Reading the reviews above, the impression I'm left with is that they all suck, to varying degrees. How about a review of a Calculus book, suitable for self-instruction, which DOESN'T suck? (Of course, that presupposes that such a beast actually exists, or is even possible to create). Major bonus points for a single book which teaches the related physics concepts alongside the related mathmatical concepts.
but no mans' time is worth 1/2 million for 8 hours of surgery
I'll have to disagree with you on that one -- a neurosurgeon or another doctor in an extremely demanding discipline is one of the few people who's time IS worth just about any amount of money. How many people have the combination of intelligence and manual dexterity to do neurosurgery? How valuable is that skill to society? Neurosurgery is practically the benchmark against which difficult jobs are measured. How many times have you said something like, "$JOB isn't brain surgery"?
Consider that many professional athletes make over a million dollars *per* *game*. The CEO of a large corporation can make a million a day. Tell me who's being overpaid. A surgeon saves lives. No lawyer, CEO, athlete, or entertainer can make that claim.
Use flint and steel. This was the preferred fire-starting technique used from (at least) classical antiquity on up until WWI. The first practical, non-toxic match was invented in 1855, although a toxic variety had been in use since 1827.
Bow drills date back to the paleolithic, but even then they were considered to be a last resort -- it was much easier to keep an ember alive from an old fire than it was to start one from a bow drill.
I don't consider having Daddy buy your way into an ivy league school and squeaking by with a "gentleman's" C average to be sterling academic achievement. If The Shrub didn't have a rich and well-connected daddy he would have been lucky to have been admtted into a second-tier state college (which he would have promptly failed out of), wouldn't have gotten a safe and cushy national guard gig flying an obsolete and soon-to-be-decommissioned plane, nor would he have gotten away with going AWOL from said N.G. posting, and would actually had to face the concequences for his DWI arrests.
I didn't vote for either one of the assholes, but given the choice between:
A pot-smoking Rhodes Scholar who lied about screwing an intern, who got where he is on his personal merit and accomplishments and
A coke-snorting drunken fratboy who lied about why he wanted to start a war, who got a free ride through life courtesy of daddy's money and daddy's friends
I'll chose the former any day.
Slick Willie ended his term in office with one woman's spit on his knob. The Shrub will end his presidency with over 3700 soldiers' blood on his hands. Which do you consider to be the lesser of these two evils?
I'm going to stick with a couple of time proven battle rifles
Time proven, huh? I'm kind of partial to the M-1 Garand myself -- cheap, readily available, and accurate as hell. Plus, since it's not a scary-looking evil black assult weapon, the bleeding ass liberals don't get their panties in (as much of) a twist when they see one.
I bought a dresser [at Ikea] that lasted about a month before the drawers fell apart.
Maybe you are just hard on furniture, or you didn't put it together correctly. I have a bunch of Ikea furniture (a chair & ottoman, 2 tables, and a couple of bookshelves) which are still in perfect condition after 8 years and 3 moves. The only piece of Ikea furniture I had which didn'd hold up so well was an entertaiment center -- it got banged up during one of the moves.
[Intelligence and popularity] are not mutually exclusive
I'd say they the two are almost comletely unrelated. Two great examples: Slick Willie and Dubya. Both enjoy(ed) widespread popularity. As a Rhodes Scholar, Clinton's intelligence is undeniable. Likewise, the Shrub's academic achievment (or more accurately, his lack thereof) is also well documented.
However, they are not totally unrelated because there are personality traits, which are often associated with high intelligence, which do not engender popularity. Many smart people do not suffer fools, which is not exactly an endearing characteristic. Likewise, many intelligent people come off as aloof, condescending, or superior; none of which are mannerisms likely to make friends and influence people. Finally, there is some evidence to suggest that people with high IQs tend to be more polarized on the I-E scale of Meyers/Briggs type personality gauges -- a smart person has a higher probability of being either highly introverted or highly extraverted than a person of average intelligence.
