I agree, though, even better yet, keep them as a "red team" continuing to work on ways to subvert google's results, and keep on shifting tactics to stop them.
To a degree, but the more interesting argument was that new hardware tends to be released with windows drivers first. Apple also doesn't offer anywhere near the range of choice in (say) powerful video cards.
Finally, next generation video cards are being designed for... yes... DirectX10, and, ultimately, Vista. It's conceivable that Apple will persuade AMD or NVidia to design for some next-generation Apple video standard, but it doesn't seem likely.
I find all that persuasive. What I didn't find persuasive was the article leaving out the fairly serious performance problems Vista has with many games (vs. XP) on the same hardware.
I also thought the article's dismissal of bootcamp/parallels was a little too quick.
If I posted "Just because Windows 98 has lots of security holes doesn't mean OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD is any more secure. I'm pretty sure that's true. I'll have to do some research to back this up", would I really get modded insightful?
Although one of the Powers in conflict may not be a party to the present Convention, the Powers who are parties thereto shall remain bound by it in their mutual relations. They shall furthermore be bound by the Convention in relation to the said Power, if the latter accepts and applies the provisions thereof.
In other words, signatories are bound if a non-signatory abides by the convention, otherwise they aren't. Since beheading people, parading them on TV, and mass suicide bombings of civilians are clearly non-compliant with the Conventions, the US is not bound by GCIII as a matter of international law in dealing with al Qaeda or similar organizations.
That doesn't mean the US can do whatever it wants -- it's still not allowed to kill people it's captured, and UCMJ also applies.
It also doesn't prevent the US from abiding by GCIII, and here as a matter of personal opinion I think the administration was very unwise and set a foolish precedent. Your opinion may vary.
In Vietnam, for example, the US chose to treat North Vietnamese POW's under the Conventions, but not the Vietcong, even though neither force was abiding by the Geneva Conventions.
The Radeon X1950 beats the NVidia cards in every single test save for the "synthetic" crapmark test that has nothing to do with reality.
Interesting, that's not what I've been seeing in tests. In fact, in most tests it seems the 8800 GTX beats the X1950 XTX
In context, it's clear the GP was referring to the NVidia cards that were reviewed by the article. And he's mostly right. In only one (of many) actual gaming benchmark did any of the Nvidia cards reviewed outperform the X1950.
Where I believe the GP is mistaken is in his conclusions about the article. The article itself says, in conclusion:
The 256MB version of the Radeon X1950 Pro is faster in most games, and by a pretty good margin, too.
The article notes, correctly I think, that the X1650XT is not a good card for gamers to buy. It notes that the 1950 won't do DirectX10, and the budget NVidia cards may not be fast enough to do it well either.
However, it's also instructive to have a look at this review at Hard OCP. There, in two demanding games (Oblivion and STALKER), the 8600 GTS appears to win handily over the 1950XT. If those benchmarks are accurate, it suggests the ExtremeTech article may draw conclusions that are too favorable to the X1950.
Ah well, interesting times for all gfx card consumers!
Despite the fact that the real reason there are few women in CS -- men in the field discriminating against women -- is put blatantly before them every time they look in the mirror.
You're making an assertion that this is the real reason. Where's the proof?
Do you really contend that [male] engineers and CS types were and are more discriminatory towards women than, say, lawyers or doctors? Doesn't the fact that women hit a high of about 35-40% in the profession -- back in 1985 -- then steadily declined point to possibly some other reasons?
Your argument is that law, business and medicine cleaned up its act towards women in the 70's and 80's. I'd agree with that. You further argue that CS didn't, and remains biased to this day. I don't agree with that at all. The article itself, in noting a 1985 peak, suggests it's much more complex than your 'Oh it's discrimination against women' assertion.
Personally, I'm all for an end to most forms of gender discrimination. (For example, I think allowing only women to be rape counselors for women is a valid form of gender discrimination.) I get uneasy, however, when I see people pushing for significant changes in entrance standards that appear, on the surface, to be designed to discriminate on the basis of gender.
The article notes a anecdotal example of a young man with three field-relevant patents that was denied a space at the university for a female applicant presumably less qualified in "programming", but perhaps more qualified in "leadership skills". While it's difficult to tell for sure, since the article cheerfully glosses over the issue, it does seem that were this policy applied in reverse it would be rightly condemned as extreme sexism.
Now, I agree with you sex/gender discrimination exists. It exists both as a force for -- and definitely against -- women. I remain unconvinced that it is a significant barrier preventing women from entering the CS field (as compared to law, medicine, or any other profession). If you're going to assert that male CS-types are significantly more biased and bigoted than male lawyers and doctors, let's see some evidence please. My own experience, and those of the women in my family that are in the field is very much the reverse.
Actually most of the junk falling out of the sky is the 'good' news, notwithstanding how disturbed the flight crew must have been. (inasmuch as there is good news at all). Most of it is relatively small; that which isn't is usually tracked more precisely. The article notes that they got the timing wrong for the terminal de-orbit of that satellite (and hence the position as well).
The really bad news is the junk that isn't de-orbiting, but staying up there. As the second article notes, even if we stopped all launches today, collisions and resulting fragmentations (creating even more space junk objects) would only be balanced by de-orbiting space junk up until 2055, after which time the number of objects would increase for circa 200 years.
