Many technologies follow a saturation curve--slow take-off, sudden surge, then leveling off. I'll never forget the story about the town that didn't have TV until the 1970s. Then of course, there are those who just don't want something, or weren't raised with it. The Amish don't have cars. Your grandparents may have no desire for a net connection either. Once the older generation passes on, we should be close to having filled up the natural market for this technology. It may never penetrate as much as some other innovations, such as electrity which can light the night, or the phone which can summon emergency help. Compared to that, the ability to send an e-mail or download videos of rednecks blowing up home-made firecrackers just isn't compelling enough for many people. If they can find a social circle that feels the same way, 'net penetration may not reach the high 90 percent that some of these other techs have.
Oh man, thank-you. This brings back fond memories. I was channel surfing with my cousin one night back in the 80s, and we decided to stop on the Young Ones, and that was the episode. I'd never watched the show before, but we couldn't find anything else, so we were like, "let's watch this", and we busted up laughing all over the place. The Motorhead interlude just made it all the more insane and anarchic. Such good times. I'm glad somebody 'tubed this.
Best of all: If you eat chocolate before you climb into the Hummer, it'll improve your thinking and you'll be a better driver. A glass or two of red wine (afterwards, please) to celebrate. It's all for your health, and the good of the planet.
During the 2nd year of my one and only Summer intern job, I got to write and run some FORTRAN (the year before that, I had to run the shredder and do other simple clerical stuff). It was probably about 100 lines and did a very simple analysis; but it was actually used. This was in 1987, so it wasn't punched cards though. I'm not that old. RIP Mr. Backus.
A bunch of people doing their own thing? This is very much like a free market. At Google, it sounds like they're harnessing the power of the free market, and giving it just enough direction to satisfy management goals.
A bunch of people working through multiple levels of management to achieve management goals? This is very much like a centrally planned economy with a beurocracy. It's proven to be less efficient than the other system. Yes, you still need some management at a software company. The political analogy, like all analogies, breaks down at some point. MS is, however, much more of a centrally planned beurocracy than Google.
Reading about the way MS is run reminds me of the airlines before deregulation. The United States had many features of a centrally planned, socialist economy (and still does), but we never admit that because if we did, the CIA would have to overthrow the government (heheh... digress). At any rate, if I were Balmer, I'd consider airline deregulation as a way to transform and re-invigorate MS. Start by firing half your PMs and flattening the hierarchy a bit. At the very least, there should be less degrees of separation between you and your most distant employee than there are between that same employee and the President of the USA. The average is 6, right? I've heard that at MS, you have something like 11 degrees of separation! And it's not even a planet, it's just one company. Classic sign of a company hog-tied by management, procedure, beurocracy, inflexibility, etc. It's no wonder Google and a bunch of loosely affiliated coders (Linux community) are both out-coding MS.
The magma has gas in solution. Opening the magma chamber is like taking the top off a soda bottle. The gas comes out of solution, the molten rock mixed with gas comes flying out like crazy. This is what I've been told. It makes sense.
OTOH, pumping water into the rocks might help stave off the eruption by cooling the magma chamber. It would also provide geothermal power. I'm not sure if we could pump enough water to make a difference, and if we drill into the rocks and hit the magma chamber... see the previous paragraph.
"The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico) nearly the whole of the United States west of the Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world's cereals...It took thousands of workers eight months to clear 1.8 billion tons of debris from the sixteen acres of the World Trade Center site in New York. Imagine what it would take to clear Kansas.
Imagine what it would take to turn over all the soil in Kansas. Oh... wait... that happens at the start of every planting. So. If this happens during the winter, they might need to scrape off some ash, pile it by the side of the field, or take and put it in a big pile someplace (which is what happens to grain a lot of the time anyway). The real concern is that it will happen during the growing season and interfere with growth and harvest.
