Why is it that Microsoft can never enter and compete in an industry? Of course every company is out to 'crush' its competitors, but that's rhetoric - except for Microsoft. In most industries, despite talk of 'crushing' there's a competitive landscape, and things go from generation to generation with the advantage shifting back and forth.
Microsoft is EVIL, if for this reason alone. They really do CRUSH their competition, and after they do innovation in that domain DIES, because they're expending their energy CRUSHING someone else in a different arena. This behavior is obvious and self-serving, and what any company probably should do. Antitrust laws were meant to keep markets competitive - it's actually regulation to preserve free markets, and at this point the laws are broken by broken enforcement.
Without some form of fundamental reform, there will be ANOTHER copyright extension when Steamboat Willie gets set to go public domain. That is, unless Disney goes under. But in that case, no doubt whoever buys up Disney's assets will buy the legislators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hp ush for the next extension. And if that doesn't go, no doubt the RIAA will assume the extension mantle before Elvis and the Beatles copyrights expire, if someone else doesn't do so, before.
Or as Lester Thoreau once said, "Present trends never continue." Assuming that, we have two outcomes: 1: Between corporate-greed-drive outsourcing and ??AA-driven shackles on technology, the US will lose its edge. Having bought protection from competition, the ??AA will get even more fat and lazy, and (currently) third-world upstarts like Bollywood will take Hollywood's place in the world entertainment market. 2: Someone in the US government exercises a little wisdom and forsight, and undertakes some fundamental reform of IP Law, bringing it back in line with the intent of the framers of the constitution.
In Vermont we're shaping up to have a battle between Patrick Leahy and (formerly accused of being a carpetbagger, but now has 7 years residence instead of 1) Jack McMullen. It would HURT Vermont to lose Leahy's seniority. But from what I can tell, Leahy is right behind Hatch on copyright, and it might well hurt the nation more to keep him in. I need to research this, knowing nothing of McMullen's position.
Too bad most geeks are apolitical, otherwise we might be able to raise enough consciousness and votes to make a difference, here.
But as long as we're talking about saving power, who would be using a monitor? LCD screens are low-voltage beasts, perhaps except for the backlight, and that could be run off a buck regulator.
The 300V is because that's what you get when you rectify line voltage, depending on the style of rectifier you use, and if you want to have the simple 120/240V operation in one box.
The fact of the matter is, we're talking about switching regulators, here. They can take practically any DC voltage and turn it into practically any other DC voltage. If you're designing from scratch, the obvious thing to do would be to pick a well-suited battery and design from there.
OK, that takes care of the 12V supply, that at most is used to spin things.
The motherboard also gets +5V and +3.3V, and IIRC it may also get -5V and/or -12V. Those don't come from a marine battery, without some sort of extra regulator. They'd better be buck regulators, or some other sort of switching regulators, or your efficiency's shot, again.
Next problem, droop, especially on the lower voltage supplies. I don't know how close you were planning on having the marine battery to the motherboard, or what size copper wires you were planning on using, but supply feed resistance can be an issue. As components get to lower and lower voltages, the supply tolerance tightens. (millivolt-wise it's getting smaller, the percentage is staying pretty close to the same.) This is normally solved with regulation and Kelvin sensing.
Oh, you also can't use marine batteries unless you've also planned ventilation. They can give of hydrogen gas when being charged. UPS batteries are sealed for this reason.
Not that there isn't merit to your thought, it's just that a little more thought is needed before it becomes practical.
Ike was thought of as a do-nothing President, and perhaps rather stupid, at that.
OTOH, you don't head the D-Day invasion if you're dumb. You don't even get near the position, when the stakes are that high. We tend to forget that.
There were two things in particular he said, that I liked: As he left the presidency, he cautioned the nation against the rise of the military-industrial complex. Of course we ignored his warning. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, he visited one of the Death Camps. I forget where his quote is placed, but it's rather stunning, and I'll try to paraphrase it: "I came here as a personal witness to his, because I know someday people will try to say it never happened."
