My GF's nephew grew up in a Spanish-speaking household and was basically fluent at 4. But now, at age 13, he seems to have mostly forgotten it in favor of his dominant language, English.
I'm one of those kids that completely understood another language other than English at an early age but have completely forgotten most of it when I grew older. The reason why I knew I was fluent is not just because my family tells me that I understood everything but that because my grandpa used to live with me and he cannot speak English. At best his English is just a handful for words that he shouts out. I remember understanding everything he told me at around the age of 3. The strange thing is that when I recall him talking to me, it comes out in grammatically correct English!
Later we moved away and the only exposure I had to the language at home was through my parents. But the thing that probably sealed the deal was school. When I attended elementary school with kindergarten and 1st grade, my teachers would tell my parents that my English was terrible. Then my parents made the mistake in accepting what the teachers told me and said I had to work on my English, and they'd say it in English of course. Even though it was a simple statement, as a kid, you take it as truth and run with it.
So my advice to any parents that speak a different language than English is that they ignore every English teacher until high school. If their English grades are barely passing that's fine as long as they fully understand every word at home. They will inevitably learn English because of their exposure in school and with friends that are English speakers. In high school you can probably start alternating languages freely, but the trick is you should tell them they are required to respond back in the same language you are talking to them in. Another thing that is pretty common is kids will grow up understanding the language you taught them but they can't speak it--that usually happens if you allow them to respond back in English.
They may not appreciate the dual language use as a child, but when they get to be an adult or even a teenager they'll quickly realize how much of an advantage they have by speaking more than one language. The best part is if done perfectly they will be completely fluent and 2 languages with no overwhelming accent or common grammar mistakes (in both languages) by the time they are an adult.
what is *with* you people always reaching for the lawyer every time some little conflict with another person comes up
My entrepreneurship teacher put it best: "people come after you the second you have lots of money." The reason why everyone says "ask a lawyer" is because if you happen to make lots of money and some big business guy comes at you with a lawsuit and wins, you're fucked. Even if they don't win, as long as they have deeper pockets than you, you will lose the court game or they'll sink you with lawyer fees.
People don't like lawyers because it is an ugly game where the only winners are the lawyers.
Now sure, if you bother to read all the documents you sign and actually understand them as well as the boatload of BS laws in the US, then you can cover your own ass without legal advice. But it's pretty damn clear this guy isn't sure about a lot of those laws therefore asking others on slashdot is a poor alternative. That's like going to a bar and asking some random dude how to start a business.
This situation is probably as simple as taking a copy of the GPL and asking the company if they're willing to release the source under the GPL license. But the most likely answer from the company will be "no" not because they want to be a dick to you, but because their allegiance is to investors or the owners of the company. So if 2 years later the GPL'ed source code happens to turn into something like Linux, you can sure bet there would be something like chairs thrown at people that were once managing the company (or worse).
With the latest hardware and fully integrated chipsets, you can already build an incredibly power efficient system for as low as 20watts idle, and yes, it will perform better than the VIA platforms. Here's one example.
What are the ethical and sociological implications? Is this already going to be the first step of realizing Transhumanism [wikipedia.org] - just not exactly in the same way Nietzsche envisioned? Discuss!
It's been debated before but, yes, I think inevitably we are moving towards Transhumanism concepts in the future. Perhaps not in our lifetimes but in a few generations it seems likely.
Currently much of science and technology is moving forward. But it is much easier for engineering to move forward than biological research. The bio stuff will always be a step behind because, ultimately, they want to first cure biological abnormalities and diseases. On the other side of the spectrum, there's a whole lot of ethical arguments from various groups against certain types of bio research. It also doesn't help that the current experiments are more like "guess and check" rather than achieving a full understanding of the problem before trying it out. So in this sense people will happily accept a cure for cancer but will come with question marks on their faces when you ask them about cloning, genetic modifications, and stem cell research.
However with engineering and technology there are no such barriers. You can look at a fake arm and say, "that's effectively a machine these various materials, there's no 'human' in there, the 'human' is still in control." So the ethical issues won't stop this train until we reach a state similar to that of Ghost in the Shell. In that setting the extreme is that the only "human" portion is the brain, but the rest of the body is effectively a machine. But by then it will be too late. Engineered replacements will become the norm (as if they aren't already, see pace makers and things like that) and everyone will look around and either wonder what happened or continue like life is normal.
If you look around, the ingredients are coming together. Materials engineering will play a bigger part and that field and industry is advancing as we start seeing more engineered materials like carbon fiber. Battery advancements are also in high demand with mobile devices taking off and potentially electric/hybrid cars. Computation power is still increasing, becoming more efficient, and is getting even smaller.
We could probably buy 5-10 years if they could reclaim just the 3, 9, 13, 17, 19, 20, 34 and 40 class As and get over 130,000,000 IPs back.
130,000,000 / 4,294,967,296 = 3%
The article says we will run out of unallocated IPs by 2011. The unallocated pool is 14%. It is currently 2008. 2011 - 2008 = 3 years. What makes you think that reclaiming 3% is going to buy us 5 to 10 years?
I like the fact that I can now run as a normal user rather than an admin user. And when I (as a normal user) need admin privileges, UAC will run the task as admin without logging in/logging out. I like this also because it will force software makers to correctly build their software for windows and it will help prevent junk from getting installed accidentally.
I like the sleep feature that actually works in vista but was flaky in XP. My laptop has sleep / wakeup issues that I got so annoyed and stop using the sleep function completely when it could have easily been used to saved power when left idle. My vista desktop now sleeps and wakes up better than my laptop and only uses 1 watt in sleep mode.
I like the fact that 64bit drivers are signed. Sure, it limits 3rd party drivers and doesn't let tinkerers do as they please, but as a consumer it helps prevent me from accidentally buying cheap crap at the store only to find that it is making my system unstable because of a poor driver.
I like how firefox 2 runs in vista. In XP firefox 2 would get slower and slower until it would either crap out or be so slow you had to close it and restart it. And when you just wanted to start it quickly to check a map or something on the internet, it would take years to load itself. In vista firefox (and other programs) actually start quickly.
Now there are many things I don't like about vista but when I think about other OSes I realize that there are also many things I don't like about them either (XP, Ubuntu).
One thing that is probably a show stopper for many people is the other side of hardware support. When trying to install vista on an ICH9 disk controller for example, it turns out that you need to give the vista installation the Intel Matrix Storage Driver so it can disable a laptop feature in vista that makes the system unstable.
Another thing that really ticks people off is the reorganization of the control panel. Some tools in control panel show up on the left while others show up on the right. Other controls are buried even further into other applications. Like the convenient resource monitor is on the performance tab in task manager but buried somewhere on the left hand side in the control panel. Same with the disk partitioner. I think in this area they really need to give up on laying out the control panel and just leave it as a list of items. In fact the flatter the list is the better. I'd love to simply go from control panel straight to the disk manager.
But I can go off on the other OSes as well. For example I hate the fact that Windows XP only loads fast the first time and every time after that it inconveniently loads slower than before. I hate the fact that ubuntu has a stupid token key ring that ranks right up there with vista UAC at times. I like the fact that ubuntu now has a "safe mode" x windows feature but it still needs serious work (wouldn't correctly detect my friend's 24" monitor resolution and at times would just have no options in the drop downs, didn't even tell you that you had to restart before the settings took effect, the test button didn't "test" like it was supposed to half the time).
But there will always be bad things about everything, otherwise we'd have the perfect solution and nobody would need to use another OS. Personally I am going to run windows on my personal machine with ubuntu in virtualbox. This would give me the superior abundance of support and applications for windows and the power user/server utilities of linux. You could probably get away with the reverse as well, all depends on your tastes.
