If you're telling me that better games hit PC's more often, then point proven. If you're telling me that The same games you're running on your 3 year obsolete PC are now magically able to run on your 6 year old console, you're missing the point. Consoles are early into this generation and PC graphics have already long past their hardware specs.
OK, now I REALLY take issue with this assumption. That is; "Needs the latest, bleeding edge everything" does NOT mean the same as "better".
If you want to get sucked up into the buy-newer-crap-to-replace-your-older-crap cycle, with its temporal doublethink of 'good' (ie. a game is amazing when it comes out, but two years later it is utter crap even though it hasn't changed at all) then be my guest, but don't spout it as truth since that just encourages more people to join you in brain-rotting in front of a TV set, game pad in hand.
I use Linux. This is because it allows me to communicate with people, find things out on the Web, create things, etc. (ie. a computer. I'm not prepared to put up with a proprietary OS to do those things, and Linux has the best hardware support of Free Software systems for my laptop). I don't play games because frankly I don't have enough time to get the things done that I would like, so I'm not going to restrict my time even more by endeavouring to store an ever-larger number on a memory stick through an incredibly inefficient process.
The problem is that so many things are being consolidated through businesses and governments which means everything has to be stored in databases and such. For example, a local newsagent probably wouldn't mind giving you credit in the form of "Damn, sorry I'm a quid short. Mind if I pay you tomorrow?" kind of thing. Tesco won't do that, because Tesco has no idea who you are.
The way around this is credit cards, and this also applies to loads of other areas like transport, any kind of shop loyalty card, etc. The way these are implemented has a big problem which is that they get around the who-are-you issue using numbers. It's easier to store a number in a database than a person.
Prisoner jokes aside, as soon as people are just numbers then fraud is going to skyrocket. The whole POINT of a credit card is that the place where the card is used doesn't have to know who you are, the human element is irrelevant to the system. Therefore as far as the system is concerned there can be ANYONE using these numbers, checking who the person is defeats the point of having the whole infrastructure to abstract it away in the first place.
This is fine for the infrastructure and systems, and I'm sure the people who designed them thought long and hard about making a working system. The system, however, exists to serve people. We are the ones that matter. I'm not bothered if the system has a headache, it is a computer program and we haven't reached the point where ethical questions about computer programs are relevant. The system chugs along merrily, processing transactions, etc. whilst the people, who the system has made irrelevant, are shafting each other by using different numbers.
The notion of Identity Theft is due to abstracting away people. It can be said that one's name at the bottom of a letter is an abstraction of onesself, and that sending letters under someone else's name is also identity theft, but at the blistering speeds and automation of our number-based systems these days it is very easy to pervert large aspects of someone's life in a timeframe of weeks, days or even hours, without anyone in the process to say "Hang on a second, this is a little fishy.", since people are flexible enough to, for example, send a confirmation letter (out of band) if something seems odd, but an instant system can't have that capability (can't go home to receive a letter confirming the payment of your groceries, and anything electronic and portable like an email is just another hack away).
It seems that we're in between the manual-only, human common sense at every point (although open to corruption) world and the AI-run, AI common sense at every point (although open to hacking) world, where we have the ultimate in stupidity (modern software) managing ever more intimate parts of our lives, ever faster.
On the other hand, I can't attach a patch to this bug report.
Lock-in works very well for businesses, just like bulking out food with sawdust works well for businesses. Businesses *should* exist to benefit people, making both of those practices bugs in the current system that need fixing (possibly by legislation).
However, the biggest bug with the current system, and which must be fixed before those, is that for some reason businesses, intangible names and sets of contracts, are given higher priority than living, breathing people (who often work for those businesses).
Re:Clouds on the Cayman tax heaven REPOSTED HERE
on
WikiLeaks Under Fire
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· Score: 1
Question: Is my brain so truly messed up that I subconsciously started reading that article to the theme tune of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?
