You are aware that contributors to anything that's part of the GNU project (gcc, glibc, bash, autotools, emacs, etc) have all signed their copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, right?
Apple didn't pay Gartner to produce this report and release it to the public. Somebody (maybe a hedge fund that owns a shedlot of AAPL and is having trouble covering it's losses in oil futures) that wants Apple to cannibalize it's potential long-term growth in exchange for a massive short term gain did.
As usual, the loudest criticisms of Apple are the ones based on the machines of a decade ago. Honestly, who still cares about the Centris/Performa/LC series or even the G3? What's next, a scathing critique of System 7?
Also, do the Mac fans still get to be snarky about PCs in general because Packard Bell and eMachines made such awful clunkers, or is this tactic reserved for the Apple-bashers only?
So, your support for the ideals of Open Source is strong enough that you're willing to give up 3D acceleration (and games) for The Cause. That's a start, but you still have a long way left to go.
I, on the other hand, am so committed to the principles of the Open Source revolution that I'm willing to make an even greater sacrifice. I'm not running ANY SOFTWARE WHATSOEVER on my GNU/Linux box. That's right, my computer is on strike, and we won't settle for anything less than total software freedom. I really feel so strongly about the value of open-source software that I'm willing to give up using ALL the functionality of my computer indefinitely, just to show all those closed-source-mongering pinheads an nVidia, the fascists at Phoenix who won't hand over my BIOS's source code, the filthy Microsoft appeasers who wrote WINE, and the double agent that made OpenOffice read and write.doc files how I feel. So I bought a Mac for web surfing and email and whatnot and an XBox for gaming, unplugged the GNU/Linux machine, boxed it up and put it away in a closet. Yeah, they'll be feeling the effects of my strike any day now. Just you wait...
Time is only worth what somebody willing to pay for it. If the 5 seconds a day comes out of business hours when you have work waiting, are willing and able to do the work, and can't do any part of the work until the computer is finished booting, then it's worth your normal hourly rate. If the 5 seconds of waiting for the computer to boot comes out of your scotch drinking and slashdot posting time, it's only worth what you're willing to pay to keep from being interrupted by computer delays.
Not only is the story complete fiction, but the premise is wrong! Ball-point pens will write upside down, so they obviously don't need gravity to work correctly...
It works when the player can hold your entire music collection, you can just drag&drop everything at once. It breaks down when you want to fill a 20GB player from a 32GB music collection. Building an iTunes playlist for all tracks rated 3 stars or more and syncing it to an iPod takes about 5 mouse clicks. Putting the same set of songs onto a drag&drop player requires spending hours of quality time with Windows Explorer, Finder, or "man rsync".
Those sentences in quote marks are direct quotes from the article. Flaming Mr. A.C. about them being stupid is even more pointless than replying to an A.C. post normally is...
Where do these people get off deciding what we will remember, and why is it all useless information?
I agree. The Kofi Annan article is a useless waste of bits. It's just a fluffy biographical sketch that repeats information available in numerous print encyclopedia and on the UN's web site. Read five newspaper articles about the UN, and you could glean all the information that's in the WP article.
The stuff about Knuckles, however, is more useful. It's not covered in any print encyclopedia, it's not background information you can pick up from reading the news, and the primary sources are inaccessable to most people because they either don't own every Sega system ever made or don't read Japanese!
You're missing the importance of the part where they define "licensed device" as a "physical hardware system". That means the licensed device cannot be a VM (because a machine that is virtual is by definition not physical). You don't have a license (and thus can't use Vista at all) until you put it on a licensed (physical) device, and you can't put it on a VM in addition to that licensed device, therefore you aren't allowed to use Vista Home in a VM even if it is the only installed copy of Vista you have.
Why does Microsoft all of a sudden have to compete with Google Video/YouTube?
