Posts by John Savard 2460 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007
The technology isn't the problem. After all, using "just-in-time" compilation technology, Intel was able to develop a software solution for executing x86 code on an Itanium that was faster than the hardware ability to execute x86 code that the chips included. And there's the similar approach Apple took to executing PowerPC code on Intel Macs. So relatively efficient software simulation is now well-established enough that we don't need to doubt that this is possible.
Since this advertisement is not for the purpose of selling a commercial product, or soliciting donations, but is to encourage a healthier lifestyle, for an advertising council to be able to regulate it seems to be an intrusion into freedom of speech.
Next they'll ban advertisements for books written by people who claim to have been taken aboard flying saucers.
Since Apple did not make an effort to make the original Macintosh at all affordable, back when the Amiga and the Atari ST were competing with it, it's not surprising that people ended up flocking to PC clones instead, and saw Microsoft, with Windows 3.1, as the heroic champion of the ordinary person.
Microsoft's image has taken a beating since then, but Apple isn't making much of an effort to pick up the slack. Otherwise, it would be possible to buy a Mac Mini with a Core 2 Quad processor in it, with a modest price difference not much above the price difference of the processors.
It's a pity, really; the Mac has a visibility and an availability of third-party software that, while it's behind that of Windows, is still far ahead of that of Linux. They could win, if they wanted to play. Instead, Microsoft is being given the time to fix the slowness of Vista with Windows 7, another missed opportunity for Apple.
I am surprised that as many as 80 workers would expose themselves to prosecution for serious crimes. I realize that French political culture may possibly be sufficiently different from that elsewhere that there may not be outraged calls from one end of France to the other to lock the lot up and throw away the key, but, how can France be that different when Sarkozy was able to get elected?
Abundant and clean energy, but not necessarily cheap, can be provided by nuclear power, so that we can continue to survive at a high technical level as would be required to be able to afford to pay for the research needed for either solar power satellites or controlled thermonuclear fusion (or, preferably, both).
But this wouldn't "break the back of the energy monopolies" the way warm and fuzzy technologies like windmills and geothermal and tidal power would.
We're just lucky that Thorium 232 can be turned into Uranium 233, and Uranium 238 can be turned into Plutonium 239, as easily by neutrons from Uranium 233 and Plutonium 239 fission as by neutrons from Uranium 235 fission, so that the delay in moving to utilize common nuclear fuel resources instead of only scarce ones will not lead to disastrous waste.
It's true that with Microsoft making Windows 7 more efficient than Vista, and with low-power chips becoming more powerful, the rationale for using Linux on a netbook is weakening. But a netbook is still a laptop computer, just a smaller and lighter one, and what people want to run on personal computers, laptop or otherwise, are mainstream applications.
Thus, treating this as a "what if?" scenario is misleading. The netbook is really a part of a market Microsoft has already won. What could have been prevented is Windows CE on handhelds becoming dominant, because Windows CE doesn't run Windows (3.1/98/XP) applications. But trying to stop Microsoft here, under the illusion that one has an isolated market segment to do battle in, is a recipe for failure.
However I might feel about the policies of the Chinese government, I don't recall anyone ever complaining that they required Tibetans to convert their names to Chinese characters; and, as well, GB18030 includes the Yi Syllabary and Radicals also found in Unicode, so people who aren't Chinese do apparently have the options of recording their names in their own scripts.
Oh, I see someone else has already noted that the checksum in an ISBN number can sometimes be an X. Just as the usual casting out nines checksum only has nine possible values, its natural complement, to protect against two digits being swapped, needs eleven values to work.
In the TV pilot for the series The Six Million Dollar Man, and I believe in Martin Caidin's original novel Cyborg on which it was based, instead of Steve Austin being able to see with his artificial eye - that being considered a bit too far-out for a techno-thriller as opposed to far-future science fiction - his artificial eye merely contained a miniature camera.
