I read this article in the Times a year ago and it still makes me hungry to think of it: A Fruitcake Soaked in Tropical Sun, covering the tradition of "black cake, a spicy, fragrant fruitcake steeped in dark rum and tradition that is a Christmas classic throughout the English-speaking Caribbean." I foresee a trip over to brooklyn sometime in my near future.;)
Solaris, it's been said, has a great kernel and an utterly shit userland (i.e. the tools you actually interact with). I can almost guarantee you that at some point the admins of your system have gotten pissed off at the Sun-shipped utils (from hell's heart, sun tar, I stab at thee) and have installed some variety of 3rd-party-freeware utilities on the system (either Sun's freeware, Sun Freeware [different], or Blastwave freeware come to mind). You might try looking, if you haven't yet, in/opt and/usr/local to see if bin dirs exist under there somewhere as these are common locations for these packages. If so, adding them into your shell's $PATH will make interactive use a lot more pleasant.
I'll reply with the part of my post you evidently didn't read:
[It] is a really cheap investment in their future and indirectly all of our futures (that a country ultimately depends on a solid workforce would be one interpretation, which might be why a Republican (Ford) enacted EIC and two others (Reagan, Bush Sr.) expanded it).
Paying a negligible sum towards the commons gives you the individual a more stable and productive society to live in. Again, note above that three mainline conservative presidents have signed on to that theory. (And it is a negligible sum. You pay a lot more for social security, medicare, and our military than you do to support EIC. Even those Three Big Ones of the federal budget are things that basically are all in the theme of "a more perfect Union" [stable society].)
Sure, those links are all to the same site, but Tannenbaum seems to be pretty honest with his data and even if you didn't trust it you could if so motivated dig elsewhere. I don't think your perception squares with historical reality of the polling data (I had stopped watching the mainstream media by then, so I don't clearly recall what they might've been saying). I am a politically left-wing voter on many issues, and I knew then it was going to be very very close. This year I don't really get that impression, but I remain only cautiously optimistic until the votes are counted.
Almost everyone pays income tax if they have any income at all. Seriously, check the tax tables for 2007. 10% on income less than 7500 or so for the '07 tax year, so even J. Random Burgerflipper is paying into the system (it should be noted that many types of federal aid are also taxable income). The real question is how much of that payment into the system you get back at the end of the year (or conversely how much additional you owe). Earned income credit is one of the factors affecting that calculation, sure, but don't confuse somebody getting a bit back with not having contributed at all.
Whether someone should get a bit back more than the total sum they contributed seems to be your objection. Consider that the implicit purpose of this is to give a bit of a boost to struggling families with children, that boost might be enough that they eat a bit better and have better clothes or supplies for school or more generally live in a more stable fiscal environment, which is a really cheap investment in their future and indirectly all of our futures (that a country ultimately depends on a solid workforce would be one interpretation, which might be why a Republican (Ford) enacted EIC and two others (Reagan, Bush Sr.) expanded it).
The same things that make an expensive keyboard better than a cheap keyboard. They both work for the same purpose, but one will be made with better materials and likely with more care by virtue of being a niche product. Ergo one will likely last longer and make the relevant part of your body happier. Much like keyboards, shoes are highly individual (I've had great luck with doc martens and rockports, for example, but I won't advocate them as being great for everybody; similarly I love KeyTronic keyboards but I know other people go for Microsoft Natural Somethings, and so on).
I remember reading (long enough ago that I don't remember the source or exact words) something by Gates saying that he feared the worst case for Microsoft would be to end up like their partner IBM: big and slow, with lawyers wedged into every orifice impeding every move.
Fast forward twenty/thirty years and now they're in pretty much the same situation. I don't envy them.
you really don't seem to understand business risk
on
Joel Hodgson Answers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
No, the risk is in the sunk cost of producing an expensive product that may or may not sell. (Or did you think that you could put flowers in your hair and smile about creative commons this or that and all of your physical materials vendors would just go "OK SURE HERE TAKE ALL OF OUR EFFORT AND MATERIALS FOR FREE"?) Compared to that, piracy as a risk is rather small. Do you think indie comic book or role-playing game publishers go tits up because of piracy?