You can't compare the clearing of a massive wreck of twisted metal and concrete full of remains to clearing a field. Obviously, interfering with growth and harvest is a major concern. If it's not raining, a strategy involving a blower attachment to a combine might still save the crop. Somebody should test that. If it rains though, your crop couuld end up encased in something with the consistancy of wet cement. Also, you've got to filter those engines really well. Somebody should test this, like FEMA... umm... ok, umm... yeah, we're fucked.
Enormous turtle farts. Then nothing. Then the Universe. Before that, I would say turtles all the way down, but there was no down. It was turtles all the way flammix, especially in the direction of Zorch. Believe me. I was there. At least, I'm sure I was, in at least one of the parallel turtles.
Well, if you're willing to give away your position just to find your position, then this is fine. I'd like to see them solve this problem for a sub that's running silent. Since almost all subs are military, and stealthiness is important, that's the real problem. If they don't care about giving away their position, they might as well raise their tethered antenna package above the water-line. That would be a lot less expensi... oh... wait... it's the military. Yes. Let's order this system right now. Better have a a backup network too, in case the primary network goes down.
I've often wondered that too. I asked a Russian co-worker about it though, and he said his experience with foreign systems that only use a payroll tax, is that they are much more likely to be corrupt. Since there's a lower compliance rate, they have to have a higher tax. I don't really buy into that though. I'd much rather just have the payroll tax and be done with it, as long as I can't be held personally liable for failing to pay it. If it's just a payroll tax, then who is liable though? It can't be the person who runs payroll. Those jobs don't pay very much, and people won't run the risk of personal bankruptcy for failing to carry a decimal. If the corporation or company is liable, then it's much harder to pin blame on a person. The corporation or company just goes bankrupt, so I think my Russian co-worker had a good point.
Historicly, taxes in the US were collected from individuals. I've been told that payroll deductions, called "witholding" here, were an emergency measure adopted because they needed funds during WWII. After the war, witholding continued. Some have actually argued that we get rid of witholding due to its history as a WWII emergency measure. It also feeds into some conspiracy theories regarding the "continual state of war" in the US. Anyway, the US is, in some sense, "pay as you earn", it's just that you have to file to reconcile the difference between what you've paid and what you actually owe.
What you owe can be less due to deductions (e.g., charity, marital status, etc.). Over the years, the US has used the tax code for social engineering. Those deductions are popular, entrenched, and backed by powerful lobbies and interests who have a lot to gain from the tax code as it stands. If I had to give a one-word answer to your question it would be:
...EEG results... NOT! Oh, and experiments in biology going all the way back to that guy who put wires on dead frog legs and made them twitch, sorry don't feel like looking it up. Oh, and when I was a kid and I had the electronic project kit and made my thumb twitch with electricity. Or, anybody who's ever felt a shock. Yes. From now on, we'll do all of that by YELLING REALLY LOUD.
And no, I didn't read TFA, but do I really have to? For once, I think not.
I beg to differ. I'd much rather embed animted GIF in something than Flash. The latter has many more capabilities; but with that comes a larger footprint and more security and compatability issues to consider. If you understand the limitations of GIF, there are actually not that many cases where you need PNG. Most non-lossy images are line art or cartoons. It's very rare that you come close to exhausting the 256 color palette. Even the Sunday version of Dilbert, for example, with full color, looks great as GIF. Most lossy images are photo-real, so you just use JPEG.
Don't get me wrong. I love PNG, and you can get better compression than GIF. It's just that most of the time you don't really need PNG's non-lossy true color capabilities. GIF is so entrenched, there are so many legacy images, it's so widely implemented, it's here to stay. See my.sig also.
I didn't mean for the top beer to be outside the fridge. There would have to be a sliding door or something at the top of the magazine to keep it cold of course. Picture something like the tray return at some cafeterias--where the top tray is always at the same height regardless of how many trays have been returned. The spring compression always "just balances" things. Yeah, this is not quite the same as a rifle magazine, which has more spring force and pushses the shell into the chamber. There might still be a need for an elevator ride, but it would be a much shorter ride. HTH clarify what I was thinking; definitely not thinking of anything that would make the beer warm. Blech!
