My Lenovo X60 is a tablet PC that only responds to wacom pen input. It came with a wacom pen. The wacom drivers are what it uses. In fact, the display is essentially a really nice resolution (1400x1050 at 12.1" diagonal) cintiq. The screen doesn't have to lock at angles or anything, I just press on it and it stays put, yes, even when the display is unlatched and being used like a laptop.
If I really want though, I can twist the display around and put the back of the display flush with the keyboard and now I have a tablet-input only laptop.
Thankfully there -isn't- a Department of Constitutional Rights. If such a thing existed, we could expect the same bureaucracy and red tape to drown any chance it has at reasonably protecting Americans against broad violations of their rights.
Additionally, you can bet that if such a department existed, laws like the USA PATRIOT Act would serve to maim or gag it in order to perpetuate even greater crimes while people are none the wiser.
No, I'm glad we live in a country where our rights are defended by regular people putting their time and money to organizations they deem valuable to the future of the nation. Is it the -best- way? Perhaps not, but it's certainly better than betting it all on responsible government.
I will insist, again, that I am glad I live in a country where we have the ACLU, the EFF, the NRA, the NAACP, etc. I am glad we have all of those. It doesn't bother me one bit that they at times disagree with one another, it doesn't bother me that these organizations can be overzealous. I am glad they are overzealously defending my rights. If that means the NRA makes it legal for me to own a bazooka without a permit, well, to quote Office Space, "Fuckin' A, man."
I wasn't being particular enough, but there's a lack of "intermediate" size black holes from what we can see. We only find really stinking huge ones and then smaller ones, but still many times the mass of our solar sun.
But what we need to find are -ridiculous- numbers of these smaller black holes, or still a ridiculous number of intermediate or supermassive black holes. We don't though. They apparently aren't there.
And for the Sun to be a black hole, it would have to become a lot more massive. There's no way our solar system could ever become a black hole without interacting with another star.
I'm saying that if that if the Sheriff, well, to be honest, the FBI rolls in, and says, we're taking these backup tapes, then they'll have it. Not deleted.
But if you roll in and say, hey, I want my old emails, they'll say, sorry, no, we have no way of giving you just your old emails back in a timely manner.
That said, Google has resisted what it correctly considered to be unlawful demands for information.
That's not true and you know it. It'd be a waste to do that on their end. I highly doubt it gets securely wiped, and I'm guessing it's only a few references that get set to NULL or somesuch and the data still exists. And if they have tape backups, well, obviously they're not going to pull those out and wipe those every time you delete an old email.
So completely gone? No, getting rid of something permanently on the internet (not just on Google) is hard, close to impossible. What Google is basically saying is that when you delete something, don't cry to them to get it back, it's as much an effort to truly delete all traces of something as it is to actually restore it. If they aren't going to pull out tapes to delete your emails, they won't do it to recover them. If they aren't going to waste CPU/IO on deleting every single disparate copy of your email, they aren't going to waste CPU/IO trying to recover it.
I fail to notice the upkeep and constant struggle.
Err, I mean, last week I had to duct-tape my computer together because Windows made my case explode. It was really strange, but whatever, I'm going to go ahead and keep using Vista because it's evil and I feel like my constant efforts to keep my machine intact make it more valuable. A labor of love, you might say. *eyeroll*
That is a "MACHO," which we have looked for and not seen enough of. MACHOs are unique in that they affect the light behind them (they are opaque and gravitationally lensing) and so while they could account for a lot of matter, we aren't seeing enough lensing and enough holes in the spectrum from "dark stars", areas where the sky is darker from an object blocking light behind it.
And back of the envelope calculations say a dyson sphere wouldn't be anywhere near a black hole's mass, which is what we really would need to find quite a few of in order to find the missing mass.
And this ignores any technical difficulties with actually constructing a dyson sphere.
I Am Not A Physicist, but the problem with MOND is that, well, it explains only one problem of gravity or cosmology, rather: galactic rotation. It fails to explain how spectacularly successful tests of general relativity have been. For example, where does MOND predict frame-dragging? Answer: it doesn't.
