There was (and still is) a company called Flying Buffalo that ran play-by-mail, computer-mediated games. Their all-time favorite was called StarWeb, but they also had a game called Time Trap.
In it, you placed units on a playing field, and they attempted to destroy each other. Units could move, shoot, or store energy; with enough stored energy, a unit could move backwards in game time. Moving N turns back took N^2 energy units, and the computer re-resolved the position from the earliest intervention.
Which I could do by checking one option box on my account. I don't do it because Slashdot's ads aren't (usually) intrusive or annoying. if Slashdot had rollover-activated ads, or ads with sound, I'd block them in a heartbeat.
TopWebComics has a similar option box. I do block them there, because many of their ads are video clips that take time and bandwidth to load, and are noisy to boot.
If web sites keep their ads relevant, non-intrusive, and down to a reasonable fraction of the total content, I won't block them, and I suspect the vast majority of consumers would do the same.
I've been myopic with serious astigmatism all my life, and am just getting into presbyopia. I have tried bifocals, and can't wear them for any length of time without serous eye strain - I see fine when using the appropriate sections of the lens, but after a few minutes of normal wear, my eyes start to sting. I've endured this for a week at a time in the hopes I'd adapt - no dice.
Maybe a few years from now, when my corneas go completely stiff and my eye muscles give up on bending them, I could do bifocals. Right now, I'd love to try something like this, or clip-on, flip-up bifocals.
They get the credit for the most visible good parts of the iPhone, and they can arrange it so that AT&T gets the blame for the most visible bad parts.
Gruber says his sources primarily blame AT&T for this one, and I believe him. It is awfully convenient, though, that this decision is also in Apple's best financial interests (and not their customers').
The problem with Swiss-army chainsaws like Perl/Python/Ruby is that beginners see that you can do almost everything in them, and conclude that you can do everything in them, and there's no reason to learn anything else.
I would have people start out with something really domain-specific (Javascript, Emacs Lisp, Mathematica) so that you must branch out sooner. The quicker beginners discover that there's always something different available, that it might be better than what they already know, and that they should be open to learning it, the better for their long-term skills.
I'm a militant agnostic, myself... as brilliantly explained to Buck Godot.
Seriously, the difference between Bertrand Russell's atheism ("Insufficient evidence, sir.") and militant agnosticism is the apparent willingness to have your mind changed.
For the Nth time - we can't arbitrarily replace current baseload power (coal/nuclear) with wind or PV solar(*) without a major technological advance in energy storage. The current grid supports small-scale contributions from wind and solar only because they're small scale - a grid with more than a few percent of solar or wind would be so unstable as to be unusable without a lot of quick-starting, controllable generating capacity to jump on when the wind/sun fluctuates. Today, that means natural gas or oil-fired systems.
A smart grid could theoretically solve this problem; note, however, that the problems are at least as hard as internet routing, and failures mean blackouts and fires/explosions - we are very unlikely to get it right the first time.
For a better view of the magnitude of the problem, look here.
(*)Thermal solar might work, with big enough heat sinks.
If it looks like a portable computer (laptop/netbook), people will expect to see Windows on it, and the vast majority of them will run away if it doesn't have it.
Alternative OSs have a chance on things that have the same compute power as a portable computer, but don't look like them.
Android/Linux/OS X on smartphones or similar things will sell.
I predict that whatever Apple does with all those 10" screens it it rumored to be buying, it won't look like a netbook.
I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that a physical measurement based on a transcendental number is "nicer" than one based on rational numbers, though in a measurement system you may not like.
And diesel fuel is taxed more in the US because it's mostly used by large trucks. It's an attempt to shift the burden of road repair onto the vehicles that do the most damage.
Of course, this whole fund-the-roads-from-fuel-fees idea is going to break down as plug-in vehicles become practical. We should just shift to a user fee where once a year you go to a DMV station, they weigh your vehicle and look at its odometer, and send you a bill.
Anyone else notice what Conficker and the Morris worm had in common? They both took advantage of a lack of diversity in the connected population - Conficker vs Windows, Morris vs. early BSD.
A gated-community internet would almost certainly be a "trusted computing" internet, with only a few blessed OS configurations allowed - the perfect environment for mass pwnage.
The difference between 1985 and today is the end of the free lunch in clock rates. 1985 was roughly the middle of the last great clock rate stall - during the shift from minicomputers to micros, Moore's Law expressed itself not as speedup, but as decrease in cost per bit/gate.
Then we entered the great die-shrink and clock rate increase era, where for about 20 years processors really did get twice as fast every 12-18 months. Why expend the effort to bury a problem in parallel hardware when you can see faster serial hardware coming over the hill?
