This is the same question as what you do about people like Bigley, who got his head cut off in Iraq. Negotiating with the terrorists makes it more likely others will meet the same fate. So the correct decision is to do nothing for him, even though it's a heartbreaking situation.
But now I have an alternative, which is the point of the article. Instead of letting myself die, I can go to India and have the operation done there. Everyone wins but the US healthcare establishment.
In the 1970s, Americans built lousy cars because there was no competition. So competition emerged from foreign countries, and now the entry-level cars you buy are superior in build quality to even the highest-quality cars 30 years ago.
Maybe competition from India will put a much-needed jolt in the foundations of the healthcare establishment, and if so, it's long overdue.
Incidentally, it's interesting that I got theories based on the ideology of the proponent, but no actual breakdowns. Why should a hospital bed cost $1,000 a day? I'm sure I could hire a private nurse for under $200 a day, so why should hospitals, which can split a nurse's services between patients, be so expensive?
Steve and Linda Dashew are wealthy sailboat cruisers. While on their $1.2 million sailboat in a remote island, Steve had some kind of injury - maybe he got an infection or broke his leg or something similar. The local hospital nursed him back to health. He could have had a helicopter lift him off the islands, back to civilization and "real" healthcare for a negligible price compared to his regular budget. He decided the local guys seemed good and moving him would probably be riskier than sticking around. So he stayed five days in the local hospital and was presented with a bill for $200, which I'm sure he paid out of petty cash.
Why can't we have that kind of health care here?
The free market, with people like me wanting to opt out of the system, is the only real hope for reducing the cost of health care. Having the State pay for it is just going to mean we get State-quality health care. Single payer exists in Canada, but so do enormous queues for operations. (Read the original article for supporting evidence, since Canadians have been major users of the Indian health system).
The only alternative to the free market in health care is the State. I look out my window every day and I see broken roads, because the State is supposed to be taking care of them. I see lousy crime prevention, because the State is supposed to be taking care of crime. I see schools that can't educate, because the State has a near monopoly on them. In short, if there's a service in my life that's unsatisfactory, nine times out of ten it's being provided by the State, badly.
Single payer health care, in Canada and elsewhere, doesn't seem to be any different, based on what I've read about the situation there. (There is evidence backing this up in the article we're discussing).
So if you want to tell me that the market isn't the best mechanism to deal with health care, well, tell me what should replace it that would work. I'm not convinced Single Payer is the answer.
Why would it cost $200,000 to get heart surgery? (Or $100,000, or whatever).
I'd definitely go to India rather than face that kind of horrorific bill. It makes me think medical costs are truly out of control, and frankly, I don't want to pay them.
This propostion was actually tested by a curious experiment conducted by the left-wing Guardian newspaper in the UK.
The Guardian selected Clark County, OH as a hotbed of undecided voters, and put together a letter-writing campaign to them. Some 14,000 letters were sent and the universal response from Clark County voters was, well, unprintable.
The sample letters I read were horribly condescending and quite frankly unpersuasive to anyone not already having anti-Bush views, but it's pretty clear that the American man on the street really doesn't want to be influenced by foreigners.
Which, come to think of it, might have doomed Kerry's multilateral candidacy from the start.
There is highly controversial evidence that Iraq had a role in 9/11. For example, there is the infamous alleged meeting in Prague between an Al Queda operative and Mohammed Atta. There is also alleged Iraqi involvement in one of the major organizational meetings for 9/11. I believe there is strong evidence to support those propositions, but it is correct that they have not been proven; there are just too many gaps. Nonetheless, to say that it's known that there was no Iraqi involvement in 9/11 is certainly overstating the case; there's evidence to the contrary, even if it is not proof. So the correct stance is not to say that there is no link, or that there is a link, but that we simply don't know based on the evidence we presently have. If you go deep enough into the 9/11 report, that is in fact what it says: There is no proof of Iraqi involvement. Doesn't mean there's no involvement, just no proof.
The writer of the Duelfer report pleads, in the first few pages, for us to read the whole thing, and understand what he's saying in context. It seems rather churlish for us to ignore that part of the report and simply say there were no WMDs. The report tells us to dig deeper and understand what was really going on, and I feel we should instead of leaping to the glib conclusion that Kerry is right and we did go on a wild goose chase of a war.
After all, there is no question at all that Saddam has a long record of supporting terrorism, including Palastinian suicide bombers. He also was known to harbor terrorists. And if you dig deep into the Duelfer report, you will see that there is no question that Saddam was starting to suceed in getting sanctions lifted, and if they were, he was planning to restart his WMD programs.
