The problem with this kind of accounting is that it is fundamentally flawed.
What is YOUR life worth to some bean-counter, who doesn't care about you, your spouse of offspring?
Now what is worth to YOU?
Now let's REALLY cut costs.
We've got problems with luggage?
Screw it. No more luggage luggage handlers, customs, custom-agents. That ought to save a lot.
Who needs to pay for stewardesses?
Who needs to pay for a galley and a toilet.
Who needs to pay for seat-belts?
Who needs to pay for seats?
If you could fly as a standee with no luggage I'm sure the airline would LOVE to fly you.
And don't get me started on what the airports cost. You don't need ramps, endless walkways, buildings that are only used for a fraction of the time that you should actually be up in the air. Walk up to your plane and climb up some stairs from the tarmac, you lazy bastard.
So its raining. You'll drip-dry in he plane, as you stand there holding onto a strap hanging from a rail in the unpainted cylinder that is going to take you to your destination, for the least amount possible.... So you'd feel like you were taking your last trip, to Auschwitz....
It would be possible, just not desirable for you as a passenger.
the feeling of an orchestra actually playing in my living room.
Personally, I can't think of anything I would like less than having an orchestra actually playing in my living room.
Quadraphonic sound tried to that with audio in the late sixties, and it fell flat with a resounding thud! People only have two ears and the synthesize the rest from hat they hear through those two ears. It is enough to be able to position an instrument or vocalist along a left to right axis. People really didn't care that the second oboe was positioned behind the first bassoon.
Keep in mind that this was audio and that the "stage" could be potentially infinite along that left-right axis. (Headphones worked great because the actual distance didn't matter, only the perceived displacement between sound sources.)
In 3D movies it would matter a great deal if a performer was behind another.
In 2+D movies, where position is taken as important, though it may lead to disorientation and optical illusions but it is not essential, our brains have evolved mirror neurons and a whole set of visual disambiguation mechanisms to recreate a 3D scene from stereo-optic 2D image capture through binocular senses and reintegrate all of this using relative parallax and scaling of objects.
3D is not only difficult but pointless; literally as in the intended POV (Point Of View) intended by the director would be lost
That they shoot the movies in 3D is fine, that they playback movies in 2+D on a flat screen and involve our unthinking portion of our brain is also fine.
Until we have home theaters which can behave like holo-decks, its futile ice it would take that level of immersiveness for 3D to be more that an annoyance.
strictly about music discovery and band discovery.
Steve Jobs is amazingly (obsessively?:-) focused on making up for what the record companies gave up on in the nineties, promotion.
Now that he's in a great position of power in the music industry, look for him to use "ping" to make an end-run around those same record companies which are run by accountants who treat artists and performers worse than livestock.
In return he gets to listen to great bands. (Remember, Apple in the seventies used to host music events.)
Why is Microsoft applying for a patent when the Macintosh has had this since OS 1.0?
What? I'm supposed to send Microsoft some money every time I want to write an application (or an app) that declares an interest (wants to be notified,) when a system shut down request event occurs.
What kind of idiocy is this crap?
Has Microsoft finally lost its marbles? (The only thing I can think of is that Balmer is an idiot. Somebody has to hurry up and kill all the damn lawyers before they ruin everything.)
I personally don't eat based on what the FDA says (its not aimed at me anyway.)
But I find it reprehensible that people delude themselves into thinking that FDA recommendations are honest (FDA: "This stuff is good for ya...") when they're anything but (FDA: "Here ya go Cargil or Koch or Monsanto, your shit will keep on a shelf even longer.")
Its the same kind of stupidity as thinking that Kilby and Noyce got their Nobel prize for inventing the silicon chip. Wrong!
They got it for solving the interconnection problem. The components, resistors, capacitors, transistors can be silicon, germanium, whatever... The substrate can be silicon, germanium, whatever. They deserved and got the Nobel prize for figuring out how to vapor deposit wires between them.
And don't get me started on data objects. The data objects play exactly the same role as IC components. A data base should be both the data objects AND the connections (and the relationships) between them. Do databases have anything for keeping connections and relationships? NO! You're lucky if they even have stored procedures (the wrong of implementing these by the way.)