It seems that his setup is using 'permanent' magnets to accelerate a motor instead of slow it down. What this would say to me is that the retardation effects are being shifted from the motor to the magnets. This would comply with current Physical knowledge, since 'permanent' magnets are not truly permanent, only in the sense that they can't be turned on and off like electromagnets.
If this is the case then expect the 'permanent' magnets to lose their magnetism over time, and if this magnetism was imparted to them from an industrial process (ie. they are not naturally magnetic) then the extra energy would be coming from the magnet factory's machinery.
It is still interesting, however, since such a method would be a way of storing energy, reducing the need for batteries. To be useful this technique would need to be measured in terms of extra energy imparted, magnet lifetime and whether the weight of the magnets would be better used to hold more batteries.
IAAPBIDHMTGO (I Am A Physicist But I Don't Have Much To Go On)
So the assumption is that LANs will go in favour of VPN type stuff over the net because net speeds will be fast enough? I think that's bogus, because people would be doing it now if that's the case. In 10 years time WAN connections will be very fast, yes, but I'm pretty sure LAN connections will be ultra mega fast. Couple this with moves towards thin client type applications being run from a business's server to its desktops and the unknowable crazy application ideas that will spring up thanks to ingenious startups and truly massive storage and transfer capacity and I'm quite certain that the killer apps being used in 10 years time will fail spectacularly if used over a mere GB/s connection and sysadmins will be laughing at these predictions like the 640K predictions we laugh at now.
"Creating laws to combat hypothetical future situations is a waste of time. Let there be some evidence that the situation is actually feasible or enevitable before we pass a law preventing it.
That comment just reminded me of a blog post I read the other day about us here in the UK with ever extending police powers to hold people without charge (not my blog, BTW, got it from Planet LUGRadio)
Bah, the document won't hold water in the long term. Nobody will accept the LineSpacingLikeNapster section, or the verdict times being specified in two different formats (one counting from 1900, one from 1904), or of course the break from widely used hex codes for "light grey-area" and "dark grey-area". Time will tell if anyone is able to implement these claims...
Exactly. The idea that "Home cooking is destroying the restaurant industry" may seem silly, but if meals could be copied indefinetly and distributed around the world for low cost and at the click of a button then it really would be the end for a great many restaurants (although there would still be a few for the odd romantic night out, but the idea of not-having-to-make-it-yourself would be gone). If there was an agreed upon technical way to make cultural works available AND easily editable (well structured SVG for images? Protracker is the only comparable thing I can think of for music) then all questions about quality would be gone, since works could be built upon, reused ("remixes" only really work for rap and dance in my opinion, and my personal opinions on such genres would make my comment 5 pages long and get modded Troll), etc.
The short version is this: Nobody has a right to make money from things they make. That would involve forcing people to pay someone for things they can make themselves. No amount of technology can make this a reality, however legalities can. Current legislation (mostly, depending on the country) favours individual rights, supervises business activity, etc. but the most influential forces in the world are pushing for that to change, and have been doing so since the dawn of time (Governments want more control, hence more terrorist legislation, corporations want to ensure their revenue streams without having to do anything productive, hence more copyright legislation and patent legislation)
Also don't forget that the third-party attempts at solving this problem (like WINE, VirtualBox, etc.) can end up being an excuse for software vendors not to make a Linux version.
The technology seems interesting, however the "double the efficiency" crap comes from one sentence: "Based on the theoretical Carnot thermodynamic cycle, at 600 degrees efficiency rates approach 60 percent, twice those of today's solar Stirling engines."
A Stirling engine is a heat engine, therefore it is limited by the Carnot efficiency. However, that is an upper limit and current technology is not near that (if the article is accurate in that area then let's say 30%). So the article says "Stirling engines are only running at half of the efficiency that Physics says they may achieve". For some reason though it is assumed that this new technology is as perfectly efficient as a heat engine can be (which is complete crap to begin with) even though the article states that bigger temperature differences for the hot and cold resevoirs increase efficiency (how can a perfectly efficient engine get more efficient?). This low moving part design (the hydrogen moves, does that count as solid state?) seems interesting, and it certainly seems useful if it works, but the efficiency argument is complete bollocks, they're just saying that it can't go over that efficiency, but physically the same could be said of any kind of heat engine, whether it's steam, internal combustion, Stirling, whatever, doesn't mean it will get anywhere near that high.
