The XScale doesn't have enough integrated peripherals for it to be cost effective. It's also a power hungry beast compared to competition.
Nughhh, huh, what? What other processor pulls 0.001W/MHz and can run up to 600MHz?
As to integrated peripherals: the standard PXA package has sufficient facilities to pull USB, bluetooth, several serial ports, a color LCD, memory management, audio, various wireless and wired networking options, I2C, and a big honking cache on a single chip. There's a reason the Gumstix is so small. There's also a good reason why the XScale is so popular with PDAs. And there's a dang good reason why the Newton MessagePad 2K, almost ten years old now, is still surprisingly competitive.
I don't mean to dis this guy, but this award list should not be used as a demonstration of impressiveness. It's very typical of a person in his situation. He's doing fine, but there are PLENTY of/. readers doing just as well, thanks. Of course there are also 13 year olds but...
While at NASA he got a grant -- from NASA. Internal grants of institutions like this are generally easier to come by than external ones (trust me, I have many), and more importantly, they're usually the result of a large number of people working on a proposal. Likewise, he has four patents listed, all variants of the same item: almost unquestionably this is joint work he's done with as a team member while at Microsoft. This is all good stuff to have on your resume, but it's not atypical.
Let me make it clear that I don't think Microsoft is evil a-la the Nazis.:-) But that stating that Group A can't be bad because it's mostly made up of "good, hardworking people" is an argument that's been made before, but mostly in propaganda. He needs to rethink his kool-aid.
The guy complains that people are referring to Microsoft as an "evil" company. He goes on a big long diatribe about how you can't say someone's working for an "evil" company if that company is made largely up of good, hardworking folk. And suddenly I got a World War II image. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's Law, try replacing The Nazis for Microsoft everywhere in his stuff below to see just how absurd his claim really is. Also replace politicial organization[s] for company[ies] and for group[s].
Microsoft's Not Evil
I'm probably the last person to end up defending Microsoft. I'm writing this on an Apple Powerbook. I've publically argued for more diversity in computing environments. But there's one thing people do that really drives me nuts: anthropomorphization.
I joined Microsoft at the beginning of the antitrust litigation against the company. My NASA coworkers made all sorts of derogatory comments about my choice. I remember one began a conversation with "So you've decided to go work for The Great Satan, huh?" A lot of people who ought to know better are convinced Microsoft is evil. Apologies if you're one of them -- because these people are idiots.
Companies (countries, races, etc.) are not "evil" or "good", and they do not have "intentions." Star Trek is science fiction -- there is no Borg mind. Companies, countries, races, and other groups are made up of individuals like you and me, who make individual decisions that determine the group's direction. People who speak of companies (or countries, or races, or other groups) as being good or evil are at best ignorant, and at worst bigots.
The reality is that Microsoft is made up of mostly honest, earnest, hardworking people. People with families. People with hardships. People with ordinary and extraordinary lives. People who make wise and foolish decisions. Some employees are bad apples, and some leaders make poor decisions (which their employees may or may not support). Both usually meet with failure. All the Microsoft employees I know are internally driven to "succeed," where success sometimes means outselling the competition but always means doing your personal best and improving people's lives with your work.
Although groups don't have intentions, it's true that group policies reward some kinds of behavior over others. So perhaps "Microsoft is evil" is shorthand for "Microsoft's policies are evil."
The thing is, I haven't seen any evidence of that on the inside -- and I'm usually very critical of these things. For as long as I've worked at Microsoft, ethics have been a real part of employee performance reviews. It's not just talk, but the way work goes each day. Most product designs revolve around addressing specific customer needs. No one ever says "Hey, let's go ruin company P" or other things that could be construed as "evil." Instead, it's "customers Q and R are having trouble with this, and I have an idea how we could fix it..." and other positive, constructive statements.
If anything, Microsoft seems to have the opposite problem, in which employees sometimes design or cut a feature or product without fully appreciating the huge impact their decision can have outside the company. When the media goes wild with knee-jerk reactions for or against something Microsoft did, often the employees responsible for the decision are caught off-guard by the disproportionate public attention.
It's referencing a Techdirt rumor article, which in turn only cites a random blogger who appears to have made the claim without any attribution at all.
My BS detector is going off big-time. It *is*/. though: should I have that fixed?
Countries do not have rights. People have rights. The people of China are not determining their own destiny: they are having it imposed on them by a dictatorial regime hell-bent on maintaining power by any way necessary. This regime in no way has any "right" to impose such brutal "customs". It only gets away with it because of its big guns.
