"what if the only thing you're agreeing to is to be rejected?"
You have to agree to the NDA when you download the development kit. You also have to pay a $99 fee. It is hard to argue you did not agree to it after paying a fee. The rejection letter was always covered by NDA but now what's changed is that Apple is printing "NDA" on the letters and enforcing the agreement.
My opinion of this whole mess is that Apple is fully within their righs but is being stupid. Developers will figure out that the risk is rejection is to great and will abandon the platform. But maybe Apple is not stupid and that is their goal, to cull the heard as they have to many developers.
"I think it's going to depend whether or not the user needs 64 bit for their work."
Right. And as of today every single last graphic profesional was able to get their work done on a 32 bit Photoshop. Are there many jobs that you had to refuse in the past?
"So they're saying that if I am doing something that requires more bandwidth, I will get less bandwidth; and when I don't need much bandwidth, they're going to give me more? I'm really confused by this. Can anyone make sense of this for me?"
You got it wrong. If you are using a lot of bandwidth you do NOT get throttled down. You are simply put at the end of the queue and a few shorter network packets are allowed to go to the front.
What they have is a fixed size pipe. When they see more demend for bandwidth then they have tey go into "rationing mode". In this mode they let the user with the lowest bandwidth requirements in front. This is a very old idea and comes from the scheduling algorithms used on operating systems from about the 1960's called "shortest job first" doing this can be shown to make the entire system seem more responsive to the greatest number of users. What they are doing is maximizing the amount of customer satisfaction.
I worked on a large military system once with about 200 programmers. At some point it was decided that the error messages would be centralized and they made rules for when we had to issue them. One rule was that EVERY exception in the code had to produce a message and EVERY case statement had to have a "default" branch. Then associated with every message had to be some "operator action", some way to fix the problem. All the 20,000 or so messages were inside a database. We were reviewing these for grammar, spelling and the like and found one "operator action" that read
"Try walking through walls or flying, the laws of logic no longer apply."
This is my all time best favorite message. We looked at the code that cause it. Something like this: If A=0 do_someotherthing Else "..rules of logic no longer apply". The programmer was kind of forced into this by the combination of project rules.
This is NOT about making the OS "cleaner". It is designed to combat pirated copies of Windows 7. Microsoft withholds stuff like e-mail until after you register.
At my location the digital broadcasts are SO MUCH BETTER. In every case the station's digital signal is far better and most are in HD. I actually get more stations in digital than in analog. The total number of digital stations is more than I'm willing to count. After some point you just say "lots" and stop counting.
That said, I really can't remember the last time a watched a TV show. I'm sure that I have but can't remember if it was weeks or months ago. So I gues the bottom line is that we have lots of very clear and crisp channels of pure junk
",,,you end up hating yourself for not spending the time instead on understanding the 3 years worth of adv.math courses you need to really grasp what is happening..."
The real breakthroughs don't require advanced math. Einstein said that with all of his work the breakthroughs happen very quickly at the conceptual level and then only after that he worked out the math. For example if the speed of light really was constant then speed is distance over time then if the product is constant then either distance or time is not. That was the breakthrough or leap in thinking. The math followed
With Newton his breakthrough was to think that gravity might extend all the way up to the sun and planets and be "universal". The math was hard (for the day) but was secondary to the flash of insight.
I think the next big revolution will be easy too. My guess is that space-time is discrete and non-continuous. It is a simple idea but has the potential to unite quantum and cosmic scales. Easy idea but the math is well past what we poor humans can handle.
The average person not working in the feild inly needs to understand the concept and some of it's implications and does not need the math tho understand them.
You are absolutly correct and the same logic goes all the way back. There must have been 2,000 classical composers who lived in the 1700's Today most people would be hard pressed to name a dozen. Time filters out the crap.
I do remember the 60's and 70's and there was a lot of junk on the air. But today we only remember the best 1% or 2% of it
Really were the "monkeys" TV show any bette than Hana Montana. I'd argue that the old 60's made for TV band was even worse. Remember the "partridge Family". There was some real crap back then, worse even then today's crap.
