I don't think there's really anything to this story in regards to anything technical. Policy, as he says, will remain relatively unchanged. The main thing is his reaction to being in the public's eye, and his actions under the pressure of unfounded allegations.
The same thing happens to all politicians and anyone in the public's eye. George W Bush sloughs off criticism about his military past. Bill Clinton was able to sidestep allegations of sexual harassment in the Paula Jones case and tackled the issue head on in the Lewinsky witchhunt. Vince Foster blew his brains own brains out.
Public scrutiny really shows the true character and intestinal fortitude of the scrutinized.
The problem with any new interface is its rate of acceptance. With standard QWERTY keyboards firmly entrenched, there really isn't a place for a new keyboard layout for computers.
However, there are many places where a well-designed keyboard could be useful. Cell phones need a good keyboard design. Cash registers are notoriously over-keyed. Even airport check in counters could stand a new interface.
The site isn't loading the picture of the keyboard, but aside from the "split" keyboard, there really hasn't been any keyboard layout that has caught on.
Google has been quite adept at keeping themselves distanced from obvious corporate sponsorship. Their advertising model has been refreshing, with ad space sold very democratically. In addition, their decision to keep advertising to simple text has made using their search engine, even with advertisements, pleasurable to use.
I do not understand the need to partner with AOL, except that AOL perhaps brings in quite a bit of advertising revenue. The downside, though, is obvious. Google has lost their independence and is slowly succumbing to AOL's wishes. First is image advertisements.
I wonder what the general consensus at Google is about this latest deal. Perhaps they don't expect to lose users when the new ads arrive, or maybe they are strapped for cash and AOL's money is bailing them out. I don't know, but I do know that I don't like AOL, and I don't like image advertisements. It's why I have Adblock installed and why I don't frequent certain other sites anymore.
This is a big mistake, I think. In a long-term business sense, I simply don't see what could possibly be so attractive. Then again, I haven't seen the check that AOL used to buy Google's soul. It may have been worth it.
If it were closer to Cydonia, maybe we could pick up movement as the little guys take the spacecraft away and hide it in top secret Martian military bunkers.
I hope they don't have an equivalent Will Smith fighter pilot capable of flying our space ships over there. It'll make our invasion that much harder.
I am curious. Is this the next sequential prime after the previous one? Is it possible that there are other primes between this new one and the one found before it?
No, I blame Microsoft for incorporating the copy protection mechanism into XP which requires me to call Microsoft when I want to reinstall my OS.
I do not blame them for Dell's unwillingness to provide me with a clean installation. But I do blame them for making it difficult for me to re-image my machine without going through a lot of hoops to satisfy the copy protection mechanism.
Which is why I stick with Windows2000, which allows me to do just that when I need to.
This isn't bad because it limits freedom or any such nonsense. That's a lot of hot air blown by zealots with lots more free time than brain cells.
This is bad legislation because it attempts to force certain types of technology into existence. While a government program designed to discourage people from engaging in media piracy would be a good thing, mandating that all devices have this built in is simply a way to skirt the issue while appearing to be tackling the problem.
Such a law does not stop what it is intended to stop. Pirates will still be able to break the encryption, replicate the media, and resell it on the open street in lands far away from where American law can reach. This law is useless anywhere other than America.
What you get, instead of stopping piracy, is a mandated standard form of copy encryption and DRM that may or may not be adequate for everyone's needs. Instead of letting the market figure out what forms of DRM will be used, the government decides that it's items A, B, and C that need to be addressed. Nevermind that in the future item B may no longer be useful and item D is not provided for at all.
It's unfortunate that the respectable John Conyers (D) is drafting this bill. I would have expected more from the gentleman.
I don't think it's a problem either. In fact, it's part of the ecosystem that many "bottom feeders" will exist to service the needs of Joe's Silicon Shack and the rest of the little hardware players. These are typically very small shops of a handful of engineers who know one part of the system very well and can provide the driver imlementation at a low enough cost.
As long as people are innovating new devices, or don't want to pay licensing fees for existing drivers, little shops that specialize in writing new drivers will always exist.