Did you read Slashdot yesterday? If they don't react, people will start to question whether Windows (and the whole concept of OS as platform for applications) is still relevant. Microsoft felt threatened by web 1.0 turning the browser into an application platform, slashdot types started to ask if PC operating systems and local applications would be relevant in the future. Something had to be done, so they introduced MSIE, WMP, MS Java, Active X, and gratuitiously incompatible html and javascript. Eventually they killed off Netscape and gravely wounded Real and Java. For 6 years after that nobody, not even the die-hard Linux and Mac zealots, asked whether Windows was still relevant.
Now they're even more threatened by web 2.0. The ghost of Netscape is back to haunt them. Flash and AJAX make a much more compelling platform than html forms, Java and Realplayer ever did. Articles questioning whether Windows is still relevant are back on the front page of Slashdot. They've got to kill somebody soon, and Google and Yahoo seems like the obvious targets.
Yes I've heard of it, but what does a 3rd rate sci-fi author arriving at outlandish conclusions about the future by extrapolating trends well beyond the area where they are meaningful have to do with anything?
Cars on today's market, at least in the US, have better fuel economy at the same (or improved) power levels as models 5, 10, 15, or more years ago. Even those "gas guzzling SUVs" such as Suburbans and such get around 20 or more MPG now.
I'm not the AC, but here's some data from fueleconomy.gov. In cases with more than one engine/transmission combination, I tried to keep them as close to the same as possible to the 1985 engine/trans for each subsequent year. These are not cherry-picked examples, every long running model I looked at showed the same trend of near-constant fuel economy.
Common sedans, one midsize, one small: 1986 Ford Taurus (2.5L I4, auto): 22 MPG 1995 Ford Taurus (3.0L V6*, auto): 23 MPG 2005 Ford Taurus (3.0L V6*, auto): 23 MPG *No 4 cyl. model available 1995-2005
1985 Toyota Corolla (1.6L I4, auto): 29MPG 1985 Toyota Corolla (1.6L I4, auto): 27MPG 1985 Toyota Corolla (1.8L I4, auto): 33MPG
A Minivan: 1986 Ford Aerostar (2.3L I4, auto): 22MPG 1995 Ford Aerostar (3.0L V6*, auto): 20MPG 2005 Ford Freestar (3.9L V6*, auto): 20MPG *No 4 cyl. Ford minivan available 1995-2005. I think the 1995 model year was when Ford changed the name to Windstar, but fueleconomy.gov lists it as an Aerostar, so I'll stick with that name.
A gain of 3-5 MPG in 20 years? Color me unimpressed.
5.7 million new jobs have been created since 2003....and with a population growth rate of 0.91% (taken from the CIA world factbook), 8.2 million new Americans have been created in the same time period.
It's true that wage growth is flat since 1999, but if you include benefits, there has been steady growth. Taxes are falling, so after-tax disposable income is higher than it's ever been.
The value of benefits is up because health care costs so much more than it did in 1999. Being able to afford the same N goods and services plus the same annual visit to the doctor and the same prescription on your current salary as on your 1999 salary even though the doctor visit costs twice as much and the prescription costs 4 times as much is NOT income growth! (unless you're a doctor or a health plan administrator)
Your statistics are bad, but look on the bright side. By the time the perfect economic storm that's coming when massive consumer debt, and economic growth based entirely on construction and real estate collide with rising interest rates and stagnant wages reaches it's full bank-collapsing fury, Bush will be out of office so you'll get to blame that one on the democrats too.
I agree with you that unquestioning acceptance of Google Truth(beta) is a bad idea, but it could be a great research project and a useful tool as long as the users are willing to think critically about the results. As long as we don't allow "Google says his statement is inconsistent with 78% of the published material on that subject" to be confused with "he's obviously lying" it could be very useful. As for the competition part of the argument, nothing Google does goes uncopied for long. If this works, there would probably be "truth detector" sites from Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and several governments within a year, all using slightly different algorithms and bodies of reference material. Hopefully they'll disagree frequently and provoke a lively debate about who is and isn't lying, and what "Truth" is. If they're all consistently wrong, well, it'll be hard to do more damage than Bill O'Reilly and the People's Daily do now.