Rationale? We already have JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless and now that GIF is off-patent we have that too. All of these have un-encumbered implementations. Having lossless and lossy in one format doesn't really offer much of an advantage. Unless this new image format gives me time-traveling X-ray vision into whatever the picture is, why should I care? Extra compression is nice, and it might be worthwhile if you were archiving terabytes of image data. Most web sites are not, so even if it has better compression it's still not worth the hassle of switching. Bandwidth and storage are just not that expensive. In other words, it would have to totally blow away the existing formats by some performance metric. I have a hard time believing the ammount of effort to switch things over could be justified. What could possibly be that much better about any new image format? Anyone remember JPEG 2000? The wavelet compression was really interesting, but it was proprietary, somebody was trying to make money off it, and so nobody cared. It's tough to enter a market where the price is already set at ZERO. The existing product in such a market has to be inferior enough so that people are willing to pony up the extra bills. An example of where this has happened in the recent past is the compiler market. People were willing to pay extra for the Intel compiler even though GCC is free, because the Intel compiler generated faster code. It's been a while since I've looked into that, so I don't know if that's still the situation. Even with the performance difference, many people still just stuck with GCC rather than pay more. This is not MS-bashing. It's just basic economics.
If you take the Monticello tour, they point out the little mini dumb-waiter that brought wine up from the cellar. Of course, there was no remote control. He just told his slaves what to bring up, and then they presumeably operated the mechanism with a hand-crank or something. It's been a long time since I took that tour.
This robot has a couple obvious flaws. First, the arm has to rotate to get into firing position. He should have the beer elevator on the other side. Next the beers shouldn't have to ride the eleveator. It should be more like a sprung rifle magazine, so that there is always one beer right by the "chamber", ready to be loaded and fired. These two changes alone should increase his firing rate considerably. The first time you get a beer from this thing it's fun, but once you realize what a painfully slow rate of fire it has, the novelty will wear off.
It's a cool robot though. Way better than I could do, I'm sure.
Maybe it's the geography. On the other side of the pond it hasn't skipped a beat. I'm in DC but my v6 PoP is in Boston for some reason. I agree though, if I were in control of the provider decision I'd go with someone who offered it natively or at least ran their own tunnel so I could scream at them when it went down. There is at least one DSL provider here that offers native IPv6. The provider decision was made by others based on cost. IPv6 wasn't a factor, or even really a serious consideration in our office at the time. Since SixXS is free, I really can't complain about it.
I've had a SixXS tunnel up for a few weeks. They are definitely the way to go. The other tunnel provider I tried wasn't very reliable. I wouldn't try this with WindowsXP. I've had to do all my testing with Linux. Some people claim to have made it work with XP; but I can only get utilities like ping to work. Real apps like IE just don't seem to work with it yet. The applications have to support it, and that seems like a bigger hurdle to IPv6 than the network infrastructure. A lot of infrastructure hardware has IPv6 support built in already. And yes, I realize I'm talking about a tunnel here and intermixing my commentary, so cool your inference-trolling jets. I know the difference between tunnels and native connections, dammit! That might be the problem; but I don't have native connectivity so I can't tell if that's it or not.
Good point. A non-biased way would involve, perhaps, taking hair samples from all the students. You have to snip a lock too, not just a single hair. I remember how we measured the width of a hair in one of our high school science classes. It turns out that on a lot of people, there is a lot of variation in width, and perhaps there is variation in shape too but we didn't attempt to measure that.