Yep. I read it after the first reply told me about it.
But it's just possible that Open Source led to the quick resolution, because there wasn't a week or two of finger-pointing before getting down to working on the real problem.
Sometimes I wonder how much new Bible translations are driven by archaeology, learning, modern culture, and new translation skills/insights, and how much they're driven by a desire to keep the thing under copyright.
This one is 'only' a local DOS. Even if, as others say, crashed time is money, it could be much worse. At least you don't get 0wn3d, and you have a way to get back up by kicking users off, temporarily.
Drifting the topic, slightly...
This exploit, as well as the mremap ones, were derived from intimate examination of the source. So far, most of the Windows exploits have really been using 'features' for nefarious ends, not exploits of bugs. The recent Windows worms exploit a true bug in the security system, but I've heard that this one was developed from access to the source that leaked.
The Linux source has been out and discussed for over a decade, with plenty of time to find truly deep bugs. With the leak of WinNT/2k source, one hole was revealed fairly quickly. As people REALLY study that source, what else is going to emerge? (And how much code was really rewritten for XP vs reused?) Note that this isn't just a function of the source leak. As Microsoft shows more with Shared Source, more people will have the kind of access needed for this type of exploit.
The obvious issue with Gideon Bibles in space would be weight, and the second volume.
The equally obvious solution is Gideon eBibles.
I wonder how the Gideons would position and eBible wrt copyright, DRM, and the like. Any copyright on the Bible has obviously expired, but I presume copyrights on specific (recent, post-Bono) translations may still be in force.
But would you want to 'protect' an eBook when you're being evangelistic about it? Isn't your whole point to get *more* people to read it? Wasn't that part of the original point of publishing?
Remember Digital Audio Tape? Wanna go buy one? Look at what the DMCA is doing to reverse engineering. Look at what's being discussed to close the 'analog hole'.
Our nation is sacrificing it's technological competitiveness in the name of the entertainment industries. We have already sacrificed a LOT, though it's still reversible.
One of my Senators is Patrick Leahy, and maybe it's time for me to become a single-issue voter. His response to my last letter on this was not satisfactory, I need to try again - well before November.
In true/. fashion, I haven't RTFA yet, but I did hear the story a day or two back, on NPR.
I also heard a related story, about how North Dakota has come up with an alternative pollution formula to allow them to build more power plants, and burn more coal in them, even though the current formula says they're already over the limit. The scientists at the EPA disagreed, but the politicians at the EPA overruled, and approved the EPA formula.
Meanwhile, here in Vermont, we have strict limits on the local fish we're supposed to eat. (For instance, one Walleye per person per month, and they advise that children or pregnant women probably shouldn't have even that much.) One component of this is mercury, which is largely from powerplant emissions. The North Dakota report cited their 'pristine sky'. Of course it is, it all blows downwind on the prevailing westerlies. As a kid in school in Ohio, they talked about how tall smokestacks got the junk up into the stratosphere, and were the solution to pollution. Right. It got it into the prevailing westerlies, and made it S.E.P. (Somebody Else's Problem)
No doubt if we took a similar attitude in Vermont, it would blow out to sea, and we'd hear more about dying fisheries. As it is, we have some of the highest power rates in the country. I'll rant no further.
It's just a way to kill time while medium-sized things execute. Short things execute so fast that you stay on task. Long things execute so slowly that you multitask, and work on something else. Medium-sized things don't give you enough time to get going on another task, but more than enough time to absorb the useful content of a typical blog or/. post. Come to think of it, figuring the usefulness of most/. posts, reading/. ought to generate time instead of wasting it.
I agree with you on peer review on scientific journals. But I'll disagree with you on music. For the silly point, some rap fans are not 'live and let live,' they pack guns.