There is good news in Iraq, and most of it is ignored by our press. Iraq has a free press. It has a new government with excellent support from the people. Its new police and military are starting to vigourously attack the Al Queda members in the country. The economy is booming. By a narrow majority, Iraqis support the presence of our troops until the new military gets up to speed.
Al Queda and factions of the old Iraqi government are attacking Iraqis and our soldiers. The image of the rebels has been badly damaged by their actions, including the infamous beheadings. Even in Fallujah, the natives are getting restless and opposition to the Al Queda foreigners is strong.
I'm not saying things are perfect in Iraq, and I'm not buying my plane ticket over there until Americans are no longer serious targets. But life's getting better for the man on the street, and although we have made plenty of mistakes, it's nothing like the horrors under Saddam.
In the end, I support President Bush not because he's always right - of course he's not - but because he is steadfast and resolute when confronting our enemies. John Kerry is not the kind of person who will take strong and decisive action when faced with a threat, and I think that's the wrong kind of leader for us during these difficult times.
I visit an Apple store and get generally excellent service, with little to no hard sell. They also offer free help with their products, which is an enormous advantage over Gateway and others. This move gives the chain amazing customer loyalty; I'll go out of my way to buy from them because I know I'll get quality assistance if I have trouble.
I visited a Gateway store a couple of times, and it's always been "push-push-push" hard sell. Very unpleasant experience. Better than the CompUSA "no sell" experience, where you practically have to beg to find a sales rep to ask a question to, but leagues behind the Apple Store experience. Gateway stores were in fairly low-traffic middle class shopping malls, while Apple's stores are in upscale malls. It's fairly obvious which strategy worked better, and to their credit Sony seems to be copying Apple's formula, not Gateway's.
If Sony patterns their stores after Apple's, including the Genius Bar, I think they could do well and build loyalty. But it sounds like it's more a passive showcase for their products, without even real sales expectations. If so, I don't think it will build the kind of loyalty Apple does.
Steve Jobs and crew really are exceptional at their jobs. I really don't think Sony has the ability or the desire to invest enough money to beat Apple on what is now their own turf.
Well, I do buy used cars because new cars are so bloody expensive:-(.
That being said, BMW has iDrive, designed by Microsoft, while Mercedes has COMND designed by themselves or an unknown party.
As long as cars don't need to run standardized software - and I think we have laptops for that - I would suspect that it will remain a competitive market. Hopefully Windows for Cars will cause the somewhat clunky COMND to improve so that when I buy a new Mercedes in 2020 or thereabouts, it will be designed better than the old models.
The idea of having an in-car version of "find the cheapest gas within x miles" is actually pretty cool.
That being said, I would personally boycott any automaker that used Windows in their products, for any reason. I just don't want to see it, and I'm willing to pay extra, if necessary, to use whatever competition comes up instead.
cp or scp will not successfully back up a running mySQL database because data is stored in cache and rarely flushed. For applications where the database must run continuously, you would in fact need to back up through replication.
It would also help with load balancing at the same time.
He's correct that it would not use Quartz Extreme, which is a speedup feature that uses the video card to offload a lot of work from the CPU.
However, he's most likely wrong about it not speeding up your machine. I had a 400mhz PowerBook G4 when it was first introduced, and the menus were pretty sluggish. Quartz Extreme fixed this when I upgraded to the 1ghz model. But then I sold that and temporarily got a 400mhz PowerBook again with Panther.
It was much, much faster than my original 400mhz PowerBook. Menus and basic functions were almost as fast as the 1ghz model. Of course meaty processor-intensive functions were a lot slower, but the point I'm making is that the optimizations made even an old machine shine.
The other major advantage is that the Finder has really been smoothed up nicely. It works a lot better than in earlier versions because they noticed a lot of the usability bottlenecks and fixed them.
Of course at this point you might just want to wait until Tiger (you have maybe six months to go) unless you can get Panther cheap.
I bought a 32" Sony HDTV (used, for $550) and was looking forward to using its DVI inputs with my computer, since I assumed the DVI input combined with the HD image quality would produce a sharp picture.
Unfortunately, it does not. The picture is fuzzy and generally not good enough for much other than showing a desktop image. I'm pretty disappointed.
One peculiarity is that the picture's letterboxed at HD resolution. My TV has a standard aspect ratio, which is good since it shows standard definition TV at full size. Strangely enough, this extra space is not offered to the host computer.
My TV is excellent quality otherwise, with a beautiful NTSC picture, although I haven't found a HD signal source other than my computer to check it out with. So I think the TV is fine, but TVs are just not optimized as computer displays, at least not yet. So if you're thinking of using a TV as a monitor as well, be sure to check it using a computer - preferably your own - before making your purchase.
I don't have the time to do the research necessary to refute your comments about Wal-Mart, so I'm going to leave that alone.
