This works using the same technology from those plastic animation pieces you used to get in cereal boxes. Am I right? Somebody let me know, because I can't bear to read the stupid article. If it weren't for the frat boy who cooled his room with institutional ice and thought he'd invented a refrigerator, I'd say this is the lamest thing I've read all day.
If this qualifies for an engineering PhD, I'm not sure I really care about getting one anymore. This kidn of thing has been done a LONG time ago to make rudimentary 3D displays out of LC panels. It's hard to believe it's considered noteworthy engineering when somebody slaps a plastic lens array on an LCD panel and doesn't even do the most interesting thing you can imagine with it. Viewer multiplexing? Fricking viewer multiplexing? Yeah, if you don't move your head much.
For advertising connected to web searches? Not their idea, or even a very brilliant one at that.
Peace: "Do No Evil" put into practice.
That prize is usually given to somebody who sets their aspirations higher than simply avoiding evil. Hell, I avoid it pretty well myself. Nonetheless, we'll see how Google does in this regard. They may find it hard to stay out of evil when they find themselves knee deep in everybody's personal information and somebody offers them a ludicrous amount of money or power or avoidance of indightment just for a peek. As with government, the concentration of wealth (in this case of the information kind) will beg for corruption despite all original intents otherwise.
is the current title of this guy's homepage. Perhaps this should've tipped off the submitter to do a little more checking into this "engineer's" idea, which turns out to be little more than the thermodynamic equivalent of cooling yourself down by drinking cold beer that you stole from your neighbor.
This isn't a recipe for a heat pump. It's a recipe for how to get something cold in your room, period. Throwing the "waste" water outside is actually just plain stupid, because it's never warmer than the room and therefore can only cool it. (A real heat pump is a closed cycle system that actually transfers heat to the outside by producing something actually hotter than the outside as part of the cycle.) This isn't even the best way to cool a room given a supply of free cold water! (You'd probably evaporate it.)
This is in no bloody way clever, and cooling a room like this has occurred to everybody on the planet with an IQ greater than 40 at one point or another, none of whom ended up doing it because either (1) they are the ones paying for the ice/water/electricity and realize it's cheaper to buy an A/C; or (2) they have access to free utilities but realize that it is a huge fucking waste of water and energy and therefore completely irresponsible (and certainly not clever enough to warrant ignoring that fact).
This is totally unworthy of a/. story. The guy should buy a goddam $100 air conditioner and quit wasting water and electricity on his fake "heat pump." Eventually his university will come across his self-satisfied little post and put an end to it, at which point he will simply have found a way to cool his room for $28 for two days and make a tool of himself to everybody on the web who knows any physics.
With all the amazing hacks out there that don't get posted here, why do we hear about this kid who didn't even understand the undergrad thermo class he keeps telling us about?
Linus at beginning:...you'll find a lot of areas where Linux is better (often a lot better -- as in "it works"), and then you'll find a few narrow areas where one particular BSD version will be better.
Linus at end:...I don't know anything about BSD technical internals, so I'm the wrong person to ask.
Well, the space rented for the restaurant doesn't usually come with servers for Web hosting. Neither are the restaurant owners experienced in Web design (think of ethnic type Mom-and-Pop establishment), so another company would be required to kick in to do design and hosting sooner or later.
I missed addressing this fully in my earlier response: Restaurant owners, even the dumb "ethnic type Mom-and-Pop" ones you refer to, are perfectly capable of making their own menus. And they are perfectly capable of reading an order. And that is all that should be required to get their menu on the network.
This attitude of computer people is my entire point. Folks shouldn't have to hire a web designer, because web design should be less complex than normal design. Hell, why is it easier to produce a physical menu than a virtual one? Shouldn't the virtual menu be simpler?!? Isn't that the promise of technology?
The only time you should have to hire a web designer is when you need DESIGN (artistic) help. People shouldn't need help just putting up things of their own design, and this is, I believe, a failure of us engineers and not inherent to digital publishing.