"Just forward port 6969 (the standard port for FAP or Fridge Access Protocol)"
But what if I own ten Fridges?
I more resonable example is my workstations at the office. I have two public IP address one for each machine. We could have used NAT but then how would I SSH into the workstaion from an outside location?
The real solution is V6. Then every grain of dust on Earth has it's own address.
All you need to do is buy a domain name that you like and then set up the MX records in the DNS to point yur incomming mail to Google.
As others have said you can set up your own server but you'd need to add some backup servers to for the times when yours is down. And you'd need to keep off-site back ups for all the data. This is the best why to go if you have a larger company with several offices but is to much work for a smaler outfit.
Bottom line: forward your MyName@MyCompany.com mail to google and that's it.
What has stopped people from buying Blue Ray? That is very easy to answer in just one word: "Cost."
If the BR discs cost the same as DVD and the plyers could be bought for under $100 then BR would take off.
Maybe sony could sell all their titles as duel sided discs with DVD on one side and BR on the other or just put a BR disc in free with every DVD then maybe people would buy the players.
I talk to peole about this and most of then say they think DVD is good enough and can't see the difference or if they can they don't think it is worth $200.
"Truthfully, what is wrong with the Vista interface?"
Haven't you figured it out. Nothing. All Microsoft will really do is make some very minor changes nd re-name Vista to "Windows 7". It's the last part that is the most impotent, the re-naming. Consumers are mostly stupid and if the marketing is done right this time they will think "this is not Vista". Did Microsoft prove that a simple re-branding would work with their TV ad where they siply re-named the OS? It works so that is what they are doing.
The only thing most people use anymore is a web browser. Very few users use more than 5% of the features. All MS has to do is get those 5% to work reasonably welll.
You can argue that people could have done the job better but that is like saying I could get to work fater in a flying car or a jet pack. The problemm is that we simply don't have the means to send people to mars. Given the current state of the art they'd likey never survive the trip.
AN then you have the little problem of getting off of Mars. What you need is a rocket on Mars that can lift off and travel to Earth. Here on Earth we have huge infrastucture in place to launch rockets, we'd have to fly a launch system to mars.
There is much work to be done before we can even think about sending people. Just a simple thing like radiation shielding. How would you do that? Shielding requires mass
"So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low! I guess they are taking a page from Scotty's manual."
No. What's happend is that they asked the engineers to design something that has a 99.99% chance of working for 90 days. They did that. But as a side effect the device has a 85% chance of lasting 180 days and a 70% chance of one year and 50% on two years and so on. My numbers are not right but you get the idea.
There is another really smart thing you can do too. When it is hot inside and not hot outside yu can open a window. That seems obvious but how many office building have openable windows? For some reason Architects like to cool office space with AC even if there is "free" cool air out doors.
This is even easier with computers. The servers would be happy to run at 95F and much of the time even in the American SW the outside air is cooler than 95F.
I've been saying this for many years. I think the reason for resistance is that no one gets a take home pay bonus based on how much power is saved.
How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?
They don't. Read the article. He thought of the idea and now hopes to find a company that can built a prototype. We don't yet know it the device is even buildable.
"As far as I am concerned, this is an invasion of privacy."
Technically, any dog poop on the ground is a "crime scene". There is no way it could be there unless a law were broken. Isn't DNA analysis a common tool in criminal investigation? What's new here is that in the past DNA analysis was so expensive that it was used only to help solve very serious crimes. Now it's cheap.
Interesting that some one would be concerned about a dog's privacy anyways. I really don't think that dogs care about that.
We know one thing for sure Bill Gates himself bought off on the idea. He would have never agreed to be in front of the camera if he didn't like the idea. So with Gates giving the thumbs up to the project everyone at Microsoft was scared shit-less to say it was a bad idea. So only after it was on the air and it was so obvouisly pointless could they remove it.
