I can toss a tv dinner in a toaster oven on an X10 plug, ssh into my box and turn it on with the firecracker module, and save... whatever it costs minus 15 bucks.
I think the idea behind this smart oven is that it
refrigerates the stuff while you're gone at work,
so you can safely leave that Stouffer's brand
frozen pork chop and mashed potatoes in there
for 10 or 12 hours (or a week, if you feel like
it) without it going bad while you're gone.
Whether that's worth $9000 odd dollars to you is
another question, but it is at least
more than an oven on a timer.
If you're that seriously strapped for time that
you can't even devote, say, 2 hours a week to
e-mailing and phoning prospective companies and
recruiters, then hire a
maid. It's actually fairly cheap. I just
priced a local service on their web site,
and if I have them come clean my 2-bedroom
apartment every other week, it's $59 each
time they come. That's not too tough to
fit in most budgets.
If they come do that, it should save you a fair
amount of time, since they will vacuum, straighten
up your clutter, clean your kitchen sink, load your
dishwasher, clean the bathroom, dust, take out
the trash, etc. Whatever amount of time it saves,
you can spend that looking for a job.
By the way, while it is best to really look hard
and explore all your options, it is possible to
get a new job just by chipping away at the task.
It might take you a year to do it if you can't
devote much time, but eventually you'll get
something.
Also, on a somewhat related note, it wouldn't
be such a horrible idea to just stay where you
are for another year. It looks better not to
switch jobs. It does suck to be given more
work without increased pay or even a better
title, but this is one of those things that
is really pretty common considering the fact that
ideally it should never happen. The grass may
or may not be greener on the other side.
OK, so it appears Linus has decided that Linux
will not be converted over to GPL v3. Lots of
people have given philosophical opinions about
this, but what if we step back and look at it
from a purely practical point of view? What
are the costs of converting to GPL v3, and what
benefits would it provide to the Linux maintainers
and users?
Possible benefits:
GPL v3 prohibits DRM. Does this really make a
difference with Linux? Linux doesn't have
DRM features
anyway, so what does it matter what the license
says? I suppose it might prohibit a few things
that could be done on top of Linux using DRM,
and that might be good, but it seems like a
minor effect, so at best this has a minor positive
effect in favor of a
cause which isn't directly related
to the central purpose of Linux.
Keeping up to date. Yes, I suppose there is
some small benefit in being on the latest version
of the GPL just to avoid being out of date, but
personally I reject the idea that everybody
ought to always be on the latest version of
everything. You should use what works.
Make Richard Stallman happy. Doesn't
seem like a major goal of Linux.
That's pretty much it as far as the positives
for Linux, as far as I can tell. Now, what
about the negatives?
Redefinition of "user". As I understand it,
GPL v3 says if you are using something over the
network, you're still a user, and if that software
is modified, it's no longer a private modification
and the source to the changes has to be made
available. This would appear to mean that if
someone is running a public
web server on a Linux system,
they will now have to make any of their
changes to Linux public. That's unlikely to
happen, but it could affect some sites in
that they wouldn't be able to upgrade and
bring their changes forward. Probably a minor
issue, though.
Copyrights. As others have said,
Linus doesn't hold the copyrights; the
contributors do. So it's a huge hassle to
get that all converted to GPL v3.
So what is the bottom line? Converting offers
basically no major advantage. GPL v2 is just
as good as GPL v3 for the purposes of Linux.
And, converting is a huge hassle. So, rather
than looking at why Linus isn't converting the
kernel over, why don't we ask this question:
why should it be converted over? There
doesn't seem to be any kind of compelling
advantage.
My guess is that the same thing is going to apply
to lots of other projects. Converting is a great
big hassle, and it doesn't offer any big advantage,
so people just won't bother.
I thought most people over here thought these views were outdated and lacked substance.
"Outdated"? What kind of argument is that?
Things are true or false independent of how
long people have believed them. People have
believed that gravity makes things fall down
for a hell of a long time, and nobody calls
that belief "outdated".
The sad thing is, there are a lot of good
arguments for evolution. So why the need
to pull out this kind of stuff? It only
adds fuel to the fire of conflict between
evolutionists and creationists. Also, when
you adopt an attitude of superiority like
this ("we're all well educated atheists"),
you only reinforce the creationists'
perceptions that scientists are arrogant.
You claim to be upset that people
don't believe in evolution, but you're
giving them extra reasons to reject it.
Congratulations on being just what most
people hate about religious people:
being someone who thinks the beliefs of
his group are obviously the truth and
that the only reason members of other
groups can't see that is because they're
stupid, lazy, and inferior.
Well, if you mean life, as in Jessica Alba, you're correct.
But that's a tad provincial, limited, humdrum, some might say.
I think you have a good point that there could
be other
forms of life out there that are dissimilar to
Jessica Alba.
On the other hand, it might be a matter of personal
preference which ones we should concern ourselves
with. For instance, the (Star Trek)
Enterprise's mission is to seek out new life
forms, but I personally prefer to seek out
life forms similar to Jessica Alba.