Have you ever used the equivalent authorization interfaces in other Operating Systems? It seems like everybody I know who has used Mac OS X, and had it occasionally ask for a password when doing something with the system, considers the Vista equivalent to be a really poor reimagining.
I'm not the original author but I have used both ubuntu and vista and I have to say you're a little misinformed.
Vista's UAC only pops up "allow/deny" boxes when the user is running as an administrator. By default, the first account created on Vista is created as an administrator account. I think this is a mistake.
If you instead set aside the first account and call it "admin" or whatever, then create a second account, you can now have the second account be a normal user account. So let's call the normal user account "bob". So now if you use the bob account for your everyday tasks, when the bob account tries to access something that requires admin privileges, UAC will now popup a window. But because bob is not an administrator, it will ask/require the admin account password before continuing. This is almost exactly how ubuntu is configured when doing admin tasks.
Like I said before I'm not a CS guy, but I'm not sure how the OS is supposed to know what to cache other than what the running applications tell it to. I don't know if I'm going to launch excel today, how would my computer?
If you're not a CS guy perhaps you should stop trying to push your flawed logic on people that have already proved you wrong? Just because you don't know what you'll be running in the future doesn't mean that we can't make an educated guess. The only way you could stop us from proposing a solution is if you, the user, acted completely randomly all the time. In fact, even if you acted randomly, we can still do better than doing nothing at all...
In CS there are many problems which have many solutions. One solution, is the random solution. That is if I just act randomly in my algorithm, how well will I perform? This is interesting to computer science because it illustrates the worst we could possibly do. The other solution is the optimal solution. This illustrates how well we could do in the best possible circumstances (like reading the future).
So for your problem it would be better phrased this way:
We have 1gb of free memory the user is not using. We can easily fit 1 program in there without them noticing we took some of the free memory. How do we pick which program to load? The user's computer has 100 programs installed.
In the random case if we pick randomly we have a 1/100 chance of picking correctly. So already we are doing better than had we done nothing at all as long as we had the extra idle resources to spare. If the user happens to need the memory, we let him write over what we loaded, no visible penalties occurred from loading the program.
In the optimal case we read the future and predict exactly the next program. Ta-da. 100% chance of picking correctly. We win! Except we can't read the future, darn. But at least we have an idea of the best possible is quite a ways from the worst possible, so there's still lots of room in between.
At this point we know that doing nothing is worse than acting randomly. Therefore, why not at least act randomly?
Now let's put more information into the problem. Suppose the user is your typical office user: reads email, browses the net, and opens word documents and pdfs. If we monitor his program usage we will see consistently high usage of his email program, his browser program, his office program, and his pdf reader. Ah ha! So not all users are incredibly random after all!
How do we guess this data or manage this data? Well there's many different solutions: keep track of program access dates, keep track of program start counts, keep track of most recently used programs, etc. Some are simpler than others but all accomplish the task of giving us more information which we can use to increase our odds at picking the correct program to load.
Now suppose we implement our algorithm, we find that he has a 90% chance of picking between the email/browser/word/pdf programs. If we manage to pick between one of those four programs, we have a 1/4 * 9/10 = 22.5% chance of picking correctly. That is a hell of a lot better than 1/100.
I was hoping that this would mean that as a US customer I could easily buy international music but unfornately it doesn't look like that's going to be the case.
For a while I was on a mission to build a really power efficient PC. Unfortunately when I got my AC power meter, I learned a number of disappointing things:
Power specifications are incredibly hard to find. One good resource is actually Dell's specification sheets.
Most of the inefficiency is in the power supply. In the past PSUs were made incredibly cheaply and even good brands were selling 70% or less efficient PSUs. When a system consumes 100 watts at the plug, that means 30 watts are wasted at the PSU. This has become a lot better with 80+ ratings, but you still have the issue where efficiency tends to drop as power consumption drops.
The next big culprit is the video card. The best card I ever found was an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP. They still make them and the power consumption is somewhere in the low single digit watts. Other good options are probably Intel's onboard graphics chips. I think the latest intel integrated x3100 has a max draw of 9 watts (found it somewhere on dell's spec sheets).
Another huge culprit is the motherboard. Motherboards these days come with everything. For something like a server you don't need the fancy soundcard. The fancy secondary raid chip is also probably useless. They simply don't make plain vanilla motherboards anymore. Also the chipsets (especially nVidia's chipsets) are horrible with power consumption. There are nearly no specifications available for motherboard chipset power consumption but from my experience it can be anywhere from 10 to 30 watts total.
Laptop parts are the best. If you can build your entire server out of laptop parts, that would be ideal. Laptop parts usually have the right configurations for clocking down the CPU, not having a power hungry motherboard, and having efficient parts along with it (wireless, hard drives). For example a 2.5" laptop hard drive even while spinning will consume around 2 to 3 watts. A normal 3.5" hard drive on the other hand can suck 7 watts while spinning. I still haven't come close to beating my dell pentium M laptop in terms of power even with a Via Eden 600mhz system with nothing but a hard drive attached. The laptop would idle at 26 watts (screen off) while the Via would idle at 40watts.
Todays CPUs (intel core, a64 single cores) are incredibly efficient. For example I was able to build a 45watt idle AMD64 single core system. The trick is you have to pick the other parts carefully. The board I have (Asus Via board, they no longer make it) allowed me to clock down the CPU to 1000mhz and lower the voltage.
For really small server tasks, you may want to consider purchasing a wireless router and turning it into a server by using custom firmware like DD-WRT. Some wireless routers come with usb ports which will allow you to easily attach some flash memory for storage. Routers are also naturally headless so you don't have extra useless overhead from sound and video. To top it all off they come with 3 interfaces! One for the wan, another for the lan, and a wireless interface. What more could you ask for!
At first I thought I would wait until the format war ended before buying such a thing. Then I realized why do I even need such a player? Rarely do I ever want to watch a movie over again for the hell of it. Most of the time I simply want to watch a movie once and that's the end of it. There are few movies that you want to watch multiple times.
In the past the way to get around buying the DVD would be to drive down to the video rental place and rent it for a couple of nights. But that was still a hassle and they'd charge ridiculous prices for such a service. These days new services are opening up with high definition movie download-rentals thanks to big players like Netflix, Microsoft, and Apple. Now I don't have to worry about borrowing and returning a physical disc.
People have often brought up the question, "why does internet bandwidth (download speed) matter?" I say it matters big time because today you pay a theatre $10 or more per a ticket, are forced to wait in line, and sit in a seat that a million other people sat in. If you're lucky maybe the audience will be entertaining, but if you're not they'll be annoying as hell. Now if everyone was capable of downloading a high definition stream to their home and services were capable of handling incredibly large loads, why not distribute the movie over the internet? You've completely eliminated the theatre and make the movie accessible to anyone with the right connection.
Ultimately I think the internet will slowly replace consumer physical disk/storage mediums as the network technology gets faster and cheaper. Right now most people save files to their local disk, but how many businesses have shared network drives that are accessible anywhere on the company's network? Wouldn't it be even more convenient if you could save and read to some magical place that happens to exist in any developed portion of the world? Well we have the ability to build that magical place now, it is called the internet.
Probably because the CIO author is highly ignorant of the existence of CPAN and some of the high quality modules it archives and distributes. One particularly high quality module is Template Toolkit. It is an incredibly powerful templating system. Some would even say it is too powerful (you could write enter programs in the template language). But what I have found is that power was purposely put there because there are instances where you need to do something fancy in the template or view rather than the controller code. And I have found it actually turns out cleaner than the equivalent in something built on J2EE.
