Governments and civil societies construct legal systems to server the populace. The populace, under 18, needs to be prevented from pr0n, booze, weapons, and in this particular case, violent video games or those video games with adult images in them.
No, it's not fair to arbitrarily have 18 as the age, but there is no other accepted metric for separating youthful impessionistic people from adults within our society.
It's whether or not to protect the sensibilities of children. It's not a book ban, or a movie ban, or even a game ban. It's keeping kids from getting uber violent and very adult-oriented materials.
And they do, unsuccessfully, all the time. I applaud the efforts of the State of Michigan. They may lose, but if they do, at least it's one more step towards keeping patently objectionable material out of the hands of impressionable youth.
And they're not the first ones to try and embarrass Sun on Sun's turf. Galaxy-Class servers. Gene Roddenberry is rolling in his grave.
Folks, this is a 1U, 2-64 CPU machine. Nice. But just wait a short while and multi-cores will blow this stuff away-- before the end of the year you can get four (then more) 64-bit cores in a 1U, and stuff it with enough RAM to make a real difference.
Please watch the Tom and Dick Smothers-- oops I mean Scott and Jonathon-- Show for more details. And it's Schwartz playing bass.
The people and government of Singapore are very realistic in some ways, but I don't defend them; they have to do that. My citations are strictly addressing another lens to look at the problems in a pluralistic society of derogatory racial tension prevention as regards the apparent suppression of free speech.
It's possible to divide, statistically, illegal drug consumption in to socio-economic categories. It's often done to study the impact of the criminological impacts, so that it can be measured.
Singapore, as a state, chose to not be a part of the surrounding drug cultures, which are deeply sewn into the region. The human toll exceeds the capital toll if you value humans more than non-human assets.
But the US, along with nearly every other government, is funded through taxes on highly addictive drugs (to a certain portion of the population), including nicotine-based products, alcohol-based products, and so on. Whether it's chewing chat, coca leaves or beetlenuts, the effects also prevent populations from developing, economically and even culturally. It's just taxed where it can be.
There's much I don't like about Singapore, and I'm not defending them, just trying to add a lens to the picture that cites that the Singapore culture is young, and an amalgamation of cultures that's almost artificial-- and very sensitive to the destruction of cultures in the region through ethnic strife. Free speech should be more endemic, but the question of public speech that's racially derogatory is a transient issue. In 100 years, the world will be so full of people that either we'll shed our tribal legacies or have bloodshed that boggles the mind. I see little middle ground. I believe that Canada's cultural ideologies are a good model, but Canada also has an artificial population-- more than 95% of it non-native and arriving in only the past 100 years. More entrenched cultures have bigger problems-- look at Bosnia, and the artificial state of Indonesia for good examples of what happens.... wars based on thousand year old ethnic tensions. It's sad, but we're still barely out of the tribal stage and the inate tendencies of the human animal aren't easily surpressed.
There is the rule of law. Some jurisdictions mandate the concept of innocence until proven guilty, others not. Unilateral action taken without the rule of law in either case is a hallmark of a police state. This isn't done. You must have counsel in Singapore if you request it. You don't just get thrown in jail, awaiting an outcome; there is bailment and there is the opportunity to represent one's self with counsel.
In terms of citation of a source saying that the Singapore police are the country's largest drug dealers is an unproven allegation, and a dig at their draconian measures. I don't personally believe in capital punishment. I also believe that drug trafficing is a very bad thing and leads to social entropy in very costly (in terms of human capital) ways.
It could be argued that the administrations in Washington dating to the 1950's are huge drug dealers, by inference that they've allowed the drug trade to flourish by so many goofy missteps. Each and every program has been a monumental failure. That doesn't mean I'm justifying drug use, rather that the societal needs to stop drug use aren't there; it has to be stopped at the buyer. Amsterdam and Vancouver and Bangkok have taken three different legalization steps, with mixed successes. What I see in all three places are a handful of open junkies, and a lot of stoned people-- confined largely to small areas. It's sad, so very sad, to see these heavy users, as they rapidly get life sucked from them. But I digress.
So, Singapore is tough. So is Texas sometimes, and so is Buenos Aires. By comparison, Ridyah is unbelievably tough. KL is tough, but in different ways.... and so on. By comparison, Singapore is just weird, but a police state it isn't. It's precariously perched, at the tip of the Malay peninsula, between lots of strong cultures.
