***Even if he's 100% correct in what he says about the figures, I wish/.***
Ironically, Thurrott is complaining about others doing exactly what you are down on him about. Publishing silly statements based on inadequate research and thinking. I sort of think he's right in this case and I'd also give him some points for having the good grace and good judgment not to disparage the ipad.
Maybe you should make an exception this time. But feel free to unload the next time Thurrott returns to his old ways.
It's silly. The ipad is interesting. It has by far the best touch screen software I've ever seen. But IMO, touch screens are loathsome especially for typing. There is no way that I'm buying an ipad rather than a cheaper, more capable, netbook. At least not unless and until "they" somehow fix ipad data entry. Which may or may not be possible.
Yes I could buy a keyboard for the ipad. But why not buy a cheaper netbook that comes with a keyboard tidily packaged?
I'm sure that I have a lot of company.
My wife who basically just does IM, eMail and surfing loves her XP based netbook. I'm much more neutral about my Windows 7 based netbook. I like the hardware other than the touchpad which is marginally tolerable with all the lunatic overloaded actions turned off. I plug a USB mouse in to do anything serious. But I absolutely detest Windows 7 on this limited hardware. I suppose that I'm going to have to spend a week of my life getting a tolerable operating system to dual boot.
Anyway, I think Thurrott is more right than wrong. ipad will certainly make a lot of sales and most of them will be sales that would otherwise go to netbooks. OTOH, netbooks are going to make a lot more sales. They'd do even better without Thurrott's favorite OS. Most people aren't as hardcase about Windows as I am, but they are getting there, and Windows 7 isn't going to help once people figure out that 'better than Vista' is sort of like 'less painful dentistry without anesthetic'. 'Better than Vista" is not an absolute measure of quality and it's apparently not a high bar.
Right on. Scribd has traditionally been a candidate for the worst designed site on the Internet managing to combine flash abuse, baffling layout, slow response, and wretched human factors in one tidy package. I started avoiding Scribd links months ago.
The bright side. I don't see how HTML5 could possibly make it any worse.
Is there anyone there who knows how to do that? It's a little hard to envision any of the CNN "reporters" pulling a Mika Brzezinski and refusing to read the latest pop-culture garbage.
***get over it. all the evidence is very very clear to anyone who is willing to look at it.***
Bullshit. I'm willing to bet that you have never actually looked at the data and are just spouting off. The evidence for very moderate global warming is fairly persuasive. The evidence for run away global warming is obvious garbage and these guys at CRU have helped to make it so by their sloppy handling of one of the major data sets.
You should take some time and actually learn something about this subject.
***I have not encountered a scientist that publishes "all of their data", there is just way too much of it.
And even if they did, so what. The way fraud gets ferreted out is when people try to replicate their results.***
Are you sure that you have thought this through? This isn't Chemistry where anyone can go into the lab and try to repeat the experiment. The results in question are based on analysis of historical data. In the case of the CRU the data was "massaged" in undocumented ways and summarized prior to release. Exactly how the hell would you propose to replicate (or fail to replicate) their results?
As I understand it, the CRU handled two data sets -- tree ring data and surface temperature data. Apparently, the tree ring data was mostly from external sources and is not at issue. The issue is their sloppy and apparently quite dubious handling of the temperature data.
***When CRU starts doing these things, wake me up. I'm not really interested in what blue-ribbon committees of politicians think of their science.***
Amen.
It appears that the University of East Anglia is both unable to do science properly, and unable to review their own work competently. The failure of the CRU to make its data and methods available for review really says it all. What they were doing might have been interesting. It's even possible that their conclusions are correct. What it wasn't, was science.
From the report "CRU accepts with hindsight that they should have devoted more attention in the past to archiving data and algorithms and recording exactly what they did."
