But don't physicists say that >90% of the stuff in the universe isn't like the stuff we are made out of?
Why so "normal matter" centric when we're not even made of normal matter by the statistics according to popular theory.
Anyway, maybe there's life inside stars if you define life as fairly complex swirls in the "river of entropy". If bacteria can be considered life, why not some self reproducing evolving pattern inside a star? There's plenty going on inside a star - electrical currents, magnetic fields etc, lots of resources and energy, and many stars provide a fairly stable environment for billions of years, so maybe there'll be pockets of life.
If we're not interested in that sort of life, then what are we really looking for?
"But people seem to be missing the point here - it's an operating system. You use it to launch applications and provide a framework for those applications to work in. That's all it does."
I don't think that's Microsoft's line. Otherwise I could use Win2K/XP to do the same thing for most existing Windows software.
If they kept selling XP, eventually Wine will catch up, and someone will package it properly.
And then Microsoft would be just like one of those BIOS vendors. That's not where they want to go...
It's just not that easy to make such a huge improvement in the O/S if there are all those artificial lock-ins AND all those "undocumented" slightly broken APIs AND there's all that backward compatibility to maintain. And did they outsource part of the development? If they did that makes it even harder.
In contrast, if some binary doesn't work across platforms the Linux people just "glibly" say recompile using the new glibc. No source? Your fault then.
I think the bulk of the switchers to WinXP were using Win9x.
I'm still using Win2K. The only advantage to _me_ of XP over Win2K is XP boots faster:). I heard WinXP has better backward compatibility with Win9x stuff, but I've never noticed.
Also, WinXP at the start was pretty crap - BSODs etc. But WinXP _SP2_ is quite different from WinXP in terms of stability and security.
As for Vista, I borrowed a Vista machine from a different dept to test it out, and I got a BSOD while logging in on a different account. Maybe it's due to crappy hardware or crappy hardware drivers. But who really cares - given that there are alternatives like Win2K or XP?
I haven't had a blue screen on Win2K or WinXP for a very long while, and even if I eventually have to use Vista (hope not), I'll let the Vista Fan Club do Microsoft's testing first for a few more years.
There was a reason for people to upgrade to XP from Win9x even if WinXP was still flaky. Win9x sucked - you had crap like GDI resource problems and worse. BTW when you boot Win98 if you press the "windows key" while it's coming up, Win98 kinda doesn't work properly. Win95 was OK. I'm not still sure how Win98 was better than Win95.
Microsoft's problem is Win2K/XP >> Win9x whereas Vista < Win2K/XP.
Microsoft's other problem is if people continue sticking to WinXP/Win2K, someone could end up making a WinXP +DirectX compatible that works on Linux (or *BSD?), and people could just switch to "Linux/BSD XP" instead of Vista.
You call the competition between Intel and AMD minor competition?
So what's major competition? When your products are _expected_ to (and actually) get better, faster and cheaper every week instead of just every few months? Show me examples, I'm curious now.
Coca Cola vs Pepsi = minor competition. McD vs others = minor competition.
Smart investors should avoid investing in IT companies - much easier to accidentally get it right in other areas;).
The "big problem" with Hugo Chavez is that he isn't the US's puppet. And Venezuela has oil.
How about the US go fix Saudi Arabia sometime? No? Why not?
When Saddam in Iraq was the US's puppet, there were no complaints. Only after Saddam outlived his usefulness then the US set him up.
Saddam actually did inform the USA he was considering attacking Kuwait (depending on the outcome of Kuwait-Iraq negotiations) and the USA then said "whatever".
Well, given the US voting system only supports "voting for X", it could mean that those people staying away are just voting "none of the above".
I propose you just do a simple change where people can choose to "vote against" instead of "vote for" - and it counts as a negative vote.
Then may the candidate with the least negative score win.
That'll be worth getting off your butt wouldn't it? Imagine the interview questions - so what do you think of your win with a score of -14423? It's better than the other candidate's -33456 but what sort of "mandate" is that?
Even if it's still the same old bunch leading, at least it'll be more entertaining.
"An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours,"
I think it's only alarming if the number is zero;). After all, how many people actually like such jobs? And how much do such jobs pay? So to me it's a good sign that women are finding better things to do with their lives than being "on call" just to make the 1-2% rich (who own 50% of the wealth) richer.
