If it were, there would be no laws governing search and siezure, chain of evidence, entrapment, or a number of other long-standing and well-established laws that we respect, if not revere.
I disagree. Truth trumps civil liberties any day.. However, ensuring that law enforcement follows procedures and gathers evidence in a responsible manner helps to ensure the quality and integrity of that evidence. It's a lot harder to plant evidence when you have to have a court order just to search for it. That this enhances our personal sense of privacy is just a side benefit.
No, what I want is not another API or library, and certainly not another widget kit. We've got plenty of those. What I want is to A) move all display-related functions to the GPU (including that eMail client or browser) and B) Do it in OS-agnostic, hardware-agnostic way.
My eMail client and browser know next to nothing about the mechanics of talking to a printer compared to, say Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXpress. But the same language serves to send both simply formatted text and arbitrarily formatted graphics to my LaserJet or a $50000 Xerox megaprinter.
I'd much rather have the card vendors get together and agree on a system of standards that could wrap up X, Quartz, GDI, OpenGL and DirectX into some standardized video description language. Do for video what PostScript did for print.
This would probably entail a performance penalty at first, but if the engineering resources that are currently being dedicated to creating drivers for each and every little card were re-applied, it could come out ahead in short order.
The only thing keeping this from happening is getting Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, and the community to agree on such a standard.
As a US-born individual of Filipino descent, I sometimes have a hard time understanding some of my Filipino relatives, many of whom learned English as a child and have spent decades in the US. Certainly, their accent is no clearer to my ears than many Indian and Indian-Americans.
They're tasteful photographic postcards. Ordinary JPEGs: no animation, no MIDIs. Free, and no ads. You don't need a Mac, or an account or anything but a web browser.
The Aspirin trademark may not be valuable to Bayer, but only because Bayer no longer owns it (at least in many countries.) Bayer's ownership was overturned by the courts because of a failure to defend it. You can bet Bayer executives still curse their predecessors for their stupidity in losing control over that name.
Companies are under no obligation to keep their trademarks. Plenty of companies give up on brands that aren't worth what it costs to advertise them. They spend billions to build and maintain the ones that are. Xerox is still Xerox and Kimberly-Clark still sells Kleenex because those brands are worth a fortune. If the weren't,the parent companies would waste no time rebranding themselves.
A widely-recognized trademark turns your competitors' products into advertisements for your own. The trick is protecting the use of the name so that your competitors can't use it to sell their products.
As for 8 cores - it all depends on how well your code is written and how many things you'd like to do in CPU simultaneously
So far, the biggest excuse for not writing paralellizable code has been "Well, only 1% of the population has a dual-CPU workstation, anyway."
That justification is rapidly becoming obsolete. Add in the lure of faster multitasking, and you've got your answer. Maybe not for eight cores just yet, but certainly for two to four.
Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in. Your energy consuption is now being done by the supply chain that feeds the city, so the energy is being consumed by proxy on your behalf.
Firstly, very few people actually live anywhere near food-growing land. Most people in industrialized countries live either in the suburbs, or in cities. Given those options, city life (including at least moderate use of public transportation and non-detatched housing) is clearly the less-energy-intensive option.
Second, people in the country get almost all of their food from supermarkets, too. Local farmers markets can't supply food out of season, much less things that can't be grown locally. And even country bumpkins drink Coca-Cola and eat frozen pizza, Oreos, and other mass-produced foods.
Only, in their case, the nearest supermarket might be 10-20 miles away. And of course, it uses the same distribution network that the major cities use, except the trucks have to travel even farther.
In the grand scheme of things, you may believe that reducing a commute to work makes a big difference in the energy consumption equation, but, it's not your major source of energy consumption.
In the United States, "Transportation is the greatest single use of petroleum, accounting for an estimated 67 percent of all U.S. petroleum consumed in 2004". (source: DOE) Yes, there's more to transportation than the daily commute, but that's hardly insignificant.
When you turn the heat off, living indoors at ambient outdoor temperature (same for the air conditioning), and stop eating, then you'll make a BIG difference.
