Re:you missed the other part
on
IBM Turns 100
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
and then there are the ways that the subsidiaries, after the war, were brought back into the fold of IBM, along with all the profits they had reaped from their wartime experiences, which were meticulously recorded
You're right - IBM should have forced those subsidiaries out of business for their complicity in the German war machine. In fact, all companies in Germany that helped out the Nazi regime should have been closed down. All those horrible people should have been forced into bread lines for their crimes.
I mean, that's basically what they did after WWI, and it seemed to work out pretty well.
Yes, because it would be much more efficient for the government to pay people to go around writing down people's mileages from their odometers, after first identifying the owner, getting them to open up the car, writing each one down and collating them each day...
Or how about a transmitter that ONLY TRANSMITTED YOUR ODOMETER READING, instead of every place you've driven?
Or, if you want to do variable road pricing, have it figure out how much you owe based on where you've driven and just transmit that?
If your shitty chinese speakers are sensitive enough to pick up a cell phone, tell me how a receiver designed to recieve a 5 watt signal in MEO can't get interference from it, but your shitty speakers can.
Because the speakers have no out of band rejection or signal discrimination built into them, they stupidly amplify anything they can detect.
And, yes, I've worked on digital radio systems. The only thing I've seen kill a very sensitive mobile digital radio antenna is a poorly built CB radio that blasted high amplitude garbage all over the spectrum.
The article says that there is "anecdotal evidence" indicating some record of this happening. I assume they know what types of planes this anecdotal evidence comes from. Test those planes. Heck, I bet they can even get the exact route and everything, if it's a confluence of environmental factors.
Direct government action. A lawsuit from an individual, you have a chance of defending against. The government makes the rules, interprets the rules, and arbitrates the rules. The deck is pretty well stacked against you.
Don't fret, Hollywood Accounting will ensure no one who actually put the work and sweat into creating anything will ever reap a dime, just ask Winston Groom.
I personally know actors who've gotten nice residual checks years after having been in a movie, after the cable networks pick them up and start playing them more regularly. Ironically it's usually the rank and file that *don't* get screwed in Hollywood, it's usually the people higher up the foodchain who get a higher percentage of the net as payment, which is often barely anything.
They are small. They don't rely on full blown nuclear fission to create power. They are maintenance free. Pretty much every failure mode is that they shut down - no secondary equipment required, the shutdown is built-in to the nature of the reaction.
Bury one in a concrete vault in every neighborhood. If some idiot manages to open it up he'd be on fire by the time he gets close enough to mess with one - they run pretty hot.
They'll run for a dozen years or so, then you swap them out with a new one. You recycle the old one, the amount of unusable nuclear waste is about the size of a baseball.
I think 15-20 years is entirely reasonable. Think of all the movies that tank at the box office, but become "cult classics" years later. I think the people who put the work and sweat into making them should be able to profit off of that success. Ditto all the songwriters whose songs become popular after some other band has reworked it, such as the endless covers of Not Fade Away in the 60's.
You mean how Apple charges for the Server versions based on the number of users served?
So does MS.
Microsoft does segmenting because their product is the OS.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.
Not to mention XCode 4 is not not free, when it used to be,
Visual Studio isn't free, either. Well, you could try and use one of the crippled "Express" versions, which are good for learning and not much else.
There is no reason to ban Sony and other third party ebook readers from the App store
The Sony ban was because of the restriction that outside-app purchases must also be available inside the app. Sony wasn't doing that so they got banned. Kindle is still on there. So is the Nook and the Borders app.
There used to be a software implementation of the MT-32 that you could use as a plug-in for DOSBox, but Roland sued them to stop, since it used MT-32 samples. 'Cause, you know, Roland really cashes in on those late 80's consumer-grade sample sets.
Yeah, the games designed for Win98 just don't work well on anything after XP. Most don't work that well in XP, either.
Here's a fantastic rig for Win98 games:
1GHz P3 on an AOpen A34 motherboard 256MB RAM GeForce 2 AGP video card Turtle Beach Santa Cruz audio card Intel Pro/100 Ethernet 500GB HD
Running Windows 98SE with the unofficial 2.1a service pack, DX9, MP9, IE6, and KernelEx to run more recent browsers.
The nice thing about the above hardware combo is that it was supported until fairly recently - most of the kinks have been worked out in the supported games. The GeForce 2 has enough horsepower to play nearly every 98 era game at 1024x768 res as fast as your monitor can refresh.
If I recall correctly, video was encoded in a modulated analog signal. So the data is pulled off of the disc and ran through a DAC, and a composite analog video signal is created. This is opposed to how DVDs and Blu-Rays work, where the video is stored digitally, decompressed and an analog video signal is created, if an analog monitor is used.
