I think he is confusing "Judicial Review" which was affirmed in Marbury v Madison In 1803, where the Supreme Court decided it had the power to declare laws unconstitutional through the process of adjudication, with "nullification," an unconstitutional exercise of "States Rights" that was settled by the end of the Civil War.
Readers of Slashdot would do well to remember the Reconstruction era, which settled this issue of "nullification" upon admitting those States "then in rebellion" back into the Union, extracting a promise that there would be no such unconstitutional nullification of federal law and federal powers and territory in the future United States. I note that today, there is a lot of rhetoric, mostly from Republicans (the party who once claimed federal power supreme in the US) and also Libertarian and "TEA Party" wing nuts that the States should exercise their "power" to "nullify" federal laws they do not like.
When Antebellum States did "nullify," it was generally done through the exercise of legislative power within those States and not judicial. States' legislatures passed laws to countermand federal laws not on the premise that those laws were unconstitutional, but on the premise that they were disliked. Disliking a law does not give states a legal leg to stand on.
This is why there is this confusion between Judicial Review (which adheres to the US Constitution) and "nullification" (which does not), Republicans are proposing it because, while a Minority power, they did not like what was happening and decided that the Constitution no longer needed to be adhered to (despite swearing to adhere to it and protect it) when they don't like what the Majority decides.
Let us be clear here: When Republicans hold a majority, they do not talk of nullification and even fight wars to affirm it's unconstitutionality. Whey they don't, they suddenly think it's a viable option and start telling everyone that it's an option worth exercising.
Microsoft is singling Google out here because Google is #1 in phone sales. Microsoft is chasing after Fortune 1000 companies with this comment, with an subtext here of "their stuff isn't going to work with your back office." Which is classic FUD misinformation from The Collective.
Meanwhile, in Reality World, which everyone outside of Redmond lives in, Microsoft's Windows Phone launch is seriously disappointing the company. So someone in Microsoft sales perked up and said, "Well Android phones can't possibly work as well with Enterprise as ours," completely forgetting that Android phones and iPhones have been banned from the Microsoft campus for so long that nobody knows how well the new smartphones work in the enterprise.
So this just looks like an ad-hominem attack, rather than what it is really aimed at.
Company data is company data. And if a personal smartphone is used and personal data and applications are wiped on termination or if the phone is lost or stolen, that's a good protection for the company.
What everyone's missing here is that the iPhone backs up all data every time you sync. I know, I have owned one since six months after the original one came out. and I went through three of those, as one thing or another would quit working (the last was a bad plastic lens on the camera). I did a sync, took the phone to the Genius bar at the Apple store, exchanged my phone under extended warranty, took the new phone home and restored all data -- including the last 50 emails -- from my computer.
At that point, and with those last 50 emails as long as you do not reconnect to the Exchange server you still have access to the last 50 company emails from the restore. You also have all of the rest of your data as well as all of your apps.
So, note to company managers: If you are going to violate the Employee Handbook or write or transmit something that violates employment law, make sure that those actions are taken more than 50 email messages before the Smartphone gets wiped, else you may have to defend against the undeniable proof of your misdeeds that remain in your former employee's cell phone.
"In the eleventh hour, intelligence was perceived in the US Senate. Right now, as we continue to report this stunning headline, reporters are en route to discover the source of this rumor, and if it is factual, we'll bring you straight to the source. Stay tuned for more breaking news as it happens..."
This is the wrong question that keeps getting asked again and again. It's the "NASA shouldn't send men into outer space" meme that closely accompanies the "NASA should only use robotic spacecraft" meme.
This is blue-sky (well, since it's space, its probably black) research. This is the last vestige of this type of research that the United States has any investment in. the Reagan Administration axed all federal funding for this kind of ongoing research at Universities and think tanks long ago. But, since NASA had landed on the Moon, the Reagan Administration didn't want to cut this for fear they'd be hounded out of office.
But CNN correspondents breathlessly ask Astronaut after Astronaut in "exclusive" interviews, taking up precious air time, "Considering the dangers, should we really keep putting men up into outer space?"
Call me an Old Fossil, but I was there. Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question. Everyone knew the answer. "Of course!" Even after the near-disaster that was Apollo 13, everyone was still just fine with the idea of going to the Moon. And we did it four more times, putting eight more men on the Moon. And we completely revolutionized our understanding of the Earth-Moon system and its origins.
When NASA pulls its head out and gets the right teams together, they can do anything. And that includes helping pull Chilean miners out of the ground. (Oh, maybe there are some scientists at NASA who know a thing or two because of all this money being thrown at these "blue sky" projects!) The only limitation is funding, and NASA's funds have been cut, sliced, diced and reduced to the point where they cannot get off the ground any more. NASA is on life support, dependent utterly on 1960s-era technology supplied by Russia. When NASA was flying things with the Shuttle, people my size could go into outer space (I stand 6'5"). Now that we're all "back to the future" with Russian space capsules, It has increased to 6'3" because Russia generously redesigned their capsules, which were limited to 5'11". Russian capsules are what our Astronauts called "Spam in the can."
Everyone here on Slashdot uses a computer for something. And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line. Microcomputers were developed based on needs by NASA to have computers that were light enough to be on a spacecraft because you couldn't fit a room-sized mainframe on an Apollo spacecraft or on the Lunar Excursion Module. So, let's see. We have this little space race thing that ends in the 1970s with NASA pouring money into little teeny solid state computing devices and you get the Apple ][ computer in 1977. And the IBM PC four years later. The last Apollo spacecraft was designed around 1967 more or less so I have to ask the naysayers what they're expecting to see in about ten years now that the ISS is complete. because everybody knows NASA science doesn't contribute to anything down here on earth.
I get absolutely disgusted and horrified when I hear and read this line of reasoning. Here we have this community on slashdot that is the beneficiary of the technology that NASA's scientists had a major hand in developing and you're discussing piddling nonsense.
Blue sky research generally takes about ten to fifteen, sometimes 20 years to result in something you hold in your hand. That's why it's called blue sky research, because it seems like you're funding a bunch of people looking up at the sky and asking why it is blue. But it always results in benefits to humanity that are incalculable. The United States is the only remaining superpower in the world. Rather than developing and maintaining stuff to kill people, we should be throwing big budgets at NASA and at other blue sky research. But, ever since Reagan took away the funding in our Universities (saying the Government is the problem), we have had none at Universities and a dwindling amount at NASA.
Slashdotters should be ashamed these questions are being asked.
I did no less than four investigative reports on how lax security used to be at US airports we would have a production assistant get a job with security with no background check or sneak contraband into a security zone. We would then interview a Congresspweson and an FAA person and they would wring their hands and agree that it was awful.
And nothing would change.
