Basically, there's a lot of people who want to use education as a way to brainwash children under the guise of "critical thinking" or "education".
Left-wingers were forced out of economics departments, because Marx and Keynes are evil (just ask Senator McCarthy). They switched to education and english, where they came up with stuff like Postmodernism and Outcomes Based Education. They became masters of obscurism and sophistry, because they couldn't publicly say what they meant without enraging the anti-socialist lobby (which is still pretty powerful).
There's right-wing education movements too, but they come from other quarters than mainstream academia.
So basically, students get told to learn weird cryptic left-wing stuff (which is designed to be incoherent enough to fly under the radar), and a bit of right-wing propaganda which gets forced in by the right (i.e. intelligent design).
So... "Nice operating system. Shame if something happened to it, like, it couldn't run the latest productivity suite. Guess you'll have to upgrade."
A few large orgs will get on the Win 7/8 bandwagon. Then everyone who works with them will need to upgrade, so they can read their client's email attachements.
Before you know it, running XP will feel like running Linux back in the 00s, when you would bitch to everyone about "propitiatory document formats", and act like some kind of oppressed minority group (a bit like the Apple users, but with an overgrown soul patch).
Also, MS hires good people. If you are competing against other good people (not useless dolts), then it's hard to win on ability alone. It's far more effective to do a reasonable job, and suck up to your boss / make your boss look good / advertise your "achievements" to your boss's peers, etc.
Eventually, the people who are good at the game get promoted, and forget that the game is actually a bad thing. They start consciously rewarding people for playing the game (not getting fooled by it, but actually expecting their workers to game the system), and madness prevails.
People who work in risk reduction joke about man-made natural disasters.
The 2008 Sichuan earthquake was natural, but the quality of buildings may have contributed to the death toll. Katrina was natural, but the government response was pathetic (perhaps in a neo-liberal attempt to show how useless governments are). Anything climate change related would be both natural, and man-made.
You forgot to mention floods, like what happened in Thailand last year, and could possibly happen again this year.
But... if you're outsourcing it shouldn't matter, because you don't carry the risk anymore. It all comes from the cloud, and you can instantly switch to another supplier.
The country with the greatest number of English speakers is India (roughly 25% of the population of India). USA is about 2/3ds of native English speakers, but most English speakers aren't native.
I wouldn't call Linus's off-the-cuff speech "bashing". While his exact words were "Fuck you, nVidia" it was in a jovial sort of way. Americans might not understand, but for most English speakers (especially Brits and non-natives) "Fuck you" is not always incredibly harsh.
His main criticism was, they were making a lot of money off Linux (selling chips to run Android), and were being difficult to work with.
Also, it was an off-the-cuff remark. He's not a Presidential candidate or CEO, he's a programmer. Some people talk in a way that PR flacks don't, and if they are well known it causes a bit of a PR shitstorm. The media reports their "rant", instead of the 49 other minutes before it, in which they were speaking quite insightfully.
Seriously, everyone knows about the Tanenbaum–Torvalds "flame war", in which Linus came up with such withering remarks as "linux still beats the pants of minix in almost all areas", and Andrew shot back with things like "You would not get a high grade for such a design:-)", and sprouted fanatical anti-free-software rhetoric like "For the true hacker, not having source code is fatal, but for people who just want a UNIX system, there are many alternatives (albeit not free)".
Strong stuff.
I guess people are more interested in shit-slinging (or even pretending that there was shit-slinging) than the technical points these guys raise.
I've heard Linus is a bit mean at times (rejecting patches? refusing to mentor new contributors?), but the idea that he's an angry angry man seems to be more myth than anything.
Compare the iPhone 1.0 to the LG Prada phone. Apple was not the first capacitive touch phone. It came up with a similar design to the LG Prada. It's convergent evolution - once they realized that capacitive screens are better (because no-one wants to mess around with a stylus) then a few common solutions (big screen, no buttons, big icons, smooth dragging) cropped up. Apple just did it a bit better.
Humans aren't that freaky. We are pretty much identical to chimps, with slightly better communication hardware.
Perhaps complex communication triggered divergent evolution. Humans (well, proto-human talking chimps) work well together, but not with normal chimps. Normal chimps had advantages though - they could communicate far faster. Simple communication is a good thing if all you want to say is "LEOPARD!!!!".
Once we'd diverged, the talking apes found they were better off in the savanna and beaches than the forest (where speed is more important than strategy).
When a research organization files a patent on non-trivial research they did, it's called "innovation", and when an organization which employes mostly lawyers files one on a fairly obvious thing it's called "trolling".
> Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
It's comical for the Democrats to claim they are Democrats (remember the grey uniforms, pro slavery, pro state rights "Solid South"?) when they have a black federalist guy as President.