However, it's pretty clear that the amount of money schools get doesn't relate at all to the quality of education. There are Catholic-run schools that blow away public schools in quality of education and yet they cost half the price. Many parents nowadays are homeschooling, and they outscore public school pupils on standardized tests.
See, I think you and people who make similar arguments to you are looking at things in the wrong way. You're saying, "We're cheap with our schools; we should give them money and things will improve". I reply by saying "Well, there are schools that spend less and get better results, and that makes me think there is absolutely no excuse for our public school system to even exist."
Let me give you a good example of why money isn't the answer. One problem with ghetto schools is that many pupils think of education as almost a sin, as something white people do. They actually turn hostile towards pupils who try their best to learn. If you put these people into a gorgeous, shiny school with all the money in the world thrown at it, all they'll do is paint it with graffiti and blow up the science lab. You have to change attitudes to fix that, and there have been ghetto schools that have succeeded. How has this happened? Through sheer force of character, personality and will. It had nothing to do with money; the schools were poorly funded and remain so. But someone who cared, who probably wasn't paid a lot, did magical things.
The only way to encourage that is to loosen the bureaucratic chains that exist in our school systems. These also absorb a lot of the money sloshing around.
I'd like to see schools improve, but I don't want to throw money into a black hole. I want to see results, and we've had decades of alleged "reform" with nothing to show for it.
It's time to try something else, and to me that something else is vouchers. I'd like to hear other solutions that don't require increased amounts of money going to the schools. We give the schools plenty. It's not the money, it's the management -- and no amount of money is going to change the management.
Describe how this situation is different from present public schools.
The rich get their snob schools and the poor and middle class get mediocrity.
Vouchers help by widening the demand for alternative forms of education and making it possible for private initiative to help.
Why do I think it would help?
Well, I don't like Wal-Mart either - I'm at an income and educational class where I just don't like poor quality and don't care about cheap prices. But I'm glad it exists for people who would otherwise have to go without clothing or cheap stereos or whatever. For you see there are two Americas, and one America has $5,000 stereos and the other has $30 ones, and yet they both listen to and enjoy music.(*)
Besides, everyone knows the more discriminating go to Target, which sells similar stuff to Wal-Mart at similar prices, but much higher quality overall.
If we could have a school like Target, instead of just Wal-Mart like public schools, wouldn't that be an advantage?
D
(*) Actually, the other America has people who put $1,500 super loud stereos in their cars, which just goes to show that people of all economic levels find the money for what they really want in life. Capitalism gives them that flexibility, and that is its greatness.
Work on military products is normally kept domestic because it's not good for security to be dependent on services from another country. It's also not politically desirable, since weapons systems are "sold" through the pork they bring to various states.
I think our problems with education are less with resources than with our educational bureaucracy. Spending more money doesn't necessarily mean quality. Good management can bring quality to financially starved institutions. Our problem is bad management and only significant reform on the local level will fix it.
That's why I support vouchers, which let kids go to public or private schools of their choice. It forces schools to focus on their quality problems, or die. It's a stark choice, but it works.
The hawks and the war mongers practically built today's computing, you know. The Internet was originally a military project. Computing has gotten an enormous boost by military research.
Turning Iraq and Afghanistan from brutal dictatorships to democracies - a change already made in Afghanistan and fast-coming in Iraq - strikes me as something that is very, very good for the long-term interests of the US, the world and the nations involved. And thanks to our sophistication, we did it with a remarkably low loss of life, both on our side and the Iraq's.
I would recommend that you check out Tommy Franks' book American Soldier. Get to know military people a little better. They're not devils; they are people doing the best they can at a very difficult job. And over seventy percent of them are supporting George W Bush for re-election, because they believe what they're doing is right. I'm not asking for you to agree with them, but you should check out their side and understand that they are not cardboard cutout people.
If you're looking for domestic entry level programming that's going to stay here, I'd say the military's not a bad place to start; outsourcing is prevented by security considerations.
And if your domestic improvements are various subsidies and added government fat, that will just ensure that we become less effective than ever.
We are victims of our own success. We've bloated our cost of living to the point where a typical programmer salary of $60,000 doesn't buy all that much. So if people outside the US are willing to work hard for $8k a year, and feel rich, with a comparable lifestyle to what we have here, I can't really blame anyone for wanting to move operations to India.
So how do we compete? I don't know, but I don't think cutting our military (which is only about 6% of GNP) is going to help. The root problem is our cost of living, and I have no idea how to lower it.
One thing that will happen is that Indian salaries are going to increase, but it will be a long time, if ever, before they reach parity with ours.
Thoughts?
D
PS For more on Iraq from an Iraqi perspective, I think this sums it up nicely. Please read it if you're a skeptic about the Iraq war or believe we've done a really bad thing by invading Iraq.