And as far as I remember, majority of the professors when commenting on the differences between unis, did say that Eastern Europe ones seemed to give broader education than the US ones they've taught at.
My experience has been very strongly the opposite. But just to check on this I asked my Polish, Russian, and Romanian student friends. The answer: the US is much broader. The Italians and French say the same thing.
It's possible that the polish students were smarter. It's also unlikely. The US has eight times the population as poland. MIT is the US's top school, and is drawing on a larger population that competes to go there. Furthermore, a fair percentage of the best and brightest in the _world_ competes to attend US schools -- and not polish ones -- increasing that competitive pool dramatically. Simple statistics would suggest to me that various top US schools are strongly likely to have "smarter" kids than the various top polish schools simply because of the competition base on which they can draw.
This isn't to say Poland doesn't have bright students. Oh hell yes, they do. I have two friends here who among the top students in all of Poland. And it's also true that Poland doesn't have the poverty disparity that we do in the US. But it's still not going to counter the effects on our universities that our raw size and our worldwide educational draw can cause.
If you ever see Russian State Universities at the top of anything, be very, very cautious. I studied at MGU (Moscow State University) for a little while, and it was frankly appaling. They were taught extremely specific skillsets, they knew exactly what they would be tested in in advance of tests and didn't study *anything* else.
This is a highly spot-on comment. The problem ACM is now discovering, I suspect, is that in certain countries students at certain universities will work all year to compete in the programming contest, at the expense of all else. And in other (european) countries, the educational system is set up to strongly emphasize the major over breadth, producing students good at a certain vocational task -- computer algorithms, say -- but with no ability in things American students would find basic. The US educational system has a much heavier emphasis on breadth, under the presumption that education should teach you to be the Everyman, not just the Cog.
It's not at all surprising that the US doesn't perform well in the contest except in its best schools. Comparing the US against Poland only says that Polish students will study nothing but computer science, and settle on this concentration at a fairly early age compared to US students. Comparing the US against China and Moscow realy just says that certain Chinese and Russian universities have entire programs that do nothing but ACM programming contest work in order to get their names on the map.
This is a problem of how we're spreading the fertilizer. Maybe we should revisit what the ACM contest should be measuring: or its validity in the first place. Imagine a contest that requires students to put together code which does models in several different fields -- everything from economics to the arts -- and you don't know what the fields are beforehand. We'll see Moscow dropping off the ACM map real fast.
He makes two contradictions that completely unravel his entire premise that software patents are not evil.
First he says:
"There's nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software equivalent not."
Then later, he says:
"Building physical things is expensive and dangerous. The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to have to work as part of a larger group; and you're subject to a lot of regulations. You don't have any of that if you and a couple friends decide to create a new web-based application."
I fail to see where these are in contradiction. Graham is 100% correct, IMHO, that many mechanical patents are nothing more than the physical embodiment of control algorithms; but that early patent laws didn't see this. Now instead of banning such patents, or allowing algorithms in general, they instead attempt to allow software algorithms in through the side door by calling them non-algorithms.
Just because the two are conceptially the same doesn't mean that one isn't easier to construct than the other. You know, in theory there's no difference between theory and practice: but in practice there is a difference.
And again:
He says:
"A lot of companies (Microsoft, for example) have been granted large numbers of preposterously over-broad patents, but they keep them mainly for defensive purposes."
Then he says:
"They win by locking competitors out of their sales channels."
This isn't contradictory in the least: Microsoft use patents for defensive purposes because they have other ways of locking competitors out of their sales channels (by being big and bullying their distributors). What's not to understand here?
You may have some kind of point -- I'm not sure what it was -- but please don't call perfectly non-contradictory statements "contradictions". It just annoys the pig.
The last time I checked, one is innocent until proven guilty.
Only in criminal court.
But let's accept that the grandparent shouldn't have used the phrase "guilty". Even so, here's what we have: a student, who has has all but admitted to illegal file sharing, is being offered a settlement to avoid being sued for rather more money than that (likely). Is this a bullying, stronghanded tactic by the RIAA? Sure. Is it extortion? Absolutely not. Unless you (ahem) think that people should be presumed guilty of extortion before it's proven in court.
Words like "RICO", "extortion", and "threaten" suggest to me that you are in *fact* one of the lunatic fringe. At any rate, I find it very interesting that in the woman's sob story, she never once admitted that she was responsible for getting herself in this mess in the first place by doing something illegal. I'd bet you wouldn't admit that either.
(Please don't make any more points about words you don't understand.)
