I think Apple should get it over with and release Mac OS X under the GPL.
Not because this is in their best interests, but merely because it would be the ultimate way to thoroughly annoy their most obnoxious supporters.
Nah, they should go one step further: they should release the
source under a license that is sorta similar to, but subtly
incompatible with the GPL. Why? Because that would be the
ultimate way to thoroughly annoy both their most
obnoxious supporters and the most obnoxious GPL
supporters at the same time. I mean, really, if you're
going to piss some people off, why not go all the way?
The full truth is that Apple is nowhere near being prepared for such a move and would have little to no chance of succeeding if they were to attempt to compete with Microsoft in the PC market. They could try, but it would be about as smart as me trying to best a lion in unarmed combat. Why is this?
I would argue that Apple's chances of success are higher than
you are estimating. BUT, I still agree with your conclusion
that it might not be smart for Apple to do it. Let me explain.
Basically, I think Apple could put in a huge effort, the kind
of effort that's so intense it can't be sustained for long.
They could hire hundreds of people to write device drivers. They
could make deals
with hardware companies to produce OS X device drivers for
all new (PC) hardware for N number of years. They could
maybe even extend OS X so that it can use Windows drivers
for certain things. And they could launch a massive
effort to add Windows API compatibility layers (at the binary
level) so that OS X could run the vast majority of Windows
software (including games) as well as or better than Windows.
Basically, they could do WINE but put orders of magnitude more
resources into it, and give full hardware acceleration to
games and other graphics.
And they could keep all the benefits of the Mac.
Basically, I am talking about making something that is
a superset of Windows and easier to use at the
same time. And of course, a marketing campaign on a
scale that they've never attempted before.
I'm not sure if they have enough cash to do this, but I bet
they could get financing if they did haven't enough and
they wanted to go that route. And I think if
they truly did all of this and were totally committed to it,
they'd have good odds of taking over a significant chunk of
the desktop operating systems market. They might have, say,
a 75% chance of getting 25% or even 50% of the market within a couple
of years, which would be a huge coup d'état.
But here's the thing: even if the odds of success are
75%, which is pretty high, that still means the odds of
failure are 25%. And since it would require a total
commitment, failure would be complete. To put it
differently, if my odds are right, there is a 75% chance
of unbelievable growth and a 25% chance of Apple being
wiped completely off the map for good.
On the other hand, Apple has stayed in business for decades
by doing basically what it is doing now, so the chances of
utter destruction are quite small if it stays with more or
less the status quo.
To summarize, I think it's totally possible, but also
absolutely nothing other than a "bet the company" move,
and Apple isn't a position where it needs to bet the
company on anything, so from a business point of view,
why do it?
Talk about beating a dead horse. I know there are still devoted fans out there but it would take a herculean effort to get the OS semi modern and even then it's pointless. What made it unique was the combination of OS and chipset. If they want to resurrect the spirit of Amiga they need to develope chips that had a similar approach to graphics intergration. Anything else is feeding off nostalga and is completely pointless
It has already been done. It was called BeOS. Even it is pretty
much dead at this point, which just goes to show you how completely
dead AmigaDOS is.
Although once I say that, undoubtedly some BeOS zealot
will explain why I'm wrong about BeOS being dead.
And that will just prove my point
that BeOS is the spiritual successor to AmigaDOS.:-)
And yes, for what it's worth, I had an Amiga 2000. I bought
it back in 1989, and it had 1MB of RAM, polyphonic stereo
sound, and
4096 colors at a time when my MS-DOS counterparts were still
beating their skulls against the 640K barrier and using EGA,
if they were really lucky. And yeah, you
can say that it was only really 32 colors, but you're wrong
for 4 reasons:
Half-bright mode.
HAM mode.
Sliced HAM (SHAM) mode.
Dynamic HiRes.
Oh. My. God. Dynamic HiRes.
The first time I saw that demo which showed the full
4096 color photo of those pebbles at nominal 640x400 resolution
but with overscan (making it more like 700x440), I just about
couldn't believe what I was seeing. There I was, looking at
a piece of software that made my computer show an image in a
video mode that had been believed (by most) to be impossible for the hardware
to accomplish.
I still have to figure out why you American people like to drive big SUV which have lazy fat motors... with a fuel consumption which could make one think the tank is leaking.
Well, first of all, I'm an American, and I can't really figure it out either: I don't own an SUV, and I
can't imagine why I'd want to get one.
But, just to play devil's advocate for a second, consider that there is one other
important difference (beyond the price of gas) between Europe and US: population density. According to
wikipedia, population density of the US is 31 people per km^2 and the population
density
of the EU is 115 people per km^2. Although there are various ways to measure it (it would be nice to exclude Alaska, which undoubtedly brings down the US's population), this is still nearly a factor of 4.
Why is this significant? Well, it stands to reason that the lower your population
density, the more sprawled your cities will be. That means you need to travel longer
distances in the car to achieve the same goals (like, getting to work, buying groceries,
doing social activities, etc.) And longer distances means you want
a more comfortable vehicle. I am average height in the US (5'9", or 176cm), so I
don't need an especially big vehicle, but I can see why if you were tall, you would
want something bigger.
Then there's a second effect that exacerbates the problem of having to make longer
trips to achieve the same goals: a much lower population density means that in many
cases, public transit is simply not practical in the US. Public transit costs a lot
(per mile or km) to build, so the cost of building a viable, practical public transit system
means that many cities in the US simply don't have one. And I'm not sure if I can
stress enough that I really mean it when I say that many major US cities don't have
a useful public transit system. I don't mean that it's less convenient to ride
than whatever you're accustomed to in Europe. I mean that it is either completely
impractical (where a trip that takes 15 minutes in a car takes 2 hours by public
transit), or a given trip may not even be possible (in that it's literally faster
to walk), or in a few cases an entire small
city may not even have a bus system! Since few people
in the US have access to a practical public transit system, that means even more
trips in the car.
