I took an astronomy class in which the professor lectured on The Drake Equation. It struck me as utterly rediculous, and seemed fraught with assumptions about 'life' that would likely have no basis in reality.
The Drake Equation would make a great title for a science fiction book, though.
Missile defense has never been taken seriously... if it were, we'd have it. Personally, since it's only effective against long range ICBMs, I'd prefer something more localized, not space-based.
Microsoft's success is a testament to the relative absence of big mistakes. Of course, there has been a bit of luck too, but the defining moment for the Microsoft of the 21st century was when Gates cancelled a bunch of projects and got most of Microsoft's developers working on internet-related technology. Most companies lack the kind of visionary leadership necessary to abruptly halt and venture off into uncharted territory. That is precisely what I mean when I refer to Gates' entrepreneurial spirit. It is the main reason he's successful.
If you've ever worked closely with an entrepreneur, you will notice that he/she is much MUCH MUCH different from the kind of career middle-managers that end up making most of the decisions in corporate America. It is night and day. Teachers and fire-fighters definitely get my admiration, but through his vision and risk taking, Gates has made it possible for himself to donate more money (in today's dollars) to help the world than anyone else in the history of the world. Like it or not, capitalism offers mankind the freedom to make an incredible difference in world history. Gates is doing that with his life, and he's nowhere near done. You may not love his software, but you must admit that he is poised to make a dramatic impact upon the fates of millions of the world's poorest people, a feat few teachers or fire-fighters could ever dream of.
...because Microsoft has lots of money to sink into it and make it successful.
Keep in mind, Microsoft may make a few dumb moves occasionally, but they make a lot fewer than most companies. Also, when they settle on a goal they typically acheive it (though maybe a year or two later than originally planned).
Gates is an entrepreneur -- you've got to respect him for that.
You seem to have forgotten the story of Einstein and how his insights were first received.
In academia, there are factors that lead people in established positions of authority to be highly skeptical of new ideas. Most graduate students are experts in this kind of skepticism.
Why not let the experts read over Wolfram's work for a few weeks and repeat some of his experiments (like good scientists do) before you get appalled about the book...
First of all: anybody who has worked their way through an undergraduate curriculum in Physics understands in a visceral fashion that there is an extreme difference between MODELLING the world with a construct, mathematical, computational or otherwise, and saying that the world IS such a construct.
Maybe you should read the book. It sounds to me from the review that Wolfram is saying that CA's and the Universe are like the way an airplane is like a bird, not the way a bird is like a bunch of feathers glued to a paper-towel roll.
Thus, an airplane can be viewed as a model of a bird in the way that some of Wolfram's CAs can be viewed as models of the universe...
However think of the philosophical implications if it turns out we're all just lightened grid squares being generated by a few lines of code in Mathematica?
It depends on your target audience. As a spectator, a page of comments before each function is fine. But if you are a novice programmer and you want to straightforwardly understand the techniques used, more of a line by line approach would be more useful. I personally like a bit of high level as well as some low level commentary to make the code easy to read quickly.
It is interesting to see US an Europe diverging on their treatment of the Microsoft 'monopoly'. For anyone who is interested in learning more about the history of innovation and antitrust and patent law, there is an excellent book. It's called The Lever of Riches. It's a non-technical but fascinating look at the small decisions and factors that have made huge differences in the world as we know it today.
Heck, I might have to re-read it and review it for Slashdot b/c it seems oddly relevant to the Microsoft issues now.
Alcohol wipes (the kind you would find in a hospital) do wonders for cleaning up a keyboard and mouse. I'm sure that in most cases, it's the keyboard and mouse that harbor most of the grime.
I've used some campus computing sites where there is a brown slimy coating on everything. Probably a result of human oils produced during the many all-nighters around exam time.
well, it could be that the hsg cases occurred from strangelets that passed within a few feet of the earth and hit a human but not the earth... good point though.
I think you are taking a free ride, and at the expense of those who do not use blocking software.
The best strategy for everyone would be to click through on as many ads as possible, thereby creating the impression that the ads are working. This would drive their price up, and the content providers would not need to find every possible annoying way (such as flash) to make us watch the ad, they would just be happy charging top dollar for a simple banner.
The only acceptable alternative would be if the ad blocker programs visited all of the small and inconspicuous ads (behind the scenes, of course), so that over time the advertisers would 'discover' that small ads were actually more effective.
Wouldn't the existence of something like that lead to sloppy site design? I always thought that good websites contained actual hyperlinks to other relevant parts of the site. Why complicate matters with a link tag that isn't fully adopted and that would appear to overlap with the functionality of hyperlinks?
please share with us your compelling reasons for using Suse. I tried it 2 years ago and I didn't like it as much as RH or Mandrake. I'm interested to know what is so great about it that makes you willing to put down $80 for it.