Though Mac OSX has some great features, and is a fine operating system, it does not support some of the niche software and does not have the capabilities to be deployed in a company of hundreds, or thousands of computers. There could very well been issues with the filevault had it been deployed in corporate environments en-mass. Tools like Active Directory is absolutely crucial to running most IT infrastructures, as is controlling user access to the server and their own computer.
As this is slashdot, after all, mind telling us all what issues you have had integrating Mac OS X with Active Directory? Why, a cursory reading of your post would seem to suggest that OS X has no AD support whatsoever! I'm sure that's not what you meant to imply...
Mac-on-Linux is a linux/ppc program which makes it possible to run Mac OS in parallel with Linux.
MOL is primarily intended to be used by those who run linux/ppc as their main operating system but still want to be able to run that occasional Mac OS application.
It may shock you to learn this, but today's schoolchildren do not walk home through an idyllic suburban landscape to be met by June Cleaver with a plate of cookies.
They walk through questionable neighborhoods, and come home to empty houses. They stay after school to play sports or work on projects. They drive to after-schol jobs. Parents are late coming home, and need the kid to pick up siblings from daycare. Things come up. Cars break down. Plans change. School offices are not answering services; if they were, they'd be swamped.
Kids "need" cell phones for all the same reasons adults say they "need" cell phones.
Many students "need" cell phones after school...to communicate with parents or siblings during after-school activities, or jobs.
Besides, most schools only have phones in the main administrative office. Lives have been saved because students used (often prohibited) cell phones to call 911 quickly when teachers had heart attacks. And the first call to police after one of the school shootings (I don't think it was Columbine, but one of those) came from a student's cell phone.
"Proper threat assessment" is definitely missing here. This kid is not dangerous, and never was. The teacher was a fool for thinking he was being targeted. The school's knee-jerk reaction doesn't make anyone safer. Meanwhile, the school's resources are tied up "protecting" idiots from their own stupidity.
The manned Apollo program resulted in fifteen manned launches. (Apollo-Soyuz, three Skylabs, and Apollo 7-17) and one manned launchpad test that is counted as part of the program. That early pre-flight test claimed the lives of three astronauts. One manned mission suffered an in-flight emergency that, while ultimately non-fatal, certainly caused some concern over the survival of those aboard. That gives a 5.8% fatality rate for crewmembers.
In contrast, the Shuttle has recorded 114 flights, with two fatal emergencies, and a 2% fatality rate for crew.
Those numbers don't tell the whole story, of course, but I hope they will illustrate the danger of comparing two very different programs with very different goals.
Apollo met and exceeded its design goals (beat the Russians to the moon) whereas the Shuttle arguably failed to fulfill its design goals (make space travel as cheap and safe as air travel.) But it would be foolish to expect that a resurrected Apollo would fulfill the Shuttle's design goals. Both Apollo and the Shuttle have lessons to teach spacecraft designers, and it would be wise of NASA to learn from its mistakes and successes.
In the US, we have websites called "search engines" which allow Americans to research topics they are unfamiliar with. Such websites return links to other pages on the web which relate to the topic input. The results are returned almost instantly, making them much faster than, say, posting a query on Slashdot. Besides providing insight into topics that are country-specific, search engines can connect their users with many other types of information, including obscure scientific and technical topics, records of historical events, analyses of art and literature, and many, many collected personal anecdotes, which are called "blogs."
The most popular Search Engine in the US is called Google, and is operated by a company of the same name. The URL for the Google search engine is http://www.google.com/. If you were to type "H-1B" into this search engine, you would first be directed to this page operated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which explains the topic of the H-1B visa in detail.
I hope that "Search Engine" technology, which I know to be very popular in the US and many other countries, is of use to you in whatever nation you apparently reside.
IANAL, but couldn't the would-be EV-1 owners simply set up a corporate entity (LLC) of their own and assume all of GM's legal burden relating to the operation of these cars? Don't sell them as a retail product, just "sell off" the EV-1 leasing "business unit" to a holding company set up by the owners. The owner's group could then allow its "shareholders" to drive the company's cars.
