Slashdot should have a Microsoft section. It seems like there is at least one MS article a day, and they are all the same article: "MS bad OSS good."
With a separate section, those who enjoy whining about how "M$" is taking over the world can go off in a corner and circle-jerk all they want. The rest of us can (hopefully) read something truly interesting.
Also, the MS articles shouldn't appear on the main page unless there is something *truly* newsworthy, for example, the final resolution to the anti-trust case.
Of course, this will never happen because/. gets more page hits from MS articles on the front page than from any other single source; but I can dream.
"high demand" does not mean a small number of people squaking loudly. It means either a large number of people willing to pay a little, or a small number of people willing to pay a lot.
Actually, in economic terms, "demand" is a graph of what people are willing to pay for a unit vs. the number of units.
So, all you have established is one datum on the demand curve, and you haven't provided us with any information about how many units you'd be willing to buy at a given price.
Now, if Dell actually tracked requests like yours and added them up, they undoubtedly have some kind of report on some manager's desk that approximates the demand (in the economic sense) for laptops loaded with Linux.
That same report also contains a "supply" which is the price at which companies are willing to sell units vs. number of units.
The intersection of these two curves is the equilibrium price, and if Dell can't sell units at that price, and make a profit, they have no business selling these boxes.
That's all there is to it. If you don't believe me, just ask the CEO of VA Linux.:)
Whether IP is property or not is a lot less relevant than people think.
You can define IP as property, or you can define it as a limited monopoly granted by the government. You can define it as the square root of PI. It doesn't matter.
All of these definitions are simply a convenience for lawyers, so that they can have a starting point on which to base the law. The programmer's analogy is whther IP could have Foo as its base class, or Bar as its base class. Regardless of which one you pick, the customer has a set of specifications that you want to meet.
In this case, the customer is the public, and the specification is that we benefit producers and consumers without violating the rights of either. This formulation of arbitration between RIAA and Napster in terms property law illustrates my point. They could also formulate a remedy in terms of limiting the monopoly, but regardless of how they formulate a remedy they need to respect both sides.
Bah! We're way ahead of that. You can just shoot those down with a 50 caliber. Of course, that site won't tell you, but you just know there are guys holed up in cabins with 50-cal machine guns, which can probably shoot down a buzz-bomb, and can certainly bring down those black helicopters. I know V-1s were shot down during the war, but I'm not sure if they did it with 50-cal.
I think maybe you missed the point. If you try to measure by putting your elbow to the ground 30 times and eye-balling it, and you have a systematic error of one inch each time you do that, it's 30 inches of error by the time you're done. Given those circumstances and no knowledge of higher math, 3 isn't such a bad estimate.
Also the range of characters used is often very limited - simply decoding a few characters with every sequence, and see whether it would give you any characters outside the expected set would let you throw away a huge number of starting points very quickly.
This problem is easy enough to solve. Just gzip before you encrypt. Then they might look for the gzip magic number, but you can exclude that too. The only real problem would be if gzip uses a "dictionary". They might be able to pick words out of that. So, gzip might not be the ideal choice but I'm sure there must be some compression method that produces statisticly random results, even in the early part of the file.
Well, if you're going to be using "cubits", it's not like precision is really a concern to begin with. IIRC, The cubit was the distance from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger. Whoever was ruler at the time set the standard. It would be interesting to see how close we could come doing it by hand, or with a "cubit-stick".
Maybe they should have based the prize ammount on one of the factors, moving the decimal to a reasonable position of course.
So, if you just randomly pick factors what are your odds, and how does it compare to the lottery when computed on an average PC? Of course unlike lotto, you don't have to pay to play unless you really decide to go all out and purchase additional hardware, which would probably not be justified.
2. A detachable monitor. Note, that doesn't mean wireless. A 2 foot cord is probably fine.
3. A real mouse option as well as an "eraser head" on the keyboard.
4. A CD/DVD drive and floppy built in.
5. Capable of running on commodity batteries. NO proprietary form factors on the battery. Standard rechareable D-cell sized batteries, chemical composition of my choosing. Needless to say, it should also be possible to run it off a regular wall socket. To expand on this point, there should be as many commodity components as possible. I don't want to be beholden to the manufacturer if something breaks.