Tell me about it: my neighbor (& wife's best friend) is a total wrenchhead -- her day job is fixing armored vehicles (tanks and APCs). Whenever I'm feeling over my head with a mechanical problem, I go ask her.
These are no longer $10,000 machines. You can pick them up at any decent parts shop for under $400 (for nice ones) and about $100 for a basic version
Plus, most good auto parts stores have a stock of specialist tools like this you can borrow on deposit, or at worst rent for a nominal charge. No need to buy a $400 tool when you can rent it for $10/day for the 3 days this year you'll actually use it. It's not even like it's out of the way -- if your car is broken you're going to be making a trip to the auto parts store anyway.
I used to think the same way. Then I learned (from financial necessity) how *easy* it is to do routine car repairs myself. Auto mechanics are not exactly noted for being rocket scientists, so cars are generally designed to be easy to fix. It helps to have a wrenchhead to learn from (or turn to if you get in a jam), but you can get started just by reading a few basic books and talking to the clueful-looking guy behind the counter at your local auto parts store.
Most of the common repairs and maintenance your car requires are about as complicated as swapping out a bad hard drive. There are some jobs that you need special equipment for, but probably about 75% of all problems can be fixed with nothing more complicated than a set of wrenches and a pair of jack stands. A real geek shouldn't be afraid of taking something apart and putting it back together: the principle is the same regardless of whether it's computer hardware or automotive hardware. Give it a try -- it's car repair, not brain surgery.
You compare driving a brand new car to a 12 year old clunker and you want to know who's the sap?
Why do you think that a 12 year old car is automatically a clunker? If you take a well-made vehicle and keep it properly maintained, it can remain in excellent shape for decades. There are only 2 reasons for a 12 year old car for being a clunker: it was a piece of shit to start with, or it was abused by it's owner. (Or both.)
Machines become clunkers because they aren't taken care of. Look at airplanes: there are thousands of 25 and 30 year old airplanes which are still totally airworthy -- because they get proper maintenance. If pilots treated their planes the way most drivers treat their cars, they'd be falling out of the sky after 5 years.
My car has no mechanical or cosmetic blemishes -- not a scratch on the paint, perfect interior, and runs smooth as silk. If it weren't for the body style, you'd think it was only a few years old. I've seen 2 year old cars that are in worse shape than my Cadillac. It will STILL be on the road when the brand-new Kia you bought today is rusting in a junkyard. Why? Because it's owner (me) and it's previous owner (my father) are anal-retentive geeks who take care of their toys.
Yeah, but those women who don't open the hoods often have husbands or boyfriends who do. There's no way my wife going to spend the family's money on a car that I can't fix, no matter how "cute" it is. Same goes for my daughter, once she's old enough to drive.
For the rest of you saps buying 5-10 year old vehicles - EAT MY SEALED CARS DUST!!!
Hmmm how much is your sealed-hood Honda going to be worth when the warranty expires? No one in their right mind is going to buy a USED car with a sealed hood, which makes your trade-in value squat. Let's say your car is $25K new, you drive it for three years and it's worth maybe $10K. $15K to drive for three years, before paying for gas? No thank you. I'll buy a GOOD used car for cash, do preventitive maintenance as needed, and spend far less.
My '92 Eldorado was worth about $6500 three years ago, it's worth about $5000 now. In the last three years I've had to put in a new water pump, a new starter, and new tires, and normal tune-up stuff (spark plugs & PCV valves). Total cost for repairs, maintenance, and depreciation over three years: well under $5000. I'm paying 1/3 as much to drive a Cadillac as you're paying to drive a Honda. Who's the sap?
32-bit Athlon isn't going away anytime soon -- hell, (AFIK) AMD is still cranking out the venerable K6-2's.