While a $100m satellite being destroyed may just be bad news for taxpayers, or shareholders (and hence pension funds) or TV viewers, or GPS users, it might also be very bad news for people in remote communities who rely on telemedicine. There are a lot of increasingly critical applications that depend on satellites.
I thought companys that made employee's conform to a dress code were bad, but they dictate what customers have to wear ?
I can't resist. You've not heard of "no shirt, no shoes, no service"?
Back slightly on track: While I agree with the GP that a myspace page doesn't positively impress me, it's not me -- or the GP -- that the page is aimed at. Politicians who advertise during sports venues don't impress me either, but they obviously impress someone or they wouldn't be doing it.
As the linked entry notes, this original wireless vulnerability (and Apple's very heavy-handed response) appears to have lead to MoAB. Since MoAB Apple has erupted into a flurry of vulnerability fixes. This is in fact good news for Mac users. Far from being a smear campaign, MoAB pointed to a series of real vulnerabilities in Apple products, on Apple platforms, and, yes, in third party software. And Apple's fixing them, and preemptively fixing new vulnerabilities.
Great.
MoAB was nothing but a smear campaign. I'm happy to see Apple smearing them back.
Not so great.
As a couple of others pointed out, MoAB largely was 'Apple bugs'. But even if it weren't, you're happy to see a company smearing two individual security researchers unaffiliated with MoAB?
You'd rather see the platform you (I assume) use and love be unaudited, have a series of vulnerabilities, and the company spend its energy not on sound engineering but 'smearing' critics?
You'd be happy to see Microsoft smearing critics of Windows 'security'?
Happy to see Sony smearing those who uncovered its rootkit CD's?
Music is licensed on a per-country basis. Often, different organizations/people hold the rights in different countries. A Canadian band, for instance, might keep (or buy back) Canadian rights, but a major label would have the US rights, and a Europeans subsidiary of that label -- or another label altogether -- might have the European rights.
Selling all music globally is something no one's ready for legally, and probably won't be for years, given the glacial rate at which the *AA's seem to be evolving to embrace new technologies and opportunities.
Sure, they're two cities, but one contiguous metro area like the (San Francisco) Bay Area, or Minn./St. Paul. Given that an available highly educated workforce is a key component of their criteria for an 'intelligent city', the usage is reasonable, as people cross between the two jurisdictions to work all the time.
Waterloo also suffers similarly in that it's really Kitchener-Waterloo, but for some reason they've named only Waterloo.
It's legal, but the obvious concern is liability. And that's a huge issue in the United States. Obstetricians now do a lot of C-sections. Not because it's better or safer (it's probably not), but because trial lawyers were very successful over the last 10-15 years in painting the C-section as "safer" anytime something went wrong with a delivery.
Without FDA approval, you're asking for your medical practice to be annihilated by any hungry lawyer that comes along. Moreover, the drug manufacturer is begging for annihilation like Dow Corning. Who cares about the science or the logical merits, there's billions to be made in law suits.
Like it or not, patent protection seems to be the best model we've got for developing innovative new drugs. (No, I don't think software patents are a great idea). I can't see other countries with different regimens that have produced lots of innovative drugs like the US.
And and incredibly slow FDA trials seem to be the best model so far for preventing bankruptcy. (Not, it should be said, for the patients as witness the relaxation of some rules in HIV and HCV treatments).
I sadly can't see any effective model that beats out drug patent protection. If you can, name one in operation that is producing superior results. I can certainly see a number of models (see Canada, much of Europe) that beat out FDA trials.
Holmwood
I just know I'm going to lose Karma for this, but... "introduce something for the corporate world that will really make people stand up"
I don't see how they can.
Apple simply isn't a serious player in most of the large-scale Enterprise market. They're not competing with Redhat or Microsoft.
Why not? Stability. (and that doesn't just mean "not crashing")
- Apple's radically changed processor architecture 3 times in a decade. - Apple just doesn't support OS releases for a serious (8-10 year) length of time. Some of the OS X pushes have been only ~18 months of support. Contrast Redhat and MS. - Apple is mono-source. (That may not matter in reality, but on snazzy grids people draw to evaluate, it does). - Regression testing. MS does this incredibly well. To a fair degree, so does Redhat. Apple? Older machines, while they run very well, typically don't get upgraded to the latest and greatest since there's been such an architectural change. So it's irrelevant.
The above is not bad. It doesn't mean Apple's crap. Quite the reverse.
Apple makes some fantastic, elegant machines, and the price premium for those machines has, in some cases, dropped to zero since they've switched to x86 architecture.
But for many (not all) corporate clients who want a guarantee that they can get a similar software configuration supported for 4-6 years?
Apple has the potential to enlarge its dominance in certain areas -- everything to do with ease of use and reliability for example -- in the corporate market. I still don't see it as a big enterprise player. It would have to radically change the way it does business -- processor sourcing, possibly splitting the OS from the hardware, guaranteeing longterm support for a particular major OS rev, guaranteeing processor stability for a decade, etc.
As a consumer, I like the rapid change that Apple manages. With an enterprise hat on? Not so much. Holmwood
From the 'article' (really just a brief overview), it's clear that it will generally at present improve performance for the BitTyrant user; it will also statistically improve performance for any peer with substantial spare upload capacity, regardless of client used.
