I'm sorry, I give up: I can't figure out from the verbiage that follows that statement what those two directions are. Perhaps that particular kind of English major that this guy represents should not write about technology.
No, not at all. Running a headache off flash is still a headache.
Ah, I see: you meant that you are using XP and this was making you "re-think" switching to Vista. Well, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, with Windows, Microsoft does the thinking for you, and you will be switching to Vista sooner or later, whether you want it or not. That's why your statement made no sense.
All that means is that your drive slows down.
Not necessarily. There is some rate of uncorrectable failures (and even undetected failures), .
I use my desktop machines for work.
So do I, which is why I'm using Linux; Windows simply doesn't get the job done. (I do use Windows for gaming, though.)
This kind of thing has been used for a long time: Nipkow Disk, Drum Scanner. The combination with micromirror arrays is new.
However, there's a reason we "acquire first, ask questions later", as the article talks about current systems: electronics is much better at "asking questions" than mechanical hardware.
This is also broken for a different definition of "broken".
The fact that UNIX handles the case where you update the executable correctly doesn't mean it handles this case any worse.
If I install a newer version of lib that has a security update, I want all the processes that use the lib to start using the updated version *NOW*.
In fact, in UNIX, in addition to hot-replacing the application, you still have all the options you have in Windows for this: ask the user to quit the application, kill the application processes, or reboot. So, you don't lose anything.
And that's what Linux package managers do: if they come with an important security update in libc, they'll reboot the machine unless you cancel out of it. (It happens once in a blue moon.)
We aren't talking about glibc, we are talking about a browser upgrade.
On a major upgrade like this, how do you guarantee all applications are linked against the new version of the library?
There is no need to "guarantee" that. If IE6 libraries have worked the past 3 years, they'll continue to work until the Windows machine is rebooted anyway.
And please take into account that most of your user base are users, not admins.
All the more reason not to annoy the hell out of them.
Rebooting is just a sane thing to do.
It's not "a sane thing to do" for a browser and HTML rendering library upgrade.
As such, a system reboot is neccesary as the rendering engine itself, exposed as a library, must be updated. Basically it just ensures nothing is using the browser control at the time of update.
That's only a problem if your DLL support in the operating system is poorly designed. A reasonably well-designed system (most systems other than Windows) lets you upgrade DLLs and applications pick up the new DLLs when it's safe to do so. Reboots should only be necessary if the kernel has been upgraded (and even that is avoidable!).
That is actually reason enough for me to re-think that whole Vista thing.
Has the ability to boot and run Linux off flash made you "re-think that whole Linux thing"?
With partial flash drives and eventually 100% flash drives, the last major component of computer hardware failure, namely, all of those closely moving parts in a hard drive, will be wiped out.
They'll be replaced by a medium that has a much higher MTBF for writes.
Oh yeah, and it'll be fast as hell, too.
Not really. Flash memory is not all that fast, and a lot of boot time is spent doing other things. On all my machines, most of the booting process is concerned with checking and initializing hardware.
You've been able to boot from Flash for years. These days, you can easily stick a 4G or 8G flash card into your PCMCIA slot and boot off that. But don't expect miracles: the boot process itself takes time. That's being addressed, though, with a rewrite of "init" (shipping with Ubuntu Edgy Eft).
Human societies had your attitudes for a few thousand years. Then modern democratic government came along, and with that came a recognized right to privacy; that means that only specific public institutions have a right to invade your privace, and only in specific circumstances. Personally, I'd prefer not to give up on our democratic achievements and go back to the Middle Ages.
If you can hide something from microwaves, you can hide it from radar and visible light.
It's an open question whether metamaterials for visible light are practical. Even if they are, there's a big difference between an "invisibility box" and an "invisibility suit". We already have "invisibility boxes" constructed of various rigid materials (magicians use them), but an "invisibility suit" is a thin, fairly flexible, irregularly shaped covering, and that's a much harder engineering problem. Many engineering problems simply don't have solutions under real world constraints and constructed from real-world materials, even if physical principles permit a solution in some kind of generic sense.
You don't want someone with a big drug habit in a position of trust over money or something that they can sell for money.