Analog audio could be stored along with the modulated video, along with a couple of digital PCM encoded audio tracks, which is usually where data was stored if needed. Newer surround-sound Laserdiscs would have a stereo Dolby Pro-Logic encoded digital stereo track, and a digital surround track encoded in the analog portion of the video track - which is why you needed a special "AC3" decoder, the digital info was coming out embedded in an RF signal.// Still has a LaserDisc player for a few Criterion titles never released on DVD, and the THX release of Star Wars, the last decent, un-screwed-up version
Blu-Ray - points against #1 - They assume we're pirates and thieves - they sure aren't getting my money.
Well, same with DVD - the copy protection just isn't as good:)
#2 - They require internet connectivity, or waiting weeks to get firmware updates to watch the latest releases - no thanks - not giving away that kind of info to watch a movie.
Yeah that blows.
#3 - It was developed by Sony - I don't give Sony any money - ever. The only Sony music or movies in my collection were bought by friends and family as gifts - I don't / won't purchase any or pay money to see their shit in the theaters.
That's odd. I'm not sure what you have against Sony, but I'd be more pissed at MPEG-LA, patent troll supreme, than them.
Heck, you can get DVDs for $5 - even cheaper if you get them used. Target has them on sale all the time. They are super-basic versions, no special features or anything, but the movie itself is the exact same copy as the regular one. All I want to do is watch Real Genius whenever I want, I'd pay $5 for that.
I've also heard rumors that some Blu-Ray discs are just line-scaled copies of the DVD transfer. This seems to mostly happen with TV shows, but it's not good advertising for the technology in general.
Keep in mind I was just using Wikipedia as an example. What he cares about is the data structure - how creation and categorization is governed is up to whomever is using the system.
He envisions something like a more advanced semantic web. Think of Wikipedia plugged into Wolfram Alpha, but instead of static HTML pages everything is stored as linked concepts. So if you ask for information on Romania, all the linked information on Romania would be generated in an abstract based on information related to Romania. You would also get all the information related to Romania - the diaspora, eastern European politics, etc... If you clicked on Romanian Diaspora, it would bring up all the relevant information on that topic, probably divided up by geographic region. Or you could ask for it divided up by what industry the diaspora was involved in - or what the second language was, or whatever.
The underlying idea is you ask the computer for information and the computer finds it for you, instead of you having to find it yourself amongst lots of desperate and arbitrarily assembled information.
I'm probably not explaining it as well as Nelson, but I think it's close.
What's the point in "teaching" math if you let the calculator do 90% of the work?
You could learn computer science without ever using a computer - but it would be rather pointless. A calculator is a tool, just like a protractor or graphing paper. Once you understand how the basics work, there's no reason to do it by hand anymore. It's much more useful to learn how to effectively use a calculator to get stuff done faster and more accurately.
And no, I'm not talking about "show your work" when solving for seriously complex calculations, I'm talking about what 95% of high school students are "taught" and yet the system allows them to pass through with flying colors due to massive hardware "grants" from Texas Instruments.
Source, please. Everyone I knew in high school had an 81 or 85. I had a 48. At the time the only calculators you were allowed to use on AP exams were the non-graphing non-scientific style. Nearly everyone in my class got college credit in math, chemistry and physics. I bypassed three years of college chemistry.
The calculator exercises are extra - use of them isn't integral to the textbook. I've seen a lot of textbooks with generalized calculator exercises as well.
> The point of the water was that it would be boiled off as it served its purpose of controlling the overheated fuel.
Sure, if the building was designed to vent steam into the atmosphere. The holding pool is designed to keep water *inside* You could argue that they should have built the pools to allow for external cooling, but every entry and exit point is an other potential source of failure, if the primary goal of the facility is to contain something.
Let's see - they've been pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater into the spent fuel pools for over a week now. I would take a wild guess and predict that, yes, there will be some radioactive water lying around.
FTA: ". Big things, like obscuring the networking stack under so many countless layers of abstraction that it’s virtually impossible to even imagine what bytes are actually going over the wire"
using System.Net.Sockets... IPEndPoint _p = new IPEndPoint (127.0.0.1, 80); Socket _s = new Socket(_p, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp); _s.Connect(_p); _s.Send(...bytestream...);
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and then there are the ways that the subsidiaries, after the war, were brought back into the fold of IBM, along with all the profits they had reaped from their wartime experiences, which were meticulously recorded
You're right - IBM should have forced those subsidiaries out of business for their complicity in the German war machine. In fact, all companies in Germany that helped out the Nazi regime should have been closed down. All those horrible people should have been forced into bread lines for their crimes.
