If you want something that "just works", get a Danger Hiptop from T-Mobile: it's cheaper and a lot nicer than the Blackberry ever was.
Otherwise, the Palm Treos are the obvious choice. Use IMAP for mail, with the new mail notification extension and you get all the Blackberry features and a lot more.
Finally, the Nokia communicators look nice, although I haven't used one regularly. The bluetooth-only model looked like a nice compromise between power and size; there'll probably be an updated version soon that gives you 802.11 in the small form factor as well. Again, IMAP is the way to go for mail.
The Intel Macs should have excellent virtualization given their chips. Does anybody know what the plans are for VMware, Virtual PC, QEMU/Qvm86, and/or Xen on the new Macs?
Yes, and it also points out that the proliferation concerns aren't all that justified--there are plenty of easier ways of getting weapons-grade material. As for complex design, these kinds of reactors have been built and work. On balance, it's easier to build such a reactor than to build waste storage facilities that are safe for millennia, and that's the alternative.
Let's be clear about one thing: we already have a nearly unlimited supply of nearly waste-free nuclear power in the form of breeder reactors: they destroy most of the radioactive waste and are at least an order of magnitude more efficient than current nuclear power plants in using nuclear fuel.
Why aren't they being used? Hard to say. The US claims it's because of nuclear proliferation, but that doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument. In light of the hazards of current fission reactors, and the difficulties of achieving fusion, maybe that's the third option.
Of course, the best solution would be to stick with the fusion power plant in the sky: it provides more than enough energy for our needs, with current technologies, if we only made a concerted effort to capture it.
I don't know about German law, but the United States generally doesn't believe they have jurisdiction about what people do in other countries.
What rock have you been living under?
Why do you believe Germany thinks its laws apply to everyone in the world?
Germany applies its laws as it sees fit, just like the US. Generally, the extent to which laws of one nation apply elsewhere are limited by jurisdiction and ability to enforce. In this case, enforcement can happen against the German domain registrar, against any German ISPs involved, against any German subsidiaries of US companies involved, and against a US citizen should he step on German soil.
In practice, German law, law enforcement, and courts are usually far more restrained than US law, law enforcement, and courts, in international matters and matters involving foreign citizens.
IMHO, there are several reasons, the most trivial being that everywhere you will notice history lessons focus on the country they are taught in.
That's not a reason, it's a consequence. And I question whether it makes sense. The historical lessons we can learn from Nazi Germany are just as important for Americans, Israelis, and French as they are to Germans.
But people like to think of this as "a German problem", which is wrong in several ways. First, it, in fact, assumes that there is some hereditary propensity of one group of people compared to another. Second, it means people in other nations aren't sufficiently vigilant when it comes to avoiding making the same mistakes.
No, it doesn't mean that they are trying to bury the past, it means is that the law has a hard time precisely defining positive and negative portrayals of Nazis, and they err on the side of caution. Given that German education, public debate, politics, and historical symbols are permeated by exposing the Nazis for the criminals and butchers that they were, suggesting that Germans are trying to bury the past is preposterous.
The real question to ask is why Germans shouldn't actually bury the past at this point. Germans born after WWII clearly hold no responsibility whatsoever for the Nazi atrocities, they clearly didn't benefit in any way from the Nazis, and they have grown up in a political and social environment that's entirely different from the one in which the Nazis came to power. What grounds does anybody have to believe that Germans born after WWII need to be educated about Nazi atrocities than any other human on this planet?
Just about every major German city has numerous sites for WWII, the crimes the Nazis committed against minorities, and the horrors of war. These sites include concentration camps, large memorials, and burned out churches and buildings.
If you were actually stationed in Germany (as opposed to making it all up) and didn't see them, that's just a testament to your own inattention and ignorance.
They do have jurisdiction over German domain addresses, as well as connectivity between the US and Germany. They can and they will do whatever it takes to enforce German law. They could, for example, fine subsidiaries of network providers unless they start filtering.
I think they are wrong in this case, but don't live under any illusion that they can't get their way.
Besides, US courts are much more aggressive in enforcing their rights overseas; in addition to fining or shutting down foreign companies, they will actually send US police to "help" foreign nations enforce US laws.
What I don't understand is how this article can be constructive.
He isn't trying to be constructive, he is simply telling you that it makes no difference what you do. After people like you have put us on an irreversible path to doom, at least allow the guy to say "told you so".
