"Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project"
What's wrong with the old goals? as in "Make a working Free desktop environment work better and better".
Nobody questions what the goals of GCC project are: make better compilers which work better with new hardware. It's at least 20 years old.
My opinion unburdened with empirical fact: The new GNOME developers were young and they really wanted to do something New Kewl Different because they needed a sexy project to put in their portfolio so they can get a better job.
"the mobile phone platform will become alot more appealing to many people who want the familiarity of their PC on their phone. "
(remove shoe, bang on table) Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!
That's one of the biggest problems with Microsoft.
Average people's idea of Windows: something annoying they have to use at work or on their PC, DO NOT WANT.
I had a Windows Mobile 5.x, and they obviously attempted to make it "look like" and sort of feel-like Windows XP. It was horrid. I got it for free from somebody who bought an early iPhone (2 or 3G?).
Jobs understood the problem from the beginning. He did NOT shove the Mac interface on the iPhone. Why? Because he had the balls to say that something whose interface he personally contributed to or at least vetted would not be good on a handheld phone.
Now Microsoft STILL fails to correctly learn the lesson, and after a major fail putting a craptastic XP on their phone, they are putting a phone interface and craptasticing Windows on the PC.
I know what people will feel: DO NOT WANT.
Microsoft should do something more radical, like not call their mobile phone operating system "Windows", and stop believing that there is any reason to have the same interface. Start by making something good, really good--and by the new name declare that the sublimation of everything to supporting the Great Windows Empire is now over. For this to happen, Ballmer needs to be fired first. Why is he still there?
Its budget is from the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy which deals with weaponry.
The design is ill-suited for civilian energy production research, and there is little attention to investigating cost-effective engineering necessary to get fusion power. By contrast the large tokamak being built in France does have significant engineering application (e.g. materials which could withstand the neutron flux in semi-commercial powerloads) as part of its scientific program.
The underlying facts: There is nothing important to learn in the nuclear reactions of fusion. Everything difficult is in the complex radiative transfer and fluid dynamics and thermodynamics in extreme circumstances. The goal of the NIF is to generate calibration data for the classified software simulation codes for nuclear weaponry without nuclear test detonations. You can do certain kinds of "subcritical" experiments to test the explosives and fission primary without a full yield nuclear explosion, but there isn't anything equivalent for the secondaries without the NIF.
The target of the NIF is, in some ways, a miniature recreation of the thermonuclear secondary of H-bombs. In fact, until about 15-20 years ago the actual setup used in the DOE laser fusion experiments was classified: the lasers are not directly heating or compressing the fusion fuel. They are heating a metal outer-surface called a "hohlraum (German for hollow room)" named so in the initial breakthrough Ulam-Teller design for the fusion weapon.
The outer metal shell fully ionizes which then releases a dense gas of X-rays which equilbrate themselves as the speed of light inside the container and themselves heat and ablate the surface of the inner fusion pellet. The gas being pushed off from the inner pellet imparts momentum inward imploding and fusing the inner pellet.
This is how an H-bomb works, except the initial x-rays are provided by a fission primary implosion. The real key is that you do not want the heat/blast from the primary---that would ruin the fusion assembly. You just want a clean X-ray pulse first.
Personally, I don't favor excess spending on nuclear weapons, and would favor funding into a variety of heterodox experimental fusion configurations which have a chance, if small, of eventually providing commercially successful power generation.
"If they're a suicidal death cult, why have they held back from trying to "wipe Israel off the map" for the last 20-30 years?"
Uh, suicide bombers aren't in it for the suicide, they're in it for the bombing.
And if they had WMD's then why are they getting nukes? (because in reality especially chemical weapons are far less powerful and biological weapons are very unreliable).
Most likely, when they get nukes they will start up with nonnuclear war through Hezbollah.
The most radical Zionist factions in Israel are not in control of the government and believe throroughly in not dying, roughly "We're not dead yet, nyah nyah nyah!" even if they are aggressive colonizers. They don't have an apocalyptic religious ideology.
The mass suicide as Masada was in response to military conquest and siege. They were about to be slaughtered by the Roman army anyway.
I don't really see any parallel.
A really serious problem though with Iran is the same as North Korea, once Iran gets nukes, its people will never be free of its crazy tyranny, and I think that's a real motivation for the leadership.