It's definitely possible to write an algorithm that will output something inaccurate because that's the rational thing to do. I can't find a reference to it now, but I do remember playing a computerized poker game where the AI players would bluff occasionally. The question is if there is more to intent than evaluating which of the possible outputs has the highest value associated with it. As for whether humans are algorithmic (and thus algorithms can have intent), I don't know.
Anyway, I didn't really have a deep philosophical point to make beyond not liking to hear that anyone shouldn't pursue some interesting new field of research because it's not a machine's place to assess truth. Not pursuing knowledge for fear of losing our place as the only arbiters of truth is just as dehumanising as letting Google pick the next congress to me.
Why is your assertion that computers can't (or worse, can, but should not be allowed to) determine what is an accurate statement any less "creepily religious" than the google fetishists who think it's inevitable? I find the notion that the human mind has some privleged view of what is and isn't true that's inaccessable to mere machines to be pretty creepy and think it borders on begging the god question....and yes, an algorithm *is* immune to lying. It's output may be inaccurate, but lying requires intent to decieve, intent implies conscious thought, and computers aren't yet (and may never be) capable of that.
That technique might be helpful if you're looking for plagarism of published software or independent-study projects, but it's going to be about useless for finding out who is cheating on something like a CS 101 project. When the day's assignment is "write a java class that performs the following operations and implements interface CS101TestClass2", any student's code is going to be a 90%+ match with any other student's code.
If your children think typing their IM handle and password into a strange web site is a good idea, they need to get The Talk about phishing and identity theft as well as about sex.
Maybe you slept through the first few episodes of "The DVD Jon Show" here on slashdot, so let me catch you up on the plot.
Jon lives in Norway, where American court judgements don't hold much meaning and there is no law equivalent to our DMCA. He cracked CSS (the encryption scheme on DVD movies), got sued by the MPAA, got arrested by the local authorities (acting at the request of US movie industry players), and then got off without any penalty. Turns out that cracking DVD DRM isn't a crime or grounds for a civil judgement there, so this likely isn't either.
Tune in next week, when "DVD Jon" flips Steve Jobs the bird, and releases another daring DRM hack!
Most of the high-resolution imagery on Google Earth is from aerial photograpy not satellites, and even in 2006 the vast majority of that is still shot on positive-color film. Satellites are sexy and high-tech, but not the most cost-effective way to get very high reolution true-color images.
Now the fuzzy, false-color "aww, they don't have good pics of this area" imagery *is* from a satellite (Landsat 7, IIRC).
Taking that one step farther... The maximum current a circuit using 0000AWG copper wire (11.5mm diameter, the largest I can find specs for online) should carry is 380 amps. That means you have to run the charger at about 3200 volts to deliver 1.2MW of power. I think this would be the end of self-serve fueling, the first driver who shorts a 380A 3.2kV capacitor charger with part of their body is going to become a very messy warning to others.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that contributors to anything that's part of the GNU project (gcc, glibc, bash, autotools, emacs, etc) have all signed their copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, right?
Just checking...
Look on the bright side. With a Zune, their bad music has a limited time to annoy you since you can't listen to shared songs more than three times.
Apple didn't pay Gartner to produce this report and release it to the public. Somebody (maybe a hedge fund that owns a shedlot of AAPL and is having trouble covering it's losses in oil futures) that wants Apple to cannibalize it's potential long-term growth in exchange for a massive short term gain did.
As usual, the loudest criticisms of Apple are the ones based on the machines of a decade ago. Honestly, who still cares about the Centris/Performa/LC series or even the G3? What's next, a scathing critique of System 7?
Also, do the Mac fans still get to be snarky about PCs in general because Packard Bell and eMachines made such awful clunkers, or is this tactic reserved for the Apple-bashers only?