As similar as possible, in fact. Identical
would be best.
But - are the NTP patents valid? I say they are perfectly obvious. Back before 1985 I was using fido-net systems and there were some running over packet radio. My neighbour across the street ran packet radio back then.
To send an email over a packetized transmission system is perfectly obvious to _anyone_ who thinks about this for a moment.
It doesn't even require a practitioner of the field. Even a retard would think of this.
I agree. One of the things that is so
unfathomably stupid about some of the software
patents I've seen is that they just completely
ignore
one of the fundamental principles of computer
science. In order to prevent
systems' complexity from getting totally out
of control, you break things down into subsystems,
and you give each a well-defined behavior,
making it as general-purpose as practical.
For example, TCP/IP works the same whether it's
running on top of Ethernet or PPP or FDDI or
radio waves or avian carrier or
whatever. This is done on purpose specifically
to make it so that everything that depends on
something doesn't have to be re-invented every
time some change in an unrelated system is made.
It's so vitally important to do this (because
otherwise complete chaos would result) that
it should be impossible to claim you know
anything about computers without knowing this.
Anyway, the point is a wireless network works
the same as a wired network. It's an abstraction.
Whether it's wireless or wired doesn't matter.
And yet, through the collective lunacy of
the government and others, somehow people are
being granted patents for every possible
combination of interchangeable things they can
put together.
The thing that I just do not understand is how
people cannot see this. Nobody would contemplate
allowing separate patents for a microwave oven
that draws its electrical energy from a
natural-gas fired power generation facility
and for a microwave oven that draws its electrical
energy from a dam that generates electricity
hydroelectrically. They wouldn't because they
see that wall outlets are general-purpose,
and that plugging a microwave into a different
wall
outlet is not an invention.
Why, then, is the equivalent
thing allowed for software? How can it be
possible that people are so ignorant that they
can't see that networks (and other well-defined,
standardized interfaces in computers)
work exactly the same way?
As recently as the G4 towers, a firmware update required the user to physically depress the Programmer's button (the hardware interrupt button) on the computer itself.
Strictly speaking, using the Programmer's button
wasn't required to update the firmware. You can
instead use option-apple-O-F to boot to the
OpenFirmware prompt, then use the boot
command and the path of the OpenFirmware updater
(having used devalias, dev device, cd dir,
and ls to browse around and find that
image);
when you do this, the system boots from the
standalone
OpenFirmware update image instead of loading
the regular bootloader, and when that code
runs, it updates the firmware. I'm 90% sure
it doesn't require you to hit the Programmer's
button either, and instead the Programmer's button
thing just triggers the system to load the
same executable that you can load manually
with the boot command.
So, the point is, on a G4 tower at least,
although the Programmer's button is involved
in the process, it isn't actually required and
doesn't provide any security, as far as I
can tell.
If you're wondering how I figured this out,
let's just say I was trying to get a Mac
working that failed to autoboot, dumping
me at the OpenFirmware prompt every time.
I thought it was a problem with OpenFirmware
settings, so I aimed to find a way to upgrade
the OpenFirmware on the assumption that doing
this would force the system to also reset
every setting related to it (more thoroughly
than just
"zap the PRAM"). I couldn't use the normal
method because the failure to autoboot prevented
that method from working.
On a side note, I succeeded in
updating the OpenFirmware to a newer version,
and it didn't help at all. I eventually discovered
that the machine was a Frankstein computer that
had the wrong Front Panel Board in it, and THAT
was why the OpenFirmware wouldn't boot -- it knew
something was wrong with its hardware. I finally
traded this Front Panel Board with someone else
for the right one, and now my friend who bought
the G4 tower for half price because of the fact
that it wouldn't autoboot is happily using it.
On another side note, isn't the flash chip on
the iMac Core Duo socketed, and can't they
get an identical chip and make a copy of its
contents BEFORE they go messing with it, thus
allowing them to monkey with the copy and
revert to the original if needed?
If I were a university student, I would think of this sort of group as a blessing. They'd show which professors have the guts to provide their views without trying to self-censor. Those are the sorts of professors who are worth learning from.
In general, I agree with you. However, there are
exceptions. I had a professor who had strong views
on religion and pornography and who often went into
those views in class as a sort of part of the
lecture. The problem was, he was a computer
science professor. His views on these topics
are about as helpful to me as a philosophy
professor's views on botany and mechanical
engineering would be.
GOOG is just following the market down. Every time the market moves, the analysts have to come up with an explanation, which is almost always bogus.
That's true. However, I think the particular
explanation they came up with, when called upon
to come up with one, gives away their real
attitude about a company like Google. I suspect
many analysts and many proponents of the traditional
American way of doing business have an ideological
need to scorn and reject
Google for its "do no evil" policy. The "do no evil"
policy needs to be proven to be foolish in order
to validate their policy, which is more like
"eh, don't worry about evil; that's not your job".