For the more serious point, it's not AC/DC vs Britney[0], it's how the heck did we get to those two in the first place. How did the music industry focus on who gets to be stars, who gets promotion, who gets airplay, etc?
IMHO, publishing industries have four main functions: 1 - facilitate origination - In the case of music or movies, this is the studio. In the case of publication, it's standards/guidelines and perhaps personal assistance. 2 - editorial review - Make sure what gets published is worth publishing. 3 - promotion - The word needs to get out, about any given work. This isn't necessarily advertising. 4 - distribution - This is what we commonly think of as publishing. Get the dead trees, CDs, and DVDs on the shelves and in the bins.
The Internet chisels away at all of these roles.
First, easiest, and easiest to imagine is (4) distribution. Since Joe 6pak equates this to the publication industries, (ie - music) this is where the heat is at.
Right behind it is (3) promotion, though most didn't recognize it. The/. (and others) did though, and stated that filesharing got them to buy more CDs, because they had a chance to hear more, and do a better job of deciding what they liked.
As for (1) origination, it isn't so much the Internet as technology. It's now easier to make a professional-looking report than it is to put professional content in it. (Perhaps it always was, but now it's SO easy that more poor content gets dressed-up.) Same for music and animation, a computer and perhaps a little specialized hardware, and you can do in you home what used to need an expensive studio.
IMHO, the biggie is (2) editorial. Someone mentioned page-rank as a form of peer review. Perhaps it is, but I think I'd prefer better qualified reviewers for scientific papers. The music industry is the one that rankles me. IMHO, they're falling down on their basic editorial responsibilities and giving us mostly a choice of drek vs slop for music. My personal theory is that the music industry is now run by money-men instead of music-men, and they wouldn't know a good song/artist if it blasted their eardrums out. No wonder most of my recent purchases have been fleshing out my Beatles collection into CDs.
I suspect there is interesting innovation waiting in using the Internet for editorial purposes. Not a serious proposal, but imagine if/. mod points were given strength by the karma of the moderator. Obviously doesn't work well for i=-1..5, but I'm thinking of the concept.
Parting thought: "If I have done great things, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Imagine if those giants had heirs and assignees who either charged exhorbitant rent for their shoulder-space, or simply refused admittance, altogether.
For all of the objections others have raised, like take-home being much lower than billing, bad hours, etc, you all forgot one.
The profession is potentially lethal. You may take home something other than pay. I have no idea if working women insist on barriers, or if there's a price premium to go without barriers, or if they require a recent negative test document. But none of that is foolproof.
In which case you're more interested in the disk and memory subsystems than in raw CPU speed. From what I've heard, VMWare is also just as much a memory hog as CPU hog, too.
For both of these cases, seems to me that your incremental dollar would be better spent on more memory and/or faster FSB instead of a simply-higher clock speed CPU.
Obvious caveats: Once you hold your working set in RAM, there may be little point in more memory. Assuming you're 32bit, the 4G+4G patch may hurt more than it helps, and you may be max'ed in the 1-4G range, but how big is your source tree? Higher FSB and clock speed are somewhat related, but there's still wiggle room on both Intel and AMD.
The command line is fundamental, primitive. It's the simplest way to drive the system. Sure, voice controls and stuff may happen, GUIs will get better, and maybe we'll find a way to do it with mouse gestures and data gloves. Maybe most administration will be done with those tools.
But way down deep, spitefully neglected, the command line will still be there. For some systems, 'reformat and reinstall,' won't be an acceptable answer when the fancy stuff fails.
The real problem is a hijacking of the concept of 'money'. 'Money' was originally meant to be a means of extended barter. You need a chicken, I need work done on my house, but I have spare corn instead of a chicken. We could find a third party that needs corn, and has a chicken. Or we could come up with 'money' that lets us extend our barter system into a marketplace, and allows all goods to become more liquid.