Chewing gum is not a controlled substance, but the improper disposal of chewing gum *is*. Their religious supression problem is certainly a problem, we'll agree. So is what happens to followers of the Quran in the United States, as well as rebuke of Scientologists. Few societies are very tolerant of dissent in this way.
Sex in Singapore is suppressed, we'll agree. Just remember that it took a Supreme Court ruling to make buggery legal in the US, just a handful of years ago (2002, I believe).
And yes, there are some pretty arcane statutes there, we'll agree on that, too. So be polite, ok? It's too bad they had to make these things a law, in what should be a responsible society. But they had the guts to do it. You can't buy pr0n there, either. It's just tough, eh? How to survive?
I've been to Bulgaria before the fall of the wall. I've been to East Germany, and Rumania, before the fall. Poland. Bhutan. Bahrain. These were police states. Given to unilateral action.
Your characterization of Singapore by comparison to these police states, is not correct.
Anectodal information about their police is specious. Sorry.
And finally, we agree on what Amnesty International says; I would ask you to also review their sentiments about the US. This review doesn't mean the US is better or worse, rather that such a comparison doesn't render one a police state, and the other not.
Quality makes a real difference, no doubt. Innovation means geting to readers, and bringing the foundation of an interested readership to advertisers, else the income comes from newsstand revenue, which is paltry at best.
In the end, like it or not, profits keep publishers publishing. What gets to profit is making more than you spend. You have to pay real writers, or find afficianados willing to work for peanuts in exchange for their name/content in print. There are no other formulas.
Yes, quality counts. Innovation is less so in publishing; look at all the formulaic if successful zines out there. It's like the nightly news, the difference between Time, Newsweek, and others-- just to cite a couple of mass-market appeal weeklies.
Scientific American is interesting.... but its science is more pop science than within a specific discipline, and only rarely is it interdisciplinary in its article content. Insightful, yes. Interesting, yes. Pop science--> yes.
Does that mean it's bad? No, but it's not what you'll find in a university library, ruminating through academic and research-focused articles. A journalist, when enlightened, can sort through these things, make sense of them, and try to put them into context that's usable by a large audience-- and that's a good thing. More often than not, however, the content is put in the light of the magazine's focus, and not on the other salient research available on a topic. It's like looking through a pinhole.
Although another poster claimed friction by the 'Chinese' class, this is a country that claims four official languages, and is a melting pot on the order of Hong Kong, or Bangkok.
Holding this contentious group together is a miracle given the tensions in the region. The economic success of Singapore is legendary in a region where its neighbors routinely slaughter each other- Indonesians with rebels, Malaysians with sectarian strife, Thai with sectarian strife, and so on. Singapore has to hold together ethnic Chinese, Malay, Tamils, as well as expats from all over the region, Euros, and so on. They take racial prejudice very seriously, and if they didn't they'd have bedlam.
Yes, Singapore is draconian in other ways, and is also known as the "Fine City" where every offense is a S$500 fine. They execute drug smugglers. So, don't smuggle drugs there. It's a follow-the-rules place. Not much crap is put up with. But it's not a police state, it just lacks a lot of democracy and free speech. This seems to suit the population, who are the envy of all of their neighbors. I've traveled the region many times; Singapore is the 52nd US State (after British Columbia)
Excitement != quality. Enthusiasm is great, but it doesn't necessarily replace critical training within a discipline. Dedication certainly helps, and that's part of the success of these 'boutique' (actually highly focused) reviews and critical thinking sites.
Big chains have consistency and a formulaic approach that may or may not benefit or them in the end run. Some mom-and-pop restaurants have rotten food, but good service, or the benefit of location or community-karma.
A good chef is a good chef, and a bad one is at best, mediocre. Quality counts, not necessarily revenue production. And turning journalists into science writers is haphazard. And scientists are otherwise unmotivated towards mass-market writing, because they do science, not documentation and writing for public consumption, rather peer review.
For an excellent review on entropy in communications, read _Grammatical Man_ by Jeremey Campbell. It's basic premise is that the greatest amount of information transferred in the least entropic manner occurs when the conveyor knows the most of the context of the consumer. Simple grammatical correctness and use of the language counts, but is only the medium being greased, not the contents of the envelope of the message.
About 80% of the zines on the stands are owned by just a half dozen publishers these days. Their job is to sell zines, not benefit scientific understanding, unless their readership has some decided and saleable interest.