The choice is extremely expensive or FDA approved. (Greasy, salty preservative laden crap filled with unpronounceable components [I don't dare call them ingredients.])
you've got lots and lots of RAM with room for the keys and lots of space to waste for unfilled pointers.
Pass 1, read the records, at the key radix store a record URI Pass 2, sweep RAM and read the record URIs in the order you encounter them copying them onto a sequential write device.
I was doing this years ago.
If you are careful with the number and sizes of your read buffers, the re-read done for pass 2 doesn't have to be all that disk intensive.
You can even generate the keys using what ever hash function you find that is truly efficient and store collisions separately (leave a bit high and go into the a link list maintained by the hash generator for those few keys that hash redundantly.)
I have MS so I'm utterly without fine motor control.
That means my handwriting has deteriorated from what the nuns taught me until I have no use for the Mont Blanc pen I got as an award.
During that time (since 1975) my handwriting has NEVER been challenged on a cheque. They blithely ignored everything but the amount. Thank god I never wrote a post-dated cheque. (Yes, I'm Canadian though I now live in NJ. That's they way I've always spelt it:-)
I once had an identity theft perpetrated on mew and I was able to prove it WASN'T me because of the difference in the way I write dates compared to how an US citizen writes dates. That and the fact that the signature was identical (the forger was repeating his forgery exactly on ALL the cheques while I can't ever repeat anything even if I try.)
The first two are writing systems using syllabaries where vowels* are paired with consonants (but not all of them which leads to certain words in English not being renderable in Japanese.
Kanji uses the Chinese style of character formation and is an incredibly hefty system of writing. The major advantage is/was that a Kanji is the same and carries the same meaning throughout the entire continent regardless of how its actually pronounced in the myriad dialects.
Thus the Kanji for "house" is the same in Chinese, (regardless of whether its spoken in Mandarin, Manchurian or any of the hundred or so dialects,) Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and so on across the breadth of the continent.
But that kind of cross-cultural understandability is a hefty price to pay. The average peasant was illiterate and the "learned" classes only had to really learn a few thousand Kanji to get ahead in life. A public service exam consisted of writing poetry because that proved that the applicant knew Kanji.
The Chinese didn't mind paying because in the infancy of the empire communications often took weeks to cross China. There was no need to rush. It didn't matter that it took years to build up a written vocabulary as large as one's spoken one.
Now with communications occurring in fractions of seconds instead of weeks, with the rise of the mass media and with the rise of the internet, Kanji is showing itself to be a hindrance to rapid written communication.
* the usual five: a, e, i, o, & U but in a different order: a, i, u, e & o.
I'd like to see some lawyer from FaceBook(TM)® try to tell the nice officer at the front desk of the 68th precinct in Brooklyn to stop calling it that.
"Fuggedaboutid! We got a room in the back where you'z can go and sober up. It ain't a request bub. Get your ass back there... NOW!"
My IPv6 address will deny the handshake to the SMTP server and your message won't get through. (That's only ONE use IPv6 addresses.)
My devices will be tied to ME through a registration process and if the get stolen they all become useless to anybody else (and report their exact location when asked to by a police server. Theft only works if you can get away with it. With IPv6 every grain of sand on the beach can be an active responder, 1.8^19 many of them.
Soon you won't be able to get away with SQUAT!
Is this good? Is this bad? Bit of both really but we're all going to go through a whole lot of changes.
The FDA definitely controls and mandates the use of preservatives, just like they control the use of food coloring. (Remember the stink over red dye #2? Its was fine with the FDA, but the medical profession said it was carcinogenic. Eventually, eventually, the doctors won out.)
Its going international in a document called the "Codex Alimentarius". Google it.
By the way, fats can be toxic if they're full of toxins. (Like tobacco smoke was good for you and it helped with cold sores. I don't know anybody who believed that.)
You're being led like a lamb to slaughter by your own inability to pay attention.
Live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse, because its no fun when the "D" in the FDA gets to you and your blood pressure gets elevated from from all the food you've eaten that was regulated by the "F" in the FDA.
