Sorry for the errors, it's been more than 20 years since I studied a bit of Kant & others. I seem to recall a bit where he wrote that the authority of which you speak -- the one that should be above man, could be replaced not with a God but with mankind itself. In other words mankind as a species or as an entity should be able to, as a result of working out its best interest (such as the continuation of the species) through reason, decide whether acts are good or evil.
However this is does not seem practically workable, precisely for the reasons you detail and that Hume pointed out (about the majority often being wrong). Nevertheless, (a) one can observe in the world today seemingly semi-workable community standards, and common judgment of acts as being good or evil. One can imagine the human species working out the necessity of a God giving rise to morality as a means to deferring to a non-existent, but invokable higher authority. Also (b) the human moral majority may be often wrong, but perhaps it is because it is not excercising Reason.
In neither case is the existence of a set of moral guidelines divorced from an actual deity actually disproved.
In general, having also read SoM (and even studied it at Minky's own course at media lab), I don't think I agree with much of what he writes. Essentially MM writes pseudo-knowledgeably about things he doesn't have the faintest idea about and spouting nonsense such as "consciousness is just memory after all".
I have to stop now, sorry, I'll try and reply some more later on.
For the record I've been doing my computing on 64-bit CPUs since 1994 (alphas). At that time alphas were 2-5x faster than anything around them (200MHz alpha vs 75Mhz pentium), so there is no inevitability about 64-bit being slow or even slower than 32-bit, rather the opposite.
The thing is while Intel definitely have a good CPU to put in laptops, their desktop chips still aren't that great, to be polite. The core-duo goodness doesn't translate there, at least not yet. Also Athlon64 chips have been good with power for a long time, so much so that there is not much difference between a desktop Athlon64 and the Turion. The Turion typically gets 80-90% of the autonomy of the Pentium-M. We don't know about the Core Duo yet AFAIK.
Remember that the benchmarks that you are seeing comparing Athlon64 and Intel dual-core are all 32-bit only. From my own benchmark I easily can get +20% from swithching to 64-bit on the same Athlon64 CPU. I don't consider this overrated. Cache problems are definitely overrated though.
Also memory access benefits come in earlier than the 4GB mark. In 32-bit land, the memory is typically shared 2GB/2GB between userland and kernelland. You can change the ratio but there's not much option on this typically. This goes away in 64-bit mode. All your apps can address as much as they need.
I don't know about you but all my new machines come with 2GB+ these days. In 2007 everything will need to be 64-bit. I wouldn't buy a machine today that wasn't 64-bit if it were my own money. I would buy it with 2GB outright and put an extra 2GB in as soon as I have the money.
You are making the classic error of saying that there can't be morals/ethics without religion.
It is perfectly possible to come up with a set of moral guidelines regarding for example behaviours with your fellow humans without involving any deity whatsoever.
Kant and Hume were amongst the first to propose atheist ethics. They are mostly based on the idea that one should help one's fellow man, because this is in everyone's best interest, in other words do unto others what you would like others done unto you. In this light culling humans makes no sense whatsoever, and notice the strinking parallel with some Christian core beliefs.
There is no inconsistencies in seeing one's children as a machine and an object to love and cherish both at the same time. If you get right down to it, your children are your best hope to pass on your genes to future generations. It makes sense for the machine that you are to care most for the machine that is part you.
Somewhat incredibly, all these philosophers through history haven't exactly wasted their time in vain. Why not go and read some of them ?
So the fact is it's not sufficient to be rich to be happy. One still needs something to do.
A corrolary of this is that in my opinion you don't need to be rich to be happy. It sure helps to have enough money to go by, but if everything is dirt cheap for you then nothing has real value, except things that one can't buy.
So rather than trying desperately to get rich, why not simply enjoy life more?
Usually your drives will be arranged in some kind of RAID. The truly redundant ones cost you 50% to 75% of your capacity, so it really become cheaper around the 2-3TB mark.
On tape you can have multiple incremental backups. Incremental backups are very cheap and fast, you really want those. Multiple backups are essentials too.
Then there is the offsite aspect. If you want to backup your server room to somewhere 20 miles away on a regular basis (every night?) you're up for a hefty network access bill.
If we are talking a server room full of a few TB of data, 2-5k$ is chump change. Pros use everything, RAID, disk backups, CD/DVDs, printouts, and tape. Tape is not going away.
In a RAID10 configuration like you describe, i.e two sets of 4 mirrors that are striped, you lose 75% of your space, and this is where your extra redundancy comes from.
> Shouldn't it be illegal for a computer vendor to force you to only use a > particular OS on your computer?
Apple isn't forcing anybody to run OS/X. I'm quite sure people buying Macs do it of their own volition. Furthermore I'm pretty sure Linux will be booting on these machines quite soon, this should answer this worry.
On the other hand there is no requirement on hardware manufacturers that their machines must be made to boot Windows, just because they have an x86-compatible chip inside.
Actually, children are not stupid, they are simply ignorant. Teaching children in the way outlined in the parent requires lots of patience, but eventually it seems most children do learn something valuable, and since that something valuable they got throught their own free will, they actually own it and make better use of what they have learned.