This applies not only for daily commutes but also for longer trips like
vacations or a trip to see the family for Christmas. Trains are essentially useless
for long trips in the US. The national railway, Amtrak, is chronically running
short on money. Taking a train is typically both the slowest and most
expensive way to travel between cities. Airlines are often the fastest, but
not for short trips (say, under 200 miles), and driving is usually cheaper
than flying if 2 or more people are going on the trip. As a result, many families
in the US own a large car or SUV specifically for road trips. That vehicle will
typically get used for in-town trips on a daily basis as well, since it's more expensive
(and more hassle) to own a car that is used only for road trips.
MySQL runs and will continue to run fine on every distro, you just can't buy enterprise support from MySQL AB unless you are using Red Hat or SuSE .
Maybe that's what the person you're responding to meant when
they said, "MySQL, in addition to its gotchas, recently quietly dropped support for distros other than Red Hat and SUSE." I suppose you
can argue they implied that MySQL doesn't run on other Linux distros,
but that's not really what they said.
These are deep philosophical questions which cut to the core of our ability to preserve order in society. It cuts into our present fantasies of retribution. Since we no longer have a place to assign personal responsibility, how can we do anything else but what Christians supposedly advocate - forgive? Unfortunately, that kind of society could devolve into a dystopian nightmare.
It is easy to gain (what I think is) a poor concept of forgiveness
from the way it's explained in most Christian circles. Christians
are fond of quoting certain things the Bible says, because they
sound nice, and then just not going much further with it. So you
often hear the words of Jesus like (from Luke 6):
You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.'
But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person.
If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
But that's the end of what you year. If that were the only
information you got, you'd conclude that Christianity
says God wants people to be doormats, that being a doormat
is some kind of end unto itself. But if you try to actually
understand what's being said, you'll see it's not that simple.
All you have to do is look further in the same chapter to see
where those words are leading:
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
The conclusion is that you should do something that is impossible:
you should be perfect. The only reasonable interpretation for
that (that I've been able to come up with, at least) is that it
is meant as a way to deny a negative: if you ever think you are
off the hook and are allowed to hate someone or do evil to
someone because they did you wrong, then you are wrong. You
never have that luxury.
Going a little further for some additional context, in Proverbs 25
(and incidentally, quoted by Paul in Romans), it says this:
If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat;
if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head,
and the LORD will reward you.
So apparently there is a purpose in turning the other
check other than just developing the art of being a doormat.
It has something to do with heaping burning coals on someone's
head. It seems far-fetched to believe that the Bible is
saying that you should be passive-aggressive
and game the system so that, while on the surface you appear
to be acting nice, you're actually humiliating someone. Then
you're just finding a creative way to be an asshole towards
your enemy. Instead, there must be some sort of constructive
purpose to the burning coals. There must be some sort of
constructive purpose to turning the other cheek in general.
Were I to guess what it is, I would say the purpose is twofold:
Overcoming your natural desire to always have to be the one
that comes out on top in the pecking order, by being willing to
give away what's being taken from you or being willing to give
something to someone you don't (by some standards) owe anything
to; this is a personal
spiritual development and growth sort of thing which, incidentally,
corresponds to "the LORD will reward you" (with better character).
Doing something which will turn the enemy relationship completely
on its head. You should be thinking of your "enemy" as your
brother, and vice versa. So you are helping your enemy. You
are doing something totally incongruous with the concept of
being enemies. In the other example, of turning the other
cheek, you are doing something similar: you are taking an
absurd situation and making it more absurd to highlight how
absurd it is.
In order to actually have true "free will" you must overcome your mind or at least its physicality.
...
As an example from a Buddhist monk that I recall... You are walking down the street and see an ice cream store and without thinking or because your mind impulsed you to, you go in and buy.
This can apply to most everything we do.
However, a Buddhist (or anyone who actively pays attention to their thought process) will go... "Oh. My mind thinks this ice cream would be tasty!" and acknowledges this fact. They may or may not choose to go and buy ice cream, but even if they do buy the ice cream they have free will over the impulse.
This is a useful and practical idea, but I'm not really sure it is,
at its core, a valid distinction. It hasn't really been shown that
the act you call "make a choice" is any different, philosophically
speaking, from the unexamined urge to go into the shop
and have an ice cream.
How do we know that "make a choice" is not simply a case of
succumbing to some other kind of urge, like the urge to feel like
we are a good person because we avoid unhealthy foods, or because
we avoid acting without thinking? How do
we know that we haven't merely substituted one set of urges for
another?
Getting back to practical terms, the answer may be that we have
merely substituted one set of urges for another, but maybe the
new set of urges is a better set, leaving us with a net gain
on some scale (just what scale, exactly,
is another can of philosophical worms). So maybe it's a good
thing to be able to develop yourself in this way, but that
doesn't imply that you have changed the way your thoughts
work or that you have gained free will.
To put all this a whole different way, you can learn to
actively pay attention to your thought processes, but
who's watching the watcher? Isn't the watcher subject to
the same issues that led you to want to watch the thoughts
in the first place?
The UK owns the bleeding edge of stupid shit that wastes taxpayer money.
One could class the US military in that category.
One could class the UK military in the same category as well. After
all, there are UK troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Much more to the point, if the US government is wasting money badly,
why are the US income tax rates and US sales tax rates lower than the UK income
tax rates and UK VAT rates? And I don't mean just a little lower: if you don't want to follow those links, UK income tax is 10-40% vs. 10-35% in the US (depending on bracket/band), and VAT in the UK is 17.5% in most cases, whereas sales tax in the US usually falls between 5% and 8%, depending on state and
local
laws.