Unfortunately, for some people money has turned into a measure of self-esteem. They're not even collecting castles, or jet planes, or home theaters, or any sort of goods, any more. They measure their success by incrementing digits.
Also unfortunately, as much as we'd like to think of the economy as an expanding pie that has room for everyone to get as much as they want without depriving others, it just isn't. Though there is some expansion, the finite size of the pie is painfully apparent to many. In order for the more successful to tick their digits upward, they end up taking away from others. In other terms, this can be called 'downsizing', 'offshoring', 'making benefits competitive', and the like.
Why this use of money is bad is that it's so easy to tick digits upward. Had these people been accumulating toys and property, it would be more obviously outrageous.
The nifty thing about a gift economy is that it lets you measure your self-esteem through contribution. But it does need to piggyback on top of a money economy, because goods in the real world aren't free, and we all need to eat and get out of the rain.
Finding the balance between gift and money economies, and getting Joe 6pak to buy into that balance, is the task for TruenGenius.
In the next few years, we'll see how this plays out from a strategic point of view.
As things like OpenOffice mature, Linux becomes more ready for the desktop. But there's always been that, "Where are the games?" argument the Linux has had a hard time matching. Now that Microsoft is deprecating PC games in favor the the XBox, they're also chiseling away at the "Where are the games?" argument against Linux on the desktop.
But that's the kicker - when it was initially released. Wasn't that back at DX8.0, or does the XBox have DX8.1 hardware?
And it hasn't changed, since.
Meanwhile, the PC has been through DX9.0c, IIRC. No, every PC isn't at that capability, MY PCs aren't at that capability. But the leading edge is. So some of the new games will have multiple render-paths, and give leading hardware better graphics. (nothing about gameplay, here) The multiple renderpaths are the curse of games programming on PCs, compared to consoles. But it also gives programmers a chance to flex their muscles on new stuff, too. It also adds to the value of PC gaming.
For that matter, DoomIII, presumably this summer, will be DX9 on PCs, and presumably DX8 or DX8.1 on the XBox.
As the father of a teenage girl, you just have to hope you've done a good job of instilling values. It also helps that she's so doggone stubborn that no boy is going to get away with anything she doesn't want him to do. (That's where the values come in.) I've also given her permission (several times) to HURT anyone stepping out of line.
I have a friend with the toughest 4 or 5 yo I've ever seen, and it happens to be a girl. I pity the boy who ever tries to cross her - now or in a decade or two.
Oh, and my daughter has shown interest in biological sciences, so I've started her on folding@home. She's been busy at school, but after school's out, I'm hoping she'll look deeper into what folding@home is really doing. (Either that, or she'll decide that biological sciences really aren't for her, and that's ok, too.)
Doesn't matter. I have two teenagers, but it's a rare occasion when I'm not home for supper with the family. If the schedule is in a tight spot, I may be onto the VPN shortly after supper, but we nearly always have that piece of family time together, usually more.
Don't think this is just for small children, even if you think teenagers are ignoring or avoiding you, you need to be there for them, too. Perhaps the best thing about Star Trek Enterprise, the bane of/., was that it was something my 18yo son and I did together regularly.
BTW, my late father-in-law used to tell his kids, in exasperation at the mealtime conversations, "The Kennedys talked about politics at dinner." Our same 18yo son has understandably become quite interested in politics, in the past year. So we really do talk about politics at the dinner table.
Offline processing. Set a simple filter against the inbox, and have it collect/consolidate for you while you're out acting like a pillar of the community. Using the web could be automated, but it would be more trouble.
Besides, using spam has the good (to clandestine types) side-effect of clogging the Internet and annoying Westerners.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that Microsoft can never enter and compete in an industry? Of course every company is out to 'crush' its competitors, but that's rhetoric - except for Microsoft. In most industries, despite talk of 'crushing' there's a competitive landscape, and things go from generation to generation with the advantage shifting back and forth.