Now that we have professional security that is actually paid to care, everyone is complaining. I'm not. I get the full pat-down each time because I have a knee replacement. I point to it and politely tell the TSA person that I will set off the magnetometer. I always do the pat down. It is completely routine, I expect it and know what to do. I thank the TSA worker "for keeping us all safe." always gets a smile.
If you're going to cop an attitude, it won't be pleasant. If you don't see it as an imposition, it won't be. I am looking forward to the scanners. Maybe I won't need the pat-down. I am hoping the new technology makes everyone safer.
That is just not practical. I develop and host websites. If I need to change registrars because someone wasn't happy with their web designer and they came to me. As it is today, it can take up to 10 days to complete a registrar change.
I am using Melbourne IT as my registrar because my hosting provider works well with them. Certified mail to and from another country would take upwards of two weeks -- and all that time my client is waiting.
I completely understand the eagerness to deny spammers and malware fiends domains. But this is not the right solution for those of us who are legitimate.
But honestly, folks, this is a huge comeback (from the dead!)
Not too long ago, Apple's demise was being spoken of regularly by the Wall Street Journal, by the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other newspapers back when newspapers really meant something. The stock sunk to 14 dollars a share. I bought 100 shares thinking that, if you sold off the component parts of the company, you would get more than $14 per share. My target price was $35 and, like a fool, I sold shortly after the iMac came out.
But parallel to that was a triumphant Microsoft. Bill Gates still ran that company and he could speak to the software people. Microsoft could do no wrong and Steve Jobs, when he took over Apple again, had to end a lawsuit against Microsoft (over Windows 3.x) in order to get Microsoft to develop a version of Office for the Mac. Microsoft also bought up a huge tranch of Apple stock. the press lionized Gates and Microsoft. They were the juggernaut that could do no wrong, and Apple was "The Beleaguered Apple" and on its last legs.
I see positive press on Apple these days and I remember all that. And I think, "Wow, what a comeback."
Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?
Please see my earlier post for the long explanation, but:
Photoshop CS5 can. CS 4 and CS3 only see four cores, that's all they were programmed to see because that's a Carbon limitation. Since Illustrator and Final Cut Pro are also 32-bit Carbon applications, they cannot either. Final Cut Pro, when rendering as hard as it can render, only uses 4 cores and some of the plugins only see one core. Photoshop plugins (almost all of them, which have not been rewritten to Cocoa and to 64-bit) only see 4 cores.
But I'm lying, too. Photoshop CS5 sometimes doesn't use the CPU at all. CS5 will use the GPU for some of the things it does.
I think we're at the point where the software lag has truly hit us.
I have a dual Quad-core "Nehalem" Mac Pro 4,1. So far it has 16G of system RAM. I'll add another 16G on its third anniversary.
But Apple's Final Cut Pro is a 32-bit Carbon application. So it's pretty much limited to four cores and I'm not sure it's able to use the dual-mode of the Nehalem cores. A truly well-written bit of software should make my system "look" like it has 16 cores and use all of them. The most I have seen Final Cut use is four (or eight if it does take advantage of dual-mode). So I can have a render cooking away and I have four cores to spare (though I may not have much RAM).
Oh, but wait -- nobody just uses Final Cut! No, they're using plugins!
Right you are (you smarty-pants, you)! You're using plugins to make Final Cut really sing. After all, green screen work, particle effects and other effects require the work of Boris Continuum Complete, Digital Anarchy, ToolFarm and CoreMelt, not to mention others. So how many cores do they work with?
Turns out, in some cases, only one.
So you could be editing away, planning your render to take up a few hours overnight and come back to work (as I did with an earlier version of Red Giant Software's ToonIt which only used one processor core) after a cuppa joe and a splendid breakfast in the morning to see your Mac tell you, "only six more hours to go."
I really needed to kill something when I saw that.
Oh, and let's talk about Photoshop, shall we?
I did not upgrade to CS4. Adobe really stroked the Mac crowd nicely when they released a 64-bit (Vista-UGH!) version of Photoshop for Windows only, folks -- despite the fact that Apple had 64-bit built into its operating system two years before Microsoft (unless you count XP-64 which lacks drivers and now lacks any support from Microslush). Photoshop CS5 is now out and it's been done right because someone at Adobe had a nice steamin' hot cuppa Cocoa and rewrote it, like they should have when Apple told them to in 1999 (please tell me why Adobe seems so much like GM, OK?) that Carbon was transitional and that it would start getting old and crusty pretty soon.
But, as far as I can tell, all of the plugins for Photoshop are still 32-bit, so you won't be seeing any improvement in speed until they're rewritten, too.
Seems like Apple could take a cue from Adobe with Final Cut now, couldn't they.
Most of the Adobe suite, excepting Photoshop and After Effects is 32-bit Carbon. So you're not going to get Grand Central Dispatch sending stuff out to 8 cores or 16 core-lets (with Nehalem). So the 12-core Mac will have -- let's see... eight cores sitting idle most of the time? Boy, I really want one of those!
Apple needs to release these computers and these servers. The technology in these beasties is frightfully fast (I know, my Mac can run like a bat outa wherever if it's running a 64-bit application). But remember: Microsloth Word is going to want the first core and it's going to hog it. Grand Central Dispatch isn't going to get you anywhere with Dreamweaver. If you have Excel running in the background, Mathematica may stall because it's running out of RAM and resources that Microsoft Excel wants to keep.
I would imagine we're looking at another generation in software before our computers are actually unbound by the dependencies written into what we're using currently.
Oh, and I do note that the splash screens for Microsoft Excel still stay up for a long time -- even at 2.93 GHz.
OK, i'll bite (or is it byte -- naah, that's just a really good magazine I used to read that was killed).
I was working with Microsoft back in 1995 doing PR for them. Happened to go to a meeting that, maybe I should not have attended. Bunch of microserfs in attendance looking at a new product. Gates enters the room and everyone gets really excited and really quiet.
Gates asks about part of the user interface. Microserf answers. Gates proceeds to rip into him like the wrath of ghod (which he may have been to the microserfs). Calls him a total idiot, tells him his UI won't work because nobody will get it. Then turns to the rest of the room -- which cowers as one (actually, I almost flinched and I had nothing to do with the project). Then Gates brings up another aspect of the application and one guy stands up with a quavering voice and takes responsibility (blame). Gates tells him that most of what he has seen makes pretty good sense, then rips into him about part of the thing he took credit for.
I figured half the room was going to be let go and escorted off the Microsoft campus by armed guards at gunpoint (and no, you cannot empty your desks!). Gates then tells everyone that they have to be afraid, that the other software companies were going to catch up, that Microsoft was going to die horribly if they didn't get it together and think. Gates then whines about sloppy coding habits, tells them to get back to work and he'd better see a better application and soon.
Folks, Steve Ballmer is a manager-type. If he ever wrote a single line of code, it was in MSBasic as a new hire so that he could show Gates that it can be used to calculate sums and count beans. He doesn't understand, and has never understood, the people who design software. He cannot pick apart their work. And he cannot, as Gates used to, exhort them to produce better because he can do better.