Clock rates have stalled again, and we're reaching physical limits for our current fabrication methods and physical chip designs. We're seeing renewed interest in functional programming because it looks like a way to make use of parallel hardware safely compared to imperative coding. Traditional coding methods are easier to understand, and are probably more efficient when they work, but...
However, most people believe in smaller government, in a government that is less intrusive, and in free markets.
I wish that were true. In practice, what the Republican party believes in is:
Smaller government while they're not running it Less intrusive government when they're not choosing the intrusions Free markets as long as they're booming
If they actually believed in the three pillars you listed, they wouldn't have dropped them like a hot rock in 2000.
I don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to run for national office. Communicating via the internet is much cheaper than buying media time, and doing it this way doesn't leave me obligated to rich donors. Choose me based on my policy ideas, not how many times you saw my face on TV this week.
Every time you see a billboard, a full-page ad, or a TV spot, you should be saying "Who paid for that, and how much of the candidate do they own as a result?"
Maybe this will be possible by the next presidential cycle, when the major networks and big news outlets are all bankrupt.
It lasts much longer than XP before needing reboots, especially under a large amount of hibernates and standbys per day. XP would degrade after a couple weeks, especially under many standbys/hibernates per day, and running leaky apps like Eclipse. This degradation is massively reduced in Vista.
But not gone? Vista still doesn't sleep reliably? Apple had that sleep/wake thing working in 10.2. I have an ancient and revered iBook (circa 2002, currently running 10.4) that routinely goes months between restarts - I reboot it for major software updates, or to put it into firewire target mode. It goes from lid closed to usable in at most 5 seconds - screen and mouse are visible and working in 2, wireless networking ready a few seconds later.
What you say when you drop something heavy on your foot is mostly determined by your upbringing. I'm a militant agnostic and still say "God DAMMIT!" in situations like that.
If I'm more in control, I can sometimes redirect to "What in the name of the six healthy sheep is going on?"
Slashdot Mirror
There was (and still is) a company called Flying Buffalo that ran play-by-mail, computer-mediated games. Their all-time favorite was called StarWeb, but they also had a game called Time Trap. In it, you placed units on a playing field, and they attempted to destroy each other. Units could move, shoot, or store energy; with enough stored energy, a unit could move backwards in game time. Moving N turns back took N^2 energy units, and the computer re-resolved the position from the earliest intervention.
Which I could do by checking one option box on my account. I don't do it because Slashdot's ads aren't (usually) intrusive or annoying. if Slashdot had rollover-activated ads, or ads with sound, I'd block them in a heartbeat.
TopWebComics has a similar option box. I do block them there, because many of their ads are video clips that take time and bandwidth to load, and are noisy to boot.
If web sites keep their ads relevant, non-intrusive, and down to a reasonable fraction of the total content, I won't block them, and I suspect the vast majority of consumers would do the same.
I've been myopic with serious astigmatism all my life, and am just getting into presbyopia. I have tried bifocals, and can't wear them for any length of time without serous eye strain - I see fine when using the appropriate sections of the lens, but after a few minutes of normal wear, my eyes start to sting. I've endured this for a week at a time in the hopes I'd adapt - no dice. Maybe a few years from now, when my corneas go completely stiff and my eye muscles give up on bending them, I could do bifocals. Right now, I'd love to try something like this, or clip-on, flip-up bifocals.
They get the credit for the most visible good parts of the iPhone, and they can arrange it so that AT&T gets the blame for the most visible bad parts. Gruber says his sources primarily blame AT&T for this one, and I believe him. It is awfully convenient, though, that this decision is also in Apple's best financial interests (and not their customers').
Which gets the proper "will hack for food" vibe in.
The problem with Swiss-army chainsaws like Perl/Python/Ruby is that beginners see that you can do almost everything in them, and conclude that you can do everything in them, and there's no reason to learn anything else.
I would have people start out with something really domain-specific (Javascript, Emacs Lisp, Mathematica) so that you must branch out sooner. The quicker beginners discover that there's always something different available, that it might be better than what they already know, and that they should be open to learning it, the better for their long-term skills.
I'm a militant agnostic, myself... as brilliantly explained to Buck Godot.
Seriously, the difference between Bertrand Russell's atheism ("Insufficient evidence, sir.") and militant agnosticism is the apparent willingness to have your mind changed.
For the Nth time - we can't arbitrarily replace current baseload power (coal/nuclear) with wind or PV solar(*) without a major technological advance in energy storage. The current grid supports small-scale contributions from wind and solar only because they're small scale - a grid with more than a few percent of solar or wind would be so unstable as to be unusable without a lot of quick-starting, controllable generating capacity to jump on when the wind/sun fluctuates. Today, that means natural gas or oil-fired systems.
A smart grid could theoretically solve this problem; note, however, that the problems are at least as hard as internet routing, and failures mean blackouts and fires/explosions - we are very unlikely to get it right the first time.