***I don't know why they didn't just fix it [address nomenclature] properly in the first place to make it more human readable. I mean, if you're going to talk about design flaws at conception...***
Indeed. The failure to make ipv6 addressing readable; the failure to make ipv4 a proper subset of ipv6; and the failure to support existing ipv4 NAT all make me wonder if the people who designed ipv6 knew what they were doing. I'm really inclined to let the early adopters find out. I think I have a lot of company on that.
***Ahhh, I long for the days when a private address was garanteed to be private. why don't they switch already to ipv6...***
Probably because deep down inside, a whole lot of people think ipv6 is going to be a massive bundle of fascinating bugs and general grief. They wish to let somebody else clean it up to the extent that is possible. It's a matter of avoidance of pain.
So, feel free to switch over to ipv6. But don't be too surprised if you look back and don't find a crowd following you. Be sure and write and tell us how it works.
I wouldn't worry too much about high inflation due to central government spending until housing demand exceeds housing supply and the economy starts to heat. Which will likely be a number of years.
Now moderate inflation due to paying to import ten million barrels of expensive crude oil a day... that might be a problem. Could do stuff like driving smaller cars and driving them slower of course, but that's unamerican. More fun to whine.
If government spending bothers you, you might want to look into downsizing the US's preposterously large military. It's possible that the best place to cut expenses is the place where the money is being squandered.
Hey, in many cases here in the US, the ads are better than the programming. But the ads do sort of lose their zip the 28th time you see the same ad.
Television advertising does serve a socially useful function however -- It provides the viewer with a long list of products and manufacturers to avoid. With very rare exceptions the fact that some item or service is advertised on TV is a sign that the product is overpriced and probably defective, inferior, or actually dangerous.
Things might be better if there were some penalty enforced on advertisers for blatant mistruths.
***According to the report, approximately 4.3 billion people live in countries without effective intellectual property protection***
You mean that there are 4.3B people on this planet who aren't obligated to pay royalties whenever they sing Happy Birthday? How sad. However will they survive?
***The main idea is that this difference of 32% and 25% survivor rates may not indicate a "slight extension" due to a universal treatment, but rather a treatment that is very effective for one segment of the patient population and worthless for the rest.***
Prostate cancer is normally a very unaggressive and slow growing cancer. It's also very common. It often isn't treated in the elderly as the risks of treatment may outweigh the expected benefits. The feeling is that men over 70 with newly detected prostate cancer may well die of something else before the cancer becomes a health problem and that treatment is always an option if the cancer progresses more quickly than expected.
The very high mortalities in this study would seem to indicate that the subjects had very severe cases -- i.e. this may not be a valid sample of typical prostate cancer cases. The results may not tell us about the likelihood of the vaccine helping with more normal cases.
Still, though, it's an interesting and encouraging result doncha think?
***(Why should any corporation upgrade to Windows 7?)***
You are suggesting that good enough is good enough? My God man are you trying to shut down the money machine and actually have IT provide cost savings? Or better yet fade away like Marx's idea of the fate of the ideal communist state?
Do you have the slightest idea what your weird ideas will do to the economy?
***We're assuming you could put a container ship in close proximity to the aircraft carrier***
I think that probably the container serves the function of the US Navy's Armored Box Launcher. It's there to get the missile -- which has been preprogrammed with a target? -- into the air. (Not a trivial job BTW). If the missile is a genuine cruise missile similar to the BGM-109 Tomahawk, the actual target can -- conceptually at least -- be hundreds of kilometers away.
Not that I know very much about modern naval warfare.
***I would imagine that seeing an unknown mach 2-3 object heading for a carrier anywhere would be reason enough to turn on the anti missile systems like Phalanx or Goalkeeper.***
Well, I'd imagine that also. OTOH, with a sophisticated opponent, the missile will probably be at wavetop height down in the scattering returns from waves, accompanied with jamming and possibly built using stealth technology. It may not be that easy to see.
OTOH, I don't know much about this stuff. I do know that cruise missiles are generally subsonic (I believe the Russian's latest may be faster) and are traditionally optimized for distance and payload capacity, not speed.