I think Dell makes a good case here for why vendors should be forced to package clean OS discs and why Microsoft is helping these fools cause headaches by making it difficult to reinstall the OS. The first thing that should happen with these machines is that the existing installation ought to be wiped and replaced with an absolutely clean version of the OS, no software, just the OS. Critical updates ought to be packaged on discs as well.
But instead you get "backup CDs" (not even provided in the case of this Dell!) which bring you back to the OEM's idea of a starting point. That's probably fine for most desktops, but on laptops you never know which uninstall is about to break the touchpad or cause the monitor to stop working.
I keep Win2K around, with all its slow bootup times and lousy hardware support, just because I am able to reinstall when I need to. And, it's just so good that I hardly ever need to. XP? It may be technically better, but unless I have the ability to reinstall it on my own machines at my whim, it's useless.
I suppose it depends on the type of customer you are. If you are someone who wants to put RedHat on your company's servers, they'll be happy to set you up with a support contract. But if you are someone who wants RedHat to port a driver for some esoteric piece of hardware, you've got to have a long-term viability (Texas Instruments = Good, Joe's Silicon Shack = Bad). And of course, if you want them to port those drivers, they aren't going to do it for free.
It's not so much an anti-customer mindset than a focused business mindset. Work on partnerships that are meaningful, work with customers with a strong track record, and cash up front.
Redhat is where it is because it is the company that employs the people who write Linux, most notably Alan Cox. There is a lot of code in the Linux kernel and periphery that simply wouldn't be there if Redhat wasn't around to pay these programmers to put it in there.
So if we consider the authors of the source as the ultimate support channel, then Redhat will always filter its way to the top. Throw in the existing momentum behind the platform, both on the "child" distros side and the business side, and you've got an unstoppable (for now) juggernaut. Want embedded Linux? Montavista's got a custom RedHat Linux for you. Want some esoteric hardware supported? Redhat's gone through the trouble to port a driver for you.
It's so far ahead of every other commercial distribution that it's not even funny.
Is it ahead/better than non-commercial distros like Debian? No, probably not. But they aren't really competing against each other.
In relation to their adult ability, the increased rate of maturity will allow them to reach their potential quicker than humans in a determined period of time. At 12 months, a chipmanzee, in my understanding (which may be insufficient, I'm not a primatologist), will be further along towards maturity than a human of the same age. This gives the chimp a headstart on the human child.
So let's say a mature chimp's maximum ability is 50 points and a human's is 200 points. At 1 year, the baby chimp has achieved 50% of its maximum mature-level ability. It is at 25 points. Now a human baby may have only reached 10% of its maximum level because of the delay in development. The human baby is only at 20 points, which is 5 points lower than the same age chimp.
Now, those numbers above are ALL made up and aren't valid for anything but a very simple explanation of how I came to my conclusion, but my gut feeling would be that the results of such an experiment would bear out something similar (and which, given no other information, this article shows).
Knowing only that they would be testing human toddlers vs adolescent chimpanzees? I would have predicted that the toddlers would fail by a mile. If you performed the same experiment with human toddlers vs human adolescents, I'd expect similar results.
This isn't because I think that chimps are our mental equals, but because the human toddler is underdeveloped and essentially helpless compared to a similarly aged chimpanzee.
Human babies have a prolonged childhood. Whereas a chimpanzee may be considered an adult by age three, humans may not even reach (emotional) adulthood until well into their 30s. So it seems a little disingenuous to compare chimpanzees to human babies when the rates of growth and maturity are so different.
It used to read DVD-RAM discs just fine. Now, it says that the disc is unreadable.
I'm another victim of the DVD format wars.
I'm glad that the industry is standardizing the next generation media now when there are very few (any?) players on the market. It's good to have a standard, even if it is a de facto standard rather than a de jure standard.
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I've stuck my foot's own foot in my mouth's own mouth.
I don't think there's really anything to this story in regards to anything technical. Policy, as he says, will remain relatively unchanged. The main thing is his reaction to being in the public's eye, and his actions under the pressure of unfounded allegations.
The same thing happens to all politicians and anyone in the public's eye. George W Bush sloughs off criticism about his military past. Bill Clinton was able to sidestep allegations of sexual harassment in the Paula Jones case and tackled the issue head on in the Lewinsky witchhunt. Vince Foster blew his brains own brains out.