I wouldn't give a damn if they did their job well and were paid well enough to afford their drug habit. Furthermore, we could lower the "paid well enough to afford their habit" threshold by legalizing drugs.
Employee monitoring outside of the workplace, especially secret monitoring is expensive and frankly not productive. After all, what sort of employee will consent to that kind of thing? How would that affect morale?
I think the point is that powerful corporations may not have to ask your consent, and how it affects morale won't matter because everybody will be doing it.
Apple's machines are generally built by contract PC manufacturers in Asia; Apple already is largely only design, marketing, distribution, and some software development. Involving Dell would only increase costs for Apple.
pick up your dork card, too
on
No Ice on the Moon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The meaning of terms depends on context and audience. If you refer to radio waves as "light", you will be misunderstood not only by laymen, but also by people who know about the physics of "light" in many contexts. Furthermore, when talking about blocking, wavelength matters, and it makes a big difference whether it's "(visible) light" or "radio waves". In this context, "radio waves hitting the dish" is the correct usage, while "light hitting the dish" is sloppy, unnecessarily imprecise, and misleading. If you want to be generic about it, the correct term is "electromagnetic radiation hitting the dish", not "light hitting the dish".
The largest meteorite found in the US is 15 tons, so 154 pounds isn't all that "massive". What makes this unusual is the fact that it was found using ground penetrating radar, a method that may also be used on Mars.
According to an article at the BBC, an evolutionary theorist in London suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species within the next 100,000 years.
The way we're going, it's unlikely we'll even survive the next 100,000 years.
Seriously, though: this theme has been explored in science fiction stories multiple times. These kinds of futurists apparently are simply scifi writers that can't write.
I almost bought the Slingplayer because it had a Mac OS X logo on the box and claimed it was Mac compatible. This article now says that the player isn't out yet.
So, what is it? Is the article outdated, or is Sling selling boxes that claim Mac compatibility without actually shipping the software?
There are a bunch of widely used systems like this: rdist, cfengine, fai,... In what way is "Slack" supposed to be better? Or is this simply a case of NIH?
I have twins, a boy and a girl, age 1 year and 2 months (or so). We made a conscious decision to raise them without television, at least before the age of two.
That statement would be funny if it weren't so sad. I would think simple common sense would tell parents not to put kids younger than school age in front of a TV.
The researchers that conduct these kinds of studies usually aren't completely stupid--they usually go through great lengths to control for such variables. The fact that somewhere in the paper, they may also illustrate their claim with appealing one-liners doesn't change that fact.
So, unless you have read and reviewed the entire paper and can make a reasonable argument, you have no business calling this "bad science". Your remarks are actually just an example of "spectacularly bad public debate".
What is also missing is maybe that Adobe build its tools closely with their professional customers while Gimp looks like developed by developer for enthousiast/developer
If anything, Photoshop's Windows and Mac-compliant interface reveals its origins as a consumer product that moved into the professional market from the bottom up. There were professional graphics programs before Photoshop, and they had rather unpolished interfaces (ragged icons, etc.). As a rule, professional high-end tools don't have pretty interfaces because the market is too small.
Most of them I've known would have been happy if KWord (or OpenOffice, etc) had dropped the silly alphabet support, and just used MathML.
You don't know what you're talking about. OpenOffice has a full-featured, integrated, mature formula editor similar to LaTeX and eqn.
The de-facto standard for mathematics input is LaTeX, with some MS Word, OpenOffice, and eqn thrown in. MathML use is non-existent in the sciences, and if it will ever amount to anything, it will be as a back-end interchange format that users never see. I sure hope I'll never have to see it.
And you're someone who doesn't know what FUD is you don't sound like you're in any position to run a UNIX system, either.
I said "FUD" and I meant it: the guy sounded like someone with a commercial stake in Windows who is trying to give them impression that UNIX in insecure, prone to botnet attacks, and generally associated with hackers. That is exactly what FUD is: spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a competing product out of commercial interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Web 2.0 can take two distinct directions [...]
Back button and forward button?
Upstream and downstream?
Bears and bulls?
I'm sorry, I give up: I can't figure out from the verbiage that follows that statement what those two directions are. Perhaps that particular kind of English major that this guy represents should not write about technology.