Journalists, bless them, aren't often scientifically trained. Look at the poor quality of the computer industry zines of the late 90's and early 00's. Most them are gone, and good riddance, These guys were better at covering sports than bus architectures and burgeoning CPU and OS monopolies. Getting scientists to write cogent articles for people that aren't buying an academic/discipline article is really tough. They get no recognition for that, just some cash. Only a few scientists can cross over to mainstream writing and be successful more than their research career gave them. So, there's a good reason why we don't get good science writing: publishers don't understand the need for quality; researchers are busy publishing in journals within their disciplines, and journalists make rotten scientists-- but better beer drinkers.
I have both, as you do, apparently. We stopped counting after the first Vista 100 blue screens. Security is abysmal. Several APIs are plainly broken. The 64bit drivers for Vista are even more rare than the XP-64 version.
If you want to see MacOS run on Intel, go to theinquirer.net and look. Ok, it's a dev release... but it proves the point. Eye candy is cute. Underneath Vista is the same rotten core that built XP and 2003. It's a Revlon job, not a rewrite. Plastic surgery, not new youth is what Vista is all about. Microsoft, IMHO, is running, and hasn't invented much in the ten years since Win95/Win32.
Put your glasses on and look underneath the UI, ugly (again IMHO), a dry-rip of MacOS, and uninventive. The best part of Vista is that it has actual attention paid to workgroup needs. Fancy that.
Vista is riddled with bugs and FUD about what will/not be delivered with it. It's a long way from finished. Some sycophants will get it with their new HP or Dell and be pioneers for us, ready to take the arrows in their back (and front). Yes, Vista has some eye candy. But review after review has shown that its security model is incomplete, and still lags behind most *nix, including MacOS.
Apple gives it away with their machines. They don't have to; I'll bet that newer x86/686 machines from Apple will also boot Vista. It proves that the base OS is a ticket for selling other brands and timelines of accessories and plans. The base OS becomes increasingly irrelevant except as a security problem or enabler of a brand(s) of software and games that people want to use.
*nix (xBSD, Linux, etc) will stay at a lower entrance cost, at the cost of having civilians hurt themselves when they see a bash prompt. Microsoft will continue to build on eye candy with a nearly 20 year old, flawed architectural design. Bah.
A million bully pulpits, and multimillion people that don't have time to read it all. Blogging has imploded. Geek bloggers are like other bloggers; some excellent but the signal to noise ratio favored noise. Now, let Darwin rule. Some will survive. Others are dead, rest their souls. Oh, they're not dead yet? Reach for the twit filter-- quickly!
Diaries and journals are good. Blather is bad. A good geek knows the difference and we value that. Bad geeks blather, and the noise shelf overcomes the signal. A bien tot.
Consider that the effects of preprocessing seem to make the near-collision detection methods fallible, or so they cite. Better preprocessing == fewer 'hits' to then anchor reduction/decriment detection for real collision vectors. This is heartening, but are only a speed bump for a while. I think SHA-X will get attacked in a different way. At DefCon, an interesting tabling method was described that has some possibilities, by reducing both the input methods, linked to a rapidly anded table to see what pooped out the other end of the algo. That's tested for smell (pardon the metaphor) and therefore decriments rather rapidly. It sure beats the sifting method.
Several inaccuracies in the article
on
Wi-Fi Times Sixteen
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You get 4 a/b/g APs, plus 12 a-only APs in their can. That's where they get the big # of users. For a total of 16 APs, this is a great device for high-density, conference room or public lobby applications. And the retail is more like $14K.
Yes gzip can compress. Count the number of pages that use this. Not enough. Sadly, quite few. Could more apps do this? Sure. But we don't.
Could we compress non-English fonts? You bet. Just because there's an extra 'bit' used to do things causes little compression pain. Extend that to the tough or tokenized characters sets and you still buy lots of bandwidth back.
But we add in useless Google ads boxes (ok, you make a few dimes and you sacrifice your page code and genuflect to Google or another add revenue source), little Flash doodads, and lots of nice arty things that usually have little to do with content.
JPeg has compression capabilities, but with Pegasus' software you can do selective zoned compression and cut binaries from several megs down to several k with no loss of contextual content. This is important-- most of what you see in a single frame is noise and not content. When we get into MPEG codecs, you can get pretty lossy without pixelation, but again, it's not a zoned compression (zoned meaning that content like a face receives no compression while the pretty hillside in the background gets pounded by it, but your eyes focus on the human face where discernablity is needed).