My feeling
is that lots of businessmen look at actions like
Google's decision to resist the DoJ and think
Google is just being stupid and idealistic
by not doing the practical thing and just
giving the government the information and being
done with it. Nevermind that it wouldn't be
the end of it: once the DoJ gets a taste of
being able to demand stuff like that, they are
going to start doing it all the time, and there
will be a cost to Google and to other companies
if that becomes normal.
Equally bad, Google has a lot of smart people
working there, and they may have seen things
clearly and actually developed the best
strategy here (not giving away the info to avoid
setting a precedent), even just for the purposes
of self-interest. But because they are going
against the grain (compared to MSN and Yahoo
and so on), they are getting punished for that.
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
Basically, the business climate in the US is
a little biased against a company like Google
which appears to want to succeed on the basis
of having integrity and offering an excellent
product. Right now, Google rocks so much that
that isn't stopping them, and hopefully it'll
continue that way for a while.
I have a friend who is a serious, serious
Disney fan. He takes being a Disney fan to a new
level. He once played Disney Trivia (a knockoff
of Trivial Pursuit where the subject matter is
all Disney)
with his wife, and she refused to play again because
he got all the questions right and won on his first
turn. He and his wife spent their honeymoon
at Disneyland. And he mailed
a wedding invitation
to Mr. Mickey and Mrs. Minnie Mouse when he
got married. (No, the Mouses weren't able to
attend.)
Anyway, this is his take on the whole thing:
if Disney and Pixar merge, this will prevent
them from having to maintain separate
computer / 3D animation studios. In effect,
Pixar can take over all the 3D animation that
Disney wants to do. This will free up Disney
proper to get back to what they are (or were,
but could be again?) actually
good at: hand-drawn, non-computer, 2D animation.
Whether this is likely or not, I don't know.
However, although people have said that
hand-drawn animation is dead, my Disney freak
friend and I agreed that that is about as
likely as saying that since someone invented
the camera, nobody is going to paint oil
paintings anymore. The point is, we may have
reached the stage where the novelty of 3D
computer animation has worn off, and perhaps
they (Disney, and others)
will start doing hand-drawn animation
again.
Apparently nobody watched the Keynote, in which Steve himself said that other components (hard disk, memory, etc) were not faster, so the overall experience would not be as fast as the 2-3x numbers he posted.
Actually, the memory is a lot faster on the
new machines, but you're absolutely right about
disk and all that other stuff.
Just so people don't have to fast-forward through
the keynote (which is over an hour long),
here's what Steve Jobs actually said about
iMac Core Duo performance compared to the iMac G5:
And we've got the numbers which speak for themselves,
so let's take a look at them. The iMac G5
and the iMac Core Duo. Let's take a look at
SPECmarks. SPEC2000, integer performance, the
most important benchmark of computer performance:
10.2 on the iMac G5, 32.6 on the iMac Core Duo.
3.2X. And these are using the best compilers on
each: IBM's compilers on the G5, and Intel's compilers on the Core Duo. For floating point,
13.0 on the G5, 27.1 on the Core Duo, for 2.1.
So, in the most important benchmarks of
performance, 2-3X. Now everything's not
going to run 2-3X. You know the disks aren't
2-3X faster, etc., but on the most important
benchmarks, 2 to 3 times faster.
So, what Jobs is saying is that the SPECint2000
and the SPECfp2000 performance is 2-3 times as
fast, and he's also saying that those
benchmarks are important, which admittedly is
debatable.:-)
For what it's worth, I noticed that lots of the
MacWorld tests focused on image processing.
That's a useful thing to know about, but
aren't most of thoses tasks going to be done
using special stuff like Altivec or SSE?
If that's the case, they're not really good
comparisons of the regular performance of
the processors.
...what's wrong with submitting this data to the government?
Assuming you haven't entered into an agreement
with anyone that says you won't give away their
private information, there is absolutely nothing
wrong with submitting this information to the
goverment!
However, there is also absolutely nothing wrong
with refusing to hand over the information if the
organization doesn't feel like it. The problem
here is that apparently the DoJ is acting like
they are automatically
entitled to the information because
they are The Government.
Basically, the organization should have the right
to choose to submit the information or not based
on what the laws (which are supposed to ultimately
be based on the constitution) require them to do,
not based on the whims of some DoJ person who
thinks they should get whatever they want whenever
they want it.
for google, but lets get something straight. Google is doing this for a reason, and it's not to "stick it to the man". They are getting HUGE. They're looking to be bigger than Microsoft somewhere down the line and even with a "Don't be Evil" slogan, distrust is already bubbling up in some of the populace. Another portion of the populace still trusts them but are weary of them. This is to show the public that they're personal and private data is safe with them.
I think that's possible, and it is good PR if that's
what they're doing. Another possibility is that
they are doing this because they mostly employ
intelligent people who have the luxury, as one of
the world's leading companies (at least by
mindshare), of setting a good example for others
and who are willing to pay their lawyers to do
that just because they get satisfaction out of
doing the right thing.