It probably will initially hurt performance for users with saturated upload capacity who cannot contribute any more to the swarm than they are at present.
It's not at all clear that this is a bad thing, even if everyone switched to BTyrant. A lot could come down to the social behavior of Tyrant users once they become seeders, for example. If a Tyrant keeps a torrent active as long as s/he presently does, it would clearly be an improvement. For those who say "well a tyrant user may not even seed to 1.0"; fine; that Tyrant user won't really benefit much from the protocol.
All I can say is you have incredibly bad luck (or are buying from a bad supplier). I've been buying from people like Phillips (no great outfit) since about '92 and I've still got some 13-year-old bulbs (and ballasts) going.
It seems likely to me that you've got a power problem if your LCD monitor electronic ballast is frying as well. I'd say check with the local power company, get them to check transients, spikes, dropouts, phase issues, etc. I had a similar (though obviously less severe given that my bulbs were surviving) problem and it was repeatedly frying my TV. Power company fixed it and I put a UPS on the TV.
Yep, you're quite right. I blame a brain spasm. Landfill was something that occurred to me just before posting; I threw it in. Bad idea. I humbly stand corrected.
Yes, they should be recycled... will they be? There's the rub.
I agree LED's aren't quite ready for prime time yet... much too hostile and cold (blue) a spectrum of light (they make CFL's look warm and bambi-like). The poster above who complained they weren't bright enough has a point; I find they're very good for directed tasks like light for reading or providing background for a room in which one is watching TV/movies. They're horrible for lighting up a room (e.g. kitchen) in which to work, especially if colors matter.
No question though, LED's (or some hybrid thereof) are the wave of the future, or so my slashdotty side says.
The bulbs last massively longer and do use a lot less energy. As long as people are happy with the 'colder' light they produce, it really is a good deal for consumers. There's far less landfill space consumed (1 compact fluorescent vs 5-10 incandescents), a lot less CO2 and other pollutants due to lower energy use. (Downside: the CF's do contain small quantities of mercury).
It is a relatively benign move by Walmart. One presumes they're doing this for PR reasons, but that doesn't make it evil.
That said, in typical slashdot fashion, I'll point out a technologically superior solution: LED lights.
You can use a 100W incandescent that lasts (say) 1000 hours; ($1) a 23W CFL (compact fluorescent) bulb that lasts (say) 10,000 hours; ($10) a 5-9W LED that lasts 130,000 hours. ($40+)
Thanks to Walmart (and others), the CFL's probably make the most economic sense. From an environmental standpoint, the LED bulbs are probably best, though the cost is up-front cost is prohibitively high.
FallLine -- I didn't make that up; it's a scenario that's actually been posited in situations that don't seem to make statistical sense (e.g. wards with huge numbers of spoiled ballots where people punched D and R combined with lots of valid D votes and few R votes -- or vice versa).
Keep in mind that the infamous chads are designed to be punched out unlike your hypothetical stack of paper. I've played around with punched cards -- same physically as the voting ones -- and had no trouble punching 30 chads in a stack of 50 with just a knitting needle. This would be analgous to punching through 50 votes, all for Bush. (with, say, 30 non-Bush votes) Every genuine Bush vote is fine; every Gore/Buchanan vote gets invalidated.
-Holmwood.
Actually, I was technically unspecific. I did not intend any reference to a single voter, however; I intended to refer to one or more officials. I described someone as left alone with access to many votes for under 60 seconds. Since, in my experience, this never describes an individual voter, it seemed obvious to me I meant an offical. Granted, perhaps where you are from, individual voters are routinely left alone with access to many votes. If this is the case, your region/country has far more than electronic voting to worry about.
The idea that there are problems with lots of votes not being counted with pen and paper but mysteriously being counted properly with (say) punched cards or today's e-voting systems is, respectfully, asinine.
If it's a cognitive challenge for a voter to mark an X or fill out a circle, then it's going to be an even greater cognitive challenge to operate and verify the actions of a voting machine.
First, being geographically small and having a sole ISP has nothing to do with wealth. Second.
Qatar not able to afford to upgrade to IPv6? And stuck using Win95?
Uh... respectfully, how did the parent get marked "interesting"? Anyone who's thought about the middle east is well aware that, while it's a small country, "Oil and natural gas revenues enable Qatar to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world." (CIA World Factbook, 2007).
We seem good at marking Qatar as UAE, and characterizing it as a country too poor/ignorant to evolve beyond Win95.
We should be thankful they're still allies of the US.
I agree with most of what theonetruekeeper says. I wanted to explore a couple of points in particular, though.
First, jokingly. It's a Florida ballot. I somehow don't have trouble believing it was badly laid out and difficult to understand.
Second, more seriously. As for "her support base is statistically more likely to do something stupid than her opponent's" this might well be true.
Voting is a cognitive challenge. Not a big one for the average slashdotter, but tougher for the elderly, the uneducated, the illiterate, the disabled and, yes, the stupid.
The following is NOT a troll. Please read it carefully before blowing up. Statistics seem to suggest that people more likely to vote Democrat if they either struggle cognitively or are cognitively brilliant.
Improverished urban African Americans -- who score badly on cognitive tests for whatever reason (legacy of slavery? Horrible inner city schools? Racism?) -- vote 90% Democrat. Brilliant PhD's are similarly disproportionately Democratic voters. [While there are white and other demographic groups that are equally or even more cognitively challenged than the poorest-scoring minority voters, none of these groups seem to vote in as large numbers for one single party].
