Anyway since many observatories have to spend time looking at other crap.. I think we should have a telecope permanently aimed at Eta Carinae taking pictures in succesion (aka video).
Let's see.. we need about initially $40K ($25K for a phat telescope +computer, rest for the housing of it etc.)
Hmm actually make that ($40K x 4 = $160k) because I think we'll need eastern hemisphere coverage and there should be two sites in each hemisphere to reduce the chance of being screwed over by cloud cover.
If you're thinking to try to get a bunch of astronomy geeks to dedicate the lens, camera, and computers to this project, why post AC?
Did you trace through the post to see if there were possibly some botch on apple's part that made the locale issue hard for the user to deal with?
(Living in Japan, I happen to know first hand what locale issues can do to an app.)
It could be a bug. That is, I'm not interested enough in checking a cold thread on youtube or whatever that was to see whether it's a bug in the handling of (the French?) locale by the UI.
It is not, at any rate, a math bug, which is what you seem to be thinking.
Discordantus missed the divide by two point. You're still missing it. If a Mac OS X box's math libraries gave the result you initially gave as an example, I don't think it would boot.
you didn't leave Microsoft's junk on that machine you bought for your mom. That's not doing her a favor.
Unless, I suppose, you need an excuse to go visit (and talk while you back her mail up and clean out the malware). But, then, a regular visit to upgrade Fedora or Ubuntu could be a good reason for a visit, too.
Yeah, I know, dialup. But, no..zip files that aren't zip files do come as mail attachments.
Get serious. Division by five, yeah, there is a little rounding error that creeps in there really quick.
But rounding error has been with us since before computers were available to make them for us. Anybody, for instance, who gets excited at 117/5 giving 23.399999999999999999986 is just not understanding the limitations of the tools and using settings he or she doesn't understand. (Heh, I just copy/pasted that in and it pasted in as 23.4. Had to type it in by hand, didn't count the nines.)
But division by two? I think you're just blowing smoke. Any hardware failure that would give a rounding error of that sort when dividing by two is going to be a hard failure of the sort that prevents the OS from booting.
What's the point of paying the extra $1.00 for the privilege of throwing away 99 pounds of sugar?
(I never really understood this until I had lived in Japan for several years. Now I realize that USAians need to understand this in order to do their part at reducing the human component of global warming.)
Now, the problem with allegory is that it may not apply.
If I had the money for more hardware, I could go cheap and get a used notebook PC with barely enough HD and RAM to boot Linux and find myself with no real improvement over toting around my current ancient clamshell iBook. Well, it would be a little lighter and a little faster. Lighter would matter on the train. If I go for enough HD and RAM to dual boot the MSWindbowls that I'm sure would come with it, I might as well buy a new one, and if I buy a new one, a MacBook looks not much different.
Possible solution? More recent used iBook? Hard to get those in Japan, so the price difference is not really there. Primary advantage that way is not needing to re-boot to get *nix. Also, the current version of NeoOffice handles Japanese a little bit better than OpenOffice (and runs, but only like molasses, on my old clamshell). Also, I can avoid supporting iNTEL. (Do we really want another monopoly?)
Most likely partial solution? Maybe I can scrape up enough money to add enough RAM and HD to the clamshell to dual-boot Linux with a light-weight window manager. (Dual-boot the clamshell because it is now frozen at 10.2 and Linux could cover some of what Jaguar lacks.)
Well, sure, I mean the Japanese keyboards (and -- mostly -- the software interfaced to them via the OS) have strange issues about the (half-width) backslash and (half-width) yen symbol. For several years you had to have some serious ambition to try to use Project Builder to write C when you had your log-in account set for Japanese in Mac OS X. I mean, when you have trouble getting a newline into a debug printf(), it can be hard slogging.
Why is it less of a problem with MS-OSses? Well, let's just say they are the half-wits most responsible for the half-width business and they were quietly (via application behavior) pushing their customers away from that for a long time.
(Me: But I really want to do this job and get paid for it. MSWxxx: No. You don't want to go there. I promise you. Me: [reboot, select FreeBSD])
I haven't read who you were replying to, but I've sure seen a lot of joe-sixpack-types proclaiming loudly how glad they were that evolution proved religion wrong so they could watch their pr0n on Saturday night and going to church on Sunday morning with a clean conscience.
Evolution is not _a_ religion, but it has sure been used as a substitute for religion by a lot of people who don't want to think.
The argument here is not between religion and science. It's between people who don't like what the other guy is thinking.