Just off the top of my head: Production. Packaging. Physical distribution. Marketing. All not free. All for, let's face it, a fairly niche product aimed at a fairly small market. This is the same reason your senior year textbooks on Advanced Interferometric Gizmology were $150 and you can get Harry Pothead: Chamber of Hotboxing for $4.99 in paperback, more or less.
(I'm going to leave the larger debate about internet vs. physical distribution or CC licensing vs. traditional commercialization alone save to say that the original creators have every right to make the choices they did; I'm only arguing for the reasonableness of the pricing given the chain of decisions taken.)
I hated SWB/SBC (for many good reasons too lengthy for a comment box) and AT&T hasn't done anything to lessen that hatred over time. No matter how many features the iWhatever may have, even a footnote of involvement with AT&T is an instant buzz-kill. I really don't care what mitigating circumstances or defenses might be brought up here, AT&T is an instant "NO!" in my book.
Compared to that, my disgruntlement with their video hardware across the line is a minor thing. The exact nature of that disgruntlement depends on the model in question. Suffice to say that apple has my heart in the portable sphere for offering well spec'd, decently priced, and well-integrated portable Unix with their powerbooks/mac pros but I really wish they had something in the mid-range desktop line that wasn't an iMac (the mini is a bit too constraining, already have a nice monitor rendering the imacs moot, and the pro is far too over-spec'd/expensive for my needs). I'm half-way considering building a hackintosh for my next desktop. (It's either that or ubuntu most likely. Vista is right out.)
I did a math paper for a mathematical modeling class during my chemistry undergrad on the BZ reaction mechanism, which is another oscillator like the system in TFA. It's not a perpetual oscillation, but with precisely controlled reagents you can get some pretty long-lasting oscillations (precisely as in on the order of hundredths of a mole, iirc). There's a really good little book in the oxford chemistry primers series (series as a whole is quite nice for accessible, focused introductions to various fields) on this topic: Oscillations, Waves, and Chaos in Chemical Kinetics by Scott.
No, I was merely pointing out that "oxidized" doesn't have to mean "oxygen" or "that crud you think of on old metal", that in fact there is a technical meaning to the term the average software engineer who took one freshman level science course a decade ago -- which may not have even been chemistry -- might not connect with. Ionization and oxidation/reduction are in fact closely related terms, which the wikipedia link was meant to illustrate. If you compare the two entries ("Redox" and "Ionization"), I think you'll see the connection. Describing the process as oxidation and the effect as ionization is not a priori incorrect.
True, re: thermo! I'd put thermo/stat thermo in the top three most brain-hurting classes I took, along with qm and inorganic (group theory + symmetry + qm wave equantions + orbital theory = some reasonably evil homework sets, heh), but for all the pain in retrospect it was deliriously fun to see the mathematical patterns and systems that came together to describe the various processes of chemistry (the most fun I had was with organic and organic synthesis specifically; that same joy of creation of building molecules I ended up following into software). I only wish I'd been better at mathematics to see that beauty clearer; seeing the same sort of work being done with the processes of finance is pretty fascinating stuff even if my maths are more than a little rusty by this point. Recently for fun I picked up a copy of Capinski and Zastawniak's _Mathematics for Finance: An Introduction to Financial Engineering_ (isbn 978-1852333300 per amazon) which assumes only that the reader has calculus and basic stat/probability and works from first principles in a fairly accessible tone up through stuff like black-scholes and have been working through it in my spare time. Pretty neat and digestible (so far) little book, might be handy for a dev coming from another industry who has some maths but doesn't know what (say) euro vs. am options are or what the mathematical implications of either approach would be, how value could be quantified or created from that knowledge, etc. (Of course, not being an expert in the field I have only my gut feeling and the reviews of others to guess that it's a good text... there could certainly be other, better ones. It reads like a work where the authors cared deeply for their craft, which is a good sign at least.)