Microsoft is EVIL, if for this reason alone. They really do CRUSH their competition, and after they do innovation in that domain DIES, because they're expending their energy CRUSHING someone else in a different arena. This behavior is obvious and self-serving, and what any company probably should do. Antitrust laws were meant to keep markets competitive - it's actually regulation to preserve free markets, and at this point the laws are broken by broken enforcement.
Yes it is.
p ush for the next extension. And if that doesn't go, no doubt the RIAA will assume the extension mantle before Elvis and the Beatles copyrights expire, if someone else doesn't do so, before.
Without some form of fundamental reform, there will be ANOTHER copyright extension when Steamboat Willie gets set to go public domain. That is, unless Disney goes under. But in that case, no doubt whoever buys up Disney's assets will buy the legislators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
Or as Lester Thoreau once said, "Present trends never continue." Assuming that, we have two outcomes:
1: Between corporate-greed-drive outsourcing and ??AA-driven shackles on technology, the US will lose its edge. Having bought protection from competition, the ??AA will get even more fat and lazy, and (currently) third-world upstarts like Bollywood will take Hollywood's place in the world entertainment market.
2: Someone in the US government exercises a little wisdom and forsight, and undertakes some fundamental reform of IP Law, bringing it back in line with the intent of the framers of the constitution.
In Vermont we're shaping up to have a battle between Patrick Leahy and (formerly accused of being a carpetbagger, but now has 7 years residence instead of 1) Jack McMullen. It would HURT Vermont to lose Leahy's seniority. But from what I can tell, Leahy is right behind Hatch on copyright, and it might well hurt the nation more to keep him in. I need to research this, knowing nothing of McMullen's position.
Too bad most geeks are apolitical, otherwise we might be able to raise enough consciousness and votes to make a difference, here.
But as long as we're talking about saving power, who would be using a monitor? LCD screens are low-voltage beasts, perhaps except for the backlight, and that could be run off a buck regulator.
The 300V is because that's what you get when you rectify line voltage, depending on the style of rectifier you use, and if you want to have the simple 120/240V operation in one box.
The fact of the matter is, we're talking about switching regulators, here. They can take practically any DC voltage and turn it into practically any other DC voltage. If you're designing from scratch, the obvious thing to do would be to pick a well-suited battery and design from there.
OK, that takes care of the 12V supply, that at most is used to spin things.
The motherboard also gets +5V and +3.3V, and IIRC it may also get -5V and/or -12V. Those don't come from a marine battery, without some sort of extra regulator. They'd better be buck regulators, or some other sort of switching regulators, or your efficiency's shot, again.
Next problem, droop, especially on the lower voltage supplies. I don't know how close you were planning on having the marine battery to the motherboard, or what size copper wires you were planning on using, but supply feed resistance can be an issue. As components get to lower and lower voltages, the supply tolerance tightens. (millivolt-wise it's getting smaller, the percentage is staying pretty close to the same.) This is normally solved with regulation and Kelvin sensing.
Oh, you also can't use marine batteries unless you've also planned ventilation. They can give of hydrogen gas when being charged. UPS batteries are sealed for this reason.
Not that there isn't merit to your thought, it's just that a little more thought is needed before it becomes practical.
Ike was thought of as a do-nothing President, and perhaps rather stupid, at that.
OTOH, you don't head the D-Day invasion if you're dumb. You don't even get near the position, when the stakes are that high. We tend to forget that.
There were two things in particular he said, that I liked:
As he left the presidency, he cautioned the nation against the rise of the military-industrial complex. Of course we ignored his warning.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII, he visited one of the Death Camps. I forget where his quote is placed, but it's rather stunning, and I'll try to paraphrase it: "I came here as a personal witness to his, because I know someday people will try to say it never happened."
How about if after crackers 0wn you, they replace your 'ping' .wav with one of the Reagan quote, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!"
Yep. I read it after the first reply told me about it.