Personally, I'd prefer you to think, using the best tools you have, even if they're wrong.
By that reasoning, there is no activity safe from government regulation.
I mean, seriously, how far is it from asserting that a non-taxed entity should not be allowed to build museums dedicated to a ridiculous (in someone's opinion) theory to preventing _anyone_ from voicing a contrary opinion? Maybe it's all of twenty years' more legal evolution, but that's way too close for me.
(And, no, I'm not talking about whether the theory of the evolution of species is considered legal or not, I'm talking about the evolution of the interpretation of the Constitution that was originally intended to protect the individual's freedom to think things another person thought weren't worthy of being thought. And, no, the freedom to think, without the option of attempting to implement the thought, is not really freedom to think. It would be like the freedom to write source code without the freedom to compile and debug it. Or maybe the freedom to write comments but not actual code.)
Peace is about whether you can go about your business without expecting to have to accept being raped (pillaged or murdered) _and_ _like_ _it_.
It's the last part that is the deadliest to the human spirit, that the aggressor demands that you must _enjoy_ his (or her) attentions. (It's bad enough not being allowed to fight back, but then they insist that you _must_ be enjoying it.)
Or, if you insist that peace is the lack of argument, I will qote The Revelation about being "oppressed by peace".
There's a lot of worry about XOs ending up in the black market. With the iNTEL's low-price, low-performance model on the market, the black-market value of the XO might actually remain low enough to make it not worth stealing candy from babies.
You talk about the 1st world, and you make yourself part of the problem. Yeah, scammers are illegal and immoral. A lot of what goes on on wall street (and its equivalent in other countries) is immoral, and likely illegal, if somebody with enough money were willing to prosecute it
Money is like pus. It tends to accumulate around social injuries. That's why sick companies like Microsoft have so much of it. Why do you want more?
Think a little deeper into the social implications of things.
Microsoft was not the first company to push a feature list, but they have most consistently and for the longest time used the feature list as an anti-competitive tool.
Does that make it any clearer for the yea-sayers?
Or do I need to state the obvious, that as long as long as the Steve and Bill act continues to run, it's going to be really hard to get any software that does the right thing, security wise or otherwise, into the public venue.
Forgot about that one. A dedicated browser really doesn't have to do dns lookup, and shouldn't.
Not to save lookups, of course. Actually, there should probably be double watchdog mechanism, where as many as three separate watchdog servers are monitoring the machines the users log into, and the dedicated browser would query the watchdogs concurrently with logging into the account server: exchange certificates, get a one-time pad token from the account server, confirm the token with the watchdog, or some such.
I'm pretty sure the.bank tld would be an overall plus (for international banks), and.financial.us or.kin-yuu.jp and the like for local banks, but before we should start with that, we should start with some other essentials.
One, banks have to quit letting people log in from general purpose browsers. Not MSIE, not Firefox, not Safari, not the standard Opera. Not even Lynx.
Banks and other institutions performing financial transactions must start providing their own dedicated browsers. Look up the bank's current interest rate and operating hours on the web, sure, but use a different port and a custom browser that only connects to that bank's url, never looks in the hosts file, and dials (well, e-mails) the cops if the certificate's wrong.
Even your typical on-line store should have its catalog and even its grocery cart under, say,.com, but no way to pass a credit card number over http on port 80 with MSIE (et. al.).
Of course, to really get around key-logging trojans and the like, you should have a completely separate box to transmit the credit card number and such. Anyone want to front me some bread to develop an electronic wallet that plugs into ethernet?
I can think of immediately, mentioned already, false security (but we have that anyway) and the problem of managing the domain (but without the domain, there is nothing to manage).
Actually, as someone has pointed out about the hosts file, almost every negative mentioned is really the exposure of one way of managing the problem. Exposure of an API may or may not be a bad thing.
The only real negative I can think of is that it makes it that much easier for governments to monitor financial activity on the net. I have to think about this a bit longer to see how much is lost on that front.
Slashdot Mirror
The last post mumbled something about user error.
Did you trace through the post to see if there were possibly some botch on apple's part that made the locale issue hard for the user to deal with?
(Living in Japan, I happen to know first hand what locale issues can do to an app.)
It could be a bug. That is, I'm not interested enough in checking a cold thread on youtube or whatever that was to see whether it's a bug in the handling of (the French?) locale by the UI.
It is not, at any rate, a math bug, which is what you seem to be thinking.