***I can't believe it's possible to get anything bigger than a football close enough to a cruiser, bypassing all anti-missile systems.***
Believe it. You may be correct about the open ocean under wartime conditions against an unsophisticated opponent. But major vessels have been taken out by clever opponents in training exercises. Here's a quote from the Guardian's story on Operation Millenium Challenge -- a major war game conducted in 2002.
***In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.***
And, of course, islamic fundamentalists did put a pretty big hole in the USS Cole in 2000 using half their navy (one small boat -- their other boat sank when they overloaded it with explosives). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing
And NPR told me the other day the US Navy is lugging some Somali pirates back to the US for trial after the pirates attempted to board and loot not one, but two, US destroyers. These may not be the smartest pirates in the Red Sea. But they did apparently manage to get into close proximity to the ships.
***History is against you. The 10 years (1962-1972) of manned space exploration has never been matched by unmanned probes.***
With the notable exception of the return of lunar material during the Apollo program, most important research has been done with unmanned devices -- Viking, Spirit, Hubble etc. In a sane environment, what Skylab 1973-1974 would have established was that there was very little need or use for humans in space -- at least in the 20th Century and probably well into the 21st as well. Instead we ended up with the monster, money sucking black hole of the space shuttle/ISS whose very high cost, and inability to meet schedule objectives probably set space science overall back at least a decade.
Thanks. It took me about 40 seconds to figure out that the cameras couldn't possibly be in space even if they are capable of resolving the numbers on a license plate from Earth orbit. -- which I doubt because of the amount of light they'd need to collect and the platform stability requirements. Things like that are why real spy satellites are huge and cost a fortune. In any case, no matter how nifty the optics, you can't see the license plate from directly overhead, off to the side, at low angles if there is traffic, etc.
Yes. I use Python myself for any script longer than a couple of lines. But interfacing Python to the unix OS is messier than it looks on the surface. For example, if your script hangs around for days and launches a lot of processes you will find that there are armies of "defunct" Zombie processes cluttering up the system. They don't go away until the script is killed. That's fixable, but figuring out how to fix it is an adventure for those of us who are not OS experts.
***Yeah they can get the data back, but the drive image won't match the new hardware.***
I can't speak for modern Windows which I think is a rather abominable OS. But with Windows 9, if you loaded a Ghost image for a different hardware configuration, it just assumed that you'd made some hardware changes. Depending on the degree and nature of what was different, it would take between one and four reboots to identify and replace all the drivers that needed to be changed. So, barring pathological cases like Netware drivers misconfiguring themselves which could be sort of messy, the system would be up and running as well as Windows ever runs on the new hardware in about 20-45 minutes.
***A typical US family would have at least 3 of them.***
Not for long I expect. Ignoring "Check Engine" lights and strange noises in a flying vehicle is probably going to have serious consequences. If these things ever hit the consumer market, invest in funeral home stocks.
Actually, I think that he might have. Since I am NOT a fan of the manned spaceflight program, that doesn't bother me much. The less money we spend on expensive and pointless manned vehicles and the ISS, the happier I am. If some of the money not spent ends up in far more cost effective unmanned probes and satellites, I'm even happier
***Of course, I think the future lies in the private industry.***
Not impossible, but it doesn't seem seem especially likely that private industry will be able to take up the slack. I suspect private industry is only in the "plan" in order to pacify the space cadets who tend to see only the glorious vision and to ignore the gritty reality. I'd like to be wrong about that, but I doubt I am.
Slashdot Mirror
***Even if he's 100% correct in what he says about the figures, I wish /.***
Ironically, Thurrott is complaining about others doing exactly what you are down on him about. Publishing silly statements based on inadequate research and thinking. I sort of think he's right in this case and I'd also give him some points for having the good grace and good judgment not to disparage the ipad.