(I haven't RTFA to figure out for sure, but if they're talking "hydrogen" on one side of a reaction and "proton/electron" on the other, it seems plausible on first blush.)
My experience as such is watching a presentation they (I mistakenly called them Azure but I think it's actually Azul, the "blue compute box company" either way much like Cisco is "the blue-green packet box company" in my mind, heh) gave a few months ago to the ny java sig and hearing on the grapevine that it was in planned or actual deployment at a few places. The presentation was pretty neat, made me think about some things here at work that I'd like to demo on it, but of course as a line engineer/sub-contractor I could exactly requisition that much hardware for demo giggles. I did get the impression from the guy at the sig meeting that they were pretty interested and willing to be flexible about getting hardware in people's hands to demo, fwiw. The grapevine here said that it was being rolled out for test in another group, haven't heard more about it (and given the tendency for bad news to travel faster and farther, I assume that means it was either a success or not a total debacle). I got the impression that its big weak point would be anything that was very heavy on disk I/O given the way the system worked (basically, client machines have "proxy" or "shim" jvms that forward everything over to the compute node, so disk I/O has to go roundtrip through the network to be serviced). As to it being worthy of the cost, they never tossed around numbers so I can't say. I imagine if people are committed to Java and have problems that are in its strong point(s) and big enough that no other platform could scale that far, it would be worth it. A lot of ifs, to be sure.:)
I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but the book has been out for quite some time -- checking Amazon, July of 1999. It is pretty great, and I would recommend it to those who somehow managed to miss it up to this point, but a review almost nine years later? Slow news day much?
On the other hand, maybe periodically prodding towards the direction of higher internal quality (to be distinguished from external quality, that which is perceived in a black-box fashion by your customers, the relationship between these two qualities is of course a matter of much friction and debate between the managing and laboring classes) isn't a bad call. Lord knows any extra ammo to convince people that this is worthwhile is appreciated. As much as we like to think of ourselves as poets, I sometimes think the traditional profession most software development resembles is "butcher" or "janitor", just one messy hack-job and sweep under the rug after another after four or five decades of which you can retire and grumble on the beach about putting cyanide in the guacamole, fondly reminiscing about your red swingline or asr-33 or what have you.
I feel your pain regards unfortunate name-google results. My name is Michael Jackson. It does have its upsides: nobody ever asks me to babysit and only one person has ever seriously asked me to spell my name.
For what its worth I'm doing java backend stuff for a bank here in nyc (admittedly not algorithmic trading, more like automated trade settlement stuff in the fixed income/commodities sphere). I'm a chemist that fell into programming because it looked fun though, so I don't know whether I'd fit your filters (I'm seriously thinking about going back to school for another, possibly advanced, degree in CS just to solidify my grounding in theoretical CS). Anyway, of possible interest to you re: Java vs. C++ might be Azure if you haven't seen any of their equipment show up over there (it's making a few inroads here from what I've heard on the grapevine). Basically they make these really high-end custom java machines (as in literal rack-mounted boxes containing 100s of custom asic cores and 100s of gigabytes of ram) that promise things like hard real-time java performance, deterministic and pause-less GC, truly massive heap allocation, etc. for exactly the sort of Hugemongous(tm) problems the financial set encounter.
Powerful computers are absolutely not a prerequisite for nuclear weapons design. The Manhattan project was more chalk and pencil driven than anything else. The highest yielding device we ever tested was in the early 1960s when computers were many orders of magnitude less capable than they are today. We rely so much on computers today only because we signed treaties mandating that we stop testing devices/designs by actually detonating samples.
Hehe, "bomba" was in my collegiate russian slang dictionary for, uh, a woman of exceptional size. (I don't recall if it was in equivalent usage for men.) The sad thing re: the dolls is that I can remember how to spell it in russian, I'm just not sure exactly how that would canonically be rendered in english phonetics.
Cool, I might be able to find some new powernoise musicians that way!:D Merzbow has reminded me at times of what it must sound like to pipe a tarball into/dev/dsp.
