builidng the huge pipelines (or canals, which'd be much cheaper) to bring water from the coasts to interior cities
You'd be suprised at what "cheaper" means, though. For example, the canal from the San Francisco Bay Delta (up in the Bay Area) to L.A. loses about 80% of the water it draws off the bay in evaporation before it even makes it down there. Canals may seem cheaper, but in the long run they waste much (in this case, the majority) of the water you worked so hard to obtain.
Well, for one thing, we're going to end up leaving a truly massive written record. They won't think football fields are for worship, because almost every newspaper they find will mention the game, allong with millions of books, films, cds, dvds, and who knows what else. If you look at the dates, these were probably built around the time that the Roman empire was being built. Why don't we think that the circus maximus was built for religious reasons? Because of all the written material that mentions it's actual use. The same can be said for much older cultures, such as the ancient Egyptians and Chinese. Egyptians are a really good example, because not so long ago we couldn't read their language, and we had a lot of wacky ideas about what rather simple stuff was for. It's just a fact that most history, including almost all pre-columbian new world cultures, is pretty much lost to us if they didn't leave a written record.
That's one thing that I can't find anywhere on the site, how much it will cost. Personally, I can see this is being really great if it's $50 or less round trip from the Bay Area to L.A. Likely, however, it's going to be targeted at business travelers, so I'd bet it'll be more like the $100 amtrak ticket.
As for Portland, how many people make that trip? Bay Area to L.A. to Sacramento will get a whole lot of traffic on a daily basis. Heck, 2 hours is comperable to some of the commutes that people take from way out in Daneville or Tracy to San Francisco every day. I can see people commuting from Visalia to any of the three larger metro areas this will cover. Portland, though? I don't know anyone who travels there regularly. Maybe I'm off my mark, but I don't see that being a heavily traveled route.
In any situation, no matter how well you document what you do, there are going to be a few things that are both specific to your particular setup and not something anyone else at the company knows. I suppose this would be less of a problem the larger your staff is, i.e. how many people there were doing the same job you were. In cases where this is an issue, I think it's pretty reasonable for your boss to call and ask questions, although I think it would be equally reasonable to not answer if you held a lot of enmety towards said boss. If you left on good terms (which it didn't sound like was the case in the post), then the friendly thing to do is give an answer. If they want you to come over and spend time on a problem, then by all means get paid, but if it's just a quick query, then helping them out seems reasonable.
Provides a foundation for the journalling filesystem (JFS), which may currently be enabled via Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server systems.
Does this mean that I won't be able to use the journalling on my non OS X Server systems? Frankly, I'll have more use for it on my iBook, which runs standard OS X but also all sorts of beta and development software.
Aren't we sending people there?!? If we're so close, then wouldn't this be an opertune time to take the next step in human exploration of space?
I've gotten to the point where I seriously doubt the intent of NASA to ever send a manned mission further than the moon. They've become so addicted to safe, academic research in orbit or from afar that they've forgotten how to take that leap into the unknown which was (in my opinion) what made the early space program (Murcury, Gemini, and Apollo) truly great.
There's theft and there's armed robbery. What gets me is not that they were prosicuted (it was, I guess, breach of contract), but that the were greeted at the door by armed FBI agents with guns drawn. What these guys did may have been illegal (we'll have to wait for them to be tried to know for sure), and may have been wrong, but it in no way should have led the FBI to belive they were likely to assault them, which was a precurser to law enforcement drawing their guns, so so I thought. Why didn't they just come in, cuff them, and take them away?
I can't find anything about it on their site, but I have a feeling the problem is me not finding it, not it not being there (assuming that sentence made any sense). Anyone know if you can run their software on an existing linux server? I'm using my linux gateway/firewall as my AP right now, but the new protocol looks like it could be a lot of fun. On their site, however, I can only find info about running it either on an access point or by booting off of a CD, which would kind of mess up all the other stuff I do on that machine. Anyone have any info on how to run it without booting off a removable disk?
I have a 700Mhz radion iBook, so as soon as I saw this story I rebooted and made the change (it's not so much a script as a list of firmware commands, you have to copy it out or look at them on another machine and enter them by hand). I'm now typing this in on my 21 inch Sony trinitron running at 1600x1200. Works great! Gotta wonder, though. Apple really has limited the use of this radion chip. They disable this, and it only came with 16 megs of vram. Chip supports up to 64! If it only came with 16 more, it would be a pretty able 3d card (not that it's terrible now, just somewhat underpowered). How much would an extra 16 megs cost?