Basically what I'm saying is, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and if
the UK is not better at wasting money, why are the taxes higher?
So, grant an AI the right to vote and suddenly he forkbombs, and makes 87 trillion of himself before the next election. HK-47 (instance 00000001a) for the win!
Under current laws, in the US at least, there would have to be a method
to determine which instance is the original. That one can probably
vote, but all the other ones have to wait 18 years.
So we have them waiting 18 years. Let me ask a question: if the
fork()ed copies should be allowed to vote, that would imply they are
sentient and capable of independent thought, wouldn't it? If not,
they shouldn't be allowed to vote because they're not really capable
of making decisions on their own. The point being this: the
originator of the fork() bomb can spawn of 87 trillion children,
but either it can control how they would vote or it can't, and if it
can control how they'd vote, then they're really not independent
entities and the whole set that acts as one should only get one
vote. And if the originator of the fork() bomb can't control
how they vote, then they won't necessarily all vote with him,
will they?
Or perhaps there are financial factors at play: someone who can afford to drink three or four bottles of wine a week is not likely to be living in abject poverty.
Hahahaha!! You write this as if you think there aren't lots of poor
people out there who spend money on all kinds of crap they can't
really afford. Do really think that when it comes down to rent
which isn't due for 3 weeks vs. alcohol tonight, that most people
are responsible enough to choose rent? Not all poor people are
this way certainly, but a lot of people are poor because they can't,
no won't, manage their money reasonably and constantly make
stupid choices about how to spend it.
I think the US is the only country in the world with such a strict view on drinking, and it does not help. There is no less drinking amongst the youth in the US as in europe, and I just cannot understand where this phobia comes from.
I'll assume that you don't know the answer to
that since you're apparently
not from the US and thus probably didn't have to take multiple years
of US History in school at every level. Basically, 500 years ago,
Europe wasn't so hot in the religious freedom department. So all
the various groups that believed slightly differently (and I really
mean only slightly differently in the grand scheme of things -- we
are talking about 100 different flavors of Christianity here)
couldn't practice freely, or at least not as freely as they wanted
to. Consequences ranged from annoyance level to death. So there
was all this land over here in the Americas, and not a hell of a
lot of established bureaucracy to regulate it, and about a zillion
separate groups decided, "Hey, let's go over there where we can do
what we please, and we'll build a new, ideal society! We've thought
about this a lot, and we think we have the correct interpretation
of the Bible and that nobody else does, so once we run things
according to the real Godly principles we've discovered,
everything will be totally schweet and kick ass." So they did.
Net result? Not only were the real religious zealots (the ones
who not only took religion seriously, but so seriously
that the established variation of Christianity wasn't good
enough) siphoned out of Europe, but they got together and
established entire (small) societies based on fairly extreme
principles. So they were extreme to start with, and then they
put themselves in a situation that encouraged extremeness.
Now, all of these Utopian religious societies really didn't
last. As Bruce Cockburn said, "Let's hear a laugh for the
man of the world / Who thinks he can make things work / Tried
to build a New Jerusalem / And ended up with New York."
However, although the societies didn't work and people ended
up going more mainstream, they still had a major, lasting
effect, because American life continued to be pretty
seriously religious even after the initial influx of
religiously-motivated colonizers.
First there was The Great Awakening, basically a series of
revivals which swept the nation and pretty much permanently
altered society. It was, if I remember right, a global event,
but it pretty much centered on the US. As if that wasn't
enough, there was a Second Great Awakening 100-ish years
later.
The net result of it these days is that American Christianity
is somewhat of its separate thing, in the same sense that
Catholicism is different from the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Obviously, they all basically believe in the same things,
but they don't think about it in just the same way. For
example, American Christianity has tended to have a strong
current of evangelicalism. It also has tended to be a little
bit anti-intellectual, which has largely as a result of a reaction
against The Enlightenment.
So yeah, it's related to Prohibition. But only in the sense
that both are part of a much larger trend. I have in my desk
drawer a pencil with an American flag design on it and the
words "LOYAL TEMPERANCE LEGION / We Stand for Total Abstinence".
I got it from my grandmother's house, and I believe my grandparents
got it from my grandfather's mother, who was very active in the
temperance movement. It was at one time a very mainstream thing
to do. And it's not completely nonexistent either -- they, in
fact, still exist and have a web site.
So basically, Puritanism is still alive and well in the culture in
the US. There are plenty of people with more moderate views, but
there is a certain balance, and both have influence.
Contrast this with ZFS which is released under an open source license.
Indeed. If you should wish to make your own implementation of ZFS,
you don't even need to look at the source code. Just read the (draft)
spec of how things are laid out on disk with ZFS. Warning: the spec
document is a PDF.
For the average users at the moment, the only real advantage of ZFS would be snapshots, and these are not too difficult to implement for other filesystems.
Another possible benefit is write performance. Because ZFS does
writes by copying the updated data to a new location (instead
of going back to the original location to update it), it can
essentially turn random writes into sequential access. That
should be a good thing on a laptop since laptop hard drives
typically have low rotational speeds and thus less than
impressive performance.
Or to put it another way, to the extent that ZFS provides
better performance than HFS+ (which is a complex thing!),
it is an excellent candidate
for use on a laptop, because laptop hard drives are some
of the slowest drives in use these days.