CPUs are cheap today. Operating systems are bloated. They now have everything including the kitchen sink in them-- no wonder they're not good at adding in tough stuff, like native/kernel-based decompression tricks. The graphics cards are getting very cool, but they're for GIS and gaming. In GIS, there's another possibility for delightful compression/decompression algos that can make high use of the relationship between CPU and graphics engine and memory movements. But the numbers say keep the gamers happy.
Sigh.
To answer your main question, yes I am mad, in both senses of the word. Source compression standards aren't being used, even the few we have.. And we need more.
Hmmmm. Let's see. The Internet was designed for binaries.
Wrong.
It was designed for 7-bit data. ASCII.
Movies? Not designed for it. MP3's? Not designed for it. Security? Not designed for it.
It's nice to download distros, blobs of all kinds, etc. No argument there. But how much of that distro do you really use? Hardly any of it. You get it all because you think you need it. You can get easy downloads of Knoppix and tight Gentoos that aren't the same ISO burn blob represented by the fat ones.
I have a great TV for movies. A fine stereo and an iPod. Mucho gigs of iTunes hanging on my local media server.
When you drag these bowling balls through the garden hose of the Internet, it makes you dream. And jealous of those with fat pipes. The economics of the last mile sucks, and it always has, and it always will. My mother and my aunts have no need for the Internet in any way, let alone a fat pipe. They still use pen and paper mail. Once in a while, they'll come over and check their email, but they don't have to live, sucked into Internet time. They don't make a living from the 'Net. I do, and it suits me to buy a fat pipe. Others need it, too. Move where the pipes are, if you simply must have them. Otherwise don't be deluded by a perceived lack of quality of life because I still say that the control messaging infrastructure, and most of this page, is superfluous, uncompressed nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
We completely disagree.
Governments and civil societies construct legal systems to server the populace. The populace, under 18, needs to be prevented from pr0n, booze, weapons, and in this particular case, violent video games or those video games with adult images in them.
No, it's not fair to arbitrarily have 18 as the age, but there is no other accepted metric for separating youthful impessionistic people from adults within our society.
It's whether or not to protect the sensibilities of children. It's not a book ban, or a movie ban, or even a game ban. It's keeping kids from getting uber violent and very adult-oriented materials.
And they do, unsuccessfully, all the time. I applaud the efforts of the State of Michigan. They may lose, but if they do, at least it's one more step towards keeping patently objectionable material out of the hands of impressionable youth.
Ooops. Thought they were dual-single cores.
And they're not the first ones to try and embarrass Sun on Sun's turf. Galaxy-Class servers. Gene Roddenberry is rolling in his grave. Folks, this is a 1U, 2-64 CPU machine. Nice. But just wait a short while and multi-cores will blow this stuff away-- before the end of the year you can get four (then more) 64-bit cores in a 1U, and stuff it with enough RAM to make a real difference. Please watch the Tom and Dick Smothers-- oops I mean Scott and Jonathon-- Show for more details. And it's Schwartz playing bass.
I mistrust your citation.
Please see http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/c/ch /chewing_gum_ban_in_singapore.htm for the history and the reality of chewing gum in Singapore. Your sources need updates.
The people and government of Singapore are very realistic in some ways, but I don't defend them; they have to do that. My citations are strictly addressing another lens to look at the problems in a pluralistic society of derogatory racial tension prevention as regards the apparent suppression of free speech.
It's possible to divide, statistically, illegal drug consumption in to socio-economic categories. It's often done to study the impact of the criminological impacts, so that it can be measured.
Singapore, as a state, chose to not be a part of the surrounding drug cultures, which are deeply sewn into the region. The human toll exceeds the capital toll if you value humans more than non-human assets.
But the US, along with nearly every other government, is funded through taxes on highly addictive drugs (to a certain portion of the population), including nicotine-based products, alcohol-based products, and so on. Whether it's chewing chat, coca leaves or beetlenuts, the effects also prevent populations from developing, economically and even culturally. It's just taxed where it can be.
