>this is an obvious (and mathematically correct)
>conclusion.
It is neither obvious, nor mathematically correct. And since when is "chinese" a language? Does he mean mandaring?
The simple and relevant mathematical fact is that more people speak english than any other language, and taht gap is likely to widen. English will increase its dominance not because its spoken in the U.S., but because it is the language of commerce.
Yes, there's probably in the neighborhood of a billion mandarin speakers. As you point out, this doesn't mean that they can all use the internet. Furthermore, guess what second language those that can afford the internet are more likely to speak?
>seem to have no problem with the folks at GM and
>Honda deciding that there will be one particular
>convention for pedal layout.
That's an arrangement we can all use *without looking*, without retraining, etc. You can't say that about Windows or Office. For crying out loud, ms just changed the binding that, for more than ten years, has been "kill block of cells" to "insert hyperlink." Ford randomly moving the horn around the cockpit from year to year is one thing. This is closer to changing "second pedal from the right fully depressed" from "maximum braking" to "honk horn" or "release hood."
There is *not* a trivial standardized ms interface. It changes from month to month, and requires constant user attention to the interface rather than the task on hand.
> Gnome and KDE would set a terrific example if
>they would get together, rationally and
>unemotionally select the most desirable features
>from each, and include them in the one
>frontrunning Linux desktop
But that's just not possible. Gnome exists for *religious* reasons, namely that KDE wasn't pure enough in the Holy GPL. Look for Catholicism and Lurtheranism as a single institution before Gnome and KDE (after 500 years, there is some progress [of course, that has the Missouri Synod upset, but that's another story ....]).
The entire claim that KDE was in violation of the GPL was just plain nonsense. It wasn't true (though imported GPL code may have violated the GPL). It is not *possible* to violate your own license with your own work. KDE was not GPL, in spite of their protestations, but a Quasi-GPL, with an exception for libraries. Not because it said so, but becausethe law does that on its own.
I put KDE on the home machine for my kids and wife, but I have yet to see a reason to use either. Yes, they replace xterms with annoying things. They also try to replace the woven X background.
So why choose to install either? You can still use the aplications that are linked to their libraries.
A friend paid the $45 because they couldn't get an example in the excel manual to work (they needed it for a group project). The answer was that excel couldn't do that, and the manual was wrong. No refund.
Go back and take microeconomics. If, by chance, you took it and somehow passed, do your professor a a favor and leave his name out of it . . .
Firms sell at a loss when they lose less by selling than by sitting idle. If my choices are to sit still and lose two billion from my idle plant that I'm stuck with, or to pay another half a billion to produce a billion and a half in revenue, I choose the latter, losing one billion instead of two.
>Most chips and circuit boards are never sold
>directly to the general public; they're designed,
>manufactured and purchased by the various
>companies who manufacture hardware for end-users.
>Thus, applying the same analysis that you might
>use when considering, say, high speed
>digital-to-analogue converters, might yield some
>phoney results.
yeah. bought three of those last week, instead of my usual two, do to the great sale . . .
:)
hawk
Re:not as easy as you might think
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
>Speaking as a programmer who works for a big
>software company, it's unlikely that anything
> like that would be able to get through.
Speaking as a director of the Federal Aviation Authority, it's unlikely that four planes could be simultaneuously hijacked and . . .
A couple of years ago, I stumbled across an old "Walt Disney Presents" from the 50's or early 60'sl with a discussion of this. They really spend time on the plausibility and the twist that makes it "believable"
The phyysics of a game should be playable; there's no need for them to be accurate. If Aristotelian physics work better, use them . . .
I'm reminded of folks in high school who would get hot under the collar arguing that the Arduin rules for magic and hit points were more realistic than the D&D versions, or the realism of different types of dragons . . .
>Well, the biggest grip I have with Linux is that
>the GNU people (it was the GNU, people
>right?)
Yes.
>that decided that 'man' wasn't good enough and
>they wanted to reinvent it;
It's not that they wanted to reinvent itthat's a probelem; that would have been survivable. It's that info is just plain an abomination. It seems to be an "emacs everywhere" notion. It's a pain to navigate, counter-intuitive, and the type of thing that could only have come out of the emacs or redmond mentalities.