Microsoft is expcted to release a report demonstrating how Windows is a better choice than the Linux system installed on the XO based on figures for its XPS+Windows addon, showing that Windows exceeds the performance of the pure OLPC Linux system in areas such as higher framerates for games, faster clock cycles, faster archive compression and decompression, higher levels of RAM and other key areas of OS performance.
It is also in Intel's interests, with the whole Wintel thing. Linux is cross platform, and when a new technology (CELL?) looks to beat Intel's offering the transition is pretty straightforward. With Windows, however, people are locked into using what Microsoft choose (and compatible implementations), and Intel and Microsoft have very strong ties indeed. The classic maybe-conspiracy theory from the '90s is that Microsoft made Windows more bloated partially because Intel needed to justify the faster and faster machines they were churning out, and Intel in turn gave Microsoft preferential treatment when designing and offering their chips (ie. more deep level info, more statistics to better optimise algorithms, etc.). In my opinion though, Intel saw Windows as a way to get more people using computers and therefore increase sales, whilst Windows has become so bloated because it is a more effective use of Microsoft resources to build ever upwards with features and more layers of glossy paint than to look back down the stack at what can be improved/combined/reimplemented, ie. Windows is doing phenominally well, and why fix what ain't broken (from a business point of view)?
Microsoft licenses confuse me. I have read and pretty much understood most/all of the licenses used by the software in my machine (GPL, MPL, LGPL, X11, etc.), so I decided to see if I could do the same for Microsoft Office (I have read through the XP EULA before). Of course, the machine it was installed on did not have the EULA available seperately, in order to read it one has to open the application then go in Help->About, which means using the software which means agreeing to the terms, which is a silly thing to do without reading them first. So, I went onto Microsoft's website, read through their terms of use, privacy policy, etc. then found 'the' Office 2000 EULA. This is a PDF, and the machine I was on opened it with Adobe Reader, which I also had to read the EULA for (which sent me through to the Apple Public Source License). I took notes throughout on areas I felt were ambiguous, self-contradicting or things I refuse to agree to (I might type them up at some point). After reading through the whole PDF (and jumping back and forth around it for the references and when I thought areas contradicted) I finally opened up Excel. When inside I went in Help->About and found a DIFFERENT EULA. I read through this different EULA and found it had different terms. However, each EULA said that it was the definitive license for the software and could not be overridden by any other agreement. For an example of a difference in terms, the PDF from Microsoft.com said that the Office 2000 license is also valid for any previous version of Office, so I can use Microsoft Office 97, for example, without having to pay for another license. The EULA inside Microsoft Office 2000, however, not only said that the Office 2000 license wasn't applicable to older versions but it also said that by having an Office 2000 license I lose any license to use previous versions and cannot get another in the future, and also that if I get a license for a newer version of Microsoft Office then I am no longer allowed to use Office 2000.
Well, at this point I decided to play it safe and not use it at all, since I have already used Microsoft Office XP in the past and thus based on the 'definitive' terms of the EULA in Office 2000 I am not allowed to use it. I went to tell my computer lab demonstrator the conclusions of my petty legalities, but everyone had finished the Excel-monkey training session a while before and had left.
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I'd think that would be cheaper to do in software really.
1) Software can be created in any way desired and deployed easily to existing computer systems for very low cost
2) The cost of clicking "delete" is less than the cost of a descending hammer
Of course its a different issue. The Mohammad cartoons didn't offend the those in charge, thus they are free speech.
If you're telling me that better games hit PC's more often, then point proven. If you're telling me that The same games you're running on your 3 year obsolete PC are now magically able to run on your 6 year old console, you're missing the point. Consoles are early into this generation and PC graphics have already long past their hardware specs.