Interesting that you compare it with Pan Am because Virgin Air now has a similar high-class image.
After I sent the parent message, I remembered that Virgin Mobile used the same colour scheme on their mobile phones. So it actually appears to be their scheme even though the phones aren't their own either.
I guess Richard Branson wanted it gray to match his suits.
But he doesn't wear suits, does he?
A very strange misstep. I expect better from his company, which is normally pretty good at doing interesting things.
I agree that an improved language would be interesting.
It just doesn't look like the one in the article is it.
You could, of course, solve the null problem by simply defining new operators that were the same as regular ones except that NULLs were treated as zeroes or empty strings. Or you could define all your fields as NOT NULL, which would have the effect of defaulting them to zeroes or empty strings. You don't need a whole new language to do that.
Now, I would love to have an easier to learn JOIN syntax. Took forever for me to figure it out. So I don't think the current SQL syntax is without flaws. It's certainly worth working on improving it. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The language should still use English terms that are reasonably comprehensible to the person learning the language. Keywords like SELECT, FROM, WITH, and so on make the language easier to learn than if mathematical notation is substituted.
I glanced through the paper, and to be honest the new language looks like something only a mathematician could love.
I think I prefer the old SQL to having to learn about TUPLEs and typing all my keywords in UPPER CASE WHICH I THINK MAKES IT TOUGH ON THE EYES.
I still want to say
insert into database set x = 100, y = 'foo'
instead of
TUPLE (100, 'foo'), (200, 'bar')
That's almost unreadable! Of course maybe the former is just mySQL syntax, but it's still enormously easier to read, write and debug than what they seem to be proposing.
Give me SQL syntax, however awkward, before math theory syntax any day!
I hear a lot about leftist groups screaming about how terrible GM foods are, but insofar as I know, they're on people's dinner tables all the time and we've chomped plenty of them down with no ill effects.
The urge to improve on what we've been given in life is an incredibly strong human trait, and it's one of the things I most admire about us as a species. So I am disinclined to listen to this almost religious hatred of the idea.
GM foods seem like excellent ways to make food more abundent and cost-effective, and that's a brainy scheme for all mankind. Fewer people will starve and farms will work better.
Of course the MacOS also comes free with the initial hardware sale.
You are right that the MacOS is pricey. On the other hand, every release of the MacOS to date has included slick, glitzy features like Expose. And every release of the MacOS has worked better with existing hardware than before.
For example, I have a PowerBook G4 400mhz. It was the first of the G4 PowerBooks, introduced in January 2001. This system flies under MacOS X Panther. I remember feeling it was sluggish at times when I first bought it but now it feels reborn. That's an OS upgrade that delivers real value!
In contrast, consider the upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, which confused the heck out of users by changing the options completely around, and managed to slow down even machines that were lightning fast under 2000.
Microsoft hasn't introduced an upgrade since XP, not because they're not greedy enough to want our money, but because they have been slow in improving on the now ancient system. I'm not so sure that's a good thing.
By buying MacOS upgrades, you're financing an innovative development team that continuously produces wonderful surprises. Sure, we have to pay for them, but at least they come, and they delight us.
What's the point of being so rude to this nice fellow?
The odds are pretty good that in a town of 600, there aren't two people who want to go to exactly the same place at the same time. And as long as that's the case, a bus or carpool simply won't work.
I'm in a large urban area and there STILL aren't two people who do anywhere near the exact same commute as I do. And often I want to shop or run errands on the way to work and back. Carpools don't work well if you like flexibility.
You can be as anti-car as you want, I suppose, but it in terms of time, it's still by far the most efficient way to go around. And if you can eliminate the ecological impact of driving, why not do it instead of wasting away your life at bus stops or waiting to be picked up or dropped off?
D
PS Note that traffic congestion is not a problem in a rural community of 600. It's not a problem in Los Angeles, either, if you simply live close to where you work, as I do. I have a trouble-free 10 minute commute.
Have you figured out a solution to it getting tangled in all the wires geeks normally have on the floor?
That's what did mine in, from a practical perspective. But I have the older generation model.
I finally wound up getting a maid. It does work and she does a lot more than vacuum(*). Dishes, laundry, all that sort of stuff. For $40 a week, it will be quite a while before technology can compete.
D
(*) No, sadly, not that. Get your mind out of the gutter:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Let myself die.
This is the same question as what you do about people like Bigley, who got his head cut off in Iraq. Negotiating with the terrorists makes it more likely others will meet the same fate. So the correct decision is to do nothing for him, even though it's a heartbreaking situation.
But now I have an alternative, which is the point of the article. Instead of letting myself die, I can go to India and have the operation done there. Everyone wins but the US healthcare establishment.