The reason Audi's are popular is they are the closest thing to a luxury car which is not actually considered a luxury car. If they drove BMWs or Mercedes, it would really look ostentatious.
> The problem with the Hind is they tried to build a craft with the troop carrying capacity of the Huey with the attack capability of the Cobra and ended up with a VERY large target
Kind of like the stealthy, ground attack capable, STOL, air superiority F-35?
If you have a site license, everything MS is free (for your manager), since the company has already paid for it. Sure, you could get MS licenses piecemeal, but you'll pay more.
If Linux is free, then it simply has a level playing field. If you want a supported version of Linux (i.e. Red Hat), it's suddenly a heck of a lot more expensive than Windows.
Of course, if your company starts experimenting with Linux, MS might give you a sweeter deal on the site license. But your manager won't save any money from that, either.
No, it's a "region". All the countries are "regions", but not all "regions" are necessarily countries. It's a great weasel word for people who want to reach some sort of consensus (i.e. on "country codes") without being able to resolve 50 year old conflicts. Taiwan also has its own "country code" (.tw), because it is an independent country, dependent territory, or special area of geographical interest - and the beauty is you don't have to say which.
Seriously, Microsoft has had employees detained in China because they didn't make this sort of thing clear enough.
It would probably result in *horrendously* expensive drugs while they are still under patent, and less expensive drugs the rest of the time.
It would also result in a few less drugs (as healthcare would become cheaper, so big pharma would have less to spend on R&D, and doctor "education"), but the extra money could be spent on more leisure, or non-pharmaceutical treatments (stomach staples?).
Tian-He 1A has 7,168 Teslas, and is the fastest supercomputer using GPUs. Titan (formally Jaguar) will have 18,000 GPUs. Amazon probably has quite a few.
The very top HPC projects may buy 10,000 lots, but most don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, there's a lot of people who want to use education as a way to brainwash children under the guise of "critical thinking" or "education".
Left-wingers were forced out of economics departments, because Marx and Keynes are evil (just ask Senator McCarthy). They switched to education and english, where they came up with stuff like Postmodernism and Outcomes Based Education. They became masters of obscurism and sophistry, because they couldn't publicly say what they meant without enraging the anti-socialist lobby (which is still pretty powerful).
There's right-wing education movements too, but they come from other quarters than mainstream academia.
So basically, students get told to learn weird cryptic left-wing stuff (which is designed to be incoherent enough to fly under the radar), and a bit of right-wing propaganda which gets forced in by the right (i.e. intelligent design).
So ... "Nice operating system. Shame if something happened to it, like, it couldn't run the latest productivity suite. Guess you'll have to upgrade."
A few large orgs will get on the Win 7/8 bandwagon. Then everyone who works with them will need to upgrade, so they can read their client's email attachements.
Before you know it, running XP will feel like running Linux back in the 00s, when you would bitch to everyone about "propitiatory document formats", and act like some kind of oppressed minority group (a bit like the Apple users, but with an overgrown soul patch).
Q: What do Slashdotters use for birth control?
A: Their mothers!
Also, MS hires good people. If you are competing against other good people (not useless dolts), then it's hard to win on ability alone. It's far more effective to do a reasonable job, and suck up to your boss / make your boss look good / advertise your "achievements" to your boss's peers, etc.
Eventually, the people who are good at the game get promoted, and forget that the game is actually a bad thing. They start consciously rewarding people for playing the game (not getting fooled by it, but actually expecting their workers to game the system), and madness prevails.
Also, RIM's loss was mostly from writing down old stock. It's a paper loss, making up for paper profits which never really happened.
Their position isn't good, but it's not as horrible as the half billion loss indicates.
People who work in risk reduction joke about man-made natural disasters.
The 2008 Sichuan earthquake was natural, but the quality of buildings may have contributed to the death toll. Katrina was natural, but the government response was pathetic (perhaps in a neo-liberal attempt to show how useless governments are). Anything climate change related would be both natural, and man-made.
You forgot to mention floods, like what happened in Thailand last year, and could possibly happen again this year.
But ... if you're outsourcing it shouldn't matter, because you don't carry the risk anymore. It all comes from the cloud, and you can instantly switch to another supplier.
(Obligatory xkcd comic - http://xkcd.com/908/)
Similarly, if people carry firearms, it's suicide to give the other guy a chance to shoot first; so you'd better shoot to kill.
The country with the greatest number of English speakers is India (roughly 25% of the population of India). USA is about 2/3ds of native English speakers, but most English speakers aren't native.