I've not worked for Apple or done any projects within that company. But it's my understanding that Jobs is the same as Gates was. He has worked on design, which is a primary focus of Apple. He can rip into people who don't innovate. Jobs is not a bean counter, he's a visionary. Love him or hate him, Jobs requires something more of his people than a bean counter would and I would argue that Jobs can require that because of what he knows, which goes way beyond handling a company's balance sheet.
Where Gates lost his way was when the Internet became a phenomenon. "It's a gold-rush mentality," he said, "And the only people who are going to make money off the Internet are people who make tools for things on the Internet."
By that, I suppose he meant FrontPage and IIS servers. FP has been completely eclipsed by Dreamweaver and there are even free tools that create better websites. I do have one website on an IIS server. I uploaded an.M4V video file and it didn't work on the server. Administrator had to enable those types of files (I'll take normal Linux/Apache any day). And don't get me started on what I have to do to support Microsoft's non-W3C-compliant Internet Exploiter browser! I think they failed in that mission and that was back under Gates.
My argument is that Microsoft's decline is more due to lack of technical leadership than anything else. Ballmer was important to the company as its first manager but a tech company needs a tech guru sitting in the CEO seat, not someone who could run a division of Proctor and Gamble.
You're getting distracted by the example. Most people agree that pictures of naked women or men, in an artistic conceptualization, is free speech and the dividing line between that and pornography is fuzzy. I would tend to want to protect your right to pontificate about the evils you see in our government and that includes holding up signs, shouting slogans and standing up on a proverbial soapbox, holding forth on your opinions. I also think you would agree that this is free speech.
But, in certain circumstances, courts (not always the Supreme Court) have ruled that one may be arrested for standing on the side of the road with a sign that says "The President is a War Criminal." And, during the last administration there were zones along motorcade routes that had prohibitions from you holding such a sign so that the President could, possibly, if he was looking out the window at the right moment, see your sign. The ACLU had problems with this practice. And it would seem that the Bush Administration thought that the 9-11 attacks gave them the pretext to abolish the First Amendment
.
Were these attacks on our freedoms to actually have seen the light of day in a courtroom, I believe the long precedents of re-labeling "speech" a "verbal act" in SCOTUS decisions offer the path that would have been gleefully taken.
According to Wirenius, the way you ignore the First Amendment in arresting someone for speaking, exercising press freedoms and so on, is to call it a "verbal act" and not speech, which is protected.
I can see a good class-action suit here (and I'm not a lawyer) to require that Apple send all iPhone 4 owners a bumper or case for their new phone that prevents the attenuation of the signal caused by holding the phone incorrectly. That is really the fix for this issue and, were the phone sold with one or packaged with one, this would be a non-issue.
Complete disclosure here: I own the original iPhone (limited to Edge Network) and am planning to upgrade as soon as I know if there will (or definitely won't) be any competition between telcos.
My good friend, John Wirenius some time ago published a book on free speech called "First Amendment, First Principles: Verbal Acts and Freedom of Speech." The book is kind of hard-going, so unless you're interested in carefully-researched legal argument covering the subject, you're in for a slow read.
My point is this (and John makes it in detail): Immediately upon the adoption of our current Constitution here in the United States, the Supreme Court began hacking away at this First Amendment -- and with a really large axe, rather than an ice pick. There are current definitions for what one may present or do or say that consider speech a "verbal act" that may be Constitutionally limited. It is this tortured creation of an action from one's words that really defies any and all logic.
Everyone is familiar with the "limitation" on "free speech" that is described thusly:
... crying "Fire" in a crowded movie house
Something like this is, presently no problem for the Supreme Court, as saying that word in that situation is re-defined, not as "speech" but as a "verbal act," and thus, not protected by the First Amendment. So, I don't really see Elena Kagan as proposing anything different than what has been going on in the United States for 200 plus years. The definition of "Free Speech" versus "verbal act" is one that is entirely subject to interpretation of any Court, be it local, federal, a court of original jurisdiction or an appellate court.
This is really cool -- and good info about what it takes to make an actual star in the comments that follow the parent. Sometimes Astronomy means observations over years and years.
I think the pitchfork analogy is a pretty good one.
AT&T is a company we love to hate. They were broken up as a monopoly that was "too big to fail," and priced their services accordingly. They foundered for a number of years, selling long distance and trying to compete against smaller, scrappier companies by sticking to their old model of bad service, high prices.
They quit innovating. They closed Bell Labs (after telling all their employees there that they weren't going to do that). They didn't upgrade their network. They didn't anticipate the VOIP revolution. In order to get into cellular telephony, they had to purchase a good phone company (Cingular). Then they applied their bad service model to that company.
The real advantage of purchasing an iPhone is the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. You don't have to deal with an AT&T flack who doesn't know his own product. The advantage of purchasing an Android phone is the user community. As long as you can get an answer from the FOSS geeks that know the OS and how to use it, you don't have to deal with AT&T.
I am currently out of contract on my AT&T iPhone. And AT&T ought to be worried but, somehow, they're not. Frankly, all of the cellular phone companies ought to worry when any of their customers get out from under their two-year agreements.
Any pricing ideas AT&T introduces will certainly be met with hostility. I intend to stay with my $30 unlimited plan even though I have no idea how much data I normally use. I have the original 8G iPhone that is limited to the Edge Network. I live in an area where I have crappy reception from AT&T but there is value in my phone. And there are other areas where I spend time where the reception is not bad. AT&T's unlimited data plan should have served as an incentive for AT&T to upgrade its network. Instead, they didn't and published reports about how the few people who were using lots of data were, somehow, at fault for AT&T's network shortcomings.
So get out your pitchforks. Hoist those torches. Let's go kill Dr. Frankenstein's Monster.
Jim, you are absolutely correct. There are tons of opportunities. But one thing I notice teachers in the grammar and high schools doing is not "thinking outside of the box." If you are teaching, you have a college education and you know how education works -- at least on the University level. "Publish or perish" is all about grants, writing them, getting them, cultivating them over time and taking care of donors.
Often though, our high school and grammar school teachers are thinking only in terms of their classes, their courses, the students and getting through the lesson plans. But in high schools like the one described in the original post, the school is looking to achieve something special. While the school may have a Development department, the expertise is in the classroom, not in Development, so this is where any grant proposal should originate.
Summer is almost here. You have, maybe, six more weeks of classes to teach. Sit down with Development, the Principal and, perhaps, a school administrator and get a "buy-in" to support a proposal and assistance. Then during the summer, along with the second job you have to take in order to make ends meet as a schoolteacher, get the proposal done and start shopping it around. Have Development assist and get everyone involved. Someone in your town knows someone who can get the money for the proposal. Maybe not all of it, but a significant portion. Now's the time to get things going.