In the 1970s, Americans built lousy cars because there was no competition. So competition emerged from foreign countries, and now the entry-level cars you buy are superior in build quality to even the highest-quality cars 30 years ago.
Maybe competition from India will put a much-needed jolt in the foundations of the healthcare establishment, and if so, it's long overdue.
Incidentally, it's interesting that I got theories based on the ideology of the proponent, but no actual breakdowns. Why should a hospital bed cost $1,000 a day? I'm sure I could hire a private nurse for under $200 a day, so why should hospitals, which can split a nurse's services between patients, be so expensive?
Steve and Linda Dashew are wealthy sailboat cruisers. While on their $1.2 million sailboat in a remote island, Steve had some kind of injury - maybe he got an infection or broke his leg or something similar. The local hospital nursed him back to health. He could have had a helicopter lift him off the islands, back to civilization and "real" healthcare for a negligible price compared to his regular budget. He decided the local guys seemed good and moving him would probably be riskier than sticking around. So he stayed five days in the local hospital and was presented with a bill for $200, which I'm sure he paid out of petty cash.
Why can't we have that kind of health care here?
The free market, with people like me wanting to opt out of the system, is the only real hope for reducing the cost of health care. Having the State pay for it is just going to mean we get State-quality health care. Single payer exists in Canada, but so do enormous queues for operations. (Read the original article for supporting evidence, since Canadians have been major users of the Indian health system).
The only alternative to the free market in health care is the State. I look out my window every day and I see broken roads, because the State is supposed to be taking care of them. I see lousy crime prevention, because the State is supposed to be taking care of crime. I see schools that can't educate, because the State has a near monopoly on them. In short, if there's a service in my life that's unsatisfactory, nine times out of ten it's being provided by the State, badly.
Single payer health care, in Canada and elsewhere, doesn't seem to be any different, based on what I've read about the situation there. (There is evidence backing this up in the article we're discussing).
So if you want to tell me that the market isn't the best mechanism to deal with health care, well, tell me what should replace it that would work. I'm not convinced Single Payer is the answer.
D
Why would it cost $200,000 to get heart surgery? (Or $100,000, or whatever).
I'd definitely go to India rather than face that kind of horrorific bill. It makes me think medical costs are truly out of control, and frankly, I don't want to pay them.
D
This propostion was actually tested by a curious experiment conducted by the left-wing Guardian newspaper in the UK.
The Guardian selected Clark County, OH as a hotbed of undecided voters, and put together a letter-writing campaign to them. Some 14,000 letters were sent and the universal response from Clark County voters was, well, unprintable.
The sample letters I read were horribly condescending and quite frankly unpersuasive to anyone not already having anti-Bush views, but it's pretty clear that the American man on the street really doesn't want to be influenced by foreigners.
Which, come to think of it, might have doomed Kerry's multilateral candidacy from the start.
D
There is highly controversial evidence that Iraq had a role in 9/11. For example, there is the infamous alleged meeting in Prague between an Al Queda operative and Mohammed Atta. There is also alleged Iraqi involvement in one of the major organizational meetings for 9/11. I believe there is strong evidence to support those propositions, but it is correct that they have not been proven; there are just too many gaps. Nonetheless, to say that it's known that there was no Iraqi involvement in 9/11 is certainly overstating the case; there's evidence to the contrary, even if it is not proof. So the correct stance is not to say that there is no link, or that there is a link, but that we simply don't know based on the evidence we presently have. If you go deep enough into the 9/11 report, that is in fact what it says: There is no proof of Iraqi involvement. Doesn't mean there's no involvement, just no proof.
The writer of the Duelfer report pleads, in the first few pages, for us to read the whole thing, and understand what he's saying in context. It seems rather churlish for us to ignore that part of the report and simply say there were no WMDs. The report tells us to dig deeper and understand what was really going on, and I feel we should instead of leaping to the glib conclusion that Kerry is right and we did go on a wild goose chase of a war.
After all, there is no question at all that Saddam has a long record of supporting terrorism, including Palastinian suicide bombers. He also was known to harbor terrorists. And if you dig deep into the Duelfer report, you will see that there is no question that Saddam was starting to suceed in getting sanctions lifted, and if they were, he was planning to restart his WMD programs.
There is good news in Iraq, and most of it is ignored by our press. Iraq has a free press. It has a new government with excellent support from the people. Its new police and military are starting to vigourously attack the Al Queda members in the country. The economy is booming. By a narrow majority, Iraqis support the presence of our troops until the new military gets up to speed.
Al Queda and factions of the old Iraqi government are attacking Iraqis and our soldiers. The image of the rebels has been badly damaged by their actions, including the infamous beheadings. Even in Fallujah, the natives are getting restless and opposition to the Al Queda foreigners is strong.