But then there's also a more down-to-earth
explanation: Google could be doing this
simply because, if they hand over the
requested information now, it's going to
establish a bad precedent, and pretty soon,
they're going to have the government asking
them for more and more data until they finally
reach the point where they have hundreds of
full-time employees (programmers, IT people,
etc.) all working on providing reports for
the government. And that's just a waste of
time and money. Perhaps, at least partially,
Google doesn't want to go down that road just
because it would be a giant pain in the ass
if they let the government think they're
entitled to this.
Apple is not a software company. They are a hardware company. It's that simple. They build really solid, nifty hardware that apparently reaches fetish level for a certain market, and they've learned to turn that market into money.
I would argue that they're not a software company,
but they're not a hardware company either. Instead,
they're an integrated system company. Years ago,
before the PC and Windows (and Linux, which has
the same model) took over, you bought both an
operating system and a computer. The two were
pretty much inseperable. (This was how the IBM PC
started out, as well as the Mac, the Amiga, the
Atari ST, the Commodore 64, the Apple ][, etc.
And the same thing was true before personal
computers: VAX machines had VMS, IBM machines
had one of IBM's 99 different operating
systems, etc.)
These days, not as many people are doing the same
thing. Certainly if you buy a machine from Dell,
Dell is working with Microsoft to make sure the
system has all the right drivers. But that's not
quite the same thing as an integrated platform
where hardware design and software design are
done by the same organization. Integrated
hardware and software designs are available
from Apple and also a few other companies like
Sun. And the interesting thing is that both
Apple and Sun have now adopted some x86 chips.
Sun has Opteron servers and workstations
available but continues to make new SPARC chips
(including Niagara, a whole new series of chips),
and Apple is using Intel chips in desktops
and laptops.
For what it's worth, there is some value in an
integrated system. Knowing that all the
hardware and software come from the same place
gives you a greater degree of confidence that
it will all just work together. And if it
doesn't, when you call for support, you are
dealing with only one organization, so the
blame game ("it must be the other vendor's
product, not ours") is less likely.
A certain
percentage of the people are willing to pay
a bit of a premium for these advantages,
so that gives Apple (and Sun) a market that
is a bit different from the regular market,
which gives them a niche to play in.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that Apple has
really snazzy industrial design and that
people look at an Apple laptop and instantly
want one without yet even knowing what's
inside. Think of the amount of appeal
PowerBooks have had for the last few years
even despite the fact that they still
contain slow G4 processors.
But, is the transaction unethical from the perspective of the industrious coder whom the cheater hires? Does the rent-a-coder have an obligation to look beyond the color of his client's money, and into the content of his character?
I can think of at least one good argument in favor
of it being unethical for the others to enable the
cheating: the CS graduate might later get a
job writing
software for someone's pacemaker, or an airplane
flight control system, etc., etc. Maybe the
cheating CS graduate isn't an obvious incompetent
but just cheated on that one assignment where
he couldn't figure out how to use semaphores
correctly or something, in which case he might
actually get hired to do something important
and might appear to be capable.
...why not be a buisness major instead? I mean, if you're not really passionate the work, why not pick an occupation that a) pays more and b) is easier to fake your way through?
... and c) explicitly supports and
encourages cheating.
Let's program our cell-phone to display random barcodes at a fast rate. Put it in front of the barcode reader and wait for a few seconds. If we show enough barcode options, and I assume the barcode reader works fast, we might be able to fall on a valid one.
This is easily defeated by making the reader
require that the barcode is held for 1/2
second or by reading the barcode repeatedly
and then sounding an alarm if the barcode
changes from one valid barcode (one with a
valid checksum) to another valid barcode.
Yes, you can easily combat that countermeasure
of your own, which is slowing down the rate
at which you present barcodes to the reader.
But since it's a 2D barcode, chances are the
number of possible barcodes is HUGE, because
there are likely hundreds of bits in such a
barcode. That means your chances of getting
the valid one quick enough (before someone
wonders why you're holding your phone up to
the reader for 10 minutes) are virtually nil.
You are welcome to disagree, and your points are all valid: some people can't see meaning through grammar error. But me, I'm used to mailing lists, bulletin boards, quickly jotted emails, badly written comments in source code etc etc. This is a stylistic decision.
No, it's an excuse.
It's simply not that hard to use proper grammar,
or at least pretty good grammar. I noticed that
twice now you have suggested that everyone uses
bad grammar when they fire off a quick e-mail.
That's not true. I use good grammar even when I
write a quick e-mail. I learned how to use
good grammar when I was in school as a kid, and
once you're in the habit, it just comes out
right to begin with. (Yes, it does take initial
effort to reach the point where you can do that.)
Also, good grammar and a casual tone aren't
mutually exclusive like you are implying they
are. I don't think anyone's
suggesting that Slashdot should follow all
the formal rules (not starting sentences with
"And" or "But", not splitting infinitives,
not using contractions, and stuff like that).
All that's
being asked is that people use grammar that's
good enough that it doesn't distract people
and make the text hard to read. That level
of grammar isn't incompatible with a casual
tone.