For brevity, let's stipulate IQ measures something useful cognitively and that this relates to the cognitive challenge of filling out a ballot correctly. (If you're a foreigner who thinks it's ludicrous that filling out a ballot properly could be a cognitive challenge, look up "butterfly ballot" and shudder).
If it's a challenge for anyone below IQ 85-95, there's a decent chance you're disproportionately disenfranchising likely Democratic voters, especially in urban areas, if the above statistics hold.
Similarly, if it's a challenge for anyone below IQ 130-140, there's a decent chance you're disproportionately disenfranchising Republicans. Same caveats.
Since the people designing the ballots are probably in the IQ 110-130 range, it's unlikely they will design ballots they cannot possibly fill out. And thus, we are much more likely to have disproportionate disenfranchising of likely Democratic voters.
No, this really isn't a snarky way for me to say Democrats are stupid. Because they aren't. Or one could just as easily argue Republicans are average; Democrats are smart. And even that's not really accurate.
In general though, a sound case can be made that complex ballots will disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, the elderly, and likely Democratic voters. (Some touch-screen voting systems might well be better for some of the disabled, though, than pen and paper).
Machine ballots of any type appear to be considerably more complex than paper, with any punched card system possibly being the worst and most confusing.
The rush to electronic voting machines was a largely well-intentioned knee-jerk reaction to the mess of 2000. It's not clear that it was a good knee-jerk reaction at all, and for reasons more subtle than simply the distinction between open-source and closed-source.
Actually, paper and pencil are a pretty good approach. Simply because a solution is old doesn't mean it's a bad one nor does it mean that the shiniest new piece of technology is the best answer.
Assuming a situation where there's reasonable oversight of most votes most of the time, and opportunities to be alone with ballots for more than a minute don't generally exist:
- Electronic voting machines? An attacker can change thousands of votes in a second. - Punched cards? An attacker can shove a ten cent piece of steel through the hole for the preferred candidate and invalidate a hundred ballots for the opponent in a few seconds. - Paper? Well, an attacker can start spoiling every ballot for the opponent, but that's going to take time. Quite a bit of time. And the attacker will be leaving some forensic evidence.
Canada -- a country geographically even larger than the US with probably even more serious geographic distribution problems -- has generally used paper ballots for a great many years. Elections are typically counted and results are in by somewhere between 10pm for local/provincial elections and maybe 2am (eastern) for Federal elections.
Most of all, a paper ballot system is comprehensible and reasonably transparent to the ordinary voter. Not so with even open-source software (which may be transparent and comprehensible to some, but is neither to the average voter).
If you really want something that's counted fast, use paper ballots scanned into optical scanners (and deposited in locked ballot boxes for later inspection/recounts) in front of the voter.
Paper and pencils: A technology who's time has come.
You're right that there are no activation headaches for the overwhelming majority of Windows users. Frankly, even for those of us who do swap mobos a lot, the headaches have been pretty minor. Not enough to make me switch completely away from Windows.
But you're wrong in your arguments of no one trading "investment in hardware, software, peripherals". I've got hardware from 1987-2005, all of which will run (most of which is switched off), running or connected to computers that are running either Windows * or OS * or QNX or BSD. For fun, I played around with Knoppix Live, Linspire, and Ubuntu recently and was amazed at the level of support for hardware and devices. Pretty much the only hardware with serious problems was my old IBM PS/2 Model 50... a lot of people don't support the orphaned 16-bit Microchannel bus.
"Nor is big box retail going to touch a Linux distro dependent on unlicensed media codecs." Very true. That's why Linspire and Freespire have licensed codecs.
"By the time you configure a system that is actually marketable to home users, the price differential simply disappears or shifts in favor of Windows." Not so. Freespire, for example is free (though one variant is not completely open source). Linspire costs OEMs... what? $500 a year for as many installations as you like? That's maybe 10 or 20 copies of Windows OEM.
a bunch of Canadians came down and burned the White House
One shouldn't suggest the Canadians (or British) came out of nowhere to burn Washington. The Americans (very unwisely) started the burnings of towns: first York (now Toronto) in April 1812. At least that was in springtime, though, and mostly public buildings were burned, along with some houses. A year and a half later, in December 1813, US forces under Gen. McClure burned Newark, Ontario (now Niagara-on-the-Lake):
When he decided to withdraw. McClure compounded his earlier errors by ordering the village of Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake) burned... McClure. after giving the inhabitants only a few hours warning ordered the whole village of some 150 houses put to the torch.
[he forced] the inhabitants -- mostly women and children, since the men were away in the army -- out into the snow and bitter cold of a mid-December night...
Needless to say the British -- or proto-Canadians if you prefer -- were unimpressed, and vowed vengeance. Starting on the 19th of December, they overran Fort Niagara, destroyed Lewiston, and burned Manchester (Niagara Falls, NY), Schlosser, Black Rock and Buffalo.
Even the Americans blamed McClure for the outcome.
Some months later in 1814, the British revenged themselves for the burning of York. In a controlled and disciplined operation, (unlike the brutalities along the Niagara frontier), public buildings in Washington, DC were burned, with most residences and businesses surviving.