These characteristics, especially the full-sized keyboard suggest a non-typical form factor. When you put the keyboard and the screen next to eachother, you get two rectangles that don't fit, so don't try.
Instead, what I would probably have is something that looks like a thin suitcase. Remember the original Compaq computers from the early and mid 1980s? These were "luggable" computers with 6-inch CRTs in them. We could do the same thing today, except now we have the technology to make them truly portable with no CRT.
This product would work really well for my typical mobile computing scenario which involves being in a public library or away from home in a motel room.
I think it could even be made to work on a plane, though not as well. The key would be clever case design, fixing it so the keyboard and monitor slide out of the box and lock into an ergonomic position.
...seems to be that they are marketing to companies that make products nobody wants. Put the thing in a real laptop for crying out loud. If people wanted these webpad thingies, the laptop market would already have evolved in that direction by integrating some of the webpad features into traditional laptops. It hasn't. People don't want this crap.
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: It's the servers, stupid.
People want to cram more servers in a rack, run them cooler, with less power. Save space, save power. Everybody seems to understand that except Transmeta's sales and marketing department. If they continue like this, I give the company another 6 months and that's it.
I think this may have been a flaw in the test. The users were simply plopped in front of terminals and told there was a new system on it. In the real world, there would be some exposure to advertising. There would be e-mails sent to employees. There would probably be a meeting about it or somethig. Usually people see the product logo before it ends up on their system. Actually, when you run startx the logo comes up then, but they didn't have them do that. I'm sure that would bring back a lot of memories of having to type WIN every morning. I'd say most Linux desktops are about where Win3.x was in terms of useability.
Agreed. If I want to edit a webpage, I use Notepad. A webpage that is too big to load in Notepad is too big. Period.
If I want to view or edit a really large plain-text, I open it in MSVC. MSVC whips the pants off Wordpad for large plaintexts. Wordpad is only useful for viewing documents from people who insist on sending you.doc files. As long as there isn't any crap embedded in a word file, you can view it. If people send me word files with crap in them, it usually doesn't matter. 99% of the time the graphics are just that--crap with no information that can't be deduced from the accompanying text.
It's relative. The US losing a small country is like a small country losing a medium sized city. In this case, 4% of 5 million is 200,000. I wouldn't be surprised if Finland lost that many votes. If they lost *significantly* less than perhaps there is a model to which we should look. OTOH, perhaps we should do a world-wide survey and see who is doing best in that regard, and emulate them if possible.
As for nobody thinking it's wrong, that's simply not true. It was all you heard about until the matter was finally settled. We just didn't have any riots or anything like that. That, I believe, is one of the great strengths of this country. People are too busy working to take time off and riot. "Hey, are you going to the demonstration? No. I have to double-check the Smith account."
It will almost certainly fail to diagnose an Interface Nightmare. Please note, the link is something that I wrote when I worked in tech sup, and as you can tell, I haven't worked there for a while.
The fundamental idea to come away with is that you should not always assume there is something wrong. When I was a level-2 tech, I straightened out all kinds of problems caused by level-1 techs because they assumed that there was a problem. After all, the customer is on the phone, so there *must* be a problem, right? Of course, I probably did the same thing when I was a level-1 tech.
Exploitation Of A 90-10 Rule
on
IANAL
·
· Score: 2
It seems like this kid exploited something like the familiar 90-10 rule of code optimization. You know, how programs spend 90% of the time executing 10% of the code. Well, maybe lawyers spend 90% of the time dealing with 10% of the law.
So, all the kid had to do to move up to number 1 was learn 10% of the law. Maybe he had to learn even less than that.
the Moon's low, one-sixth-Earth gravity, and the absence of wind were an architectural boon allowing a much more slender and fragile-looking building than would have been possible on Earth
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not really attracted to slender and fragile looking buildings, especially if it's the only safe place on the whole ball of rock. Is it the architectural fashion now to create buildings that don't look safe?