During the original program, GM somehow managed to overcome the legal hurdles necessary for the public to operate these vehicles on public roads. There's nothing special about GM in this regard. If GM did it, then any sufficiently motivated group could.
GM donated many of the cars to universities. Apparently, that which is unsafe for a trained mechanic to work on can still be given to a bunch of engineering grad students to dissect and play with.
The problem with the simple explanation is that 100 or so of the (former) lessees wanted to buy them, and were willing to absolve GM of any liability, service, or warranty obligations. Many of these people were fairly wealthy, and probably would have paid good money for the cars. Certainly enough to let GM come out ahead after processing the fairly trivial legal paperwork involved. Yet GM went out of its way to collect the cars and crush them into oblivion.
Since most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, an all-electric car would most likely be worse than one burning the fuel directly. I have never heard of a perfectly efficient method of transmitting electricty from where it was produced to where it was needed (e.g. charge up the car). Ergo, there would be a net increase in "environmental badness" to use the e-car vs what we have now.
In the real world, it doesn't always work this way. For one thing, burning fossil fuels in a powerplant is much more efficient than in a small engine. For another, about 20% of the electric power in the US comes from nuclear, hydroelectric, and other non-CO2-emitting sources. Even with transmission loss, storage battery loss, and conversion loss, electric vehicles can put a lot less carbon in the atmosphere than a gas vehicle. Do a comparison between a 2001 Toyota RAV4 EV and the comparable gas model, and there's a substantial decrease in fuel economy. A lot of this is dependent on the powerplant(s) and power gird in question, though.
Basic thermodynamics can lead you down some sensible, but totally wrong, thought paths. Thermodynamically speaking, hybrid vehicles should be ridiculously inefficient. We convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, convert the electrical energy into chemical energy in a storage battery, and then reverse the whole process to get mechanical energy again. And yet it all comes out ahead, because so much of the vehicle's mechanical energy is ordinarily lost forever through braking.
I'm all for abandoning convention and coming up with an original approach. But that's not what I see here.
I see a bunch of people in a hazy room taking hits off a joint and saying, "Dude...what if we made it with...beads?
These are solutions looking for problems. Mobile phones are real devices that people have real problems with. Bad reception, poor screen readability, slow response time, small buttons, poor durability. But I see nothing here that addresses those issues.
"...no, no, no, man...it really needs to take over your awareness, man. Like smell. Smell with your phone, man....just smell with your phone."
No piece of technology is so frustrating to me as my mobile phone. I agree, this is a product that needs to be entirely rethought. Perhaps then we would have a device that actually lives up to the promises it makes: Communicate clearly with anyone, from anywhere.
Here is what I *think* the US is trying to do: 1) Strengthen it's military power as well as the fear and respect it generates 2) Use this military power (as well as its expertise with finance) to obtain new resources as well as improve the result of bargaining situations 3) ??? 4) Profit!
It's not as if this was anything new. This has been The Master Plan since the end of WWII. We took a little breather in the 1990's after the Soviet Union collapsed, but we're back on track now.
Oh, and step 3 is "Watch other nations try to match our expenditures."
The market will find the path of least resistance one way or another.
There is no market. Where I live, there is a single (cable) broadband provider. I can't get a cellular signal; the trees block the satellite signals, and DSL stops several miles east of here. If my broadband provider decides to favor a certain content provider, I have to deal with that content provider, or accept the reduced level of service.
So long as telecom providers have monopolies, there is no market.
Slashdot Mirror
The law is NOT about the search for truth.
If it were, there would be no laws governing search and siezure, chain of evidence, entrapment, or a number of other long-standing and well-established laws that we respect, if not revere.
I disagree. Truth trumps civil liberties any day.. However, ensuring that law enforcement follows procedures and gathers evidence in a responsible manner helps to ensure the quality and integrity of that evidence. It's a lot harder to plant evidence when you have to have a court order just to search for it. That this enhances our personal sense of privacy is just a side benefit.