I would say it IS flawed, because it's based on the fictitious underlying assumptions that people are altruistic, not greedy, and can see the forest for trees.
People who believe that Capitalism is bad just because society has some less fortunate people often make the mistake of believing that there is no room for improvement in the present system. Ironically, it is the democratic nature of capitalism that enables us as a society to make changes and improve the system! Systems such as communism might do that, but they would need to rely on a massive uprising or on a 'kind artificer' to make modifications.
Notice how our evil system of capitalism has improved over the past 150 years. People have more rights, a better standard of living, more employment, better health and longevity, and better ways of communicating with one another about the system's evils (such as Slashdot). No, I am not saying that it's perfect, or that it's even close to perfect, but at least it's moving in the right direction.
What does one who opposes capitalism suggest as an alternative?
As for greed vs altruism, my point in my previous post was that Capitalism works based on self-interested behavior, not altruism. It is in the best interest of the majority to have the poorest minority healthy and employed, if for no other reason than to lighten the load on the tax money required to pay for catastrophic care when these people become sick.
I am not saying that perfect rationality or information exists. In fact, even if one were perfectly rational he/she could still make the wrong choice if given imperfect information. Let's face it, information is getting better. This discussion is an example of it. The bottom line is that neither needs to be perfect in order for a lot of improvement to occur.
I'm a fan of yours, but I disagree with your comment.
If you view society as a machine as some self-proclaimed capitalists do, with each group serving as a necessary cog, then it is easy to draw the conclusion that the "poor" cog is necessary and that hunger, albeit unfortunate, is a necessary biproduct of the machine that is society.
In reality, people who suffer at the 'bottom rung' of society are a valuable resource being wasted. Bad schools, starvation, etc., are an example of wasted potential Homo Economicus would not waste this resource if he had perfect rationality and perfect information. Alas, humans are not Homo Economicus. The fact that this resource gets wasted is a failure of information and therefore effectively a failure of rationality, but not a failure of capitalism itself.
Except we're not talking about Bill Gates, we're talking about Microsoft. You know, the company. Companies don't worry about dying and leaving money to descendants or estate taxes, and public companies choose business practices to enhance shareholder value, not cure Polio, unless curing Polio enhances shareholder value.
And that's how it should be. Companies are supposed to make money, and do it ethically, however in the realm of competition the definition of ethics is sometimes a bit murky, particularly when you've got competetors who view challenging your ethics as a legitimate competetive strategy.
Investments are a way to grow money. If Bill had taken the initial startup funding that he used to create Microsoft and donated it to the poor, a lot less good would have been done than has been done by the GatesFoundation, etc.
Your comment was emotional and quite senseless. If it was an appeal to tug at the anti-MS and anti-capitalist sympathies of Slashdot, its score of 2 indicates that it failed to do so.
The networks are going to lose to HBO anyway... HBO is great television, and I gladly pay $4.99 a month for it in digital quality.
Below is an excerpt from an article in The Economist about television:
So how is it that commercial American TV can come up with such funny, clever output? The first explanation is HBO. "Sex and the City", "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under" are all made by this cable channel, part of AOL Time Warner. "HBO's achievements have had a dramatic impact on the entire media culture; creatively, it's put its rivals to shame," comments Peter Bart, editor of Variety, a Hollywood industry newspaper. HBO owes its achievements to a potent mix: stable management under Jeff Bewkes, who has held one or other of the two top jobs for the past 11 years; savvy, blanket promotion of its shows; and a business model that relies entirely on subscriptions rather than advertising. Curiously, a channel that did not originally chase ratings, because it did not need to, has ended up grabbing them anyway: on Sunday evenings during the summer, "Sex and the City" often beats other network shows. All this enables HBO to take creative risks, which itself draws talent to it. Alan Ball, who writes "Six Feet Under", had previously won an Oscar for the screenplay for "American Beauty", a successful movie. Writers love working there. "On most network TV, once you have a successful formula, you have to stick to it for ten years," says Michael Patrick King, creator of "Sex and the City". "With HBO, we have complete liberty to take the story wherever we want."
the parent post is dead on. Most slower machines will speed right up if you put in a sufficient amount of RAM.
After that, go after the processors, if they're upgradable.
Find some affordable hard drives and swap them out on the machines that are near capacity.
Invest the money you save into an upgrade plan based on an upcoming hardware platform, such as the Athlon T-bred, and watch the prices on RAM and buy in bulk when the price dips.