MOND is what you get when you have a problem posed to amateur mathematicians and physicists, and they answer that problem (galactic rotation) with the simplest solution (let's just tweak this equation) without considering the fact that their modified theory is inconsistent with well-established theories that currently exist. MOND does not predict certain things that we see in nature, but this isn't seen by proponents. All the proponents see is, hey, it solves this problem. Well, yes, but it causes a whole lot more that you neglect to mention. Chiefly among those is, pretty much every quirk of relativity.
The fact that Apple charges for service packs and has the legal ability to add new functionality in those service packs (as opposed to Microsoft, which has to consult a team of rabid lawyers every time it wants to add a new feature) does not make it a "new operating system" every time they release another point version. Sure, I might call the differences between 10.0 and 10.5 enough to qualify as a different OS, but 10.4 and 10.5? Or 10.5 and 10.6, which is so far as being marketed as 10.5 But With More API Stability, frankly I'm dumbfounded as how anyone cal call these different operating systems.
Usually the only differences between the point releases are modified subsystems of the OS. It's like releasing Windows XP with the same kernel but, say, a different window manager. And then releasing it again with say, a backup manager. And then doing it again with say, a new mail client and an integrated messenger. Repeat ad nauseum.
I said "designed" by programmers. As in, things that are very much not the purview of programmers were designed by them. The user interface, for example, is the thing that everyone experiences. No one cares how beautiful, or fast, or well-coded an application is in the source code. People want one that works well. Take a look at Pixelmator (note: I use Windows) for good UI design. The entire thing effuses elegance and a combination of form and function. At every stage programmers and UI designers collaborated. With GIMP, function is preferred over form, and only when it's convenient to the programmer. Take, for example, the extremely poor color space support that still exists despite being identified as an issue for professional adoption eight years ago. I'm sorry, but I think the GIMP is awful. It's not as bad as inkscape though, which when I go to look for hotkey help, loaded a document with all the hotkeys in it zoomed out so everything was a blur. What, am I supposed to print this out?
And I've seen, ahem, GIMP, multiple ways. Sorry to the authors.
But someone who bought their computer in 2001 will pay the "Microsoft Tax" of around $80 (I do love how you don't use the OEM prices for Windows which can be gotten at NewEgg and most other online retailers.) And after that, they could spend $200 on Vista Ultimate.
On the other hand, if the Mac guy wants to keep up with the joneses, he has to buy OS X, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5.
Your argument is a straw man, for using prices most people never pay: from what I've seen with non-technical people, they won't ever upgrade their OS. They just buy a new computer. And this is true for Mac OS users as well, though I think to a lesser extent. I would wager the average Apple user spends more on their OS than the average Windows user merely because I know people who have computers from 2001/2002 that are running Windows XP who have no inclination to upgrade. So they spent around $80 on the OS. The sheer number of these people relative to the number of people who I know who have chosen to upgrade their machine to Vista at any point suggests something not quite anecdotal, though not quite data yet:)
Let's keep off the strawmen shall we though? I mean, neither argument is valid so the jury is out until someone actually performs a study.
Any finite amount of stuff in a finite volume at a finite temperature has the ability to perform only a finite number of calculations per second.
Anyway, assuming the brain is infinite is hardly falsifiable, you would always be able to claim there's something more that we're "just not seeing." Instead, you should start with the assumption that the brain is nothing, and well, that's obviously not true, we can remove what we call the brain from a mouse and it stops living, so it clearly does something. Then we can start dealing with parts of the brain, and we very clearly see that damaging one part of the brain leads to errant behaviors. And we can go on to the genetic scale and see how mutations in the production of neurons affects the cells. And we can extract neurons and test them with highly precise equipment to see how they operate, what internal mechanisms are used, etc.
The alternative position is untenable in the scientific realm. You can't assume the universe has infinite complexity, because you're saying that there will always be something we're missing. You have to assume it has zero complexity and then start to add all the complexities of your observation.
No, The Gimp genuinely sucks. It's dialogues are hideous, the menus are atrocious, and you can tell it was designed by programmers because they (at least at one point) considered the scripting tool to be so important that it was a primary user interface element when starting up The Gimp.