No, what I want is not another API or library, and certainly not another widget kit. We've got plenty of those. What I want is to
A) move all display-related functions to the GPU (including that eMail client or browser)
and
B) Do it in OS-agnostic, hardware-agnostic way.
My eMail client and browser know next to nothing about the mechanics of talking to a printer compared to, say Adobe Illustrator or QuarkXpress. But the same language serves to send both simply formatted text and arbitrarily formatted graphics to my LaserJet or a $50000 Xerox megaprinter.
I'd much rather have the card vendors get together and agree on a system of standards that could wrap up X, Quartz, GDI, OpenGL and DirectX into some standardized video description language. Do for video what PostScript did for print.
This would probably entail a performance penalty at first, but if the engineering resources that are currently being dedicated to creating drivers for each and every little card were re-applied, it could come out ahead in short order.
The only thing keeping this from happening is getting Microsoft, ATI, nVidia, and the community to agree on such a standard.
That's a matter of opinion.
As a US-born individual of Filipino descent, I sometimes have a hard time understanding some of my Filipino relatives, many of whom learned English as a child and have spent decades in the US. Certainly, their accent is no clearer to my ears than many Indian and Indian-Americans.
They're tasteful photographic postcards. Ordinary JPEGs: no animation, no MIDIs. Free, and no ads. You don't need a Mac, or an account or anything but a web browser.
.Mac page, but you don't need to log in to send them.
They're on the
The Aspirin trademark may not be valuable to Bayer, but only because Bayer no longer owns it (at least in many countries.) Bayer's ownership was overturned by the courts because of a failure to defend it. You can bet Bayer executives still curse their predecessors for their stupidity in losing control over that name.
Companies are under no obligation to keep their trademarks. Plenty of companies give up on brands that aren't worth what it costs to advertise them. They spend billions to build and maintain the ones that are. Xerox is still Xerox and Kimberly-Clark still sells Kleenex because those brands are worth a fortune. If the weren't,the parent companies would waste no time rebranding themselves.
A widely-recognized trademark turns your competitors' products into advertisements for your own. The trick is protecting the use of the name so that your competitors can't use it to sell their products.
As for 8 cores - it all depends on how well your code is written and how many things you'd like to do in CPU simultaneously
So far, the biggest excuse for not writing paralellizable code has been "Well, only 1% of the population has a dual-CPU workstation, anyway."
That justification is rapidly becoming obsolete. Add in the lure of faster multitasking, and you've got your answer. Maybe not for eight cores just yet, but certainly for two to four.
Yeah, it might look almost as bad as 240-line VHS.
I've looked at iTunes' video quality. (I got a freebie.) It's watchable for SDTV-sourced content, but not something I'd want to use for a film.
Sure, you may walk to the grocery store, but those groceries didn't grow in that store, they were shipped in. Your energy consuption is now being done by the supply chain that feeds the city, so the energy is being consumed by proxy on your behalf.
Firstly, very few people actually live anywhere near food-growing land. Most people in industrialized countries live either in the suburbs, or in cities. Given those options, city life (including at least moderate use of public transportation and non-detatched housing) is clearly the less-energy-intensive option.
Second, people in the country get almost all of their food from supermarkets, too. Local farmers markets can't supply food out of season, much less things that can't be grown locally. And even country bumpkins drink Coca-Cola and eat frozen pizza, Oreos, and other mass-produced foods.
Only, in their case, the nearest supermarket might be 10-20 miles away. And of course, it uses the same distribution network that the major cities use, except the trucks have to travel even farther.
In the grand scheme of things, you may believe that reducing a commute to work makes a big difference in the energy consumption equation, but, it's not your major source of energy consumption.
In the United States, "Transportation is the greatest single use of petroleum, accounting for an estimated 67 percent of all U.S. petroleum consumed in 2004". (source: DOE) Yes, there's more to transportation than the daily commute, but that's hardly insignificant.
When you turn the heat off, living indoors at ambient outdoor temperature (same for the air conditioning), and stop eating, then you'll make a BIG difference.
I'll stop eating if you will.