(My gdrive would probably contain one large encrypted file. Tar + gpg + free offsite backup, sounds like a win to me.)
I think the dolls you're referring to would be rendered in english phonetics as "matroishka". Mamushka sounds like "babushka", which would be a plane-load of supersonic grandmothers. Holy Christ, that is a disturbing thought. They'd descend on our troops with an unstoppable rain of warm soups and freshly-knitted sweaters would be everywhere!
(I took russian many years ago in college, so please pardon any errors.)
Long one of my favorite movies, but I was very small when it was in the cinema. Being able to see it in that environment was well worth the price of admission, as no home video system can quite compare. Plus, I have to admit, being in an auditorium packed with people who loved the film was a great experience: no talking, no crying babies, no cell phones, just total admiration for the film. Dead silence except for a cheer at the beginning and at the end.
You could wear a kilt, but that much wool (~9 yrds for a full traditional) is hot and scratchy. So the option exists for other socially acceptable forms of bottom-half-covering, but in most situations pants win by being the most function for the least cost/hassle. You could probably go further into this with a full marginal utility analysis of various cuts and types of cloth.
I can't believe I just wrote a quarter-serious post about pants.
Six months from the ipo would've been around june of 2000, certainly after the peak of the NASDAQ (you can see the decline in the prices above). Still, $36 per share is better than the $3 per share it is now. For simplicity assuming the shares were given to him for $0 and he paid no taxes on them once sold and had transaction costs of $0 and that he sold them all as soon as he could (wise given a $240->$36 drop in six months), that would mean clearing $5,400,000 off of his 150k share allotment. Still nothing to sneeze at, but not the absurd valuation he mentions in his post. After removing all the simplifying assumptions, lord only knows. Less than $5M, probably more than $0.;)
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I read this article in the Times a year ago and it still makes me hungry to think of it: A Fruitcake Soaked in Tropical Sun, covering the tradition of "black cake, a spicy, fragrant fruitcake steeped in dark rum and tradition that is a Christmas classic throughout the English-speaking Caribbean." I foresee a trip over to brooklyn sometime in my near future. ;)
Solaris, it's been said, has a great kernel and an utterly shit userland (i.e. the tools you actually interact with). I can almost guarantee you that at some point the admins of your system have gotten pissed off at the Sun-shipped utils (from hell's heart, sun tar, I stab at thee) and have installed some variety of 3rd-party-freeware utilities on the system (either Sun's freeware, Sun Freeware [different], or Blastwave freeware come to mind). You might try looking, if you haven't yet, in /opt and /usr/local to see if bin dirs exist under there somewhere as these are common locations for these packages. If so, adding them into your shell's $PATH will make interactive use a lot more pleasant.
I'll reply with the part of my post you evidently didn't read:
Paying a negligible sum towards the commons gives you the individual a more stable and productive society to live in. Again, note above that three mainline conservative presidents have signed on to that theory. (And it is a negligible sum. You pay a lot more for social security, medicare, and our military than you do to support EIC. Even those Three Big Ones of the federal budget are things that basically are all in the theme of "a more perfect Union" [stable society].)
No, on this day in October of 2004, the polling data was strongly favoring bush:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/Pres/Maps/Oct29.html
The fall of 2004 showed a much closer race; compare this:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/info/graph.html
and this:
http://electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/ec_graph-2008.html
Sure, those links are all to the same site, but Tannenbaum seems to be pretty honest with his data and even if you didn't trust it you could if so motivated dig elsewhere. I don't think your perception squares with historical reality of the polling data (I had stopped watching the mainstream media by then, so I don't clearly recall what they might've been saying). I am a politically left-wing voter on many issues, and I knew then it was going to be very very close. This year I don't really get that impression, but I remain only cautiously optimistic until the votes are counted.
Almost everyone pays income tax if they have any income at all. Seriously, check the tax tables for 2007. 10% on income less than 7500 or so for the '07 tax year, so even J. Random Burgerflipper is paying into the system (it should be noted that many types of federal aid are also taxable income). The real question is how much of that payment into the system you get back at the end of the year (or conversely how much additional you owe). Earned income credit is one of the factors affecting that calculation, sure, but don't confuse somebody getting a bit back with not having contributed at all.