Well, the space rented for the restaurant doesn't usually come with servers for Web hosting. Neither are the restaurant owners experienced in Web design (think of ethnic type Mom-and-Pop establishment), so another company would be required to kick in to do design and hosting sooner or later.
So we go from a phone system to an internet system and the costs increase by 10% and we call that progress? Every restaurant I've seen already has a computer in the back office that is more than capable of handling the few orders an hour that will come in.
Anyway, I'm not even suggesting the website would have to be at the restaurant. My only problem is with the idea that a company full of people is required for this. At the very most, this should be a $500 software package that the restaurant buys and installs that has a very simple interface and maybe even groks the menu database from their point of sale computer system. This whole thing should be doable for a negligable marginal cost.
If you needed a mechanic to successfuly start your car for you most days or "upgrade" it with new gas, we'd be disgusted with the automotive engineers for their lack of competence, and might even suggest that their shitty engineering were a self-serving nod to the dealers. But nobody seems to mind that computer science research seems to mostly produce jobs for IT people, and not elegant solutions. It may seem like an unfair analogy, but consider the fact that companies need to hire an IT staff to deal with their computers on a daily basis, but don't need to hire a mechanical staff to run the company cars.
Besides, if you're interested in volume, which way would you rather go - your own site with perhaps couple of users a day, or heavily advertised "restaurant aggregator", like this outfit seems to be, where you might get a larger volume just by being listed with them.
I'd rather not have my ordering facility and marketing coupled. I'd wish I could handle my own menu and ordering system cheaply and then spend my advertising money where it's most efficient. These guys are charging a lot for the service of providing an ordering sytem, and they're going to get away with it because no small restaurant can figure out how to do this themselves. And that's a huge shame, and a cost to our economy, and it occurs all over our economy.
RTFA. The restaurant handles delivery, unless I completely misread TFA. All these guys do is pass orders through.
You have something about the single website, but the presentation of a bunch of restaurant menus in one place should be something done at the information consumer's level, so that you can choose which restaurants to aggregate. If information were available intelligently on the net as opposed to primarily as formatting directives (which is what I guess they are going towards with the coming symantic web) this would also be possible.
I don't think people realize how shoddy IT basic technology really is, at least relative to what it could be, because those of those that are engineers are used to the underlying metaphors and schemes. But if you imagine what it takes to put up a web form from the perspective of a "normal person" you realize how much we've failed. As a nation, we should be putting our efforts into simplification of IT foundational elements, not the morass of increasingly complicated "features" that researchers seem more intent upon providing us.
Until a mom and pop shop can put a friggin' take-out menu up without hiring an IT person or needing an entire separate company, maybe we should work on better metaphors and interfaces for web technology in lieu of robots with articulating lips or cell phones that smell fear (or whatever the Media Lab is working on this week).
If, as engineers, we were doing our jobs right, it should be so easy for a restaurant to setup this kind of service for itself that there would be no no need for a guy who essentially just puts up an ordering system for restaurants and then charges huge commissions (which get passed on).
Wasn't the whole point of the democratization of the net that small businesses should be able to do this for themselves (without needing outside help) thereby saving everybody money? It's constantly disappointing to see how technology that's supposed to make things cheaper and more efficient often just provides an excuse for more expense and waste and yet another service company.
It took them long enough, but they finally realized that if you hide the cost of the second business (delivery) in the prices from the first business (food) people can be fooled into thinking they are getting free delivery.
Or, another way of looking at this is that urban prices are so inflated that one can piggyback entire businesses inside the margins. I suppose when a sandwich costs $15, you've got a lot of room to play with your delivery model.
Ok, so given that it costs something like millions of dollars to launch even a small few pound payload, why the hell are they worried about the cost of making a real satellite? My understanding is that you can make something space hardened fairly easily (which is the only point of the suit, AFAIK) and that the vast majority of the cost of a simple satellite comes from the launch.