I don't know if this can be modded up to a 7 or 8, but it is very insightful as well as interesting.
Fact is, schools have to deal with Realistic Budgets and any computers they purchase will certainly need to be multiple-use and not just for the teaching of programming. They'll need to be general use, as well.
I run a small business and I recently purchased a new computer. It's a workstation-class computer and needs to be because of what I do. And I bought on the kinda cheap side from a top-tier manufacturer. This one computer cost me $7,500 (and I need to add RAM). If you have a class of 20 students, all of whom need a separate CPU, you're looking at a cost outlay of $157,500. Heck, my daughter's school just bought whiteboards and it took them about four years to raise the funds.
First thing I would do is find out how much budget you can sink into your project. That will guide what you can buy. Second thing I would do is hit your local Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Kiwanas Club and so on and see if you can get local sponsorship for your project. Since you're a technology school, see if you can get a tech company to give you a grant as well. Target around a quarter million and you're looking at a first class lab that will begin to go obsolete as soon as you build it.
I realize I'm talking to a school teacher here. School teachers in high schools and elementary schools don't write grant proposals, because that's university stuff. But, by thinking in terms of raising funds, you suddenly place yourself on another playing field all together. And, with respect to computer purchases, bake sales just won't raise anywhere near sufficient funds. I know -- if it takes four years to get White Boards, your computing technology will be on life support by the time you can replace it.
Also if you develop the kinds of leads to get funding for this kind of a project, you will be set to upgrade and stay with current technology as you go forward. And if you have a tech company from your area that is supporting you, they will probably be able to offer you curriculum guidance for what they think they will need in the future as well.
As to platforms, the only computer that can run everything is made by Apple. You can install Windows, OS X, Linux, other Unix, emulators for iPhone and iPad, etc on a Mac. While workstations are really nice for schools, you might look at the Quad-Core processor iMac. The only downside I see to this computer is lack of hard disk space for multiple operating systems, so getting a server and having everything boot off a server might be the best solution for that problem. But the discussion of what hardware you should specify should take a serious back seat to funding.
TFA mentioned possible useful things, like curing or reversing Alzheimer's as well as looking in to how to stop "rogue" cells from forming cancer.
I can see a lot of potential from this, but we're looking some 20 years out and there are, undoubtedly, many other genes in the process that need to be looked into to make sure that the body parts being regenerated form correctly and link up to the rest of the body correctly. I can see new mouse heads in 15 years based on this discovery, followed by human regeneration beginning experimentally in 20.
Of course, my Alzheimer's (assuming I have it or get it) will have progressed to the point where I would not be a candidate by then. They tend to come up for cures for stuff just after someone I know dies from the disease.
Last company my wife worked for fielded a sales force with laptops. their "office" was their home. They sold advertisements. There was no data security.
These sales people knew their territories, knew their jobs and knew how to generate revenue. And they were in New England, where a friend is hard won but, once won, a friend for life. The company, based in Virginia, gave no thought to relationships. They operated under the mistaken impression that their product was king.
So they put my wife out like the cat. Didn't give her severance. She's suing.
And they fired all of their sales staff. One by one. Told them they were not meeting their quotas.
There were no corporate financials on the salespeoples' laptops. There was no sensitive information, save addresses and phone numbers of the advertisers and email addresses of the company yes-men that went along with this deal.
One of the salespeople, who had been with the company some 30 years went to all of his clients and started a new publication and started selling space in it. He has been growing and gaining clients because he treats them right and has a good ad production department. He has the old advertisers he used to have and has new ones who want in. And he's growing in New England.
Oh, and the original company? They're looking for a New England regional sales manager to replace my wife now. They want one with a complete sales team and solid contacts in the market.
Data security? We backed up my wife's entire drive onto our own external hard drive because they wouldn't buy her a backup drive (too cheap). We kept that drive. And at the initial hearing for her lawsuit, the company was repeatedly shocked by the content of their own emails coming back to haunt them.
So in this day and age of corporations firing people for being female, pregnant "too old" or "too unwhite" and getting away with it most of the time, why do they think they need data security again?
Manufacturers can currently make cards that will work in modern Mac Pro computers. In fact, I seriously extended the life of my G4 Mac by installing a SATA card in it so that I could use (more modern and faster) SATA drives with the computer. I also upgraded the GPU. I will probably do something along those lines with my Cheese Grater and, maybe, it will be useful for about 10 years like my last computer.
The idea around the Apple// computer was that hardware hacks were a good way to extend it. And people sold breadboards that you could install and test on your Apple//. But you really needed to know what you were doing, else you could fry your motherboard and that would be really bad. So the Steve Wozniak part of the Apple Computer company did their best to publish warnings and specifications so that hardware hackers would make innovative stuff for the Apple//.
Today, hardware hackers are still out there. You can get the complete hardware information you need about a Mac Pro as a hardware developer, so that you can make a card to install in the computer to handle digital audio, VTR control, set up a hard disk array or anything else a Mac can do in the workplace. Were that not the case, there would be no Blackmagic Design, no AJA Video systems, no Digidesign, and no CI Design as just a few examples.
The spirit of the 1980s still lives on, mostly in the software communities that are writing free, open software. I don't see breadboards for sale these days for Apple computers -- but I don't see them for pee cees either. But that doesn't mean they are not being made. That means I'm not shopping for them.
I like where we have headed. It used to be that animation, destined for video (which is a much smaller screen than the cinema) took overnight to do just a few seconds, with a really expensive SGI workstation attached to a 1" C-format open reel VTR, recording one frame at a time (and you hoped there would be no h-phase errors, else you would have to start rendering all over). Today, we can play Doom real-time on our 24" monitors attached to our inexpensive personal computers with better than 30 frames per second render times for each whole frame in widescreen. The "computer" that landed the Lunar Excursion Module on the moon would probably be an inferior cousin to the processor you find in a hand calculator today. And those computers were really, really expensive. The Apple// did everything in "character mode," drawing things with very crude graphics developed out of an extended character set. Forget about shading, drop shadows and the like. So, looking at my Apple Studio Display, running in 32-bit color at 1920 x 1200 powered by my NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512 MB of video RAM, I'm seeing a nicer image than the Apple//, hooked up to a monitor or a TV using a box that the FCC said was illegal.
I'm still bummed that Pystar lost, even though they ought to have in every sense. Here were these scrappy guys out there trying to re-invent the Mac Clone. My first experience with Apple's System Software was with a Mac Clone. but I don't want to go "back to the future" and I don't hate Steve Jobs because of the result.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he is confusing "Judicial Review" which was affirmed in Marbury v Madison In 1803, where the Supreme Court decided it had the power to declare laws unconstitutional through the process of adjudication, with "nullification," an unconstitutional exercise of "States Rights" that was settled by the end of the Civil War.