I like to eat FOOD, not shit from a chemistry set.
One of the problems that the various FDAs the world over have caused with all of the pesticides and preservatives they mandate that the food industry use at every step of the processing chain is that the food not degrade at any point.
Obesity results when the LAST point in the chain, ME and THEE folks, doesn't degrade the food either. It just sits there, on our hips, waists and in our blood streams, turning into toxic, insoluble fats.
Stay as far away from processed food as possible and you'll live a healthier life.
The FDAa are not your protectors.
They're there for Agribusiness's sake, by maximizing self life.
That YOU die fat, unhealthy and miserable doesn't enter into it...
Going a nice dinner date with a real live woman takes more time and has far fewer side effects than LSD, cocaine and crack.
I don't know about StarCraft but World of Warcraft (WoW) and WoW Gold are the major source and cause of the Spam some nuts from Korea try to post on my blogs.
I have moderation turned on so...
I might take on some ads for some remuneration but there is no way I'm giving it away.
The only reason that programs are still running on von Newman, SISD, architecture is because programmers don't like thinking, including von Neumann.
He figured he could simplify the expression of problems by a SISD reduction of the problem space and it screwed up the thinking of every programmer since.
The fact that every single CPU and GPU built with ICs is fundamentally a MIMD processor (even if constrained through a single clock pulse,) and runs lots of processes in parallel is completely opaque to the average programmer.
They keep going on about how many transistors go into a chip without realizing that it is just a bunch of dirty sand without the ability to connect all those components.
Noyce and Kilby got their Nobel prizes not for the number of transistors they could put on a chip but for figuring out how to connect them all together with traces.
The trace is what is behind the silicon and germanium empire of Intel and the other foundries.
Its the only component that has been working reliably and not giving the chip fabs problems.
Just because its not sexy, (read: troublesome,) it gets no respect.
were originally the same size as the US currency in use in the late nineteenth century have to do with anything?
Punchdcards were later shifted to 96 columns and the dimensions of the card shrunk from the old format (which I still remember fondly along with my old IBM 29 keypunch,) to these tiny punch cards.
None of this made any sense back in the nineteen-seventies and none of this makes any sense now.
A typical record was an integer divisable fraction of the 19k 3330 DASD write buffer length when I was working for CN back in the late nineteen-seventies.
Later when I was responsible for coming up with an archiving scheme for Canada Post, when the so-called records could be scanned images of payroll records from the nineteen-thirties and forties, there was no such thing as a fixed format for an employees' file and the hundreds and thousands of transaction records.
Depending on a fixed format record layout is something reprehensible only a unit-record fascist would do.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this kind of accounting is that it is fundamentally flawed.
What is YOUR life worth to some bean-counter, who doesn't care about you, your spouse of offspring?
Now what is worth to YOU?
Now let's REALLY cut costs.
We've got problems with luggage?
Screw it. No more luggage luggage handlers, customs, custom-agents. That ought to save a lot.
Who needs to pay for stewardesses?
Who needs to pay for a galley and a toilet.
Who needs to pay for seat-belts?
Who needs to pay for seats?
If you could fly as a standee with no luggage I'm sure the airline would LOVE to fly you.
And don't get me started on what the airports cost. You don't need ramps, endless walkways, buildings that are only used for a fraction of the time that you should actually be up in the air. Walk up to your plane and climb up some stairs from the tarmac, you lazy bastard.
So its raining. You'll drip-dry in he plane, as you stand there holding onto a strap hanging from a rail in the unpainted cylinder that is going to take you to your destination, for the least amount possible. ... So you'd feel like you were taking your last trip, to Auschwitz. ...
It would be possible, just not desirable for you as a passenger.
the feeling of an orchestra actually playing in my living room.
Personally, I can't think of anything I would like less than having an orchestra actually playing in my living room.
Quadraphonic sound tried to that with audio in the late sixties, and it fell flat with a resounding thud! People only have two ears and the synthesize the rest from hat they hear through those two ears. It is enough to be able to position an instrument or vocalist along a left to right axis. People really didn't care that the second oboe was positioned behind the first bassoon.