Most folks in my department used word for theses and dissertations. It typically took at least a week, full time, to browbeat the document into compliance with the graduate office rules.
I used lyx, and found an existing isu.sty program. My time? Less than 10 minutes . . .
>Sure, make your CV presentable, as messy hard to
>read ones make the reader's life more
>difficult and get thrown. Equally, don't send in
>a coffee stained paper copy (or virus infected
>email copy;-) as they make you look
>unprofessional.
Many years ago, at 18, I had been hired by a startup to write software. We needed changes in some firmware, and I told them that my change to part time for the school year would prevent me from doing that *and* keeping up with the MIS system.
I'd been hired on the spot when I showed up. I didn't know better than simply to appear with my resume in hand, rather than mailing it in. I was abe to show them something they desparately wanted, and they realized they could have me full time for less than a part time consultant.
Anyway,they handed me the folders of resumes collected when they had advertised, and told *me* to find someone.
I was shocked by some of them. I'd always heard about the importance of appearance, etc., but I just wasn't prepared.
The one that I can still picture had been printed on a crummy (even for the time) dot matrix printer--the kind swhere the dots were distinct with space between them. It had then been copied on a crummy photocopier, and was quite grey. To top it off (really, I'm not making this up) the cover letter was written on *graph paper* in pencil . . .
I got sent to speech classes for a similar reason. My speech teacher was quite proud of her achivement. I don't think anyone had the heart to tell her that my two front teeth had grown in at the same time . . .
> whereas psychiatry-forcing social misfits into institutions,
Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. Clinical psychology seems to fit into your rant, too.
>When's the last time you had cause to curse the >entire profession of astrophysics, for
>example?
Let just *one* comet hit the earth, and guess who's going to get the blame.
>They're the ones Shakespeare tells us to kill first
You're falling into what Stalin called the "useful idiot" category. Killing the lawyer's was part of destabilizing society for revolution, not of improving it . . . and for every lawyer who commits one of those "villain" acts, there's another lawyer opposing it. That's how te system works.
If you have that kind of difference running around, there's a possiblity that the field is changing.
One of the things that drew me to economics when leaving law is that it is still emerging as a science. To call the economics of 30 or 40 years ago science would be pushing it, at best. Today, with the Ph.D.'s produced in the last 10 years or so, the scientific method has won. As a science, economics is still primitive--perhaps at a level near Newton's laws of motion.
There's still plenty of cranks around, but retirement by retirement, "social science"[1] is being displaced by science. The split between positive economics [science] and normative economics [politics, social choice] is becoming explicit.
We're also much more careful about experiments. The pyscholgists are in an irrecoverable hole, as too many people understand that they *are* being lied to as part of the experiment. In economics, the tendency is to refuse approval of an experiment that lies to the subjects--*and*, more importantly, to discount the alleged results. We're studying the decisions made, and the lie contaminates the decision. I once saw a psychologest utterly flabbergasted by the explanation of a particular economic experiment--she had never even conceived that an experiment could be performed without lying to the subjects.
We are also careful about our selection of subjects. I won't go out on a limb and claim that the *typical* subject in a psych experiment comes from the "you must complete two experiments for my research to pass this class" category, but I've seen that requirement, and watched people fill out the forms. That would never fly in econ. Not only are people who have ever before participated in an econ experiment typically filtered out, we sometimes filter out even those who have taken a class in the subject.[2]
hawk
[1] I'm still not sure what a social science is, and I have a Ph.D. in Economics . . . it seems to me that, most often, the term is used to claim an exemption from the scientific method. I am a scientist who studies economics, not a social scientist.
[2] There are articles showing a clear difference in the choices made by those who have taken at least one econ class.
According to his Quantum Chromo-Dynamics, he should be anything but peaceful. 1 live Feynman simply goes forward in time. 0 dead Feynmans, hoewever, consist of a Feynman going backwards in time (making it an anti-Feynman) until the moment of his death, at which time it goes forward in time as a Feynman, which balances out to 0 net Feynmans--but he's twice as busy as when alive!
If you go the direct tivo way, your tivos can share as long as you're paying the $5 for an extra receiver. So you get one unit with a lifetime, which you use in another room (it's only $79, anyway:). You then mod the daylights out of your main unit. And replace the main unit, not the simple one.