Google is already involved in television. They
are involved in a cable channel called
Current TV,
in that they have a show on that channel called
Google
Current.
The basic principle, as far as I can tell, for the
show is that the stories are chosen not on what
some news editor thinks is news, but instead the
topics are chosen based on information about which
Google queries are most popular. (Kind of based
on Google Zeitgeist.)
For what it's worth, another notable feature of
Current TV is that supposedly 1/3 of their
programming is produced by viewers rather than
the network. This turns the traditional
TV model (where networks produce content, and
viewers do nothing but consume, i.e. purely
one-way communication) on its ear. It's not
quite like the Internet where almost anyone can
self-publish almost anything, but it is an
interesting twist on things.
Frankly, this is not as cheap as the Linux-based alternatives
Nope, but it's SO far beyond easy to implement
that it almost wraps around to painful and
difficult again.
If you aren't trying to save a few bucks by
using some old machine, just go to the local
Fry's and buy a Mac Mini and two or three
FireWire drives. Take it all home, find
someplace with 1/2 square foot of empty
space, plug it all in, boot up, run Disk
Utility to make RAID 0, RAID 1, or concatenation
as desired. Then finally, turn on "Windows Sharing"
under Sharing in the preferences.
If formatting disks didn't take time, once the
machine was booted up, you'd be done with the
whole process in about 60 seconds.
I think this is actually a good lead-in to the topic of TFA -- part of the ROM contained a specific string, I think it was "Stolen from Apple Computer" that could be searched for and found in an image. So let's say you make a Mac emulator, and claim that it doesn't contain Apple's intellectual property in any way. A quick search can reveal whether it has the whole ROM image embedded in it somewhere.
Ah yes, I've read about that here.
(It's got to be authentic, because nobody would think
to fake that printout from an ImageWriter with a
faded ribbon!)
Some of the Rev. A iMac G5s sounded like a jet taking off, but it appears they fixed it in later revs. I want to get one of these bad boys, but only if they are silent.
It's probably relevant here what Jobs had to say in
the keynote address about power consumption of these Intel
processors versus the PowerPC G5 processors Apple
was using. When you compare computing power
versus electrical power used (bang for the watt),
the Intel Core Duo processors' ratio of
computing power to watts is something like
4.5 times as good as the G5.
Combine that with the fact that they say the
Intel processors they're using are 2-3 times
faster than the G5s, and if you do the math,
it would seem that even though they are faster
machines, they are using about 35-55%
less electricity than the G5s did. And of
course, using less electricity translates
directly into producing less heat. And
that translates into less noise.
As it happens, this will also be good for all of us. Galileo promises sub-meter accuracy, faster acquisition, and better penetration through cover.
I agree -- it will even be good for the US. It
provides an extra level of redundancy, and what's
more, it's engineered by a completely different
group of people in a different country, so they
may have different failure modes. Anyone for
whom it's truly important to have accurate
geolocation data will now have the option of
getting a receiver for each system, with one
serving as a backup to the other.
Nations other than the US and the EU nations
will now have less risk of it shutting down
because blocking acces to both systems
will require the cooperation of the US
and the EU.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the idea behind this smart oven is that it refrigerates the stuff while you're gone at work, so you can safely leave that Stouffer's brand frozen pork chop and mashed potatoes in there for 10 or 12 hours (or a week, if you feel like it) without it going bad while you're gone.
Whether that's worth $9000 odd dollars to you is another question, but it is at least more than an oven on a timer.
If you're that seriously strapped for time that you can't even devote, say, 2 hours a week to e-mailing and phoning prospective companies and recruiters, then hire a maid. It's actually fairly cheap. I just priced a local service on their web site, and if I have them come clean my 2-bedroom apartment every other week, it's $59 each time they come. That's not too tough to fit in most budgets.
If they come do that, it should save you a fair amount of time, since they will vacuum, straighten up your clutter, clean your kitchen sink, load your dishwasher, clean the bathroom, dust, take out the trash, etc. Whatever amount of time it saves, you can spend that looking for a job.
By the way, while it is best to really look hard and explore all your options, it is possible to get a new job just by chipping away at the task. It might take you a year to do it if you can't devote much time, but eventually you'll get something.
Also, on a somewhat related note, it wouldn't be such a horrible idea to just stay where you are for another year. It looks better not to switch jobs. It does suck to be given more work without increased pay or even a better title, but this is one of those things that is really pretty common considering the fact that ideally it should never happen. The grass may or may not be greener on the other side.
OK, so it appears Linus has decided that Linux will not be converted over to GPL v3. Lots of people have given philosophical opinions about this, but what if we step back and look at it from a purely practical point of view? What are the costs of converting to GPL v3, and what benefits would it provide to the Linux maintainers and users?
Possible benefits:
That's pretty much it as far as the positives for Linux, as far as I can tell. Now, what about the negatives?
So what is the bottom line? Converting offers basically no major advantage. GPL v2 is just as good as GPL v3 for the purposes of Linux. And, converting is a huge hassle. So, rather than looking at why Linus isn't converting the kernel over, why don't we ask this question: why should it be converted over? There doesn't seem to be any kind of compelling advantage.