Let's start at the top of your goalpost-moving spectacle, jackass. We begin with this claim:
Well then, maybe Apple Inc shouldn't have "innovated" their company name by copying it off a Beatles record.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, baloney. Apple was named Apple because of Steve Jobs's current part-time profession. You got called to the mat for your malarky, but instead of backing down, you just made the same bald baloney assertion, now coupled with an additional claim that Apple licensed "its name" from Apple Records:
Apple Computers licensed their name from Apple Records. That's all the proof anyone needs. Even so, the common folklore story is (or was) that Steve Jobs came up with the Apple name while listening to Beatles records.
You got called to the mat on that one as well. Apple struck a trademark agreement with Apple Corps, not a license. But on you went moving the goalposts further:
Apple Computer paid millions of dollars for the right to use the "Apple" name in certain fields. Please explain how that's not a license agrement.
I don't see how an agreement struck in 1991 proves that Apple Computers took the idea from a Beatles record.
I didn't say it did -- only that it was a commonly repeated folklore story in the 1980s. Besides, what do any of us know about what Jobs/Woz may have admitted to under deposition? They may well have fessed up to it!
Yes, who indeed knows? Since none of us knows, let's just make stuff up! Steve Jobs struck a deal with space aliens. Who knows if he didn't? Certainly you and I don't. And it's a commonly repeated folklore? Where? By whom? Did you just pull this out of your butt? It's commonly assumed you did. So I call you to the mat on that, and you move the goalposts even further:
Obviously there's been decades of "spin" around the issue, so at this point there's plenty of folklore to go around. But, Apple Computer has been licencing their trademark from Apple Records since 1981 (long before they had a sound chip even), so if you follow the money, it's pretty obvious why.
"Has been licensing" implies repeatedly obtaining licenses (or paying for them). Apple has done nothing of the sort, so far as we know. They struck a deal with Apple Records: as long as Apple kept on its side of the trademark, and paid Apple Records off, Apple Records wouldn't sue. And then you had that fun bit about "sound chips" and "following the money", not really knowing what you're talking about there. But after I called you on that, you didn't respond. You just moved the goal posts again:
They paid a lump sum for partial rights.
Which is pretty much the definition of a license. (Please don't make any more points about words you don't understand.)
Yeah. Thankfully, I know what a license is. But "licensed in 1981" is different from "has been licensing since 1981". You claimed, IMHO, that Apple has been repeatedly obtaining licenses from Apple Records, rather than receiving a one-time right for a one-time sum. You also claimed that Apple was named after a Beatles record, that Apple "bought its name" from Apple Records, and that it must have been before 1981 because that was before there was a "sound chip" in the machine. Can you just back down and admit you don't know what the hell you're talking about? It'll make us all feel a little better about feeding a troll.
I sure hope Sun's got a trademark on that name
on
Sun's Open Source DRM
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Otherwise these guys may have something to say about it.
Obviously there's been decades of "spin" around the issue, so at this point there's plenty of folklore to go around. But, Apple Computer has been licencing their trademark from Apple Records since 1981 (long before they had a sound chip even), so if you follow the money, it's pretty obvious why.
Uhm, could it be because the Apple ][ was more than capable of producing music? In 1978? And Apple Records was worried about trademark dilution?
Apple has not been "licensing" their trademark from the Beatles. They paid a lump sum for partial rights.
Re:You say you want a revolution?
on
On Apple vs Apple
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· Score: 2, Informative
I didn't say it did -- only that it was a commonly repeated folklore story in the 1980s. Besides, what do any of us know about what Jobs/Woz may have admitted to under deposition? They may well have fessed up to it!
"Common" only to you.
The standard story about how Apple got its name was that Steve Jobs (who was working at an apple orchard at the time) threatened to call the company "Apple Computer", after the orchard's fruit, if no one could come up with a better name by 5 pm. Didn't have a damn thing to do with Apple Records.
Network transfers. We chose Dell 1425s running Fedora instead of XServes running 10.4 largely because our benchmarks found the XServes had a huge network latency. It took us almost ten times longer to emit packets in some cases.
So far MAC users were proud of their closed door OS which runs on specific hardware, is bullet proof and user friendly.. Why now MAC user want to even try to run windows on their highly expensive hardware? What happend once average MAC user gets addicted to supereasy but insecure windows? Will MAC loose or increase their marketshare? Interesting question
Another interesting question: Will Slashdot ever learn that "Mac" isn't an acronym? It's short for "Macintosh".
Apparently Google doesn't know either. So I think I'm in good company. I'm calling shenanigans on you.