"Who the hell knows. Given the fact that you can't get your hands on the original datasets without the right secret handshake or whatever it is that climate scientists use to identify each other they could be doing just about anything,"
By the way, remember the Berkeley statistician who was a skeptic about global warming and the methodologies by the climatologists? He got their raw data and processed it in what he believed was the right way. The answer came out the same as the mainstream climate community said. They aren't lying, or faking.
Nearly every pub I've been to in the USA in the last 10-15 years has had a significant selection of good beer on par with European quality. Every supermarket has good beer, along with cheap macrobrews. You have to work pretty hard to find a "dive bar" which has only generic 'macrobrews' from BudMilCoors and nothing decent. It's a huge change from 25 years ago. Maybe not in rural Oklahoma, but in every moderately sized city, certainly.
It's not at all like Tesla vs internal combustion automobiles (you'd have to search for hours to find one in a city) more like Japanese vs American---you can find a Japanese car in every parking lot.
If you're a patent attorney, the applicable size of your market and your quantity of billable hours, as well as the urgency for your services, scales positively with a legal regime in which
a) broad patents for minor variations are easily granted
and
b) the potency of the threat of patent litigation is very high
If you make your living in that arena, are you likely to make legal decisions (anything important decided by a judge intriniscally touches on (a) and (b)) which would have profoundly reduced your income or made your job, which you spend decades of hard work preparing for, redundant?
Judge Posner has a decent understanding of software production, but only as an amateur dilettante. He wasn't ever a programmer who lost his job because his employers folded because of patent problems---roughly the parallel opposite to Koh.
a) errors in weather forecasting in short times arise, significantly, from the limited data available as inputs ("data assimilation") and the quality thereof, and this sounds like this could easily give
b) the chaos-predicted exponential with time applies to 1) infinitesimal perturbations, and in 2) very long time average over a stationary attractor. In reality the local/finite-time Lyapunov exponents can vary very widely (usually high when there is interesting weather/convection).
Stealth aircraft have always been detectable on radar, the only question is "how much radar power" and "how close", and that still applies to indirect radar measurements as well. It's still harder to detect changes in moisture vs a B-52-sized hunk of aluminum glinting back at 100 km.
The real point of stealth is that mission planners know what range the stealth aircraft is detectable at, and the range that said aircraft detects its targets, and the range of its weapons. If it lines up, stealth craft launches in the gap and turns away.
Also, 'detection of stealth' (there is somebody out there) isn't always good enough to be able to accurately track to launch a missile which itself would be able to lock on.
Office will be on the tablets, hard-wired like phone carrier junkware, and it will be a special Microsoft-only build process to install "desktop-quality" apps in the otherwise restrictive Metro environment for the locked-RT.
Also I'm sure they will make it easy to connect to corporate Exchange, and harder for everybody else to connect to corporate Exchange. Probably a few years ago, Microsoft figured their main competition was Blackberry, but the latter is imploding on its own even without Microsoft's shove.
Microsoft's goal is to have an official Microsoft entry so that large IT departments will have a good excuse to refuse to integrate iPad deeply.
iPad will still take 80% of the profits in the space with 40% of the sales.
*) Don't turn your workplace into a fraternity. *) a super-automatic espresso machine, and pay for all the coffee & maintenance of said machine. *) Agree that you don't want to do anything stupid or wasteful even if some book, or person, think's its the 'best practice' or 'cool' *) newer is not always better. Newer is not always worse.
USSC, 1866: “It is true that the power of Congress to tax is a very extensive power. It is given in the Constitution with only one exception and only two qualifications. Congress cannot tax exports, and it must impose direct taxes by the rule of apportionment and indirect taxes by the rule of uniformity. Thus, limited, and thus only, it reaches every subject, and may be exercised at discretion.”
Quoting the website: The court agreed that Congress could not prohibit or regulate the activities that were being taxed.
For instance, there is a federal excise tax on gasoline and alcohol, and since 2010, a tax on indoor tanning services. (no kidding). Even if the gasoline came from oil which was drilled, pumped, refined and dispensed in Texas, it is still legal for Congress to tax Texans for it.