The thing to realize is that most children want to learn. In a standard school standards of learning are adapted to pretty much the slowest level, and that's mostly why school is dull. In a free school all children learn at their own rate.
For example I can't think of a worse way to teach mathematics than the way it is taught in school right now. I'm now a researcher in applied mathematics, but I thoroughly hated the way maths were taught all the way to college, except during the last year of high school where by chance I had the most wonderful teacher. Without that single exception I don't know what I'd be doing right now.
The "third world" is a reference to "the third estate" that was relevant during the French revolution. At that time in France the powers in society were divided between the Church and the Nobility. All the rest, from the lowliest peasant to the richest merchant were "the third estate". They made the revolution come about, since they had the most to gain.
The "third world" is not meant to mean poor countries or unaligned countries, it is meant to mean countries by which change will happen.
Anyway, originally some third world countries were in fact aligned with one or the other superpower during the cold war, e.g. all of South America -> US, China -> USSR (for a while). There also still exists a Non-Aligned Movement of about 100 states, but countries can be "third-world" and aligned or non-aligned.
Moderate is usually an attitude rather than a particular frequency in the spectrum of opinions.
Moderate most often means willing to at least listen to more than one side of an argument. As such, moderates usually can swing their opinion one way or the other, not necessarily on cogent and reasoned arguments, but simply because they can be swayed.
Therefore it is impossible to be a hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred moderate;-) on the other hand one can be a moderate liberal, communist or capitalist.
The article theorizes that the putative brown dwarf culprit may have been missed if it were located in a region of the sky with lots of stars as background, e.g. the milky way. In fact it could be anywhere and could have been missed easily.
The scientist who found Pluto was looking for it, was very talented and got lucky.
I don't think the whole sky is being surveyed for moving objects. Indeed a recent piggyback project that used serendipitous tracks on Hubble plates discovered hundreds of asteroids. Yet asteroids are much more numerous, typically brighter and move much more quickly across the sky than any brown dwarf that would fit the data. To find them the Hubble scope made use of very long exposures and of the huge parallax the telescope had while orbiting the Earth.
Hence the hypothesis of an as-yet, undiscovered close-by brown dwarf is not implausible.
BTW I tried to help for the asteroid Hubble project in a small way by automating the finding of the hallmark tracks, but it turned out using graduate students was faster and more efficient.
Actually the article is much better than what you describe. A first year university science undergrad can understand the idea, it explains old observations in a new light and it is testable.
Your take on "not allowing reuse actually fosters creativity" is somewhat simplistic, no offence meant.
We observe that the golden years at Disney, when they did their stunning best work, was when they reused old, public domain plots to make new stuff. Cinderella, Pinocchio, Snow white, all were books and stories in the public domain. Disney was able to reuse & extend them to fit with their idea of what works with animation, with great result.
It worked because Disney was able to start from great plot ideas, with no one telling them what they were allowed to do and not to do with those plots.
Another example is what is happening to Bloomsday, an international celebration of James Joyce masterpiece "Ulysses", more or less the de-facto anglo-saxon litterary day of fun. Here is a great quote from this site.
At the moment, the role of lead Ulysses killjoy is being played by Joyce's last living heir, the issueless, irritable grandson Stephen James Joyce. Thanks to European Union copyright extensions, Stephen Joyce regained control of the author's published works in the mid-1990s. Since then, he has alienated most of his grandfather's fans by charging exorbitant rates to anthologists and artists, putting the kibosh on a host of adaptations he considered inappropriate (including Groden's "Digital Ulysses" annotation project), and reportedly stating that Ulysses is meant to be read, not performed or adapted to other media.
It is a textbook example of not releasing copyright to the public domain is measurably and undeniably stifling creativity and even causing damage to the original work. I encourage you to read the whole article.
The linked article is not really about Nemesis, a distant companion to the Sun supposedly linked to regular massive exctinctions through its influence on the Oort cloud (where comets come from).
It is, however, about an unseen Sun companion responsible for the precession of the equinox. The precession of the equinox is the observation that as the Earth orbits the Sun, after a full year around the Sun the Earth does not realign itself with the distant stars, there is a difference of about 50 arcseconds. This correspond to a period of about 24,000 years.
Current theory for precession says the phenomenon is due to tidal effects due to the Moon acting on the non-perfectly-spherical Earth.
TFA makes the simple point that this could be also more easily explained if the Sun was revolving around an heretofore unseen companion for the same period. This would also explain a number of other more complex phenomena, such as why this the precession rate seems to slowly, but undoubtedly change with time, why the angular momentum of the Sun appears to be so low compared to that of the planets, etc.
TFA goes on to make prediction where this companion might be in the sky, and how far away it should be (between 0.01 and 0.03 of a LY), using nothing more complicated than basic Newtonian celestial mechanics.
Well, time will tell, and I'm not an astronomer, but the theory is actually very simple and testable (in the mid to long run), so either evidence will mount in this direction or it will be disproved.
For example we could measure precession rates on Mars. Since Mars has no large satellite, if it is found to have a precession rate similar to that of the Earth, then this will be very strong evidence that the tidal theory cannot be correct, and that the distant companion one is more likely to be. On the other hand if precession on Mars is very low, then this theory cannot be correct.