CPAN is also a whole lot more active than other library inventories. While some authors do tend to give up on maintaining their modules, there are lots of reports and patches submitted along-side the modules as well as test reports on systems where successfully/unsuccessfully installed. There are often multiple submissions of the same concept of a module but with varying implementations. This gives you many choices and lets you explore various implementations until you find one that suits your needs.
Here's a list of other awesome modules that extend perl or implement various concepts:
RPC::XML - Implement XML Remote Procedure Calls without writing a single line of HTTP, XML, or Socket code!
Inline - Embed other languages like C directly into Perl code (yes the C code gets compiled!).
Moose - Extension of objects in Perl, allows more control and adds new syntax sugar to make writing OO programs cleaner/stricter.
libwww - World Wide Web library for Perl, easily create something like a robot without too much low level detail with HTTP and Sockets.
In other languages or platforms there's also been issues with third-party libraries. For example in Java you could spend days trying to get a library or tool to work in your IDE. With perl and unix that's not the case. You simply go onto CPAN, see if someone's done it. If someone has, you'll be up and running in under a minute.
As usual everyone is going to go off and talk about people creating their own viruses and other Frankenstein sort of issues. But there is actually a new field opening up called bio-computing.
This is interesting because the concept is this: instead of using biology to create living lifeforms or things that affect living things, we're instead interested in using the biological building blocks to do computations for us. For example if we can create a bacteria with DNA that will only replicate 1000 times before it stops, then we've effectively implemented an algorithm using biology that counts to 1000 and stops. This is interesting because the nature of cells is naturally parallel so suddenly we break all models based on the Turing machine. This potentially could be a fast ticket towards solving NP before the physicists really understand quantum physics.
Too much implied through context and operators, not enough spelled out.
There's nothing stopping you from being more verbose in perl.
For example I typically write my plain functions like this:
sub add($$) # (x, y) { my $x = shift; my $y = shift;
return $x + $y; }
While I could have easily gotten away with:
sub add($$) { $_[0] + $_[1]; }
which actually turns out to be faster but not very easy for the unexperienced to read or maintain.
As such I reserve non-verbose and awkward code for special situations (needs optimization, needs to go fast) but I tried to be verbose in all other cases.
I do wish there were more ways to restrict definitions of function and method parameters (argument prototyping only applies to plain non-OO style calls) and that the OO was better defined not just hashes and bless. But I find for now, it does allow me to implement OO designs with minimal language barriers.
I don't remember PHP but I do remember an awful lot of limitations on the OO model. Some of the limitations turned me away from PHP quickly.
just about anything is watchable when you watch it in HD
HD ruined my expectations that the nightly news would be worth a watch because at least the female newscasters would be beautiful. With HD I now know they just have gobs of make up on and are actually not so pretty after all.
Personally I'd rather have the high school grad that likes to mess around with programming and would like an internship than the same kid after 4 years of college.
No, never. There is more to an undergraduate degree than just a specialization of computer science. A high school diploma on the other hand is worthless. I've been on both ends. I was hired in my 3rd year in high school as an intern with some programming. I worked summers and produced code that was later used. After high school I got my bachelors in 4 years and then was hired back into the same company as a full time software engineer.
If I had instead worked those 4 years and skipped a formal education, I would probably worse off. Two major consequences may have resulted from that path: incredibly bad decisions made for the company due to lack of insight and research in the field of CS (high school grads are incredibly stupid, including the "smart" ones) and a much lower salary.
With the 4 year degree I was able to leverage professors in CS who had years of experience and could soundly prove to me why they were right. I didn't blindly accept that Quicksort was the fastest sorting algorithm, instead I was dragged along whether I liked it or not for the proof. And at the end of all that not only was I proven wrong (Quicksort is only optimal for certain conditions) but I was also forced to recognize weaknesses in the algorithm and other characteristics of it.
The college kid spent 4 years learning java and c at a base level (meaning spending half of that time learning syntax and idiosyncrasies rather than working on actual challenges
I don't know what college you speak of but from where I came from every student was exposed to the following languages: Java, C, C++, (Pure) Lisp / (Pure) Scheme, Assembly (x86 or MIPS), and probably some Prolog. Of all the courses I took, none of them had the programming language in the title. It might have been in the description but it was never a course based on the language. Instead it was a course in the study of programming languages (functional, imperative, object oriented, logic based) and how they are implemented, or maybe the study of the implementation and run times of data structures and algorithms. The only "intro to programming" course that you were required to take was the first one, where by the end of 3 months you were expected to fully understand object oriented programming including fancy things like inheritance and polymorphism. In short, the students were given very little time to get up to speed on the language whether they had used it before or not. And you can bet a boat load of students failed that first class.
And that was one class out of a 3 or 4 class quarter and there are 3 academic year quarters per a year (summer quarter is optional). So if a student took 12 classes a year for four years with at least half of those being general education courses, that is 1 class out of 24 or 4.17% of the class time for CS. The other 23 courses were not on examining Java or C++, but rather understanding processor design (single cycle, multi cycle, pipelined, decoders, ALUs, register files), digital logic (build me a half adder, build me a multiplexer, do it again with only the following types of gates, etc), implementation of object oriented languages using a virtual method table (oh, it's not magic after all), understanding artificial intelligence algorithms and topics (bayesian, A*, greediness, constraints problems), analyzing algorithms (sorting, searching, running times, worst case, proofs on optimality, matrix multiplication, etc), compilers and interpreters (BNF, grammars, scanner, lexer, various optimizations, generating machine code, etc -- goodbye even more magic), operating systems (process scheduling, synchronization, paging, bootloaders, shared libraries, addressing, memory schemes including contiguous memory schemes and why they're stupid no matter what you do) and even some software engineeri
Why don't they use something that is related, in English, or at least a bit more understandable, do the Japanese speak French?
They do, but it isn't what you would think. Here's some fun examples (note double vowels means to hold the sound longer):
Japanese: Depaato
English: Department Store
Japanese: Supa
English: Supermarket
Japanese: Terebi
English: Television (TV)
Japanese: Pasokon
English: Personal Computer (PC)
All of these words are derived from English words but have been kana-butchered because Japanese does not have all of the sounds English has and some are even shortened forms of the full words. For example "pasokon" which you would hear sounded like "pah soh com" is really from the first parts of "personal computer" being "perso" and "com".
Some words actually sound pretty close to their English equivalent:
But when written in katakana or even romaji you sometimes wouldn't figure it out the actual English word as an English speaker. Only until they show you the object or describe what they are talking about do you suddenly make the connection.
So they do use English and other foreign words (not related to English) as any language is allowed. But even if they did, the word probably wouldn't sound exactly like it did from the originating language.
You could also say similarly of English which takes and borrows at will. In fact English will even allow you to force words to be used in different contexts than are technically sound. For example words like "guestimate" are used more commonly to express estimates that have no basis or technical reasoning. You may have issues trying to use that type of verbage (verbage--yet another made up word) in published works but for communication it is just fine. Additionally we still takes words like rendevous from other languages (French) despite using it in English. So are we speaking French or English? Well English obviously.
I had the same complaints about the languages my parents spoke because sometimes they would alternate between the native language and English. So I would hear certain English phrases thrown in at random times and get frustrated and ask why they wouldn't just speak in one language or come up with a valid translation or expression of their thoughts in the other language. The answer is they switch between languages because sometimes it is easier and quicker to express a thought or concept in one language versus another.
I also get an awful lot of complaints from my Spanish speaking friend who says we (American) English speakers tend to butcher the pronunciation of many borrowed Spanish words. For example the word "churro" in Spanish is specifically pronounced "chu ro" but English speakers tend to sit on the "r" sound and say something "chr ro".