Maybe you should make an exception this time. But feel free to unload the next time Thurrott returns to his old ways.
It's silly. The ipad is interesting. It has by far the best touch screen software I've ever seen. But IMO, touch screens are loathsome especially for typing. There is no way that I'm buying an ipad rather than a cheaper, more capable, netbook. At least not unless and until "they" somehow fix ipad data entry. Which may or may not be possible.
Yes I could buy a keyboard for the ipad. But why not buy a cheaper netbook that comes with a keyboard tidily packaged?
I'm sure that I have a lot of company.
My wife who basically just does IM, eMail and surfing loves her XP based netbook. I'm much more neutral about my Windows 7 based netbook. I like the hardware other than the touchpad which is marginally tolerable with all the lunatic overloaded actions turned off. I plug a USB mouse in to do anything serious. But I absolutely detest Windows 7 on this limited hardware. I suppose that I'm going to have to spend a week of my life getting a tolerable operating system to dual boot.
Anyway, I think Thurrott is more right than wrong. ipad will certainly make a lot of sales and most of them will be sales that would otherwise go to netbooks. OTOH, netbooks are going to make a lot more sales. They'd do even better without Thurrott's favorite OS. Most people aren't as hardcase about Windows as I am, but they are getting there, and Windows 7 isn't going to help once people figure out that 'better than Vista' is sort of like 'less painful dentistry without anesthetic'. 'Better than Vista" is not an absolute measure of quality and it's apparently not a high bar.
Right on. Scribd has traditionally been a candidate for the worst designed site on the Internet managing to combine flash abuse, baffling layout, slow response, and wretched human factors in one tidy package. I started avoiding Scribd links months ago.
The bright side. I don't see how HTML5 could possibly make it any worse.
***Maybe CNN could start reporting actual news***
Is there anyone there who knows how to do that? It's a little hard to envision any of the CNN "reporters" pulling a Mika Brzezinski and refusing to read the latest pop-culture garbage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1556022/Paris-Hilton-script-screwed-up-burnt-and-shredded.html
***get over it. all the evidence is very very clear to anyone who is willing to look at it.***
Bullshit. I'm willing to bet that you have never actually looked at the data and are just spouting off. The evidence for very moderate global warming is fairly persuasive. The evidence for run away global warming is obvious garbage and these guys at CRU have helped to make it so by their sloppy handling of one of the major data sets.
You should take some time and actually learn something about this subject.
***I have not encountered a scientist that publishes "all of their data", there is just way too much of it.
And even if they did, so what. The way fraud gets ferreted out is when people try to replicate their results.***
Are you sure that you have thought this through? This isn't Chemistry where anyone can go into the lab and try to repeat the experiment. The results in question are based on analysis of historical data. In the case of the CRU the data was "massaged" in undocumented ways and summarized prior to release. Exactly how the hell would you propose to replicate (or fail to replicate) their results?
As I understand it, the CRU handled two data sets -- tree ring data and surface temperature data. Apparently, the tree ring data was mostly from external sources and is not at issue. The issue is their sloppy and apparently quite dubious handling of the temperature data.
***When CRU starts doing these things, wake me up. I'm not really interested in what blue-ribbon committees of politicians think of their science.***
Amen.
It appears that the University of East Anglia is both unable to do science properly, and unable to review their own work competently. The failure of the CRU to make its data and methods available for review really says it all. What they were doing might have been interesting. It's even possible that their conclusions are correct. What it wasn't, was science.
From the report "CRU accepts with hindsight that they should have devoted more attention in
the past to archiving data and algorithms and recording exactly what they did."
That's not an exoneration. It's an indictment.
***I don't know why they didn't just fix it [address nomenclature] properly in the first place to make it more human readable. I mean, if you're going to talk about design flaws at conception...***
Indeed. The failure to make ipv6 addressing readable; the failure to make ipv4 a proper subset of ipv6; and the failure to support existing ipv4 NAT all make me wonder if the people who designed ipv6 knew what they were doing. I'm really inclined to let the early adopters find out. I think I have a lot of company on that.