So, your support for the ideals of Open Source is strong enough that you're willing to give up 3D acceleration (and games) for The Cause. That's a start, but you still have a long way left to go.
.doc files how I feel. So I bought a Mac for web surfing and email and whatnot and an XBox for gaming, unplugged the GNU/Linux machine, boxed it up and put it away in a closet. Yeah, they'll be feeling the effects of my strike any day now. Just you wait...
I, on the other hand, am so committed to the principles of the Open Source revolution that I'm willing to make an even greater sacrifice. I'm not running ANY SOFTWARE WHATSOEVER on my GNU/Linux box. That's right, my computer is on strike, and we won't settle for anything less than total software freedom. I really feel so strongly about the value of open-source software that I'm willing to give up using ALL the functionality of my computer indefinitely, just to show all those closed-source-mongering pinheads an nVidia, the fascists at Phoenix who won't hand over my BIOS's source code, the filthy Microsoft appeasers who wrote WINE, and the double agent that made OpenOffice read and write
Holy bad economics, Batman!
Time is only worth what somebody willing to pay for it. If the 5 seconds a day comes out of business hours when you have work waiting, are willing and able to do the work, and can't do any part of the work until the computer is finished booting, then it's worth your normal hourly rate. If the 5 seconds of waiting for the computer to boot comes out of your scotch drinking and slashdot posting time, it's only worth what you're willing to pay to keep from being interrupted by computer delays.
Not only is the story complete fiction, but the premise is wrong! Ball-point pens will write upside down, so they obviously don't need gravity to work correctly...
The technical problem isn't gathering metadata on the player, there are perl programs to build an iPod track database without iTunes. The problem is with the user having to select, drag, and drop 3,000 songs to fill up a 20GB player.
It works when the player can hold your entire music collection, you can just drag&drop everything at once. It breaks down when you want to fill a 20GB player from a 32GB music collection. Building an iTunes playlist for all tracks rated 3 stars or more and syncing it to an iPod takes about 5 mouse clicks. Putting the same set of songs onto a drag&drop player requires spending hours of quality time with Windows Explorer, Finder, or "man rsync".
Those sentences in quote marks are direct quotes from the article. Flaming Mr. A.C. about them being stupid is even more pointless than replying to an A.C. post normally is...
Where do these people get off deciding what we will remember, and why is it all useless information?
I agree. The Kofi Annan article is a useless waste of bits. It's just a fluffy biographical sketch that repeats information available in numerous print encyclopedia and on the UN's web site. Read five newspaper articles about the UN, and you could glean all the information that's in the WP article.
The stuff about Knuckles, however, is more useful. It's not covered in any print encyclopedia, it's not background information you can pick up from reading the news, and the primary sources are inaccessable to most people because they either don't own every Sega system ever made or don't read Japanese!
You're missing the importance of the part where they define "licensed device" as a "physical hardware system". That means the licensed device cannot be a VM (because a machine that is virtual is by definition not physical). You don't have a license (and thus can't use Vista at all) until you put it on a licensed (physical) device, and you can't put it on a VM in addition to that licensed device, therefore you aren't allowed to use Vista Home in a VM even if it is the only installed copy of Vista you have.
When you would no longer be surprised to hear that the boss has been arrested on suspicion of murder, it's time to quit.
Why does Microsoft all of a sudden have to compete with Google Video/YouTube?
Did you read Slashdot yesterday? If they don't react, people will start to question whether Windows (and the whole concept of OS as platform for applications) is still relevant. Microsoft felt threatened by web 1.0 turning the browser into an application platform, slashdot types started to ask if PC operating systems and local applications would be relevant in the future. Something had to be done, so they introduced MSIE, WMP, MS Java, Active X, and gratuitiously incompatible html and javascript. Eventually they killed off Netscape and gravely wounded Real and Java. For 6 years after that nobody, not even the die-hard Linux and Mac zealots, asked whether Windows was still relevant.