OK, now I REALLY take issue with this assumption. That is; "Needs the latest, bleeding edge everything" does NOT mean the same as "better".
If you want to get sucked up into the buy-newer-crap-to-replace-your-older-crap cycle, with its temporal doublethink of 'good' (ie. a game is amazing when it comes out, but two years later it is utter crap even though it hasn't changed at all) then be my guest, but don't spout it as truth since that just encourages more people to join you in brain-rotting in front of a TV set, game pad in hand.
I use Linux. This is because it allows me to communicate with people, find things out on the Web, create things, etc. (ie. a computer. I'm not prepared to put up with a proprietary OS to do those things, and Linux has the best hardware support of Free Software systems for my laptop). I don't play games because frankly I don't have enough time to get the things done that I would like, so I'm not going to restrict my time even more by endeavouring to store an ever-larger number on a memory stick through an incredibly inefficient process.
The problem is that so many things are being consolidated through businesses and governments which means everything has to be stored in databases and such. For example, a local newsagent probably wouldn't mind giving you credit in the form of "Damn, sorry I'm a quid short. Mind if I pay you tomorrow?" kind of thing. Tesco won't do that, because Tesco has no idea who you are.
The way around this is credit cards, and this also applies to loads of other areas like transport, any kind of shop loyalty card, etc. The way these are implemented has a big problem which is that they get around the who-are-you issue using numbers. It's easier to store a number in a database than a person.
Prisoner jokes aside, as soon as people are just numbers then fraud is going to skyrocket. The whole POINT of a credit card is that the place where the card is used doesn't have to know who you are, the human element is irrelevant to the system. Therefore as far as the system is concerned there can be ANYONE using these numbers, checking who the person is defeats the point of having the whole infrastructure to abstract it away in the first place.
This is fine for the infrastructure and systems, and I'm sure the people who designed them thought long and hard about making a working system. The system, however, exists to serve people. We are the ones that matter. I'm not bothered if the system has a headache, it is a computer program and we haven't reached the point where ethical questions about computer programs are relevant. The system chugs along merrily, processing transactions, etc. whilst the people, who the system has made irrelevant, are shafting each other by using different numbers.
The notion of Identity Theft is due to abstracting away people. It can be said that one's name at the bottom of a letter is an abstraction of onesself, and that sending letters under someone else's name is also identity theft, but at the blistering speeds and automation of our number-based systems these days it is very easy to pervert large aspects of someone's life in a timeframe of weeks, days or even hours, without anyone in the process to say "Hang on a second, this is a little fishy.", since people are flexible enough to, for example, send a confirmation letter (out of band) if something seems odd, but an instant system can't have that capability (can't go home to receive a letter confirming the payment of your groceries, and anything electronic and portable like an email is just another hack away).
It seems that we're in between the manual-only, human common sense at every point (although open to corruption) world and the AI-run, AI common sense at every point (although open to hacking) world, where we have the ultimate in stupidity (modern software) managing ever more intimate parts of our lives, ever faster.
On the other hand, I can't attach a patch to this bug report.
"I'm waiting for microsoft and apple (for all their software) to get a clue ;)"
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MSFT&annual Yeah, I wonder when they'll get a clue.....
Lock-in works very well for businesses, just like bulking out food with sawdust works well for businesses. Businesses *should* exist to benefit people, making both of those practices bugs in the current system that need fixing (possibly by legislation).
However, the biggest bug with the current system, and which must be fixed before those, is that for some reason businesses, intangible names and sets of contracts, are given higher priority than living, breathing people (who often work for those businesses).
Question: Is my brain so truly messed up that I subconsciously started reading that article to the theme tune of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?
Answer: Yes.
I suggest the Kai Hansen telescope.
It seems that his setup is using 'permanent' magnets to accelerate a motor instead of slow it down. What this would say to me is that the retardation effects are being shifted from the motor to the magnets. This would comply with current Physical knowledge, since 'permanent' magnets are not truly permanent, only in the sense that they can't be turned on and off like electromagnets.