Can anyone please tell me what Mr. Lovelock hoped to gain from this article other than creating hysteria among his fans and receiving "nut job" status from those who disagree with him?
It sells books and lots of it. Since his life will likely come to an end before yours and global catastrophe, that allows him to live out his final days in luxury. What you do is your own business.
Stackable components are not a new idea, they've been a part of the 'Mac' since nearly the beginning.
Stackable computer components go back a lot longer than the Mac (what is it with Mac users that they think that everything was invented on Macintosh first?).
But even with image and design conscious Mac users, the market for them is tiny, and most people choose non-stackable components. Which proves my point.
OK, so here's what Sun needs to do in order to provide an "alternative" to.NET:
add missing features to Java: multidimensional arrays, true generics, portable unsafe code
remove bloat from Java, like JNI and many of the APIs
remove compatibility requirements
make Java an ISO and ECMA standard
stop being so goddam arrogant about WORA and cross-platform compatibility: as a Linux developer, I want high quality Linux GUIs and Java GUIs suck on Linux
open source the JRE and JVM under the LGPL, BSD, or Apache license (this wouldn't be necessary if Sun hadn't alienated open source developers, but they have)
dedicate the patents Sun holds on Java to the public domain
fire the people responsible for the current mess, McNealy and Schwartz, and stop lying about Java and open source
But, frankly, even if they do all that, it's too little too late. Sun is doomed anyway--they have proven conclusively that their management is incapable of adapting to changing environments. As for Java, Java has missed its opportunity: Java will be the new Pascal and the new Cobol rolled into one, which isn't bad, but it will never become the language of choice for more than those two niches.
There have been numerous designs like that before. The Mac Mini is the lastest example, with stackable components being increasingly available.
They look clean and nice, but they don't catch on. Why? Because they don't make economic sense. A lot of the case material is between components, where it actually impedes heat flow and ventilation. Each of the boxes needs its own fan and power components. And the connector design is tricky and costly, too, compared to internal connectors. Finally, the vendors that the customer can choose from is restricted by such designs; what good is an easily expandable system if my vendor only offers a tiny set of the possible expansions?
Their Shifttricycle is similarly stupid: learning to ride a bicycle is a fairly quick affair, and training wheels already ease the transition; spending a lot of money on a weird, mechanically complex bicycle just doesn't make sense.
I think these people are entirely missing the point of good design: good design combines form with function; they seem to forget about the "function" part.
Just because the patent office didn't rule the patent invalid doesn't mean it's a valid patent; Microsoft still has to assert the patent in court.
What will happen in court is anybody's guess. On the surface, any recent patent on FAT/VFAT is absolutely ridiculous because the systems were documented and in use for many years. I think there's a good chance that they'll get laughed out of court.
Actually, I'm glad Microsoft is doing this: they are hurting themselves much more than any amount of money they can possibly collect with it. After this, electronics manufacturers are going to be reluctant to adopt any kind of Microsoft format.
Java provides a better level of portability than C#/CLR...I'd look there instead for a VM based runtime.
That's if portability is something you want. Gnome users don't want portability, they want high quality Gnome applications, and Mono supports that far better than Java.
Furthermore, you only get portability in Java if you run your code on different Sun-derived Java implementations; compatibility between Sun Java and open source Java implementation is far worse than compatibility between Microsoft C# and Mono.
Mono is here to stay and it is quickly becoming an integral part of Gnome. Technically, I think Mono with the open source Gnome APIs (but not Mono with the.NET APIs, which is an entirely different thing) is also by far the best desktop platform right now. Neither Cocoa, nor Java, nor Qt come even close in my opinion.
The worry that people have about patents is understandable on the surface, but ultimately not warranted: Microsoft only has patents on.NET (and even those don't look like they are a problem); Microsoft just has no patents on Mono with the Gnome APIs.
Jaron vision is about as stale as civil war cookies left in a damp basement: the computer science community has been abuzz for several years now with notions of "organic computing" and "autonomic computing", and even those are fads that reflect an obsession with biologically inspired computer science that goes back half a century.
Of course, little has come of it so far: as it turns out, merely applying ideas of biology to computer science does not lead to robust systems. And non-biologists tend to overestimate how good biology actually is--biological systems have high failure rates and lots of trouble spots.
What I can't figure out is whether people like Jaron are simply deluding themselves into thinking that they have come up with a novel vision, or whether they actively scour the world for on-going trends and deliberately plan a strategy to make it appears that it is "their" vision.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of alternatives.