Keep in mind that this was audio and that the "stage" could be potentially infinite along that left-right axis. (Headphones worked great because the actual distance didn't matter, only the perceived displacement between sound sources.)
In 3D movies it would matter a great deal if a performer was behind another.
In 2+D movies, where position is taken as important, though it may lead to disorientation and optical illusions but it is not essential, our brains have evolved mirror neurons and a whole set of visual disambiguation mechanisms to recreate a 3D scene from stereo-optic 2D image capture through binocular senses and reintegrate all of this using relative parallax and scaling of objects.
3D is not only difficult but pointless; literally as in the intended POV (Point Of View) intended by the director would be lost
That they shoot the movies in 3D is fine, that they playback movies in 2+D on a flat screen and involve our unthinking portion of our brain is also fine.
Until we have home theaters which can behave like holo-decks, its futile ice it would take that level of immersiveness for 3D to be more that an annoyance.
have iTunes installed don't give a fuck about you or your pity.
These people have probably bought Office for Christ's sake. They obviously don't care about bloatware of wasted CPU cycles.
Now can we stop sticking our noses up Steve Job's butt and get back to real news?
strictly about music discovery and band discovery.
Steve Jobs is amazingly (obsessively? :-) focused on making up for what the record companies gave up on in the nineties, promotion.
Now that he's in a great position of power in the music industry, look for him to use "ping" to make an end-run around those same record companies which are run by accountants who treat artists and performers worse than livestock.
In return he gets to listen to great bands. (Remember, Apple in the seventies used to host music events.)
The law IS an ass.
This sounds like a perfect opportunity for some lawyer to sue another lawyer.
Bring this up again when the use the DMCA for something useful.
It'll shut down real fast.
Why is Microsoft applying for a patent when the Macintosh has had this since OS 1.0?
What? I'm supposed to send Microsoft some money every time I want to write an application (or an app) that declares an interest (wants to be notified,) when a system shut down request event occurs.
What kind of idiocy is this crap?
Has Microsoft finally lost its marbles? (The only thing I can think of is that Balmer is an idiot. Somebody has to hurry up and kill all the damn lawyers before they ruin everything.)
The thing is what's at issue here?
I personally don't eat based on what the FDA says (its not aimed at me anyway.)
But I find it reprehensible that people delude themselves into thinking that FDA recommendations are honest (FDA: "This stuff is good for ya...") when they're anything but (FDA: "Here ya go Cargil or Koch or Monsanto, your shit will keep on a shelf even longer.")
Its the same kind of stupidity as thinking that Kilby and Noyce got their Nobel prize for inventing the silicon chip. Wrong!
They got it for solving the interconnection problem. The components, resistors, capacitors, transistors can be silicon, germanium, whatever... The substrate can be silicon, germanium, whatever. They deserved and got the Nobel prize for figuring out how to vapor deposit wires between them.
And don't get me started on data objects. The data objects play exactly the same role as IC components. A data base should be both the data objects AND the connections (and the relationships) between them. Do databases have anything for keeping connections and relationships? NO! You're lucky if they even have stored procedures (the wrong of implementing these by the way.)
I'm so glad.
I even have a little folding cash left over for travel to Dallas in winter and Montréal in summer.
P.S.Its a lot easier if you take care of the biggest expense (mortgage) first.
Its becomes easier to live on a pension and do your own cooking.
The spouse you can still stand after 30 years just requires some diplomacy.
chemicals and a bunch of crap that gives agribusiness near eternal shelf-life while giving me nothing but tasteless greasy, salty pap in return.
Remember eating real bread? (I'll be baking my own bread again when the weather gets cooler.)
Remember eating "Wonder Bread"(TM)®?
The only thing I wondered about is "What the fuck is this tasteless white congealed spooge?"
Then again, I only have to think about what passes for beer in America and I know that American taste buds are hopelessly deficient.
They eat homogenized peanut butter that consists mainly of salt. Read the indredients list on a jar of Skippy's(TM)® and get depressed.