But it's just possible that Open Source led to the quick resolution, because there wasn't a week or two of finger-pointing before getting down to working on the real problem.
Sometimes I wonder how much new Bible translations are driven by archaeology, learning, modern culture, and new translation skills/insights, and how much they're driven by a desire to keep the thing under copyright.
Naaah, IMHO the memremap exploits were worse.
This one is 'only' a local DOS. Even if, as others say, crashed time is money, it could be much worse. At least you don't get 0wn3d, and you have a way to get back up by kicking users off, temporarily.
Drifting the topic, slightly...
This exploit, as well as the mremap ones, were derived from intimate examination of the source. So far, most of the Windows exploits have really been using 'features' for nefarious ends, not exploits of bugs. The recent Windows worms exploit a true bug in the security system, but I've heard that this one was developed from access to the source that leaked.
The Linux source has been out and discussed for over a decade, with plenty of time to find truly deep bugs. With the leak of WinNT/2k source, one hole was revealed fairly quickly. As people REALLY study that source, what else is going to emerge? (And how much code was really rewritten for XP vs reused?) Note that this isn't just a function of the source leak. As Microsoft shows more with Shared Source, more people will have the kind of access needed for this type of exploit.
The obvious issue with Gideon Bibles in space would be weight, and the second volume.
The equally obvious solution is Gideon eBibles.
I wonder how the Gideons would position and eBible wrt copyright, DRM, and the like. Any copyright on the Bible has obviously expired, but I presume copyrights on specific (recent, post-Bono) translations may still be in force.
But would you want to 'protect' an eBook when you're being evangelistic about it? Isn't your whole point to get *more* people to read it? Wasn't that part of the original point of publishing?
Remember Digital Audio Tape? Wanna go buy one?
Look at what the DMCA is doing to reverse engineering.
Look at what's being discussed to close the 'analog hole'.
Our nation is sacrificing it's technological competitiveness in the name of the entertainment industries. We have already sacrificed a LOT, though it's still reversible.
One of my Senators is Patrick Leahy, and maybe it's time for me to become a single-issue voter. His response to my last letter on this was not satisfactory, I need to try again - well before November.
In true /. fashion, I haven't RTFA yet, but I did hear the story a day or two back, on NPR.
I also heard a related story, about how North Dakota has come up with an alternative pollution formula to allow them to build more power plants, and burn more coal in them, even though the current formula says they're already over the limit. The scientists at the EPA disagreed, but the politicians at the EPA overruled, and approved the EPA formula.
Meanwhile, here in Vermont, we have strict limits on the local fish we're supposed to eat. (For instance, one Walleye per person per month, and they advise that children or pregnant women probably shouldn't have even that much.) One component of this is mercury, which is largely from powerplant emissions. The North Dakota report cited their 'pristine sky'. Of course it is, it all blows downwind on the prevailing westerlies. As a kid in school in Ohio, they talked about how tall smokestacks got the junk up into the stratosphere, and were the solution to pollution. Right. It got it into the prevailing westerlies, and made it S.E.P. (Somebody Else's Problem)
No doubt if we took a similar attitude in Vermont, it would blow out to sea, and we'd hear more about dying fisheries. As it is, we have some of the highest power rates in the country. I'll rant no further.
Outsourcing is BAD!
No, if you could see clearly, you'd see that oursourcing is really GOOD!
Just upgrade your skills.
Overqualified for available jobs now, before upgrading.
Hey folks, it isn't a black-and-white issue. Trying to cram it into being one is the biggest disservice of all - on both sides.
It's just a way to kill time while medium-sized things execute. Short things execute so fast that you stay on task. Long things execute so slowly that you multitask, and work on something else. Medium-sized things don't give you enough time to get going on another task, but more than enough time to absorb the useful content of a typical blog or /. post. Come to think of it, figuring the usefulness of most /. posts, reading /. ought to generate time instead of wasting it.