Now they're even more threatened by web 2.0. The ghost of Netscape is back to haunt them. Flash and AJAX make a much more compelling platform than html forms, Java and Realplayer ever did. Articles questioning whether Windows is still relevant are back on the front page of Slashdot. They've got to kill somebody soon, and Google and Yahoo seems like the obvious targets.
Yes I've heard of it, but what does a 3rd rate sci-fi author arriving at outlandish conclusions about the future by extrapolating trends well beyond the area where they are meaningful have to do with anything?
Cars on today's market, at least in the US, have better fuel economy at the same (or improved) power levels as models 5, 10, 15, or more years ago. Even those "gas guzzling SUVs" such as Suburbans and such get around 20 or more MPG now.
I'm not the AC, but here's some data from fueleconomy.gov. In cases with more than one engine/transmission combination, I tried to keep them as close to the same as possible to the 1985 engine/trans for each subsequent year. These are not cherry-picked examples, every long running model I looked at showed the same trend of near-constant fuel economy.
First, a couple of long-running SUV models:
1985 Chevy Suburban K-10 (5.7L V8, auto, 4WD): 13 MPG
1995 Chevy Suburban 1500 (5.7L V8, auto, 4WD): 13 MPG
2005 Chevy Suburban 1500 (5.7L V8, auto, 4WD): 16 MPG
1987 Nissan Pathfinder (3L V6, auto, 4WD): 15 MPG
1995 Nissan Pathfinder (3L V6, auto, 4WD): 16 MPG
2005 Nissan Pathfinder (4L V6, auto, 4WD): 17 MPG
Common sedans, one midsize, one small:
1986 Ford Taurus (2.5L I4, auto): 22 MPG
1995 Ford Taurus (3.0L V6*, auto): 23 MPG
2005 Ford Taurus (3.0L V6*, auto): 23 MPG
*No 4 cyl. model available 1995-2005
1985 Honda Accord (1.8L I4, auto): 26MPG
1995 Honda Accord (2.2L I4, auto): 25MPG
2005 Honda Accord (2.4L I4, auto): 27MPG
Compact Cars:
1985 Honda Civic (1.5L I4, auto): 27MPG
1995 Honda Civic (1.5L I4, auto): 32MPG
2005 Honda Civic (1.7L I4, auto): 33MPG
1985 Toyota Corolla (1.6L I4, auto): 29MPG
1985 Toyota Corolla (1.6L I4, auto): 27MPG
1985 Toyota Corolla (1.8L I4, auto): 33MPG
A Minivan:
1986 Ford Aerostar (2.3L I4, auto): 22MPG
1995 Ford Aerostar (3.0L V6*, auto): 20MPG
2005 Ford Freestar (3.9L V6*, auto): 20MPG
*No 4 cyl. Ford minivan available 1995-2005. I think the 1995 model year was when Ford changed the name to Windstar, but fueleconomy.gov lists it as an Aerostar, so I'll stick with that name.
A gain of 3-5 MPG in 20 years? Color me unimpressed.
5.7 million new jobs have been created since 2003. ...and with a population growth rate of 0.91% (taken from the CIA world factbook), 8.2 million new Americans have been created in the same time period.
It's true that wage growth is flat since 1999, but if you include benefits, there has been steady growth. Taxes are falling, so after-tax disposable income is higher than it's ever been.
The value of benefits is up because health care costs so much more than it did in 1999. Being able to afford the same N goods and services plus the same annual visit to the doctor and the same prescription on your current salary as on your 1999 salary even though the doctor visit costs twice as much and the prescription costs 4 times as much is NOT income growth! (unless you're a doctor or a health plan administrator)
Your statistics are bad, but look on the bright side. By the time the perfect economic storm that's coming when massive consumer debt, and economic growth based entirely on construction and real estate collide with rising interest rates and stagnant wages reaches it's full bank-collapsing fury, Bush will be out of office so you'll get to blame that one on the democrats too.