In short I think the guy might be wrong but he is no crackpot.
The G5 is a cut-down version of the IBM POWER5 architecture, which IBM puts in their mainframe. The POWER5 is great and has been multi-core for a long time, but eats up power like there's no tomorrow (hence its name?). It's never been made to fit into a laptop. It was easy for IBM to come up with the G5 for desktop use, but very hard for them to design a laptop version.
On top of that IBM has a series of word-class fabs, but lately they've had serious problem converting to a 65nm process. They are still on the more power-hungry 90nm process.
Notice that Intel was *never* able to put together a serious laptop P4 version. All the P4 laptops were desktop replacements with a 45-minute battery life. Notice further that the same problem is befalling AMD. Even though the Athlon64 is not a power-hungry processor compared to the P4, the laptop versions don't compete well enough with the pentium-M, let alone the new Core-Duo.
To pull the Core-Duo feat, Intel essentially went one step back to the P-III and added all the recent power step-down features, the multi-core stuff and built it with the best fab in the business. Even then they can't produce it in volume yet.
To summarise, G5 essentially only sold to Apple. Apple is the only large entity interested in a laptop version. IBM crunched their numbers and came to the conclusion that developing a serious G5 laptop version would cost them dearly and return little. Embedded systems builders are still happy with the G3 and G4s, a G5 would be overkill at this point, essentially since embedded developers are not tied to any architecture.
IBM is retreating on that front, but notice they have scored a number of important hits with games consoles lately. The next round might be different. Which will be the processor to have in a laptop in 3 years' time? In all likelyhood IBM is preparing their POWER6, and that might have interesting power-consumption features. People in compute centres are tired of paying for air-conditionning, and large centres like Google's have repeatedly stated that they are not interested in raw compute numbers, but in electricity consumption.
No offense, but you need to compare OS/X with more recent systems.
> I mean some of the features like Expose and Dashboard are really convenient once you > get to use them
Only compared to using nothing to organize your windows. I use desktop manager for keeping my various apps organized by default. I hardly ever used Exposé as result.
> system wide services
Very few applications provide services (in the application's menu). To make applications interact, windows' COM is actually superior.
> How could one argue that having features from one program (or independent of any program) > that can be used by all other programs. It saves the hassle and overhead from multiple > programs replicating the same functionality.
This is exactly what Microsoft COM does, and like I said it's more powerful than Apple services. You can integrate application components into your own, like for example an Excel spreadsheet into your own accounting software, whatever.
> apps that are directories
Superior to the windows' way of installing anywhere and modifying the registry, but not as good as something like stow IMHO. Anyway, this is a 1990 NeXTStep feature.
> It will be very difficult to convince me to downgrade to a system where you can't use > your spellchecker in all applications
System spellchecking is great, but it's not enabled for all applications under OS/X, only certain Cocoa apps. Firefox doesn't have the system spellchecking at all for example. Word comes with its own spellchecker (incompatible with the system's). None of the Adobe apps, all built with Carbon, have system spellchecking.
> I can copy a program onto a flash drive or an ipod and it works just fine. I can back up > programs without worrying about installers.
For some apps yes, for others, no. Usually the large applications require an installer.
> The UI is great and more consistent,
Between Cocoa (white and brushmetal), Carbon and X apps, I tend to disagree.
> but more importantly for me is the multitasking. It actually works under high loads. > I have a dozen applications running right now, and that is normal.
Windows since 2k has no problem with this. Under Linux I typically run 2-3 users at once, 10-20 apps each with no problem, and Linux is faster and much better than OS/X at memory management.
> My uptime on my laptop right now is 45 days, > even though I carry it back an forth to work every day and > used it to game at a LAN party last weekend.
This is true that I love this aspect about my iBook.
> I can run the vast majority of software designed for Linux, including X apps, > as well as most mainstream software, since most things have a mac port.
Have you tried OpenOffice 2.0 on Mac yet? It's pretty terrible, whereas it works great on Linux and Windows. The truth is the Mac port of F/OSS is usually behind and of lesser quality than what is found under linux. Moreover Apple's X11 server is slow and poorly integrated.
> I guess what I'm not seeing is how you consider another OS to be superior.
For me, I don't much like Windows, but it is unmatched for games. Games suck on OS/X, they are usually older and more expensive, except for a few. For file and compute servers, I like Linux, especially on 64-bit machines. OS/X is not 64-bit despite what Apple pretends, and Linux is much more efficient on the same hardware (see Berkeley link above).
I like my little iBook - OS/X, but I'd love it more if I could have a decent CPU in it and if OS/X were more efficient.
> Maybe if you need some specific, resource intensive application that only runs on > Windows, you're stuck.
It's all a matter of compromises. Mac + OS/X is a good platform but not perfect. It
I don't share your pessimism. Matters are much more democratic when they are subject to a vote in parliament. Parties can ask questions, lobbying can take place, public records are taken, accounting for actions can happen, and does. Things are reported in newspapers, which translate into opinion ratings, which can comfort of weaken a government, ultimately weighing on its actions.