I'm not saying things are perfect in Iraq, and I'm not buying my plane ticket over there until Americans are no longer serious targets. But life's getting better for the man on the street, and although we have made plenty of mistakes, it's nothing like the horrors under Saddam.
In the end, I support President Bush not because he's always right - of course he's not - but because he is steadfast and resolute when confronting our enemies. John Kerry is not the kind of person who will take strong and decisive action when faced with a threat, and I think that's the wrong kind of leader for us during these difficult times.
D
I visit an Apple store and get generally excellent service, with little to no hard sell. They also offer free help with their products, which is an enormous advantage over Gateway and others. This move gives the chain amazing customer loyalty; I'll go out of my way to buy from them because I know I'll get quality assistance if I have trouble.
I visited a Gateway store a couple of times, and it's always been "push-push-push" hard sell. Very unpleasant experience. Better than the CompUSA "no sell" experience, where you practically have to beg to find a sales rep to ask a question to, but leagues behind the Apple Store experience. Gateway stores were in fairly low-traffic middle class shopping malls, while Apple's stores are in upscale malls. It's fairly obvious which strategy worked better, and to their credit Sony seems to be copying Apple's formula, not Gateway's.
If Sony patterns their stores after Apple's, including the Genius Bar, I think they could do well and build loyalty. But it sounds like it's more a passive showcase for their products, without even real sales expectations. If so, I don't think it will build the kind of loyalty Apple does.
Steve Jobs and crew really are exceptional at their jobs. I really don't think Sony has the ability or the desire to invest enough money to beat Apple on what is now their own turf.
D
Well, I do buy used cars because new cars are so bloody expensive :-(.
That being said, BMW has iDrive, designed by Microsoft, while Mercedes has COMND designed by themselves or an unknown party.
As long as cars don't need to run standardized software - and I think we have laptops for that - I would suspect that it will remain a competitive market. Hopefully Windows for Cars will cause the somewhat clunky COMND to improve so that when I buy a new Mercedes in 2020 or thereabouts, it will be designed better than the old models.
D
The idea of having an in-car version of "find the cheapest gas within x miles" is actually pretty cool.
That being said, I would personally boycott any automaker that used Windows in their products, for any reason. I just don't want to see it, and I'm willing to pay extra, if necessary, to use whatever competition comes up instead.
D
cp or scp will not successfully back up a running mySQL database because data is stored in cache and rarely flushed. For applications where the database must run continuously, you would in fact need to back up through replication.
It would also help with load balancing at the same time.
D
He's correct that it would not use Quartz Extreme, which is a speedup feature that uses the video card to offload a lot of work from the CPU.
However, he's most likely wrong about it not speeding up your machine. I had a 400mhz PowerBook G4 when it was first introduced, and the menus were pretty sluggish. Quartz Extreme fixed this when I upgraded to the 1ghz model. But then I sold that and temporarily got a 400mhz PowerBook again with Panther.
It was much, much faster than my original 400mhz PowerBook. Menus and basic functions were almost as fast as the 1ghz model. Of course meaty processor-intensive functions were a lot slower, but the point I'm making is that the optimizations made even an old machine shine.
The other major advantage is that the Finder has really been smoothed up nicely. It works a lot better than in earlier versions because they noticed a lot of the usability bottlenecks and fixed them.
Of course at this point you might just want to wait until Tiger (you have maybe six months to go) unless you can get Panther cheap.
D
Most phishing scams simply duplicate images from a web site, not a spam from the target, so sadly you are wrong.
D
I bought a 32" Sony HDTV (used, for $550) and was looking forward to using its DVI inputs with my computer, since I assumed the DVI input combined with the HD image quality would produce a sharp picture.
Unfortunately, it does not. The picture is fuzzy and generally not good enough for much other than showing a desktop image. I'm pretty disappointed.
One peculiarity is that the picture's letterboxed at HD resolution. My TV has a standard aspect ratio, which is good since it shows standard definition TV at full size. Strangely enough, this extra space is not offered to the host computer.
My TV is excellent quality otherwise, with a beautiful NTSC picture, although I haven't found a HD signal source other than my computer to check it out with. So I think the TV is fine, but TVs are just not optimized as computer displays, at least not yet. So if you're thinking of using a TV as a monitor as well, be sure to check it using a computer - preferably your own - before making your purchase.
D
I don't have the time to do the research necessary to refute your comments about Wal-Mart, so I'm going to leave that alone.
However, it's pretty clear that the amount of money schools get doesn't relate at all to the quality of education. There are Catholic-run schools that blow away public schools in quality of education and yet they cost half the price. Many parents nowadays are homeschooling, and they outscore public school pupils on standardized tests.