And what's with everyone trying to encourage women to move into IT, when: 1) Most women aren't interested in the first place 2) The jobs aren't valued highly by Management and tend to get outsourced. 3) The jobs aren't that _wonderful_ in terms of pay, security etc. (They're ok if you actually like IT stuff a lot, but see 1) ) 4) An "alarming number" are moving out.;)
From the article: "I had a 14-year-old daughter that I didn't want to leave alone at 3 a.m.,".
Oh wow, an alarming number of women have got their priorities right?
Compare this with: "I have to babysit these flaky 24/7 app servers at 3 am"
It better be something like a wonderful charity's donation server at say "tsunami time" for you to have a greater chance of being proud of doing that at the end of your life, when you choose to do that instead of being able to have normal hours and thus spend more time with your kids (and try to brainwash them before MTV etc do).
Whereas if it's just to make a bunch of Machiavellian rich guys richer and more powerful, you better know what you are doing and why.
The US dollar is not gold backed, but it doesn't have to be as long as everyone uses the US dollar for trade - the Feds can keep printing money (either by actually printing money or with "IOU"s) and things still "kinda work" (there's so much USD in circulation and 66% of it is held outside the USA, so it's not devalued as fast). The problem is if more and more start shifting to other currencies like the Euro. In 2002/2003 EUR25 and USD25 would get you 1 barrel of oil. In 2006 it was USD70 vs EUR57.
The Bank of Japan and Bank of China respectively hold about 640 and 350 billion USD of the Fed's debt. That's 20% of the total US public debt as of end 2006. And 44% of the total US public debt is held by foreigners.
Basically Japan and China lend the US money and the US buys their stuff. It's a bit of a shell game and a bit of "Mutually Assured Destruction";). Though it'll eventually blow up, so far it's worked longer than the previous "schemes".
And when things blow up, given that 1-2% of the population owns 40-50% of all the wealth and 20% own 80%, many of the extremely rich will just use that opportunity to increase their share of the ownership (buy low, sell high and guess who has spare money to buy stuff in times of trouble).
Enjoy the world's Monkey Business and Freakonomics while it lasts:).
Most people don't understand money either. They're just passing around tokens the way they've been trained by their parents and others around them.
Washers and monopoly money aren't worth much because not enough people believe they are worth something.
What it takes is belief.
If the belief in the US Dollar's value weakened, it will fall in value. If it dropped enough you might have to give a million of them to perfect strangers just to buy loaves of bread, or a virtual sword in an MMOG.
Most people do not make buying decisions the way you claim they do. Only a few would do "this will save me X hours, but does it cost more than I make in X hours". Maybe even more people would go "Shiny! Let's buy it" than do what you say (looking at how advertising works;) ).
See "The Psychology of Spending": http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/winter99/spendi ng.html
Well I guess big business will be happier, because studies have shown that women tend to not ask for as high salaries as men (even if they are more qualified). Even so, it seems in the west companies don't value CS jobs very highly - they prefer cheap and plentiful.
So I really don't see why it is so important to spend so much effort to encourage women to do something they aren't interested in, that isn't on the top of the list of "secure well paying jobs".
The barriers of entry are already very low, while they may not be as low as for math (but I wonder if "Ramanujans" would get lost in the noise nowadays), computers are cheap, plenty of free tools and information. So the lack of women just shows that they prefer to do other things.
There really are plenty of viable options, and seems to me more ladies prefer doing Law or Medicine. Jobs in those fields tend to be harder to outsource, so maybe they're picking better long term career paths.
That's why it would be good if companies could semiautomatically categorize callers, say based on track record.
caller actually only calls when it's the company's fault = add points most support staff (or even who call gets escalated to) believe caller knows stuff (and not rude - worth dealing with) = add points.
Then you can fast track the useful ones with a clue - they may actually spot problems (and maybe even solutions) faster than inhouse staff (who might be busy with other stuff).
Most of the ignorant ones will willingly go through the script anyway. So as long you work out a decent script, that'll actually help them (Oh silly me, the notebook was plugged in BUT the power socket wasn't on).
quote: 'And as long as English is commonly spoken, it is not dead either. That's why I said it is a "Dieing" standard, as in it is depricated, being fazed out...'
English may not be dead yet, but you and those infamous "loosers" are making a good attempt at killing it:).