Of Thomas Jefferson: So, it's OK to buy and sell people, but not ideas. Just so we're clear on all that.
OK, repeat after me class:
People: OK to own them if they are Negroes.
Ideas: Not OK to own them.
You know, it's funny how wealthy men who profit from the entrenched system of power get all "idealistic" when it comes to the business of buying and selling ideas. It's easy when you've got another source of income.
To such men, the patent office is a hinderence. On the other hand, to a man who has no personal wealth, and only an idea to his name, the patent office shines like a beacon.
Ideas are a gift from God, a birthright. A man who would take your ideas against your will would just as soon take your birthright and make you a slave. This whole "IP is not a natural right" thing is part of a fiction that has been created by the ruling class to help them maintain power.
Yes, but He didn't give us the source. Therefore, all of you in the "closed source is immoral" camp must be either atheists or blasphemers. I know Stallman is an atheist; I guess that makes a lot more sense now.
All you have to do is read some of the descriptions of what goes on in places like The Three Sisters and especiallyYellowstone to get a real scare--the place has heaved up 86 cm this century.
A major caldera explosion at yellowstone could cover the American breadbasket with ash and plunge the world into volcanic winter.
So, why don't they build huge hydrothermal plants at places like that to siphon off some of the heat. That is, assuming that we could actually make a difference. When you are dealing with something capable of ejecting 240 cubic *miles* of ash into the atmosphere, I'm inclined to think we will be powerless.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot should have a Microsoft section. It seems like there is at least one MS article a day, and they are all the same article: "MS bad OSS good."
With a separate section, those who enjoy whining about how "M$" is taking over the world can go off in a corner and circle-jerk all they want. The rest of us can (hopefully) read something truly interesting.
Also, the MS articles shouldn't appear on the main page unless there is something *truly* newsworthy, for example, the final resolution to the anti-trust case.
Of course, this will never happen because /. gets more page hits from MS articles on the front page than from any other single source; but I can dream.
"high demand" does not mean a small number of people squaking loudly. It means either a large number of people willing to pay a little, or a small number of people willing to pay a lot.
Actually, in economic terms, "demand" is a graph of what people are willing to pay for a unit vs. the number of units.
So, all you have established is one datum on the demand curve, and you haven't provided us with any information about how many units you'd be willing to buy at a given price.
Now, if Dell actually tracked requests like yours and added them up, they undoubtedly have some kind of report on some manager's desk that approximates the demand (in the economic sense) for laptops loaded with Linux.
That same report also contains a "supply" which is the price at which companies are willing to sell units vs. number of units.
The intersection of these two curves is the equilibrium price, and if Dell can't sell units at that price, and make a profit, they have no business selling these boxes.
That's all there is to it. If you don't believe me, just ask the CEO of VA Linux. :)
Whether IP is property or not is a lot less relevant than people think.
You can define IP as property, or you can define it as a limited monopoly granted by the government. You can define it as the square root of PI. It doesn't matter.
All of these definitions are simply a convenience for lawyers, so that they can have a starting point on which to base the law. The programmer's analogy is whther IP could have Foo as its base class, or Bar as its base class. Regardless of which one you pick, the customer has a set of specifications that you want to meet.
In this case, the customer is the public, and the specification is that we benefit producers and consumers without violating the rights of either. This formulation of arbitration between RIAA and Napster in terms property law illustrates my point. They could also formulate a remedy in terms of limiting the monopoly, but regardless of how they formulate a remedy they need to respect both sides.
Bah! We're way ahead of that. You can just shoot those down with a 50 caliber. Of course, that site won't tell you, but you just know there are guys holed up in cabins with 50-cal machine guns, which can probably shoot down a buzz-bomb, and can certainly bring down those black helicopters. I know V-1s were shot down during the war, but I'm not sure if they did it with 50-cal.