I think you're better off replacing the existing machines in thirds. First get rid of the most pesky third of the machines, cannabalize some RAM to improve the remaining 2/3. Then institute your new standard (whether its Dells or your self-built machines). You'll learn how to make the DIY approach efficient after the first 20 machines. In 6 months, you'll be able to buy equivalent machines at 2/3 of their current cost.
Benefits: The business keeps more cash all along, and you make the absolute most out of the existing investment.
Cheap Dells would be the option to compare your strategy against. I suggest looking at one of the onboard-everything motherboards from ECS. Mine was around $150 (a few months ago) for the mobo and Athlon XP 1700+ processor.
Slashdot Mirror
The Drake Equation would make a great title for a science fiction book, though.
Microsoft's success is a testament to the relative absence of big mistakes. Of course, there has been a bit of luck too, but the defining moment for the Microsoft of the 21st century was when Gates cancelled a bunch of projects and got most of Microsoft's developers working on internet-related technology. Most companies lack the kind of visionary leadership necessary to abruptly halt and venture off into uncharted territory. That is precisely what I mean when I refer to Gates' entrepreneurial spirit. It is the main reason he's successful.
If you've ever worked closely with an entrepreneur, you will notice that he/she is much MUCH MUCH different from the kind of career middle-managers that end up making most of the decisions in corporate America. It is night and day. Teachers and fire-fighters definitely get my admiration, but through his vision and risk taking, Gates has made it possible for himself to donate more money (in today's dollars) to help the world than anyone else in the history of the world. Like it or not, capitalism offers mankind the freedom to make an incredible difference in world history. Gates is doing that with his life, and he's nowhere near done. You may not love his software, but you must admit that he is poised to make a dramatic impact upon the fates of millions of the world's poorest people, a feat few teachers or fire-fighters could ever dream of.
Keep in mind, Microsoft may make a few dumb moves occasionally, but they make a lot fewer than most companies. Also, when they settle on a goal they typically acheive it (though maybe a year or two later than originally planned).
Gates is an entrepreneur -- you've got to respect him for that.
In academia, there are factors that lead people in established positions of authority to be highly skeptical of new ideas. Most graduate students are experts in this kind of skepticism.
Why not let the experts read over Wolfram's work for a few weeks and repeat some of his experiments (like good scientists do) before you get appalled about the book...
Maybe you should read the book. It sounds to me from the review that Wolfram is saying that CA's and the Universe are like the way an airplane is like a bird, not the way a bird is like a bunch of feathers glued to a paper-towel roll.
Thus, an airplane can be viewed as a model of a bird in the way that some of Wolfram's CAs can be viewed as models of the universe...
However think of the philosophical implications if it turns out we're all just lightened grid squares being generated by a few lines of code in Mathematica?
It depends on your target audience. As a spectator, a page of comments before each function is fine. But if you are a novice programmer and you want to straightforwardly understand the techniques used, more of a line by line approach would be more useful. I personally like a bit of high level as well as some low level commentary to make the code easy to read quickly.
Heck, I might have to re-read it and review it for Slashdot b/c it seems oddly relevant to the Microsoft issues now.
I've used some campus computing sites where there is a brown slimy coating on everything. Probably a result of human oils produced during the many all-nighters around exam time.
well, it could be that the hsg cases occurred from strangelets that passed within a few feet of the earth and hit a human but not the earth... good point though.
Seriously, couldn't this actually be the explanation?
The best strategy for everyone would be to click through on as many ads as possible, thereby creating the impression that the ads are working. This would drive their price up, and the content providers would not need to find every possible annoying way (such as flash) to make us watch the ad, they would just be happy charging top dollar for a simple banner.
The only acceptable alternative would be if the ad blocker programs visited all of the small and inconspicuous ads (behind the scenes, of course), so that over time the advertisers would 'discover' that small ads were actually more effective.
Wouldn't the existence of something like that lead to sloppy site design? I always thought that good websites contained actual hyperlinks to other relevant parts of the site. Why complicate matters with a link tag that isn't fully adopted and that would appear to overlap with the functionality of hyperlinks?
please share with us your compelling reasons for using Suse. I tried it 2 years ago and I didn't like it as much as RH or Mandrake. I'm interested to know what is so great about it that makes you willing to put down $80 for it.
People who believe that Capitalism is bad just because society has some less fortunate people often make the mistake of believing that there is no room for improvement in the present system. Ironically, it is the democratic nature of capitalism that enables us as a society to make changes and improve the system! Systems such as communism might do that, but they would need to rely on a massive uprising or on a 'kind artificer' to make modifications.