I mean, that's basically what they did after WWI, and it seemed to work out pretty well.
Not to threadjack, but if we're talking about Sen. Franken...
Al Franken reads the 4th Amendment to a justice department official defending the PATRIOT act:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A8A7hsDOAw
Al Franken's recent vote on extending the Patriot Act (from Project VoteSmart)
02/15/2011 Extension of Various Patriot Act Provisions HR 514 Y Bill Passed - Senate
That Y means Yea.
??
Yes, because it would be much more efficient for the government to pay people to go around writing down people's mileages from their odometers, after first identifying the owner, getting them to open up the car, writing each one down and collating them each day...
Or how about a transmitter that ONLY TRANSMITTED YOUR ODOMETER READING, instead of every place you've driven?
Or, if you want to do variable road pricing, have it figure out how much you owe based on where you've driven and just transmit that?
If your shitty chinese speakers are sensitive enough to pick up a cell phone, tell me how a receiver designed to recieve a 5 watt signal in MEO can't get interference from it, but your shitty speakers can.
Because the speakers have no out of band rejection or signal discrimination built into them, they stupidly amplify anything they can detect.
And, yes, I've worked on digital radio systems. The only thing I've seen kill a very sensitive mobile digital radio antenna is a poorly built CB radio that blasted high amplitude garbage all over the spectrum.
The article says that there is "anecdotal evidence" indicating some record of this happening. I assume they know what types of planes this anecdotal evidence comes from. Test those planes. Heck, I bet they can even get the exact route and everything, if it's a confluence of environmental factors.
Direct government action. A lawsuit from an individual, you have a chance of defending against. The government makes the rules, interprets the rules, and arbitrates the rules. The deck is pretty well stacked against you.
Don't fret, Hollywood Accounting will ensure no one who actually put the work and sweat into creating anything will ever reap a dime, just ask Winston Groom.
I personally know actors who've gotten nice residual checks years after having been in a movie, after the cable networks pick them up and start playing them more regularly. Ironically it's usually the rank and file that *don't* get screwed in Hollywood, it's usually the people higher up the foodchain who get a higher percentage of the net as payment, which is often barely anything.
My vote is for more decentralized power generation using nuclear batteries.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2050039,00.html
They are small. They don't rely on full blown nuclear fission to create power. They are maintenance free. Pretty much every failure mode is that they shut down - no secondary equipment required, the shutdown is built-in to the nature of the reaction.
Bury one in a concrete vault in every neighborhood. If some idiot manages to open it up he'd be on fire by the time he gets close enough to mess with one - they run pretty hot.
They'll run for a dozen years or so, then you swap them out with a new one. You recycle the old one, the amount of unusable nuclear waste is about the size of a baseball.
I think 15-20 years is entirely reasonable. Think of all the movies that tank at the box office, but become "cult classics" years later. I think the people who put the work and sweat into making them should be able to profit off of that success. Ditto all the songwriters whose songs become popular after some other band has reworked it, such as the endless covers of Not Fade Away in the 60's.
You mean how Apple charges for the Server versions based on the number of users served?
So does MS.
Microsoft does segmenting because their product is the OS.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't suck.
Not to mention XCode 4 is not not free, when it used to be,
Visual Studio isn't free, either. Well, you could try and use one of the crippled "Express" versions, which are good for learning and not much else.
There is no reason to ban Sony and other third party ebook readers from the App store
The Sony ban was because of the restriction that outside-app purchases must also be available inside the app. Sony wasn't doing that so they got banned. Kindle is still on there. So is the Nook and the Borders app.
Mathematica 8 can use OpenCL (and CUDA) I think the new MATLAB can, too.
There used to be a software implementation of the MT-32 that you could use as a plug-in for DOSBox, but Roland sued them to stop, since it used MT-32 samples. 'Cause, you know, Roland really cashes in on those late 80's consumer-grade sample sets.
Yeah, the games designed for Win98 just don't work well on anything after XP. Most don't work that well in XP, either.
Here's a fantastic rig for Win98 games:
1GHz P3 on an AOpen A34 motherboard
256MB RAM
GeForce 2 AGP video card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz audio card
Intel Pro/100 Ethernet
500GB HD
Running Windows 98SE with the unofficial 2.1a service pack, DX9, MP9, IE6, and KernelEx to run more recent browsers.
The nice thing about the above hardware combo is that it was supported until fairly recently - most of the kinks have been worked out in the supported games. The GeForce 2 has enough horsepower to play nearly every 98 era game at 1024x768 res as fast as your monitor can refresh.
Er, why do we need snopes.gov if we have snopes.com?