AMD's appeal has almost always been that they deliver more bang for the buck than Intel. The CPU market tends to be polarized to the 2 extremes: power-hungry users to whom price is no object, and value-concious users on a budget. Yeah, a top-end P4 may spank a top-end Athlon32 (if you consider being a few percentage points faster a spanking), but you wind up paying an absurd premium for that minor performance bump.
Is a small performance improvement worth a huge price difference? Maybe if you have money to burn or if you are using computer speed as a means of compensating for an *ahem* personal inadequacy. Anyone who is interested in getting the most out of his money isn't going to buy top-of-the-line, bleeding-edge chips anyway -- what was top of the line 3 months ago is good enough for most people and is a much better value for the money on a price/performance basis.
Let's say you have a maximum of $170 to spend on a CPU. Looking on NewEgg, you can get a 1.4GHz Opteron, an Athlon-XP 3000+, or a 2.4Ghz P4 without going over budget. Either of these 2 AMD chips is going to spank the similarly-priced Intel chip by a WIDE margin. To get a 3.0GHz P4, you'd spend $219 -- that's a 25% price increase for basically the same performance. If we only have $60 to spend, the difference is even more drastic: a 1.7GHz Celeron w/128K cache versus an Athlon XP 2000+ w/256K cache.
After an hour or so you would become acclimitized. You'd still smell it, but your brain woult block it out so you don't notice it.
This used to happen all the time back at one of my first real jobs. The owner of the company smoked really foul cigars. When I'd first walk in my eyes would water from the fumes, but after an hour I didn't notice it anymore. What was ironic was if you opened the windows to get fresh air, it actually made it worse... you'd get enough fresh air to disrupt the acclimitazion, but not enough to actually get rid of the accumulated cigar reek.
Yes, a bank is interested in making money from you. Banking is a long-term relationship between the customer and the bank. The way a bank makes money from a customer is through repeat business. A bank that treats it's customers like people instead of walking wallets is more likely to have them come back when they need additional services. A bank that screws it's customers is going to lose their business.
Global warming does not result in a uniform raise in temperature around the world. It results in more extreme weather.
All weather is caused by the uneven heating of the Earth by the Sun. Global warming magnifies the effect. Hot spots get hotter, and do so faster, causing a larger temperature differential. Higher temperature make water evaporate faster, causing more clouds, which causes even more uneven heating.
In the short term this causes more extreme conditions -- larger storms occuring more frequently, hotter summers, colder winters, more erratic and unseasonable temperature changes, and so forth. More severe storms disrupt the hydrological cycle, dumping all thier rain in one area, causing flooding in some places and droughts elsewhere. In the longer term it causes major climatic shifts -- changes in ocean currents in wind patterns.
I'll disagree with the assertation that a bad GUI is one which does not follow established standards.
The purpose of any user interface (GUI, CLI, or physical controls) is to make the device do what you want it to do. A good UI is one that lets you make it do what you want it to do with a minimum of effort and confusion. A bad UI is one that makes the task unnecessarily complex or time-consuming.
Standards are a good thing, generally, because they generally help flatten the learning curve across a system. However, adherence to standards can't take second place to real usability. Standards, when followed too rigidly, can become a straightjacket by dismissing novel and creative solutions.
"Code" can't be free (libre, not gratis) because it is an inanimate artifact. Freedom is only applicable to living creatures. Can a spoon be free? No. Can an animal be free? Yes, at least to some extent. Can a person be free? Without question.
While we talk about "Free software", it really isn't the software which is free -- it is people who are free to use, modify, and redistribute the software. PD and BSD grants people the right to redistribute the software and derivitive works under any terms they desire; GPL forces people to redistribute the software and derivitive works under it's terms only. Code can't be enslaved any more than a hammer can be enslaved.
When you modify a piece of free code, you are adding value to it at your personal expense. BSD says that you are free to do whatever you want with the fruits of your labor, which includes keeping your value-added contributions propriatary. GPL confiscates your contributions and forces you to give them away if you want to share your work with others.