Whether someone should get a bit back more than the total sum they contributed seems to be your objection. Consider that the implicit purpose of this is to give a bit of a boost to struggling families with children, that boost might be enough that they eat a bit better and have better clothes or supplies for school or more generally live in a more stable fiscal environment, which is a really cheap investment in their future and indirectly all of our futures (that a country ultimately depends on a solid workforce would be one interpretation, which might be why a Republican (Ford) enacted EIC and two others (Reagan, Bush Sr.) expanded it).
The same things that make an expensive keyboard better than a cheap keyboard. They both work for the same purpose, but one will be made with better materials and likely with more care by virtue of being a niche product. Ergo one will likely last longer and make the relevant part of your body happier. Much like keyboards, shoes are highly individual (I've had great luck with doc martens and rockports, for example, but I won't advocate them as being great for everybody; similarly I love KeyTronic keyboards but I know other people go for Microsoft Natural Somethings, and so on).
I remember reading (long enough ago that I don't remember the source or exact words) something by Gates saying that he feared the worst case for Microsoft would be to end up like their partner IBM: big and slow, with lawyers wedged into every orifice impeding every move. Fast forward twenty/thirty years and now they're in pretty much the same situation. I don't envy them.
Just an FYI, the common advice for getting a Congress member to pay any modicum of attention to criticism is to send it via some tangible form: physical mail or fax transmission. Emails and online petitions and so forth appear to be generally ignored or held in much lighter regard. You can get the appropriate contact information for your senators via looking them up here: http://senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm (the equivalent for the House would be https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml). As for voting histories, those are likely available with more digging on either senate.gov or house.gov. I think this is the relevant roll-call record for this issue: http://senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=110&session=2&vote=00019
No, the risk is in the sunk cost of producing an expensive product that may or may not sell. (Or did you think that you could put flowers in your hair and smile about creative commons this or that and all of your physical materials vendors would just go "OK SURE HERE TAKE ALL OF OUR EFFORT AND MATERIALS FOR FREE"?) Compared to that, piracy as a risk is rather small. Do you think indie comic book or role-playing game publishers go tits up because of piracy?
Just off the top of my head: Production. Packaging. Physical distribution. Marketing. All not free. All for, let's face it, a fairly niche product aimed at a fairly small market. This is the same reason your senior year textbooks on Advanced Interferometric Gizmology were $150 and you can get Harry Pothead: Chamber of Hotboxing for $4.99 in paperback, more or less.
(I'm going to leave the larger debate about internet vs. physical distribution or CC licensing vs. traditional commercialization alone save to say that the original creators have every right to make the choices they did; I'm only arguing for the reasonableness of the pricing given the chain of decisions taken.)
I hated SWB/SBC (for many good reasons too lengthy for a comment box) and AT&T hasn't done anything to lessen that hatred over time. No matter how many features the iWhatever may have, even a footnote of involvement with AT&T is an instant buzz-kill. I really don't care what mitigating circumstances or defenses might be brought up here, AT&T is an instant "NO!" in my book.
Compared to that, my disgruntlement with their video hardware across the line is a minor thing. The exact nature of that disgruntlement depends on the model in question. Suffice to say that apple has my heart in the portable sphere for offering well spec'd, decently priced, and well-integrated portable Unix with their powerbooks/mac pros but I really wish they had something in the mid-range desktop line that wasn't an iMac (the mini is a bit too constraining, already have a nice monitor rendering the imacs moot, and the pro is far too over-spec'd/expensive for my needs). I'm half-way considering building a hackintosh for my next desktop. (It's either that or ubuntu most likely. Vista is right out.)
I did a math paper for a mathematical modeling class during my chemistry undergrad on the BZ reaction mechanism, which is another oscillator like the system in TFA. It's not a perpetual oscillation, but with precisely controlled reagents you can get some pretty long-lasting oscillations (precisely as in on the order of hundredths of a mole, iirc). There's a really good little book in the oxford chemistry primers series (series as a whole is quite nice for accessible, focused introductions to various fields) on this topic: Oscillations, Waves, and Chaos in Chemical Kinetics by Scott.