If you're including expected future social security and medicare outlays, largely due to the baby boom, that's wonderful. It's also relatively irrelevant to our current outlays. Which, I might add, you also got wrong. I think the "committed debt", so to speak, is more relevant to our expected future revenues, which you didn't bother to include. Oh, and to real dollars, which I suspect you ommitted to make your number sound scarier.
Eliminating government's pax romana generally results in law by thuggery. The degree to which thugs rule successfully tends to be proportional to how close people live together: it's why libertarians tend to live in Montana. Libertarians find few friends in cities, and with good reason.
CATO does have libertarian roots, but its libertarianism is staunchly locked in the Republican camp. "left-wing" libertarians find few friends at CATO.
Slashdot Mirror
As to integrated peripherals: the standard PXA package has sufficient facilities to pull USB, bluetooth, several serial ports, a color LCD, memory management, audio, various wireless and wired networking options, I2C, and a big honking cache on a single chip. There's a reason the Gumstix is so small. There's also a good reason why the XScale is so popular with PDAs. And there's a dang good reason why the Newton MessagePad 2K, almost ten years old now, is still surprisingly competitive.
I don't mean to dis this guy, but this award list should not be used as a demonstration of impressiveness. It's very typical of a person in his situation. He's doing fine, but there are PLENTY of /. readers doing just as well, thanks. Of course there are also 13 year olds but...
While at NASA he got a grant -- from NASA. Internal grants of institutions like this are generally easier to come by than external ones (trust me, I have many), and more importantly, they're usually the result of a large number of people working on a proposal. Likewise, he has four patents listed, all variants of the same item: almost unquestionably this is joint work he's done with as a team member while at Microsoft. This is all good stuff to have on your resume, but it's not atypical.
Let me make it clear that I don't think Microsoft is evil a-la the Nazis. :-) But that stating that Group A can't be bad because it's mostly made up of "good, hardworking people" is an argument that's been made before, but mostly in propaganda. He needs to rethink his kool-aid.
It's referencing a Techdirt rumor article, which in turn only cites a random blogger who appears to have made the claim without any attribution at all. My BS detector is going off big-time. It *is* /. though: should I have that fixed?
Countries do not have rights. People have rights. The people of China are not determining their own destiny: they are having it imposed on them by a dictatorial regime hell-bent on maintaining power by any way necessary. This regime in no way has any "right" to impose such brutal "customs". It only gets away with it because of its big guns.
That's why MIT is also in the top ranks in the contest.
It's possible that the polish students were smarter. It's also unlikely. The US has eight times the population as poland. MIT is the US's top school, and is drawing on a larger population that competes to go there. Furthermore, a fair percentage of the best and brightest in the _world_ competes to attend US schools -- and not polish ones -- increasing that competitive pool dramatically. Simple statistics would suggest to me that various top US schools are strongly likely to have "smarter" kids than the various top polish schools simply because of the competition base on which they can draw. This isn't to say Poland doesn't have bright students. Oh hell yes, they do. I have two friends here who among the top students in all of Poland. And it's also true that Poland doesn't have the poverty disparity that we do in the US. But it's still not going to counter the effects on our universities that our raw size and our worldwide educational draw can cause.
This is a highly spot-on comment. The problem ACM is now discovering, I suspect, is that in certain countries students at certain universities will work all year to compete in the programming contest, at the expense of all else. And in other (european) countries, the educational system is set up to strongly emphasize the major over breadth, producing students good at a certain vocational task -- computer algorithms, say -- but with no ability in things American students would find basic. The US educational system has a much heavier emphasis on breadth, under the presumption that education should teach you to be the Everyman, not just the Cog.
It's not at all surprising that the US doesn't perform well in the contest except in its best schools. Comparing the US against Poland only says that Polish students will study nothing but computer science, and settle on this concentration at a fairly early age compared to US students. Comparing the US against China and Moscow realy just says that certain Chinese and Russian universities have entire programs that do nothing but ACM programming contest work in order to get their names on the map.
This is a problem of how we're spreading the fertilizer. Maybe we should revisit what the ACM contest should be measuring: or its validity in the first place. Imagine a contest that requires students to put together code which does models in several different fields -- everything from economics to the arts -- and you don't know what the fields are beforehand. We'll see Moscow dropping off the ACM map real fast.
I fail to see where these are in contradiction. Graham is 100% correct, IMHO, that many mechanical patents are nothing more than the physical embodiment of control algorithms; but that early patent laws didn't see this. Now instead of banning such patents, or allowing algorithms in general, they instead attempt to allow software algorithms in through the side door by calling them non-algorithms.