So controlled borders are probably an even better thing for Canadians, judging simply by history.
Of course, maybe not so good a thing for the safety and sanctity of your laptop, hard drive and data.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, though, even better yet, keep them as a "red team" continuing to work on ways to subvert google's results, and keep on shifting tactics to stop them.
To a degree, but the more interesting argument was that new hardware tends to be released with windows drivers first. Apple also doesn't offer anywhere near the range of choice in (say) powerful video cards.
... yes... DirectX10, and, ultimately, Vista. It's conceivable that Apple will persuade AMD or NVidia to design for some next-generation Apple video standard, but it doesn't seem likely.
Finally, next generation video cards are being designed for
I find all that persuasive. What I didn't find persuasive was the article leaving out the fairly serious performance problems Vista has with many games (vs. XP) on the same hardware.
I also thought the article's dismissal of bootcamp/parallels was a little too quick.
This is insightful?
If I posted "Just because Windows 98 has lots of security holes doesn't mean OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD is any more secure. I'm pretty sure that's true. I'll have to do some research to back this up", would I really get modded insightful?
From the actual text of GCIII (1949), Part 1, Article 2, para 3:
In other words, signatories are bound if a non-signatory abides by the convention, otherwise they aren't. Since beheading people, parading them on TV, and mass suicide bombings of civilians are clearly non-compliant with the Conventions, the US is not bound by GCIII as a matter of international law in dealing with al Qaeda or similar organizations.
That doesn't mean the US can do whatever it wants -- it's still not allowed to kill people it's captured, and UCMJ also applies.
It also doesn't prevent the US from abiding by GCIII, and here as a matter of personal opinion I think the administration was very unwise and set a foolish precedent. Your opinion may vary.
In Vietnam, for example, the US chose to treat North Vietnamese POW's under the Conventions, but not the Vietcong, even though neither force was abiding by the Geneva Conventions.
In context, it's clear the GP was referring to the NVidia cards that were reviewed by the article. And he's mostly right. In only one (of many) actual gaming benchmark did any of the Nvidia cards reviewed outperform the X1950.
Where I believe the GP is mistaken is in his conclusions about the article. The article itself says, in conclusion:
The article notes, correctly I think, that the X1650XT is not a good card for gamers to buy. It notes that the 1950 won't do DirectX10, and the budget NVidia cards may not be fast enough to do it well either.
However, it's also instructive to have a look at this review at Hard OCP. There, in two demanding games (Oblivion and STALKER), the 8600 GTS appears to win handily over the 1950XT. If those benchmarks are accurate, it suggests the ExtremeTech article may draw conclusions that are too favorable to the X1950.
Ah well, interesting times for all gfx card consumers!
HolmwoodYou're making an assertion that this is the real reason. Where's the proof?
Do you really contend that [male] engineers and CS types were and are more discriminatory towards women than, say, lawyers or doctors? Doesn't the fact that women hit a high of about 35-40% in the profession -- back in 1985 -- then steadily declined point to possibly some other reasons?
Your argument is that law, business and medicine cleaned up its act towards women in the 70's and 80's. I'd agree with that. You further argue that CS didn't, and remains biased to this day. I don't agree with that at all. The article itself, in noting a 1985 peak, suggests it's much more complex than your 'Oh it's discrimination against women' assertion.
Personally, I'm all for an end to most forms of gender discrimination. (For example, I think allowing only women to be rape counselors for women is a valid form of gender discrimination.) I get uneasy, however, when I see people pushing for significant changes in entrance standards that appear, on the surface, to be designed to discriminate on the basis of gender.
The article notes a anecdotal example of a young man with three field-relevant patents that was denied a space at the university for a female applicant presumably less qualified in "programming", but perhaps more qualified in "leadership skills". While it's difficult to tell for sure, since the article cheerfully glosses over the issue, it does seem that were this policy applied in reverse it would be rightly condemned as extreme sexism.
Now, I agree with you sex/gender discrimination exists. It exists both as a force for -- and definitely against -- women. I remain unconvinced that it is a significant barrier preventing women from entering the CS field (as compared to law, medicine, or any other profession). If you're going to assert that male CS-types are significantly more biased and bigoted than male lawyers and doctors, let's see some evidence please. My own experience, and those of the women in my family that are in the field is very much the reverse.
HolmwoodActually most of the junk falling out of the sky is the 'good' news, notwithstanding how disturbed the flight crew must have been. (inasmuch as there is good news at all). Most of it is relatively small; that which isn't is usually tracked more precisely. The article notes that they got the timing wrong for the terminal de-orbit of that satellite (and hence the position as well).
The really bad news is the junk that isn't de-orbiting, but staying up there. As the second article notes, even if we stopped all launches today, collisions and resulting fragmentations (creating even more space junk objects) would only be balanced by de-orbiting space junk up until 2055, after which time the number of objects would increase for circa 200 years.
While a $100m satellite being destroyed may just be bad news for taxpayers, or shareholders (and hence pension funds) or TV viewers, or GPS users, it might also be very bad news for people in remote communities who rely on telemedicine. There are a lot of increasingly critical applications that depend on satellites.
-HolmwoodI can't resist. You've not heard of "no shirt, no shoes, no service"?