Really? Rather than work on a better user interface or anything, they make it support scripting and make it one of the windows that pops up with The Gimp?
That's not to mention the fact that there's been a new graphic engine that will some day support CMYK (and L*A*B and all those other "strange" and "esoteric" color spaces that no one has ever heard of *eyeroll*) that's been in the works for as long as I've known it.
I think the devs behind The Gimp are obviously not graphic artists, or if they are, they consider writing sweet scripts the pinnacle of the form.
The even brain-dead simpler solution is for the one-click purchasing to be disabled on purchases over $25. This would be akin to having to sign for your card in stores. In my state, at least, unless you buy more than $25 worth of goods your credit card is a one-click gateway to whatever you want. More than that, and you just have to add your consent with a signature.
I find that most times when people say "If you can't tell, don't bother. But those of us who can, it's totally worth it" tend to be either scam artists or they have confirmation bias affecting their judgment. At least you issued a caveat, but the second sentence there is pretty much indicative of every pseudoscientific medical device available on the internet. And there are people who buy magnetic rings and the like and claim life-changing benefits.
There's an IBM chip in every one of the three major consoles, which have sold around 50 million units in 2 years.
And that's a small part of their business. IBM sells a lot more chips, period, than probably anyone other than Intel or maybe there's an ARM manufacturer that does more business. But IBM also fabs ARM CPUs, so there you go.
If each supercomputer contains a hundred thousand CPUs, they only need to sell TEN supercomputers.
If each mainframe contains a hundred CPUs, they only need to sell ten thousand mainframes.
See, those are quantities that help make sense of this. A Blue Gene/P installation can use up to nearly 900,000 processors alone.
So yes, IBM probably does ship more CPUs than Apple does. IBM doesn't just fabricate and sell Power chips either, so I'd say there's probably a pretty wide margin.
Actually no, the indexing runs in the background, as with all other search systems currently in use.
But a smarter system would only check new and used files, and do a one-time-pass when you decide to change a highly used query of the filesystem. For example, adding.ogg to the music bucket/folder/search would require another pass over the system, and then any future.ogg files would automatically be added to the music area.
But no, Spotlight is not a live indexing filesystem, saved searches are only cached, not updated live. The indexer doesn't seem to update the saved search itself, rather, the saved search must go to the indexer.
The catalytic converter isn't as efficient as a straight pipe. While not legal, cutouts that push exhaust straight outside the engine and bypass the exhaust system do improve horsepower.
It's more like bumping up the speed of your front side bus on your CPU. If you have a slower FSB, you might not ever notice it if you aren't racing your ca... CPU. But when you need that speed, it sure would be nice to remove the FSB limitation.
That said, the amount of good that catalytic converters do means we should probably keep them, as they aren't a huge drain on the power of a vehicle.
The idea is that the data really exists in one place, and you can, if you want, access it through a hierarchy.
But the new (everything old is new again) idea is that you can also organize everything in a completely different but still the same way. That is, instead of having to manually find all your music on your computer, you have a saved search that contains references to every.mp3 on your hard disk. Now you can have your cake and eat it too.
It's only been in the past half decade though that this has become very easy, which goes to show you how poor OS or at least application and filesystem integration has been since then. I always found it appalling that every time I have to do a search on the filesystem that it has to go through folders that haven't changed in a year and it has to re-find everything every time. Completely ridiculous. And the filesystems haven't actually gotten that much better at reporting changes and new stuff. For example, when I rename a file to.mp3 or download a new.mp3, why isn't there some sort of hook that automatically tests a new file against various saved searches? If it's a music file, put it in this bucket, a picture, put it in that bucket. It seems like the filesystem needs to be aware that it isn't the only method of finding files, and these ideas are still something of a surprise to their developers.
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I have a desktop PC I'd like to sell you.
It's transportable.
My Lenovo X60 is a tablet PC that only responds to wacom pen input. It came with a wacom pen. The wacom drivers are what it uses. In fact, the display is essentially a really nice resolution (1400x1050 at 12.1" diagonal) cintiq. The screen doesn't have to lock at angles or anything, I just press on it and it stays put, yes, even when the display is unlatched and being used like a laptop.