My guess is that the same thing is going to apply to lots of other projects. Converting is a great big hassle, and it doesn't offer any big advantage, so people just won't bother.
"Outdated"? What kind of argument is that? Things are true or false independent of how long people have believed them. People have believed that gravity makes things fall down for a hell of a long time, and nobody calls that belief "outdated".
The sad thing is, there are a lot of good arguments for evolution. So why the need to pull out this kind of stuff? It only adds fuel to the fire of conflict between evolutionists and creationists. Also, when you adopt an attitude of superiority like this ("we're all well educated atheists"), you only reinforce the creationists' perceptions that scientists are arrogant. You claim to be upset that people don't believe in evolution, but you're giving them extra reasons to reject it.
Congratulations on being just what most people hate about religious people: being someone who thinks the beliefs of his group are obviously the truth and that the only reason members of other groups can't see that is because they're stupid, lazy, and inferior.
I think you have a good point that there could be other forms of life out there that are dissimilar to Jessica Alba.
On the other hand, it might be a matter of personal preference which ones we should concern ourselves with. For instance, the (Star Trek) Enterprise's mission is to seek out new life forms, but I personally prefer to seek out life forms similar to Jessica Alba. As similar as possible, in fact. Identical would be best.
Yeah, I hear they're 2 to 3 times as fast now on the most important bug finding benchmarks.
I agree. One of the things that is so unfathomably stupid about some of the software patents I've seen is that they just completely ignore one of the fundamental principles of computer science. In order to prevent systems' complexity from getting totally out of control, you break things down into subsystems, and you give each a well-defined behavior, making it as general-purpose as practical.
For example, TCP/IP works the same whether it's running on top of Ethernet or PPP or FDDI or radio waves or avian carrier or whatever. This is done on purpose specifically to make it so that everything that depends on something doesn't have to be re-invented every time some change in an unrelated system is made. It's so vitally important to do this (because otherwise complete chaos would result) that it should be impossible to claim you know anything about computers without knowing this.
Anyway, the point is a wireless network works the same as a wired network. It's an abstraction. Whether it's wireless or wired doesn't matter. And yet, through the collective lunacy of the government and others, somehow people are being granted patents for every possible combination of interchangeable things they can put together.
The thing that I just do not understand is how people cannot see this. Nobody would contemplate allowing separate patents for a microwave oven that draws its electrical energy from a natural-gas fired power generation facility and for a microwave oven that draws its electrical energy from a dam that generates electricity hydroelectrically. They wouldn't because they see that wall outlets are general-purpose, and that plugging a microwave into a different wall outlet is not an invention. Why, then, is the equivalent thing allowed for software? How can it be possible that people are so ignorant that they can't see that networks (and other well-defined, standardized interfaces in computers) work exactly the same way?
Strictly speaking, using the Programmer's button wasn't required to update the firmware. You can instead use option-apple-O-F to boot to the OpenFirmware prompt, then use the boot command and the path of the OpenFirmware updater (having used devalias, dev device , cd dir , and ls to browse around and find that image); when you do this, the system boots from the standalone OpenFirmware update image instead of loading the regular bootloader, and when that code runs, it updates the firmware. I'm 90% sure it doesn't require you to hit the Programmer's button either, and instead the Programmer's button thing just triggers the system to load the same executable that you can load manually with the boot command.
So, the point is, on a G4 tower at least, although the Programmer's button is involved in the process, it isn't actually required and doesn't provide any security, as far as I can tell.
If you're wondering how I figured this out, let's just say I was trying to get a Mac working that failed to autoboot, dumping me at the OpenFirmware prompt every time. I thought it was a problem with OpenFirmware settings, so I aimed to find a way to upgrade the OpenFirmware on the assumption that doing this would force the system to also reset every setting related to it (more thoroughly than just "zap the PRAM"). I couldn't use the normal method because the failure to autoboot prevented that method from working.
On a side note, I succeeded in updating the OpenFirmware to a newer version, and it didn't help at all. I eventually discovered that the machine was a Frankstein computer that had the wrong Front Panel Board in it, and THAT was why the OpenFirmware wouldn't boot -- it knew something was wrong with its hardware. I finally traded this Front Panel Board with someone else for the right one, and now my friend who bought the G4 tower for half price because of the fact that it wouldn't autoboot is happily using it.
On another side note, isn't the flash chip on the iMac Core Duo socketed, and can't they get an identical chip and make a copy of its contents BEFORE they go messing with it, thus allowing them to monkey with the copy and revert to the original if needed?
Not me, I think of those who teach chemistry. They're the ones likely to get in trouble for being radical professors.
(And they probably listen to acid jazz too, which just goes to show what sort of degenerates they are!)
In general, I agree with you. However, there are exceptions. I had a professor who had strong views on religion and pornography and who often went into those views in class as a sort of part of the lecture. The problem was, he was a computer science professor. His views on these topics are about as helpful to me as a philosophy professor's views on botany and mechanical engineering would be.