Discordantus missed the divide by two point. You're still missing it. If a Mac OS X box's math libraries gave the result you initially gave as an example, I don't think it would boot.
you didn't leave Microsoft's junk on that machine you bought for your mom. That's not doing her a favor.
.zip files that aren't zip files do come as mail attachments.
Unless, I suppose, you need an excuse to go visit (and talk while you back her mail up and clean out the malware). But, then, a regular visit to upgrade Fedora or Ubuntu could be a good reason for a visit, too.
Yeah, I know, dialup. But, no.
seriously. ;-)
Get serious. Division by five, yeah, there is a little rounding error that creeps in there really quick.
But rounding error has been with us since before computers were available to make them for us. Anybody, for instance, who gets excited at 117/5 giving 23.399999999999999999986 is just not understanding the limitations of the tools and using settings he or she doesn't understand. (Heh, I just copy/pasted that in and it pasted in as 23.4. Had to type it in by hand, didn't count the nines.)
But division by two? I think you're just blowing smoke. Any hardware failure that would give a rounding error of that sort when dividing by two is going to be a hard failure of the sort that prevents the OS from booting.
software that doesn't get sucked into the nearest bot army on the first breach of the NAT?
.zip attachment to get clicked on and everything this side of whatever router was between them and the web is now fair game.
All it takes is one hidden
Junk e-mail is like global warming. Cleaning up the environment incurs some cost.
joudanzuki
And there is a particular backdoor you wanted to install, right?
What's the point of paying the extra $1.00 for the privilege of throwing away 99 pounds of sugar?
(I never really understood this until I had lived in Japan for several years. Now I realize that USAians need to understand this in order to do their part at reducing the human component of global warming.)
Now, the problem with allegory is that it may not apply.
If I had the money for more hardware, I could go cheap and get a used notebook PC with barely enough HD and RAM to boot Linux and find myself with no real improvement over toting around my current ancient clamshell iBook. Well, it would be a little lighter and a little faster. Lighter would matter on the train. If I go for enough HD and RAM to dual boot the MSWindbowls that I'm sure would come with it, I might as well buy a new one, and if I buy a new one, a MacBook looks not much different.
Possible solution? More recent used iBook? Hard to get those in Japan, so the price difference is not really there. Primary advantage that way is not needing to re-boot to get *nix. Also, the current version of NeoOffice handles Japanese a little bit better than OpenOffice (and runs, but only like molasses, on my old clamshell). Also, I can avoid supporting iNTEL. (Do we really want another monopoly?)
Most likely partial solution? Maybe I can scrape up enough money to add enough RAM and HD to the clamshell to dual-boot Linux with a light-weight window manager. (Dual-boot the clamshell because it is now frozen at 10.2 and Linux could cover some of what Jaguar lacks.)
I'm rambling. I need to get back to work.
Well, sure, I mean the Japanese keyboards (and -- mostly -- the software interfaced to them via the OS) have strange issues about the (half-width) backslash and (half-width) yen symbol. For several years you had to have some serious ambition to try to use Project Builder to write C when you had your log-in account set for Japanese in Mac OS X. I mean, when you have trouble getting a newline into a debug printf(), it can be hard slogging.
Why is it less of a problem with MS-OSses? Well, let's just say they are the half-wits most responsible for the half-width business and they were quietly (via application behavior) pushing their customers away from that for a long time.
(Me: But I really want to do this job and get paid for it.
MSWxxx: No. You don't want to go there. I promise you.
Me: [reboot, select FreeBSD])
It's just that most joe sixpacks who buy cheap PCs go to their "cool friends" for suport.
That's real reason #2 that it's hard to get a low-end mac that isn't used.
(In Japan, it can be hard to get a used mac, as well, at any rate, not as easy as getting a used PC.)
clickity-clickity
Don't get scared by the non-US symbols on that page, you can find the product pages for keyboards without too much effort.
So, what was it you were trying to say?
joudanzuki
Ya know, the "totality of physical law" is not a bad definition for "God", even for many religious people.
joudanzuki
so mod the AC parent up. Once you've clipped below the sampling rate, you've already clipped.
I haven't read who you were replying to, but I've sure seen a lot of joe-sixpack-types proclaiming loudly how glad they were that evolution proved religion wrong so they could watch their pr0n on Saturday night and going to church on Sunday morning with a clean conscience.
Evolution is not _a_ religion, but it has sure been used as a substitute for religion by a lot of people who don't want to think.
The argument here is not between religion and science. It's between people who don't like what the other guy is thinking.