If I really want though, I can twist the display around and put the back of the display flush with the keyboard and now I have a tablet-input only laptop.
Hey now, you looked before you said that and that's cheating.
Thankfully there -isn't- a Department of Constitutional Rights. If such a thing existed, we could expect the same bureaucracy and red tape to drown any chance it has at reasonably protecting Americans against broad violations of their rights.
Additionally, you can bet that if such a department existed, laws like the USA PATRIOT Act would serve to maim or gag it in order to perpetuate even greater crimes while people are none the wiser.
No, I'm glad we live in a country where our rights are defended by regular people putting their time and money to organizations they deem valuable to the future of the nation. Is it the -best- way? Perhaps not, but it's certainly better than betting it all on responsible government.
I will insist, again, that I am glad I live in a country where we have the ACLU, the EFF, the NRA, the NAACP, etc. I am glad we have all of those. It doesn't bother me one bit that they at times disagree with one another, it doesn't bother me that these organizations can be overzealous. I am glad they are overzealously defending my rights. If that means the NRA makes it legal for me to own a bazooka without a permit, well, to quote Office Space, "Fuckin' A, man."
I wasn't being particular enough, but there's a lack of "intermediate" size black holes from what we can see. We only find really stinking huge ones and then smaller ones, but still many times the mass of our solar sun.
But what we need to find are -ridiculous- numbers of these smaller black holes, or still a ridiculous number of intermediate or supermassive black holes. We don't though. They apparently aren't there.
And for the Sun to be a black hole, it would have to become a lot more massive. There's no way our solar system could ever become a black hole without interacting with another star.
I'm saying that if that if the Sheriff, well, to be honest, the FBI rolls in, and says, we're taking these backup tapes, then they'll have it. Not deleted.
But if you roll in and say, hey, I want my old emails, they'll say, sorry, no, we have no way of giving you just your old emails back in a timely manner.
That said, Google has resisted what it correctly considered to be unlawful demands for information.
That's not true and you know it. It'd be a waste to do that on their end. I highly doubt it gets securely wiped, and I'm guessing it's only a few references that get set to NULL or somesuch and the data still exists. And if they have tape backups, well, obviously they're not going to pull those out and wipe those every time you delete an old email.
So completely gone? No, getting rid of something permanently on the internet (not just on Google) is hard, close to impossible. What Google is basically saying is that when you delete something, don't cry to them to get it back, it's as much an effort to truly delete all traces of something as it is to actually restore it. If they aren't going to pull out tapes to delete your emails, they won't do it to recover them. If they aren't going to waste CPU/IO on deleting every single disparate copy of your email, they aren't going to waste CPU/IO trying to recover it.
I fail to notice the upkeep and constant struggle.
Err, I mean, last week I had to duct-tape my computer together because Windows made my case explode. It was really strange, but whatever, I'm going to go ahead and keep using Vista because it's evil and I feel like my constant efforts to keep my machine intact make it more valuable. A labor of love, you might say. *eyeroll*
That is a "MACHO," which we have looked for and not seen enough of. MACHOs are unique in that they affect the light behind them (they are opaque and gravitationally lensing) and so while they could account for a lot of matter, we aren't seeing enough lensing and enough holes in the spectrum from "dark stars", areas where the sky is darker from an object blocking light behind it.
And back of the envelope calculations say a dyson sphere wouldn't be anywhere near a black hole's mass, which is what we really would need to find quite a few of in order to find the missing mass.
And this ignores any technical difficulties with actually constructing a dyson sphere.
I Am Not A Physicist, but the problem with MOND is that, well, it explains only one problem of gravity or cosmology, rather: galactic rotation. It fails to explain how spectacularly successful tests of general relativity have been. For example, where does MOND predict frame-dragging? Answer: it doesn't.