***Ahhh, I long for the days when a private address was garanteed to be private. why don't they switch already to ipv6...***
Probably because deep down inside, a whole lot of people think ipv6 is going to be a massive bundle of fascinating bugs and general grief. They wish to let somebody else clean it up to the extent that is possible. It's a matter of avoidance of pain.
So, feel free to switch over to ipv6. But don't be too surprised if you look back and don't find a crowd following you. Be sure and write and tell us how it works.
I wouldn't worry too much about high inflation due to central government spending until housing demand exceeds housing supply and the economy starts to heat. Which will likely be a number of years.
Now moderate inflation due to paying to import ten million barrels of expensive crude oil a day ... that might be a problem. Could do stuff like driving smaller cars and driving them slower of course, but that's unamerican. More fun to whine.
If government spending bothers you, you might want to look into downsizing the US's preposterously large military. It's possible that the best place to cut expenses is the place where the money is being squandered.
James Webb = NASA bureaucrat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Webb
Hey, in many cases here in the US, the ads are better than the programming. But the ads do sort of lose their zip the 28th time you see the same ad.
Television advertising does serve a socially useful function however -- It provides the viewer with a long list of products and manufacturers to avoid. With very rare exceptions the fact that some item or service is advertised on TV is a sign that the product is overpriced and probably defective, inferior, or actually dangerous.
Things might be better if there were some penalty enforced on advertisers for blatant mistruths.
***It would be interesting to know exactly what the other "organic materials" are***
My spies tell me they are
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and howlet's wing
Let's see if the USTPO can recognize the prior art once this stuff is reformulated into patent speak.
***According to the report, approximately 4.3 billion people live in countries without effective intellectual property protection***
You mean that there are 4.3B people on this planet who aren't obligated to pay royalties whenever they sing Happy Birthday? How sad. However will they survive?
***The main idea is that this difference of 32% and 25% survivor rates may not indicate a "slight extension" due to a universal treatment, but rather a treatment that is very effective for one segment of the patient population and worthless for the rest.***
Prostate cancer is normally a very unaggressive and slow growing cancer. It's also very common. It often isn't treated in the elderly as the risks of treatment may outweigh the expected benefits. The feeling is that men over 70 with newly detected prostate cancer may well die of something else before the cancer becomes a health problem and that treatment is always an option if the cancer progresses more quickly than expected.
The very high mortalities in this study would seem to indicate that the subjects had very severe cases -- i.e. this may not be a valid sample of typical prostate cancer cases. The results may not tell us about the likelihood of the vaccine helping with more normal cases.
Still, though, it's an interesting and encouraging result doncha think?
***(Why should any corporation upgrade to Windows 7?)***
You are suggesting that good enough is good enough? My God man are you trying to shut down the money machine and actually have IT provide cost savings? Or better yet fade away like Marx's idea of the fate of the ideal communist state?
Do you have the slightest idea what your weird ideas will do to the economy?
***We're assuming you could put a container ship in close proximity to the aircraft carrier***
I think that probably the container serves the function of the US Navy's Armored Box Launcher. It's there to get the missile -- which has been preprogrammed with a target? -- into the air. (Not a trivial job BTW). If the missile is a genuine cruise missile similar to the BGM-109 Tomahawk, the actual target can -- conceptually at least -- be hundreds of kilometers away.
Not that I know very much about modern naval warfare.
***I would imagine that seeing an unknown mach 2-3 object heading for a carrier anywhere would be reason enough to turn on the anti missile systems like Phalanx or Goalkeeper.***
Well, I'd imagine that also. OTOH, with a sophisticated opponent, the missile will probably be at wavetop height down in the scattering returns from waves, accompanied with jamming and possibly built using stealth technology. It may not be that easy to see.