You're only half correct. See:
Slashdot | TRS-80 Laptops Still Plugging Along
I think maybe you missed the point. If you try to measure by putting your elbow to the ground 30 times and eye-balling it, and you have a systematic error of one inch each time you do that, it's 30 inches of error by the time you're done. Given those circumstances and no knowledge of higher math, 3 isn't such a bad estimate.
Also the range of characters used is often very limited - simply decoding a few characters with every sequence, and see whether it would give you any characters outside the expected set would let you throw away a huge number of starting points very quickly.
This problem is easy enough to solve. Just gzip before you encrypt. Then they might look for the gzip magic number, but you can exclude that too. The only real problem would be if gzip uses a "dictionary". They might be able to pick words out of that. So, gzip might not be the ideal choice but I'm sure there must be some compression method that produces statisticly random results, even in the early part of the file.
Well, if you're going to be using "cubits", it's not like precision is really a concern to begin with. IIRC, The cubit was the distance from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger. Whoever was ruler at the time set the standard. It would be interesting to see how close we could come doing it by hand, or with a "cubit-stick".
Maybe they should have based the prize ammount on one of the factors, moving the decimal to a reasonable position of course.
So, if you just randomly pick factors what are your odds, and how does it compare to the lottery when computed on an average PC? Of course unlike lotto, you don't have to pay to play unless you really decide to go all out and purchase additional hardware, which would probably not be justified.
Yeah, it'd be a lot like my Celeron, only a lot heavier and a lot uglier... But not by much. :)
Here's what I really want in a laptop:
1. A full sized keyboard.
2. A detachable monitor. Note, that doesn't mean wireless. A 2 foot cord is probably fine.
3. A real mouse option as well as an "eraser head" on the keyboard.
4. A CD/DVD drive and floppy built in.
5. Capable of running on commodity batteries. NO proprietary form factors on the battery. Standard rechareable D-cell sized batteries, chemical composition of my choosing. Needless to say, it should also be possible to run it off a regular wall socket. To expand on this point, there should be as many commodity components as possible. I don't want to be beholden to the manufacturer if something breaks.
These characteristics, especially the full-sized keyboard suggest a non-typical form factor. When you put the keyboard and the screen next to eachother, you get two rectangles that don't fit, so don't try.
Instead, what I would probably have is something that looks like a thin suitcase. Remember the original Compaq computers from the early and mid 1980s? These were "luggable" computers with 6-inch CRTs in them. We could do the same thing today, except now we have the technology to make them truly portable with no CRT.
This product would work really well for my typical mobile computing scenario which involves being in a public library or away from home in a motel room.
I think it could even be made to work on a plane, though not as well. The key would be clever case design, fixing it so the keyboard and monitor slide out of the box and lock into an ergonomic position.
Oh, and it should cost less than $1000.
Does anybody make such a beast?
...seems to be that they are marketing to companies that make products nobody wants. Put the thing in a real laptop for crying out loud. If people wanted these webpad thingies, the laptop market would already have evolved in that direction by integrating some of the webpad features into traditional laptops. It hasn't. People don't want this crap.
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: It's the servers, stupid.
People want to cram more servers in a rack, run them cooler, with less power. Save space, save power. Everybody seems to understand that except Transmeta's sales and marketing department. If they continue like this, I give the company another 6 months and that's it.
I think this may have been a flaw in the test. The users were simply plopped in front of terminals and told there was a new system on it. In the real world, there would be some exposure to advertising. There would be e-mails sent to employees. There would probably be a meeting about it or somethig. Usually people see the product logo before it ends up on their system. Actually, when you run startx the logo comes up then, but they didn't have them do that. I'm sure that would bring back a lot of memories of having to type WIN every morning. I'd say most Linux desktops are about where Win3.x was in terms of useability.
No frontpage headline or editorial in any of those papers. Maybe something on the business page. Below the fold.
Agreed. If I want to edit a webpage, I use Notepad. A webpage that is too big to load in Notepad is too big. Period.