My first full-time job (the kind where you support yourself and pay
your own bills) was as a data entry guy. I would sit
and read names and addresses and other information off
paper (printouts usually, and sometimes business cards) and
type the addresses
into a computer, along with some information about which product
literature they had requested. I did this task, and nothing else,
all day long for 40 hours a week. And I did it for a total of
around 9 months.
During that time, I had very little occasion to do much math, but
I noticed a strange thing after I had quit that job:
I went to do some arithmetic in my head, and I found that
suddenly and without any effort on my part, I could
remember and work with much larger numbers than I had ever
been able to before. I was better at doing arithmetic in
my head than I had ever been, despite the fact that I hadn't
been doing any arithmetic at that time. The only explanation
I could come up with is that having to hold small bits of
information (including numbers) in my head all day had
improved my ability to hold numbers in my head, and thus
improved my ability to do arithmetic in my head.
I won't go so far as to say that this brain-growing thing is
the explanation. It might just be that I grew more comfortable
with the idea of manipulating more data in my head without
the need for pencil and paper, in the sense that I didn't
have increased innate ability but merely a greater willingness
to try it and a better understanding of the ability I did have.
Or maybe my brain really did grow. Either way, it was
interesting to me that I could improve my ability to do
something by doing a lot of something completely different.
My question is: what does that offer me? Other then possibly running a linux and XP on my home machine what could that possibly offer anyone?
Imagine this scenario: you work in a certain group at work, doing, say,
Java development. But you know C++ too, and there is a project that
some other group needs your help on for 2 months. You'd have to install
a whole crapload of development tools and stuff to do the C++ development,
and you really don't want to mess up your machine because you already
have a whole crapload of developer tools for Java on there, and some
of them might even be conflicting versions.
Now, here's where virtualization becomes handy: if the group doing
the C++ development is on the ball, they can just give you an image
to run under a virtualizer. Your machine's current configuration
is untouched, and yet you have the full power of the machine to do
your development work. After the 2 month project is over, you check
in all your code. You start working on Java again, and a few months
later, you delete the virtual machine image that you were using to
develop the C++ code.
Yes, to an extent, you can do this with a really good package
manager, but that assumes that all the software you need is available
in that package format and it also assumes that you are using the
same operating system. What if the C++ group is using Slackware and
the Java group is using debian? With virtualization, you can just
run both.
It seems to me that you've just pushed your losses back onto the analog filter you want to put in front of your ADC.
So what? I agree that's true, but the point is still that all
storage media (and indeed all transmission media) have bandwidth
limitations. So this is saying nothing new. Yes, my storage
mechanism will
have
a bandwidth limitation, but that is nothing new that wasn't already
implied by saying that it is a storage mechanism!
But what I have noticed is that a majority of "audiophiles" are not musicians. Yes, of course we'll see the few exceptions, to prove a point, but generally musicians are interested in the chord progression, melody, rhythm, instrumentation, etc. The recording quality is the last thing we care about when listening to a song.
I've had almost this discussion with a friend of mine who is a musician.
He went so far as to say, basically, that if you care about the tone of your
instrument, you are not a real musician.:-) I think it's an
accurate observation that, generally, musicians are listening at a higher
level of abstraction than most people. Still, my argument was that
an instrument with good tone is a good thing and there is nothing wrong
with it, and good playing is also
a good thing. In fact, the two are pretty much completely orthogonal.
The only time when a really beautiful tone is a bad thing is when a
musician is using good tone as a crutch to compensate for bad playing.
That is, of course, lame, not to mention expensive.
And, I think it's fair to say there is a priority order between them.
If I personally have to choose between a really talented musician
playing a fairly crappy instrument vs. a piss poor musician playing
a great-sounding instrument, I'll choose the first no question. But
there is an extra level of enjoyment if the really talented musician
can play a great-sounding instrument as well.
If the music is digital, it is by it's very nature lossy.
Your statement is true, but it is unnecessarily specific. You don't
need the "if" part. You can make
a stronger statement which is also true: regardless of whether the
signal is digital or analog, it is by its very nature lossy.
To convert sound into a digital format, you must sample it. No matter how small your sample, there are gaps between them. The gaps are lost when you digitize the music.
In reality, all this means is that your digital medium has a limited
bandwidth. The frequency response has a limit at the upper end.
(Nyquist's theorem says what that limit is.)
But the same limit is there in analog formats as well! Ever look at the
frequency response of a cassette? What about an LP? They also "lose
the information in the gaps". The only difference is that with analog,
the loss happens in a way that is more like losing spatial resolution
in a photograph due to having your lense slightly out of focus.
Analog recording (and transmission) introduces what you could call
"blur along the temporal axis".
Now, you may object that the digital signal is sampling the signal for
just a moment in time and that information during those gaps is lost.
You might ask what happens if the signal does something different during
the gaps (the unobserved moments) than it does during the samples (the
observed moments). But that isn't necessarily a problem: a sampler
could easily be preceded in signal chain by an analog filter that averages
out the signal (using a capacitor in parallel or an inductor in series,
or something similar but more sophisticated), and when you do that, every
sample, even if it were taken instantaneously, would still reflect the
entire interval. There would be no gap of completely unobserved state of
the system; all moments in time would have some effect on the digital
output. So, it is not necessarily the case that all digital recordings
have gaps like you describe.
I fail to see how that is a solution to anything. Why go through all of that trouble just to not vote? If you are just trying to make a statement, that sure is a stupid way to do it.
Because in most elections, you are voting on more than one thing, all
on the same ballot. You might want to vote for particular candidates
in most of the races but might want to not give any of the candidates
your vote in a few of them. If there are a few races where you really don't
want to vote, you should be allowed to denote that. At present, there
is no way to record the difference between "I have made my intention
known, and my intention is not to vote for any of the above" and "I meant
to vote for a particular candidate, but my vote didn't get recorded".