Recently in France some minister tried to push through a tough anti-piracy, pro content scrambling reform, which would have made the mere use of open-source software like DeCSS illegal. It was roundly defeated in parliament, where the majority faction (the minister's own party !) instead voted for a flat fee to compensate content providers in return for format openness.
If the minister had been allowed to make his own law unimpeded this would have resulted in disaster.
Not so long ago a French citizen was taken to court because he had made private copies of DVDs he had rented or borrowed from friends. The judged ruled that since he had used taxed blank medias for which the tax goes directly to content providers in return for private copies for home use, they had no ground to complain, and threw the case out.
Democracy is much more than voting once every four years, it's reading the papers (free press), complain and demonstrate when things go bad (free association, right to strike, right to free speech), perhaps get involved into local politics or more, to name only a few things you can do.
However, in the case of the French nuclear power decision, it should have been a matter of public debate, and it was indeed a particularly bad example of democracy not working, unfortunately like many others.
Exactly what part of "TPM is not useful for all end-users" is (a) wrong and (b) not understandable ?
To refute the above assertion you have to provide an example where "TPM is actually useful to at least one end-users" instead of writing over and over again that it has supposedly no effect on *you* because you chose to discard the otherwise perfectly good O/S that was shipped with your machine and which you paid for, BTW.
Your action is in fact an excellent example where TPM is harmful, to you in particular, since you have to go through the trouble of wiping the O/S on your machine so that its hardware works for you. Is this extra effort useful to you in any way?
Moreover you choosing to do away with the TPM in OS/X by moving to a different O/S will lock you out of some content and facilities, e.g. ability to run iTunes, no way to use the otherwise excellent airport extreme WiFi card (still no driver available after 3 years of reverse engineering attempts). Are these limitations useful to you in any way ? Again a demonstration of my very point.
You write :
> You are confusing software with hardware and not understanding what real world limitations there are > in various uses of TPM.
In your very word, TPM is used for "limitations". This is my whole point, Thanks. Skirting around the issue is not defeating it nor rendering it irrelevant.
As the answer to :
> Now what exactly makes you think storgae capacity will be hampered with Blu-Ray?
I believe, as an example, that Dual-Layer DVDs are not becoming as easily available or cheap as they should because makers are afraid they are going to run into trouble with content producers, given that with DL-DVD one can duplicate a commercial DVD9 bit for bit without any special equipment or software, whereas to duplicate a DVD9 onto a DVD4, one needs to go through a lossy round of transcoding. Remember that many media makers are also content providers (e.g. Sony).
Translating to Blu-Ray, this would mean that we would get large-capacity, encoded, read-only BR media much much before we get the same write capacity, if ever, and I doubt it will be purely for technical reasons.
5 minutes of research with their search engine might sometimes save a few weeks of development. If you are still keen to do your own engine (good on you!) then at least go the referenced site, where they explain that pitch is not necessary, only the sequence of whether the music goes up or down in frequency. You can whistle very imprecisely and it still works.
To find the pitch of what people are whistling, you can use the code from gstring, a simple guitar tuner, for example. The software is old, but that's because it has been working really well.
Your restaurant analogy is very good. In general I try to order something I know I'll like, because I'll be paying for it whether I like it or not.
In the case of blue-ray you are paying for the R&D and licensing costs of technology you won't be using if you only use the device as a backup/storage facility. Moreover, as is the case with DL-DVDs, you'll find that the capacity of the storage media will be hampered so as to reduce the ability of the new device to be used for piracy.
Ergo, exactly as I was writing, TPM is not useful, it's only there to reduce the ability of all users to exploit the data/format to their fullest.
Notice I didn't write to say that one shouldn't use TPM-enabled device, especially at cross-purposes like you do.
The complexity of Linux is not due to the kernel, which works well enough. The complexity is due to the userland which still requires much work for the uninitiated.
Switching kernels to L4 or Plan9 is going to be satisfying from the intellectual point of view but won't help with the huge amount of work needed to make things work for the end-user. You'll start great but then soon run into all the problems Linux and the BSDs are running into now : lack of H/W doc, unavailable specs, incomplete developer tools, competing demands, patents, DRM, etc. Many OSes have started, few have gotten as far as Linux.
> Imagine if we had an operating system that was not only better than OS X is, > but is also available for all computers that can handle it.
Actually if you start designing, and then coding today with a team of 100 top-notch developers dedicated 100% to the project, you might get there in 20 years, and by then you'll be out of date. Do you realize that NeXTStep / OSX is about that age today? Your best bet is to jump on your favorite OS bandwagon, and develop some useful, portable userland application.
This is what the world needs, not another OS design. Good luck.
Also, frankly OS/X is overrated, try Linux Ubuntu sometime, and you'll realize that it's not that far behind in usability, and ahead in performance.
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Interesting discussion, sorry for the late reply.
Sorry for the errors, it's been more than 20 years since I studied a bit of Kant & others. I seem to recall a bit where he wrote that the authority of which you speak -- the one that should be above man, could be replaced not with a God but with mankind itself. In other words mankind as a species or as an entity should be able to, as a result of working out its best interest (such as the continuation of the species) through reason, decide whether acts are good or evil.