Readers of Slashdot would do well to remember the Reconstruction era, which settled this issue of "nullification" upon admitting those States "then in rebellion" back into the Union, extracting a promise that there would be no such unconstitutional nullification of federal law and federal powers and territory in the future United States. I note that today, there is a lot of rhetoric, mostly from Republicans (the party who once claimed federal power supreme in the US) and also Libertarian and "TEA Party" wing nuts that the States should exercise their "power" to "nullify" federal laws they do not like.
When Antebellum States did "nullify," it was generally done through the exercise of legislative power within those States and not judicial. States' legislatures passed laws to countermand federal laws not on the premise that those laws were unconstitutional, but on the premise that they were disliked. Disliking a law does not give states a legal leg to stand on.
This is why there is this confusion between Judicial Review (which adheres to the US Constitution) and "nullification" (which does not), Republicans are proposing it because, while a Minority power, they did not like what was happening and decided that the Constitution no longer needed to be adhered to (despite swearing to adhere to it and protect it) when they don't like what the Majority decides.
Let us be clear here: When Republicans hold a majority, they do not talk of nullification and even fight wars to affirm it's unconstitutionality. Whey they don't, they suddenly think it's a viable option and start telling everyone that it's an option worth exercising.
Microsoft is singling Google out here because Google is #1 in phone sales. Microsoft is chasing after Fortune 1000 companies with this comment, with an subtext here of "their stuff isn't going to work with your back office." Which is classic FUD misinformation from The Collective.
Meanwhile, in Reality World, which everyone outside of Redmond lives in, Microsoft's Windows Phone launch is seriously disappointing the company. So someone in Microsoft sales perked up and said, "Well Android phones can't possibly work as well with Enterprise as ours," completely forgetting that Android phones and iPhones have been banned from the Microsoft campus for so long that nobody knows how well the new smartphones work in the enterprise.
So this just looks like an ad-hominem attack, rather than what it is really aimed at.
Company data is company data. And if a personal smartphone is used and personal data and applications are wiped on termination or if the phone is lost or stolen, that's a good protection for the company.
What everyone's missing here is that the iPhone backs up all data every time you sync. I know, I have owned one since six months after the original one came out. and I went through three of those, as one thing or another would quit working (the last was a bad plastic lens on the camera). I did a sync, took the phone to the Genius bar at the Apple store, exchanged my phone under extended warranty, took the new phone home and restored all data -- including the last 50 emails -- from my computer.
At that point, and with those last 50 emails as long as you do not reconnect to the Exchange server you still have access to the last 50 company emails from the restore. You also have all of the rest of your data as well as all of your apps.
So, note to company managers: If you are going to violate the Employee Handbook or write or transmit something that violates employment law, make sure that those actions are taken more than 50 email messages before the Smartphone gets wiped, else you may have to defend against the undeniable proof of your misdeeds that remain in your former employee's cell phone.
"In the eleventh hour, intelligence was perceived in the US Senate. Right now, as we continue to report this stunning headline, reporters are en route to discover the source of this rumor, and if it is factual, we'll bring you straight to the source. Stay tuned for more breaking news as it happens..."
This is the wrong question that keeps getting asked again and again. It's the "NASA shouldn't send men into outer space" meme that closely accompanies the "NASA should only use robotic spacecraft" meme.
This is blue-sky (well, since it's space, its probably black) research. This is the last vestige of this type of research that the United States has any investment in. the Reagan Administration axed all federal funding for this kind of ongoing research at Universities and think tanks long ago. But, since NASA had landed on the Moon, the Reagan Administration didn't want to cut this for fear they'd be hounded out of office.
But CNN correspondents breathlessly ask Astronaut after Astronaut in "exclusive" interviews, taking up precious air time, "Considering the dangers, should we really keep putting men up into outer space?"
Call me an Old Fossil, but I was there. Not once did Walter Cronkite ask the Apollo Astronauts this question. Everyone knew the answer. "Of course!" Even after the near-disaster that was Apollo 13, everyone was still just fine with the idea of going to the Moon. And we did it four more times, putting eight more men on the Moon. And we completely revolutionized our understanding of the Earth-Moon system and its origins.
When NASA pulls its head out and gets the right teams together, they can do anything. And that includes helping pull Chilean miners out of the ground. (Oh, maybe there are some scientists at NASA who know a thing or two because of all this money being thrown at these "blue sky" projects!) The only limitation is funding, and NASA's funds have been cut, sliced, diced and reduced to the point where they cannot get off the ground any more. NASA is on life support, dependent utterly on 1960s-era technology supplied by Russia. When NASA was flying things with the Shuttle, people my size could go into outer space (I stand 6'5"). Now that we're all "back to the future" with Russian space capsules, It has increased to 6'3" because Russia generously redesigned their capsules, which were limited to 5'11". Russian capsules are what our Astronauts called "Spam in the can."
Everyone here on Slashdot uses a computer for something. And I'll bet over 90% of slashdotters are using microcomputers to get on line. Microcomputers were developed based on needs by NASA to have computers that were light enough to be on a spacecraft because you couldn't fit a room-sized mainframe on an Apollo spacecraft or on the Lunar Excursion Module. So, let's see. We have this little space race thing that ends in the 1970s with NASA pouring money into little teeny solid state computing devices and you get the Apple ][ computer in 1977. And the IBM PC four years later. The last Apollo spacecraft was designed around 1967 more or less so I have to ask the naysayers what they're expecting to see in about ten years now that the ISS is complete. because everybody knows NASA science doesn't contribute to anything down here on earth.
I get absolutely disgusted and horrified when I hear and read this line of reasoning. Here we have this community on slashdot that is the beneficiary of the technology that NASA's scientists had a major hand in developing and you're discussing piddling nonsense.
Blue sky research generally takes about ten to fifteen, sometimes 20 years to result in something you hold in your hand. That's why it's called blue sky research, because it seems like you're funding a bunch of people looking up at the sky and asking why it is blue. But it always results in benefits to humanity that are incalculable. The United States is the only remaining superpower in the world. Rather than developing and maintaining stuff to kill people, we should be throwing big budgets at NASA and at other blue sky research. But, ever since Reagan took away the funding in our Universities (saying the Government is the problem), we have had none at Universities and a dwindling amount at NASA.
Slashdotters should be ashamed these questions are being asked.
I did no less than four investigative reports on how lax security used to be at US airports we would have a production assistant get a job with security with no background check or sneak contraband into a security zone. We would then interview a Congresspweson and an FAA person and they would wring their hands and agree that it was awful.
And nothing would change.
Now that we have professional security that is actually paid to care, everyone is complaining. I'm not. I get the full pat-down each time because I have a knee replacement. I point to it and politely tell the TSA person that I will set off the magnetometer. I always do the pat down. It is completely routine, I expect it and know what to do. I thank the TSA worker "for keeping us all safe." always gets a smile.