OTOH, I don't know much about this stuff. I do know that cruise missiles are generally subsonic (I believe the Russian's latest may be faster) and are traditionally optimized for distance and payload capacity, not speed.
***I can't believe it's possible to get anything bigger than a football close enough to a cruiser, bypassing all anti-missile systems.***
Believe it. You may be correct about the open ocean under wartime conditions against an unsophisticated opponent. But major vessels have been taken out by clever opponents in training exercises. Here's a quote from the Guardian's story on Operation Millenium Challenge -- a major war game conducted in 2002.
***In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.***
And here's a link to the Guardian story. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq
And, of course, islamic fundamentalists did put a pretty big hole in the USS Cole in 2000 using half their navy (one small boat -- their other boat sank when they overloaded it with explosives). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing
And NPR told me the other day the US Navy is lugging some Somali pirates back to the US for trial after the pirates attempted to board and loot not one, but two, US destroyers. These may not be the smartest pirates in the Red Sea. But they did apparently manage to get into close proximity to the ships.
***History is against you. The 10 years (1962-1972) of manned space exploration has never been matched by unmanned probes.***
With the notable exception of the return of lunar material during the Apollo program, most important research has been done with unmanned devices -- Viking, Spirit, Hubble etc. In a sane environment, what Skylab 1973-1974 would have established was that there was very little need or use for humans in space -- at least in the 20th Century and probably well into the 21st as well. Instead we ended up with the monster, money sucking black hole of the space shuttle/ISS whose very high cost, and inability to meet schedule objectives probably set space science overall back at least a decade.
Thanks. It took me about 40 seconds to figure out that the cameras couldn't possibly be in space even if they are capable of resolving the numbers on a license plate from Earth orbit. -- which I doubt because of the amount of light they'd need to collect and the platform stability requirements. Things like that are why real spy satellites are huge and cost a fortune. In any case, no matter how nifty the optics, you can't see the license plate from directly overhead, off to the side, at low angles if there is traffic, etc.
But thanks for checking the spec.
***The shell is a poor clone of 1950's algol.***
"poor clone" seems entirely too generous.
***Today, scripting in Ruby or Python ...***
Yes. I use Python myself for any script longer than a couple of lines. But interfacing Python to the unix OS is messier than it looks on the surface. For example, if your script hangs around for days and launches a lot of processes you will find that there are armies of "defunct" Zombie processes cluttering up the system. They don't go away until the script is killed. That's fixable, but figuring out how to fix it is an adventure for those of us who are not OS experts.
***Yeah they can get the data back, but the drive image won't match the new hardware.***
I can't speak for modern Windows which I think is a rather abominable OS. But with Windows 9, if you loaded a Ghost image for a different hardware configuration, it just assumed that you'd made some hardware changes. Depending on the degree and nature of what was different, it would take between one and four reboots to identify and replace all the drivers that needed to be changed. So, barring pathological cases like Netware drivers misconfiguring themselves which could be sort of messy, the system would be up and running as well as Windows ever runs on the new hardware in about 20-45 minutes.
***A typical US family would have at least 3 of them.***
Not for long I expect. Ignoring "Check Engine" lights and strange noises in a flying vehicle is probably going to have serious consequences. If these things ever hit the consumer market, invest in funeral home stocks.
***I am glad he hasn't just gutted it.***
Actually, I think that he might have. Since I am NOT a fan of the manned spaceflight program, that doesn't bother me much. The less money we spend on expensive and pointless manned vehicles and the ISS, the happier I am. If some of the money not spent ends up in far more cost effective unmanned probes and satellites, I'm even happier
***Of course, I think the future lies in the private industry.***
Not impossible, but it doesn't seem seem especially likely that private industry will be able to take up the slack. I suspect private industry is only in the "plan" in order to pacify the space cadets who tend to see only the glorious vision and to ignore the gritty reality. I'd like to be wrong about that, but I doubt I am.