From a company with a huge marketing budget, I expect something that isn't (1) a cheap copy of your competitor's and (2) can't be picked into little bits in 15.32 seconds.
Well, it might be the right size, and maybe even have a moon, but cool stories like Asimov's Nightfall (as well as the longer novel based on the short story by Silberberg) aside, most of what I have read suggested that a planet in a binary system would be exposed to a whole lot more radiation that would be good for earth-type life. Now, the fact that that the Asimov classic was in a system with 3 stars rather that 2 and the fact that I have no real clue what I'm talking about makes this all crap, but whatever.
What if you have an external antenna, but keep it out of site? Not like the 'pine tree' cell towers, mind you, but you could put a dipole antenna under the eaves or something allong those lines. Possibly you could put it behind bushes, allong the inside of a door frame, all sorts of hidden away, but non-invasive places can be found to put a simple dipole, especially in an old building like that. Windows in rarely-used parts of the house (like an attic) work well, too. Just put the antenna allong the bottom of the panes of the window (windows are usually pretty radio transparent), and nobody will notice.
Even if this particular event was rather unlikely, the news coverage over it likely raised public awareness that this sort of thing can happen, and has happened before. Despite the overwhelming evidence that we need to be watching for planet killer collisions, we are not, and we won't until the possibility of one happining is real and scary to John Q. Public. Look at what happened with terrorism: two major attacks on Americans abroad (the embassy bombings and the attack on the ship in Yemen), but people didn't take notice. It would be a real shame if, for lack of public intrest, we were unprepaired for a planatary September 11th.
Ah, but what you're failing to deal with is that when you smoke, you don't only hurt yourself. According to the last US national survey, only 28% of americans choose to smoke, but the other 72% don't have a choice about breathing smokers' second hand smoke. Not to mention pregnant women. Personally, I don't really have much investment in the health (or lack thereof) of your lungs, but I don't want to get one of these things myself. So, as soon as they figure out how you can smoke, kill your lungs, and get an artificial pair, all without effecting mine (or the other millions of non-smokers), go for it! In the meantime, don't smoke near me or people I care about; we'd all like to keep our current, functional lungs.
How are they preventing you from saving it? While you might not be able to save the file using the RealPlayer client, it wouldn't be that hard to record the stream on a network level. As I understand it, you can rig squid to cache realplayer (we've been thinking of doing at the school where I work so classes can watch stuff without killing our bandwidth). Couldn't you just do that locally and then copy the file out of the cache when you're done watching?
This seems to me to be another issue where people have decided that the fact that something is on the web makes it different from other mass media. It may (or may not, given the state of most search engines today) be a more effective means of dessiminating information, but it's goal is the same as that of print magazines or tv or annoying "lose 30 lbs in 30 days" messages: getting information to a large number of people. What the judges should be asking themselves is not 'does something on the web constitute a threat' but rather 'if they put this on a billboard in times square, would it constitute a threat'.
I find the best thing to get in "stallion" mode is to have some sort of sucess with the computer. Could be programming, could be getting DSL or cable to finally work, could be even just getting X to work for the first time. Getting the computer to do something you only sort of belived it would do at all is the best love drug I've found. (also, coming home and saying "guess what I did today, honey" gets you lots of 'big strong man (or woman)' points, too:)
My boss and I were looking at these this morning on handspring's site, and we came to the conclusion that they either look really good or really bad, depending on your point of view.
For PDA users, this is great because it's smaller than you're PDA and it's also a phone, so you don't have to carry another device.
Most phone users, though, don't have a PDA, so they won't get to carry fewer devices, and the form factor really sucks in comparison to the newer phones on the market. Plus, if a PDA was something they wanted to have, they'd have gotten one in addition to a phone already. Why carry something as bulky as my phone a year ago just to have a set of features I don't really want or need?
For me, this looks pretty cool. For most of the people I work with, it's just bulky and expensive.
This is the sort of move that to Bush administration has been wanting to do for months, and has been building the fear up to accomplish. Three months ago, average, intellegent people would be making lots of noise against destroying public records, and because of sunshine laws and the like it couldn't have been done. But now, because the government has been sewing fear rather than hope, people are ready to give up all sorts of important civil rights because the think that they going to be killed by crazy terrorists at any moment.
50 years ago, the government told us "There's nothing to fear but fear itself". Now they say "You're all going to watch your loved ones die of chemical and biological warfare, and then die yourselves". Is it any suprise that an agenda has now shown up?