I know what Gatets was thinking too. I tried being on film once too. It was fun trying to act but then I saw the result. Man was it bad. After that I decided to work only in back of the camera. I do much better there. Likely Gates saw himself on TV and thought "OMG this is bad", just like I did. So they spent $10M on it. To him that's pocket change.
In space useless crap is worth billions, you just have to keep it around long enough to find a use for it.
But you have to use power to re-boost it. Anything inlow orbit is subject to orbital decay and will fall. The more "useless crap" you have the more you have to spend to periodically re-boost it.
If the Software is GPL'd you can in fact use the software without agreeing to the GPL. But ONLY the GPL gives you the permission to re-distribute the software.
All GPL'd software is copyrighted. You can use it but copyrighted stuff can't be copied and re-sold or even given away without specific consent of the author. The GPL is that specific written consent that you need should you want to make a copy.
You can have up to 8 "blades". each blade is a dual socket Xeon board with it's own RAm and graphics. The blades are in effect dual CPU Xeon PCs. The blades are connected to an high performance Ethernet switch which ties them together in a cluster.
So if you call eight PCs connected to a network a "supper computer" then this is it.
"but, for the most part, office suites, e-mail user agents, etc., do not actually benefit directly from SMP."
I think you've got that slightly wrong. Office SUITES do use multicores while word processors and spread sheets don't. With today's software multi cores don't do much for you unless you are multitasking.
If you are just running a word processor or a browser you don't need much computer power
Another way to do this would be to build a small roover that you can drive around and find a place where something else has already made a huge hole in the ground for then drive into that hole. This is slightly cheaper because you don't launch a giant rock from Earth.
Any one of us can experiment with this technology. It is not expensive and you can do it with home built equipment. What's happened here is that much of the functionality has moved from radio hardware into a computer. And a typical PC has enough power for this job. Google project names like "gnuradio" and "hpsdr" for leads on amateur projects. There are large on-line communities around several projects. If you want to transmit on higher power in is not easy to get a HAM license. You just pass an easy 35 question multiple choice test.
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"what if the only thing you're agreeing to is to be rejected?"
You have to agree to the NDA when you download the development kit. You also have to pay a $99 fee. It is hard to argue you did not agree to it after paying a fee. The rejection letter was always covered by NDA but now what's changed is that Apple is printing "NDA" on the letters and enforcing the agreement.
My opinion of this whole mess is that Apple is fully within their righs but is being stupid. Developers will figure out that the risk is rejection is to great and will abandon the platform. But maybe Apple is not stupid and that is their goal, to cull the heard as they have to many developers.
"I think it's going to depend whether or not the user needs 64 bit for their work."
Right. And as of today every single last graphic profesional was able to get their work done on a 32 bit Photoshop. Are there many jobs that you had to refuse in the past?
"So they're saying that if I am doing something that requires more bandwidth, I will get less bandwidth; and when I don't need much bandwidth, they're going to give me more? I'm really confused by this. Can anyone make sense of this for me?"
You got it wrong. If you are using a lot of bandwidth you do NOT get throttled down. You are simply put at the end of the queue and a few shorter network packets are allowed to go to the front.
What they have is a fixed size pipe. When they see more demend for bandwidth then they have tey go into "rationing mode". In this mode they let the user with the lowest bandwidth requirements in front. This is a very old idea and comes from the scheduling algorithms used on operating systems from about the 1960's called "shortest job first" doing this can be shown to make the entire system seem more responsive to the greatest number of users. What they are doing is maximizing the amount of customer satisfaction.
I worked on a large military system once with about 200 programmers. At some point it was decided that the error messages would be centralized and they made rules for when we had to issue them. One rule was that EVERY exception in the code had to produce a message and EVERY case statement had to have a "default" branch. Then associated with every message had to be some "operator action", some way to fix the problem. All the 20,000 or so messages were inside a database. We were reviewing these for grammar, spelling and the like and found one "operator action" that read
"Try walking through walls or flying, the laws of logic no longer apply."
This is my all time best favorite message. We looked at the code that cause it. Something like this: If A=0 do_someotherthing Else "..rules of logic no longer apply". The programmer was kind of forced into this by the combination of project rules.