If this is the case then expect the 'permanent' magnets to lose their magnetism over time, and if this magnetism was imparted to them from an industrial process (ie. they are not naturally magnetic) then the extra energy would be coming from the magnet factory's machinery.
It is still interesting, however, since such a method would be a way of storing energy, reducing the need for batteries. To be useful this technique would need to be measured in terms of extra energy imparted, magnet lifetime and whether the weight of the magnets would be better used to hold more batteries.
IAAPBIDHMTGO (I Am A Physicist But I Don't Have Much To Go On)
Why put a CELL in a Mac? I thought the All Knowing Steve Jobs (TM) said PowerPC (which CELL is an evolution of) was dead and Intel is the way to go?
Well, of course when Macs were using PowerPCs Intel was dead and PowerPC was the way to go.
I love the way each doublethink-style statement gets chanted louder and harder than the last one....
It's called renting.
So the assumption is that LANs will go in favour of VPN type stuff over the net because net speeds will be fast enough? I think that's bogus, because people would be doing it now if that's the case. In 10 years time WAN connections will be very fast, yes, but I'm pretty sure LAN connections will be ultra mega fast. Couple this with moves towards thin client type applications being run from a business's server to its desktops and the unknowable crazy application ideas that will spring up thanks to ingenious startups and truly massive storage and transfer capacity and I'm quite certain that the killer apps being used in 10 years time will fail spectacularly if used over a mere GB/s connection and sysadmins will be laughing at these predictions like the 640K predictions we laugh at now.
I can't be the only one that read the review's conclusion as "the alligators were groundless" can I?
That comment just reminded me of a blog post I read the other day about us here in the UK with ever extending police powers to hold people without charge (not my blog, BTW, got it from Planet LUGRadio)
Do stories like this make any "Nobody cares what happens on the Internet" skeptics of Anonymous's recent communique change their minds?
"...if it exists, the Higgs boson has an enormous effect on the world around us.[citation needed]"
Bah, the document won't hold water in the long term. Nobody will accept the LineSpacingLikeNapster section, or the verdict times being specified in two different formats (one counting from 1900, one from 1904), or of course the break from widely used hex codes for "light grey-area" and "dark grey-area". Time will tell if anyone is able to implement these claims...
Hmmm.... There's a joke here about hot air, but I can't quite get it off the ground.....
Exactly. The idea that "Home cooking is destroying the restaurant industry" may seem silly, but if meals could be copied indefinetly and distributed around the world for low cost and at the click of a button then it really would be the end for a great many restaurants (although there would still be a few for the odd romantic night out, but the idea of not-having-to-make-it-yourself would be gone). If there was an agreed upon technical way to make cultural works available AND easily editable (well structured SVG for images? Protracker is the only comparable thing I can think of for music) then all questions about quality would be gone, since works could be built upon, reused ("remixes" only really work for rap and dance in my opinion, and my personal opinions on such genres would make my comment 5 pages long and get modded Troll), etc. The short version is this: Nobody has a right to make money from things they make. That would involve forcing people to pay someone for things they can make themselves. No amount of technology can make this a reality, however legalities can. Current legislation (mostly, depending on the country) favours individual rights, supervises business activity, etc. but the most influential forces in the world are pushing for that to change, and have been doing so since the dawn of time (Governments want more control, hence more terrorist legislation, corporations want to ensure their revenue streams without having to do anything productive, hence more copyright legislation and patent legislation)
Also don't forget that the third-party attempts at solving this problem (like WINE, VirtualBox, etc.) can end up being an excuse for software vendors not to make a Linux version.
The technology seems interesting, however the "double the efficiency" crap comes from one sentence: "Based on the theoretical Carnot thermodynamic cycle, at 600 degrees efficiency rates approach 60 percent, twice those of today's solar Stirling engines."