If you're going to cop an attitude, it won't be pleasant. If you don't see it as an imposition, it won't be. I am looking forward to the scanners. Maybe I won't need the pat-down. I am hoping the new technology makes everyone safer.
That is just not practical. I develop and host websites. If I need to change registrars because someone wasn't happy with their web designer and they came to me. As it is today, it can take up to 10 days to complete a registrar change.
I am using Melbourne IT as my registrar because my hosting provider works well with them. Certified mail to and from another country would take upwards of two weeks -- and all that time my client is waiting.
I completely understand the eagerness to deny spammers and malware fiends domains. But this is not the right solution for those of us who are legitimate.
I unfriended /. when every post was sent to my account in quadruplicate. Needed to stop the madness.
I suppose I'm old. And crusty.
But honestly, folks, this is a huge comeback (from the dead!)
Not too long ago, Apple's demise was being spoken of regularly by the Wall Street Journal, by the New York Times, the Washington Post and many other newspapers back when newspapers really meant something. The stock sunk to 14 dollars a share. I bought 100 shares thinking that, if you sold off the component parts of the company, you would get more than $14 per share. My target price was $35 and, like a fool, I sold shortly after the iMac came out.
But parallel to that was a triumphant Microsoft. Bill Gates still ran that company and he could speak to the software people. Microsoft could do no wrong and Steve Jobs, when he took over Apple again, had to end a lawsuit against Microsoft (over Windows 3.x) in order to get Microsoft to develop a version of Office for the Mac. Microsoft also bought up a huge tranch of Apple stock. the press lionized Gates and Microsoft. They were the juggernaut that could do no wrong, and Apple was "The Beleaguered Apple" and on its last legs.
I see positive press on Apple these days and I remember all that. And I think, "Wow, what a comeback."
Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?
Please see my earlier post for the long explanation, but:
Photoshop CS5 can. CS 4 and CS3 only see four cores, that's all they were programmed to see because that's a Carbon limitation. Since Illustrator and Final Cut Pro are also 32-bit Carbon applications, they cannot either. Final Cut Pro, when rendering as hard as it can render, only uses 4 cores and some of the plugins only see one core. Photoshop plugins (almost all of them, which have not been rewritten to Cocoa and to 64-bit) only see 4 cores.
But I'm lying, too. Photoshop CS5 sometimes doesn't use the CPU at all. CS5 will use the GPU for some of the things it does.
I think we're at the point where the software lag has truly hit us.
I have a dual Quad-core "Nehalem" Mac Pro 4,1. So far it has 16G of system RAM. I'll add another 16G on its third anniversary.
But Apple's Final Cut Pro is a 32-bit Carbon application. So it's pretty much limited to four cores and I'm not sure it's able to use the dual-mode of the Nehalem cores. A truly well-written bit of software should make my system "look" like it has 16 cores and use all of them. The most I have seen Final Cut use is four (or eight if it does take advantage of dual-mode). So I can have a render cooking away and I have four cores to spare (though I may not have much RAM).
Oh, but wait -- nobody just uses Final Cut! No, they're using plugins!
Right you are (you smarty-pants, you)! You're using plugins to make Final Cut really sing. After all, green screen work, particle effects and other effects require the work of Boris Continuum Complete, Digital Anarchy, ToolFarm and CoreMelt, not to mention others. So how many cores do they work with?
Turns out, in some cases, only one.
So you could be editing away, planning your render to take up a few hours overnight and come back to work (as I did with an earlier version of Red Giant Software's ToonIt which only used one processor core) after a cuppa joe and a splendid breakfast in the morning to see your Mac tell you, "only six more hours to go."
I really needed to kill something when I saw that.
Oh, and let's talk about Photoshop, shall we?
I did not upgrade to CS4. Adobe really stroked the Mac crowd nicely when they released a 64-bit (Vista-UGH!) version of Photoshop for Windows only, folks -- despite the fact that Apple had 64-bit built into its operating system two years before Microsoft (unless you count XP-64 which lacks drivers and now lacks any support from Microslush). Photoshop CS5 is now out and it's been done right because someone at Adobe had a nice steamin' hot cuppa Cocoa and rewrote it, like they should have when Apple told them to in 1999 (please tell me why Adobe seems so much like GM, OK?) that Carbon was transitional and that it would start getting old and crusty pretty soon.
But, as far as I can tell, all of the plugins for Photoshop are still 32-bit, so you won't be seeing any improvement in speed until they're rewritten, too.
Seems like Apple could take a cue from Adobe with Final Cut now, couldn't they.
Most of the Adobe suite, excepting Photoshop and After Effects is 32-bit Carbon. So you're not going to get Grand Central Dispatch sending stuff out to 8 cores or 16 core-lets (with Nehalem). So the 12-core Mac will have -- let's see... eight cores sitting idle most of the time? Boy, I really want one of those!
Apple needs to release these computers and these servers. The technology in these beasties is frightfully fast (I know, my Mac can run like a bat outa wherever if it's running a 64-bit application). But remember: Microsloth Word is going to want the first core and it's going to hog it. Grand Central Dispatch isn't going to get you anywhere with Dreamweaver. If you have Excel running in the background, Mathematica may stall because it's running out of RAM and resources that Microsoft Excel wants to keep.
I would imagine we're looking at another generation in software before our computers are actually unbound by the dependencies written into what we're using currently.
Oh, and I do note that the splash screens for Microsoft Excel still stay up for a long time -- even at 2.93 GHz.
OK, i'll bite (or is it byte -- naah, that's just a really good magazine I used to read that was killed).
I was working with Microsoft back in 1995 doing PR for them. Happened to go to a meeting that, maybe I should not have attended. Bunch of microserfs in attendance looking at a new product. Gates enters the room and everyone gets really excited and really quiet.
Gates asks about part of the user interface. Microserf answers. Gates proceeds to rip into him like the wrath of ghod (which he may have been to the microserfs). Calls him a total idiot, tells him his UI won't work because nobody will get it. Then turns to the rest of the room -- which cowers as one (actually, I almost flinched and I had nothing to do with the project). Then Gates brings up another aspect of the application and one guy stands up with a quavering voice and takes responsibility (blame). Gates tells him that most of what he has seen makes pretty good sense, then rips into him about part of the thing he took credit for.
I figured half the room was going to be let go and escorted off the Microsoft campus by armed guards at gunpoint (and no, you cannot empty your desks!). Gates then tells everyone that they have to be afraid, that the other software companies were going to catch up, that Microsoft was going to die horribly if they didn't get it together and think. Gates then whines about sloppy coding habits, tells them to get back to work and he'd better see a better application and soon.
Folks, Steve Ballmer is a manager-type. If he ever wrote a single line of code, it was in MSBasic as a new hire so that he could show Gates that it can be used to calculate sums and count beans. He doesn't understand, and has never understood, the people who design software. He cannot pick apart their work. And he cannot, as Gates used to, exhort them to produce better because he can do better.