That's why many companies separate the customers into groups. One group who are usually right (or pay extra to be treated that way:) ). And another group who are clueless.
Even companies like Dell have an Engineer-to-Engineer support, and at that level if a customer says the CDROM drive is broken it's not because it was used as a cup-holder;).
Now if companies could semi-automatically sort long-term customers into separate groups that'll be good.
It'll be good for me and _them_ when I tell them that they've screwed up their routing config, and no I do not need to reboot my ADSL modem - they don't go uh "that's not in the script" and keep asking me to do pointless stuff.
The problem is with the ICANN - they're mainly collecting money and doing nothing really good for the long term (they approve TLDs that are just "yet another.com"s - see any significant innovations/improvements?). A single Jon Postel could replace the entire ICANN and the world would probably be better for it.
The bigger problem is everyone currently lining up to replace ICANN is probably worse than the ICANN.
1) AFAIK the dvorak layout is based on statistics for "normal" English, not code. I doubt it makes { or } easier to type. Or the various other brackets and special chars that many computer languages like, and then there are also IDEs with autocompletion etc.
2) While the layout might make it easier to type comments in "English" (yeah right...), the main thing is coders are not typists - they shouldn't be copying stuff with minimal thinking or taking dictation etc.
3) Higher quality thinking = lower quantity typing. Typing time shouldn't be very much, unless you are somehow using notepad to write code in a verbose language like Java;).
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So any recent benchmarks of how the latest T2 stuff does vs recent x86 machines in popular server apps like _real_world_ webservers, databases?
AFAIK, it was slower than x86 the day it was launched, and when Intel's "Core 2" stuff came out it got crushed in performance/watt.
But don't physicists say that >90% of the stuff in the universe isn't like the stuff we are made out of?
Why so "normal matter" centric when we're not even made of normal matter by the statistics according to popular theory.
Anyway, maybe there's life inside stars if you define life as fairly complex swirls in the "river of entropy". If bacteria can be considered life, why not some self reproducing evolving pattern inside a star? There's plenty going on inside a star - electrical currents, magnetic fields etc, lots of resources and energy, and many stars provide a fairly stable environment for billions of years, so maybe there'll be pockets of life.
If we're not interested in that sort of life, then what are we really looking for?
Uh there must be some other more interesting story right?
"But people seem to be missing the point here - it's an operating system. You use it to launch applications and provide a framework for those applications to work in. That's all it does."
I don't think that's Microsoft's line. Otherwise I could use Win2K/XP to do the same thing for most existing Windows software.
Uh. Microsoft aren't stupid.
Microsoft HAS to make a new O/S.
If they kept selling XP, eventually Wine will catch up, and someone will package it properly.
And then Microsoft would be just like one of those BIOS vendors. That's not where they want to go...
It's just not that easy to make such a huge improvement in the O/S if there are all those artificial lock-ins AND all those "undocumented" slightly broken APIs AND there's all that backward compatibility to maintain. And did they outsource part of the development? If they did that makes it even harder.
In contrast, if some binary doesn't work across platforms the Linux people just "glibly" say recompile using the new glibc. No source? Your fault then.
I think the bulk of the switchers to WinXP were using Win9x.
:). I heard WinXP has better backward compatibility with Win9x stuff, but I've never noticed.
I'm still using Win2K. The only advantage to _me_ of XP over Win2K is XP boots faster
Also, WinXP at the start was pretty crap - BSODs etc. But WinXP _SP2_ is quite different from WinXP in terms of stability and security.
As for Vista, I borrowed a Vista machine from a different dept to test it out, and I got a BSOD while logging in on a different account. Maybe it's due to crappy hardware or crappy hardware drivers. But who really cares - given that there are alternatives like Win2K or XP?
I haven't had a blue screen on Win2K or WinXP for a very long while, and even if I eventually have to use Vista (hope not), I'll let the Vista Fan Club do Microsoft's testing first for a few more years.
There was a reason for people to upgrade to XP from Win9x even if WinXP was still flaky. Win9x sucked - you had crap like GDI resource problems and worse. BTW when you boot Win98 if you press the "windows key" while it's coming up, Win98 kinda doesn't work properly. Win95 was OK. I'm not still sure how Win98 was better than Win95.
Microsoft's problem is Win2K/XP >> Win9x whereas Vista < Win2K/XP.