Think of the corpus of free code as a magical pile of bricks -- it's magical because no matter how many bricks you take, the pile never gets any smaller. Those bricks have value and utility in their own right, without any changes or additions.
Now, if you take bricks from the pile and combine them with bricks you made yourself to build a house, you've created something new which has more value than the sum of it's parts. If you took bricks from the public domain pile, the house belongs to you and you can lock people out of it (or charge admission) if you want to; if you used BSD bricks, it still belongs to you, but you have to put a sign out front saying "this house contains BSD bricks." However, if you took bricks from the GPL pile, you're not allowed to lock the doors and you must add any new bricks you created from scratch to the pile.
BSD gives you the liberty to decide whether or not you want to add your bricks to the pile; GPL forces you to contribute your bricks to the communal pile, whether you want to or not.
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Reading the reviews above, the impression I'm left with is that they all suck, to varying degrees. How about a review of a Calculus book, suitable for self-instruction, which DOESN'T suck? (Of course, that presupposes that such a beast actually exists, or is even possible to create). Major bonus points for a single book which teaches the related physics concepts alongside the related mathmatical concepts.
Consider that many professional athletes make over a million dollars *per* *game*. The CEO of a large corporation can make a million a day. Tell me who's being overpaid. A surgeon saves lives. No lawyer, CEO, athlete, or entertainer can make that claim.
Bow drills date back to the paleolithic, but even then they were considered to be a last resort -- it was much easier to keep an ember alive from an old fire than it was to start one from a bow drill.
No, no, no.... you've got it all wrong... they're using CANADIAN kilometers, which as we all know are only 2/3 the size of a regular kilometer :-)
I didn't vote for either one of the assholes, but given the choice between:
- A pot-smoking Rhodes Scholar who lied about screwing an intern, who got where he is on his personal merit and accomplishments
- A coke-snorting drunken fratboy who lied about why he wanted to start a war, who got a free ride through life courtesy of daddy's money and daddy's friends
I'll chose the former any day.and
Slick Willie ended his term in office with one woman's spit on his knob. The Shrub will end his presidency with over 3700 soldiers' blood on his hands. Which do you consider to be the lesser of these two evils?
However, they are not totally unrelated because there are personality traits, which are often associated with high intelligence, which do not engender popularity. Many smart people do not suffer fools, which is not exactly an endearing characteristic. Likewise, many intelligent people come off as aloof, condescending, or superior; none of which are mannerisms likely to make friends and influence people. Finally, there is some evidence to suggest that people with high IQs tend to be more polarized on the I-E scale of Meyers/Briggs type personality gauges -- a smart person has a higher probability of being either highly introverted or highly extraverted than a person of average intelligence.
Tell me about it: my neighbor (& wife's best friend) is a total wrenchhead -- her day job is fixing armored vehicles (tanks and APCs). Whenever I'm feeling over my head with a mechanical problem, I go ask her.
Most of the common repairs and maintenance your car requires are about as complicated as swapping out a bad hard drive. There are some jobs that you need special equipment for, but probably about 75% of all problems can be fixed with nothing more complicated than a set of wrenches and a pair of jack stands. A real geek shouldn't be afraid of taking something apart and putting it back together: the principle is the same regardless of whether it's computer hardware or automotive hardware. Give it a try -- it's car repair, not brain surgery.
Machines become clunkers because they aren't taken care of. Look at airplanes: there are thousands of 25 and 30 year old airplanes which are still totally airworthy -- because they get proper maintenance. If pilots treated their planes the way most drivers treat their cars, they'd be falling out of the sky after 5 years.
My car has no mechanical or cosmetic blemishes -- not a scratch on the paint, perfect interior, and runs smooth as silk. If it weren't for the body style, you'd think it was only a few years old. I've seen 2 year old cars that are in worse shape than my Cadillac. It will STILL be on the road when the brand-new Kia you bought today is rusting in a junkyard. Why? Because it's owner (me) and it's previous owner (my father) are anal-retentive geeks who take care of their toys.