Regarding the health care "mandate". It is not a mandate, of course, it is a tax.
What Congress can NOT do is to make the failure to buy health insurance a crime and make offenders subject to prosecution. That's what it means to "compel" in the usual legal sense. If it had done so, then there would be legitimate Constitutional problems, but Congress didn't do so. Is there any compulsion to buy electric vehicles because of the tax credit? Obviously not.
The argument is pretty clear to me: 100% legal as a tax. And I can't believe that 4 supposed strict constitutionalists voted against it, but then again Scalia is pretty consistent: if it is good for people against powerful interests, he is always against it.
crap, this like like building your own oscilloscope. Doable (to get something which may be 1940's quality), but a waste of time.
There's a reason why money for high quality scientific instrumentation and supplies is valuable.
If the amateurs are going to be wasting even more of their time replacing the manufacture of standard items, poorly, they they will contribute even less to advancing science than otherwise.
Only when they built computers in factories and employed full-time engineers to design hardware and software were they significant to more than a tiny number of people.
"* Isaac Newton was actually an alchemist by trade - the physics and math were basically just fun side projects."
Well, Newton was employed full time at the leading scientific research of the UK. Wasn't quite "fun side project" as opposed to work to publish Principia Mathematica.
"* Albert Einstein published some of his most important stuff while working as a patent clerk."
Sure, and he did so after getting a PhD from a prominent research university, and the experimental evidence he used to come of with his theories, and to validate his theories, came from sustained professional researchers.
Slashdot Mirror
"Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project"
What's wrong with the old goals? as in "Make a working Free desktop environment work better and better".
Nobody questions what the goals of GCC project are: make better compilers which work better with new hardware. It's at least 20 years old.
My opinion unburdened with empirical fact: The new GNOME developers were young and they really wanted to do something New Kewl Different because they needed a sexy project to put in their portfolio so they can get a better job.
sociology with a few arbitrary symmetry laws.
(show ipad)
iPad
(show Chinese mob waiting in front of Apple Store to open)
Want
(show samsung tablet, it looks exactly the same)
Not a copy. Somebody forgot the cool.
Again.
(show deserted generic electronics store)
Do not want
(show ipad)
iPad
"the mobile phone platform will become alot more appealing to many people who want the familiarity of their PC on their phone. "
(remove shoe, bang on table)
Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!
That's one of the biggest problems with Microsoft.
Average people's idea of Windows: something annoying they have to use at work or on their PC, DO NOT WANT.
I had a Windows Mobile 5.x, and they obviously attempted to make it "look like" and sort of feel-like Windows XP. It was horrid. I got it for free from somebody who bought an early iPhone (2 or 3G?).
Jobs understood the problem from the beginning. He did NOT shove the Mac interface on the iPhone. Why? Because he had the balls to say that something whose interface he personally contributed to or at least vetted would not be good on a handheld phone.
Now Microsoft STILL fails to correctly learn the lesson, and after a major fail putting a craptastic XP on their phone, they are putting a phone interface and craptasticing Windows on the PC.
I know what people will feel: DO NOT WANT.
Microsoft should do something more radical, like not call their mobile phone operating system "Windows", and stop believing that there is any reason to have the same interface. Start by making something good, really good--and by the new name declare that the sublimation of everything to supporting the Great Windows Empire is now over. For this to happen, Ballmer needs to be fired first. Why is he still there?
Its budget is from the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy which deals with weaponry.
The design is ill-suited for civilian energy production research, and there is little attention to investigating cost-effective engineering necessary to get fusion power. By contrast the large tokamak being built in France does have significant engineering application (e.g. materials which could withstand the neutron flux in semi-commercial powerloads) as part of its scientific program.
The underlying facts: There is nothing important to learn in the nuclear reactions of fusion. Everything difficult is in the complex radiative transfer and fluid dynamics and thermodynamics in extreme circumstances. The goal of the NIF is to generate calibration data for the classified software simulation codes for nuclear weaponry without nuclear test detonations. You can do certain kinds of "subcritical" experiments to test the explosives and fission primary without a full yield nuclear explosion, but there isn't anything equivalent for the secondaries without the NIF.