Plus, having a human shaped thing floating around in orbit gives me the creeps. Can you imagine what that looks like to other life forms? "Xzarg, look what these people do to their criminals! Fuck this, keep driving."
I see your points, but what about the possibility that Intel could produce fresh designs for Apple that aren't hindered by x86 binary compatibility? It seems to me that Intel could easily produce an offshoot of their pentiums that simply cut out the CISC->RISC crap and achieve the same speeds with markedly less chip size and power consumption. Perhaps this is what Steve meant when he talked about performance/power at the keynote. It wouldn't mean too much for Intel to engineer such a chip, though I don't know if it would be feasible to produce such a chip.
However, it may be exactly as you suggest: Apple just tied themselves inexplicably to a chip that is hobbled by binary compatibility to a 70s design, and yet they actually don't need that binary compatibility. But underneath that decision is perhaps a possibility YOU are missing: maybe IBM ditched Apple, not the other way around.
Well, by your argument I might as well say people should use C++ to do page layout. I'm quite certain there are some cases where you could do layout more easily in C++, maybe generating low-level TeX, than with TeX itself. TeX is a godawful programming language. The only reason it's still around is that it's great to use LaTeX (if you don't need much changing to the styles) and TeX produces beautiful output. Otherwise, it's a miserable system. If it were as good as you say, places like the New Yorker WOULD use it, because it would potentially save a ton of time and money. But they don't because nobody could ever figure out how to do the New Yorker in TeX in a way that would allow them to do everything they need, and without having an in-house programmer always needed. It was designed by a nerd, and only nerds will want to use it. That's a strength and a weakness, I suppose.
There are a lot of manual adjustments people like to do visually that LaTeX will never be able to do. Separating content and layout is a good idea, but that doesn't mean you should have to give up editing layout. LaTeX is terrible for that.
Someday, I hope somebody writes layout software that logically separates content and layout without resorting to the stale model of compiling a plain text file.
You know, this whole notion that open source is good because it's quite possible for closed development to be disingenuous is really kind of naive, if you think about. Give me one example of something that cannot be totally destroyed if a human decides to be completely disingenuous. The quest for schemes whereby one can never be duped is a fool's errand. You're just going to have to get used to the fact that much of your security, both physical and otherwise, is a matter of trust and faith in the general goodness of other humans, whether or like it or not. I'm starting to think that the geek obsession with security and open systems is more a manifestation of phychological neuroses than a rational expenditure of effort.
All I'm saying is I notice that we, as geeks, used to get a hell of a lot more done before we all became obsessed with the chimerical notion of perfect computer security. We'd actually implement useful things instead of patching for vulnerability #23427823, wherein a incredibly evil and brilliant hacker could theoretically compromise a machine by getting you to display a property formatted JPG.
Nobody who's talking about Quark/InDesign would even consider MS Word as an option. Writing a paper is one thing (and TeX is great at that) but doing arbitrary layout for graphic design is not what LaTeX was designed for, and it's really not competing with Quark/InDesign in that realm except in the opinion of misguided geeks who enjoy spending an order of magnitude more time to do something as long as they can do it in emacs.
Not when it's the stock market we're talking about. Stocks don't value companies, they value shares.
In reality, it just means people are currently willing to pay for incredibly small chunks of the company in amounts that happen to sum to $80B, but that's completely meaningless. Google's not worth $80B unless there's somebody willing to pony up the whole $80B for the company.
Just watch what would happen to the stock if even 10% of the stock holders decided to cash out their share of the $80B "value". Just because the last few tiny fractions of the company were sold at a certain price doesn't mean the whole company is worth the extrapoltion of that price in any way shape or form.
Agreed. Sending out encrypted e-mails is going to set off some flags. What we need is for somebody to come up with clever e-mail steganography. You type what you want, and it gets sent out encoded in the formatting details of an innocuous looking HTML e-mail to your mother asking how she's doing. Though people might start wondering about the coincidental fact that your mother works at a competing company.