There's much I don't like about Singapore, and I'm not defending them, just trying to add a lens to the picture that cites that the Singapore culture is young, and an amalgamation of cultures that's almost artificial-- and very sensitive to the destruction of cultures in the region through ethnic strife. Free speech should be more endemic, but the question of public speech that's racially derogatory is a transient issue. In 100 years, the world will be so full of people that either we'll shed our tribal legacies or have bloodshed that boggles the mind. I see little middle ground. I believe that Canada's cultural ideologies are a good model, but Canada also has an artificial population-- more than 95% of it non-native and arriving in only the past 100 years. More entrenched cultures have bigger problems-- look at Bosnia, and the artificial state of Indonesia for good examples of what happens.... wars based on thousand year old ethnic tensions. It's sad, but we're still barely out of the tribal stage and the inate tendencies of the human animal aren't easily surpressed.
There is the rule of law. Some jurisdictions mandate the concept of innocence until proven guilty, others not. Unilateral action taken without the rule of law in either case is a hallmark of a police state. This isn't done. You must have counsel in Singapore if you request it. You don't just get thrown in jail, awaiting an outcome; there is bailment and there is the opportunity to represent one's self with counsel.
In terms of citation of a source saying that the Singapore police are the country's largest drug dealers is an unproven allegation, and a dig at their draconian measures. I don't personally believe in capital punishment. I also believe that drug trafficing is a very bad thing and leads to social entropy in very costly (in terms of human capital) ways.
It could be argued that the administrations in Washington dating to the 1950's are huge drug dealers, by inference that they've allowed the drug trade to flourish by so many goofy missteps. Each and every program has been a monumental failure. That doesn't mean I'm justifying drug use, rather that the societal needs to stop drug use aren't there; it has to be stopped at the buyer. Amsterdam and Vancouver and Bangkok have taken three different legalization steps, with mixed successes. What I see in all three places are a handful of open junkies, and a lot of stoned people-- confined largely to small areas. It's sad, so very sad, to see these heavy users, as they rapidly get life sucked from them. But I digress.
So, Singapore is tough. So is Texas sometimes, and so is Buenos Aires. By comparison, Ridyah is unbelievably tough. KL is tough, but in different ways.... and so on. By comparison, Singapore is just weird, but a police state it isn't. It's precariously perched, at the tip of the Malay peninsula, between lots of strong cultures.
Chewing gum is not a controlled substance, but the improper disposal of chewing gum *is*. Their religious supression problem is certainly a problem, we'll agree. So is what happens to followers of the Quran in the United States, as well as rebuke of Scientologists. Few societies are very tolerant of dissent in this way. Sex in Singapore is suppressed, we'll agree. Just remember that it took a Supreme Court ruling to make buggery legal in the US, just a handful of years ago (2002, I believe). And yes, there are some pretty arcane statutes there, we'll agree on that, too. So be polite, ok? It's too bad they had to make these things a law, in what should be a responsible society. But they had the guts to do it. You can't buy pr0n there, either. It's just tough, eh? How to survive?
I've been to Bulgaria before the fall of the wall.
I've been to East Germany, and Rumania, before the fall.
Poland. Bhutan. Bahrain. These were police states. Given to unilateral action.
Your characterization of Singapore by comparison to these police states, is not correct.
Anectodal information about their police is specious. Sorry.
And finally, we agree on what Amnesty International says; I would ask you to also review their sentiments about the US. This review doesn't mean the US is better or worse, rather that such a comparison doesn't render one a police state, and the other not.
Quality makes a real difference, no doubt. Innovation means geting to readers, and bringing the foundation of an interested readership to advertisers, else the income comes from newsstand revenue, which is paltry at best.
In the end, like it or not, profits keep publishers publishing. What gets to profit is making more than you spend. You have to pay real writers, or find afficianados willing to work for peanuts in exchange for their name/content in print. There are no other formulas.
Yes, quality counts. Innovation is less so in publishing; look at all the formulaic if successful zines out there. It's like the nightly news, the difference between Time, Newsweek, and others-- just to cite a couple of mass-market appeal weeklies.
Scientific American is interesting.... but its science is more pop science than within a specific discipline, and only rarely is it interdisciplinary in its article content. Insightful, yes. Interesting, yes. Pop science--> yes.
Does that mean it's bad? No, but it's not what you'll find in a university library, ruminating through academic and research-focused articles. A journalist, when enlightened, can sort through these things, make sense of them, and try to put them into context that's usable by a large audience-- and that's a good thing. More often than not, however, the content is put in the light of the magazine's focus, and not on the other salient research available on a topic. It's like looking through a pinhole.