I agree with you that unquestioning acceptance of Google Truth(beta) is a bad idea, but it could be a great research project and a useful tool as long as the users are willing to think critically about the results. As long as we don't allow "Google says his statement is inconsistent with 78% of the published material on that subject" to be confused with "he's obviously lying" it could be very useful. As for the competition part of the argument, nothing Google does goes uncopied for long. If this works, there would probably be "truth detector" sites from Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and several governments within a year, all using slightly different algorithms and bodies of reference material. Hopefully they'll disagree frequently and provoke a lively debate about who is and isn't lying, and what "Truth" is. If they're all consistently wrong, well, it'll be hard to do more damage than Bill O'Reilly and the People's Daily do now.
It's definitely possible to write an algorithm that will output something inaccurate because that's the rational thing to do. I can't find a reference to it now, but I do remember playing a computerized poker game where the AI players would bluff occasionally. The question is if there is more to intent than evaluating which of the possible outputs has the highest value associated with it. As for whether humans are algorithmic (and thus algorithms can have intent), I don't know.
Anyway, I didn't really have a deep philosophical point to make beyond not liking to hear that anyone shouldn't pursue some interesting new field of research because it's not a machine's place to assess truth. Not pursuing knowledge for fear of losing our place as the only arbiters of truth is just as dehumanising as letting Google pick the next congress to me.
Why is your assertion that computers can't (or worse, can, but should not be allowed to) determine what is an accurate statement any less "creepily religious" than the google fetishists who think it's inevitable? I find the notion that the human mind has some privleged view of what is and isn't true that's inaccessable to mere machines to be pretty creepy and think it borders on begging the god question. ...and yes, an algorithm *is* immune to lying. It's output may be inaccurate, but lying requires intent to decieve, intent implies conscious thought, and computers aren't yet (and may never be) capable of that.
That technique might be helpful if you're looking for plagarism of published software or independent-study projects, but it's going to be about useless for finding out who is cheating on something like a CS 101 project. When the day's assignment is "write a java class that performs the following operations and implements interface CS101TestClass2", any student's code is going to be a 90%+ match with any other student's code.
Personally, I'll stick with GNUstep; better toolkit, better language, better dev tools and a better license (LGPL).
And the frameworks your apps need to run are available on a worldwide total of like four computers, counting the one in your office...
If your children think typing their IM handle and password into a strange web site is a good idea, they need to get The Talk about phishing and identity theft as well as about sex.
Maybe you slept through the first few episodes of "The DVD Jon Show" here on slashdot, so let me catch you up on the plot.
Jon lives in Norway, where American court judgements don't hold much meaning and there is no law equivalent to our DMCA. He cracked CSS (the encryption scheme on DVD movies), got sued by the MPAA, got arrested by the local authorities (acting at the request of US movie industry players), and then got off without any penalty. Turns out that cracking DVD DRM isn't a crime or grounds for a civil judgement there, so this likely isn't either.
Tune in next week, when "DVD Jon" flips Steve Jobs the bird, and releases another daring DRM hack!
...but apparently finishing the friggin OSX/Intel port they've been working on since January isn't.
It's ok, I didn't want to help cure cancer anyway.
Most of the high-resolution imagery on Google Earth is from aerial photograpy not satellites, and even in 2006 the vast majority of that is still shot on positive-color film. Satellites are sexy and high-tech, but not the most cost-effective way to get very high reolution true-color images.
Now the fuzzy, false-color "aww, they don't have good pics of this area" imagery *is* from a satellite (Landsat 7, IIRC).
Taking that one step farther... The maximum current a circuit using 0000AWG copper wire (11.5mm diameter, the largest I can find specs for online) should carry is 380 amps. That means you have to run the charger at about 3200 volts to deliver 1.2MW of power. I think this would be the end of self-serve fueling, the first driver who shorts a 380A 3.2kV capacitor charger with part of their body is going to become a very messy warning to others.