Apple has shown time and time again their resiliency to major hardware and software migrations. Once people get over the shock and awe of this announcement, people will start to realize it was a natural progression. We will be moving from a "niche" OS using a "niche" CPU to a "niche" OS using the "industry standard" CPU.
That is so bullshit. The only question is what the long term picture will be, and if their current momentum from iPod users buying Macs will offset the loss of faithful Mac users who don't feel like having to reset their entire software library for the third fucking time.
It's amazing to me so many people here don't see the obvious: This was NOT a proactive strategic move by Apple, but a reaction to external problems with IBM out of their control. But with zealots like Mac users, who even needs spin?
Apple might come through this even better than before, but let's not kid ourselves that this was their call, or that it's not without significant risks.
Bell Labs has produced some incredibly important things: The femtosecond laser, which is one of the most important tools of chemistry and physics today. The radio telescope. Modern communications theory. A lot of basic electrical engineering theory from microwaves. I'm missing a ton of stuff, obviously, but you catch my drift.
I suppose it's a little harder to come out with stuff once a week when what you're doing is a little more significant and deep than pretty scrolling maps. Comparing Google to the old Bell Labs is ridiculous, and suggesting that "PageRank" somehow compares to the scientific breakthroughs that occurred at Bell Labs is an insult to the people that worked there. I love Google, but it's not particle physics.
Let's wait to see how many Nobel prizes come out of Google labs.
I'm a bit late here, so I'm sure nobody will read this. Nonetheless, I have to add this since I can't believe nobody (maybe I missed something) has pointed out that installed base percentages don't need to sum to 100% over the entire spectrum of machine types. In other words, you can't conclude ANYTHING about the relative installed base between Windows and Mac, even if it were absolutely true that the Mac's were 16%. Windows could still be 100% theoretically. For example, I contribute to both installed bases since I own both machine types.
A more reasonable measure is still market share, I think, despite the article's breathless claims otherwise. The purchase of a machine probably corresponds highly to actual usage. And the browser share figures seem to support this notion, as they seem to coincide very closely with market share.
I think the moderation facility just makes/. a self-fulfilling prophesy. It just cements the dominant politics here, which is generally pseudo-liberal anti-religious and over-intellectual. Fortunately, some good stuff still gets through the moderation system, and a ton of worthless stuff gets killed, so I guess it's a neccesary evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Only when I read /. these days...
This works using the same technology from those plastic animation pieces you used to get in cereal boxes. Am I right? Somebody let me know, because I can't bear to read the stupid article. If it weren't for the frat boy who cooled his room with institutional ice and thought he'd invented a refrigerator, I'd say this is the lamest thing I've read all day.
If this qualifies for an engineering PhD, I'm not sure I really care about getting one anymore. This kidn of thing has been done a LONG time ago to make rudimentary 3D displays out of LC panels. It's hard to believe it's considered noteworthy engineering when somebody slaps a plastic lens array on an LCD panel and doesn't even do the most interesting thing you can imagine with it. Viewer multiplexing? Fricking viewer multiplexing? Yeah, if you don't move your head much.
For advertising connected to web searches? Not their idea, or even a very brilliant one at that.
Peace: "Do No Evil" put into practice.
That prize is usually given to somebody who sets their aspirations higher than simply avoiding evil. Hell, I avoid it pretty well myself. Nonetheless, we'll see how Google does in this regard. They may find it hard to stay out of evil when they find themselves knee deep in everybody's personal information and somebody offers them a ludicrous amount of money or power or avoidance of indightment just for a peek. As with government, the concentration of wealth (in this case of the information kind) will beg for corruption despite all original intents otherwise.
is the current title of this guy's homepage. Perhaps this should've tipped off the submitter to do a little more checking into this "engineer's" idea, which turns out to be little more than the thermodynamic equivalent of cooling yourself down by drinking cold beer that you stole from your neighbor.