It sounds like these kids get a break for being a minority in this case. In the US where African ancestry puts you in the minority, there might not be a big enough survival advantage for the necessary mutation to dominate the louse population. Even though there are pockets of the US where African ancestry is in the majority, the mutation may not have taken hold yet. If true, this might indicate that it takes a while for lice to evolve this feature. To really answer that question though, we should do a comparison in school districts where African ancestry is in the majority, and has been for quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
Many technologies follow a saturation curve--slow take-off, sudden surge, then leveling off. I'll never forget the story about the town that didn't have TV until the 1970s. Then of course, there are those who just don't want something, or weren't raised with it. The Amish don't have cars. Your grandparents may have no desire for a net connection either. Once the older generation passes on, we should be close to having filled up the natural market for this technology. It may never penetrate as much as some other innovations, such as electrity which can light the night, or the phone which can summon emergency help. Compared to that, the ability to send an e-mail or download videos of rednecks blowing up home-made firecrackers just isn't compelling enough for many people. If they can find a social circle that feels the same way, 'net penetration may not reach the high 90 percent that some of these other techs have.
watch Lemmy sing Ace of Spades on the Young Ones
Oh man, thank-you. This brings back fond memories. I was channel surfing with my cousin one night back in the 80s, and we decided to stop on the Young Ones, and that was the episode. I'd never watched the show before, but we couldn't find anything else, so we were like, "let's watch this", and we busted up laughing all over the place. The Motorhead interlude just made it all the more insane and anarchic. Such good times. I'm glad somebody 'tubed this.
Best of all: If you eat chocolate before you climb into the Hummer, it'll improve your thinking and you'll be a better driver. A glass or two of red wine (afterwards, please) to celebrate. It's all for your health, and the good of the planet.
During the 2nd year of my one and only Summer intern job, I got to write and run some FORTRAN (the year before that, I had to run the shredder and do other simple clerical stuff). It was probably about 100 lines and did a very simple analysis; but it was actually used. This was in 1987, so it wasn't punched cards though. I'm not that old. RIP Mr. Backus.
A bunch of people doing their own thing? This is very much like a free market. At Google, it sounds like they're harnessing the power of the free market, and giving it just enough direction to satisfy management goals.
A bunch of people working through multiple levels of management to achieve management goals? This is very much like a centrally planned economy with a beurocracy. It's proven to be less efficient than the other system. Yes, you still need some management at a software company. The political analogy, like all analogies, breaks down at some point. MS is, however, much more of a centrally planned beurocracy than Google.
Reading about the way MS is run reminds me of the airlines before deregulation. The United States had many features of a centrally planned, socialist economy (and still does), but we never admit that because if we did, the CIA would have to overthrow the government (heheh... digress). At any rate, if I were Balmer, I'd consider airline deregulation as a way to transform and re-invigorate MS. Start by firing half your PMs and flattening the hierarchy a bit. At the very least, there should be less degrees of separation between you and your most distant employee than there are between that same employee and the President of the USA. The average is 6, right? I've heard that at MS, you have something like 11 degrees of separation! And it's not even a planet, it's just one company. Classic sign of a company hog-tied by management, procedure, beurocracy, inflexibility, etc. It's no wonder Google and a bunch of loosely affiliated coders (Linux community) are both out-coding MS.
The magma has gas in solution. Opening the magma chamber is like taking the top off a soda bottle. The gas comes out of solution, the molten rock mixed with gas comes flying out like crazy. This is what I've been told. It makes sense.
OTOH, pumping water into the rocks might help stave off the eruption by cooling the magma chamber. It would also provide geothermal power. I'm not sure if we could pump enough water to make a difference, and if we drill into the rocks and hit the magma chamber... see the previous paragraph.
Imagine what it would take to turn over all the soil in Kansas. Oh... wait... that happens at the start of every planting. So. If this happens during the winter, they might need to scrape off some ash, pile it by the side of the field, or take and put it in a big pile someplace (which is what happens to grain a lot of the time anyway). The real concern is that it will happen during the growing season and interfere with growth and harvest.
You can't compare the clearing of a massive wreck of twisted metal and concrete full of remains to clearing a field. Obviously, interfering with growth and harvest is a major concern. If it's not raining, a strategy involving a blower attachment to a combine might still save the crop. Somebody should test that. If it rains though, your crop couuld end up encased in something with the consistancy of wet cement. Also, you've got to filter those engines really well. Somebody should test this, like FEMA... umm... ok, umm... yeah, we're fucked.