So language (in general) is a funny thing. But of course you would have learned that in your required foreign language studies classes that you didn't sleep through, right?
To end, I'm going to leave you with one last Japanese kana-fied English word. But I'll write it in romaji without correct spacing (there are no "random" spaces in Katakana words) so you can read it. Some hints: the word is actually taken from 2 common english words combined to express a concept and the first portion "ai" is sounds like the English pronoun "I" or "eye" but is commonly written with two katakana.
First off, why is it that when it comes to Apple anything negative is whining? Apple is a company. We are customers. Customers are allowed to whine all we want as long as they want our money.
2) theres a Ethernet jack dongle for the USB so you can plug it to a hard line
3) there's a mini multiple USB hub so you can put in plenty of things
The point behind ultraportable is that you don't need to take additional accessories with you. Ideally, you take the unit and if necessary the charging cord. That's it.
4) it has blue tooth (and wifi N) built in so your blue tooth mouse or pointer does not need a jack.
I prefer wired mice because I don't have to worry about the battery dying on me. The mouse is probably the only additional accessory besides the power cord that I would take with me. I'm actually not in the set of people that want to drag along a spare battery, but I still think replacing the battery easily is required since the lifetime of the machine will probably be 5 years or more.
The idea behind an ultraportable is similar to the philosophy of a light traveler. Ultraportable users want less weight, less size, and fewer accessories to drag along. Because of that they're willing to make compromises like throwing out things that rarely get used (optical drives) and sacrifice speed for battery life (eliminate the need to drag a power cord and you will have a hot product). At the same time when an ultraportable user is back at the office or back at home, they don't want to have all of these fancy accessories to plug in to make it functional again. They only want to plug in what's necessary because it is likely they will have to unplug it again.
So if Jobs and company had managed to squeeze in an ethernet port, then that's one less stupid accessory. If they managed to squeeze in a 2nd usb port that's another accessory that won't be needed. If they managed to squeeze an SD card reader instead of that stupid webcam then they'd really be on the right track. They're pretty much at a loss with the size of a DVI plug, but they could've at least considered HDMI instead now that more displays are coming with built-in HDMI.
If I was Apple I wouldn't mind the customers whining. If they whine, that means they're interested in the product as long as in the next version they addresses what people whined about. If they don't whine that either means they have no need for the product (see Apple TV) or the product is perfect. Rarely is the product perfect.
I'm also certain that even the software developers who write these games have a fun time trying to come up with strategies in order to thwart the hacker community. For them, it is a fun intellectual exercise as well, especially when you are going up against people brighter than you are.
The common mistake I have seen with these types of games that simulate worlds are that they give the clients too much information. That is if the client game software only allows me to see things within 1000 units, the protocols are actually giving me 2000 units (or more) of information. Indeed, there should be some buffer above what the client should be able to see to account for small network latency issues but not on the scales that I've seen with the games.
So given that, I'm convinced that the game companies are not all that interested in securing their game. For them it is an extra cost. If they make their game protocol wide open in plain text yet the game-play is the equivalent to the most secure scheme, the players will still blindly buy the game. If fact, the players probably won't care that the exploits are possible until the cheating becomes widespread.
Also don't forget that game companies are businesses and probably have a PHB with an MBA at some point in their chain. As such they will not always act rationally for your own benefit. If cheating remains at 1% of the population, banning that 1% will change their revenue from $1 million to $0.98 million (cheaters have multiple accounts), and the cost of cracking down on the cheaters is $100,000 (hire more GMs, tell the dev team to make the game more secure), you can sure bet they are going to let those cheaters slide.
There's good reasons to be cautious about new things. One exception to your logic is penicilin and antibiotics. When that was figured out, you bet it was a huge break through. But nobody (then) thought of the consequences: bacteria growing immune to antibiotics. Now we are very careful about how and when antibiotics are administered to prevent further bacteria mutations against our antibiotics.
If there's one thing I remember about science in general it was that proving something false is much easier than proving something to be true. That intuitively makes sense; the only way to be completely sure of something is to exhaust all areas where it can be proven false. But to prove something false you only have to find one problem with it when in reality it may have multiple problems.
But anyway... today, based on what we know, all indicators may say that clones are safe to eat. But that may only be because we have not explored or have incorrectly explored everything about the science behind cloning.
However, I will agree, and say (without any evidence of course) that clones are probably safe to eat. I am willing to say this because previously I studied GMF/GAF (genetically modified/altered foods) and all of the material I could bring up pointed to a safe track record behind GMF/GAF product consumption. And you'd be surprised at how much food is more or less "manufactured" rather than grown; the agriculture industry is living off of science right now. Meats are already tasting more and more alike these days (especially chicken) and produce displays at the grocery store are getting more and more 'perfect'. That isn't because the farmers are planting better or working long hours out in the field. Rather a good amount of it is contributed to science behind breading and controlling the crops/animals such that a particular species is chosen. That species of course is the one that tastes good, comes out perfect, and is durable enough for transportation and shelves. And that crop/animal is just planted/bread every year. In otherwords, farmers have already gotten as close as they could to cloning without using the petri dish to do it. Of course they'd love to exploit cloning to perfectly control their crop and probably genetic modification so they could make that head of lettuce last a week longer in the fridge or on the store shelf.
But now we are starting to see issues with our highly controlled crops and animals: the gene pools for the specialized crops/animals are incredibly small that one disease could effectively wipe out an entire species. If we go even further and just have clones, then one flaw (rather than just a type of disease) in that clone could probably kill off the entire batch. So I'm not convinced that we've really uncovered and proven that we can mitigate all of the flaws to this type of science.
Do you want a laptop that is 0.16" to 0.76" thick? Go grab a ruler and put that in perspective. There is no way in hell you're going to do that with a standard external battery.
Toshiba has been doing it with their portege series for quite a while now. Here's their latest ultraportable/thin laptop (Portege R500) where they even managed to cram an optical drive into the thing: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3769
You can even go to their older products like the Portege R100 which has a maximum thickness of 19.8mm (.78 inches) as well as a removable battery but no optical drive.
I was in the same group of software mavens, the FOSS crowd, and ran into the same issues everywhere from home users to big businesses. That is I did not understand why it was hard to convince people otherwise with my beliefs on open source. Then I started taking business classes and I got into a few meetings between the managers about large software purchases and I finally began to understand the whole picture. The problem is, we geeks do not understand people adn their internal perception of risk. As I scroll through the comments here I see some stuff that I can already see not working and some stuff working (but the author does not understand why it works).
The reason why people are so ready to throw money at a problem (and a lot of money in some cases) is by throwing money at the problem you are at least assured that you have entered into some sort of contract where whatever solution you get will come with some sort of support service. They don't care that you have the solution. For all they know, you could just be trying to con them out of their money or trying to waste their time. Instead, they want assurance that your solution will work as advertised after the transaction has been made. In otherwwords, they want assurance that the perceived risk they have in there minds can be mitigated by the money they give. And they will never state that either because they are acting based on experience and emotion. People don't hand over money knowing full well that it is really just there to eliminate the risk. They will say that they agree that they are handing over the money because it makes them sleep better a night or they feel like it (what they get in return) will probably turn out as expected.
So when you, a FOSS geek, comes along and says, "hey, this free stuff works better than what you paid for" they are not going to believe you and will turn down the offer. That is not because they don't trust you, that is because they are not offered any assurance should you happen to be wrong this one time. And if you happen to be wrong, now they just lost an hour or so of their life (time is just as important as money).
How can you convince them otherwise? Easy, mitigate the perceived risk in their minds. They want assurance, the safety in knowing that even the 5 or 10 minutes you're taking from their life is going to be worth it.