This is in no bloody way clever, and cooling a room like this has occurred to everybody on the planet with an IQ greater than 40 at one point or another, none of whom ended up doing it because either (1) they are the ones paying for the ice/water/electricity and realize it's cheaper to buy an A/C; or (2) they have access to free utilities but realize that it is a huge fucking waste of water and energy and therefore completely irresponsible (and certainly not clever enough to warrant ignoring that fact).
This is totally unworthy of a /. story. The guy should buy a goddam $100 air conditioner and quit wasting water and electricity on his fake "heat pump." Eventually his university will come across his self-satisfied little post and put an end to it, at which point he will simply have found a way to cool his room for $28 for two days and make a tool of himself to everybody on the web who knows any physics.
With all the amazing hacks out there that don't get posted here, why do we hear about this kid who didn't even understand the undergrad thermo class he keeps telling us about?
Linus at beginning: ...you'll find a lot of areas where Linux is better (often a lot better -- as in "it works"), and then you'll find a few narrow areas where one particular BSD version will be better.
...I don't know anything about BSD technical internals, so I'm the wrong person to ask.
Linus at end:
I missed addressing this fully in my earlier response: Restaurant owners, even the dumb "ethnic type Mom-and-Pop" ones you refer to, are perfectly capable of making their own menus. And they are perfectly capable of reading an order. And that is all that should be required to get their menu on the network.
This attitude of computer people is my entire point. Folks shouldn't have to hire a web designer, because web design should be less complex than normal design. Hell, why is it easier to produce a physical menu than a virtual one? Shouldn't the virtual menu be simpler?!? Isn't that the promise of technology?
The only time you should have to hire a web designer is when you need DESIGN (artistic) help. People shouldn't need help just putting up things of their own design, and this is, I believe, a failure of us engineers and not inherent to digital publishing.
So we go from a phone system to an internet system and the costs increase by 10% and we call that progress? Every restaurant I've seen already has a computer in the back office that is more than capable of handling the few orders an hour that will come in.
Anyway, I'm not even suggesting the website would have to be at the restaurant. My only problem is with the idea that a company full of people is required for this. At the very most, this should be a $500 software package that the restaurant buys and installs that has a very simple interface and maybe even groks the menu database from their point of sale computer system. This whole thing should be doable for a negligable marginal cost.
If you needed a mechanic to successfuly start your car for you most days or "upgrade" it with new gas, we'd be disgusted with the automotive engineers for their lack of competence, and might even suggest that their shitty engineering were a self-serving nod to the dealers. But nobody seems to mind that computer science research seems to mostly produce jobs for IT people, and not elegant solutions. It may seem like an unfair analogy, but consider the fact that companies need to hire an IT staff to deal with their computers on a daily basis, but don't need to hire a mechanical staff to run the company cars.
Besides, if you're interested in volume, which way would you rather go - your own site with perhaps couple of users a day, or heavily advertised "restaurant aggregator", like this outfit seems to be, where you might get a larger volume just by being listed with them.
I'd rather not have my ordering facility and marketing coupled. I'd wish I could handle my own menu and ordering system cheaply and then spend my advertising money where it's most efficient. These guys are charging a lot for the service of providing an ordering sytem, and they're going to get away with it because no small restaurant can figure out how to do this themselves. And that's a huge shame, and a cost to our economy, and it occurs all over our economy.
RTFA. The restaurant handles delivery, unless I completely misread TFA. All these guys do is pass orders through.
You have something about the single website, but the presentation of a bunch of restaurant menus in one place should be something done at the information consumer's level, so that you can choose which restaurants to aggregate. If information were available intelligently on the net as opposed to primarily as formatting directives (which is what I guess they are going towards with the coming symantic web) this would also be possible.