Personally, I'd prefer you to think, using the best tools you have, even if they're wrong.
joudanzuki
By that reasoning, there is no activity safe from government regulation.
I mean, seriously, how far is it from asserting that a non-taxed entity should not be allowed to build museums dedicated to a ridiculous (in someone's opinion) theory to preventing _anyone_ from voicing a contrary opinion? Maybe it's all of twenty years' more legal evolution, but that's way too close for me.
(And, no, I'm not talking about whether the theory of the evolution of species is considered legal or not, I'm talking about the evolution of the interpretation of the Constitution that was originally intended to protect the individual's freedom to think things another person thought weren't worthy of being thought. And, no, the freedom to think, without the option of attempting to implement the thought, is not really freedom to think. It would be like the freedom to write source code without the freedom to compile and debug it. Or maybe the freedom to write comments but not actual code.)
joudanzuki
Peace is not about whether people argue or not.
Peace is about whether you can go about your business without expecting to have to accept being raped (pillaged or murdered) _and_ _like_ _it_.
It's the last part that is the deadliest to the human spirit, that the aggressor demands that you must _enjoy_ his (or her) attentions. (It's bad enough not being allowed to fight back, but then they insist that you _must_ be enjoying it.)
Or, if you insist that peace is the lack of argument, I will qote The Revelation about being "oppressed by peace".
joudanzuki
as a red herring.
Or is it the purloined letter?
There's a lot of worry about XOs ending up in the black market. With the iNTEL's low-price, low-performance model on the market, the black-market value of the XO might actually remain low enough to make it not worth stealing candy from babies.
You talk about the 1st world, and you make yourself part of the problem. Yeah, scammers are illegal and immoral. A lot of what goes on on wall street (and its equivalent in other countries) is immoral, and likely illegal, if somebody with enough money were willing to prosecute it
Money is like pus. It tends to accumulate around social injuries. That's why sick companies like Microsoft have so much of it. Why do you want more?
It's not just your credit card, you know.
Think a little deeper into the social implications of things.
Microsoft was not the first company to push a feature list, but they have most consistently and for the longest time used the feature list as an anti-competitive tool.
Does that make it any clearer for the yea-sayers?
Or do I need to state the obvious, that as long as long as the Steve and Bill act continues to run, it's going to be really hard to get any software that does the right thing, security wise or otherwise, into the public venue.
Buy a used iMac. Old G4 iMacs for $200 less can be found on the web. (Often sold out, I wonder why.)
No, bite the bullet and start taking that old notebook apart.
The frame is not hard. The ports are right there.
xubuntu.
Customize the screen saver.
Done.
naw, Jobs wouldn't do that, would he?
...
Stupid impatience on the UWB business
Forgot about that one. A dedicated browser really doesn't have to do dns lookup, and shouldn't.
Not to save lookups, of course. Actually, there should probably be double watchdog mechanism, where as many as three separate watchdog servers are monitoring the machines the users log into, and the dedicated browser would query the watchdogs concurrently with logging into the account server: exchange certificates, get a one-time pad token from the account server, confirm the token with the watchdog, or some such.
joudanzuki
I'm pretty sure the .bank tld would be an overall plus (for international banks), and .financial.us or .kin-yuu.jp and the like for local banks, but before we should start with that, we should start with some other essentials.
.com, but no way to pass a credit card number over http on port 80 with MSIE (et. al.).
One, banks have to quit letting people log in from general purpose browsers. Not MSIE, not Firefox, not Safari, not the standard Opera. Not even Lynx.
Banks and other institutions performing financial transactions must start providing their own dedicated browsers. Look up the bank's current interest rate and operating hours on the web, sure, but use a different port and a custom browser that only connects to that bank's url, never looks in the hosts file, and dials (well, e-mails) the cops if the certificate's wrong.
Even your typical on-line store should have its catalog and even its grocery cart under, say,
Of course, to really get around key-logging trojans and the like, you should have a completely separate box to transmit the credit card number and such. Anyone want to front me some bread to develop an electronic wallet that plugs into ethernet?
joudanzuki
I can think of immediately, mentioned already, false security (but we have that anyway) and the problem of managing the domain (but without the domain, there is nothing to manage).
Actually, as someone has pointed out about the hosts file, almost every negative mentioned is really the exposure of one way of managing the problem. Exposure of an API may or may not be a bad thing.
The only real negative I can think of is that it makes it that much easier for governments to monitor financial activity on the net. I have to think about this a bit longer to see how much is lost on that front.