I wouldn't call Linus's off-the-cuff speech "bashing". While his exact words were "Fuck you, nVidia" it was in a jovial sort of way. Americans might not understand, but for most English speakers (especially Brits and non-natives) "Fuck you" is not always incredibly harsh.
His main criticism was, they were making a lot of money off Linux (selling chips to run Android), and were being difficult to work with.
Also, it was an off-the-cuff remark. He's not a Presidential candidate or CEO, he's a programmer. Some people talk in a way that PR flacks don't, and if they are well known it causes a bit of a PR shitstorm. The media reports their "rant", instead of the 49 other minutes before it, in which they were speaking quite insightfully.
Seriously, everyone knows about the Tanenbaum–Torvalds "flame war", in which Linus came up with such withering remarks as "linux still beats the :-)", and sprouted fanatical anti-free-software rhetoric like "For the true hacker, not having source code is fatal, but for people who just want a UNIX system, there are many alternatives (albeit not free)".
pants of minix in almost all areas", and Andrew shot back with things like "You would not get a high grade for such a design
Strong stuff.
I guess people are more interested in shit-slinging (or even pretending that there was shit-slinging) than the technical points these guys raise.
I've heard Linus is a bit mean at times (rejecting patches? refusing to mentor new contributors?), but the idea that he's an angry angry man seems to be more myth than anything.
Compare the iPhone 1.0 to the LG Prada phone. Apple was not the first capacitive touch phone. It came up with a similar design to the LG Prada. It's convergent evolution - once they realized that capacitive screens are better (because no-one wants to mess around with a stylus) then a few common solutions (big screen, no buttons, big icons, smooth dragging) cropped up. Apple just did it a bit better.
Humans aren't that freaky. We are pretty much identical to chimps, with slightly better communication hardware.
Perhaps complex communication triggered divergent evolution. Humans (well, proto-human talking chimps) work well together, but not with normal chimps. Normal chimps had advantages though - they could communicate far faster. Simple communication is a good thing if all you want to say is "LEOPARD!!!!".
Once we'd diverged, the talking apes found they were better off in the savanna and beaches than the forest (where speed is more important than strategy).
When a research organization files a patent on non-trivial research they did, it's called "innovation", and when an organization which employes mostly lawyers files one on a fairly obvious thing it's called "trolling".
> I never actually use the math I learned
You never manipulate abstract symbols, in a way which makes them solve your problem?
> Besides, I have another dinner to be at shortly.
If this is a Chinese dinner, then gan bei. See you in 48 hours, when the hangover is gone.
> Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
It's comical for the Democrats to claim they are Democrats (remember the grey uniforms, pro slavery, pro state rights "Solid South"?) when they have a black federalist guy as President.
The reason Audi's are popular is they are the closest thing to a luxury car which is not actually considered a luxury car. If they drove BMWs or Mercedes, it would really look ostentatious.
> The problem with the Hind is they tried to build a craft with the troop carrying capacity of the Huey with the attack capability of the Cobra and ended up with a VERY large target
Kind of like the stealthy, ground attack capable, STOL, air superiority F-35?
Site licenses might be a larger problem.
If you have a site license, everything MS is free (for your manager), since the company has already paid for it. Sure, you could get MS licenses piecemeal, but you'll pay more.
If Linux is free, then it simply has a level playing field. If you want a supported version of Linux (i.e. Red Hat), it's suddenly a heck of a lot more expensive than Windows.
Of course, if your company starts experimenting with Linux, MS might give you a sweeter deal on the site license. But your manager won't save any money from that, either.
No, it's a "region". All the countries are "regions", but not all "regions" are necessarily countries. It's a great weasel word for people who want to reach some sort of consensus (i.e. on "country codes") without being able to resolve 50 year old conflicts. Taiwan also has its own "country code" (.tw), because it is an independent country, dependent territory, or special area of geographical interest - and the beauty is you don't have to say which.
Seriously, Microsoft has had employees detained in China because they didn't make this sort of thing clear enough.
It would probably result in *horrendously* expensive drugs while they are still under patent, and less expensive drugs the rest of the time.
It would also result in a few less drugs (as healthcare would become cheaper, so big pharma would have less to spend on R&D, and doctor "education"), but the extra money could be spent on more leisure, or non-pharmaceutical treatments (stomach staples?).
Rome wasn't burnt in a day, either.
Tian-He 1A has 7,168 Teslas, and is the fastest supercomputer using GPUs. Titan (formally Jaguar) will have 18,000 GPUs. Amazon probably has quite a few.
The very top HPC projects may buy 10,000 lots, but most don't.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133347
$3998 for a card. The 690 is just the first non-workstation kilobuck card.
If RIM supplies a better enterprise email client / server package, then enterprises will buy it. Just like they used to.