Lisp and scheme are both used in educational setting pretty commonly, but I don't know of any production projects (which isn't to say they don't exist) that use either language. Could you discuss the difference between what makes a good educational language and a good working language, specifically as to why it might be useful to learn in a language that you are unlikely to ever use in a work environment.
Why send humans? Because there's more to life than just knowing new things. We're an expansive race, and for better or for worse (in my opinion for better) we need to grow. Robots, while they can give us a lot of information, are no substitute for actually being there and experiencing it for ourselves.
The bytecode idea is a really good one, especially with the large (although shrinking) number of platforms you have to support these days, and the possible rise of VLIW processors on the horizon. I don't really like coding in Java all that much, though. Is anyone working on a compiler for another language that compiles to bytecode that will run on a JVM (rather than a internet-c or c# vm)?
I'm not sure how todays displays differ from those of older laptops, but I have a PowerBook 170 from almost 10 years ago that is still looking great. At the time we were extatic to have found one with no bad pixels (they were few and far between at the time), and I can say for sure that the same is true of that screen today. It should be noted, however, that that was one of the earliest shipping Active Matrix screens, and monochrome, but it would be hard to find a 10 year old Apple Cinima Display (drool) to check.
These days, your browser is a tool you use with your computer, in the same way a text editor or ftp client has been for a while. This is especially true for many users of free software, since the documentation is, by and large, on the web. Browsers, on the other hand, have grown much like a microsoft product -- more complex, more bloated, and with more features rather than simple and functional. I would love to see a browser with the html rendering abilities of mozilla or internet explorer, but without all the other functions. Such a browser might still need frames support, and possibly javascript, but it wouldn't need to be your chat program, your html editor, or your kitchen sink. It seems like most browsers fall on either end: lynx which is stable but which can't see many of the sites which are written these days, and mozilla which takes up a lot of RAM and does everything you'll ever need to do on your computer.
I prefer to use my happy hacking keyboard with my palmpilot, because I've found the action on most of the folding keyboards isn't to my likeing. The happy hacking cradle has a ps2 port on it, so you can plug any keyboard into it. Not great for travle, as you have to carry a full size keyboard, but good when you want to enter data quickly.
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builidng the huge pipelines (or canals, which'd be much cheaper) to bring water from the coasts to interior cities
You'd be suprised at what "cheaper" means, though. For example, the canal from the San Francisco Bay Delta (up in the Bay Area) to L.A. loses about 80% of the water it draws off the bay in evaporation before it even makes it down there. Canals may seem cheaper, but in the long run they waste much (in this case, the majority) of the water you worked so hard to obtain.
Well, for one thing, we're going to end up leaving a truly massive written record. They won't think football fields are for worship, because almost every newspaper they find will mention the game, allong with millions of books, films, cds, dvds, and who knows what else. If you look at the dates, these were probably built around the time that the Roman empire was being built. Why don't we think that the circus maximus was built for religious reasons? Because of all the written material that mentions it's actual use. The same can be said for much older cultures, such as the ancient Egyptians and Chinese. Egyptians are a really good example, because not so long ago we couldn't read their language, and we had a lot of wacky ideas about what rather simple stuff was for. It's just a fact that most history, including almost all pre-columbian new world cultures, is pretty much lost to us if they didn't leave a written record.
That's one thing that I can't find anywhere on the site, how much it will cost. Personally, I can see this is being really great if it's $50 or less round trip from the Bay Area to L.A. Likely, however, it's going to be targeted at business travelers, so I'd bet it'll be more like the $100 amtrak ticket.
As for Portland, how many people make that trip? Bay Area to L.A. to Sacramento will get a whole lot of traffic on a daily basis. Heck, 2 hours is comperable to some of the commutes that people take from way out in Daneville or Tracy to San Francisco every day. I can see people commuting from Visalia to any of the three larger metro areas this will cover. Portland, though? I don't know anyone who travels there regularly. Maybe I'm off my mark, but I don't see that being a heavily traveled route.
In any situation, no matter how well you document what you do, there are going to be a few things that are both specific to your particular setup and not something anyone else at the company knows. I suppose this would be less of a problem the larger your staff is, i.e. how many people there were doing the same job you were. In cases where this is an issue, I think it's pretty reasonable for your boss to call and ask questions, although I think it would be equally reasonable to not answer if you held a lot of enmety towards said boss. If you left on good terms (which it didn't sound like was the case in the post), then the friendly thing to do is give an answer. If they want you to come over and spend time on a problem, then by all means get paid, but if it's just a quick query, then helping them out seems reasonable.