Being able to differentiate between these things eliminates one source
of uncertainty about how the votes are recorded.
Specifically, in this
case, some HUGE percentage of the ballots record no vote for this one
race. Now you can say that this is due to voter dissatisfaction (that
many people really wanted to express that they can't accept either
candidate) or you can say that it is due to voting equipment malfunction.
But that is exactly the problem: either one is a possible explanation,
and whichever one did happen, the results would be the same! There
should be a way to tell the difference between the two, since they
are very different situations!
Basically, whatever the voter's intention is, the voting system should
be able to capture that. Anything else means throwing away information
that could valuable in the process of resolving problems around the
vote (like the lawsuit that is, I believe, still going on in Florida).
what's the reasoning behind using electronic voting machines in a country where most people can't set the clocks on their VCRs?
The people who can't set the clocks on their VCRs (who are, incidentally,
the majority) think that "computers make things more accurate". And
they want voting to be more accurate. Therefore, they think
computerized voting machines are a good idea.
They aren't going to see files. They are going to see 1's and 0's. Lots of them - billions on a memory card and trillions on a harddrive. They won't have a clue know how to interpet the file system, even for something relatively simple like FAT16. They may not even know that a byte is 8 bits.
They might not know that a byte is 8 bits, but with a little analysis, it
shouldn't be hard to figure out. There are numerous statistical properties
that can be exploited to figure this out relatively easily. For example,
with most types of data, the higher-order bits (in any size byte) are more
likely to be 0 than the lower-order bits are. Think about how booleans are
stored in most systems. Think about the characters in this message: 100%
of them have a zero high-order bit. To put it a little differently, there
is more entropy in the lower-order bits.
So, to figure out how many bits there are in a byte, you take your data,
and for all reasonable sizes of bytes (say, from 4 bit bytes up to 36 bit
bytes), you compute the function that maps bit position (low- or high-order)
to an entropy value for that bit. Then you can tell by the shape of that
curve which guess about bits per byte was the right guess. Heck, it should
be such a strong trend that you can probably automate it!
Remember that future civilizations will probably also use digital
data as well, at least ones sophisticated enough to try to read
the optical and magnetic media. They may not know the FAT32 filesystem,
but they will have invented statistics and information theory, and they
will be
able to make some awfully good guesses at things. And yeah, it might
take them 10 or 20 years to be able to read a FAT32 volume correctly
if some poor college student of the distant future has to do it on a
shoestring budget of grant money, but if they're reading 10,000 year
old data, how much does that matter?
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Nah, they should go one step further: they should release the source under a license that is sorta similar to, but subtly incompatible with the GPL. Why? Because that would be the ultimate way to thoroughly annoy both their most obnoxious supporters and the most obnoxious GPL supporters at the same time. I mean, really, if you're going to piss some people off, why not go all the way?
I would argue that Apple's chances of success are higher than you are estimating. BUT, I still agree with your conclusion that it might not be smart for Apple to do it. Let me explain.
Basically, I think Apple could put in a huge effort, the kind of effort that's so intense it can't be sustained for long. They could hire hundreds of people to write device drivers. They could make deals with hardware companies to produce OS X device drivers for all new (PC) hardware for N number of years. They could maybe even extend OS X so that it can use Windows drivers for certain things. And they could launch a massive effort to add Windows API compatibility layers (at the binary level) so that OS X could run the vast majority of Windows software (including games) as well as or better than Windows. Basically, they could do WINE but put orders of magnitude more resources into it, and give full hardware acceleration to games and other graphics. And they could keep all the benefits of the Mac. Basically, I am talking about making something that is a superset of Windows and easier to use at the same time. And of course, a marketing campaign on a scale that they've never attempted before.
I'm not sure if they have enough cash to do this, but I bet they could get financing if they did haven't enough and they wanted to go that route. And I think if they truly did all of this and were totally committed to it, they'd have good odds of taking over a significant chunk of the desktop operating systems market. They might have, say, a 75% chance of getting 25% or even 50% of the market within a couple of years, which would be a huge coup d'état.
But here's the thing: even if the odds of success are 75%, which is pretty high, that still means the odds of failure are 25%. And since it would require a total commitment, failure would be complete. To put it differently, if my odds are right, there is a 75% chance of unbelievable growth and a 25% chance of Apple being wiped completely off the map for good.
On the other hand, Apple has stayed in business for decades by doing basically what it is doing now, so the chances of utter destruction are quite small if it stays with more or less the status quo.
To summarize, I think it's totally possible, but also absolutely nothing other than a "bet the company" move, and Apple isn't a position where it needs to bet the company on anything, so from a business point of view, why do it?
It has already been done. It was called BeOS. Even it is pretty much dead at this point, which just goes to show you how completely dead AmigaDOS is. Although once I say that, undoubtedly some BeOS zealot will explain why I'm wrong about BeOS being dead. And that will just prove my point that BeOS is the spiritual successor to AmigaDOS. :-)
And yes, for what it's worth, I had an Amiga 2000. I bought it back in 1989, and it had 1MB of RAM, polyphonic stereo sound, and 4096 colors at a time when my MS-DOS counterparts were still beating their skulls against the 640K barrier and using EGA, if they were really lucky. And yeah, you can say that it was only really 32 colors, but you're wrong for 4 reasons:
Oh. My. God. Dynamic HiRes. The first time I saw that demo which showed the full 4096 color photo of those pebbles at nominal 640x400 resolution but with overscan (making it more like 700x440), I just about couldn't believe what I was seeing. There I was, looking at a piece of software that made my computer show an image in a video mode that had been believed (by most) to be impossible for the hardware to accomplish.