However this is does not seem practically workable, precisely for the reasons you detail and that Hume pointed out (about the majority often being wrong). Nevertheless, (a) one can observe in the world today seemingly semi-workable community standards, and common judgment of acts as being good or evil. One can imagine the human species working out the necessity of a God giving rise to morality as a means to deferring to a non-existent, but invokable higher authority. Also (b) the human moral majority may be often wrong, but perhaps it is because it is not excercising Reason.
In neither case is the existence of a set of moral guidelines divorced from an actual deity actually disproved.
In general, having also read SoM (and even studied it at Minky's own course at media lab), I don't think I agree with much of what he writes. Essentially MM writes pseudo-knowledgeably about things he doesn't have the faintest idea about and spouting nonsense such as "consciousness is just memory after all".
I have to stop now, sorry, I'll try and reply some more later on.
For the record I've been doing my computing on 64-bit CPUs since 1994 (alphas). At that time alphas were 2-5x faster than anything around them (200MHz alpha vs 75Mhz pentium), so there is no inevitability about 64-bit being slow or even slower than 32-bit, rather the opposite.
The thing is while Intel definitely have a good CPU to put in laptops, their desktop chips still aren't that great, to be polite. The core-duo goodness doesn't translate there, at least not yet. Also Athlon64 chips have been good with power for a long time, so much so that there is not much difference between a desktop Athlon64 and the Turion. The Turion typically gets 80-90% of the autonomy of the Pentium-M. We don't know about the Core Duo yet AFAIK.
Remember that the benchmarks that you are seeing comparing Athlon64 and Intel dual-core are all 32-bit only. From my own benchmark I easily can get +20% from swithching to 64-bit on the same Athlon64 CPU. I don't consider this overrated. Cache problems are definitely overrated though.
Also memory access benefits come in earlier than the 4GB mark. In 32-bit land, the memory is typically shared 2GB/2GB between userland and kernelland. You can change the ratio but there's not much option on this typically. This goes away in 64-bit mode. All your apps can address as much as they need.
I don't know about you but all my new machines come with 2GB+ these days. In 2007 everything will need to be 64-bit. I wouldn't buy a machine today that wasn't 64-bit if it were my own money. I would buy it with 2GB outright and put an extra 2GB in as soon as I have the money.
You are making the classic error of saying that there can't be morals/ethics without religion.
It is perfectly possible to come up with a set of moral guidelines regarding for example behaviours with your fellow humans without involving any deity whatsoever.
Kant and Hume were amongst the first to propose atheist ethics. They are mostly based on the idea that one should help one's fellow man, because this is in everyone's best interest, in other words do unto others what you would like others done unto you. In this light culling humans makes no sense whatsoever, and notice the strinking parallel with some Christian core beliefs.
There is no inconsistencies in seeing one's children as a machine and an object to love and cherish both at the same time. If you get right down to it, your children are your best hope to pass on your genes to future generations. It makes sense for the machine that you are to care most for the machine that is part you.
Somewhat incredibly, all these philosophers through history haven't exactly wasted their time in vain. Why not go and read some of them ?
Thanks, very interesting,
So the fact is it's not sufficient to be rich to be happy. One still needs something to do.
A corrolary of this is that in my opinion you don't need to be rich to be happy. It sure helps to have enough money to go by, but if everything is dirt cheap for you then nothing has real value, except things that one can't buy.
So rather than trying desperately to get rich, why not simply enjoy life more?
Usually your drives will be arranged in some kind of RAID. The truly redundant ones cost you 50% to 75% of your capacity, so it really become cheaper around the 2-3TB mark.
On tape you can have multiple incremental backups. Incremental backups are very cheap and fast, you really want those. Multiple backups are essentials too.
Then there is the offsite aspect. If you want to backup your server room to somewhere 20 miles away on a regular basis (every night?) you're up for a hefty network access bill.
If we are talking a server room full of a few TB of data, 2-5k$ is chump change. Pros use everything, RAID, disk backups, CD/DVDs, printouts, and tape. Tape is not going away.
No,
In a RAID10 configuration like you describe, i.e two sets of 4 mirrors that are striped, you lose 75% of your space, and this is where your extra redundancy comes from.
> Shouldn't it be illegal for a computer vendor to force you to only use a
> particular OS on your computer?
Apple isn't forcing anybody to run OS/X. I'm quite sure people buying Macs do it of their own volition. Furthermore I'm pretty sure Linux will be booting on these machines quite soon, this should answer this worry.
On the other hand there is no requirement on hardware manufacturers that their machines must be made to boot Windows, just because they have an x86-compatible chip inside.
Actually, children are not stupid, they are simply ignorant. Teaching children in the way outlined in the parent requires lots of patience, but eventually it seems most children do learn something valuable, and since that something valuable they got throught their own free will, they actually own it and make better use of what they have learned.
The thing to realize is that most children want to learn. In a standard school standards of learning are adapted to pretty much the slowest level, and that's mostly why school is dull. In a free school all children learn at their own rate.