No, I was merely pointing out that "oxidized" doesn't have to mean "oxygen" or "that crud you think of on old metal", that in fact there is a technical meaning to the term the average software engineer who took one freshman level science course a decade ago -- which may not have even been chemistry -- might not connect with. Ionization and oxidation/reduction are in fact closely related terms, which the wikipedia link was meant to illustrate. If you compare the two entries ("Redox" and "Ionization"), I think you'll see the connection. Describing the process as oxidation and the effect as ionization is not a priori incorrect.
True, re: thermo! I'd put thermo/stat thermo in the top three most brain-hurting classes I took, along with qm and inorganic (group theory + symmetry + qm wave equantions + orbital theory = some reasonably evil homework sets, heh), but for all the pain in retrospect it was deliriously fun to see the mathematical patterns and systems that came together to describe the various processes of chemistry (the most fun I had was with organic and organic synthesis specifically; that same joy of creation of building molecules I ended up following into software). I only wish I'd been better at mathematics to see that beauty clearer; seeing the same sort of work being done with the processes of finance is pretty fascinating stuff even if my maths are more than a little rusty by this point. Recently for fun I picked up a copy of Capinski and Zastawniak's _Mathematics for Finance: An Introduction to Financial Engineering_ (isbn 978-1852333300 per amazon) which assumes only that the reader has calculus and basic stat/probability and works from first principles in a fairly accessible tone up through stuff like black-scholes and have been working through it in my spare time. Pretty neat and digestible (so far) little book, might be handy for a dev coming from another industry who has some maths but doesn't know what (say) euro vs. am options are or what the mathematical implications of either approach would be, how value could be quantified or created from that knowledge, etc. (Of course, not being an expert in the field I have only my gut feeling and the reviews of others to guess that it's a good text... there could certainly be other, better ones. It reads like a work where the authors cared deeply for their craft, which is a good sign at least.)
It may be "oxidized" as in the opposite to "reduced". See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox
(I haven't RTFA to figure out for sure, but if they're talking "hydrogen" on one side of a reaction and "proton/electron" on the other, it seems plausible on first blush.)
My experience as such is watching a presentation they (I mistakenly called them Azure but I think it's actually Azul, the "blue compute box company" either way much like Cisco is "the blue-green packet box company" in my mind, heh) gave a few months ago to the ny java sig and hearing on the grapevine that it was in planned or actual deployment at a few places. The presentation was pretty neat, made me think about some things here at work that I'd like to demo on it, but of course as a line engineer/sub-contractor I could exactly requisition that much hardware for demo giggles. I did get the impression from the guy at the sig meeting that they were pretty interested and willing to be flexible about getting hardware in people's hands to demo, fwiw. The grapevine here said that it was being rolled out for test in another group, haven't heard more about it (and given the tendency for bad news to travel faster and farther, I assume that means it was either a success or not a total debacle). I got the impression that its big weak point would be anything that was very heavy on disk I/O given the way the system worked (basically, client machines have "proxy" or "shim" jvms that forward everything over to the compute node, so disk I/O has to go roundtrip through the network to be serviced). As to it being worthy of the cost, they never tossed around numbers so I can't say. I imagine if people are committed to Java and have problems that are in its strong point(s) and big enough that no other platform could scale that far, it would be worth it. A lot of ifs, to be sure. :)
I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but the book has been out for quite some time -- checking Amazon, July of 1999. It is pretty great, and I would recommend it to those who somehow managed to miss it up to this point, but a review almost nine years later? Slow news day much?