I like the code name for the new release. I suppose, between pirated copies of Windows, and Red Flag Linux, they don't sell a lot of Macs in China anyways, so at least one major company isn't worried about offending the government there. (The Snow Leopard is a Tibetan national symbol.)
When did Ceres stop being a planet? When it was discovered that there were at least dozens of other asteroids out there, several of which were larger than the smallest of the first four asteroids to be discovered.
Similarly, matters came to a head over Pluto when Eris was discovered.
So the definition of a planet basically is - an object that directly orbits the Sun, and which is bigger than any object which belongs to a class of objects with a large number of members, so that it can be considered one of the major, big, and significant objects in the Solar System.
Since that has to do with subjectivity - and with the practical concern of not having lots of working astronomers waste time scanning the Kuiper Belt with large telescopes in order to be acclaimed as the next Herschel - they had to put a dynamical veneer on it with this orbit clearing business.
If Illinois feels like it has to protect the laurels of a native son, that really isn't the same thing as declaring pi equal to 3 1/5 (and the square root of two equal to 1 3/7) or pretending that evolution didn't happen, because Pluto's status was never really about science.
He may only be accused of a child pornography offence, but clearly he has violated his bail conditions. Perhaps by announcing that he is radioactive, it is hoped that he will turn himself in, rather than being Tasered by police who wouln't want to spend too long physically restraining him.
Obviously, if there is little demand for the Itanium architecture, Intel can't devote much in the way of resources to it, which leads to little reason to demand it.
The benefit of Itanium is presumably that it in some way allows chips to be produced that are bigger and more powerful than x86 chips. That's a very valuable benefit, but obviously it can't be realized if they're a generation behind.
Intel needs to do something.
I still feel that bringing Itanium goodness to the x86 world in some fashion - thus, making x86 chips more powerful, and letting the x86 subsidize the Itanium market with its volumes - is the way to go.
Of course, MS-DOS looked a lot like CP/M. But then, CP/M looked a lot like OS/8 (from DEC), which few people realized. The old PIP command for COPY came from Peripheral Interchange Program. Of course, OS/8 had 6.2 filenames instead of 8.3.
Maybe HP and Xerox should get together and produce the next great operating system. But Apple successfully sued Xerox at one time in the past (while Xerox was unsuccessful in suing Apple), so it isn't as simple as that.
The problem isn't that Microsoft shouldn't have the right to defend its intellectual property.
However, people installing Linux in a second partition should be able to access files - with their long names - in their Windows partition, because not being able to do so would be anticompetitive.
So the solution is clear. Require Microsoft to cease and desist selling copies of Windows that don't allow you to choose to use a non-proprietary filesystem instead of FAT32 or NTFS. Since there are non-proprietary filesystems that allow equivalent functionality, this would not impose undue hardship on Microsoft.
I did a bit of Googling. What happens in China is this: the normal Skype client will not function in China (presumably the ISPs block it), and a modified Skype client which is, as they say, compliant with local laws and regulations, must be downloaded from the company, TOM, that is Skype's business partner in China.
That would presumably be a bit far for any European government to go.
It was back in early October, 2008 that this was in the news; the excitement of the stock market crash may have driven it out of everyone's mind.
We know that the muscles of your arms and legs are controlled by electrical signals sent out from your brain.
We know that information sensed by your eyes and ears is converted to electrical signals that go to your brain.
And we know about how brain injuries affect people's ability to think adversely.
So of course there is no reason to suspect anything but that the control of behavior, and conscious thought take place as electrical and chemical activity in the brain. What else could they possibly be? People would have to believe in... ghosts... or something to think otherwise.
It's true that people might back into other people's private driveways to make U-turns safely, but the road from the road to one's garage is not a right-of-way. So although there was indeed a remedy for the alleged invasion of privacy, there does seem to be another area in which questionable conduct is involved.