That's true. However, I think the particular explanation they came up with, when called upon to come up with one, gives away their real attitude about a company like Google. I suspect many analysts and many proponents of the traditional American way of doing business have an ideological need to scorn and reject Google for its "do no evil" policy. The "do no evil" policy needs to be proven to be foolish in order to validate their policy, which is more like "eh, don't worry about evil; that's not your job".
My feeling is that lots of businessmen look at actions like Google's decision to resist the DoJ and think Google is just being stupid and idealistic by not doing the practical thing and just giving the government the information and being done with it. Nevermind that it wouldn't be the end of it: once the DoJ gets a taste of being able to demand stuff like that, they are going to start doing it all the time, and there will be a cost to Google and to other companies if that becomes normal.
Equally bad, Google has a lot of smart people working there, and they may have seen things clearly and actually developed the best strategy here (not giving away the info to avoid setting a precedent), even just for the purposes of self-interest. But because they are going against the grain (compared to MSN and Yahoo and so on), they are getting punished for that. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
Basically, the business climate in the US is a little biased against a company like Google which appears to want to succeed on the basis of having integrity and offering an excellent product. Right now, Google rocks so much that that isn't stopping them, and hopefully it'll continue that way for a while.
I have a friend who is a serious, serious Disney fan. He takes being a Disney fan to a new level. He once played Disney Trivia (a knockoff of Trivial Pursuit where the subject matter is all Disney) with his wife, and she refused to play again because he got all the questions right and won on his first turn. He and his wife spent their honeymoon at Disneyland. And he mailed a wedding invitation to Mr. Mickey and Mrs. Minnie Mouse when he got married. (No, the Mouses weren't able to attend.)
Anyway, this is his take on the whole thing: if Disney and Pixar merge, this will prevent them from having to maintain separate computer / 3D animation studios. In effect, Pixar can take over all the 3D animation that Disney wants to do. This will free up Disney proper to get back to what they are (or were, but could be again?) actually good at: hand-drawn, non-computer, 2D animation.
Whether this is likely or not, I don't know. However, although people have said that hand-drawn animation is dead, my Disney freak friend and I agreed that that is about as likely as saying that since someone invented the camera, nobody is going to paint oil paintings anymore. The point is, we may have reached the stage where the novelty of 3D computer animation has worn off, and perhaps they (Disney, and others) will start doing hand-drawn animation again.
Actually, the memory is a lot faster on the new machines, but you're absolutely right about disk and all that other stuff.
Just so people don't have to fast-forward through the keynote (which is over an hour long), here's what Steve Jobs actually said about iMac Core Duo performance compared to the iMac G5:
So, what Jobs is saying is that the SPECint2000 and the SPECfp2000 performance is 2-3 times as fast, and he's also saying that those benchmarks are important, which admittedly is debatable. :-)
For what it's worth, I noticed that lots of the MacWorld tests focused on image processing. That's a useful thing to know about, but aren't most of thoses tasks going to be done using special stuff like Altivec or SSE? If that's the case, they're not really good comparisons of the regular performance of the processors.
Assuming you haven't entered into an agreement with anyone that says you won't give away their private information, there is absolutely nothing wrong with submitting this information to the goverment!
However, there is also absolutely nothing wrong with refusing to hand over the information if the organization doesn't feel like it. The problem here is that apparently the DoJ is acting like they are automatically entitled to the information because they are The Government.
Basically, the organization should have the right to choose to submit the information or not based on what the laws (which are supposed to ultimately be based on the constitution) require them to do, not based on the whims of some DoJ person who thinks they should get whatever they want whenever they want it.
I think that's possible, and it is good PR if that's what they're doing. Another possibility is that they are doing this because they mostly employ intelligent people who have the luxury, as one of the world's leading companies (at least by mindshare), of setting a good example for others and who are willing to pay their lawyers to do that just because they get satisfaction out of doing the right thing.
But then there's also a more down-to-earth explanation: Google could be doing this simply because, if they hand over the requested information now, it's going to establish a bad precedent, and pretty soon, they're going to have the government asking them for more and more data until they finally reach the point where they have hundreds of full-time employees (programmers, IT people, etc.) all working on providing reports for the government. And that's just a waste of time and money. Perhaps, at least partially, Google doesn't want to go down that road just because it would be a giant pain in the ass if they let the government think they're entitled to this.
I would argue that they're not a software company, but they're not a hardware company either. Instead, they're an integrated system company. Years ago, before the PC and Windows (and Linux, which has the same model) took over, you bought both an operating system and a computer. The two were pretty much inseperable. (This was how the IBM PC started out, as well as the Mac, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Commodore 64, the Apple ][, etc. And the same thing was true before personal computers: VAX machines had VMS, IBM machines had one of IBM's 99 different operating systems, etc.)