The target of the NIF is, in some ways, a miniature recreation of the thermonuclear secondary of H-bombs. In fact, until about 15-20 years ago the actual setup used in the DOE laser fusion experiments was classified: the lasers are not directly heating or compressing the fusion fuel. They are heating a metal outer-surface called a "hohlraum (German for hollow room)" named so in the initial breakthrough Ulam-Teller design for the fusion weapon.
The outer metal shell fully ionizes which then releases a dense gas of X-rays which equilbrate themselves as the speed of light inside the container and themselves heat and ablate the surface of the inner fusion pellet. The gas being pushed off from the inner pellet imparts momentum inward imploding and fusing the inner pellet.
This is how an H-bomb works, except the initial x-rays are provided by a fission primary implosion. The real key is that you do not want the heat/blast from the primary---that would ruin the fusion assembly. You just want a clean X-ray pulse first.
Personally, I don't favor excess spending on nuclear weapons, and would favor funding into a variety of heterodox experimental fusion configurations which have a chance, if small, of eventually providing commercially successful power generation.
Apple doesn't have to lose for Microsoft to win.
are you kidding? Communists and fascists were bitter enemies since 1920's.
Healthcare in USA is 18% of GDP, the next highest developed country is France, with 12%.
"If they're a suicidal death cult, why have they held back from trying to "wipe Israel off the map" for the last 20-30 years?"
Uh, suicide bombers aren't in it for the suicide, they're in it for the bombing.
And if they had WMD's then why are they getting nukes? (because in reality especially chemical weapons are far less powerful and biological weapons are very unreliable).
Most likely, when they get nukes they will start up with nonnuclear war through Hezbollah.
The most radical Zionist factions in Israel are not in control of the government and believe throroughly in not dying, roughly "We're not dead yet, nyah nyah nyah!" even if they are aggressive colonizers. They don't have an apocalyptic religious ideology.
The mass suicide as Masada was in response to military conquest and siege. They were about to be slaughtered by the Roman army anyway.
I don't really see any parallel.
A really serious problem though with Iran is the same as North Korea, once Iran gets nukes, its people will never be free of its crazy tyranny, and I think that's a real motivation for the leadership.
"Who the hell knows. Given the fact that you can't get your hands on the original datasets without the right secret handshake or whatever it is that climate scientists use to identify each other they could be doing just about anything,"
Let me Google that for you.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
By the way, remember the Berkeley statistician who was a skeptic about global warming and the methodologies by the climatologists? He got their raw data and processed it in what he believed was the right way. The answer came out the same as the mainstream climate community said. They aren't lying, or faking.
where would he be? Hmm????
Quantities matter.
Nearly every pub I've been to in the USA in the last 10-15 years has had a significant selection of good beer on par with European quality. Every supermarket has good beer, along with cheap macrobrews. You have to work pretty hard to find a "dive bar" which has only generic 'macrobrews' from BudMilCoors and nothing decent. It's a huge change from 25 years ago. Maybe not in rural Oklahoma, but in every moderately sized city, certainly.
It's not at all like Tesla vs internal combustion automobiles (you'd have to search for hours to find one in a city) more like Japanese vs American---you can find a Japanese car in every parking lot.
"on the take" implies bribery, but.....
If you're a patent attorney, the applicable size of your market and your quantity of billable hours, as well as the urgency for your services, scales positively with a legal regime in which
a) broad patents for minor variations are easily granted
and
b) the potency of the threat of patent litigation is very high
If you make your living in that arena, are you likely to make legal decisions (anything important decided by a judge intriniscally touches on (a) and (b)) which would have profoundly reduced your income or made your job, which you spend decades of hard work preparing for, redundant?
Judge Posner has a decent understanding of software production, but only as an amateur dilettante. He wasn't ever a programmer who lost his job because his employers folded because of patent problems---roughly the parallel opposite to Koh.
a) errors in weather forecasting in short times arise, significantly, from the limited data available as inputs ("data assimilation") and the quality thereof, and this sounds like this could easily give
b) the chaos-predicted exponential with time applies to 1) infinitesimal perturbations, and in 2) very long time average over a stationary attractor. In reality the local/finite-time Lyapunov exponents can vary very widely (usually high when there is interesting weather/convection).