I don't think people realize how shoddy IT basic technology really is, at least relative to what it could be, because those of those that are engineers are used to the underlying metaphors and schemes. But if you imagine what it takes to put up a web form from the perspective of a "normal person" you realize how much we've failed. As a nation, we should be putting our efforts into simplification of IT foundational elements, not the morass of increasingly complicated "features" that researchers seem more intent upon providing us.
Until a mom and pop shop can put a friggin' take-out menu up without hiring an IT person or needing an entire separate company, maybe we should work on better metaphors and interfaces for web technology in lieu of robots with articulating lips or cell phones that smell fear (or whatever the Media Lab is working on this week).
If, as engineers, we were doing our jobs right, it should be so easy for a restaurant to setup this kind of service for itself that there would be no no need for a guy who essentially just puts up an ordering system for restaurants and then charges huge commissions (which get passed on).
Wasn't the whole point of the democratization of the net that small businesses should be able to do this for themselves (without needing outside help) thereby saving everybody money? It's constantly disappointing to see how technology that's supposed to make things cheaper and more efficient often just provides an excuse for more expense and waste and yet another service company.
It took them long enough, but they finally realized that if you hide the cost of the second business (delivery) in the prices from the first business (food) people can be fooled into thinking they are getting free delivery.
Or, another way of looking at this is that urban prices are so inflated that one can piggyback entire businesses inside the margins. I suppose when a sandwich costs $15, you've got a lot of room to play with your delivery model.
Ok, so given that it costs something like millions of dollars to launch even a small few pound payload, why the hell are they worried about the cost of making a real satellite? My understanding is that you can make something space hardened fairly easily (which is the only point of the suit, AFAIK) and that the vast majority of the cost of a simple satellite comes from the launch.
Plus, having a human shaped thing floating around in orbit gives me the creeps. Can you imagine what that looks like to other life forms? "Xzarg, look what these people do to their criminals! Fuck this, keep driving."
Doh!!!
3) (Reserved for future use.)
I see your points, but what about the possibility that Intel could produce fresh designs for Apple that aren't hindered by x86 binary compatibility? It seems to me that Intel could easily produce an offshoot of their pentiums that simply cut out the CISC->RISC crap and achieve the same speeds with markedly less chip size and power consumption. Perhaps this is what Steve meant when he talked about performance/power at the keynote. It wouldn't mean too much for Intel to engineer such a chip, though I don't know if it would be feasible to produce such a chip.
However, it may be exactly as you suggest: Apple just tied themselves inexplicably to a chip that is hobbled by binary compatibility to a 70s design, and yet they actually don't need that binary compatibility. But underneath that decision is perhaps a possibility YOU are missing: maybe IBM ditched Apple, not the other way around.
Well, by your argument I might as well say people should use C++ to do page layout. I'm quite certain there are some cases where you could do layout more easily in C++, maybe generating low-level TeX, than with TeX itself. TeX is a godawful programming language. The only reason it's still around is that it's great to use LaTeX (if you don't need much changing to the styles) and TeX produces beautiful output. Otherwise, it's a miserable system. If it were as good as you say, places like the New Yorker WOULD use it, because it would potentially save a ton of time and money. But they don't because nobody could ever figure out how to do the New Yorker in TeX in a way that would allow them to do everything they need, and without having an in-house programmer always needed. It was designed by a nerd, and only nerds will want to use it. That's a strength and a weakness, I suppose.
There are a lot of manual adjustments people like to do visually that LaTeX will never be able to do. Separating content and layout is a good idea, but that doesn't mean you should have to give up editing layout. LaTeX is terrible for that.
Someday, I hope somebody writes layout software that logically separates content and layout without resorting to the stale model of compiling a plain text file.
You know, this whole notion that open source is good because it's quite possible for closed development to be disingenuous is really kind of naive, if you think about. Give me one example of something that cannot be totally destroyed if a human decides to be completely disingenuous. The quest for schemes whereby one can never be duped is a fool's errand. You're just going to have to get used to the fact that much of your security, both physical and otherwise, is a matter of trust and faith in the general goodness of other humans, whether or like it or not. I'm starting to think that the geek obsession with security and open systems is more a manifestation of phychological neuroses than a rational expenditure of effort.