Microsoft's other problem is if people continue sticking to WinXP/Win2K, someone could end up making a WinXP +DirectX compatible that works on Linux (or *BSD?), and people could just switch to "Linux/BSD XP" instead of Vista.
Wouldn't that be interesting...
I bet the "whipping up frenzy" is not targeted at people who actually read articles.
AFAIK those popular "cough medicine"s have been proven to not work.
yeah, those double plus ungood languages ;).
Yes. Singapore.
Where the Gov is competent and it's not funny. I bet if they wanted to round up the top 2000 "troublemakers" within an hour or so they could do it.
tinyurl allows "previews" enabled - which means people can opt to see the URL first, rather than the site.
A number of other url shortening sites don't support this feature.
You call the competition between Intel and AMD minor competition?
;).
So what's major competition? When your products are _expected_ to (and actually) get better, faster and cheaper every week instead of just every few months? Show me examples, I'm curious now.
Coca Cola vs Pepsi = minor competition. McD vs others = minor competition.
Smart investors should avoid investing in IT companies - much easier to accidentally get it right in other areas
The "big problem" with Hugo Chavez is that he isn't the US's puppet. And Venezuela has oil.
e .htmlc ument.asp?docid=110705
How about the US go fix Saudi Arabia sometime? No? Why not?
When Saddam in Iraq was the US's puppet, there were no complaints. Only after Saddam outlived his usefulness then the US set him up.
Saddam actually did inform the USA he was considering attacking Kuwait (depending on the outcome of Kuwait-Iraq negotiations) and the USA then said "whatever".
See: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspi
Compare:
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/displaydo
And that's quite some time before the actual attack.
Well, given the US voting system only supports "voting for X", it could mean that those people staying away are just voting "none of the above".
I propose you just do a simple change where people can choose to "vote against" instead of "vote for" - and it counts as a negative vote.
Then may the candidate with the least negative score win.
That'll be worth getting off your butt wouldn't it? Imagine the interview questions - so what do you think of your win with a score of -14423? It's better than the other candidate's -33456 but what sort of "mandate" is that?
Even if it's still the same old bunch leading, at least it'll be more entertaining.
"phishing and identity crimes are all about tricking people who don't know better (for the most part)."
Heh, and you think politicians already in power want a large majority of people who can't be easily tricked and know better?
Go look at Diebold, the "nonwar" on Iraq, etc and you'll see a large part of it is about tricking people who don't know better.
"An alarming number of women are currently abandoning IT jobs that require workers to be on-call at all hours,"
;). After all, how many people actually like such jobs? And how much do such jobs pay? So to me it's a good sign that women are finding better things to do with their lives than being "on call" just to make the 1-2% rich (who own 50% of the wealth) richer.
;)
I think it's only alarming if the number is zero
And what's with everyone trying to encourage women to move into IT, when:
1) Most women aren't interested in the first place
2) The jobs aren't valued highly by Management and tend to get outsourced.
3) The jobs aren't that _wonderful_ in terms of pay, security etc. (They're ok if you actually like IT stuff a lot, but see 1) )
4) An "alarming number" are moving out.
From the article:
"I had a 14-year-old daughter that I didn't want to leave alone at 3 a.m.,".
Oh wow, an alarming number of women have got their priorities right?
Compare this with:
"I have to babysit these flaky 24/7 app servers at 3 am"
It better be something like a wonderful charity's donation server at say "tsunami time" for you to have a greater chance of being proud of doing that at the end of your life, when you choose to do that instead of being able to have normal hours and thus spend more time with your kids (and try to brainwash them before MTV etc do).
Whereas if it's just to make a bunch of Machiavellian rich guys richer and more powerful, you better know what you are doing and why.
Pessimistic?
;). Though it'll eventually blow up, so far it's worked longer than the previous "schemes".
:).
The US dollar is not gold backed, but it doesn't have to be as long as everyone uses the US dollar for trade - the Feds can keep printing money (either by actually printing money or with "IOU"s) and things still "kinda work" (there's so much USD in circulation and 66% of it is held outside the USA, so it's not devalued as fast). The problem is if more and more start shifting to other currencies like the Euro. In 2002/2003 EUR25 and USD25 would get you 1 barrel of oil. In 2006 it was USD70 vs EUR57.