No, not at all. Running a headache off flash is still a headache.
Ah, I see: you meant that you are using XP and this was making you "re-think" switching to Vista. Well, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, with Windows, Microsoft does the thinking for you, and you will be switching to Vista sooner or later, whether you want it or not. That's why your statement made no sense.
All that means is that your drive slows down.
Not necessarily. There is some rate of uncorrectable failures (and even undetected failures), .
I use my desktop machines for work.
So do I, which is why I'm using Linux; Windows simply doesn't get the job done. (I do use Windows for gaming, though.)
This kind of thing has been used for a long time: Nipkow Disk, Drum Scanner. The combination with micromirror arrays is new.
However, there's a reason we "acquire first, ask questions later", as the article talks about current systems: electronics is much better at "asking questions" than mechanical hardware.
There is some speculation about life on other planets in the article as well
There always is, isn't there.
This is also broken for a different definition of "broken".
The fact that UNIX handles the case where you update the executable correctly doesn't mean it handles this case any worse.
If I install a newer version of lib that has a security update, I want all the processes that use the lib to start using the updated version *NOW*.
In fact, in UNIX, in addition to hot-replacing the application, you still have all the options you have in Windows for this: ask the user to quit the application, kill the application processes, or reboot. So, you don't lose anything.
And that's what Linux package managers do: if they come with an important security update in libc, they'll reboot the machine unless you cancel out of it. (It happens once in a blue moon.)
What if glibc contains a security hole?
We aren't talking about glibc, we are talking about a browser upgrade.
On a major upgrade like this, how do you guarantee all applications are linked against the new version of the library?
There is no need to "guarantee" that. If IE6 libraries have worked the past 3 years, they'll continue to work until the Windows machine is rebooted anyway.
And please take into account that most of your user base are users, not admins.
All the more reason not to annoy the hell out of them.
Rebooting is just a sane thing to do.
It's not "a sane thing to do" for a browser and HTML rendering library upgrade.
As such, a system reboot is neccesary as the rendering engine itself, exposed as a library, must be updated. Basically it just ensures nothing is using the browser control at the time of update.
That's only a problem if your DLL support in the operating system is poorly designed. A reasonably well-designed system (most systems other than Windows) lets you upgrade DLLs and applications pick up the new DLLs when it's safe to do so. Reboots should only be necessary if the kernel has been upgraded (and even that is avoidable!).
I can't tell whether you're trying to be funny.
That is actually reason enough for me to re-think that whole Vista thing.
Has the ability to boot and run Linux off flash made you "re-think that whole Linux thing"?
With partial flash drives and eventually 100% flash drives, the last major component of computer hardware failure, namely, all of those closely moving parts in a hard drive, will be wiped out.
They'll be replaced by a medium that has a much higher MTBF for writes.
Oh yeah, and it'll be fast as hell, too.
Not really. Flash memory is not all that fast, and a lot of boot time is spent doing other things. On all my machines, most of the booting process is concerned with checking and initializing hardware.
You've been able to boot from Flash for years. These days, you can easily stick a 4G or 8G flash card into your PCMCIA slot and boot off that. But don't expect miracles: the boot process itself takes time. That's being addressed, though, with a rewrite of "init" (shipping with Ubuntu Edgy Eft).
Human societies had your attitudes for a few thousand years. Then modern democratic government came along, and with that came a recognized right to privacy; that means that only specific public institutions have a right to invade your privace, and only in specific circumstances. Personally, I'd prefer not to give up on our democratic achievements and go back to the Middle Ages.
OK, if I'm not mistaken it's completely illegal to impersonate someone, and also, are phone records not considered "private" information?
Hence the "According to the California attorney general...".
If you can hide something from microwaves, you can hide it from radar and visible light.
It's an open question whether metamaterials for visible light are practical. Even if they are, there's a big difference between an "invisibility box" and an "invisibility suit". We already have "invisibility boxes" constructed of various rigid materials (magicians use them), but an "invisibility suit" is a thin, fairly flexible, irregularly shaped covering, and that's a much harder engineering problem. Many engineering problems simply don't have solutions under real world constraints and constructed from real-world materials, even if physical principles permit a solution in some kind of generic sense.