Back slightly on track: While I agree with the GP that a myspace page doesn't positively impress me, it's not me -- or the GP -- that the page is aimed at. Politicians who advertise during sports venues don't impress me either, but they obviously impress someone or they wouldn't be doing it.
-HolmwoodParent and Grandparent poster: You do grasp that this is a private member's bill from Marlene Jennings, a member of the Liberal party?
HolmwoodAs the linked entry notes, this original wireless vulnerability (and Apple's very heavy-handed response) appears to have lead to MoAB. Since MoAB Apple has erupted into a flurry of vulnerability fixes. This is in fact good news for Mac users. Far from being a smear campaign, MoAB pointed to a series of real vulnerabilities in Apple products, on Apple platforms, and, yes, in third party software. And Apple's fixing them, and preemptively fixing new vulnerabilities.
Great.
Not so great.
As a couple of others pointed out, MoAB largely was 'Apple bugs'. But even if it weren't, you're happy to see a company smearing two individual security researchers unaffiliated with MoAB?
You'd rather see the platform you (I assume) use and love be unaudited, have a series of vulnerabilities, and the company spend its energy not on sound engineering but 'smearing' critics?
You'd be happy to see Microsoft smearing critics of Windows 'security'?
Happy to see Sony smearing those who uncovered its rootkit CD's?
Just checking.
-Holmwood
Music is licensed on a per-country basis. Often, different organizations/people hold the rights in different countries. A Canadian band, for instance, might keep (or buy back) Canadian rights, but a major label would have the US rights, and a Europeans subsidiary of that label -- or another label altogether -- might have the European rights.
Selling all music globally is something no one's ready for legally, and probably won't be for years, given the glacial rate at which the *AA's seem to be evolving to embrace new technologies and opportunities.
Holmwood.
Sure, they're two cities, but one contiguous metro area like the (San Francisco) Bay Area, or Minn./St. Paul. Given that an available highly educated workforce is a key component of their criteria for an 'intelligent city', the usage is reasonable, as people cross between the two jurisdictions to work all the time.
Waterloo also suffers similarly in that it's really Kitchener-Waterloo, but for some reason they've named only Waterloo.
Holmwood
It's legal, but the obvious concern is liability. And that's a huge issue in the United States. Obstetricians now do a lot of C-sections. Not because it's better or safer (it's probably not), but because trial lawyers were very successful over the last 10-15 years in painting the C-section as "safer" anytime something went wrong with a delivery. Without FDA approval, you're asking for your medical practice to be annihilated by any hungry lawyer that comes along. Moreover, the drug manufacturer is begging for annihilation like Dow Corning. Who cares about the science or the logical merits, there's billions to be made in law suits. Like it or not, patent protection seems to be the best model we've got for developing innovative new drugs. (No, I don't think software patents are a great idea). I can't see other countries with different regimens that have produced lots of innovative drugs like the US. And and incredibly slow FDA trials seem to be the best model so far for preventing bankruptcy. (Not, it should be said, for the patients as witness the relaxation of some rules in HIV and HCV treatments). I sadly can't see any effective model that beats out drug patent protection. If you can, name one in operation that is producing superior results. I can certainly see a number of models (see Canada, much of Europe) that beat out FDA trials. Holmwood
I just know I'm going to lose Karma for this, but... "introduce something for the corporate world that will really make people stand up"
I don't see how they can.
Apple simply isn't a serious player in most of the large-scale Enterprise market. They're not competing with Redhat or Microsoft.
Why not? Stability. (and that doesn't just mean "not crashing")
- Apple's radically changed processor architecture 3 times in a decade.
- Apple just doesn't support OS releases for a serious (8-10 year) length of time. Some of the OS X pushes have been only ~18 months of support. Contrast Redhat and MS.
- Apple is mono-source. (That may not matter in reality, but on snazzy grids people draw to evaluate, it does).
- Regression testing. MS does this incredibly well. To a fair degree, so does Redhat. Apple? Older machines, while they run very well, typically don't get upgraded to the latest and greatest since there's been such an architectural change. So it's irrelevant.
The above is not bad.
It doesn't mean Apple's crap. Quite the reverse.
Apple makes some fantastic, elegant machines, and the price premium for those machines has, in some cases, dropped to zero since they've switched to x86 architecture.
But for many (not all) corporate clients who want a guarantee that they can get a similar software configuration supported for 4-6 years?
Apple has the potential to enlarge its dominance in certain areas -- everything to do with ease of use and reliability for example -- in the corporate market. I still don't see it as a big enterprise player. It would have to radically change the way it does business -- processor sourcing, possibly splitting the OS from the hardware, guaranteeing longterm support for a particular major OS rev, guaranteeing processor stability for a decade, etc.
As a consumer, I like the rapid change that Apple manages. With an enterprise hat on? Not so much.
Holmwood
Now a misleading headline would have been "As Democrats Take Power, Russian Rocket Hits USA".
Hmmm. Let me go check Fox News.
Holmwood.
From the 'article' (really just a brief overview), it's clear that it will generally at present improve performance for the BitTyrant user; it will also statistically improve performance for any peer with substantial spare upload capacity, regardless of client used.
B itTyrant.pdf [cs.washington.edu] goes into considerably more detail, and is well worth reading if you have a nodding acquaintance with the BT protocol and elementary game theory.
This paper http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/piatek/papers/
It probably will initially hurt performance for users with saturated upload capacity who cannot contribute any more to the swarm than they are at present.