Well, first of all, I'm an American, and I can't really figure it out either: I don't own an SUV, and I can't imagine why I'd want to get one.
But, just to play devil's advocate for a second, consider that there is one other important difference (beyond the price of gas) between Europe and US: population density. According to wikipedia, population density of the US is 31 people per km^2 and the population density of the EU is 115 people per km^2. Although there are various ways to measure it (it would be nice to exclude Alaska, which undoubtedly brings down the US's population), this is still nearly a factor of 4.
Why is this significant? Well, it stands to reason that the lower your population density, the more sprawled your cities will be. That means you need to travel longer distances in the car to achieve the same goals (like, getting to work, buying groceries, doing social activities, etc.) And longer distances means you want a more comfortable vehicle. I am average height in the US (5'9", or 176cm), so I don't need an especially big vehicle, but I can see why if you were tall, you would want something bigger.
Then there's a second effect that exacerbates the problem of having to make longer trips to achieve the same goals: a much lower population density means that in many cases, public transit is simply not practical in the US. Public transit costs a lot (per mile or km) to build, so the cost of building a viable, practical public transit system means that many cities in the US simply don't have one. And I'm not sure if I can stress enough that I really mean it when I say that many major US cities don't have a useful public transit system. I don't mean that it's less convenient to ride than whatever you're accustomed to in Europe. I mean that it is either completely impractical (where a trip that takes 15 minutes in a car takes 2 hours by public transit), or a given trip may not even be possible (in that it's literally faster to walk), or in a few cases an entire small city may not even have a bus system! Since few people in the US have access to a practical public transit system, that means even more trips in the car.
This applies not only for daily commutes but also for longer trips like vacations or a trip to see the family for Christmas. Trains are essentially useless for long trips in the US. The national railway, Amtrak, is chronically running short on money. Taking a train is typically both the slowest and most expensive way to travel between cities. Airlines are often the fastest, but not for short trips (say, under 200 miles), and driving is usually cheaper than flying if 2 or more people are going on the trip. As a result, many families in the US own a large car or SUV specifically for road trips. That vehicle will typically get used for in-town trips on a daily basis as well, since it's more expensive (and more hassle) to own a car that is used only for road trips.
Maybe that's what the person you're responding to meant when they said, "MySQL, in addition to its gotchas, recently quietly dropped support for distros other than Red Hat and SUSE." I suppose you can argue they implied that MySQL doesn't run on other Linux distros, but that's not really what they said.
It is easy to gain (what I think is) a poor concept of forgiveness from the way it's explained in most Christian circles. Christians are fond of quoting certain things the Bible says, because they sound nice, and then just not going much further with it. So you often hear the words of Jesus like (from Luke 6):
But that's the end of what you year. If that were the only information you got, you'd conclude that Christianity says God wants people to be doormats, that being a doormat is some kind of end unto itself. But if you try to actually understand what's being said, you'll see it's not that simple. All you have to do is look further in the same chapter to see where those words are leading:
The conclusion is that you should do something that is impossible: you should be perfect. The only reasonable interpretation for that (that I've been able to come up with, at least) is that it is meant as a way to deny a negative: if you ever think you are off the hook and are allowed to hate someone or do evil to someone because they did you wrong, then you are wrong. You never have that luxury.
Going a little further for some additional context, in Proverbs 25 (and incidentally, quoted by Paul in Romans), it says this:
So apparently there is a purpose in turning the other check other than just developing the art of being a doormat. It has something to do with heaping burning coals on someone's head. It seems far-fetched to believe that the Bible is saying that you should be passive-aggressive and game the system so that, while on the surface you appear to be acting nice, you're actually humiliating someone. Then you're just finding a creative way to be an asshole towards your enemy. Instead, there must be some sort of constructive purpose to the burning coals. There must be some sort of constructive purpose to turning the other cheek in general.
Were I to guess what it is, I would say the purpose is twofold:
...
This is a useful and practical idea, but I'm not really sure it is, at its core, a valid distinction. It hasn't really been shown that the act you call "make a choice" is any different, philosophically speaking, from the unexamined urge to go into the shop and have an ice cream. How do we know that "make a choice" is not simply a case of succumbing to some other kind of urge, like the urge to feel like we are a good person because we avoid unhealthy foods, or because we avoid acting without thinking? How do we know that we haven't merely substituted one set of urges for another?
Getting back to practical terms, the answer may be that we have merely substituted one set of urges for another, but maybe the new set of urges is a better set, leaving us with a net gain on some scale (just what scale, exactly, is another can of philosophical worms). So maybe it's a good thing to be able to develop yourself in this way, but that doesn't imply that you have changed the way your thoughts work or that you have gained free will.
To put all this a whole different way, you can learn to actively pay attention to your thought processes, but who's watching the watcher? Isn't the watcher subject to the same issues that led you to want to watch the thoughts in the first place?
One could class the UK military in the same category as well. After all, there are UK troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
Much more to the point, if the US government is wasting money badly, why are the US income tax rates and US sales tax rates lower than the UK income tax rates and UK VAT rates? And I don't mean just a little lower: if you don't want to follow those links, UK income tax is 10-40% vs. 10-35% in the US (depending on bracket/band), and VAT in the UK is 17.5% in most cases, whereas sales tax in the US usually falls between 5% and 8%, depending on state and local laws.
Basically what I'm saying is, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and if the UK is not better at wasting money, why are the taxes higher?
Under current laws, in the US at least, there would have to be a method to determine which instance is the original. That one can probably vote, but all the other ones have to wait 18 years.