If you want something that "just works", get a Danger Hiptop from T-Mobile: it's cheaper and a lot nicer than the Blackberry ever was.
Otherwise, the Palm Treos are the obvious choice. Use IMAP for mail, with the new mail notification extension and you get all the Blackberry features and a lot more.
Finally, the Nokia communicators look nice, although I haven't used one regularly. The bluetooth-only model looked like a nice compromise between power and size; there'll probably be an updated version soon that gives you 802.11 in the small form factor as well. Again, IMAP is the way to go for mail.
That's academic. The people who are stopping breeders are the hawks and right wingers that are actually in power.
Of course, even if breeders were proliferative, proliferation is happening anyway, so the objections are pointless from either camp.
Environmentalists object to nuclear power in general, but if you're gonna have it anyway, it might as well be the cleanest kind.
The Intel Macs should have excellent virtualization given their chips. Does anybody know what the plans are for VMware, Virtual PC, QEMU/Qvm86, and/or Xen on the new Macs?
Yes, and it also points out that the proliferation concerns aren't all that justified--there are plenty of easier ways of getting weapons-grade material. As for complex design, these kinds of reactors have been built and work. On balance, it's easier to build such a reactor than to build waste storage facilities that are safe for millennia, and that's the alternative.
Let's be clear about one thing: we already have a nearly unlimited supply of nearly waste-free nuclear power in the form of breeder reactors: they destroy most of the radioactive waste and are at least an order of magnitude more efficient than current nuclear power plants in using nuclear fuel.
Why aren't they being used? Hard to say. The US claims it's because of nuclear proliferation, but that doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument. In light of the hazards of current fission reactors, and the difficulties of achieving fusion, maybe that's the third option.
Of course, the best solution would be to stick with the fusion power plant in the sky: it provides more than enough energy for our needs, with current technologies, if we only made a concerted effort to capture it.
Since, with clean power, we wouldn't need oil from the Middle East, we could get out of there and terrorists would lose interest in the US.
I don't know about German law, but the United States generally doesn't believe they have jurisdiction about what people do in other countries.
What rock have you been living under?
Why do you believe Germany thinks its laws apply to everyone in the world?
Germany applies its laws as it sees fit, just like the US. Generally, the extent to which laws of one nation apply elsewhere are limited by jurisdiction and ability to enforce. In this case, enforcement can happen against the German domain registrar, against any German ISPs involved, against any German subsidiaries of US companies involved, and against a US citizen should he step on German soil.
In practice, German law, law enforcement, and courts are usually far more restrained than US law, law enforcement, and courts, in international matters and matters involving foreign citizens.
Personally, I hope I'll go somewhere more interesting.
IMHO, there are several reasons, the most trivial being that everywhere you will notice history lessons focus on the country they are taught in.
That's not a reason, it's a consequence. And I question whether it makes sense. The historical lessons we can learn from Nazi Germany are just as important for Americans, Israelis, and French as they are to Germans.
But people like to think of this as "a German problem", which is wrong in several ways. First, it, in fact, assumes that there is some hereditary propensity of one group of people compared to another. Second, it means people in other nations aren't sufficiently vigilant when it comes to avoiding making the same mistakes.
No, it doesn't mean that they are trying to bury the past, it means is that the law has a hard time precisely defining positive and negative portrayals of Nazis, and they err on the side of caution. Given that German education, public debate, politics, and historical symbols are permeated by exposing the Nazis for the criminals and butchers that they were, suggesting that Germans are trying to bury the past is preposterous.
The real question to ask is why Germans shouldn't actually bury the past at this point. Germans born after WWII clearly hold no responsibility whatsoever for the Nazi atrocities, they clearly didn't benefit in any way from the Nazis, and they have grown up in a political and social environment that's entirely different from the one in which the Nazis came to power. What grounds does anybody have to believe that Germans born after WWII need to be educated about Nazi atrocities than any other human on this planet?
Just about every major German city has numerous sites for WWII, the crimes the Nazis committed against minorities, and the horrors of war. These sites include concentration camps, large memorials, and burned out churches and buildings.
If you were actually stationed in Germany (as opposed to making it all up) and didn't see them, that's just a testament to your own inattention and ignorance.
They do have jurisdiction over German domain addresses, as well as connectivity between the US and Germany. They can and they will do whatever it takes to enforce German law. They could, for example, fine subsidiaries of network providers unless they start filtering.
I think they are wrong in this case, but don't live under any illusion that they can't get their way.