So one particularly easy way to do that is to make them a deal: if they try the FOSS software for a day, and they find it does everything they need then they will buy you a drink, but if at the end of the day they think it does not work as you claimed then you'll buy them a drink. Besides getting you an easy free drink, this offers them the assurance that their time is not wasted: if the software works (there was no risk), then they save money (minus the drink), but if the software does not work, they get a drink for the invested time/effort. Without the drink it is a win-lose situation (if they win they win free software, if they lose they lose time and effort) and suddenly their perceived risks in losing take over. By introducing the drink you take their mind off of focusing on the risk involved and offer them some assurance that the risk they think is there is actually not there.
Others here have claimed selling the software by advertising features and "bling" that they have not seen before. While this works, the problem is now you have people spinning cubes and not exploring other things that the software is capable of. Instead you've sold them a "shiny object" and they'll use it just like a "shiny object." That's not what you want, you want them to use it as a replacement and you want them to gain confidence to eliminate the perceived risk they associated with FOSS.
Finally I want to be clear that offering a drink will not always work because people are different. Some people are more conservative than others and some people will take quite a bit more social effort to get moving along. But I assure you, the problem always revolves around ri
They were practical a long time ago (5 to 10 years).
Today I have almost a terabyte of data. To back that up to DVD 4.7G discs is a world of pain.
The other issue is DVD-Rs degrade over time, especially the cheaper stuff. You have to be very careful to order from a specific manufacturer and have a good quality burner. I'm already seeing read errors on burned CDs made not more than 10 years ago. I also have a bunch of cheapo DVD-R discs with read errors when they burned fine and tested fine after the burn.
In short I'm giving up on optical discs. I have two binders of burned discs with mostly backup data. Then I realized the binders were too big. So I just reused the spindles because I realized I don't actually use the discs all that often. Then I gave up on the spindles after I accumulated a few of those because I realized hard drives were incredibly cheap and compact. And now we have flash memory driving down prices even further:).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm one of those kids that completely understood another language other than English at an early age but have completely forgotten most of it when I grew older. The reason why I knew I was fluent is not just because my family tells me that I understood everything but that because my grandpa used to live with me and he cannot speak English. At best his English is just a handful for words that he shouts out. I remember understanding everything he told me at around the age of 3. The strange thing is that when I recall him talking to me, it comes out in grammatically correct English!
Later we moved away and the only exposure I had to the language at home was through my parents. But the thing that probably sealed the deal was school. When I attended elementary school with kindergarten and 1st grade, my teachers would tell my parents that my English was terrible. Then my parents made the mistake in accepting what the teachers told me and said I had to work on my English, and they'd say it in English of course. Even though it was a simple statement, as a kid, you take it as truth and run with it.
So my advice to any parents that speak a different language than English is that they ignore every English teacher until high school. If their English grades are barely passing that's fine as long as they fully understand every word at home. They will inevitably learn English because of their exposure in school and with friends that are English speakers. In high school you can probably start alternating languages freely, but the trick is you should tell them they are required to respond back in the same language you are talking to them in. Another thing that is pretty common is kids will grow up understanding the language you taught them but they can't speak it--that usually happens if you allow them to respond back in English.
They may not appreciate the dual language use as a child, but when they get to be an adult or even a teenager they'll quickly realize how much of an advantage they have by speaking more than one language. The best part is if done perfectly they will be completely fluent and 2 languages with no overwhelming accent or common grammar mistakes (in both languages) by the time they are an adult.
My entrepreneurship teacher put it best: "people come after you the second you have lots of money." The reason why everyone says "ask a lawyer" is because if you happen to make lots of money and some big business guy comes at you with a lawsuit and wins, you're fucked. Even if they don't win, as long as they have deeper pockets than you, you will lose the court game or they'll sink you with lawyer fees.
People don't like lawyers because it is an ugly game where the only winners are the lawyers.
Now sure, if you bother to read all the documents you sign and actually understand them as well as the boatload of BS laws in the US, then you can cover your own ass without legal advice. But it's pretty damn clear this guy isn't sure about a lot of those laws therefore asking others on slashdot is a poor alternative. That's like going to a bar and asking some random dude how to start a business.
This situation is probably as simple as taking a copy of the GPL and asking the company if they're willing to release the source under the GPL license. But the most likely answer from the company will be "no" not because they want to be a dick to you, but because their allegiance is to investors or the owners of the company. So if 2 years later the GPL'ed source code happens to turn into something like Linux, you can sure bet there would be something like chairs thrown at people that were once managing the company (or worse).
With the latest hardware and fully integrated chipsets, you can already build an incredibly power efficient system for as low as 20watts idle, and yes, it will perform better than the VIA platforms. Here's one example.
It's been debated before but, yes, I think inevitably we are moving towards Transhumanism concepts in the future. Perhaps not in our lifetimes but in a few generations it seems likely.
Currently much of science and technology is moving forward. But it is much easier for engineering to move forward than biological research. The bio stuff will always be a step behind because, ultimately, they want to first cure biological abnormalities and diseases. On the other side of the spectrum, there's a whole lot of ethical arguments from various groups against certain types of bio research. It also doesn't help that the current experiments are more like "guess and check" rather than achieving a full understanding of the problem before trying it out. So in this sense people will happily accept a cure for cancer but will come with question marks on their faces when you ask them about cloning, genetic modifications, and stem cell research.
However with engineering and technology there are no such barriers. You can look at a fake arm and say, "that's effectively a machine these various materials, there's no 'human' in there, the 'human' is still in control." So the ethical issues won't stop this train until we reach a state similar to that of Ghost in the Shell. In that setting the extreme is that the only "human" portion is the brain, but the rest of the body is effectively a machine. But by then it will be too late. Engineered replacements will become the norm (as if they aren't already, see pace makers and things like that) and everyone will look around and either wonder what happened or continue like life is normal.
If you look around, the ingredients are coming together. Materials engineering will play a bigger part and that field and industry is advancing as we start seeing more engineered materials like carbon fiber. Battery advancements are also in high demand with mobile devices taking off and potentially electric/hybrid cars. Computation power is still increasing, becoming more efficient, and is getting even smaller.
These are interesting times.
130,000,000 / 4,294,967,296 = 3%
The article says we will run out of unallocated IPs by 2011. The unallocated pool is 14%. It is currently 2008. 2011 - 2008 = 3 years. What makes you think that reclaiming 3% is going to buy us 5 to 10 years?
I like the fact that I can now run as a normal user rather than an admin user. And when I (as a normal user) need admin privileges, UAC will run the task as admin without logging in/logging out. I like this also because it will force software makers to correctly build their software for windows and it will help prevent junk from getting installed accidentally.
I like the sleep feature that actually works in vista but was flaky in XP. My laptop has sleep / wakeup issues that I got so annoyed and stop using the sleep function completely when it could have easily been used to saved power when left idle. My vista desktop now sleeps and wakes up better than my laptop and only uses 1 watt in sleep mode.
I like the fact that 64bit drivers are signed. Sure, it limits 3rd party drivers and doesn't let tinkerers do as they please, but as a consumer it helps prevent me from accidentally buying cheap crap at the store only to find that it is making my system unstable because of a poor driver.
I like how firefox 2 runs in vista. In XP firefox 2 would get slower and slower until it would either crap out or be so slow you had to close it and restart it. And when you just wanted to start it quickly to check a map or something on the internet, it would take years to load itself. In vista firefox (and other programs) actually start quickly.
Now there are many things I don't like about vista but when I think about other OSes I realize that there are also many things I don't like about them either (XP, Ubuntu).