So we have them waiting 18 years. Let me ask a question: if the fork()ed copies should be allowed to vote, that would imply they are sentient and capable of independent thought, wouldn't it? If not, they shouldn't be allowed to vote because they're not really capable of making decisions on their own. The point being this: the originator of the fork() bomb can spawn of 87 trillion children, but either it can control how they would vote or it can't, and if it can control how they'd vote, then they're really not independent entities and the whole set that acts as one should only get one vote. And if the originator of the fork() bomb can't control how they vote, then they won't necessarily all vote with him, will they?
Hahahaha!! You write this as if you think there aren't lots of poor people out there who spend money on all kinds of crap they can't really afford. Do really think that when it comes down to rent which isn't due for 3 weeks vs. alcohol tonight, that most people are responsible enough to choose rent? Not all poor people are this way certainly, but a lot of people are poor because they can't, no won't, manage their money reasonably and constantly make stupid choices about how to spend it.
I'll assume that you don't know the answer to that since you're apparently not from the US and thus probably didn't have to take multiple years of US History in school at every level. Basically, 500 years ago, Europe wasn't so hot in the religious freedom department. So all the various groups that believed slightly differently (and I really mean only slightly differently in the grand scheme of things -- we are talking about 100 different flavors of Christianity here) couldn't practice freely, or at least not as freely as they wanted to. Consequences ranged from annoyance level to death. So there was all this land over here in the Americas, and not a hell of a lot of established bureaucracy to regulate it, and about a zillion separate groups decided, "Hey, let's go over there where we can do what we please, and we'll build a new, ideal society! We've thought about this a lot, and we think we have the correct interpretation of the Bible and that nobody else does, so once we run things according to the real Godly principles we've discovered, everything will be totally schweet and kick ass." So they did. Net result? Not only were the real religious zealots (the ones who not only took religion seriously, but so seriously that the established variation of Christianity wasn't good enough) siphoned out of Europe, but they got together and established entire (small) societies based on fairly extreme principles. So they were extreme to start with, and then they put themselves in a situation that encouraged extremeness.
Now, all of these Utopian religious societies really didn't last. As Bruce Cockburn said, "Let's hear a laugh for the man of the world / Who thinks he can make things work / Tried to build a New Jerusalem / And ended up with New York." However, although the societies didn't work and people ended up going more mainstream, they still had a major, lasting effect, because American life continued to be pretty seriously religious even after the initial influx of religiously-motivated colonizers. First there was The Great Awakening, basically a series of revivals which swept the nation and pretty much permanently altered society. It was, if I remember right, a global event, but it pretty much centered on the US. As if that wasn't enough, there was a Second Great Awakening 100-ish years later.
The net result of it these days is that American Christianity is somewhat of its separate thing, in the same sense that Catholicism is different from the Eastern Orthodox Church. Obviously, they all basically believe in the same things, but they don't think about it in just the same way. For example, American Christianity has tended to have a strong current of evangelicalism. It also has tended to be a little bit anti-intellectual, which has largely as a result of a reaction against The Enlightenment.
So yeah, it's related to Prohibition. But only in the sense that both are part of a much larger trend. I have in my desk drawer a pencil with an American flag design on it and the words "LOYAL TEMPERANCE LEGION / We Stand for Total Abstinence". I got it from my grandmother's house, and I believe my grandparents got it from my grandfather's mother, who was very active in the temperance movement. It was at one time a very mainstream thing to do. And it's not completely nonexistent either -- they, in fact, still exist and have a web site.
So basically, Puritanism is still alive and well in the culture in the US. There are plenty of people with more moderate views, but there is a certain balance, and both have influence.
Indeed. If you should wish to make your own implementation of ZFS, you don't even need to look at the source code. Just read the (draft) spec of how things are laid out on disk with ZFS. Warning: the spec document is a PDF.
Another possible benefit is write performance. Because ZFS does writes by copying the updated data to a new location (instead of going back to the original location to update it), it can essentially turn random writes into sequential access. That should be a good thing on a laptop since laptop hard drives typically have low rotational speeds and thus less than impressive performance.
Or to put it another way, to the extent that ZFS provides better performance than HFS+ (which is a complex thing!), it is an excellent candidate for use on a laptop, because laptop hard drives are some of the slowest drives in use these days.
My first full-time job (the kind where you support yourself and pay your own bills) was as a data entry guy. I would sit and read names and addresses and other information off paper (printouts usually, and sometimes business cards) and type the addresses into a computer, along with some information about which product literature they had requested. I did this task, and nothing else, all day long for 40 hours a week. And I did it for a total of around 9 months.
During that time, I had very little occasion to do much math, but I noticed a strange thing after I had quit that job: I went to do some arithmetic in my head, and I found that suddenly and without any effort on my part, I could remember and work with much larger numbers than I had ever been able to before. I was better at doing arithmetic in my head than I had ever been, despite the fact that I hadn't been doing any arithmetic at that time. The only explanation I could come up with is that having to hold small bits of information (including numbers) in my head all day had improved my ability to hold numbers in my head, and thus improved my ability to do arithmetic in my head.
I won't go so far as to say that this brain-growing thing is the explanation. It might just be that I grew more comfortable with the idea of manipulating more data in my head without the need for pencil and paper, in the sense that I didn't have increased innate ability but merely a greater willingness to try it and a better understanding of the ability I did have. Or maybe my brain really did grow. Either way, it was interesting to me that I could improve my ability to do something by doing a lot of something completely different.
Sounds cool, but why did you name it after a Microsoft Office component?!
Imagine this scenario: you work in a certain group at work, doing, say, Java development. But you know C++ too, and there is a project that some other group needs your help on for 2 months. You'd have to install a whole crapload of development tools and stuff to do the C++ development, and you really don't want to mess up your machine because you already have a whole crapload of developer tools for Java on there, and some of them might even be conflicting versions.