For example I can't think of a worse way to teach mathematics than the way it is taught in school right now. I'm now a researcher in applied mathematics, but I thoroughly hated the way maths were taught all the way to college, except during the last year of high school where by chance I had the most wonderful teacher. Without that single exception I don't know what I'd be doing right now.
Well done !
I think it takes great courage to do what you've done, personally I think the risk would be insane without my better half in a steady job.
Sorry, slightly incorrect,
The "third world" is a reference to "the third estate" that was relevant during the French revolution. At that time in France the powers in society were divided between the Church and the Nobility. All the rest, from the lowliest peasant to the richest merchant were "the third estate". They made the revolution come about, since they had the most to gain.
The "third world" is not meant to mean poor countries or unaligned countries, it is meant to mean countries by which change will happen.
Anyway, originally some third world countries were in fact aligned with one or the other superpower during the cold war, e.g. all of South America -> US, China -> USSR (for a while). There also still exists a Non-Aligned Movement of about 100 states, but countries can be "third-world" and aligned or non-aligned.
There is a nice article on this at Wikipedia.
Moderate is usually an attitude rather than a particular frequency in the spectrum of opinions.
;-)
Moderate most often means willing to at least listen to more than one side of an argument. As such, moderates usually can swing their opinion one way or the other, not necessarily on cogent and reasoned arguments, but simply because they can be swayed.
Therefore it is impossible to be a hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred moderate
on the other hand one can be a moderate liberal, communist or capitalist.
OpenStep, the immediate successor to NeXTStep, also ran on Suns and under Windows with an extra compatibility layer.
The article theorizes that the putative brown dwarf culprit may have been missed if it were located in a region of the sky with lots of stars as background, e.g. the milky way. In fact it could be anywhere and could have been missed easily.
The scientist who found Pluto was looking for it, was very talented and got lucky.
I don't think the whole sky is being surveyed for moving objects. Indeed a recent piggyback project that used serendipitous tracks on Hubble plates discovered hundreds of asteroids. Yet asteroids are much more numerous, typically brighter and move much more quickly across the sky than any brown dwarf that would fit the data. To find them the Hubble scope made use of very long exposures and of the huge parallax the telescope had while orbiting the Earth.
Hence the hypothesis of an as-yet, undiscovered close-by brown dwarf is not implausible.
BTW I tried to help for the asteroid Hubble project in a small way by automating the finding of the hallmark tracks, but it turned out using graduate students was faster and more efficient.
Actually, if you want to be pedant, the nearest star to Earth is the Sun, by a long shot.
Actually the article is much better than what you describe. A first year university science undergrad can understand the idea, it explains old observations in a new light and it is testable.
Nothing like dark matter at all.
Your take on "not allowing reuse actually fosters creativity" is somewhat simplistic, no offence meant.
We observe that the golden years at Disney, when they did their stunning best work, was when they reused old, public domain plots to make new stuff. Cinderella, Pinocchio, Snow white, all were books and stories in the public domain. Disney was able to reuse & extend them to fit with their idea of what works with animation, with great result.
It worked because Disney was able to start from great plot ideas, with no one telling them what they were allowed to do and not to do with those plots.
Another example is what is happening to Bloomsday, an international celebration of James Joyce masterpiece "Ulysses", more or less the de-facto anglo-saxon litterary day of fun. Here is a great quote from this site.
At the moment, the role of lead Ulysses killjoy is being played by Joyce's last living heir, the issueless, irritable grandson Stephen James Joyce. Thanks to European Union copyright extensions, Stephen Joyce regained control of the author's published works in the mid-1990s. Since then, he has alienated most of his grandfather's fans by charging exorbitant rates to anthologists and artists, putting the kibosh on a host of adaptations he considered inappropriate (including Groden's "Digital Ulysses" annotation project), and reportedly stating that Ulysses is meant to be read, not performed or adapted to other media.
It is a textbook example of not releasing copyright to the public domain is measurably and undeniably stifling creativity and even causing damage to the original work. I encourage you to read the whole article.
Best.
The linked article is not really about Nemesis, a distant companion to the Sun supposedly linked to regular massive exctinctions through its influence on the Oort cloud (where comets come from).
It is, however, about an unseen Sun companion responsible for the precession of the equinox. The precession of the equinox is the observation that as the Earth orbits the Sun, after a full year around the Sun the Earth does not realign itself with the distant stars, there is a difference of about 50 arcseconds. This correspond to a period of about 24,000 years.
Current theory for precession says the phenomenon is due to tidal effects due to the Moon acting on the non-perfectly-spherical Earth.
TFA makes the simple point that this could be also more easily explained if the Sun was revolving around an heretofore unseen companion for the same period. This would also explain a number of other more complex phenomena, such as why this the precession rate seems to slowly, but undoubtedly change with time, why the angular momentum of the Sun appears to be so low compared to that of the planets, etc.
TFA goes on to make prediction where this companion might be in the sky, and how far away it should be (between 0.01 and 0.03 of a LY), using nothing more complicated than basic Newtonian celestial mechanics.
Well, time will tell, and I'm not an astronomer, but the theory is actually very simple and testable (in the mid to long run), so either evidence will mount in this direction or it will be disproved.