One thing that is probably a show stopper for many people is the other side of hardware support. When trying to install vista on an ICH9 disk controller for example, it turns out that you need to give the vista installation the Intel Matrix Storage Driver so it can disable a laptop feature in vista that makes the system unstable.
Another thing that really ticks people off is the reorganization of the control panel. Some tools in control panel show up on the left while others show up on the right. Other controls are buried even further into other applications. Like the convenient resource monitor is on the performance tab in task manager but buried somewhere on the left hand side in the control panel. Same with the disk partitioner. I think in this area they really need to give up on laying out the control panel and just leave it as a list of items. In fact the flatter the list is the better. I'd love to simply go from control panel straight to the disk manager.
But I can go off on the other OSes as well. For example I hate the fact that Windows XP only loads fast the first time and every time after that it inconveniently loads slower than before. I hate the fact that ubuntu has a stupid token key ring that ranks right up there with vista UAC at times. I like the fact that ubuntu now has a "safe mode" x windows feature but it still needs serious work (wouldn't correctly detect my friend's 24" monitor resolution and at times would just have no options in the drop downs, didn't even tell you that you had to restart before the settings took effect, the test button didn't "test" like it was supposed to half the time).
But there will always be bad things about everything, otherwise we'd have the perfect solution and nobody would need to use another OS. Personally I am going to run windows on my personal machine with ubuntu in virtualbox. This would give me the superior abundance of support and applications for windows and the power user/server utilities of linux. You could probably get away with the reverse as well, all depends on your tastes.
I'm not the original author but I have used both ubuntu and vista and I have to say you're a little misinformed.
Vista's UAC only pops up "allow/deny" boxes when the user is running as an administrator. By default, the first account created on Vista is created as an administrator account. I think this is a mistake.
If you instead set aside the first account and call it "admin" or whatever, then create a second account, you can now have the second account be a normal user account. So let's call the normal user account "bob". So now if you use the bob account for your everyday tasks, when the bob account tries to access something that requires admin privileges, UAC will now popup a window. But because bob is not an administrator, it will ask/require the admin account password before continuing. This is almost exactly how ubuntu is configured when doing admin tasks.
If you're not a CS guy perhaps you should stop trying to push your flawed logic on people that have already proved you wrong? Just because you don't know what you'll be running in the future doesn't mean that we can't make an educated guess. The only way you could stop us from proposing a solution is if you, the user, acted completely randomly all the time. In fact, even if you acted randomly, we can still do better than doing nothing at all...
In CS there are many problems which have many solutions. One solution, is the random solution. That is if I just act randomly in my algorithm, how well will I perform? This is interesting to computer science because it illustrates the worst we could possibly do. The other solution is the optimal solution. This illustrates how well we could do in the best possible circumstances (like reading the future).
So for your problem it would be better phrased this way:
We have 1gb of free memory the user is not using. We can easily fit 1 program in there without them noticing we took some of the free memory. How do we pick which program to load? The user's computer has 100 programs installed.
In the random case if we pick randomly we have a 1/100 chance of picking correctly. So already we are doing better than had we done nothing at all as long as we had the extra idle resources to spare. If the user happens to need the memory, we let him write over what we loaded, no visible penalties occurred from loading the program.
In the optimal case we read the future and predict exactly the next program. Ta-da. 100% chance of picking correctly. We win! Except we can't read the future, darn. But at least we have an idea of the best possible is quite a ways from the worst possible, so there's still lots of room in between.
At this point we know that doing nothing is worse than acting randomly. Therefore, why not at least act randomly?
Now let's put more information into the problem. Suppose the user is your typical office user: reads email, browses the net, and opens word documents and pdfs. If we monitor his program usage we will see consistently high usage of his email program, his browser program, his office program, and his pdf reader. Ah ha! So not all users are incredibly random after all!
How do we guess this data or manage this data? Well there's many different solutions: keep track of program access dates, keep track of program start counts, keep track of most recently used programs, etc. Some are simpler than others but all accomplish the task of giving us more information which we can use to increase our odds at picking the correct program to load.
Now suppose we implement our algorithm, we find that he has a 90% chance of picking between the email/browser/word/pdf programs. If we manage to pick between one of those four programs, we have a 1/4 * 9/10 = 22.5% chance of picking correctly. That is a hell of a lot better than 1/100.
I was hoping that this would mean that as a US customer I could easily buy international music but unfornately it doesn't look like that's going to be the case.
For a while I was on a mission to build a really power efficient PC. Unfortunately when I got my AC power meter, I learned a number of disappointing things:
At first I thought I would wait until the format war ended before buying such a thing. Then I realized why do I even need such a player? Rarely do I ever want to watch a movie over again for the hell of it. Most of the time I simply want to watch a movie once and that's the end of it. There are few movies that you want to watch multiple times.
In the past the way to get around buying the DVD would be to drive down to the video rental place and rent it for a couple of nights. But that was still a hassle and they'd charge ridiculous prices for such a service. These days new services are opening up with high definition movie download-rentals thanks to big players like Netflix, Microsoft, and Apple. Now I don't have to worry about borrowing and returning a physical disc.
People have often brought up the question, "why does internet bandwidth (download speed) matter?" I say it matters big time because today you pay a theatre $10 or more per a ticket, are forced to wait in line, and sit in a seat that a million other people sat in. If you're lucky maybe the audience will be entertaining, but if you're not they'll be annoying as hell. Now if everyone was capable of downloading a high definition stream to their home and services were capable of handling incredibly large loads, why not distribute the movie over the internet? You've completely eliminated the theatre and make the movie accessible to anyone with the right connection.
Ultimately I think the internet will slowly replace consumer physical disk/storage mediums as the network technology gets faster and cheaper. Right now most people save files to their local disk, but how many businesses have shared network drives that are accessible anywhere on the company's network? Wouldn't it be even more convenient if you could save and read to some magical place that happens to exist in any developed portion of the world? Well we have the ability to build that magical place now, it is called the internet.
Probably because the CIO author is highly ignorant of the existence of CPAN and some of the high quality modules it archives and distributes. One particularly high quality module is Template Toolkit. It is an incredibly powerful templating system. Some would even say it is too powerful (you could write enter programs in the template language). But what I have found is that power was purposely put there because there are instances where you need to do something fancy in the template or view rather than the controller code. And I have found it actually turns out cleaner than the equivalent in something built on J2EE.
CPAN is also a whole lot more active than other library inventories. While some authors do tend to give up on maintaining their modules, there are lots of reports and patches submitted along-side the modules as well as test reports on systems where successfully/unsuccessfully installed. There are often multiple submissions of the same concept of a module but with varying implementations. This gives you many choices and lets you explore various implementations until you find one that suits your needs.
Here's a list of other awesome modules that extend perl or implement various concepts:
In other languages or platforms there's also been issues with third-party libraries. For example in Java you could spend days trying to get a library or tool to work in your IDE. With perl and unix that's not the case. You simply go onto CPAN, see if someone's done it. If someone has, you'll be up and running in under a minute.
As usual everyone is going to go off and talk about people creating their own viruses and other Frankenstein sort of issues. But there is actually a new field opening up called bio-computing.
This is interesting because the concept is this: instead of using biology to create living lifeforms or things that affect living things, we're instead interested in using the biological building blocks to do computations for us. For example if we can create a bacteria with DNA that will only replicate 1000 times before it stops, then we've effectively implemented an algorithm using biology that counts to 1000 and stops. This is interesting because the nature of cells is naturally parallel so suddenly we break all models based on the Turing machine. This potentially could be a fast ticket towards solving NP before the physicists really understand quantum physics.
There's nothing stopping you from being more verbose in perl.