The Bank of Japan and Bank of China respectively hold about 640 and 350 billion USD of the Fed's debt. That's 20% of the total US public debt as of end 2006. And 44% of the total US public debt is held by foreigners.
Basically Japan and China lend the US money and the US buys their stuff. It's a bit of a shell game and a bit of "Mutually Assured Destruction"
And when things blow up, given that 1-2% of the population owns 40-50% of all the wealth and 20% own 80%, many of the extremely rich will just use that opportunity to increase their share of the ownership (buy low, sell high and guess who has spare money to buy stuff in times of trouble).
Enjoy the world's Monkey Business and Freakonomics while it lasts
Most people don't understand money either. They're just passing around tokens the way they've been trained by their parents and others around them.
;) ).
i ng.html
Washers and monopoly money aren't worth much because not enough people believe they are worth something.
What it takes is belief.
If the belief in the US Dollar's value weakened, it will fall in value. If it dropped enough you might have to give a million of them to perfect strangers just to buy loaves of bread, or a virtual sword in an MMOG.
Most people do not make buying decisions the way you claim they do. Only a few would do "this will save me X hours, but does it cost more than I make in X hours". Maybe even more people would go "Shiny! Let's buy it" than do what you say (looking at how advertising works
See "The Psychology of Spending": http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/winter99/spend
Or getting the appropriate consultant to help write the specs.
Well I guess big business will be happier, because studies have shown that women tend to not ask for as high salaries as men (even if they are more qualified). Even so, it seems in the west companies don't value CS jobs very highly - they prefer cheap and plentiful.
So I really don't see why it is so important to spend so much effort to encourage women to do something they aren't interested in, that isn't on the top of the list of "secure well paying jobs".
The barriers of entry are already very low, while they may not be as low as for math (but I wonder if "Ramanujans" would get lost in the noise nowadays), computers are cheap, plenty of free tools and information. So the lack of women just shows that they prefer to do other things.
There really are plenty of viable options, and seems to me more ladies prefer doing Law or Medicine. Jobs in those fields tend to be harder to outsource, so maybe they're picking better long term career paths.
That's why it would be good if companies could semiautomatically categorize callers, say based on track record.
caller actually only calls when it's the company's fault = add points
most support staff (or even who call gets escalated to) believe caller knows stuff (and not rude - worth dealing with) = add points.
Then you can fast track the useful ones with a clue - they may actually spot problems (and maybe even solutions) faster than inhouse staff (who might be busy with other stuff).
Most of the ignorant ones will willingly go through the script anyway. So as long you work out a decent script, that'll actually help them (Oh silly me, the notebook was plugged in BUT the power socket wasn't on).
quote: 'And as long as English is commonly spoken, it is not dead either. That's why I said it is a "Dieing" standard, as in it is depricated, being fazed out...'
:).
English may not be dead yet, but you and those infamous "loosers" are making a good attempt at killing it
Because so many customers who call up are wrong?
:) ). And another group who are clueless.
;).
That's why many companies separate the customers into groups. One group who are usually right (or pay extra to be treated that way
Even companies like Dell have an Engineer-to-Engineer support, and at that level if a customer says the CDROM drive is broken it's not because it was used as a cup-holder
Now if companies could semi-automatically sort long-term customers into separate groups that'll be good.
It'll be good for me and _them_ when I tell them that they've screwed up their routing config, and no I do not need to reboot my ADSL modem - they don't go uh "that's not in the script" and keep asking me to do pointless stuff.
The problem is with the ICANN - they're mainly collecting money and doing nothing really good for the long term (they approve TLDs that are just "yet another .com"s - see any significant innovations/improvements?). A single Jon Postel could replace the entire ICANN and the world would probably be better for it.
The bigger problem is everyone currently lining up to replace ICANN is probably worse than the ICANN.
Financial maneuvering? Add political maneuvering.
1) AFAIK the dvorak layout is based on statistics for "normal" English, not code. I doubt it makes { or } easier to type. Or the various other brackets and special chars that many computer languages like, and then there are also IDEs with autocompletion etc.
;).
2) While the layout might make it easier to type comments in "English" (yeah right...), the main thing is coders are not typists - they shouldn't be copying stuff with minimal thinking or taking dictation etc.
3) Higher quality thinking = lower quantity typing. Typing time shouldn't be very much, unless you are somehow using notepad to write code in a verbose language like Java