There might be a large number of area residents who can use apostrophes correctly, and it may also be true that a large number of the area's residents can use apostrophes correctly, but using "area's" without the "the" does not appear to me to be an example of correct English grammar.
Often, I see articles here denying global warming, which often do not even allow comments. But here is a positive piece that I agree with: the solution is not drastically cutting down our energy use, but instead improving our sources of energy.
Since, with nuclear power, we have a carbon-free way of producing energy where hydroelectricity is not available and when the wind is not blowing, it's not as if there is a question of being disappointed if research doesn't return new solutions in time.
Make the entire problem moot. Dismiss the Chinese government from office, liberate Tibet and Uighuristan (Sinkiang province).
After all, if Germany had been invaded promptly after the Kristallnacht, World War II and the Holocaust could have been avoided. We should stop tolerating nonsense from foreign dictators.
Generally speaking, a safer way to install an upgrade version would be to install it in another partition as a clean install, and use your old software in your old operating system. If that can still be done, and the license allows it, then Windows 7 would have a useful upgrade option from XP available; I agree that a replacement clean install is not a particularly useful option.
It would be very nice if there was only one version of Windows, so that I would have all the features of Windows Server for the price of Home or Basic. But Microsoft makes more money if it can charge what different markets will bear, and so the only thing that would encourage it to charge less money for Windows is... competition.
Unfortunately, OS X and Linux together aren't much of that for Windows, at least not yet.
The mortgage meltdown by itself caused a stock crash that people fear may cause the equivalent of the Great Depression. A malicious act that could make something like this worse, causing untold harm to billions of people worldwide, should be treated as something very serious indeed.
When this sort of thing happens, simply cut all the cables by which Internet traffic enters or leaves Russia. That would make it difficult for hackers in Russia to interfere with the Internet. Presumably, the Russian government would take stopping this sort of thing a high priority once this policy is in place.
It's a good thing that there is the open-source Firefox in existence.
The result of this sort of thing could be that Microsoft not only couldn't include IE with Windows, but that it couldn't give it away for free either. (How would you download it off their web site without a web browser anyways? Install an FTP client from a magazine coverdisk or shareware collection CD, maybe?)
So all the other web browsers would cost money too, like back in the days when Netscape was something that was sold.
It's true that there is a big problem with choice in the computing field. You can't go out and buy modern computers with modern performance that have chips that run the 680x0 instruction set to run your old Macintosh/Atari ST/Amiga software at today's native speed... nor, for that matter, is there a compatible upgrade path that continued without a break to the present day for Apple //GS owners based on a chip compatible with the 65816 but with instructions added to its 16-bit mode for 64-bit addressing, hardware floating-point, MMX- or AltiVec- like vector instructions, and so on and so forth.
But it is rather late in the day to try and bring these choices back now. The x86 Mac, and Linux on the x86, are today's only alternatives, and they're both far behind Windows in the availability of software and peripherals. Yes, by all means prevent Microsoft from obstructing the emergence of choice, but also think about where choices can come from.
If there was an international standard for hardware drivers that had to be followed by commercial operating systems vendors, then anyone wanting to compete would just have to support that standard for all the hardware out there to work on his operating system. Write once, run anywhere - but *not* at speeds slower than native hardware execution speed - is the goal that should be investigated; perhaps some universal subset API particularly for installers and hardware support utilities (so that on a Windows machine, a Mac, or Linux, you could use exactly the same binary to change your screen resolution, which would look like it was written for Windows 3.1 or OS/2 or something... although nothing would prevent hardware manufactures from including prettier ones for the more popular operating systems, admittedly).
While they're at it, they could make a law requiring the x86 architecture to add a feature, like the Itanium has, to switch into big-endian mode.
I think it's terrible that, in the 21st Century, we still have countries like Russia and China to worry about, instead of them, and all other countries, being, like Australia and the U.K., firm allies of the U.S., and also of all the world's other democracies, like Taiwan or Georgia or Israel, and not threats to them in any way.