Just because the two are conceptially the same doesn't mean that one isn't easier to construct than the other. You know, in theory there's no difference between theory and practice: but in practice there is a difference.
And again:
This isn't contradictory in the least: Microsoft use patents for defensive purposes because they have other ways of locking competitors out of their sales channels (by being big and bullying their distributors). What's not to understand here?
You may have some kind of point -- I'm not sure what it was -- but please don't call perfectly non-contradictory statements "contradictions". It just annoys the pig.
But let's accept that the grandparent shouldn't have used the phrase "guilty". Even so, here's what we have: a student, who has has all but admitted to illegal file sharing, is being offered a settlement to avoid being sued for rather more money than that (likely). Is this a bullying, stronghanded tactic by the RIAA? Sure. Is it extortion? Absolutely not. Unless you (ahem) think that people should be presumed guilty of extortion before it's proven in court.
Words like "RICO", "extortion", and "threaten" suggest to me that you are in *fact* one of the lunatic fringe. At any rate, I find it very interesting that in the woman's sob story, she never once admitted that she was responsible for getting herself in this mess in the first place by doing something illegal. I'd bet you wouldn't admit that either.
Let's start at the top of your goalpost-moving spectacle, jackass. We begin with this claim:
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, baloney. Apple was named Apple because of Steve Jobs's current part-time profession. You got called to the mat for your malarky, but instead of backing down, you just made the same bald baloney assertion, now coupled with an additional claim that Apple licensed "its name" from Apple Records:
You got called to the mat on that one as well. Apple struck a trademark agreement with Apple Corps, not a license. But on you went moving the goalposts further:
Yes, who indeed knows? Since none of us knows, let's just make stuff up! Steve Jobs struck a deal with space aliens. Who knows if he didn't? Certainly you and I don't. And it's a commonly repeated folklore? Where? By whom? Did you just pull this out of your butt? It's commonly assumed you did. So I call you to the mat on that, and you move the goalposts even further:
"Has been licensing" implies repeatedly obtaining licenses (or paying for them). Apple has done nothing of the sort, so far as we know. They struck a deal with Apple Records: as long as Apple kept on its side of the trademark, and paid Apple Records off, Apple Records wouldn't sue. And then you had that fun bit about "sound chips" and "following the money", not really knowing what you're talking about there. But after I called you on that, you didn't respond. You just moved the goal posts again:
Yeah. Thankfully, I know what a license is. But "licensed in 1981" is different from "has been licensing since 1981". You claimed, IMHO, that Apple has been repeatedly obtaining licenses from Apple Records, rather than receiving a one-time right for a one-time sum. You also claimed that Apple was named after a Beatles record, that Apple "bought its name" from Apple Records, and that it must have been before 1981 because that was before there was a "sound chip" in the machine. Can you just back down and admit you don't know what the hell you're talking about? It'll make us all feel a little better about feeding a troll.
Otherwise these guys may have something to say about it.
Apple has not been "licensing" their trademark from the Beatles. They paid a lump sum for partial rights.
"Common" only to you.
The standard story about how Apple got its name was that Steve Jobs (who was working at an apple orchard at the time) threatened to call the company "Apple Computer", after the orchard's fruit, if no one could come up with a better name by 5 pm. Didn't have a damn thing to do with Apple Records.
Network transfers. We chose Dell 1425s running Fedora instead of XServes running 10.4 largely because our benchmarks found the XServes had a huge network latency. It took us almost ten times longer to emit packets in some cases.
while(!fork());
This one is essentially un-killable as it keeps changing its PID. Here's more such fun:
while(!fork()) fork();
hehe...
I might also add that the AEI study never uses the phrase "committed debt" once.
Not all encumbrances are debts. There's some English for you.
If you're including expected future social security and medicare outlays, largely due to the baby boom, that's wonderful. It's also relatively irrelevant to our current outlays. Which, I might add, you also got wrong. I think the "committed debt", so to speak, is more relevant to our expected future revenues, which you didn't bother to include. Oh, and to real dollars, which I suspect you ommitted to make your number sound scarier.
Post-revolutionary France didn't work out so hot.
Somalia wasn't great either.
Eliminating government's pax romana generally results in law by thuggery. The degree to which thugs rule successfully tends to be proportional to how close people live together: it's why libertarians tend to live in Montana. Libertarians find few friends in cities, and with good reason.
CATO does have libertarian roots, but its libertarianism is staunchly locked in the Republican camp. "left-wing" libertarians find few friends at CATO.