Although another poster claimed friction by the 'Chinese' class, this is a country that claims four official languages, and is a melting pot on the order of Hong Kong, or Bangkok.
Holding this contentious group together is a miracle given the tensions in the region. The economic success of Singapore is legendary in a region where its neighbors routinely slaughter each other- Indonesians with rebels, Malaysians with sectarian strife, Thai with sectarian strife, and so on. Singapore has to hold together ethnic Chinese, Malay, Tamils, as well as expats from all over the region, Euros, and so on. They take racial prejudice very seriously, and if they didn't they'd have bedlam.
Yes, Singapore is draconian in other ways, and is also known as the "Fine City" where every offense is a S$500 fine. They execute drug smugglers. So, don't smuggle drugs there. It's a follow-the-rules place. Not much crap is put up with. But it's not a police state, it just lacks a lot of democracy and free speech. This seems to suit the population, who are the envy of all of their neighbors. I've traveled the region many times; Singapore is the 52nd US State (after British Columbia)
Excitement != quality. Enthusiasm is great, but it doesn't necessarily replace critical training within a discipline. Dedication certainly helps, and that's part of the success of these 'boutique' (actually highly focused) reviews and critical thinking sites.
Big chains have consistency and a formulaic approach that may or may not benefit or them in the end run. Some mom-and-pop restaurants have rotten food, but good service, or the benefit of location or community-karma.
A good chef is a good chef, and a bad one is at best, mediocre. Quality counts, not necessarily revenue production. And turning journalists into science writers is haphazard. And scientists are otherwise unmotivated towards mass-market writing, because they do science, not documentation and writing for public consumption, rather peer review.
For an excellent review on entropy in communications, read _Grammatical Man_ by Jeremey Campbell. It's basic premise is that the greatest amount of information transferred in the least entropic manner occurs when the conveyor knows the most of the context of the consumer. Simple grammatical correctness and use of the language counts, but is only the medium being greased, not the contents of the envelope of the message.
About 80% of the zines on the stands are owned by just a half dozen publishers these days. Their job is to sell zines, not benefit scientific understanding, unless their readership has some decided and saleable interest.
Journalists, bless them, aren't often scientifically trained. Look at the poor quality of the computer industry zines of the late 90's and early 00's. Most them are gone, and good riddance, These guys were better at covering sports than bus architectures and burgeoning CPU and OS monopolies. Getting scientists to write cogent articles for people that aren't buying an academic/discipline article is really tough. They get no recognition for that, just some cash. Only a few scientists can cross over to mainstream writing and be successful more than their research career gave them. So, there's a good reason why we don't get good science writing: publishers don't understand the need for quality; researchers are busy publishing in journals within their disciplines, and journalists make rotten scientists-- but better beer drinkers.
And so, if you have an IOS object, it might be a good idea to read the advisory, that is, if your network is still up.
For the sake of argument, using a stop/start bit (this is asynchronous, after all) you get 600 megabytes, or roughly 1 CD, not a DVD in a minute.
Still, blisteringly fast-- a DvD in five minutes.
Of course, that's downhill, hurricane at your back, towards a Schwarzchild radius, from a running start. With no errors.
It's going away. You heard it here, first. Remember that.
I have both, as you do, apparently. We stopped counting after the first Vista 100 blue screens. Security is abysmal. Several APIs are plainly broken. The 64bit drivers for Vista are even more rare than the XP-64 version.
If you want to see MacOS run on Intel, go to theinquirer.net and look. Ok, it's a dev release... but it proves the point. Eye candy is cute. Underneath Vista is the same rotten core that built XP and 2003. It's a Revlon job, not a rewrite. Plastic surgery, not new youth is what Vista is all about. Microsoft, IMHO, is running, and hasn't invented much in the ten years since Win95/Win32.
Put your glasses on and look underneath the UI, ugly (again IMHO), a dry-rip of MacOS, and uninventive. The best part of Vista is that it has actual attention paid to workgroup needs. Fancy that.
Fools.
Vista is riddled with bugs and FUD about what will/not be delivered with it. It's a long way from finished. Some sycophants will get it with their new HP or Dell and be pioneers for us, ready to take the arrows in their back (and front). Yes, Vista has some eye candy. But review after review has shown that its security model is incomplete, and still lags behind most *nix, including MacOS.