For example we could measure precession rates on Mars. Since Mars has no large satellite, if it is found to have a precession rate similar to that of the Earth, then this will be very strong evidence that the tidal theory cannot be correct, and that the distant companion one is more likely to be. On the other hand if precession on Mars is very low, then this theory cannot be correct.
In short I think the guy might be wrong but he is no crackpot.
The G5 is a cut-down version of the IBM POWER5 architecture, which IBM puts in their mainframe. The POWER5 is great and has been multi-core for a long time, but eats up power like there's no tomorrow (hence its name?). It's never been made to fit into a laptop. It was easy for IBM to come up with the G5 for desktop use, but very hard for them to design a laptop version.
On top of that IBM has a series of word-class fabs, but lately they've had serious problem converting to a 65nm process. They are still on the more power-hungry 90nm process.
Notice that Intel was *never* able to put together a serious laptop P4 version. All the P4 laptops were desktop replacements with a 45-minute battery life. Notice further that the same problem is befalling AMD. Even though the Athlon64 is not a power-hungry processor compared to the P4, the laptop versions don't compete well enough with the pentium-M, let alone the new Core-Duo.
To pull the Core-Duo feat, Intel essentially went one step back to the P-III and added all the recent power step-down features, the multi-core stuff and built it with the best fab in the business. Even then they can't produce it in volume yet.
To summarise, G5 essentially only sold to Apple. Apple is the only large entity interested in a laptop version. IBM crunched their numbers and came to the conclusion that developing a serious G5 laptop version would cost them dearly and return little. Embedded systems builders are still happy with the G3 and G4s, a G5 would be overkill at this point, essentially since embedded developers are not tied to any architecture.
IBM is retreating on that front, but notice they have scored a number of important hits with games consoles lately. The next round might be different. Which will be the processor to have in a laptop in 3 years' time? In all likelyhood IBM is preparing their POWER6, and that might have interesting power-consumption features. People in compute centres are tired of paying for air-conditionning, and large centres like Google's have repeatedly stated that they are not interested in raw compute numbers, but in electricity consumption.
No offense, but you need to compare OS/X with more recent systems.
> I mean some of the features like Expose and Dashboard are really convenient once you
> get to use them
Only compared to using nothing to organize your windows. I use desktop manager for keeping my various apps organized by default. I hardly ever used Exposé as result.
> system wide services
Very few applications provide services (in the application's menu). To make applications interact, windows' COM is actually superior.
> How could one argue that having features from one program (or independent of any program)
> that can be used by all other programs. It saves the hassle and overhead from multiple
> programs replicating the same functionality.
This is exactly what Microsoft COM does, and like I said it's more powerful than Apple services. You can integrate application components into your own, like for example an Excel spreadsheet into your own accounting software, whatever.
> apps that are directories
Superior to the windows' way of installing anywhere and modifying the registry, but not as good as something like stow IMHO. Anyway, this is a 1990 NeXTStep feature.
> It will be very difficult to convince me to downgrade to a system where you can't use
> your spellchecker in all applications
System spellchecking is great, but it's not enabled for all applications under OS/X, only certain Cocoa apps. Firefox doesn't have the system spellchecking at all for example. Word comes with its own spellchecker (incompatible with the system's). None of the Adobe apps, all built with Carbon, have system spellchecking.
> I can copy a program onto a flash drive or an ipod and it works just fine. I can back up
> programs without worrying about installers.
For some apps yes, for others, no. Usually the large applications require an installer.
> The UI is great and more consistent,
Between Cocoa (white and brushmetal), Carbon and X apps, I tend to disagree.
> but more importantly for me is the multitasking. It actually works under high loads.
> I have a dozen applications running right now, and that is normal.
Windows since 2k has no problem with this. Under Linux I typically run 2-3 users at once, 10-20 apps each with no problem, and Linux is faster and much better than OS/X at memory management.
> My uptime on my laptop right now is 45 days,
> even though I carry it back an forth to work every day and
> used it to game at a LAN party last weekend.
This is true that I love this aspect about my iBook.
> I can run the vast majority of software designed for Linux, including X apps,
> as well as most mainstream software, since most things have a mac port.
Have you tried OpenOffice 2.0 on Mac yet? It's pretty terrible, whereas it works great on Linux and Windows. The truth is the Mac port of F/OSS is usually behind and of lesser quality than what is found under linux. Moreover Apple's X11 server is slow and poorly integrated.
> I guess what I'm not seeing is how you consider another OS to be superior.
For me, I don't much like Windows, but it is unmatched for games. Games suck on OS/X, they are usually older and more expensive, except for a few. For file and compute servers, I like Linux, especially on 64-bit machines. OS/X is not 64-bit despite what Apple pretends, and Linux is much more efficient on the same hardware (see Berkeley link above).
I like my little iBook - OS/X, but I'd love it more if I could have a decent CPU in it and if OS/X were more efficient.
> Maybe if you need some specific, resource intensive application that only runs on
> Windows, you're stuck.
It's all a matter of compromises. Mac + OS/X is a good platform but not perfect. It
You can run a recent micro-ATX Athlon64 board totally fanless, if you use Cool-and-quiet. It will be cheaper than any VIA board.
Sorry for the late reply.