Enormous turtle farts. Then nothing. Then the Universe. Before that, I would say turtles all the way down, but there was no down. It was turtles all the way flammix, especially in the direction of Zorch. Believe me. I was there. At least, I'm sure I was, in at least one of the parallel turtles.
Well, if you're willing to give away your position just to find your position, then this is fine. I'd like to see them solve this problem for a sub that's running silent. Since almost all subs are military, and stealthiness is important, that's the real problem. If they don't care about giving away their position, they might as well raise their tethered antenna package above the water-line. That would be a lot less expensi... oh... wait... it's the military. Yes. Let's order this system right now. Better have a a backup network too, in case the primary network goes down.
Something tells me that if the kernel has dumped core and dropped down into a debugger, the users are going to notice something. Just a hunch.
Why not a whole town? They could even have a hammock district.
Nah, I don't see how that could be. However, this article was unusually good for some reason. I think I'm going to subscribe to Slashdot.
I've often wondered that too. I asked a Russian co-worker about it though, and he said his experience with foreign systems that only use a payroll tax, is that they are much more likely to be corrupt. Since there's a lower compliance rate, they have to have a higher tax. I don't really buy into that though. I'd much rather just have the payroll tax and be done with it, as long as I can't be held personally liable for failing to pay it. If it's just a payroll tax, then who is liable though? It can't be the person who runs payroll. Those jobs don't pay very much, and people won't run the risk of personal bankruptcy for failing to carry a decimal. If the corporation or company is liable, then it's much harder to pin blame on a person. The corporation or company just goes bankrupt, so I think my Russian co-worker had a good point.
Historicly, taxes in the US were collected from individuals. I've been told that payroll deductions, called "witholding" here, were an emergency measure adopted because they needed funds during WWII. After the war, witholding continued. Some have actually argued that we get rid of witholding due to its history as a WWII emergency measure. It also feeds into some conspiracy theories regarding the "continual state of war" in the US. Anyway, the US is, in some sense, "pay as you earn", it's just that you have to file to reconcile the difference between what you've paid and what you actually owe.
What you owe can be less due to deductions (e.g., charity, marital status, etc.). Over the years, the US has used the tax code for social engineering. Those deductions are popular, entrenched, and backed by powerful lobbies and interests who have a lot to gain from the tax code as it stands. If I had to give a one-word answer to your question it would be:
Inertia.
...EEG results... NOT! Oh, and experiments in biology going all the way back to that guy who put wires on dead frog legs and made them twitch, sorry don't feel like looking it up. Oh, and when I was a kid and I had the electronic project kit and made my thumb twitch with electricity. Or, anybody who's ever felt a shock. Yes. From now on, we'll do all of that by YELLING REALLY LOUD.
And no, I didn't read TFA, but do I really have to? For once, I think not.
I see cantbuyityet in the tags list, but this article isn't tagged. It should be.
I beg to differ. I'd much rather embed animted GIF in something than Flash. The latter has many more capabilities; but with that comes a larger footprint and more security and compatability issues to consider. If you understand the limitations of GIF, there are actually not that many cases where you need PNG. Most non-lossy images are line art or cartoons. It's very rare that you come close to exhausting the 256 color palette. Even the Sunday version of Dilbert, for example, with full color, looks great as GIF. Most lossy images are photo-real, so you just use JPEG. Don't get me wrong. I love PNG, and you can get better compression than GIF. It's just that most of the time you don't really need PNG's non-lossy true color capabilities. GIF is so entrenched, there are so many legacy images, it's so widely implemented, it's here to stay. See my .sig also.
I didn't mean for the top beer to be outside the fridge. There would have to be a sliding door or something at the top of the magazine to keep it cold of course. Picture something like the tray return at some cafeterias--where the top tray is always at the same height regardless of how many trays have been returned. The spring compression always "just balances" things. Yeah, this is not quite the same as a rifle magazine, which has more spring force and pushses the shell into the chamber. There might still be a need for an elevator ride, but it would be a much shorter ride. HTH clarify what I was thinking; definitely not thinking of anything that would make the beer warm. Blech!