On the other hand, maybe periodically prodding towards the direction of higher internal quality (to be distinguished from external quality, that which is perceived in a black-box fashion by your customers, the relationship between these two qualities is of course a matter of much friction and debate between the managing and laboring classes) isn't a bad call. Lord knows any extra ammo to convince people that this is worthwhile is appreciated. As much as we like to think of ourselves as poets, I sometimes think the traditional profession most software development resembles is "butcher" or "janitor", just one messy hack-job and sweep under the rug after another after four or five decades of which you can retire and grumble on the beach about putting cyanide in the guacamole, fondly reminiscing about your red swingline or asr-33 or what have you.
I feel your pain regards unfortunate name-google results. My name is Michael Jackson. It does have its upsides: nobody ever asks me to babysit and only one person has ever seriously asked me to spell my name.
For what its worth I'm doing java backend stuff for a bank here in nyc (admittedly not algorithmic trading, more like automated trade settlement stuff in the fixed income/commodities sphere). I'm a chemist that fell into programming because it looked fun though, so I don't know whether I'd fit your filters (I'm seriously thinking about going back to school for another, possibly advanced, degree in CS just to solidify my grounding in theoretical CS). Anyway, of possible interest to you re: Java vs. C++ might be Azure if you haven't seen any of their equipment show up over there (it's making a few inroads here from what I've heard on the grapevine). Basically they make these really high-end custom java machines (as in literal rack-mounted boxes containing 100s of custom asic cores and 100s of gigabytes of ram) that promise things like hard real-time java performance, deterministic and pause-less GC, truly massive heap allocation, etc. for exactly the sort of Hugemongous(tm) problems the financial set encounter.
Powerful computers are absolutely not a prerequisite for nuclear weapons design. The Manhattan project was more chalk and pencil driven than anything else. The highest yielding device we ever tested was in the early 1960s when computers were many orders of magnitude less capable than they are today. We rely so much on computers today only because we signed treaties mandating that we stop testing devices/designs by actually detonating samples.
Hehe, "bomba" was in my collegiate russian slang dictionary for, uh, a woman of exceptional size. (I don't recall if it was in equivalent usage for men.) The sad thing re: the dolls is that I can remember how to spell it in russian, I'm just not sure exactly how that would canonically be rendered in english phonetics.
Cool, I might be able to find some new powernoise musicians that way! :D Merzbow has reminded me at times of what it must sound like to pipe a tarball into /dev/dsp.
(My gdrive would probably contain one large encrypted file. Tar + gpg + free offsite backup, sounds like a win to me.)
I think the dolls you're referring to would be rendered in english phonetics as "matroishka". Mamushka sounds like "babushka", which would be a plane-load of supersonic grandmothers. Holy Christ, that is a disturbing thought. They'd descend on our troops with an unstoppable rain of warm soups and freshly-knitted sweaters would be everywhere!
(I took russian many years ago in college, so please pardon any errors.)
Long one of my favorite movies, but I was very small when it was in the cinema. Being able to see it in that environment was well worth the price of admission, as no home video system can quite compare. Plus, I have to admit, being in an auditorium packed with people who loved the film was a great experience: no talking, no crying babies, no cell phones, just total admiration for the film. Dead silence except for a cheer at the beginning and at the end.
You could wear a kilt, but that much wool (~9 yrds for a full traditional) is hot and scratchy. So the option exists for other socially acceptable forms of bottom-half-covering, but in most situations pants win by being the most function for the least cost/hassle. You could probably go further into this with a full marginal utility analysis of various cuts and types of cloth.
I can't believe I just wrote a quarter-serious post about pants.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=LNUX&a=11&b=9&c=1999&d=05&e=9&f=2000&g=d
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:LNUX
Six months from the ipo would've been around june of 2000, certainly after the peak of the NASDAQ (you can see the decline in the prices above). Still, $36 per share is better than the $3 per share it is now. For simplicity assuming the shares were given to him for $0 and he paid no taxes on them once sold and had transaction costs of $0 and that he sold them all as soon as he could (wise given a $240->$36 drop in six months), that would mean clearing $5,400,000 off of his 150k share allotment. Still nothing to sneeze at, but not the absurd valuation he mentions in his post. After removing all the simplifying assumptions, lord only knows. Less than $5M, probably more than $0. ;)