Though Mac OSX has some great features, and is a fine operating system, it does not support some of the niche software and does not have the capabilities to be deployed in a company of hundreds, or thousands of computers. There could very well been issues with the filevault had it been deployed in corporate environments en-mass. Tools like Active Directory is absolutely crucial to running most IT infrastructures, as is controlling user access to the server and their own computer.
As this is slashdot, after all, mind telling us all what issues you have had integrating Mac OS X with Active Directory? Why, a cursory reading of your post would seem to suggest that OS X has no AD support whatsoever! I'm sure that's not what you meant to imply...
http://www.maconlinux.org/overview.html
Mac-on-Linux is a linux/ppc program which makes it possible to run Mac OS in parallel with Linux.
MOL is primarily intended to be used by those who run linux/ppc as their main operating system but still want to be able to run that occasional Mac OS application.
Amiga has had long filename support since it was first released in 1985.
The Amiga OFS had support for 30-character filenames in 1985.
The Macintosh MFS and Finder had support for 31-character filenames in 1984.*
A year late and a character short.
(* MFS actually supported 255-char filenames, but Finder 1.0 only allowed 63, and later 31 (!) characters.)
It may shock you to learn this, but today's schoolchildren do not walk home through an idyllic suburban landscape to be met by June Cleaver with a plate of cookies.
They walk through questionable neighborhoods, and come home to empty houses. They stay after school to play sports or work on projects. They drive to after-schol jobs. Parents are late coming home, and need the kid to pick up siblings from daycare. Things come up. Cars break down. Plans change. School offices are not answering services; if they were, they'd be swamped.
Kids "need" cell phones for all the same reasons adults say they "need" cell phones.
Many students "need" cell phones after school...to communicate with parents or siblings during after-school activities, or jobs.
Besides, most schools only have phones in the main administrative office. Lives have been saved because students used (often prohibited) cell phones to call 911 quickly when teachers had heart attacks. And the first call to police after one of the school shootings (I don't think it was Columbine, but one of those) came from a student's cell phone.
People say "I'm going to kill you" all the time. People don't generally say "I've got a bomb."
Should Steve Ballmer be arrested for threatening to "Fucking kill" Larry Page and Sergey Brin?
Should this Amazon list be investigated as a death threat?
"Proper threat assessment" is definitely missing here. This kid is not dangerous, and never was. The teacher was a fool for thinking he was being targeted. The school's knee-jerk reaction doesn't make anyone safer. Meanwhile, the school's resources are tied up "protecting" idiots from their own stupidity.
The manned Apollo program resulted in fifteen manned launches. (Apollo-Soyuz, three Skylabs, and Apollo 7-17) and one manned launchpad test that is counted as part of the program. That early pre-flight test claimed the lives of three astronauts. One manned mission suffered an in-flight emergency that, while ultimately non-fatal, certainly caused some concern over the survival of those aboard. That gives a 5.8% fatality rate for crewmembers.
In contrast, the Shuttle has recorded 114 flights, with two fatal emergencies, and a 2% fatality rate for crew.
Those numbers don't tell the whole story, of course, but I hope they will illustrate the danger of comparing two very different programs with very different goals.
Apollo met and exceeded its design goals (beat the Russians to the moon) whereas the Shuttle arguably failed to fulfill its design goals (make space travel as cheap and safe as air travel.) But it would be foolish to expect that a resurrected Apollo would fulfill the Shuttle's design goals. Both Apollo and the Shuttle have lessons to teach spacecraft designers, and it would be wise of NASA to learn from its mistakes and successes.
In the US, we have websites called "search engines" which allow Americans to research topics they are unfamiliar with. Such websites return links to other pages on the web which relate to the topic input. The results are returned almost instantly, making them much faster than, say, posting a query on Slashdot. Besides providing insight into topics that are country-specific, search engines can connect their users with many other types of information, including obscure scientific and technical topics, records of historical events, analyses of art and literature, and many, many collected personal anecdotes, which are called "blogs."
The most popular Search Engine in the US is called Google, and is operated by a company of the same name. The URL for the Google search engine is http://www.google.com/. If you were to type "H-1B" into this search engine, you would first be directed to this page operated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which explains the topic of the H-1B visa in detail.