It's not at all clear that this is a bad thing, even if everyone switched to BTyrant. A lot could come down to the social behavior of Tyrant users once they become seeders, for example. If a Tyrant keeps a torrent active as long as s/he presently does, it would clearly be an improvement. For those who say "well a tyrant user may not even seed to 1.0"; fine; that Tyrant user won't really benefit much from the protocol.
Holmwood
All I can say is you have incredibly bad luck (or are buying from a bad supplier). I've been buying from people like Phillips (no great outfit) since about '92 and I've still got some 13-year-old bulbs (and ballasts) going.
It seems likely to me that you've got a power problem if your LCD monitor electronic ballast is frying as well. I'd say check with the local power company, get them to check transients, spikes, dropouts, phase issues, etc. I had a similar (though obviously less severe given that my bulbs were surviving) problem and it was repeatedly frying my TV. Power company fixed it and I put a UPS on the TV.
Holmwood
Yep, you're quite right. I blame a brain spasm. Landfill was something that occurred to me just before posting; I threw it in. Bad idea. I humbly stand corrected.
Yes, they should be recycled... will they be? There's the rub.
I agree LED's aren't quite ready for prime time yet... much too hostile and cold (blue) a spectrum of light (they make CFL's look warm and bambi-like). The poster above who complained they weren't bright enough has a point; I find they're very good for directed tasks like light for reading or providing background for a room in which one is watching TV/movies. They're horrible for lighting up a room (e.g. kitchen) in which to work, especially if colors matter.
No question though, LED's (or some hybrid thereof) are the wave of the future, or so my slashdotty side says.
Good discussion.
Cheers all
Holmwood
The bulbs last massively longer and do use a lot less energy. As long as people are happy with the 'colder' light they produce, it really is a good deal for consumers. There's far less landfill space consumed (1 compact fluorescent vs 5-10 incandescents), a lot less CO2 and other pollutants due to lower energy use. (Downside: the CF's do contain small quantities of mercury).
It is a relatively benign move by Walmart. One presumes they're doing this for PR reasons, but that doesn't make it evil.
That said, in typical slashdot fashion, I'll point out a technologically superior solution: LED lights.
You can use a 100W incandescent that lasts (say) 1000 hours; ($1)
a 23W CFL (compact fluorescent) bulb that lasts (say) 10,000 hours; ($10)
a 5-9W LED that lasts 130,000 hours. ($40+)
Thanks to Walmart (and others), the CFL's probably make the most economic sense. From an environmental standpoint, the LED bulbs are probably best, though the cost is up-front cost is prohibitively high.
FallLine -- I didn't make that up; it's a scenario that's actually been posited in situations that don't seem to make statistical sense (e.g. wards with huge numbers of spoiled ballots where people punched D and R combined with lots of valid D votes and few R votes -- or vice versa). Keep in mind that the infamous chads are designed to be punched out unlike your hypothetical stack of paper. I've played around with punched cards -- same physically as the voting ones -- and had no trouble punching 30 chads in a stack of 50 with just a knitting needle. This would be analgous to punching through 50 votes, all for Bush. (with, say, 30 non-Bush votes) Every genuine Bush vote is fine; every Gore/Buchanan vote gets invalidated. -Holmwood.
Actually, I was technically unspecific. I did not intend any reference to a single voter, however; I intended to refer to one or more officials. I described someone as left alone with access to many votes for under 60 seconds. Since, in my experience, this never describes an individual voter, it seemed obvious to me I meant an offical. Granted, perhaps where you are from, individual voters are routinely left alone with access to many votes. If this is the case, your region/country has far more than electronic voting to worry about.
The idea that there are problems with lots of votes not being counted with pen and paper but mysteriously being counted properly with (say) punched cards or today's e-voting systems is, respectfully, asinine.
If it's a cognitive challenge for a voter to mark an X or fill out a circle, then it's going to be an even greater cognitive challenge to operate and verify the actions of a voting machine.
Holmwood
First, being geographically small and having a sole ISP has nothing to do with wealth. Second.
Qatar not able to afford to upgrade to IPv6? And stuck using Win95?
Uh... respectfully, how did the parent get marked "interesting"? Anyone who's thought about the middle east is well aware that, while it's a small country, "Oil and natural gas revenues enable Qatar to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world." (CIA World Factbook, 2007).
We seem good at marking Qatar as UAE, and characterizing it as a country too poor/ignorant to evolve beyond Win95.
We should be thankful they're still allies of the US.
Holmwood
I agree with most of what theonetruekeeper says. I wanted to explore a couple of points in particular, though.
First, jokingly. It's a Florida ballot. I somehow don't have trouble believing it was badly laid out and difficult to understand.
Second, more seriously. As for "her support base is statistically more likely to do something stupid than her opponent's" this might well be true.
Voting is a cognitive challenge. Not a big one for the average slashdotter, but tougher for the elderly, the uneducated, the illiterate, the disabled and, yes, the stupid.
The following is NOT a troll. Please read it carefully before blowing up. Statistics seem to suggest that people more likely to vote Democrat if they either struggle cognitively or are cognitively brilliant.