Stealth aircraft have always been detectable on radar, the only question is "how much radar power" and "how close", and that still applies to indirect radar measurements as well. It's still harder to detect changes in moisture vs a B-52-sized hunk of aluminum glinting back at 100 km.
The real point of stealth is that mission planners know what range the stealth aircraft is detectable at, and the range that said aircraft detects its targets, and the range of its weapons. If it lines up, stealth craft launches in the gap and turns away.
Also, 'detection of stealth' (there is somebody out there) isn't always good enough to be able to accurately track to launch a missile which itself would be able to lock on.
"HP should consider what's missing in those devices from other manufacturers, find a gap they could fill, make the product different."
Is there any evidence they're going to do anything like this? They will make it different with a sticker. It's the Fiorina way.
Office will be on the tablets, hard-wired like phone carrier junkware, and it will be a special Microsoft-only build process to install "desktop-quality" apps in the otherwise restrictive Metro environment for the locked-RT.
Also I'm sure they will make it easy to connect to corporate Exchange, and harder for everybody else to connect to corporate Exchange.
Probably a few years ago, Microsoft figured their main competition was Blackberry, but the latter is imploding on its own even without Microsoft's shove.
Microsoft's goal is to have an official Microsoft entry so that large IT departments will have a good excuse to refuse to integrate iPad deeply.
iPad will still take 80% of the profits in the space with 40% of the sales.
*) Don't turn your workplace into a fraternity.
*) a super-automatic espresso machine, and pay for all the coffee & maintenance of said machine.
*) Agree that you don't want to do anything stupid or wasteful even if some book, or person, think's its the 'best practice' or 'cool'
*) newer is not always better. Newer is not always worse.
"If other OEMs follow suit, MS could find itself as the only vendor selling ARM-based W8 tablets."
Everybody else's tablets/notebooks: $1000
Microsoft's + Apple's: $600
Ballmer knows he can't outfox Apple, but HP? All too easy.
It has been established since the 1800's that Congress has plenary power to tax whatever it wants, regardless of its ability to 'regulate'.
http://evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html#interstatecommerce
USSC, 1866: “It is true that the power of Congress to tax is a very extensive power. It is given in the Constitution with only one exception and only two qualifications. Congress cannot tax exports, and it must impose direct taxes by the rule of apportionment and indirect taxes by the rule of uniformity. Thus, limited, and thus only, it reaches every subject, and may be exercised at discretion.”
Quoting the website: The court agreed that Congress could not prohibit or regulate the activities that were being taxed.
For instance, there is a federal excise tax on gasoline and alcohol, and since 2010, a tax on indoor tanning services. (no kidding). Even if the gasoline came from oil which was drilled, pumped, refined and dispensed in Texas, it is still legal for Congress to tax Texans for it.
Regarding the health care "mandate". It is not a mandate, of course, it is a tax.
What Congress can NOT do is to make the failure to buy health insurance a crime and make offenders subject to prosecution. That's what it means to "compel" in the usual legal sense. If it had done so, then there would be legitimate Constitutional problems, but Congress didn't do so. Is there any compulsion to buy electric vehicles because of the tax credit? Obviously not.
The argument is pretty clear to me: 100% legal as a tax. And I can't believe that 4 supposed strict constitutionalists voted against it, but then again Scalia is pretty consistent: if it is good for people against powerful interests, he is always against it.
ah, that makes it so much more espionage proof.
crap, this like like building your own oscilloscope. Doable (to get something which may be 1940's quality), but a waste of time.
There's a reason why money for high quality scientific instrumentation and supplies is valuable.
If the amateurs are going to be wasting even more of their time replacing the manufacture of standard items, poorly, they they will contribute even less to advancing science than otherwise.
Only when they built computers in factories and employed full-time engineers to design hardware and software were they significant to more than a tiny number of people.
"* Isaac Newton was actually an alchemist by trade - the physics and math were basically just fun side projects."
Well, Newton was employed full time at the leading scientific research of the UK. Wasn't quite "fun side project" as opposed to work to publish Principia Mathematica.
"* Albert Einstein published some of his most important stuff while working as a patent clerk."
Sure, and he did so after getting a PhD from a prominent research university, and the experimental evidence he used to come of with his theories, and to validate his theories, came from sustained professional researchers.