Besides, US courts are much more aggressive in enforcing their rights overseas; in addition to fining or shutting down foreign companies, they will actually send US police to "help" foreign nations enforce US laws.
What I don't understand is how this article can be constructive.
He isn't trying to be constructive, he is simply telling you that it makes no difference what you do. After people like you have put us on an irreversible path to doom, at least allow the guy to say "told you so".
Can anyone please tell me what Mr. Lovelock hoped to gain from this article other than creating hysteria among his fans and receiving "nut job" status from those who disagree with him?
It sells books and lots of it. Since his life will likely come to an end before yours and global catastrophe, that allows him to live out his final days in luxury. What you do is your own business.
Actually, it's declared "a matter of national security".
Stackable components are not a new idea, they've been a part of the 'Mac' since nearly the beginning.
Stackable computer components go back a lot longer than the Mac (what is it with Mac users that they think that everything was invented on Macintosh first?).
But even with image and design conscious Mac users, the market for them is tiny, and most people choose non-stackable components. Which proves my point.
But, frankly, even if they do all that, it's too little too late. Sun is doomed anyway--they have proven conclusively that their management is incapable of adapting to changing environments. As for Java, Java has missed its opportunity: Java will be the new Pascal and the new Cobol rolled into one, which isn't bad, but it will never become the language of choice for more than those two niches.
There have been numerous designs like that before. The Mac Mini is the lastest example, with stackable components being increasingly available.
They look clean and nice, but they don't catch on. Why? Because they don't make economic sense. A lot of the case material is between components, where it actually impedes heat flow and ventilation. Each of the boxes needs its own fan and power components. And the connector design is tricky and costly, too, compared to internal connectors. Finally, the vendors that the customer can choose from is restricted by such designs; what good is an easily expandable system if my vendor only offers a tiny set of the possible expansions?
Their Shifttricycle is similarly stupid: learning to ride a bicycle is a fairly quick affair, and training wheels already ease the transition; spending a lot of money on a weird, mechanically complex bicycle just doesn't make sense.
I think these people are entirely missing the point of good design: good design combines form with function; they seem to forget about the "function" part.
Finally, an explanation of my morbid fear of live chicken.
They wont be pissed because they dont care, its only 25 cents.
25 cents is huge for a mass product, even more so for one that goes for less than $100.
Where can I get some? Mwahahaha.
Just because the patent office didn't rule the patent invalid doesn't mean it's a valid patent; Microsoft still has to assert the patent in court.
What will happen in court is anybody's guess. On the surface, any recent patent on FAT/VFAT is absolutely ridiculous because the systems were documented and in use for many years. I think there's a good chance that they'll get laughed out of court.
Actually, I'm glad Microsoft is doing this: they are hurting themselves much more than any amount of money they can possibly collect with it. After this, electronics manufacturers are going to be reluctant to adopt any kind of Microsoft format.
Dejanews is not a representative sample of the programming population anymore, so those statistics are meaningless.
Java provides a better level of portability than C#/CLR...I'd look there instead for a VM based runtime.
That's if portability is something you want. Gnome users don't want portability, they want high quality Gnome applications, and Mono supports that far better than Java.
Furthermore, you only get portability in Java if you run your code on different Sun-derived Java implementations; compatibility between Sun Java and open source Java implementation is far worse than compatibility between Microsoft C# and Mono.
Mono is here to stay and it is quickly becoming an integral part of Gnome. Technically, I think Mono with the open source Gnome APIs (but not Mono with the .NET APIs, which is an entirely different thing) is also by far the best desktop platform right now. Neither Cocoa, nor Java, nor Qt come even close in my opinion.
.NET (and even those don't look like they are a problem); Microsoft just has no patents on Mono with the Gnome APIs.
The worry that people have about patents is understandable on the surface, but ultimately not warranted: Microsoft only has patents on
Jaron vision is about as stale as civil war cookies left in a damp basement: the computer science community has been abuzz for several years now with notions of "organic computing" and "autonomic computing", and even those are fads that reflect an obsession with biologically inspired computer science that goes back half a century.
Of course, little has come of it so far: as it turns out, merely applying ideas of biology to computer science does not lead to robust systems. And non-biologists tend to overestimate how good biology actually is--biological systems have high failure rates and lots of trouble spots.
What I can't figure out is whether people like Jaron are simply deluding themselves into thinking that they have come up with a novel vision, or whether they actively scour the world for on-going trends and deliberately plan a strategy to make it appears that it is "their" vision.