A Stirling engine is a heat engine, therefore it is limited by the Carnot efficiency. However, that is an upper limit and current technology is not near that (if the article is accurate in that area then let's say 30%). So the article says "Stirling engines are only running at half of the efficiency that Physics says they may achieve". For some reason though it is assumed that this new technology is as perfectly efficient as a heat engine can be (which is complete crap to begin with) even though the article states that bigger temperature differences for the hot and cold resevoirs increase efficiency (how can a perfectly efficient engine get more efficient?). This low moving part design (the hydrogen moves, does that count as solid state?) seems interesting, and it certainly seems useful if it works, but the efficiency argument is complete bollocks, they're just saying that it can't go over that efficiency, but physically the same could be said of any kind of heat engine, whether it's steam, internal combustion, Stirling, whatever, doesn't mean it will get anywhere near that high.
Microsoft is expcted to release a report demonstrating how Windows is a better choice than the Linux system installed on the XO based on figures for its XPS+Windows addon, showing that Windows exceeds the performance of the pure OLPC Linux system in areas such as higher framerates for games, faster clock cycles, faster archive compression and decompression, higher levels of RAM and other key areas of OS performance.
buy a couple of thousand of each, voila you have thousands of devices. Marketing at its best :)
It is also in Intel's interests, with the whole Wintel thing. Linux is cross platform, and when a new technology (CELL?) looks to beat Intel's offering the transition is pretty straightforward. With Windows, however, people are locked into using what Microsoft choose (and compatible implementations), and Intel and Microsoft have very strong ties indeed. The classic maybe-conspiracy theory from the '90s is that Microsoft made Windows more bloated partially because Intel needed to justify the faster and faster machines they were churning out, and Intel in turn gave Microsoft preferential treatment when designing and offering their chips (ie. more deep level info, more statistics to better optimise algorithms, etc.). In my opinion though, Intel saw Windows as a way to get more people using computers and therefore increase sales, whilst Windows has become so bloated because it is a more effective use of Microsoft resources to build ever upwards with features and more layers of glossy paint than to look back down the stack at what can be improved/combined/reimplemented, ie. Windows is doing phenominally well, and why fix what ain't broken (from a business point of view)?
Microsoft licenses confuse me. I have read and pretty much understood most/all of the licenses used by the software in my machine (GPL, MPL, LGPL, X11, etc.), so I decided to see if I could do the same for Microsoft Office (I have read through the XP EULA before). Of course, the machine it was installed on did not have the EULA available seperately, in order to read it one has to open the application then go in Help->About, which means using the software which means agreeing to the terms, which is a silly thing to do without reading them first. So, I went onto Microsoft's website, read through their terms of use, privacy policy, etc. then found 'the' Office 2000 EULA. This is a PDF, and the machine I was on opened it with Adobe Reader, which I also had to read the EULA for (which sent me through to the Apple Public Source License). I took notes throughout on areas I felt were ambiguous, self-contradicting or things I refuse to agree to (I might type them up at some point). After reading through the whole PDF (and jumping back and forth around it for the references and when I thought areas contradicted) I finally opened up Excel. When inside I went in Help->About and found a DIFFERENT EULA. I read through this different EULA and found it had different terms. However, each EULA said that it was the definitive license for the software and could not be overridden by any other agreement. For an example of a difference in terms, the PDF from Microsoft.com said that the Office 2000 license is also valid for any previous version of Office, so I can use Microsoft Office 97, for example, without having to pay for another license. The EULA inside Microsoft Office 2000, however, not only said that the Office 2000 license wasn't applicable to older versions but it also said that by having an Office 2000 license I lose any license to use previous versions and cannot get another in the future, and also that if I get a license for a newer version of Microsoft Office then I am no longer allowed to use Office 2000.
Well, at this point I decided to play it safe and not use it at all, since I have already used Microsoft Office XP in the past and thus based on the 'definitive' terms of the EULA in Office 2000 I am not allowed to use it. I went to tell my computer lab demonstrator the conclusions of my petty legalities, but everyone had finished the Excel-monkey training session a while before and had left.
Done. NEXT!