Provides a foundation for the journalling filesystem (JFS), which may currently be enabled via Disk Utility on Mac OS X Server systems.
Does this mean that I won't be able to use the journalling on my non OS X Server systems? Frankly, I'll have more use for it on my iBook, which runs standard OS X but also all sorts of beta and development software.
Aren't we sending people there?!? If we're so close, then wouldn't this be an opertune time to take the next step in human exploration of space? I've gotten to the point where I seriously doubt the intent of NASA to ever send a manned mission further than the moon. They've become so addicted to safe, academic research in orbit or from afar that they've forgotten how to take that leap into the unknown which was (in my opinion) what made the early space program (Murcury, Gemini, and Apollo) truly great.
There's theft and there's armed robbery. What gets me is not that they were prosicuted (it was, I guess, breach of contract), but that the were greeted at the door by armed FBI agents with guns drawn. What these guys did may have been illegal (we'll have to wait for them to be tried to know for sure), and may have been wrong, but it in no way should have led the FBI to belive they were likely to assault them, which was a precurser to law enforcement drawing their guns, so so I thought.
Why didn't they just come in, cuff them, and take them away?
I can't find anything about it on their site, but I have a feeling the problem is me not finding it, not it not being there (assuming that sentence made any sense).
Anyone know if you can run their software on an existing linux server? I'm using my linux gateway/firewall as my AP right now, but the new protocol looks like it could be a lot of fun. On their site, however, I can only find info about running it either on an access point or by booting off of a CD, which would kind of mess up all the other stuff I do on that machine. Anyone have any info on how to run it without booting off a removable disk?
I have a 700Mhz radion iBook, so as soon as I saw this story I rebooted and made the change (it's not so much a script as a list of firmware commands, you have to copy it out or look at them on another machine and enter them by hand). I'm now typing this in on my 21 inch Sony trinitron running at 1600x1200. Works great!
Gotta wonder, though. Apple really has limited the use of this radion chip. They disable this, and it only came with 16 megs of vram. Chip supports up to 64! If it only came with 16 more, it would be a pretty able 3d card (not that it's terrible now, just somewhat underpowered). How much would an extra 16 megs cost?
From a company with a huge marketing budget, I expect something that isn't (1) a cheap copy of your competitor's and (2) can't be picked into little bits in 15.32 seconds.
You do realize you just described their product.
Well, it might be the right size, and maybe even have a moon, but cool stories like Asimov's Nightfall (as well as the longer novel based on the short story by Silberberg) aside, most of what I have read suggested that a planet in a binary system would be exposed to a whole lot more radiation that would be good for earth-type life. Now, the fact that that the Asimov classic was in a system with 3 stars rather that 2 and the fact that I have no real clue what I'm talking about makes this all crap, but whatever.
What if you have an external antenna, but keep it out of site? Not like the 'pine tree' cell towers, mind you, but you could put a dipole antenna under the eaves or something allong those lines. Possibly you could put it behind bushes, allong the inside of a door frame, all sorts of hidden away, but non-invasive places can be found to put a simple dipole, especially in an old building like that. Windows in rarely-used parts of the house (like an attic) work well, too. Just put the antenna allong the bottom of the panes of the window (windows are usually pretty radio transparent), and nobody will notice.
Even if this particular event was rather unlikely, the news coverage over it likely raised public awareness that this sort of thing can happen, and has happened before. Despite the overwhelming evidence that we need to be watching for planet killer collisions, we are not, and we won't until the possibility of one happining is real and scary to John Q. Public.
Look at what happened with terrorism: two major attacks on Americans abroad (the embassy bombings and the attack on the ship in Yemen), but people didn't take notice. It would be a real shame if, for lack of public intrest, we were unprepaired for a planatary September 11th.
Ah, but what you're failing to deal with is that when you smoke, you don't only hurt yourself. According to the last US national survey, only 28% of americans choose to smoke, but the other 72% don't have a choice about breathing smokers' second hand smoke. Not to mention pregnant women.
Personally, I don't really have much investment in the health (or lack thereof) of your lungs, but I don't want to get one of these things myself. So, as soon as they figure out how you can smoke, kill your lungs, and get an artificial pair, all without effecting mine (or the other millions of non-smokers), go for it! In the meantime, don't smoke near me or people I care about; we'd all like to keep our current, functional lungs.