See, I think you and people who make similar arguments to you are looking at things in the wrong way. You're saying, "We're cheap with our schools; we should give them money and things will improve". I reply by saying "Well, there are schools that spend less and get better results, and that makes me think there is absolutely no excuse for our public school system to even exist."
Let me give you a good example of why money isn't the answer. One problem with ghetto schools is that many pupils think of education as almost a sin, as something white people do. They actually turn hostile towards pupils who try their best to learn. If you put these people into a gorgeous, shiny school with all the money in the world thrown at it, all they'll do is paint it with graffiti and blow up the science lab. You have to change attitudes to fix that, and there have been ghetto schools that have succeeded. How has this happened? Through sheer force of character, personality and will. It had nothing to do with money; the schools were poorly funded and remain so. But someone who cared, who probably wasn't paid a lot, did magical things.
The only way to encourage that is to loosen the bureaucratic chains that exist in our school systems. These also absorb a lot of the money sloshing around.
I'd like to see schools improve, but I don't want to throw money into a black hole. I want to see results, and we've had decades of alleged "reform" with nothing to show for it.
It's time to try something else, and to me that something else is vouchers. I'd like to hear other solutions that don't require increased amounts of money going to the schools. We give the schools plenty. It's not the money, it's the management -- and no amount of money is going to change the management.
Only vouchers can do that.
D
You are wrong. (See question 13).
D
Describe how this situation is different from present public schools.
The rich get their snob schools and the poor and middle class get mediocrity.
Vouchers help by widening the demand for alternative forms of education and making it possible for private initiative to help.
Why do I think it would help?
Well, I don't like Wal-Mart either - I'm at an income and educational class where I just don't like poor quality and don't care about cheap prices. But I'm glad it exists for people who would otherwise have to go without clothing or cheap stereos or whatever. For you see there are two Americas, and one America has $5,000 stereos and the other has $30 ones, and yet they both listen to and enjoy music.(*)
Besides, everyone knows the more discriminating go to Target, which sells similar stuff to Wal-Mart at similar prices, but much higher quality overall.
If we could have a school like Target, instead of just Wal-Mart like public schools, wouldn't that be an advantage?
D
(*) Actually, the other America has people who put $1,500 super loud stereos in their cars, which just goes to show that people of all economic levels find the money for what they really want in life. Capitalism gives them that flexibility, and that is its greatness.
Work on military products is normally kept domestic because it's not good for security to be dependent on services from another country. It's also not politically desirable, since weapons systems are "sold" through the pork they bring to various states.
I think our problems with education are less with resources than with our educational bureaucracy. Spending more money doesn't necessarily mean quality. Good management can bring quality to financially starved institutions. Our problem is bad management and only significant reform on the local level will fix it.
That's why I support vouchers, which let kids go to public or private schools of their choice. It forces schools to focus on their quality problems, or die. It's a stark choice, but it works.
D
The hawks and the war mongers practically built today's computing, you know. The Internet was originally a military project. Computing has gotten an enormous boost by military research.
Turning Iraq and Afghanistan from brutal dictatorships to democracies - a change already made in Afghanistan and fast-coming in Iraq - strikes me as something that is very, very good for the long-term interests of the US, the world and the nations involved. And thanks to our sophistication, we did it with a remarkably low loss of life, both on our side and the Iraq's.
I would recommend that you check out Tommy Franks' book American Soldier. Get to know military people a little better. They're not devils; they are people doing the best they can at a very difficult job. And over seventy percent of them are supporting George W Bush for re-election, because they believe what they're doing is right. I'm not asking for you to agree with them, but you should check out their side and understand that they are not cardboard cutout people.
If you're looking for domestic entry level programming that's going to stay here, I'd say the military's not a bad place to start; outsourcing is prevented by security considerations.
And if your domestic improvements are various subsidies and added government fat, that will just ensure that we become less effective than ever.
We are victims of our own success. We've bloated our cost of living to the point where a typical programmer salary of $60,000 doesn't buy all that much. So if people outside the US are willing to work hard for $8k a year, and feel rich, with a comparable lifestyle to what we have here, I can't really blame anyone for wanting to move operations to India.
So how do we compete? I don't know, but I don't think cutting our military (which is only about 6% of GNP) is going to help. The root problem is our cost of living, and I have no idea how to lower it.
One thing that will happen is that Indian salaries are going to increase, but it will be a long time, if ever, before they reach parity with ours.
Thoughts?
D
PS For more on Iraq from an Iraqi perspective, I think this sums it up nicely. Please read it if you're a skeptic about the Iraq war or believe we've done a really bad thing by invading Iraq.