We want to make sure that computers are not hacked. One way to work towards this is to ensure that no one possesses hacking tools - except for licensed people who can be trusted with them. So if a large corporation needs to use hacking tools to test the security of its computers, they just get one of their employees licensed and bonded as a computersmith. And they might have to abide by certain rules, such as when they take the hacking tools out of the locked computer vault, two people have to be there, so that the hacking tools can't be copied for illegitimate use, because no one is ever alone with them.
Morphine (the active ingredient in heroin and opium) has legitimate medical use. And guns are certainly legitimately useful for self-defense against criminals who have somehow managed to get their hands on guns - in general, weapons are tools for making other people mind, but which can be misused to bully other people.
People tampering with websites belonging to the U.S. Army or NATO, of course, are open to serious criminal charges.
It is regrettable that ordinary people in Gaza are getting hurt. However, neither Europe nor the U.S. have offered to invade Gaza with a larger force, that could proceed more carefully, for the purpose of destroying Hamas and ending the rocket attacks on Israel once and for all, without disrupting the lives of the ordinary people of Gaza as much.
Such attacks, like the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, are not the sort of things that will be tolerated by people in a position to do anything about it.
And Israel is in a position to defend itself. It is tragic that ordinary people are now suffering for the stupidity of Hamas. And, of course, it is also unfortunate that some of them will be embittered enough to try to do foolish things in the future, which have absolutely no hope of achieving any positive result for the Palestinian people.
Apple currently does sell some business servers, so that's one reason to take it seriously. If you are going to seek customers for any product your company makes - you should take that product seriously to maintain your company's reputation for quality.
As well, selling business servers based on the Macintosh architecture, and doing it well, could presumably help Apple get experience which it can apply to building better Macintoshes for the ordinary desktop.
The fact that there's money to be made there, on the other hand, is no reason by itself; after all, Apple could sell cars, flowers, or groceries and make money.
But if Apple has strengths that make it easy to make and sell servers, then that's a reason to take advantage of an opportunity to make money. Of course, since it is a computer company (among other things), that may have been taken for granted.
Back before they started having leap seconds, all this was handled by having the clocks just run a bit slower, and nobody, but a few scientists working in specialized areas, was affected by this.
Maybe going back is not the answer, because the Internet is so precisely timed that it is necessary (or, with advancing technology, will soon become necessary) to synchronize to such a high accuracy that even frequent leap 50 millisecond increments would be noticed. Waiting longer, and having leap hours, is not really an option.
But actually making every second longer - not running our clocks, which tell civil time, by Ephemeris Time, letting their seconds tick away a bit slower than SI seconds would - would seem very unobtrusive, if managed right. Quartz clocks would just adjust themselves to an external time standard which would differ less from the old one than their own inherent limitations, and one which only had the seconds in it you would expect to see.
I don't approve of maliciously interfering with computers that don't belong to you.
And it wasn't even funny.
Now, if a video feed of Steve Jobs had him turning into Nehemiah Scudder, the First Prophet, who then denounced Steve Jobs as not being his true anointed successor... well, while that wouldn't win points for *originality*, at least it would be a nice homage.
I wouldn't object to prosecuting the German soldiers who availed themselves of women from concentration camps, or Japanese soldiers who availed themselves of Korean 'comfort women'.
But in this case, we do seem to be talking about prosecuting men for rape who have no reason to suspect what they're doing... except that this is the way a lot of the criminal prostitution industry works. Yes, they're probably not giving full thought to the implications of what they're doing, but, on the other hand, there is no cure for AIDS yet.
What hormone, when taken, allows the body to take up more proteins from the diet?
Fortunately, Steve Jobs has no ambitions to become an Olympic athlete. It sounds like the docs are going to have to put him... on steroids. Yes, anabolic steroids.
Of course, we can presume the dosage will be limited, and Apple stockholders should have no cause for alarm.