Then read the ingredients list on a jar of Schmucker's Jam(TM)®. WTF is in that shit?
Peanut butter should consist of peanuts and jam should consist of fruit and a little sugar.
But no! ... The FDA says that's not good enough because the shelf life into the next millennium.
So what if its no longer bears any resemblance to the original food?
Penn Gilette can kiss my starfish.
If the fat fuck keeps on eating FDA recommended shit, I'll out live him by decades and have more fun doing it too.
why I don't go to restaurants anymore.
The choice is extremely expensive or FDA approved. (Greasy, salty preservative laden crap filled with unpronounceable components [I don't dare call them ingredients.])
I'll stick to my organic veggies.
Every disease they've ever encountered, every sore, cut, bruise, concussion and contusion is there for the same low asking price.
YUCK! (As apposed to Yuki. ;-)
you've got lots and lots of RAM with room for the keys and lots of space to waste for unfilled pointers.
Pass 1, read the records, at the key radix store a record URI
Pass 2, sweep RAM and read the record URIs in the order you encounter them copying them onto a sequential write device.
I was doing this years ago.
If you are careful with the number and sizes of your read buffers, the re-read done for pass 2 doesn't have to be all that disk intensive.
You can even generate the keys using what ever hash function you find that is truly efficient and store collisions separately (leave a bit high and go into the a link list maintained by the hash generator for those few keys that hash redundantly.)
Balmer's ugly, bald, sweaty, monkey-boy mug for the Microsoft icon?
Gates is gone and now the marketing and legal departments are now in charge over there.
Might as well call a spade a spade...
As Mahatma Gandhi said "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Balmer, and one comp-sci teacher, must be rueing the day that Linus questioned the accepted wisdom and stated is little OS project.
I have MS so I'm utterly without fine motor control.
That means my handwriting has deteriorated from what the nuns taught me until I have no use for the Mont Blanc pen I got as an award.
During that time (since 1975) my handwriting has NEVER been challenged on a cheque. They blithely ignored everything but the amount. Thank god I never wrote a post-dated cheque. (Yes, I'm Canadian though I now live in NJ. That's they way I've always spelt it :-)
I once had an identity theft perpetrated on mew and I was able to prove it WASN'T me because of the difference in the way I write dates compared to how an US citizen writes dates. That and the fact that the signature was identical (the forger was repeating his forgery exactly on ALL the cheques while I can't ever repeat anything even if I try.)
The first two are writing systems using syllabaries where vowels* are paired with consonants (but not all of them which leads to certain words in English not being renderable in Japanese.
Kanji uses the Chinese style of character formation and is an incredibly hefty system of writing. The major advantage is/was that a Kanji is the same and carries the same meaning throughout the entire continent regardless of how its actually pronounced in the myriad dialects.
Thus the Kanji for "house" is the same in Chinese, (regardless of whether its spoken in Mandarin, Manchurian or any of the hundred or so dialects,) Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and so on across the breadth of the continent.
But that kind of cross-cultural understandability is a hefty price to pay. The average peasant was illiterate and the "learned" classes only had to really learn a few thousand Kanji to get ahead in life. A public service exam consisted of writing poetry because that proved that the applicant knew Kanji.
The Chinese didn't mind paying because in the infancy of the empire communications often took weeks to cross China. There was no need to rush. It didn't matter that it took years to build up a written vocabulary as large as one's spoken one.
Now with communications occurring in fractions of seconds instead of weeks, with the rise of the mass media and with the rise of the internet, Kanji is showing itself to be a hindrance to rapid written communication.
* the usual five: a, e, i, o, & U but in a different order: a, i, u, e & o.
I'd like to see some lawyer from FaceBook(TM)® try to tell the nice officer at the front desk of the 68th precinct in Brooklyn to stop calling it that.
"Fuggedaboutid! We got a room in the back where you'z can go and sober up. It ain't a request bub. Get your ass back there ... NOW!"
My IPv6 address will deny the handshake to the SMTP server and your message won't get through. (That's only ONE use IPv6 addresses.)