I've not worked for Apple or done any projects within that company. But it's my understanding that Jobs is the same as Gates was. He has worked on design, which is a primary focus of Apple. He can rip into people who don't innovate. Jobs is not a bean counter, he's a visionary. Love him or hate him, Jobs requires something more of his people than a bean counter would and I would argue that Jobs can require that because of what he knows, which goes way beyond handling a company's balance sheet.
Where Gates lost his way was when the Internet became a phenomenon. "It's a gold-rush mentality," he said, "And the only people who are going to make money off the Internet are people who make tools for things on the Internet."
By that, I suppose he meant FrontPage and IIS servers. FP has been completely eclipsed by Dreamweaver and there are even free tools that create better websites. I do have one website on an IIS server. I uploaded an .M4V video file and it didn't work on the server. Administrator had to enable those types of files (I'll take normal Linux/Apache any day). And don't get me started on what I have to do to support Microsoft's non-W3C-compliant Internet Exploiter browser! I think they failed in that mission and that was back under Gates.
My argument is that Microsoft's decline is more due to lack of technical leadership than anything else. Ballmer was important to the company as its first manager but a tech company needs a tech guru sitting in the CEO seat, not someone who could run a division of Proctor and Gamble.
Yes, but I don't think that trips off the tongue as readily.
You're getting distracted by the example. Most people agree that pictures of naked women or men, in an artistic conceptualization, is free speech and the dividing line between that and pornography is fuzzy. I would tend to want to protect your right to pontificate about the evils you see in our government and that includes holding up signs, shouting slogans and standing up on a proverbial soapbox, holding forth on your opinions. I also think you would agree that this is free speech.
But, in certain circumstances, courts (not always the Supreme Court) have ruled that one may be arrested for standing on the side of the road with a sign that says "The President is a War Criminal." And, during the last administration there were zones along motorcade routes that had prohibitions from you holding such a sign so that the President could, possibly, if he was looking out the window at the right moment, see your sign. The ACLU had problems with this practice. And it would seem that the Bush Administration thought that the 9-11 attacks gave them the pretext to abolish the First Amendment
.
Were these attacks on our freedoms to actually have seen the light of day in a courtroom, I believe the long precedents of re-labeling "speech" a "verbal act" in SCOTUS decisions offer the path that would have been gleefully taken.
According to Wirenius, the way you ignore the First Amendment in arresting someone for speaking, exercising press freedoms and so on, is to call it a "verbal act" and not speech, which is protected.
I can see a good class-action suit here (and I'm not a lawyer) to require that Apple send all iPhone 4 owners a bumper or case for their new phone that prevents the attenuation of the signal caused by holding the phone incorrectly. That is really the fix for this issue and, were the phone sold with one or packaged with one, this would be a non-issue.
Complete disclosure here: I own the original iPhone (limited to Edge Network) and am planning to upgrade as soon as I know if there will (or definitely won't) be any competition between telcos.
My good friend, John Wirenius some time ago published a book on free speech called "First Amendment, First Principles: Verbal Acts and Freedom of Speech." The book is kind of hard-going, so unless you're interested in carefully-researched legal argument covering the subject, you're in for a slow read.
My point is this (and John makes it in detail): Immediately upon the adoption of our current Constitution here in the United States, the Supreme Court began hacking away at this First Amendment -- and with a really large axe, rather than an ice pick. There are current definitions for what one may present or do or say that consider speech a "verbal act" that may be Constitutionally limited. It is this tortured creation of an action from one's words that really defies any and all logic.
Everyone is familiar with the "limitation" on "free speech" that is described thusly:
Something like this is, presently no problem for the Supreme Court, as saying that word in that situation is re-defined, not as "speech" but as a "verbal act," and thus, not protected by the First Amendment. So, I don't really see Elena Kagan as proposing anything different than what has been going on in the United States for 200 plus years. The definition of "Free Speech" versus "verbal act" is one that is entirely subject to interpretation of any Court, be it local, federal, a court of original jurisdiction or an appellate court.
Posted to my Facebook Page.
This is really cool -- and good info about what it takes to make an actual star in the comments that follow the parent. Sometimes Astronomy means observations over years and years.
Good job, Phil!
Spock: (Raising eyebrow) "Fascinating Captain -- Oh, darn!"
I think the pitchfork analogy is a pretty good one.
AT&T is a company we love to hate. They were broken up as a monopoly that was "too big to fail," and priced their services accordingly. They foundered for a number of years, selling long distance and trying to compete against smaller, scrappier companies by sticking to their old model of bad service, high prices.
They quit innovating. They closed Bell Labs (after telling all their employees there that they weren't going to do that). They didn't upgrade their network. They didn't anticipate the VOIP revolution. In order to get into cellular telephony, they had to purchase a good phone company (Cingular). Then they applied their bad service model to that company.
The real advantage of purchasing an iPhone is the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. You don't have to deal with an AT&T flack who doesn't know his own product. The advantage of purchasing an Android phone is the user community. As long as you can get an answer from the FOSS geeks that know the OS and how to use it, you don't have to deal with AT&T.
I am currently out of contract on my AT&T iPhone. And AT&T ought to be worried but, somehow, they're not. Frankly, all of the cellular phone companies ought to worry when any of their customers get out from under their two-year agreements.
Any pricing ideas AT&T introduces will certainly be met with hostility. I intend to stay with my $30 unlimited plan even though I have no idea how much data I normally use. I have the original 8G iPhone that is limited to the Edge Network. I live in an area where I have crappy reception from AT&T but there is value in my phone. And there are other areas where I spend time where the reception is not bad. AT&T's unlimited data plan should have served as an incentive for AT&T to upgrade its network. Instead, they didn't and published reports about how the few people who were using lots of data were, somehow, at fault for AT&T's network shortcomings.
So get out your pitchforks. Hoist those torches. Let's go kill Dr. Frankenstein's Monster.
Jim, you are absolutely correct. There are tons of opportunities. But one thing I notice teachers in the grammar and high schools doing is not "thinking outside of the box." If you are teaching, you have a college education and you know how education works -- at least on the University level. "Publish or perish" is all about grants, writing them, getting them, cultivating them over time and taking care of donors.
Often though, our high school and grammar school teachers are thinking only in terms of their classes, their courses, the students and getting through the lesson plans. But in high schools like the one described in the original post, the school is looking to achieve something special. While the school may have a Development department, the expertise is in the classroom, not in Development, so this is where any grant proposal should originate.
Summer is almost here. You have, maybe, six more weeks of classes to teach. Sit down with Development, the Principal and, perhaps, a school administrator and get a "buy-in" to support a proposal and assistance. Then during the summer, along with the second job you have to take in order to make ends meet as a schoolteacher, get the proposal done and start shopping it around. Have Development assist and get everyone involved. Someone in your town knows someone who can get the money for the proposal. Maybe not all of it, but a significant portion. Now's the time to get things going.