This is NOT about making the OS "cleaner". It is designed to combat pirated copies of Windows 7. Microsoft withholds stuff like e-mail until after you register.
At my location the digital broadcasts are SO MUCH BETTER. In every case the station's digital signal is far better and most are in HD. I actually get more stations in digital than in analog. The total number of digital stations is more than I'm willing to count. After some point you just say "lots" and stop counting.
That said, I really can't remember the last time a watched a TV show. I'm sure that I have but can't remember if it was weeks or months ago. So I gues the bottom line is that we have lots of very clear and crisp channels of pure junk
",,,you end up hating yourself for not spending the time instead on understanding the 3 years worth of adv.math courses you need to really grasp what is happening..."
The real breakthroughs don't require advanced math. Einstein said that with all of his work the breakthroughs happen very quickly at the conceptual level and then only after that he worked out the math. For example if the speed of light really was constant then speed is distance over time then if the product is constant then either distance or time is not. That was the breakthrough or leap in thinking. The math followed
With Newton his breakthrough was to think that gravity might extend all the way up to the sun and planets and be "universal". The math was hard (for the day) but was secondary to the flash of insight.
I think the next big revolution will be easy too. My guess is that space-time is discrete and non-continuous. It is a simple idea but has the potential to unite quantum and cosmic scales. Easy idea but the math is well past what we poor humans can handle.
The average person not working in the feild inly needs to understand the concept and some of it's implications and does not need the math tho understand them.
You are absolutly correct and the same logic goes all the way back. There must have been 2,000 classical composers who lived in the 1700's Today most people would be hard pressed to name a dozen. Time filters out the crap.
I do remember the 60's and 70's and there was a lot of junk on the air. But today we only remember the best 1% or 2% of it
Really were the "monkeys" TV show any bette than Hana Montana. I'd argue that the old 60's made for TV band was even worse. Remember the "partridge Family". There was some real crap back then, worse even then today's crap.
"Just forward port 6969 (the standard port for FAP or Fridge Access Protocol)"
But what if I own ten Fridges?
I more resonable example is my workstations at the office. I have two public IP address one for each machine. We could have used NAT but then how would I SSH into the workstaion from an outside location?
The real solution is V6. Then every grain of dust on Earth has it's own address.
All you need to do is buy a domain name that you like and then set up the MX records in the DNS to point yur incomming mail to Google.
As others have said you can set up your own server but you'd need to add some backup servers to for the times when yours is down. And you'd need to keep off-site back ups for all the data. This is the best why to go if you have a larger company with several offices but is to much work for a smaler outfit.
Bottom line: forward your MyName@MyCompany.com mail to google and that's it.
What has stopped people from buying Blue Ray? That is very easy to answer in just one word: "Cost."
If the BR discs cost the same as DVD and the plyers could be bought for under $100 then BR would take off.
Maybe sony could sell all their titles as duel sided discs with DVD on one side and BR on the other or just put a BR disc in free with every DVD then maybe people would buy the players.
I talk to peole about this and most of then say they think DVD is good enough and can't see the difference or if they can they don't think it is worth $200.
"Truthfully, what is wrong with the Vista interface?"
Haven't you figured it out. Nothing. All Microsoft will really do is make some very minor changes nd re-name Vista to "Windows 7". It's the last part that is the most impotent, the re-naming. Consumers are mostly stupid and if the marketing is done right this time they will think "this is not Vista". Did Microsoft prove that a simple re-branding would work with their TV ad where they siply re-named the OS? It works so that is what they are doing.
The only thing most people use anymore is a web browser. Very few users use more than 5% of the features. All MS has to do is get those 5% to work reasonably welll.
You can argue that people could have done the job better but that is like saying I could get to work fater in a flying car or a jet pack. The problemm is that we simply don't have the means to send people to mars. Given the current state of the art they'd likey never survive the trip.
AN then you have the little problem of getting off of Mars. What you need is a rocket on Mars that can lift off and travel to Earth. Here on Earth we have huge infrastucture in place to launch rockets, we'd have to fly a launch system to mars.