I'll challenge you on this one, in an odd way.
/. (and others) did though, and stated that filesharing got them to buy more CDs, because they had a chance to hear more, and do a better job of deciding what they liked.
/. mod points were given strength by the karma of the moderator. Obviously doesn't work well for i=-1..5, but I'm thinking of the concept.
I agree with you on peer review on scientific journals. But I'll disagree with you on music. For the silly point, some rap fans are not 'live and let live,' they pack guns.
For the more serious point, it's not AC/DC vs Britney[0], it's how the heck did we get to those two in the first place. How did the music industry focus on who gets to be stars, who gets promotion, who gets airplay, etc?
IMHO, publishing industries have four main functions:
1 - facilitate origination - In the case of music or movies, this is the studio. In the case of publication, it's standards/guidelines and perhaps personal assistance.
2 - editorial review - Make sure what gets published is worth publishing.
3 - promotion - The word needs to get out, about any given work. This isn't necessarily advertising.
4 - distribution - This is what we commonly think of as publishing. Get the dead trees, CDs, and DVDs on the shelves and in the bins.
The Internet chisels away at all of these roles.
First, easiest, and easiest to imagine is (4) distribution. Since Joe 6pak equates this to the publication industries, (ie - music) this is where the heat is at.
Right behind it is (3) promotion, though most didn't recognize it. The
As for (1) origination, it isn't so much the Internet as technology. It's now easier to make a professional-looking report than it is to put professional content in it. (Perhaps it always was, but now it's SO easy that more poor content gets dressed-up.) Same for music and animation, a computer and perhaps a little specialized hardware, and you can do in you home what used to need an expensive studio.
IMHO, the biggie is (2) editorial. Someone mentioned page-rank as a form of peer review. Perhaps it is, but I think I'd prefer better qualified reviewers for scientific papers. The music industry is the one that rankles me. IMHO, they're falling down on their basic editorial responsibilities and giving us mostly a choice of drek vs slop for music. My personal theory is that the music industry is now run by money-men instead of music-men, and they wouldn't know a good song/artist if it blasted their eardrums out. No wonder most of my recent purchases have been fleshing out my Beatles collection into CDs.
I suspect there is interesting innovation waiting in using the Internet for editorial purposes. Not a serious proposal, but imagine if
Parting thought:
"If I have done great things, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants."
Imagine if those giants had heirs and assignees who either charged exhorbitant rent for their shoulder-space, or simply refused admittance, altogether.
For all of the objections others have raised, like take-home being much lower than billing, bad hours, etc, you all forgot one.
The profession is potentially lethal. You may take home something other than pay. I have no idea if working women insist on barriers, or if there's a price premium to go without barriers, or if they require a recent negative test document. But none of that is foolproof.
In which case you're more interested in the disk and memory subsystems than in raw CPU speed. From what I've heard, VMWare is also just as much a memory hog as CPU hog, too.
For both of these cases, seems to me that your incremental dollar would be better spent on more memory and/or faster FSB instead of a simply-higher clock speed CPU.
Obvious caveats:
Once you hold your working set in RAM, there may be little point in more memory.
Assuming you're 32bit, the 4G+4G patch may hurt more than it helps, and you may be max'ed in the 1-4G range, but how big is your source tree?
Higher FSB and clock speed are somewhat related, but there's still wiggle room on both Intel and AMD.
I suspect I must differ.
The command line is fundamental, primitive. It's the simplest way to drive the system. Sure, voice controls and stuff may happen, GUIs will get better, and maybe we'll find a way to do it with mouse gestures and data gloves. Maybe most administration will be done with those tools.
But way down deep, spitefully neglected, the command line will still be there. For some systems, 'reformat and reinstall,' won't be an acceptable answer when the fancy stuff fails.
Another one giving up mod to reply...