It looks like you can now get a $30 installation of reguar directtv from blockbuster, including a 4x4 switch and the oval dish (where needed). My thinking is to get that, then $79 each for two tivos. The blockbuster unit would go in my office for the kids, a tivo with only one satellite line in my bedroom, and two lines (for dual recording) to the living room.
oh, wait a minute. I only have two televisions, and the one in the office is dying:)
Slashdot Mirror
>this is an obvious (and mathematically correct)
>conclusion.
It is neither obvious, nor mathematically correct. And since when is "chinese" a language? Does he mean mandaring?
The simple and relevant mathematical fact is that more people speak english than any other language, and taht gap is likely to widen. English will increase its dominance not because its spoken in the U.S., but because it is the language of commerce.
Yes, there's probably in the neighborhood of a billion mandarin speakers. As you point out, this doesn't mean that they can all use the internet. Furthermore, guess what second language those that can afford the internet are more likely to speak?
hawk
HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/3.01Gold (Macintosh; I; 68K)
MACHTYPE: i386-pc-openbsd2.8
the ever helpful hawk
>Honda deciding that there will be one particular
>convention for pedal layout.
That's an arrangement we can all use *without looking*, without retraining, etc. You can't say that about Windows or Office. For crying out loud, ms just changed the binding that, for more than ten years, has been "kill block of cells" to "insert hyperlink." Ford randomly moving the horn around the cockpit from year to year is one thing. This is closer to changing "second pedal from the right fully depressed" from "maximum braking" to "honk horn" or "release hood."
There is *not* a trivial standardized ms interface. It changes from month to month, and requires constant user attention to the interface rather than the task on hand.
hawk
>they would get together, rationally and
>unemotionally select the most desirable features
>from each, and include them in the one
>frontrunning Linux desktop
But that's just not possible. Gnome exists for *religious* reasons, namely that KDE wasn't pure enough in the Holy GPL. Look for Catholicism and Lurtheranism as a single institution before Gnome and KDE (after 500 years, there is some progress [of course, that has the Missouri Synod upset, but that's another story .
The entire claim that KDE was in violation of the GPL was just plain nonsense. It wasn't true (though imported GPL code may have violated the GPL). It is not *possible* to violate your own license with your own work. KDE was not GPL, in spite of their protestations, but a Quasi-GPL, with an exception for libraries. Not because it said so, but becausethe law does that on its own.
hawk, esq.
So why choose to install either? You can still use the aplications that are linked to their libraries.
hawk
The lady asked me how much for three questions, and I told her, "$100."
"Isn't that outrageous?"
"Yes. Now what's your third question?"
hawk, esq.
A friend paid the $45 because they couldn't get an example in the excel manual to work (they needed it for a group project). The answer was that excel couldn't do that, and the manual was wrong. No refund.
hawk
g
One of the great breakthroughs was when memory prices dropped below "a buck a byte"--for the monthly rental . . .
hawk
Firms sell at a loss when they lose less by selling than by sitting idle. If my choices are to sit still and lose two billion from my idle plant that I'm stuck with, or to pay another half a billion to produce a billion and a half in revenue, I choose the latter, losing one billion instead of two.
hawk, economist
>directly to the general public; they're designed,
>manufactured and purchased by the various
>companies who manufacture hardware for end-users.
>Thus, applying the same analysis that you might
>use when considering, say, high speed
>digital-to-analogue converters, might yield some
>phoney results.
yeah. bought three of those last week, instead of my usual two, do to the great sale . . .
:)
hawk
>software company, it's unlikely that anything
> like that would be able to get through.
Speaking as a director of the Federal Aviation Authority, it's unlikely that four planes could be simultaneuously hijacked and . . .
hawk, not really an FAA official
hawk
I'm reminded of folks in high school who would get hot under the collar arguing that the Arduin rules for magic and hit points were more realistic than the D&D versions, or the realism of different types of dragons . . .
hawk
>the GNU people (it was the GNU, people
>right?)
Yes.