Since some children are allergic to nuts, it's reasonable to be concerned about their safety.
And it's not too surprising organizations will err on the side of caution when formulating standardized policies which must be followed without discretion by their employees when litigation is a concern.
But I was still amused a few days ago that some brands of dark (but still milk) chocolate bars were recalled from store shelves because 'milk' was accidentally omitted from their list of ingredients. But if they hadn't, I suppose the companies that had to recall their chocolate bars because nuts, although not being an ingredient, weren't listed among the ingredients because of trace contamination, would have complained of favouritism...
...is that anecdotal evidence is out of fashion. Pretty much "everyone knows" that alcohol use can lead to men getting into fights, beating their wives, or even committing rape, and, furthermore, that most of the trouble caused by using alcohol comes out of its use by members of the lower classes. (This does, however, exclude problems related to impaired or drunken driving; the upper classes are about as likely to do that as anyone else, and the lower classes are less likely to own cars.)
So high prices for alcohol on the one hand, and draconian penalties for impaired driving on the other hand, are the obvious way to go, and scientific studies are hardly needed.
Of course, countries with a sufficiently poor lower class have to weigh the costs of medical care for those who misuse non-beverage products containing alcohol when considering how to tax liquor: this is a real problem here in Canada, but it may not be as much of a consideration in the United Kingdom.
It is wonderful that there will be a standard way to access the computational power from high-end graphics cards which will be usable by software makers; perhaps Wolfram might come out with a version of Mathematica that makes use of it, for example.
And I like the name for the new OS X too, since the Snow Leopard is a symbol of the struggling land of Tibet.
Letting a computer boot up into an internet-browsing mode with the BIOS to bypass waiting for the operating system to boot isn't a bad idea, as long as it's only an alternate start-up, and you still have a real operating system.
And Linux PCs aren't a bad idea, if they're sold as desktop organizers, or pocket calculators. Maybe with a little work one could go after the $20 price point instead of the $100 price point... the equivalent of a 386 with 16 megs of RAM ought to be doable, at least with a low-resolution black-and-white screen.
Yes, if it doesn't run Windows, it's no substitute for the full-bore desktop computer that does run Windows. But that doesn't mean it isn't a computer and can't do calculations for you. So it just has to be packaged so as to avoid confusion.
What Lord May is quoted as saying about the division between supporters and skeptics of global warming concern, unfortunately, is nothing more than the simple truth. However, given the costs of combatting global warming by doing without energy if we can't replace fossil fuels with wind power and the like, ordinary voters and politicians will demand extraordinary proof (which won't be available until it's too late) to make such sacrifices. The obvious solution is nuclear power, which lets us have as much energy as we want, without carbon dioxide emissions: and there's gold in that for everyone, as energy need no longer be in limited supply.
Yes, the Macintosh is a more closed, proprietary, system than Windows. But the mere fact that it exists as an alternative to Windows is still a good thing, which is part of why Apple isn't normally criticized as much; the problem is seen as the dominance of Microsoft, and whatever limitations one has to accept to use Windows.
The fact that in some respects it might be worse for those other people who chose the Mac doesn't affect the fact that their 'sacrifice' made things better for Windows users.
And the Macintosh is indeed a bigger alternative to Windows on the desktop than Linux is. That's just not saying much.
What people want is either a highly competitive market, where there is no dominant player - you could use a Mac, you could use Windows, you could use BeOS, you could use GEM Desktop... and so on - OR where the dominant player is Linux, BSD, or something like that.
Early on, in vigorously defending a lot of aspects of its desktop interface - but licensing to Windows instead of getting into a legal fight with them - Apple made the decisions that led to Windows becoming dominant, because the other competitors Windows faced in the early days were swept off the board. Apple even sued Xerox - and won.
So there's blame to go around to Apple - and yet the world would be a poorer place without them as one alternative to Windows. It's just that it would be nice if there were many alternatives to Windows.
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