For a better view of the magnitude of the problem, look here.
(*)Thermal solar might work, with big enough heat sinks.
If it looks like a portable computer (laptop/netbook), people will expect to see Windows on it, and the vast majority of them will run away if it doesn't have it.
Alternative OSs have a chance on things that have the same compute power as a portable computer, but don't look like them.
Android/Linux/OS X on smartphones or similar things will sell.
I predict that whatever Apple does with all those 10" screens it it rumored to be buying, it won't look like a netbook.
I can't see his implementation as I type, but since it's Lisp, it probably has these two features:
* Compiled from (S-expression-based) markup to machine code
* Can be modified without restarting web server
The first would be really hard in C without a preprocessor. Your markup doesn't have to be S-expressions, but it should be some semi-readable DSL.
The second is very hard in C, as it requires having the compiler around at runtime and dynamic redefinition of code.
If you can do both of those in C, you're really good.
I don't understand how anyone can say with a straight face that a physical measurement based on a transcendental number is "nicer" than one based on rational numbers, though in a measurement system you may not like.
Though I suppose mentioning Guy Steele would have confused the Johnny-come-lately Java people.
According to this, the mass downrating of purportedly-gay-themed books at Amazon was engineered from the outside.
Ideas on how to verify this?
If
The Computer is the Network
and
The Network is Down
then
It's Time to Take the Rest of the Day Off
The only explanation I can see for all the carriers charging the same price to consumers for a service that literally costs them nothing to provide...
is collusion.
And diesel fuel is taxed more in the US because it's mostly used by large trucks. It's an attempt to shift the burden of road repair onto the vehicles that do the most damage.
Of course, this whole fund-the-roads-from-fuel-fees idea is going to break down as plug-in vehicles become practical. We should just shift to a user fee where once a year you go to a DMV station, they weigh your vehicle and look at its odometer, and send you a bill.
Anyone else notice what Conficker and the Morris worm had in common? They both took advantage of a lack of diversity in the connected population - Conficker vs Windows, Morris vs. early BSD.
A gated-community internet would almost certainly be a "trusted computing" internet, with only a few blessed OS configurations allowed - the perfect environment for mass pwnage.
Lucid used to name machines after famous disasters. The ones I remember:
titanic
edsel
bhopal
If the privacy mode switch is a physical shield that covers the lens, it's foolproof.
That is the point of the checks-and-balances thing, after all.
The difference between 1985 and today is the end of the free lunch in clock rates. 1985 was roughly the middle of the last great clock rate stall - during the shift from minicomputers to micros, Moore's Law expressed itself not as speedup, but as decrease in cost per bit/gate.
Then we entered the great die-shrink and clock rate increase era, where for about 20 years processors really did get twice as fast every 12-18 months. Why expend the effort to bury a problem in parallel hardware when you can see faster serial hardware coming over the hill?
Clock rates have stalled again, and we're reaching physical limits for our current fabrication methods and physical chip designs. We're seeing renewed interest in functional programming because it looks like a way to make use of parallel hardware safely compared to imperative coding. Traditional coding methods are easier to understand, and are probably more efficient when they work, but...
how fast do you want the wrong answer?
However, most people believe in smaller government, in a government that is less intrusive, and in free markets.
I wish that were true. In practice, what the Republican party believes in is:
Smaller government while they're not running it
Less intrusive government when they're not choosing the intrusions
Free markets as long as they're booming
If they actually believed in the three pillars you listed, they wouldn't have dropped them like a hot rock in 2000.
People who run for office by saying:
I don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to run for national office. Communicating via the internet is much cheaper than buying media time, and doing it this way doesn't leave me obligated to rich donors. Choose me based on my policy ideas, not how many times you saw my face on TV this week.
Every time you see a billboard, a full-page ad, or a TV spot, you should be saying "Who paid for that, and how much of the candidate do they own as a result?"
Maybe this will be possible by the next presidential cycle, when the major networks and big news outlets are all bankrupt.
It lasts much longer than XP before needing reboots, especially under a large amount of hibernates and standbys per day. XP would degrade after a couple weeks, especially under many standbys/hibernates per day, and running leaky apps like Eclipse. This degradation is massively reduced in Vista.
But not gone? Vista still doesn't sleep reliably? Apple had that sleep/wake thing working in 10.2. I have an ancient and revered iBook (circa 2002, currently running 10.4) that routinely goes months between restarts - I reboot it for major software updates, or to put it into firewire target mode. It goes from lid closed to usable in at most 5 seconds - screen and mouse are visible and working in 2, wireless networking ready a few seconds later.
What you say when you drop something heavy on your foot is mostly determined by your upbringing. I'm a militant agnostic and still say "God DAMMIT!" in situations like that.
If I'm more in control, I can sometimes redirect to "What in the name of the six healthy sheep is going on?"