My devices will be tied to ME through a registration process and if the get stolen they all become useless to anybody else (and report their exact location when asked to by a police server. Theft only works if you can get away with it. With IPv6 every grain of sand on the beach can be an active responder, 1.8^19 many of them.
Soon you won't be able to get away with SQUAT!
Is this good? Is this bad? Bit of both really but we're all going to go through a whole lot of changes.
The FDA definitely controls and mandates the use of preservatives, just like they control the use of food coloring. (Remember the stink over red dye #2? Its was fine with the FDA, but the medical profession said it was carcinogenic. Eventually, eventually, the doctors won out.)
Its going international in a document called the "Codex Alimentarius". Google it.
By the way, fats can be toxic if they're full of toxins. (Like tobacco smoke was good for you and it helped with cold sores. I don't know anybody who believed that.)
You're being led like a lamb to slaughter by your own inability to pay attention.
Live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse, because its no fun when the "D" in the FDA gets to you and your blood pressure gets elevated from from all the food you've eaten that was regulated by the "F" in the FDA.
I like to eat FOOD, not shit from a chemistry set.
you'll get fat.
One of the problems that the various FDAs the world over have caused with all of the pesticides and preservatives they mandate that the food industry use at every step of the processing chain is that the food not degrade at any point.
Obesity results when the LAST point in the chain, ME and THEE folks, doesn't degrade the food either. It just sits there, on our hips, waists and in our blood streams, turning into toxic, insoluble fats.
Stay as far away from processed food as possible and you'll live a healthier life.
The FDAa are not your protectors.
They're there for Agribusiness's sake, by maximizing self life.
That YOU die fat, unhealthy and miserable doesn't enter into it...
I just hope you're proud of yourself...
Actually its "Minority Report" all over again...
Imagine NEVER AGAIN being able to do anything you're ashamed of.
Be PROUD of being kinky, 'cause EVERYBODY's gonna know.
Going a nice dinner date with a real live woman takes more time and has far fewer side effects than LSD, cocaine and crack.
I don't know about StarCraft but World of Warcraft (WoW) and WoW Gold are the major source and cause of the Spam some nuts from Korea try to post on my blogs.
I have moderation turned on so ...
I might take on some ads for some remuneration but there is no way I'm giving it away.
... that gets you.
The only reason that programs are still running on von Newman, SISD, architecture is because programmers don't like thinking, including von Neumann.
He figured he could simplify the expression of problems by a SISD reduction of the problem space and it screwed up the thinking of every programmer since.
The fact that every single CPU and GPU built with ICs is fundamentally a MIMD processor (even if constrained through a single clock pulse,) and runs lots of processes in parallel is completely opaque to the average programmer.
They keep going on about how many transistors go into a chip without realizing that it is just a bunch of dirty sand without the ability to connect all those components.
Noyce and Kilby got their Nobel prizes not for the number of transistors they could put on a chip but for figuring out how to connect them all together with traces.
The trace is what is behind the silicon and germanium empire of Intel and the other foundries.
Its the only component that has been working reliably and not giving the chip fabs problems.
Just because its not sexy, (read: troublesome,) it gets no respect.
But it IS essential.
Apple is a consumer products company.
They aren't dominant in any area outside of the consumer arena.
If you don't like their stuff you don't have to buy it.
If your sister comes home with an iPhone or an iPad its NOT a reflection on you.
were originally the same size as the US currency in use in the late nineteenth century have to do with anything?
Punchdcards were later shifted to 96 columns and the dimensions of the card shrunk from the old format (which I still remember fondly along with my old IBM 29 keypunch,) to these tiny punch cards.
None of this made any sense back in the nineteen-seventies and none of this makes any sense now.
A typical record was an integer divisable fraction of the 19k 3330 DASD write buffer length when I was working for CN back in the late nineteen-seventies.
Later when I was responsible for coming up with an archiving scheme for Canada Post, when the so-called records could be scanned images of payroll records from the nineteen-thirties and forties, there was no such thing as a fixed format for an employees' file and the hundreds and thousands of transaction records.
Depending on a fixed format record layout is something reprehensible only a unit-record fascist would do.
Reality is a lot more flexible.