For example I typically write my plain functions like this:
While I could have easily gotten away with:
which actually turns out to be faster but not very easy for the unexperienced to read or maintain.
As such I reserve non-verbose and awkward code for special situations (needs optimization, needs to go fast) but I tried to be verbose in all other cases.
I do wish there were more ways to restrict definitions of function and method parameters (argument prototyping only applies to plain non-OO style calls) and that the OO was better defined not just hashes and bless. But I find for now, it does allow me to implement OO designs with minimal language barriers.
I don't remember PHP but I do remember an awful lot of limitations on the OO model. Some of the limitations turned me away from PHP quickly.
And yes, yes it does work with linux!
HD ruined my expectations that the nightly news would be worth a watch because at least the female newscasters would be beautiful. With HD I now know they just have gobs of make up on and are actually not so pretty after all.
Personally I'd rather have the high school grad that likes to mess around with programming and would like an internship than the same kid after 4 years of college.
No, never. There is more to an undergraduate degree than just a specialization of computer science. A high school diploma on the other hand is worthless. I've been on both ends. I was hired in my 3rd year in high school as an intern with some programming. I worked summers and produced code that was later used. After high school I got my bachelors in 4 years and then was hired back into the same company as a full time software engineer.
If I had instead worked those 4 years and skipped a formal education, I would probably worse off. Two major consequences may have resulted from that path: incredibly bad decisions made for the company due to lack of insight and research in the field of CS (high school grads are incredibly stupid, including the "smart" ones) and a much lower salary.
With the 4 year degree I was able to leverage professors in CS who had years of experience and could soundly prove to me why they were right. I didn't blindly accept that Quicksort was the fastest sorting algorithm, instead I was dragged along whether I liked it or not for the proof. And at the end of all that not only was I proven wrong (Quicksort is only optimal for certain conditions) but I was also forced to recognize weaknesses in the algorithm and other characteristics of it.
The college kid spent 4 years learning java and c at a base level (meaning spending half of that time learning syntax and idiosyncrasies rather than working on actual challenges
I don't know what college you speak of but from where I came from every student was exposed to the following languages: Java, C, C++, (Pure) Lisp / (Pure) Scheme, Assembly (x86 or MIPS), and probably some Prolog. Of all the courses I took, none of them had the programming language in the title. It might have been in the description but it was never a course based on the language. Instead it was a course in the study of programming languages (functional, imperative, object oriented, logic based) and how they are implemented, or maybe the study of the implementation and run times of data structures and algorithms. The only "intro to programming" course that you were required to take was the first one, where by the end of 3 months you were expected to fully understand object oriented programming including fancy things like inheritance and polymorphism. In short, the students were given very little time to get up to speed on the language whether they had used it before or not. And you can bet a boat load of students failed that first class.
And that was one class out of a 3 or 4 class quarter and there are 3 academic year quarters per a year (summer quarter is optional). So if a student took 12 classes a year for four years with at least half of those being general education courses, that is 1 class out of 24 or 4.17% of the class time for CS. The other 23 courses were not on examining Java or C++, but rather understanding processor design (single cycle, multi cycle, pipelined, decoders, ALUs, register files), digital logic (build me a half adder, build me a multiplexer, do it again with only the following types of gates, etc), implementation of object oriented languages using a virtual method table (oh, it's not magic after all), understanding artificial intelligence algorithms and topics (bayesian, A*, greediness, constraints problems), analyzing algorithms (sorting, searching, running times, worst case, proofs on optimality, matrix multiplication, etc), compilers and interpreters (BNF, grammars, scanner, lexer, various optimizations, generating machine code, etc -- goodbye even more magic), operating systems (process scheduling, synchronization, paging, bootloaders, shared libraries, addressing, memory schemes including contiguous memory schemes and why they're stupid no matter what you do) and even some software engineeri
They do, but it isn't what you would think. Here's some fun examples (note double vowels means to hold the sound longer):
Japanese: Depaato
English: Department Store
Japanese: Supa
English: Supermarket
Japanese: Terebi
English: Television (TV)
Japanese: Pasokon
English: Personal Computer (PC)
All of these words are derived from English words but have been kana-butchered because Japanese does not have all of the sounds English has and some are even shortened forms of the full words. For example "pasokon" which you would hear sounded like "pah soh com" is really from the first parts of "personal computer" being "perso" and "com".
Some words actually sound pretty close to their English equivalent:
Japanese: kohi (pronounced co-hee)
English: coffee
But when written in katakana or even romaji you sometimes wouldn't figure it out the actual English word as an English speaker. Only until they show you the object or describe what they are talking about do you suddenly make the connection.
So they do use English and other foreign words (not related to English) as any language is allowed. But even if they did, the word probably wouldn't sound exactly like it did from the originating language.
You could also say similarly of English which takes and borrows at will. In fact English will even allow you to force words to be used in different contexts than are technically sound. For example words like "guestimate" are used more commonly to express estimates that have no basis or technical reasoning. You may have issues trying to use that type of verbage (verbage--yet another made up word) in published works but for communication it is just fine. Additionally we still takes words like rendevous from other languages (French) despite using it in English. So are we speaking French or English? Well English obviously.
I had the same complaints about the languages my parents spoke because sometimes they would alternate between the native language and English. So I would hear certain English phrases thrown in at random times and get frustrated and ask why they wouldn't just speak in one language or come up with a valid translation or expression of their thoughts in the other language. The answer is they switch between languages because sometimes it is easier and quicker to express a thought or concept in one language versus another.
I also get an awful lot of complaints from my Spanish speaking friend who says we (American) English speakers tend to butcher the pronunciation of many borrowed Spanish words. For example the word "churro" in Spanish is specifically pronounced "chu ro" but English speakers tend to sit on the "r" sound and say something "chr ro".
So language (in general) is a funny thing. But of course you would have learned that in your required foreign language studies classes that you didn't sleep through, right?
To end, I'm going to leave you with one last Japanese kana-fied English word. But I'll write it in romaji without correct spacing (there are no "random" spaces in Katakana words) so you can read it. Some hints: the word is actually taken from 2 common english words combined to express a concept and the first portion "ai" is sounds like the English pronoun "I" or "eye" but is commonly written with two katakana.
Japanese: ai su ku ri mu
English: ?
First off, why is it that when it comes to Apple anything negative is whining? Apple is a company. We are customers. Customers are allowed to whine all we want as long as they want our money.
2) theres a Ethernet jack dongle for the USB so you can plug it to a hard line3) there's a mini multiple USB hub so you can put in plenty of things
The point behind ultraportable is that you don't need to take additional accessories with you. Ideally, you take the unit and if necessary the charging cord. That's it.
4) it has blue tooth (and wifi N) built in so your blue tooth mouse or pointer does not need a jack.I prefer wired mice because I don't have to worry about the battery dying on me. The mouse is probably the only additional accessory besides the power cord that I would take with me. I'm actually not in the set of people that want to drag along a spare battery, but I still think replacing the battery easily is required since the lifetime of the machine will probably be 5 years or more.
The idea behind an ultraportable is similar to the philosophy of a light traveler. Ultraportable users want less weight, less size, and fewer accessories to drag along. Because of that they're willing to make compromises like throwing out things that rarely get used (optical drives) and sacrifice speed for battery life (eliminate the need to drag a power cord and you will have a hot product). At the same time when an ultraportable user is back at the office or back at home, they don't want to have all of these fancy accessories to plug in to make it functional again. They only want to plug in what's necessary because it is likely they will have to unplug it again.
So if Jobs and company had managed to squeeze in an ethernet port, then that's one less stupid accessory. If they managed to squeeze in a 2nd usb port that's another accessory that won't be needed. If they managed to squeeze an SD card reader instead of that stupid webcam then they'd really be on the right track. They're pretty much at a loss with the size of a DVI plug, but they could've at least considered HDMI instead now that more displays are coming with built-in HDMI.