There is much work to be done before we can even think about sending people. Just a simple thing like radiation shielding. How would you do that? Shielding requires mass
"So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low!
I guess they are taking a page from Scotty's manual."
No. What's happend is that they asked the engineers to design something that has a 99.99% chance of working for 90 days. They did that. But as a side effect the device has a 85% chance of lasting 180 days and a 70% chance of one year and 50% on two years and so on. My numbers are not right but you get the idea.
$36 million is not much money. It is on the order of about 15 cents per person living in the US.
We spend FAR for money making just one Hollywood movie.
There is another really smart thing you can do too. When it is hot inside and not hot outside yu can open a window. That seems obvious but how many office building have openable windows? For some reason Architects like to cool office space with AC even if there is "free" cool air out doors.
This is even easier with computers. The servers would be happy to run at 95F and much of the time even in the American SW the outside air is cooler than 95F.
I've been saying this for many years. I think the reason for resistance is that no one gets a take home pay bonus based on how much power is saved.
How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?
They don't. Read the article. He thought of the idea and now hopes to find a company that can built a prototype. We don't yet know it the device is even buildable.
"As far as I am concerned, this is an invasion of privacy."
Technically, any dog poop on the ground is a "crime scene". There is no way it could be there unless a law were broken. Isn't DNA analysis a common tool in criminal investigation? What's new here is that in the past DNA analysis was so expensive that it was used only to help solve very serious crimes. Now it's cheap.
Interesting that some one would be concerned about a dog's privacy anyways. I really don't think that dogs care about that.
We know one thing for sure Bill Gates himself bought off on the idea. He would have never agreed to be in front of the camera if he didn't like the idea. So with Gates giving the thumbs up to the project everyone at Microsoft was scared shit-less to say it was a bad idea. So only after it was on the air and it was so obvouisly pointless could they remove it.
I know what Gatets was thinking too. I tried being on film once too. It was fun trying to act but then I saw the result. Man was it bad. After that I decided to work only in back of the camera. I do much better there. Likely Gates saw himself on TV and thought "OMG this is bad", just like I did. So they spent $10M on it. To him that's pocket change.
In space useless crap is worth billions, you just have to keep it around long enough to find a use for it.
But you have to use power to re-boost it. Anything inlow orbit is subject to orbital decay and will fall. The more "useless crap" you have the more you have to spend to periodically re-boost it.
If the Software is GPL'd you can in fact use the software without agreeing to the GPL. But ONLY the GPL gives you the permission to re-distribute the software.
All GPL'd software is copyrighted. You can use it but copyrighted stuff can't be copied and re-sold or even given away without specific consent of the author. The GPL is that specific written consent that you need should you want to make a copy.
You can have up to 8 "blades". each blade is a dual socket Xeon board with it's own RAm and graphics. The blades are in effect dual CPU Xeon PCs. The blades are connected to an high performance Ethernet switch which ties them together in a cluster.
So if you call eight PCs connected to a network a "supper computer" then this is it.
"but, for the most part, office suites, e-mail user agents, etc., do not actually benefit directly from SMP."
I think you've got that slightly wrong. Office SUITES do use multicores while word processors and spread sheets don't. With today's software multi cores don't do much for you unless you are multitasking.
If you are just running a word processor or a browser you don't need much computer power
Another way to do this would be to build a small roover that you can drive around and find a place where something else has already made a huge hole in the ground for then drive into that hole. This is slightly cheaper because you don't launch a giant rock from Earth.
Oh, wait. Didn't some one already do this?
Any one of us can experiment with this technology. It is not expensive and you can do it with home built equipment. What's happened here is that much of the functionality has moved from radio hardware into a computer. And a typical PC has enough power for this job. Google project names like "gnuradio" and "hpsdr" for leads on amateur projects. There are large on-line communities around several projects. If you want to transmit on higher power in is not easy to get a HAM license. You just pass an easy 35 question multiple choice test.