You don't want someone with a big drug habit in a position of trust over money or something that they can sell for money.
I wouldn't give a damn if they did their job well and were paid well enough to afford their drug habit. Furthermore, we could lower the "paid well enough to afford their habit" threshold by legalizing drugs.
Employee monitoring outside of the workplace, especially secret monitoring is expensive and frankly not productive. After all, what sort of employee will consent to that kind of thing? How would that affect morale?
I think the point is that powerful corporations may not have to ask your consent, and how it affects morale won't matter because everybody will be doing it.
Based on this same logic, we'd almost all be addicted to: driving, eating, refrigerators, using the toilet, showering, sleeping, and drinking.
Speak for yourself! I'm not addicted to most of those things!
Apple's machines are generally built by contract PC manufacturers in Asia; Apple already is largely only design, marketing, distribution, and some software development. Involving Dell would only increase costs for Apple.
The meaning of terms depends on context and audience. If you refer to radio waves as "light", you will be misunderstood not only by laymen, but also by people who know about the physics of "light" in many contexts. Furthermore, when talking about blocking, wavelength matters, and it makes a big difference whether it's "(visible) light" or "radio waves". In this context, "radio waves hitting the dish" is the correct usage, while "light hitting the dish" is sloppy, unnecessarily imprecise, and misleading. If you want to be generic about it, the correct term is "electromagnetic radiation hitting the dish", not "light hitting the dish".
The largest meteorite found in the US is 15 tons, so 154 pounds isn't all that "massive". What makes this unusual is the fact that it was found using ground penetrating radar, a method that may also be used on Mars.
According to an article at the BBC, an evolutionary theorist in London suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species within the next 100,000 years.
The way we're going, it's unlikely we'll even survive the next 100,000 years.
Seriously, though: this theme has been explored in science fiction stories multiple times. These kinds of futurists apparently are simply scifi writers that can't write.
I almost bought the Slingplayer because it had a Mac OS X logo on the box and claimed it was Mac compatible. This article now says that the player isn't out yet.
So, what is it? Is the article outdated, or is Sling selling boxes that claim Mac compatibility without actually shipping the software?
There are a bunch of widely used systems like this: rdist, cfengine, fai, ... In what way is "Slack" supposed to be better? Or is this simply a case of NIH?
I have twins, a boy and a girl, age 1 year and 2 months (or so). We made a conscious decision to raise them without television, at least before the age of two.
That statement would be funny if it weren't so sad. I would think simple common sense would tell parents not to put kids younger than school age in front of a TV.
The researchers that conduct these kinds of studies usually aren't completely stupid--they usually go through great lengths to control for such variables. The fact that somewhere in the paper, they may also illustrate their claim with appealing one-liners doesn't change that fact.
So, unless you have read and reviewed the entire paper and can make a reasonable argument, you have no business calling this "bad science". Your remarks are actually just an example of "spectacularly bad public debate".
What is also missing is maybe that Adobe build its tools closely with their professional customers while Gimp looks like developed by developer for enthousiast/developer
If anything, Photoshop's Windows and Mac-compliant interface reveals its origins as a consumer product that moved into the professional market from the bottom up. There were professional graphics programs before Photoshop, and they had rather unpolished interfaces (ragged icons, etc.). As a rule, professional high-end tools don't have pretty interfaces because the market is too small.
Most of them I've known would have been happy if KWord (or OpenOffice, etc) had dropped the silly alphabet support, and just used MathML.
You don't know what you're talking about. OpenOffice has a full-featured, integrated, mature formula editor similar to LaTeX and eqn.
The de-facto standard for mathematics input is LaTeX, with some MS Word, OpenOffice, and eqn thrown in. MathML use is non-existent in the sciences, and if it will ever amount to anything, it will be as a back-end interchange format that users never see. I sure hope I'll never have to see it.
And you're someone who doesn't know what FUD is you don't sound like you're in any position to run a UNIX system, either.
I said "FUD" and I meant it: the guy sounded like someone with a commercial stake in Windows who is trying to give them impression that UNIX in insecure, prone to botnet attacks, and generally associated with hackers. That is exactly what FUD is: spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about a competing product out of commercial interest.