you granted them that right, you've always sold the farm. All WE can do, is to heat up the pressure on the politicians to limit copyright again. But I highly doubt that I'll see this in my lifetime. Maybe a new generation, accustomed to file sharing will eventually, but it takes at least one generation to phase out the current breed of politicians. And even then, it's not sure we'll be there eventually: just look at current youngsters who keep parroting stuff like "sharing is stealing." They've took the RIAA/MPAA bait hook, line, and sinker. I'm not very optimistic.
Linux' ISA to PCI forced upgrade is peanuts, compared to the costs of replacing big iron enterprise-class sun4u servers with newer gear. Especially if you have big farms of those servers in data centers all round the world. Yes, companies write off servers all the time, but still, let's not compare apples to oranges.
It could also be that Oracle is having problems maintaining compatibility to old-ish hardware because they've either lost key developers and/or given them the boot during the merger and later. And they'll have a hard time to find SPARC-savvy developers in the future, because they aren't cultivating the necessary ecosystem for them (e.g. there's not a single affordable SPARC T3 workstation out there for developers, only overpriced commercial servers starting at $18K+). Sooner than later, Oracle will run into big problems, because even with support contracts, they won't have the necessary work force to service all their customers.
I'm using FreeBSD/sparc64 on UltraSPARC IIIi-based SunBlades (single and dual processors), and it's running just fine. I've also installed OpenBSD/sparc64 on some of them, and Debian Squeeze for sparc is running fine too (though I never found out how to netboot that one). It's sad the OpenIndiana hasn't produced a SPARC-release yet out of the frozen IllumOS code-base, but I hope they will eventually be there. As for Oracle as the steward of Solaris, let's forget 'em: they're the abomination they turned out to be the first day they took over.
In an alternate universe where I missed theoretical CS lectures, I wanted to build a (Universal) Turing Machine from scratch... but soon ran out of tape. Then I wanted to build a Register Machine from scratch, but ran out of memory before realizing that it was equivalent in power to the Turing Machine I couldn't build. Then I got hold of an Oracle (sadly not the company), but this Oracle-augmented machine STILL had limitations and couldn't compute EVERY imaginable function. Every time I wanted to showcase those machine, someone came with a diagonalized function that wasn't supported. Then I gave up building computers from scratch altogether.
So let's start a war on wars (metawar?)?
You must be very young. The ARPANET was invented by people working for BBN, Rand Corporation, etc... and one of the three first nodes was at SDC, a corporation (the other two at Berkeley and MIT).