If I was Apple I wouldn't mind the customers whining. If they whine, that means they're interested in the product as long as in the next version they addresses what people whined about. If they don't whine that either means they have no need for the product (see Apple TV) or the product is perfect. Rarely is the product perfect.
I'm also certain that even the software developers who write these games have a fun time trying to come up with strategies in order to thwart the hacker community. For them, it is a fun intellectual exercise as well, especially when you are going up against people brighter than you are.
The common mistake I have seen with these types of games that simulate worlds are that they give the clients too much information. That is if the client game software only allows me to see things within 1000 units, the protocols are actually giving me 2000 units (or more) of information. Indeed, there should be some buffer above what the client should be able to see to account for small network latency issues but not on the scales that I've seen with the games.
So given that, I'm convinced that the game companies are not all that interested in securing their game. For them it is an extra cost. If they make their game protocol wide open in plain text yet the game-play is the equivalent to the most secure scheme, the players will still blindly buy the game. If fact, the players probably won't care that the exploits are possible until the cheating becomes widespread.
Also don't forget that game companies are businesses and probably have a PHB with an MBA at some point in their chain. As such they will not always act rationally for your own benefit. If cheating remains at 1% of the population, banning that 1% will change their revenue from $1 million to $0.98 million (cheaters have multiple accounts), and the cost of cracking down on the cheaters is $100,000 (hire more GMs, tell the dev team to make the game more secure), you can sure bet they are going to let those cheaters slide.
There's good reasons to be cautious about new things. One exception to your logic is penicilin and antibiotics. When that was figured out, you bet it was a huge break through. But nobody (then) thought of the consequences: bacteria growing immune to antibiotics. Now we are very careful about how and when antibiotics are administered to prevent further bacteria mutations against our antibiotics.
If there's one thing I remember about science in general it was that proving something false is much easier than proving something to be true. That intuitively makes sense; the only way to be completely sure of something is to exhaust all areas where it can be proven false. But to prove something false you only have to find one problem with it when in reality it may have multiple problems.
But anyway... today, based on what we know, all indicators may say that clones are safe to eat. But that may only be because we have not explored or have incorrectly explored everything about the science behind cloning.
However, I will agree, and say (without any evidence of course) that clones are probably safe to eat. I am willing to say this because previously I studied GMF/GAF (genetically modified/altered foods) and all of the material I could bring up pointed to a safe track record behind GMF/GAF product consumption. And you'd be surprised at how much food is more or less "manufactured" rather than grown; the agriculture industry is living off of science right now. Meats are already tasting more and more alike these days (especially chicken) and produce displays at the grocery store are getting more and more 'perfect'. That isn't because the farmers are planting better or working long hours out in the field. Rather a good amount of it is contributed to science behind breading and controlling the crops/animals such that a particular species is chosen. That species of course is the one that tastes good, comes out perfect, and is durable enough for transportation and shelves. And that crop/animal is just planted/bread every year. In otherwords, farmers have already gotten as close as they could to cloning without using the petri dish to do it. Of course they'd love to exploit cloning to perfectly control their crop and probably genetic modification so they could make that head of lettuce last a week longer in the fridge or on the store shelf.
But now we are starting to see issues with our highly controlled crops and animals: the gene pools for the specialized crops/animals are incredibly small that one disease could effectively wipe out an entire species. If we go even further and just have clones, then one flaw (rather than just a type of disease) in that clone could probably kill off the entire batch. So I'm not convinced that we've really uncovered and proven that we can mitigate all of the flaws to this type of science.
Do you want a laptop that is 0.16" to 0.76" thick? Go grab a ruler and put that in perspective. There is no way in hell you're going to do that with a standard external battery.
Toshiba has been doing it with their portege series for quite a while now. Here's their latest ultraportable/thin laptop (Portege R500) where they even managed to cram an optical drive into the thing: http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3769
You can even go to their older products like the Portege R100 which has a maximum thickness of 19.8mm (.78 inches) as well as a removable battery but no optical drive.
I was in the same group of software mavens, the FOSS crowd, and ran into the same issues everywhere from home users to big businesses. That is I did not understand why it was hard to convince people otherwise with my beliefs on open source. Then I started taking business classes and I got into a few meetings between the managers about large software purchases and I finally began to understand the whole picture. The problem is, we geeks do not understand people adn their internal perception of risk. As I scroll through the comments here I see some stuff that I can already see not working and some stuff working (but the author does not understand why it works).
The reason why people are so ready to throw money at a problem (and a lot of money in some cases) is by throwing money at the problem you are at least assured that you have entered into some sort of contract where whatever solution you get will come with some sort of support service. They don't care that you have the solution. For all they know, you could just be trying to con them out of their money or trying to waste their time. Instead, they want assurance that your solution will work as advertised after the transaction has been made. In otherwwords, they want assurance that the perceived risk they have in there minds can be mitigated by the money they give. And they will never state that either because they are acting based on experience and emotion. People don't hand over money knowing full well that it is really just there to eliminate the risk. They will say that they agree that they are handing over the money because it makes them sleep better a night or they feel like it (what they get in return) will probably turn out as expected.
So when you, a FOSS geek, comes along and says, "hey, this free stuff works better than what you paid for" they are not going to believe you and will turn down the offer. That is not because they don't trust you, that is because they are not offered any assurance should you happen to be wrong this one time. And if you happen to be wrong, now they just lost an hour or so of their life (time is just as important as money).
How can you convince them otherwise? Easy, mitigate the perceived risk in their minds. They want assurance, the safety in knowing that even the 5 or 10 minutes you're taking from their life is going to be worth it.
So one particularly easy way to do that is to make them a deal: if they try the FOSS software for a day, and they find it does everything they need then they will buy you a drink, but if at the end of the day they think it does not work as you claimed then you'll buy them a drink. Besides getting you an easy free drink, this offers them the assurance that their time is not wasted: if the software works (there was no risk), then they save money (minus the drink), but if the software does not work, they get a drink for the invested time/effort. Without the drink it is a win-lose situation (if they win they win free software, if they lose they lose time and effort) and suddenly their perceived risks in losing take over. By introducing the drink you take their mind off of focusing on the risk involved and offer them some assurance that the risk they think is there is actually not there.
Others here have claimed selling the software by advertising features and "bling" that they have not seen before. While this works, the problem is now you have people spinning cubes and not exploring other things that the software is capable of. Instead you've sold them a "shiny object" and they'll use it just like a "shiny object." That's not what you want, you want them to use it as a replacement and you want them to gain confidence to eliminate the perceived risk they associated with FOSS.
Finally I want to be clear that offering a drink will not always work because people are different. Some people are more conservative than others and some people will take quite a bit more social effort to get moving along. But I assure you, the problem always revolves around ri
They were practical a long time ago (5 to 10 years).
Today I have almost a terabyte of data. To back that up to DVD 4.7G discs is a world of pain.
The other issue is DVD-Rs degrade over time, especially the cheaper stuff. You have to be very careful to order from a specific manufacturer and have a good quality burner. I'm already seeing read errors on burned CDs made not more than 10 years ago. I also have a bunch of cheapo DVD-R discs with read errors when they burned fine and tested fine after the burn.
In short I'm giving up on optical discs. I have two binders of burned discs with mostly backup data. Then I realized the binders were too big. So I just reused the spindles because I realized I don't actually use the discs all that often. Then I gave up on the spindles after I accumulated a few of those because I realized hard drives were incredibly cheap and compact. And now we have flash memory driving down prices even further :).