How are they preventing you from saving it? While you might not be able to save the file using the RealPlayer client, it wouldn't be that hard to record the stream on a network level. As I understand it, you can rig squid to cache realplayer (we've been thinking of doing at the school where I work so classes can watch stuff without killing our bandwidth). Couldn't you just do that locally and then copy the file out of the cache when you're done watching?
This seems to me to be another issue where people have decided that the fact that something is on the web makes it different from other mass media. It may (or may not, given the state of most search engines today) be a more effective means of dessiminating information, but it's goal is the same as that of print magazines or tv or annoying "lose 30 lbs in 30 days" messages: getting information to a large number of people.
What the judges should be asking themselves is not 'does something on the web constitute a threat' but rather 'if they put this on a billboard in times square, would it constitute a threat'.
I find the best thing to get in "stallion" mode is to have some sort of sucess with the computer. Could be programming, could be getting DSL or cable to finally work, could be even just getting X to work for the first time. Getting the computer to do something you only sort of belived it would do at all is the best love drug I've found. (also, coming home and saying "guess what I did today, honey" gets you lots of 'big strong man (or woman)' points, too :)
My boss and I were looking at these this morning on handspring's site, and we came to the conclusion that they either look really good or really bad, depending on your point of view.
For PDA users, this is great because it's smaller than you're PDA and it's also a phone, so you don't have to carry another device.
Most phone users, though, don't have a PDA, so they won't get to carry fewer devices, and the form factor really sucks in comparison to the newer phones on the market. Plus, if a PDA was something they wanted to have, they'd have gotten one in addition to a phone already. Why carry something as bulky as my phone a year ago just to have a set of features I don't really want or need?
For me, this looks pretty cool. For most of the people I work with, it's just bulky and expensive.
This is the sort of move that to Bush administration has been wanting to do for months, and has been building the fear up to accomplish. Three months ago, average, intellegent people would be making lots of noise against destroying public records, and because of sunshine laws and the like it couldn't have been done. But now, because the government has been sewing fear rather than hope, people are ready to give up all sorts of important civil rights because the think that they going to be killed by crazy terrorists at any moment.
50 years ago, the government told us "There's nothing to fear but fear itself". Now they say "You're all going to watch your loved ones die of chemical and biological warfare, and then die yourselves". Is it any suprise that an agenda has now shown up?
Lisp and scheme are both used in educational setting pretty commonly, but I don't know of any production projects (which isn't to say they don't exist) that use either language. Could you discuss the difference between what makes a good educational language and a good working language, specifically as to why it might be useful to learn in a language that you are unlikely to ever use in a work environment.
Why send humans? Because there's more to life than just knowing new things. We're an expansive race, and for better or for worse (in my opinion for better) we need to grow. Robots, while they can give us a lot of information, are no substitute for actually being there and experiencing it for ourselves.
The bytecode idea is a really good one, especially with the large (although shrinking) number of platforms you have to support these days, and the possible rise of VLIW processors on the horizon. I don't really like coding in Java all that much, though. Is anyone working on a compiler for another language that compiles to bytecode that will run on a JVM (rather than a internet-c or c# vm)?
I'm not sure how todays displays differ from those of older laptops, but I have a PowerBook 170 from almost 10 years ago that is still looking great. At the time we were extatic to have found one with no bad pixels (they were few and far between at the time), and I can say for sure that the same is true of that screen today. It should be noted, however, that that was one of the earliest shipping Active Matrix screens, and monochrome, but it would be hard to find a 10 year old Apple Cinima Display (drool) to check.
These days, your browser is a tool you use with your computer, in the same way a text editor or ftp client has been for a while. This is especially true for many users of free software, since the documentation is, by and large, on the web. Browsers, on the other hand, have grown much like a microsoft product -- more complex, more bloated, and with more features rather than simple and functional. I would love to see a browser with the html rendering abilities of mozilla or internet explorer, but without all the other functions. Such a browser might still need frames support, and possibly javascript, but it wouldn't need to be your chat program, your html editor, or your kitchen sink. It seems like most browsers fall on either end: lynx which is stable but which can't see many of the sites which are written these days, and mozilla which takes up a lot of RAM and does everything you'll ever need to do on your computer.
-thinmac
I prefer to use my happy hacking keyboard with my palmpilot, because I've found the action on most of the folding keyboards isn't to my likeing. The happy hacking cradle has a ps2 port on it, so you can plug any keyboard into it. Not great for travle, as you have to carry a full size keyboard, but good when you want to enter data quickly.