If I recall correctly, video was encoded in a modulated analog signal. So the data is pulled off of the disc and ran through a DAC, and a composite analog video signal is created. This is opposed to how DVDs and Blu-Rays work, where the video is stored digitally, decompressed and an analog video signal is created, if an analog monitor is used.
Analog audio could be stored along with the modulated video, along with a couple of digital PCM encoded audio tracks, which is usually where data was stored if needed. Newer surround-sound Laserdiscs would have a stereo Dolby Pro-Logic encoded digital stereo track, and a digital surround track encoded in the analog portion of the video track - which is why you needed a special "AC3" decoder, the digital info was coming out embedded in an RF signal. // Still has a LaserDisc player for a few Criterion titles never released on DVD, and the THX release of Star Wars, the last decent, un-screwed-up version
Blu-Ray - points against
#1 - They assume we're pirates and thieves - they sure aren't getting my money.
Well, same with DVD - the copy protection just isn't as good :)
#2 - They require internet connectivity, or waiting weeks to get firmware updates to watch the latest releases - no thanks - not giving away that kind of info to watch a movie.
Yeah that blows.
#3 - It was developed by Sony - I don't give Sony any money - ever. The only Sony music or movies in my collection were bought by friends and family as gifts - I don't / won't purchase any or pay money to see their shit in the theaters.
That's odd. I'm not sure what you have against Sony, but I'd be more pissed at MPEG-LA, patent troll supreme, than them.
Heck, you can get DVDs for $5 - even cheaper if you get them used. Target has them on sale all the time. They are super-basic versions, no special features or anything, but the movie itself is the exact same copy as the regular one. All I want to do is watch Real Genius whenever I want, I'd pay $5 for that.
I've also heard rumors that some Blu-Ray discs are just line-scaled copies of the DVD transfer. This seems to mostly happen with TV shows, but it's not good advertising for the technology in general.
Iran has as much right as the US does to make nuclear weapons.
Not according to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty they signed.
Keep in mind I was just using Wikipedia as an example. What he cares about is the data structure - how creation and categorization is governed is up to whomever is using the system.
He envisions something like a more advanced semantic web. Think of Wikipedia plugged into Wolfram Alpha, but instead of static HTML pages everything is stored as linked concepts. So if you ask for information on Romania, all the linked information on Romania would be generated in an abstract based on information related to Romania. You would also get all the information related to Romania - the diaspora, eastern European politics, etc... If you clicked on Romanian Diaspora, it would bring up all the relevant information on that topic, probably divided up by geographic region. Or you could ask for it divided up by what industry the diaspora was involved in - or what the second language was, or whatever.
The underlying idea is you ask the computer for information and the computer finds it for you, instead of you having to find it yourself amongst lots of desperate and arbitrarily assembled information.
I'm probably not explaining it as well as Nelson, but I think it's close.
What's the point in "teaching" math if you let the calculator do 90% of the work?
You could learn computer science without ever using a computer - but it would be rather pointless. A calculator is a tool, just like a protractor or graphing paper. Once you understand how the basics work, there's no reason to do it by hand anymore. It's much more useful to learn how to effectively use a calculator to get stuff done faster and more accurately.
And no, I'm not talking about "show your work" when solving for seriously complex calculations, I'm talking about what 95% of high school students are "taught" and yet the system allows them to pass through with flying colors due to massive hardware "grants" from Texas Instruments.
Source, please. Everyone I knew in high school had an 81 or 85. I had a 48. At the time the only calculators you were allowed to use on AP exams were the non-graphing non-scientific style. Nearly everyone in my class got college credit in math, chemistry and physics. I bypassed three years of college chemistry.
The calculator exercises are extra - use of them isn't integral to the textbook. I've seen a lot of textbooks with generalized calculator exercises as well.
> The point of the water was that it would be boiled off as it served its purpose of controlling the overheated fuel.
Sure, if the building was designed to vent steam into the atmosphere. The holding pool is designed to keep water *inside* You could argue that they should have built the pools to allow for external cooling, but every entry and exit point is an other potential source of failure, if the primary goal of the facility is to contain something.
Let's see - they've been pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater into the spent fuel pools for over a week now. I would take a wild guess and predict that, yes, there will be some radioactive water lying around.
FTA: ". Big things, like obscuring the networking stack under so many countless layers of abstraction that it’s virtually impossible to even imagine what bytes are actually going over the wire"
using System.Net.Sockets ...
IPEndPoint _p = new IPEndPoint (127.0.0.1, 80);
Socket _s = new Socket(_p, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
_s.Connect(_p);
_s.Send(...bytestream...);
Boy howdy, that's just buried in layers.