Public scrutiny really shows the true character and intestinal fortitude of the scrutinized.
I had a lot of respect for John Conyers. Unfortunately, with this bill, he's spent all his political capital in my eyes.
I'd love if there were a DRM system that worked invisibly and was effective at both stopping piracy as well as permitting fair usage.
That would be awesome.
The problem with any new interface is its rate of acceptance. With standard QWERTY keyboards firmly entrenched, there really isn't a place for a new keyboard layout for computers.
However, there are many places where a well-designed keyboard could be useful. Cell phones need a good keyboard design. Cash registers are notoriously over-keyed. Even airport check in counters could stand a new interface.
The site isn't loading the picture of the keyboard, but aside from the "split" keyboard, there really hasn't been any keyboard layout that has caught on.
Google has been quite adept at keeping themselves distanced from obvious corporate sponsorship. Their advertising model has been refreshing, with ad space sold very democratically. In addition, their decision to keep advertising to simple text has made using their search engine, even with advertisements, pleasurable to use.
I do not understand the need to partner with AOL, except that AOL perhaps brings in quite a bit of advertising revenue. The downside, though, is obvious. Google has lost their independence and is slowly succumbing to AOL's wishes. First is image advertisements.
I wonder what the general consensus at Google is about this latest deal. Perhaps they don't expect to lose users when the new ads arrive, or maybe they are strapped for cash and AOL's money is bailing them out. I don't know, but I do know that I don't like AOL, and I don't like image advertisements. It's why I have Adblock installed and why I don't frequent certain other sites anymore.
This is a big mistake, I think. In a long-term business sense, I simply don't see what could possibly be so attractive. Then again, I haven't seen the check that AOL used to buy Google's soul. It may have been worth it.
If it were closer to Cydonia, maybe we could pick up movement as the little guys take the spacecraft away and hide it in top secret Martian military bunkers.
I hope they don't have an equivalent Will Smith fighter pilot capable of flying our space ships over there. It'll make our invasion that much harder.
Makes sense. That's what I was wondering.
The ID for this story is 171673 which is itself a prime number.
Clever clever!
I am curious. Is this the next sequential prime after the previous one? Is it possible that there are other primes between this new one and the one found before it?
I wonder what sort of programming language would be needed to manipulate such esoteric devices.
No, I blame Microsoft for incorporating the copy protection mechanism into XP which requires me to call Microsoft when I want to reinstall my OS.
I do not blame them for Dell's unwillingness to provide me with a clean installation. But I do blame them for making it difficult for me to re-image my machine without going through a lot of hoops to satisfy the copy protection mechanism.
Which is why I stick with Windows2000, which allows me to do just that when I need to.
This isn't bad because it limits freedom or any such nonsense. That's a lot of hot air blown by zealots with lots more free time than brain cells.
This is bad legislation because it attempts to force certain types of technology into existence. While a government program designed to discourage people from engaging in media piracy would be a good thing, mandating that all devices have this built in is simply a way to skirt the issue while appearing to be tackling the problem.
Such a law does not stop what it is intended to stop. Pirates will still be able to break the encryption, replicate the media, and resell it on the open street in lands far away from where American law can reach. This law is useless anywhere other than America.
What you get, instead of stopping piracy, is a mandated standard form of copy encryption and DRM that may or may not be adequate for everyone's needs. Instead of letting the market figure out what forms of DRM will be used, the government decides that it's items A, B, and C that need to be addressed. Nevermind that in the future item B may no longer be useful and item D is not provided for at all.
It's unfortunate that the respectable John Conyers (D) is drafting this bill. I would have expected more from the gentleman.
I don't think it's a problem either. In fact, it's part of the ecosystem that many "bottom feeders" will exist to service the needs of Joe's Silicon Shack and the rest of the little hardware players. These are typically very small shops of a handful of engineers who know one part of the system very well and can provide the driver imlementation at a low enough cost.
As long as people are innovating new devices, or don't want to pay licensing fees for existing drivers, little shops that specialize in writing new drivers will always exist.