Apple gives it away with their machines. They don't have to; I'll bet that newer x86/686 machines from Apple will also boot Vista. It proves that the base OS is a ticket for selling other brands and timelines of accessories and plans. The base OS becomes increasingly irrelevant except as a security problem or enabler of a brand(s) of software and games that people want to use.
*nix (xBSD, Linux, etc) will stay at a lower entrance cost, at the cost of having civilians hurt themselves when they see a bash prompt. Microsoft will continue to build on eye candy with a nearly 20 year old, flawed architectural design. Bah.
A million bully pulpits, and multimillion people that don't have time to read it all. Blogging has imploded. Geek bloggers are like other bloggers; some excellent but the signal to noise ratio favored noise. Now, let Darwin rule. Some will survive. Others are dead, rest their souls. Oh, they're not dead yet? Reach for the twit filter-- quickly!
Diaries and journals are good. Blather is bad. A good geek knows the difference and we value that. Bad geeks blather, and the noise shelf overcomes the signal. A bien tot.
Consider that the effects of preprocessing seem to make the near-collision detection methods fallible, or so they cite. Better preprocessing == fewer 'hits' to then anchor reduction/decriment detection for real collision vectors. This is heartening, but are only a speed bump for a while. I think SHA-X will get attacked in a different way. At DefCon, an interesting tabling method was described that has some possibilities, by reducing both the input methods, linked to a rapidly anded table to see what pooped out the other end of the algo. That's tested for smell (pardon the metaphor) and therefore decriments rather rapidly. It sure beats the sifting method.
You get 4 a/b/g APs, plus 12 a-only APs in their can. That's where they get the big # of users. For a total of 16 APs, this is a great device for high-density, conference room or public lobby applications. And the retail is more like $14K.
Oh yeah, telnet works on it unless disabled, too.
Yes gzip can compress. Count the number of pages that use this. Not enough. Sadly, quite few. Could more apps do this? Sure. But we don't. Could we compress non-English fonts? You bet. Just because there's an extra 'bit' used to do things causes little compression pain. Extend that to the tough or tokenized characters sets and you still buy lots of bandwidth back. But we add in useless Google ads boxes (ok, you make a few dimes and you sacrifice your page code and genuflect to Google or another add revenue source), little Flash doodads, and lots of nice arty things that usually have little to do with content. JPeg has compression capabilities, but with Pegasus' software you can do selective zoned compression and cut binaries from several megs down to several k with no loss of contextual content. This is important-- most of what you see in a single frame is noise and not content. When we get into MPEG codecs, you can get pretty lossy without pixelation, but again, it's not a zoned compression (zoned meaning that content like a face receives no compression while the pretty hillside in the background gets pounded by it, but your eyes focus on the human face where discernablity is needed). CPUs are cheap today. Operating systems are bloated. They now have everything including the kitchen sink in them-- no wonder they're not good at adding in tough stuff, like native/kernel-based decompression tricks. The graphics cards are getting very cool, but they're for GIS and gaming. In GIS, there's another possibility for delightful compression/decompression algos that can make high use of the relationship between CPU and graphics engine and memory movements. But the numbers say keep the gamers happy. Sigh. To answer your main question, yes I am mad, in both senses of the word. Source compression standards aren't being used, even the few we have.. And we need more.
Hmmmm. Let's see. The Internet was designed for binaries.
Wrong.
It was designed for 7-bit data. ASCII.
Movies? Not designed for it. MP3's? Not designed for it. Security? Not designed for it.
It's nice to download distros, blobs of all kinds, etc. No argument there. But how much of that distro do you really use? Hardly any of it. You get it all because you think you need it. You can get easy downloads of Knoppix and tight Gentoos that aren't the same ISO burn blob represented by the fat ones.
I have a great TV for movies. A fine stereo and an iPod. Mucho gigs of iTunes hanging on my local media server.
When you drag these bowling balls through the garden hose of the Internet, it makes you dream. And jealous of those with fat pipes. The economics of the last mile sucks, and it always has, and it always will. My mother and my aunts have no need for the Internet in any way, let alone a fat pipe. They still use pen and paper mail. Once in a while, they'll come over and check their email, but they don't have to live, sucked into Internet time. They don't make a living from the 'Net. I do, and it suits me to buy a fat pipe. Others need it, too. Move where the pipes are, if you simply must have them. Otherwise don't be deluded by a perceived lack of quality of life because I still say that the control messaging infrastructure, and most of this page, is superfluous, uncompressed nonsense.