All I'm saying is I notice that we, as geeks, used to get a hell of a lot more done before we all became obsessed with the chimerical notion of perfect computer security. We'd actually implement useful things instead of patching for vulnerability #23427823, wherein a incredibly evil and brilliant hacker could theoretically compromise a machine by getting you to display a property formatted JPG.
Nobody who's talking about Quark/InDesign would even consider MS Word as an option. Writing a paper is one thing (and TeX is great at that) but doing arbitrary layout for graphic design is not what LaTeX was designed for, and it's really not competing with Quark/InDesign in that realm except in the opinion of misguided geeks who enjoy spending an order of magnitude more time to do something as long as they can do it in emacs.
Not when it's the stock market we're talking about. Stocks don't value companies, they value shares.
In reality, it just means people are currently willing to pay for incredibly small chunks of the company in amounts that happen to sum to $80B, but that's completely meaningless. Google's not worth $80B unless there's somebody willing to pony up the whole $80B for the company.
Just watch what would happen to the stock if even 10% of the stock holders decided to cash out their share of the $80B "value". Just because the last few tiny fractions of the company were sold at a certain price doesn't mean the whole company is worth the extrapoltion of that price in any way shape or form.
Agreed. Sending out encrypted e-mails is going to set off some flags. What we need is for somebody to come up with clever e-mail steganography. You type what you want, and it gets sent out encoded in the formatting details of an innocuous looking HTML e-mail to your mother asking how she's doing. Though people might start wondering about the coincidental fact that your mother works at a competing company.
That is so bullshit. The only question is what the long term picture will be, and if their current momentum from iPod users buying Macs will offset the loss of faithful Mac users who don't feel like having to reset their entire software library for the third fucking time.
It's amazing to me so many people here don't see the obvious: This was NOT a proactive strategic move by Apple, but a reaction to external problems with IBM out of their control. But with zealots like Mac users, who even needs spin?
Apple might come through this even better than before, but let's not kid ourselves that this was their call, or that it's not without significant risks.
Bell Labs has produced some incredibly important things: The femtosecond laser, which is one of the most important tools of chemistry and physics today. The radio telescope. Modern communications theory. A lot of basic electrical engineering theory from microwaves. I'm missing a ton of stuff, obviously, but you catch my drift.
I suppose it's a little harder to come out with stuff once a week when what you're doing is a little more significant and deep than pretty scrolling maps. Comparing Google to the old Bell Labs is ridiculous, and suggesting that "PageRank" somehow compares to the scientific breakthroughs that occurred at Bell Labs is an insult to the people that worked there. I love Google, but it's not particle physics.
Let's wait to see how many Nobel prizes come out of Google labs.
Yeah, Boston's got a port, but very little in the way of any humanity.
I'm a bit late here, so I'm sure nobody will read this. Nonetheless, I have to add this since I can't believe nobody (maybe I missed something) has pointed out that installed base percentages don't need to sum to 100% over the entire spectrum of machine types. In other words, you can't conclude ANYTHING about the relative installed base between Windows and Mac, even if it were absolutely true that the Mac's were 16%. Windows could still be 100% theoretically. For example, I contribute to both installed bases since I own both machine types.
A more reasonable measure is still market share, I think, despite the article's breathless claims otherwise. The purchase of a machine probably corresponds highly to actual usage. And the browser share figures seem to support this notion, as they seem to coincide very closely with market share.
I think the moderation facility just makes /. a self-fulfilling prophesy. It just cements the dominant politics here, which is generally pseudo-liberal anti-religious and over-intellectual. Fortunately, some good stuff still gets through the moderation system, and a ton of worthless stuff gets killed, so I guess it's a neccesary evil.