I think Dell makes a good case here for why vendors should be forced to package clean OS discs and why Microsoft is helping these fools cause headaches by making it difficult to reinstall the OS. The first thing that should happen with these machines is that the existing installation ought to be wiped and replaced with an absolutely clean version of the OS, no software, just the OS. Critical updates ought to be packaged on discs as well.
But instead you get "backup CDs" (not even provided in the case of this Dell!) which bring you back to the OEM's idea of a starting point. That's probably fine for most desktops, but on laptops you never know which uninstall is about to break the touchpad or cause the monitor to stop working.
I keep Win2K around, with all its slow bootup times and lousy hardware support, just because I am able to reinstall when I need to. And, it's just so good that I hardly ever need to. XP? It may be technically better, but unless I have the ability to reinstall it on my own machines at my whim, it's useless.
I suppose it depends on the type of customer you are. If you are someone who wants to put RedHat on your company's servers, they'll be happy to set you up with a support contract. But if you are someone who wants RedHat to port a driver for some esoteric piece of hardware, you've got to have a long-term viability (Texas Instruments = Good, Joe's Silicon Shack = Bad). And of course, if you want them to port those drivers, they aren't going to do it for free.
It's not so much an anti-customer mindset than a focused business mindset. Work on partnerships that are meaningful, work with customers with a strong track record, and cash up front.
Redhat is where it is because it is the company that employs the people who write Linux, most notably Alan Cox. There is a lot of code in the Linux kernel and periphery that simply wouldn't be there if Redhat wasn't around to pay these programmers to put it in there.
So if we consider the authors of the source as the ultimate support channel, then Redhat will always filter its way to the top. Throw in the existing momentum behind the platform, both on the "child" distros side and the business side, and you've got an unstoppable (for now) juggernaut. Want embedded Linux? Montavista's got a custom RedHat Linux for you. Want some esoteric hardware supported? Redhat's gone through the trouble to port a driver for you.
It's so far ahead of every other commercial distribution that it's not even funny.
Is it ahead/better than non-commercial distros like Debian? No, probably not. But they aren't really competing against each other.
Pavel invented the personal portable stereo player. Sony invented the Walkman.
You wouldn't say Nintendo invented the Playstation, would you?
If you take a look around at the current state of locomotion, you'll find that steam engines are largely a thing of the past.
What has taken their place? Diesel electric trains.
What's going to be the next big thing in American car engines? Diesel.
Forget steam, it's a toy. Diesel electric will run our cars into the next decades until the oil fields dry up.
Who cares what people are paying to advertise?
No, that's not what I meant.
In relation to their adult ability, the increased rate of maturity will allow them to reach their potential quicker than humans in a determined period of time. At 12 months, a chipmanzee, in my understanding (which may be insufficient, I'm not a primatologist), will be further along towards maturity than a human of the same age. This gives the chimp a headstart on the human child.
So let's say a mature chimp's maximum ability is 50 points and a human's is 200 points. At 1 year, the baby chimp has achieved 50% of its maximum mature-level ability. It is at 25 points. Now a human baby may have only reached 10% of its maximum level because of the delay in development. The human baby is only at 20 points, which is 5 points lower than the same age chimp.
Now, those numbers above are ALL made up and aren't valid for anything but a very simple explanation of how I came to my conclusion, but my gut feeling would be that the results of such an experiment would bear out something similar (and which, given no other information, this article shows).
Knowing only that they would be testing human toddlers vs adolescent chimpanzees? I would have predicted that the toddlers would fail by a mile. If you performed the same experiment with human toddlers vs human adolescents, I'd expect similar results.
This isn't because I think that chimps are our mental equals, but because the human toddler is underdeveloped and essentially helpless compared to a similarly aged chimpanzee.
Human babies have a prolonged childhood. Whereas a chimpanzee may be considered an adult by age three, humans may not even reach (emotional) adulthood until well into their 30s. So it seems a little disingenuous to compare chimpanzees to human babies when the rates of growth and maturity are so different.
It used to read DVD-RAM discs just fine. Now, it says that the disc is unreadable.
I'm another victim of the DVD format wars.
I'm glad that the industry is standardizing the next generation media now when there are very few (any?) players on the market. It's good to have a standard, even if it is a de facto standard rather than a de jure standard.
How empty your life must be to revel in the death of someone you don't even know.