Notice how our evil system of capitalism has improved over the past 150 years. People have more rights, a better standard of living, more employment, better health and longevity, and better ways of communicating with one another about the system's evils (such as Slashdot). No, I am not saying that it's perfect, or that it's even close to perfect, but at least it's moving in the right direction.
What does one who opposes capitalism suggest as an alternative?
As for greed vs altruism, my point in my previous post was that Capitalism works based on self-interested behavior, not altruism. It is in the best interest of the majority to have the poorest minority healthy and employed, if for no other reason than to lighten the load on the tax money required to pay for catastrophic care when these people become sick.
I am not saying that perfect rationality or information exists. In fact, even if one were perfectly rational he/she could still make the wrong choice if given imperfect information. Let's face it, information is getting better. This discussion is an example of it. The bottom line is that neither needs to be perfect in order for a lot of improvement to occur.
oops... sorry :)
If you view society as a machine as some self-proclaimed capitalists do, with each group serving as a necessary cog, then it is easy to draw the conclusion that the "poor" cog is necessary and that hunger, albeit unfortunate, is a necessary biproduct of the machine that is society.
In reality, people who suffer at the 'bottom rung' of society are a valuable resource being wasted. Bad schools, starvation, etc., are an example of wasted potential Homo Economicus would not waste this resource if he had perfect rationality and perfect information. Alas, humans are not Homo Economicus. The fact that this resource gets wasted is a failure of information and therefore effectively a failure of rationality, but not a failure of capitalism itself.
And that's how it should be. Companies are supposed to make money, and do it ethically, however in the realm of competition the definition of ethics is sometimes a bit murky, particularly when you've got competetors who view challenging your ethics as a legitimate competetive strategy.
Investments are a way to grow money. If Bill had taken the initial startup funding that he used to create Microsoft and donated it to the poor, a lot less good would have been done than has been done by the GatesFoundation, etc.
Your comment was emotional and quite senseless. If it was an appeal to tug at the anti-MS and anti-capitalist sympathies of Slashdot, its score of 2 indicates that it failed to do so.
I agree.. this stuff is really fun to read. Everyone should have a workshop. His stuff is really ingenious!
Everquest : Everquest II
A) Beer : Malt Liquor
B) Pentium : Athlon
C) Cigarettes : Graham Crackers
D) Capitalism : Marxism
E) All of the above
this would be an interesting discussion... i hope someone comments...
Now that is seriously funny! Mod the parent up.
Below is an excerpt from an article in The Economist about television:
So how is it that commercial American TV can come up with such funny, clever output? The first explanation is HBO. "Sex and the City", "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under" are all made by this cable channel, part of AOL Time Warner. "HBO's achievements have had a dramatic impact on the entire media culture; creatively, it's put its rivals to shame," comments Peter Bart, editor of Variety, a Hollywood industry newspaper. HBO owes its achievements to a potent mix: stable management under Jeff Bewkes, who has held one or other of the two top jobs for the past 11 years; savvy, blanket promotion of its shows; and a business model that relies entirely on subscriptions rather than advertising. Curiously, a channel that did not originally chase ratings, because it did not need to, has ended up grabbing them anyway: on Sunday evenings during the summer, "Sex and the City" often beats other network shows. All this enables HBO to take creative risks, which itself draws talent to it. Alan Ball, who writes "Six Feet Under", had previously won an Oscar for the screenplay for "American Beauty", a successful movie. Writers love working there. "On most network TV, once you have a successful formula, you have to stick to it for ten years," says Michael Patrick King, creator of "Sex and the City". "With HBO, we have complete liberty to take the story wherever we want."
The full text of the article is here
After that, go after the processors, if they're upgradable.
Find some affordable hard drives and swap them out on the machines that are near capacity.
Invest the money you save into an upgrade plan based on an upcoming hardware platform, such as the Athlon T-bred, and watch the prices on RAM and buy in bulk when the price dips.
I think you're better off replacing the existing machines in thirds. First get rid of the most pesky third of the machines, cannabalize some RAM to improve the remaining 2/3. Then institute your new standard (whether its Dells or your self-built machines). You'll learn how to make the DIY approach efficient after the first 20 machines. In 6 months, you'll be able to buy equivalent machines at 2/3 of their current cost.
Benefits:
The business keeps more cash all along, and you make the absolute most out of the existing investment.
Cheap Dells would be the option to compare your strategy against. I suggest looking at one of the onboard-everything motherboards from ECS. Mine was around $150 (a few months ago) for the mobo and Athlon XP 1700+ processor.