MOND is what you get when you have a problem posed to amateur mathematicians and physicists, and they answer that problem (galactic rotation) with the simplest solution (let's just tweak this equation) without considering the fact that their modified theory is inconsistent with well-established theories that currently exist. MOND does not predict certain things that we see in nature, but this isn't seen by proponents. All the proponents see is, hey, it solves this problem. Well, yes, but it causes a whole lot more that you neglect to mention. Chiefly among those is, pretty much every quirk of relativity.
The fact that Apple charges for service packs and has the legal ability to add new functionality in those service packs (as opposed to Microsoft, which has to consult a team of rabid lawyers every time it wants to add a new feature) does not make it a "new operating system" every time they release another point version. Sure, I might call the differences between 10.0 and 10.5 enough to qualify as a different OS, but 10.4 and 10.5? Or 10.5 and 10.6, which is so far as being marketed as 10.5 But With More API Stability, frankly I'm dumbfounded as how anyone cal call these different operating systems.
Usually the only differences between the point releases are modified subsystems of the OS. It's like releasing Windows XP with the same kernel but, say, a different window manager. And then releasing it again with say, a backup manager. And then doing it again with say, a new mail client and an integrated messenger. Repeat ad nauseum.
I said "designed" by programmers. As in, things that are very much not the purview of programmers were designed by them. The user interface, for example, is the thing that everyone experiences. No one cares how beautiful, or fast, or well-coded an application is in the source code. People want one that works well. Take a look at Pixelmator (note: I use Windows) for good UI design. The entire thing effuses elegance and a combination of form and function. At every stage programmers and UI designers collaborated. With GIMP, function is preferred over form, and only when it's convenient to the programmer. Take, for example, the extremely poor color space support that still exists despite being identified as an issue for professional adoption eight years ago. I'm sorry, but I think the GIMP is awful. It's not as bad as inkscape though, which when I go to look for hotkey help, loaded a document with all the hotkeys in it zoomed out so everything was a blur. What, am I supposed to print this out?
And I've seen, ahem, GIMP, multiple ways. Sorry to the authors.
But someone who bought their computer in 2001 will pay the "Microsoft Tax" of around $80 (I do love how you don't use the OEM prices for Windows which can be gotten at NewEgg and most other online retailers.) And after that, they could spend $200 on Vista Ultimate.
On the other hand, if the Mac guy wants to keep up with the joneses, he has to buy OS X, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5.
Your argument is a straw man, for using prices most people never pay: from what I've seen with non-technical people, they won't ever upgrade their OS. They just buy a new computer. And this is true for Mac OS users as well, though I think to a lesser extent. I would wager the average Apple user spends more on their OS than the average Windows user merely because I know people who have computers from 2001/2002 that are running Windows XP who have no inclination to upgrade. So they spent around $80 on the OS. The sheer number of these people relative to the number of people who I know who have chosen to upgrade their machine to Vista at any point suggests something not quite anecdotal, though not quite data yet :)
Let's keep off the strawmen shall we though? I mean, neither argument is valid so the jury is out until someone actually performs a study.
Any finite amount of stuff in a finite volume at a finite temperature has the ability to perform only a finite number of calculations per second.
Anyway, assuming the brain is infinite is hardly falsifiable, you would always be able to claim there's something more that we're "just not seeing." Instead, you should start with the assumption that the brain is nothing, and well, that's obviously not true, we can remove what we call the brain from a mouse and it stops living, so it clearly does something. Then we can start dealing with parts of the brain, and we very clearly see that damaging one part of the brain leads to errant behaviors. And we can go on to the genetic scale and see how mutations in the production of neurons affects the cells. And we can extract neurons and test them with highly precise equipment to see how they operate, what internal mechanisms are used, etc.
The alternative position is untenable in the scientific realm. You can't assume the universe has infinite complexity, because you're saying that there will always be something we're missing. You have to assume it has zero complexity and then start to add all the complexities of your observation.
No, The Gimp genuinely sucks. It's dialogues are hideous, the menus are atrocious, and you can tell it was designed by programmers because they (at least at one point) considered the scripting tool to be so important that it was a primary user interface element when starting up The Gimp.
Really? Rather than work on a better user interface or anything, they make it support scripting and make it one of the windows that pops up with The Gimp?