These days, not as many people are doing the same thing. Certainly if you buy a machine from Dell, Dell is working with Microsoft to make sure the system has all the right drivers. But that's not quite the same thing as an integrated platform where hardware design and software design are done by the same organization. Integrated hardware and software designs are available from Apple and also a few other companies like Sun. And the interesting thing is that both Apple and Sun have now adopted some x86 chips. Sun has Opteron servers and workstations available but continues to make new SPARC chips (including Niagara, a whole new series of chips), and Apple is using Intel chips in desktops and laptops.
For what it's worth, there is some value in an integrated system. Knowing that all the hardware and software come from the same place gives you a greater degree of confidence that it will all just work together. And if it doesn't, when you call for support, you are dealing with only one organization, so the blame game ("it must be the other vendor's product, not ours") is less likely. A certain percentage of the people are willing to pay a bit of a premium for these advantages, so that gives Apple (and Sun) a market that is a bit different from the regular market, which gives them a niche to play in.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that Apple has really snazzy industrial design and that people look at an Apple laptop and instantly want one without yet even knowing what's inside. Think of the amount of appeal PowerBooks have had for the last few years even despite the fact that they still contain slow G4 processors.
I can think of at least one good argument in favor of it being unethical for the others to enable the cheating: the CS graduate might later get a job writing software for someone's pacemaker, or an airplane flight control system, etc., etc. Maybe the cheating CS graduate isn't an obvious incompetent but just cheated on that one assignment where he couldn't figure out how to use semaphores correctly or something, in which case he might actually get hired to do something important and might appear to be capable.
(It's the perfect fit!)
This is easily defeated by making the reader require that the barcode is held for 1/2 second or by reading the barcode repeatedly and then sounding an alarm if the barcode changes from one valid barcode (one with a valid checksum) to another valid barcode.
Yes, you can easily combat that countermeasure of your own, which is slowing down the rate at which you present barcodes to the reader. But since it's a 2D barcode, chances are the number of possible barcodes is HUGE, because there are likely hundreds of bits in such a barcode. That means your chances of getting the valid one quick enough (before someone wonders why you're holding your phone up to the reader for 10 minutes) are virtually nil.
No, it's an excuse.
It's simply not that hard to use proper grammar, or at least pretty good grammar. I noticed that twice now you have suggested that everyone uses bad grammar when they fire off a quick e-mail. That's not true. I use good grammar even when I write a quick e-mail. I learned how to use good grammar when I was in school as a kid, and once you're in the habit, it just comes out right to begin with. (Yes, it does take initial effort to reach the point where you can do that.)
Also, good grammar and a casual tone aren't mutually exclusive like you are implying they are. I don't think anyone's suggesting that Slashdot should follow all the formal rules (not starting sentences with "And" or "But", not splitting infinitives, not using contractions, and stuff like that). All that's being asked is that people use grammar that's good enough that it doesn't distract people and make the text hard to read. That level of grammar isn't incompatible with a casual tone.
Google is already involved in television. They are involved in a cable channel called Current TV, in that they have a show on that channel called Google Current.
The basic principle, as far as I can tell, for the show is that the stories are chosen not on what some news editor thinks is news, but instead the topics are chosen based on information about which Google queries are most popular. (Kind of based on Google Zeitgeist.)
For what it's worth, another notable feature of Current TV is that supposedly 1/3 of their programming is produced by viewers rather than the network. This turns the traditional TV model (where networks produce content, and viewers do nothing but consume, i.e. purely one-way communication) on its ear. It's not quite like the Internet where almost anyone can self-publish almost anything, but it is an interesting twist on things.
Nope, but it's SO far beyond easy to implement that it almost wraps around to painful and difficult again. If you aren't trying to save a few bucks by using some old machine, just go to the local Fry's and buy a Mac Mini and two or three FireWire drives. Take it all home, find someplace with 1/2 square foot of empty space, plug it all in, boot up, run Disk Utility to make RAID 0, RAID 1, or concatenation as desired. Then finally, turn on "Windows Sharing" under Sharing in the preferences.
If formatting disks didn't take time, once the machine was booted up, you'd be done with the whole process in about 60 seconds.
Ah yes, I've read about that here. (It's got to be authentic, because nobody would think to fake that printout from an ImageWriter with a faded ribbon!)
It's probably relevant here what Jobs had to say in the keynote address about power consumption of these Intel processors versus the PowerPC G5 processors Apple was using. When you compare computing power versus electrical power used (bang for the watt), the Intel Core Duo processors' ratio of computing power to watts is something like 4.5 times as good as the G5.
Combine that with the fact that they say the Intel processors they're using are 2-3 times faster than the G5s, and if you do the math, it would seem that even though they are faster machines, they are using about 35-55% less electricity than the G5s did. And of course, using less electricity translates directly into producing less heat. And that translates into less noise.
I agree -- it will even be good for the US. It provides an extra level of redundancy, and what's more, it's engineered by a completely different group of people in a different country, so they may have different failure modes. Anyone for whom it's truly important to have accurate geolocation data will now have the option of getting a receiver for each system, with one serving as a backup to the other.
Nations other than the US and the EU nations will now have less risk of it shutting down because blocking acces to both systems will require the cooperation of the US and the EU.