I don't know if this can be modded up to a 7 or 8, but it is very insightful as well as interesting.
Fact is, schools have to deal with Realistic Budgets and any computers they purchase will certainly need to be multiple-use and not just for the teaching of programming. They'll need to be general use, as well.
I run a small business and I recently purchased a new computer. It's a workstation-class computer and needs to be because of what I do. And I bought on the kinda cheap side from a top-tier manufacturer. This one computer cost me $7,500 (and I need to add RAM). If you have a class of 20 students, all of whom need a separate CPU, you're looking at a cost outlay of $157,500. Heck, my daughter's school just bought whiteboards and it took them about four years to raise the funds.
First thing I would do is find out how much budget you can sink into your project. That will guide what you can buy. Second thing I would do is hit your local Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Kiwanas Club and so on and see if you can get local sponsorship for your project. Since you're a technology school, see if you can get a tech company to give you a grant as well. Target around a quarter million and you're looking at a first class lab that will begin to go obsolete as soon as you build it.
I realize I'm talking to a school teacher here. School teachers in high schools and elementary schools don't write grant proposals, because that's university stuff. But, by thinking in terms of raising funds, you suddenly place yourself on another playing field all together. And, with respect to computer purchases, bake sales just won't raise anywhere near sufficient funds. I know -- if it takes four years to get White Boards, your computing technology will be on life support by the time you can replace it.
Also if you develop the kinds of leads to get funding for this kind of a project, you will be set to upgrade and stay with current technology as you go forward. And if you have a tech company from your area that is supporting you, they will probably be able to offer you curriculum guidance for what they think they will need in the future as well.
As to platforms, the only computer that can run everything is made by Apple. You can install Windows, OS X, Linux, other Unix, emulators for iPhone and iPad, etc on a Mac. While workstations are really nice for schools, you might look at the Quad-Core processor iMac. The only downside I see to this computer is lack of hard disk space for multiple operating systems, so getting a server and having everything boot off a server might be the best solution for that problem. But the discussion of what hardware you should specify should take a serious back seat to funding.
TFA mentioned possible useful things, like curing or reversing Alzheimer's as well as looking in to how to stop "rogue" cells from forming cancer.
I can see a lot of potential from this, but we're looking some 20 years out and there are, undoubtedly, many other genes in the process that need to be looked into to make sure that the body parts being regenerated form correctly and link up to the rest of the body correctly. I can see new mouse heads in 15 years based on this discovery, followed by human regeneration beginning experimentally in 20.
Of course, my Alzheimer's (assuming I have it or get it) will have progressed to the point where I would not be a candidate by then. They tend to come up for cures for stuff just after someone I know dies from the disease.
That's not really all that scary, mykos. After the US Supreme court Decision that gives corporations the right to spend any amount of money to influence elections in the US, the corporations are now able to be the government that regulates the corporations that tell us what is OK for us to communicate and do.
Last company my wife worked for fielded a sales force with laptops. their "office" was their home. They sold advertisements. There was no data security.
These sales people knew their territories, knew their jobs and knew how to generate revenue. And they were in New England, where a friend is hard won but, once won, a friend for life. The company, based in Virginia, gave no thought to relationships. They operated under the mistaken impression that their product was king.
So they put my wife out like the cat. Didn't give her severance. She's suing.
And they fired all of their sales staff. One by one. Told them they were not meeting their quotas.
There were no corporate financials on the salespeoples' laptops. There was no sensitive information, save addresses and phone numbers of the advertisers and email addresses of the company yes-men that went along with this deal.
One of the salespeople, who had been with the company some 30 years went to all of his clients and started a new publication and started selling space in it. He has been growing and gaining clients because he treats them right and has a good ad production department. He has the old advertisers he used to have and has new ones who want in. And he's growing in New England.
Oh, and the original company? They're looking for a New England regional sales manager to replace my wife now. They want one with a complete sales team and solid contacts in the market.
Data security? We backed up my wife's entire drive onto our own external hard drive because they wouldn't buy her a backup drive (too cheap). We kept that drive. And at the initial hearing for her lawsuit, the company was repeatedly shocked by the content of their own emails coming back to haunt them.
So in this day and age of corporations firing people for being female, pregnant "too old" or "too unwhite" and getting away with it most of the time, why do they think they need data security again?
I remember the 6502...
Manufacturers can currently make cards that will work in modern Mac Pro computers. In fact, I seriously extended the life of my G4 Mac by installing a SATA card in it so that I could use (more modern and faster) SATA drives with the computer. I also upgraded the GPU. I will probably do something along those lines with my Cheese Grater and, maybe, it will be useful for about 10 years like my last computer.
The idea around the Apple // computer was that hardware hacks were a good way to extend it. And people sold breadboards that you could install and test on your Apple //. But you really needed to know what you were doing, else you could fry your motherboard and that would be really bad. So the Steve Wozniak part of the Apple Computer company did their best to publish warnings and specifications so that hardware hackers would make innovative stuff for the Apple //.
Today, hardware hackers are still out there. You can get the complete hardware information you need about a Mac Pro as a hardware developer, so that you can make a card to install in the computer to handle digital audio, VTR control, set up a hard disk array or anything else a Mac can do in the workplace. Were that not the case, there would be no Blackmagic Design, no AJA Video systems, no Digidesign, and no CI Design as just a few examples.
The spirit of the 1980s still lives on, mostly in the software communities that are writing free, open software. I don't see breadboards for sale these days for Apple computers -- but I don't see them for pee cees either. But that doesn't mean they are not being made. That means I'm not shopping for them.
I like where we have headed. It used to be that animation, destined for video (which is a much smaller screen than the cinema) took overnight to do just a few seconds, with a really expensive SGI workstation attached to a 1" C-format open reel VTR, recording one frame at a time (and you hoped there would be no h-phase errors, else you would have to start rendering all over). Today, we can play Doom real-time on our 24" monitors attached to our inexpensive personal computers with better than 30 frames per second render times for each whole frame in widescreen. The "computer" that landed the Lunar Excursion Module on the moon would probably be an inferior cousin to the processor you find in a hand calculator today. And those computers were really, really expensive. The Apple // did everything in "character mode," drawing things with very crude graphics developed out of an extended character set. Forget about shading, drop shadows and the like. So, looking at my Apple Studio Display, running in 32-bit color at 1920 x 1200 powered by my NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512 MB of video RAM, I'm seeing a nicer image than the Apple //, hooked up to a monitor or a TV using a box that the FCC said was illegal.
I'm still bummed that Pystar lost, even though they ought to have in every sense. Here were these scrappy guys out there trying to re-invent the Mac Clone. My first experience with Apple's System Software was with a Mac Clone. but I don't want to go "back to the future" and I don't hate Steve Jobs because of the result.