Interesting that you compare it with Pan Am because Virgin Air now has a similar high-class image.
After I sent the parent message, I remembered that Virgin Mobile used the same colour scheme on their mobile phones. So it actually appears to be their scheme even though the phones aren't their own either.
I guess Richard Branson wanted it gray to match his suits.
But he doesn't wear suits, does he?
A very strange misstep. I expect better from his company, which is normally pretty good at doing interesting things.
D
In the same vein, with the advantage of being free, is The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation.
I agree with the others who have said that for the most part, I would be prejudiced against any attorney with the bad taste to use PowerPoint.
D
I tend to agree. It just doesn't look like a consumer icon to me.
Come to think of it, it has a Windows 2000 look with all that funeral grey.
Even Microsoft's given that up!
D
I agree that an improved language would be interesting.
It just doesn't look like the one in the article is it.
You could, of course, solve the null problem by simply defining new operators that were the same as regular ones except that NULLs were treated as zeroes or empty strings. Or you could define all your fields as NOT NULL, which would have the effect of defaulting them to zeroes or empty strings. You don't need a whole new language to do that.
Now, I would love to have an easier to learn JOIN syntax. Took forever for me to figure it out. So I don't think the current SQL syntax is without flaws. It's certainly worth working on improving it. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The language should still use English terms that are reasonably comprehensible to the person learning the language. Keywords like SELECT, FROM, WITH, and so on make the language easier to learn than if mathematical notation is substituted.
D
I glanced through the paper, and to be honest the new language looks like something only a mathematician could love.
I think I prefer the old SQL to having to learn about TUPLEs and typing all my keywords in UPPER CASE WHICH I THINK MAKES IT TOUGH ON THE EYES.
I still want to say
insert into database set x = 100, y = 'foo'
instead of
TUPLE (100, 'foo'), (200, 'bar')
That's almost unreadable! Of course maybe the former is just mySQL syntax, but it's still enormously easier to read, write and debug than what they seem to be proposing.
Give me SQL syntax, however awkward, before math theory syntax any day!
D
I hear a lot about leftist groups screaming about how terrible GM foods are, but insofar as I know, they're on people's dinner tables all the time and we've chomped plenty of them down with no ill effects.
The urge to improve on what we've been given in life is an incredibly strong human trait, and it's one of the things I most admire about us as a species. So I am disinclined to listen to this almost religious hatred of the idea.
GM foods seem like excellent ways to make food more abundent and cost-effective, and that's a brainy scheme for all mankind. Fewer people will starve and farms will work better.
What's the problem?
D
Of course the MacOS also comes free with the initial hardware sale.
You are right that the MacOS is pricey. On the other hand, every release of the MacOS to date has included slick, glitzy features like Expose. And every release of the MacOS has worked better with existing hardware than before.
For example, I have a PowerBook G4 400mhz. It was the first of the G4 PowerBooks, introduced in January 2001. This system flies under MacOS X Panther. I remember feeling it was sluggish at times when I first bought it but now it feels reborn. That's an OS upgrade that delivers real value!
In contrast, consider the upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, which confused the heck out of users by changing the options completely around, and managed to slow down even machines that were lightning fast under 2000.
Microsoft hasn't introduced an upgrade since XP, not because they're not greedy enough to want our money, but because they have been slow in improving on the now ancient system. I'm not so sure that's a good thing.
By buying MacOS upgrades, you're financing an innovative development team that continuously produces wonderful surprises. Sure, we have to pay for them, but at least they come, and they delight us.
That's not so bad.
D
What's the point of being so rude to this nice fellow?
The odds are pretty good that in a town of 600, there aren't two people who want to go to exactly the same place at the same time. And as long as that's the case, a bus or carpool simply won't work.
I'm in a large urban area and there STILL aren't two people who do anywhere near the exact same commute as I do. And often I want to shop or run errands on the way to work and back. Carpools don't work well if you like flexibility.
You can be as anti-car as you want, I suppose, but it in terms of time, it's still by far the most efficient way to go around. And if you can eliminate the ecological impact of driving, why not do it instead of wasting away your life at bus stops or waiting to be picked up or dropped off?
D
PS Note that traffic congestion is not a problem in a rural community of 600. It's not a problem in Los Angeles, either, if you simply live close to where you work, as I do. I have a trouble-free 10 minute commute.
Have you figured out a solution to it getting tangled in all the wires geeks normally have on the floor?
:-).
That's what did mine in, from a practical perspective. But I have the older generation model.
I finally wound up getting a maid. It does work and she does a lot more than vacuum(*). Dishes, laundry, all that sort of stuff. For $40 a week, it will be quite a while before technology can compete.
D
(*) No, sadly, not that. Get your mind out of the gutter