Yep, that's the problem I was talking about. Thanks for clarifying it.
No. Next!
Rationale? We already have JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless and now that GIF is off-patent we have that too. All of these have un-encumbered implementations. Having lossless and lossy in one format doesn't really offer much of an advantage. Unless this new image format gives me time-traveling X-ray vision into whatever the picture is, why should I care? Extra compression is nice, and it might be worthwhile if you were archiving terabytes of image data. Most web sites are not, so even if it has better compression it's still not worth the hassle of switching. Bandwidth and storage are just not that expensive. In other words, it would have to totally blow away the existing formats by some performance metric. I have a hard time believing the ammount of effort to switch things over could be justified. What could possibly be that much better about any new image format? Anyone remember JPEG 2000? The wavelet compression was really interesting, but it was proprietary, somebody was trying to make money off it, and so nobody cared. It's tough to enter a market where the price is already set at ZERO. The existing product in such a market has to be inferior enough so that people are willing to pony up the extra bills. An example of where this has happened in the recent past is the compiler market. People were willing to pay extra for the Intel compiler even though GCC is free, because the Intel compiler generated faster code. It's been a while since I've looked into that, so I don't know if that's still the situation. Even with the performance difference, many people still just stuck with GCC rather than pay more. This is not MS-bashing. It's just basic economics.
If you take the Monticello tour, they point out the little mini dumb-waiter that brought wine up from the cellar. Of course, there was no remote control. He just told his slaves what to bring up, and then they presumeably operated the mechanism with a hand-crank or something. It's been a long time since I took that tour.
This robot has a couple obvious flaws. First, the arm has to rotate to get into firing position. He should have the beer elevator on the other side. Next the beers shouldn't have to ride the eleveator. It should be more like a sprung rifle magazine, so that there is always one beer right by the "chamber", ready to be loaded and fired. These two changes alone should increase his firing rate considerably. The first time you get a beer from this thing it's fun, but once you realize what a painfully slow rate of fire it has, the novelty will wear off.
It's a cool robot though. Way better than I could do, I'm sure.
Maybe it's the geography. On the other side of the pond it hasn't skipped a beat. I'm in DC but my v6 PoP is in Boston for some reason. I agree though, if I were in control of the provider decision I'd go with someone who offered it natively or at least ran their own tunnel so I could scream at them when it went down. There is at least one DSL provider here that offers native IPv6. The provider decision was made by others based on cost. IPv6 wasn't a factor, or even really a serious consideration in our office at the time. Since SixXS is free, I really can't complain about it.
I've had a SixXS tunnel up for a few weeks. They are definitely the way to go. The other tunnel provider I tried wasn't very reliable. I wouldn't try this with WindowsXP. I've had to do all my testing with Linux. Some people claim to have made it work with XP; but I can only get utilities like ping to work. Real apps like IE just don't seem to work with it yet. The applications have to support it, and that seems like a bigger hurdle to IPv6 than the network infrastructure. A lot of infrastructure hardware has IPv6 support built in already. And yes, I realize I'm talking about a tunnel here and intermixing my commentary, so cool your inference-trolling jets. I know the difference between tunnels and native connections, dammit! That might be the problem; but I don't have native connectivity so I can't tell if that's it or not.
Good point. A non-biased way would involve, perhaps, taking hair samples from all the students. You have to snip a lock too, not just a single hair. I remember how we measured the width of a hair in one of our high school science classes. It turns out that on a lot of people, there is a lot of variation in width, and perhaps there is variation in shape too but we didn't attempt to measure that.
It sounds like these kids get a break for being a minority in this case. In the US where African ancestry puts you in the minority, there might not be a big enough survival advantage for the necessary mutation to dominate the louse population. Even though there are pockets of the US where African ancestry is in the majority, the mutation may not have taken hold yet. If true, this might indicate that it takes a while for lice to evolve this feature. To really answer that question though, we should do a comparison in school districts where African ancestry is in the majority, and has been for quite some time.
Of course, this depends on what the meaning of "is" is.