The real problem is a hijacking of the concept of 'money'. 'Money' was originally meant to be a means of extended barter. You need a chicken, I need work done on my house, but I have spare corn instead of a chicken. We could find a third party that needs corn, and has a chicken. Or we could come up with 'money' that lets us extend our barter system into a marketplace, and allows all goods to become more liquid.
Unfortunately, for some people money has turned into a measure of self-esteem. They're not even collecting castles, or jet planes, or home theaters, or any sort of goods, any more. They measure their success by incrementing digits.
Also unfortunately, as much as we'd like to think of the economy as an expanding pie that has room for everyone to get as much as they want without depriving others, it just isn't. Though there is some expansion, the finite size of the pie is painfully apparent to many. In order for the more successful to tick their digits upward, they end up taking away from others. In other terms, this can be called 'downsizing', 'offshoring', 'making benefits competitive', and the like.
Why this use of money is bad is that it's so easy to tick digits upward. Had these people been accumulating toys and property, it would be more obviously outrageous.
The nifty thing about a gift economy is that it lets you measure your self-esteem through contribution. But it does need to piggyback on top of a money economy, because goods in the real world aren't free, and we all need to eat and get out of the rain.
Finding the balance between gift and money economies, and getting Joe 6pak to buy into that balance, is the task for TruenGenius.
In the next few years, we'll see how this plays out from a strategic point of view.
As things like OpenOffice mature, Linux becomes more ready for the desktop. But there's always been that, "Where are the games?" argument the Linux has had a hard time matching. Now that Microsoft is deprecating PC games in favor the the XBox, they're also chiseling away at the "Where are the games?" argument against Linux on the desktop.
But that's the kicker - when it was initially released. Wasn't that back at DX8.0, or does the XBox have DX8.1 hardware?
And it hasn't changed, since.
Meanwhile, the PC has been through DX9.0c, IIRC. No, every PC isn't at that capability, MY PCs aren't at that capability. But the leading edge is. So some of the new games will have multiple render-paths, and give leading hardware better graphics. (nothing about gameplay, here) The multiple renderpaths are the curse of games programming on PCs, compared to consoles. But it also gives programmers a chance to flex their muscles on new stuff, too. It also adds to the value of PC gaming.
For that matter, DoomIII, presumably this summer, will be DX9 on PCs, and presumably DX8 or DX8.1 on the XBox.
As the father of a teenage girl, you just have to hope you've done a good job of instilling values. It also helps that she's so doggone stubborn that no boy is going to get away with anything she doesn't want him to do. (That's where the values come in.) I've also given her permission (several times) to HURT anyone stepping out of line.
I have a friend with the toughest 4 or 5 yo I've ever seen, and it happens to be a girl. I pity the boy who ever tries to cross her - now or in a decade or two.
Oh, and my daughter has shown interest in biological sciences, so I've started her on folding@home. She's been busy at school, but after school's out, I'm hoping she'll look deeper into what folding@home is really doing. (Either that, or she'll decide that biological sciences really aren't for her, and that's ok, too.)
Doesn't matter. I have two teenagers, but it's a rare occasion when I'm not home for supper with the family. If the schedule is in a tight spot, I may be onto the VPN shortly after supper, but we nearly always have that piece of family time together, usually more.
/., was that it was something my 18yo son and I did together regularly.
Don't think this is just for small children, even if you think teenagers are ignoring or avoiding you, you need to be there for them, too. Perhaps the best thing about Star Trek Enterprise, the bane of
BTW, my late father-in-law used to tell his kids, in exasperation at the mealtime conversations, "The Kennedys talked about politics at dinner." Our same 18yo son has understandably become quite interested in politics, in the past year. So we really do talk about politics at the dinner table.
Offline processing. Set a simple filter against the inbox, and have it collect/consolidate for you while you're out acting like a pillar of the community. Using the web could be automated, but it would be more trouble.
Besides, using spam has the good (to clandestine types) side-effect of clogging the Internet and annoying Westerners.