That's not to mention the fact that there's been a new graphic engine that will some day support CMYK (and L*A*B and all those other "strange" and "esoteric" color spaces that no one has ever heard of *eyeroll*) that's been in the works for as long as I've known it.
I think the devs behind The Gimp are obviously not graphic artists, or if they are, they consider writing sweet scripts the pinnacle of the form.
There's a clone already available on Cydia, which is the Apt-based package manager you can use on jailbroken phones.
The even brain-dead simpler solution is for the one-click purchasing to be disabled on purchases over $25. This would be akin to having to sign for your card in stores. In my state, at least, unless you buy more than $25 worth of goods your credit card is a one-click gateway to whatever you want. More than that, and you just have to add your consent with a signature.
Are you sure it's not confirmation bias?
I find that most times when people say "If you can't tell, don't bother. But those of us who can, it's totally worth it" tend to be either scam artists or they have confirmation bias affecting their judgment. At least you issued a caveat, but the second sentence there is pretty much indicative of every pseudoscientific medical device available on the internet. And there are people who buy magnetic rings and the like and claim life-changing benefits.
There's an IBM chip in every one of the three major consoles, which have sold around 50 million units in 2 years.
And that's a small part of their business. IBM sells a lot more chips, period, than probably anyone other than Intel or maybe there's an ARM manufacturer that does more business. But IBM also fabs ARM CPUs, so there you go.
If each supercomputer contains a hundred thousand CPUs, they only need to sell TEN supercomputers.
If each mainframe contains a hundred CPUs, they only need to sell ten thousand mainframes.
See, those are quantities that help make sense of this. A Blue Gene/P installation can use up to nearly 900,000 processors alone.
So yes, IBM probably does ship more CPUs than Apple does. IBM doesn't just fabricate and sell Power chips either, so I'd say there's probably a pretty wide margin.
Actually no, the indexing runs in the background, as with all other search systems currently in use.
But a smarter system would only check new and used files, and do a one-time-pass when you decide to change a highly used query of the filesystem. For example, adding .ogg to the music bucket/folder/search would require another pass over the system, and then any future .ogg files would automatically be added to the music area.
But no, Spotlight is not a live indexing filesystem, saved searches are only cached, not updated live. The indexer doesn't seem to update the saved search itself, rather, the saved search must go to the indexer.
The catalytic converter isn't as efficient as a straight pipe. While not legal, cutouts that push exhaust straight outside the engine and bypass the exhaust system do improve horsepower.
It's more like bumping up the speed of your front side bus on your CPU. If you have a slower FSB, you might not ever notice it if you aren't racing your ca... CPU. But when you need that speed, it sure would be nice to remove the FSB limitation.
That said, the amount of good that catalytic converters do means we should probably keep them, as they aren't a huge drain on the power of a vehicle.
In strawmanistan, the most free and enlightened society of all, 15 is the age of consent.
I find it entirely unsurprising that, with the amount of money going into athletics programs, we would have that many gold medals.
I also find it entirely unsurprising that we are then beaten by Norway for Winter medals.
The idea is that the data really exists in one place, and you can, if you want, access it through a hierarchy.
But the new (everything old is new again) idea is that you can also organize everything in a completely different but still the same way. That is, instead of having to manually find all your music on your computer, you have a saved search that contains references to every .mp3 on your hard disk. Now you can have your cake and eat it too.
It's only been in the past half decade though that this has become very easy, which goes to show you how poor OS or at least application and filesystem integration has been since then. I always found it appalling that every time I have to do a search on the filesystem that it has to go through folders that haven't changed in a year and it has to re-find everything every time. Completely ridiculous. And the filesystems haven't actually gotten that much better at reporting changes and new stuff. For example, when I rename a file to .mp3 or download a new .mp3, why isn't there some sort of hook that automatically tests a new file against various saved searches? If it's a music file, put it in this bucket, a picture, put it in that bucket. It seems like the filesystem needs to be aware that it isn't the only method of finding files, and these ideas are still something of a surprise to their developers.
And I want some too.