If I want to view or edit a really large plain-text, I open it in MSVC. MSVC whips the pants off Wordpad for large plaintexts. Wordpad is only useful for viewing documents from people who insist on sending you .doc files. As long as there isn't any crap embedded in a word file, you can view it. If people send me word files with crap in them, it usually doesn't matter. 99% of the time the graphics are just that--crap with no information that can't be deduced from the accompanying text.
It's relative. The US losing a small country is like a small country losing a medium sized city. In this case, 4% of 5 million is 200,000. I wouldn't be surprised if Finland lost that many votes. If they lost *significantly* less than perhaps there is a model to which we should look. OTOH, perhaps we should do a world-wide survey and see who is doing best in that regard, and emulate them if possible.
As for nobody thinking it's wrong, that's simply not true. It was all you heard about until the matter was finally settled. We just didn't have any riots or anything like that. That, I believe, is one of the great strengths of this country. People are too busy working to take time off and riot. "Hey, are you going to the demonstration? No. I have to double-check the Smith account."
How many companies must Stallman destroy before he forgets about Symbolics.
Let's find out. A-One... A-two... A-threeee... CRUNCH! Three.
It will almost certainly fail to diagnose an Interface Nightmare. Please note, the link is something that I wrote when I worked in tech sup, and as you can tell, I haven't worked there for a while.
The fundamental idea to come away with is that you should not always assume there is something wrong. When I was a level-2 tech, I straightened out all kinds of problems caused by level-1 techs because they assumed that there was a problem. After all, the customer is on the phone, so there *must* be a problem, right? Of course, I probably did the same thing when I was a level-1 tech.
It seems like this kid exploited something like the familiar 90-10 rule of code optimization. You know, how programs spend 90% of the time executing 10% of the code. Well, maybe lawyers spend 90% of the time dealing with 10% of the law.
So, all the kid had to do to move up to number 1 was learn 10% of the law. Maybe he had to learn even less than that.
the Moon's low, one-sixth-Earth gravity, and the absence of wind were an architectural boon allowing a much more slender and fragile-looking building than would have been possible on Earth
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not really attracted to slender and fragile looking buildings, especially if it's the only safe place on the whole ball of rock. Is it the architectural fashion now to create buildings that don't look safe?
Of Thomas Jefferson: So, it's OK to buy and sell people, but not ideas. Just so we're clear on all that.
OK, repeat after me class:
People: OK to own them if they are Negroes.
Ideas: Not OK to own them.
You know, it's funny how wealthy men who profit from the entrenched system of power get all "idealistic" when it comes to the business of buying and selling ideas. It's easy when you've got another source of income.
To such men, the patent office is a hinderence. On the other hand, to a man who has no personal wealth, and only an idea to his name, the patent office shines like a beacon.
Ideas are a gift from God, a birthright. A man who would take your ideas against your will would just as soon take your birthright and make you a slave. This whole "IP is not a natural right" thing is part of a fiction that has been created by the ruling class to help them maintain power.
Yes, but He didn't give us the source. Therefore, all of you in the "closed source is immoral" camp must be either atheists or blasphemers. I know Stallman is an atheist; I guess that makes a lot more sense now.
It will take that long to get the EU to approve the merger.
All you have to do is read some of the descriptions of what goes on in places like The Three Sisters and especiallyYellowstone to get a real scare--the place has heaved up 86 cm this century.
A major caldera explosion at yellowstone could cover the American breadbasket with ash and plunge the world into volcanic winter.
So, why don't they build huge hydrothermal plants at places like that to siphon off some of the heat. That is, assuming that we could actually make a difference. When you are dealing with something capable of ejecting 240 cubic *miles* of ash into the atmosphere, I'm inclined to think we will be powerless.
Insert obligatory reminder from Free Software advocates that "piracy" is a corruption of the language.
Insert obligatory rebuttal that those very same advocates often refer to Windows users as slaves, thus corrupting the language in the same fashion.
Insert obligatory cry for moderation and civility in public discourse.
Go AFK to ponder futility.
Return like you always do.