I don't share your pessimism. Matters are much more democratic when they are subject to a vote in parliament. Parties can ask questions, lobbying can take place, public records are taken, accounting for actions can happen, and does. Things are reported in newspapers, which translate into opinion ratings, which can comfort of weaken a government, ultimately weighing on its actions.
Recently in France some minister tried to push through a tough anti-piracy, pro content scrambling reform, which would have made the mere use of open-source software like DeCSS illegal. It was roundly defeated in parliament, where the majority faction (the minister's own party !) instead voted for a flat fee to compensate content providers in return for format openness.
If the minister had been allowed to make his own law unimpeded this would have resulted in disaster.
Not so long ago a French citizen was taken to court because he had made private copies of DVDs he had rented or borrowed from friends. The judged ruled that since he had used taxed blank medias for which the tax goes directly to content providers in return for private copies for home use, they had no ground to complain, and threw the case out.
Democracy is much more than voting once every four years, it's reading the papers (free press), complain and demonstrate when things go bad (free association, right to strike, right to free speech), perhaps get involved into local politics or more, to name only a few things you can do.
However, in the case of the French nuclear power decision, it should have been a matter of public debate, and it was indeed a particularly bad example of democracy not working, unfortunately like many others.
Exactly what part of "TPM is not useful for all end-users" is (a) wrong and (b) not understandable ?
To refute the above assertion you have to provide an example where "TPM is actually useful to at least one end-users" instead of writing over and over again that it has supposedly no effect on *you* because you chose to discard the otherwise perfectly good O/S that was shipped with your machine and which you paid for, BTW.
Your action is in fact an excellent example where TPM is harmful, to you in particular, since you have to go through the trouble of wiping the O/S on your machine so that its hardware works for you. Is this extra effort useful to you in any way?
Moreover you choosing to do away with the TPM in OS/X by moving to a different O/S will lock you out of some content and facilities, e.g. ability to run iTunes, no way to use the otherwise excellent airport extreme WiFi card (still no driver available after 3 years of reverse engineering attempts). Are these limitations useful to you in any way ? Again a demonstration of my very point.
You write :
> You are confusing software with hardware and not understanding what real world limitations there are
> in various uses of TPM.
In your very word, TPM is used for "limitations". This is my whole point, Thanks. Skirting around the issue is not defeating it nor rendering it irrelevant.
As the answer to :
> Now what exactly makes you think storgae capacity will be hampered with Blu-Ray?
I believe, as an example, that Dual-Layer DVDs are not becoming as easily available or cheap as they should because makers are afraid they are going to run into trouble with content producers, given that with DL-DVD one can duplicate a commercial DVD9 bit for bit without any special equipment or software, whereas to duplicate a DVD9 onto a DVD4, one needs to go through a lossy round of transcoding. Remember that many media makers are also content providers (e.g. Sony).
Translating to Blu-Ray, this would mean that we would get large-capacity, encoded, read-only BR media much much before we get the same write capacity, if ever, and I doubt it will be purely for technical reasons.
Perhaps Google refused it because it has been done before.
5 minutes of research with their search engine might sometimes save a few weeks of development. If you are still keen to do your own engine (good on you!) then at least go the referenced site, where they explain that pitch is not necessary, only the sequence of whether the music goes up or down in frequency. You can whistle very imprecisely and it still works.
To find the pitch of what people are whistling, you can use the code from gstring, a simple guitar tuner, for example. The software is old, but that's because it has been working really well.
Good luck.
Your restaurant analogy is very good. In general I try to order something I know I'll like, because I'll be paying for it whether I like it or not.
In the case of blue-ray you are paying for the R&D and licensing costs of technology you won't be using if you only use the device as a backup/storage facility. Moreover, as is the case with DL-DVDs, you'll find that the capacity of the storage media will be hampered so as to reduce the ability of the new device to be used for piracy.
Ergo, exactly as I was writing, TPM is not useful, it's only there to reduce the ability of all users to exploit the data/format to their fullest.
Notice I didn't write to say that one shouldn't use TPM-enabled device, especially at cross-purposes like you do.
The complexity of Linux is not due to the kernel, which works well enough. The complexity is due to the userland which still requires much work for the uninitiated.
Switching kernels to L4 or Plan9 is going to be satisfying from the intellectual point of view but won't help with the huge amount of work needed to make things work for the end-user. You'll start great but then soon run into all the problems Linux and the BSDs are running into now : lack of H/W doc, unavailable specs, incomplete developer tools, competing demands, patents, DRM, etc. Many OSes have started, few have gotten as far as Linux.
> Imagine if we had an operating system that was not only better than OS X is,
> but is also available for all computers that can handle it.
Actually if you start designing, and then coding today with a team of 100 top-notch developers dedicated 100% to the project, you might get there in 20 years, and by then you'll be out of date. Do you realize that NeXTStep / OSX is about that age today? Your best bet is to jump on your favorite OS bandwagon, and develop some useful, portable userland application.
This is what the world needs, not another OS design. Good luck.
Also, frankly OS/X is overrated, try Linux Ubuntu sometime, and you'll realize that it's not that far behind in usability, and ahead in performance.