Improverished urban African Americans -- who score badly on cognitive tests for whatever reason (legacy of slavery? Horrible inner city schools? Racism?) -- vote 90% Democrat. Brilliant PhD's are similarly disproportionately Democratic voters. [While there are white and other demographic groups that are equally or even more cognitively challenged than the poorest-scoring minority voters, none of these groups seem to vote in as large numbers for one single party].
For brevity, let's stipulate IQ measures something useful cognitively and that this relates to the cognitive challenge of filling out a ballot correctly. (If you're a foreigner who thinks it's ludicrous that filling out a ballot properly could be a cognitive challenge, look up "butterfly ballot" and shudder).
If it's a challenge for anyone below IQ 85-95, there's a decent chance you're disproportionately disenfranchising likely Democratic voters, especially in urban areas, if the above statistics hold.
Similarly, if it's a challenge for anyone below IQ 130-140, there's a decent chance you're disproportionately disenfranchising Republicans. Same caveats.
Since the people designing the ballots are probably in the IQ 110-130 range, it's unlikely they will design ballots they cannot possibly fill out. And thus, we are much more likely to have disproportionate disenfranchising of likely Democratic voters.
No, this really isn't a snarky way for me to say Democrats are stupid. Because they aren't. Or one could just as easily argue Republicans are average; Democrats are smart. And even that's not really accurate.
In general though, a sound case can be made that complex ballots will disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, the elderly, and likely Democratic voters. (Some touch-screen voting systems might well be better for some of the disabled, though, than pen and paper).
Machine ballots of any type appear to be considerably more complex than paper, with any punched card system possibly being the worst and most confusing.
The rush to electronic voting machines was a largely well-intentioned knee-jerk reaction to the mess of 2000. It's not clear that it was a good knee-jerk reaction at all, and for reasons more subtle than simply the distinction between open-source and closed-source.
Holmwood
Actually, paper and pencil are a pretty good approach. Simply because a solution is old doesn't mean it's a bad one nor does it mean that the shiniest new piece of technology is the best answer.
Assuming a situation where there's reasonable oversight of most votes most of the time, and opportunities to be alone with ballots for more than a minute don't generally exist:
- Electronic voting machines? An attacker can change thousands of votes in a second.
- Punched cards? An attacker can shove a ten cent piece of steel through the hole for the preferred candidate and invalidate a hundred ballots for the opponent in a few seconds.
- Paper? Well, an attacker can start spoiling every ballot for the opponent, but that's going to take time. Quite a bit of time. And the attacker will be leaving some forensic evidence.
Canada -- a country geographically even larger than the US with probably even more serious geographic distribution problems -- has generally used paper ballots for a great many years. Elections are typically counted and results are in by somewhere between 10pm for local/provincial elections and maybe 2am (eastern) for Federal elections.
Most of all, a paper ballot system is comprehensible and reasonably transparent to the ordinary voter. Not so with even open-source software (which may be transparent and comprehensible to some, but is neither to the average voter).
If you really want something that's counted fast, use paper ballots scanned into optical scanners (and deposited in locked ballot boxes for later inspection/recounts) in front of the voter.
Paper and pencils: A technology who's time has come.
Holmwood.
You're right that there are no activation headaches for the overwhelming majority of Windows users. Frankly, even for those of us who do swap mobos a lot, the headaches have been pretty minor. Not enough to make me switch completely away from Windows.
But you're wrong in your arguments of no one trading "investment in hardware, software, peripherals". I've got hardware from 1987-2005, all of which will run (most of which is switched off), running or connected to computers that are running either Windows * or OS * or QNX or BSD. For fun, I played around with Knoppix Live, Linspire, and Ubuntu recently and was amazed at the level of support for hardware and devices. Pretty much the only hardware with serious problems was my old IBM PS/2 Model 50... a lot of people don't support the orphaned 16-bit Microchannel bus.
"Nor is big box retail going to touch a Linux distro dependent on unlicensed media codecs."
Very true. That's why Linspire and Freespire have licensed codecs.
"By the time you configure a system that is actually marketable to home users, the price differential simply disappears or shifts in favor of Windows."
Not so. Freespire, for example is free (though one variant is not completely open source). Linspire costs OEMs... what? $500 a year for as many installations as you like? That's maybe 10 or 20 copies of Windows OEM.
One shouldn't suggest the Canadians (or British) came out of nowhere to burn Washington. The Americans (very unwisely) started the burnings of towns: first York (now Toronto) in April 1812. At least that was in springtime, though, and mostly public buildings were burned, along with some houses. A year and a half later, in December 1813, US forces under Gen. McClure burned Newark, Ontario (now Niagara-on-the-Lake):
(http://freenet.buffalo.edu/bah/h/war1812/bowleNeedless to say the British -- or proto-Canadians if you prefer -- were unimpressed, and vowed vengeance. Starting on the 19th of December, they overran Fort Niagara, destroyed Lewiston, and burned Manchester (Niagara Falls, NY), Schlosser, Black Rock and Buffalo.
Even the Americans blamed McClure for the outcome.
Some months later in 1814, the British revenged themselves for the burning of York. In a controlled and disciplined operation, (unlike the brutalities along the Niagara frontier), public buildings in Washington, DC were burned, with most residences and businesses surviving.
So controlled borders are probably an even better thing for Canadians, judging simply by history.
Of course, maybe not so good a thing for the safety and sanctity of your laptop, hard drive and data.
Holmwood