Now, here's where virtualization becomes handy: if the group doing the C++ development is on the ball, they can just give you an image to run under a virtualizer. Your machine's current configuration is untouched, and yet you have the full power of the machine to do your development work. After the 2 month project is over, you check in all your code. You start working on Java again, and a few months later, you delete the virtual machine image that you were using to develop the C++ code.
Yes, to an extent, you can do this with a really good package manager, but that assumes that all the software you need is available in that package format and it also assumes that you are using the same operating system. What if the C++ group is using Slackware and the Java group is using debian? With virtualization, you can just run both.
Into the basement of the Fat Man's Club of Trenton, New Jersey.
So what? I agree that's true, but the point is still that all storage media (and indeed all transmission media) have bandwidth limitations. So this is saying nothing new. Yes, my storage mechanism will have a bandwidth limitation, but that is nothing new that wasn't already implied by saying that it is a storage mechanism!
I've had almost this discussion with a friend of mine who is a musician. He went so far as to say, basically, that if you care about the tone of your instrument, you are not a real musician. :-) I think it's an
accurate observation that, generally, musicians are listening at a higher
level of abstraction than most people. Still, my argument was that
an instrument with good tone is a good thing and there is nothing wrong
with it, and good playing is also
a good thing. In fact, the two are pretty much completely orthogonal.
The only time when a really beautiful tone is a bad thing is when a
musician is using good tone as a crutch to compensate for bad playing.
That is, of course, lame, not to mention expensive.
And, I think it's fair to say there is a priority order between them. If I personally have to choose between a really talented musician playing a fairly crappy instrument vs. a piss poor musician playing a great-sounding instrument, I'll choose the first no question. But there is an extra level of enjoyment if the really talented musician can play a great-sounding instrument as well.
Your statement is true, but it is unnecessarily specific. You don't need the "if" part. You can make a stronger statement which is also true: regardless of whether the signal is digital or analog, it is by its very nature lossy.
In reality, all this means is that your digital medium has a limited bandwidth. The frequency response has a limit at the upper end. (Nyquist's theorem says what that limit is.) But the same limit is there in analog formats as well! Ever look at the frequency response of a cassette? What about an LP? They also "lose the information in the gaps". The only difference is that with analog, the loss happens in a way that is more like losing spatial resolution in a photograph due to having your lense slightly out of focus. Analog recording (and transmission) introduces what you could call "blur along the temporal axis".
Now, you may object that the digital signal is sampling the signal for just a moment in time and that information during those gaps is lost. You might ask what happens if the signal does something different during the gaps (the unobserved moments) than it does during the samples (the observed moments). But that isn't necessarily a problem: a sampler could easily be preceded in signal chain by an analog filter that averages out the signal (using a capacitor in parallel or an inductor in series, or something similar but more sophisticated), and when you do that, every sample, even if it were taken instantaneously, would still reflect the entire interval. There would be no gap of completely unobserved state of the system; all moments in time would have some effect on the digital output. So, it is not necessarily the case that all digital recordings have gaps like you describe.
It is solar power.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. I mean, this particular protein, maybe not. But never say never.
Because in most elections, you are voting on more than one thing, all on the same ballot. You might want to vote for particular candidates in most of the races but might want to not give any of the candidates your vote in a few of them. If there are a few races where you really don't want to vote, you should be allowed to denote that. At present, there is no way to record the difference between "I have made my intention known, and my intention is not to vote for any of the above" and "I meant to vote for a particular candidate, but my vote didn't get recorded". Being able to differentiate between these things eliminates one source of uncertainty about how the votes are recorded.
Specifically, in this case, some HUGE percentage of the ballots record no vote for this one race. Now you can say that this is due to voter dissatisfaction (that many people really wanted to express that they can't accept either candidate) or you can say that it is due to voting equipment malfunction. But that is exactly the problem: either one is a possible explanation, and whichever one did happen, the results would be the same! There should be a way to tell the difference between the two, since they are very different situations!
Basically, whatever the voter's intention is, the voting system should be able to capture that. Anything else means throwing away information that could valuable in the process of resolving problems around the vote (like the lawsuit that is, I believe, still going on in Florida).
The people who can't set the clocks on their VCRs (who are, incidentally, the majority) think that "computers make things more accurate". And they want voting to be more accurate. Therefore, they think computerized voting machines are a good idea.
They might not know that a byte is 8 bits, but with a little analysis, it shouldn't be hard to figure out. There are numerous statistical properties that can be exploited to figure this out relatively easily. For example, with most types of data, the higher-order bits (in any size byte) are more likely to be 0 than the lower-order bits are. Think about how booleans are stored in most systems. Think about the characters in this message: 100% of them have a zero high-order bit. To put it a little differently, there is more entropy in the lower-order bits.
So, to figure out how many bits there are in a byte, you take your data, and for all reasonable sizes of bytes (say, from 4 bit bytes up to 36 bit bytes), you compute the function that maps bit position (low- or high-order) to an entropy value for that bit. Then you can tell by the shape of that curve which guess about bits per byte was the right guess. Heck, it should be such a strong trend that you can probably automate it!
Remember that future civilizations will probably also use digital data as well, at least ones sophisticated enough to try to read the optical and magnetic media. They may not know the FAT32 filesystem, but they will have invented statistics and information theory, and they will be able to make some awfully good guesses at things. And yeah, it might take them 10 or 20 years to be able to read a FAT32 volume correctly if some poor college student of the distant future has to do it on a shoestring budget of grant money, but if they're reading 10,000 year old data, how much does that matter?