I hope that "Search Engine" technology, which I know to be very popular in the US and many other countries, is of use to you in whatever nation you apparently reside.
IANAL, but couldn't the would-be EV-1 owners simply set up a corporate entity (LLC) of their own and assume all of GM's legal burden relating to the operation of these cars? Don't sell them as a retail product, just "sell off" the EV-1 leasing "business unit" to a holding company set up by the owners. The owner's group could then allow its "shareholders" to drive the company's cars.
During the original program, GM somehow managed to overcome the legal hurdles necessary for the public to operate these vehicles on public roads. There's nothing special about GM in this regard. If GM did it, then any sufficiently motivated group could.
GM donated many of the cars to universities. Apparently, that which is unsafe for a trained mechanic to work on can still be given to a bunch of engineering grad students to dissect and play with.
The problem with the simple explanation is that 100 or so of the (former) lessees wanted to buy them, and were willing to absolve GM of any liability, service, or warranty obligations. Many of these people were fairly wealthy, and probably would have paid good money for the cars. Certainly enough to let GM come out ahead after processing the fairly trivial legal paperwork involved. Yet GM went out of its way to collect the cars and crush them into oblivion.
Since most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, an all-electric car would most likely be worse than one burning the fuel directly. I have never heard of a perfectly efficient method of transmitting electricty from where it was produced to where it was needed (e.g. charge up the car). Ergo, there would be a net increase in "environmental badness" to use the e-car vs what we have now.
In the real world, it doesn't always work this way. For one thing, burning fossil fuels in a powerplant is much more efficient than in a small engine. For another, about 20% of the electric power in the US comes from nuclear, hydroelectric, and other non-CO2-emitting sources. Even with transmission loss, storage battery loss, and conversion loss, electric vehicles can put a lot less carbon in the atmosphere than a gas vehicle. Do a comparison between a 2001 Toyota RAV4 EV and the comparable gas model, and there's a substantial decrease in fuel economy. A lot of this is dependent on the powerplant(s) and power gird in question, though.
Basic thermodynamics can lead you down some sensible, but totally wrong, thought paths. Thermodynamically speaking, hybrid vehicles should be ridiculously inefficient. We convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, convert the electrical energy into chemical energy in a storage battery, and then reverse the whole process to get mechanical energy again. And yet it all comes out ahead, because so much of the vehicle's mechanical energy is ordinarily lost forever through braking.
I'm all for abandoning convention and coming up with an original approach. But that's not what I see here.
I see a bunch of people in a hazy room taking hits off a joint and saying, "Dude...what if we made it with...beads?
These are solutions looking for problems. Mobile phones are real devices that people have real problems with. Bad reception, poor screen readability, slow response time, small buttons, poor durability. But I see nothing here that addresses those issues.
"...no, no, no, man...it really needs to take over your awareness, man. Like smell. Smell with your phone, man....just smell with your phone."
No piece of technology is so frustrating to me as my mobile phone. I agree, this is a product that needs to be entirely rethought. Perhaps then we would have a device that actually lives up to the promises it makes: Communicate clearly with anyone, from anywhere.
Here is what I *think* the US is trying to do:
1) Strengthen it's military power as well as the fear and respect it generates
2) Use this military power (as well as its expertise with finance) to obtain new resources as well as improve the result of bargaining situations
3) ???
4) Profit!
It's not as if this was anything new. This has been The Master Plan since the end of WWII. We took a little breather in the 1990's after the Soviet Union collapsed, but we're back on track now.
Oh, and step 3 is "Watch other nations try to match our expenditures."
...which one of you hacked Hillary Rosen's blog...?
The market will find the path of least resistance one way or another.
There is no market. Where I live, there is a single (cable) broadband provider. I can't get a cellular signal; the trees block the satellite signals, and DSL stops several miles east of here. If my broadband provider decides to favor a certain content provider, I have to deal with that content provider, or accept the reduced level of service.
So long as telecom providers have monopolies, there is no market.