>that decided that 'man' wasn't good enough and
>they wanted to reinvent it;
It's not that they wanted to reinvent itthat's a probelem; that would have been survivable. It's that info is just plain an abomination. It seems to be an "emacs everywhere" notion. It's a pain to navigate, counter-intuitive, and the type of thing that could only have come out of the emacs or redmond mentalities.
hawk
I used lyx, and found an existing isu.sty program. My time? Less than 10 minutes . . .
hawk
>read ones make the reader's life more
>difficult and get thrown. Equally, don't send in
>a coffee stained paper copy (or virus infected
>email copy
>unprofessional.
Many years ago, at 18, I had been hired by a startup to write software. We needed changes in some firmware, and I told them that my change to part time for the school year would prevent me from doing that *and* keeping up with the MIS system.
I'd been hired on the spot when I showed up. I didn't know better than simply to appear with my resume in hand, rather than mailing it in. I was abe to show them something they desparately wanted, and they realized they could have me full time for less than a part time consultant.
Anyway,they handed me the folders of resumes collected when they had advertised, and told *me* to find someone.
I was shocked by some of them. I'd always heard about the importance of appearance, etc., but I just wasn't prepared.
The one that I can still picture had been printed on a crummy (even for the time) dot matrix printer--the kind swhere the dots were distinct with space between them. It had then been copied on a crummy photocopier, and was quite grey. To top it off (really, I'm not making this up) the cover letter was written on *graph paper* in pencil . . .
hawk
:)
hawk
hawk
hawk
> listings free for download?
uhh, tv.yahoo.com, perhaps?
:)
and if you don't want to just look grab a script that grabs the 12 different 2 hour periods . . .
hawk
hawk
Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. Clinical psychology seems to fit into your rant, too.
>When's the last time you had cause to curse the >entire profession of astrophysics, for
>example?
Let just *one* comet hit the earth, and guess who's going to get the blame.
>They're the ones Shakespeare tells us to kill first
You're falling into what Stalin called the "useful idiot" category. Killing the lawyer's was part of destabilizing society for revolution, not of improving it . . . and for every lawyer who commits one of those "villain" acts, there's another lawyer opposing it. That's how te system works.
hawk
One of the things that drew me to economics when leaving law is that it is still emerging as a science. To call the economics of 30 or 40 years ago science would be pushing it, at best. Today, with the Ph.D.'s produced in the last 10 years or so, the scientific method has won. As a science, economics is still primitive--perhaps at a level near Newton's laws of motion.
There's still plenty of cranks around, but retirement by retirement, "social science"[1] is being displaced by science. The split between positive economics [science] and normative economics [politics, social choice] is becoming explicit.
We're also much more careful about experiments. The pyscholgists are in an irrecoverable hole, as too many people understand that they *are* being lied to as part of the experiment. In economics, the tendency is to refuse approval of an experiment that lies to the subjects--*and*, more importantly, to discount the alleged results. We're studying the decisions made, and the lie contaminates the decision. I once saw a psychologest utterly flabbergasted by the explanation of a particular economic experiment--she had never even conceived that an experiment could be performed without lying to the subjects.
We are also careful about our selection of subjects. I won't go out on a limb and claim that the *typical* subject in a psych experiment comes from the "you must complete two experiments for my research to pass this class" category, but I've seen that requirement, and watched people fill out the forms. That would never fly in econ. Not only are people who have ever before participated in an econ experiment typically filtered out, we sometimes filter out even those who have taken a class in the subject.[2]
hawk
[1] I'm still not sure what a social science is, and I have a Ph.D. in Economics . . . it seems to me that, most often, the term is used to claim an exemption from the scientific method. I am a scientist who studies economics, not a social scientist.
[2] There are articles showing a clear difference in the choices made by those who have taken at least one econ class.
According to his Quantum Chromo-Dynamics, he should be anything but peaceful. 1 live Feynman simply goes forward in time. 0 dead Feynmans, hoewever, consist of a Feynman going backwards in time (making it an anti-Feynman) until the moment of his death, at which time it goes forward in time as a Feynman, which balances out to 0 net Feynmans--but he's twice as busy as when alive!
hawk
It looks like you can now get a $30 installation of reguar directtv from blockbuster, including a 4x4 switch and the oval dish (where needed). My thinking is to get that, then $79 each for two tivos. The blockbuster unit would go in my office for the kids, a tivo with only one satellite line in my bedroom, and two lines (for dual recording) to the living room.
oh, wait a minute. I only have two televisions, and the one in the office is dying
hawk