Yeah, but those women who don't open the hoods often have husbands or boyfriends who do. There's no way my wife going to spend the family's money on a car that I can't fix, no matter how "cute" it is. Same goes for my daughter, once she's old enough to drive.
My '92 Eldorado was worth about $6500 three years ago, it's worth about $5000 now. In the last three years I've had to put in a new water pump, a new starter, and new tires, and normal tune-up stuff (spark plugs & PCV valves). Total cost for repairs, maintenance, and depreciation over three years: well under $5000. I'm paying 1/3 as much to drive a Cadillac as you're paying to drive a Honda. Who's the sap?
AMD's appeal has almost always been that they deliver more bang for the buck than Intel. The CPU market tends to be polarized to the 2 extremes: power-hungry users to whom price is no object, and value-concious users on a budget. Yeah, a top-end P4 may spank a top-end Athlon32 (if you consider being a few percentage points faster a spanking), but you wind up paying an absurd premium for that minor performance bump.
Is a small performance improvement worth a huge price difference? Maybe if you have money to burn or if you are using computer speed as a means of compensating for an *ahem* personal inadequacy. Anyone who is interested in getting the most out of his money isn't going to buy top-of-the-line, bleeding-edge chips anyway -- what was top of the line 3 months ago is good enough for most people and is a much better value for the money on a price/performance basis.
Let's say you have a maximum of $170 to spend on a CPU. Looking on NewEgg, you can get a 1.4GHz Opteron, an Athlon-XP 3000+, or a 2.4Ghz P4 without going over budget. Either of these 2 AMD chips is going to spank the similarly-priced Intel chip by a WIDE margin. To get a 3.0GHz P4, you'd spend $219 -- that's a 25% price increase for basically the same performance. If we only have $60 to spend, the difference is even more drastic: a 1.7GHz Celeron w/128K cache versus an Athlon XP 2000+ w/256K cache.
This used to happen all the time back at one of my first real jobs. The owner of the company smoked really foul cigars. When I'd first walk in my eyes would water from the fumes, but after an hour I didn't notice it anymore. What was ironic was if you opened the windows to get fresh air, it actually made it worse... you'd get enough fresh air to disrupt the acclimitazion, but not enough to actually get rid of the accumulated cigar reek.
That's why you only pass your counterfeit bills to your friendly neighborhood drug dealer and/or streetwalker.
I recall hearing that cop is derived from the Latin verb "to capture".
If you use cygwin, you can run wget (and many other nice unix-y tools) on Windows.
All weather is caused by the uneven heating of the Earth by the Sun. Global warming magnifies the effect. Hot spots get hotter, and do so faster, causing a larger temperature differential. Higher temperature make water evaporate faster, causing more clouds, which causes even more uneven heating.
In the short term this causes more extreme conditions -- larger storms occuring more frequently, hotter summers, colder winters, more erratic and unseasonable temperature changes, and so forth. More severe storms disrupt the hydrological cycle, dumping all thier rain in one area, causing flooding in some places and droughts elsewhere. In the longer term it causes major climatic shifts -- changes in ocean currents in wind patterns.
The purpose of any user interface (GUI, CLI, or physical controls) is to make the device do what you want it to do. A good UI is one that lets you make it do what you want it to do with a minimum of effort and confusion. A bad UI is one that makes the task unnecessarily complex or time-consuming.
Standards are a good thing, generally, because they generally help flatten the learning curve across a system. However, adherence to standards can't take second place to real usability. Standards, when followed too rigidly, can become a straightjacket by dismissing novel and creative solutions.
While we talk about "Free software", it really isn't the software which is free -- it is people who are free to use, modify, and redistribute the software. PD and BSD grants people the right to redistribute the software and derivitive works under any terms they desire; GPL forces people to redistribute the software and derivitive works under it's terms only. Code can't be enslaved any more than a hammer can be enslaved.
When you modify a piece of free code, you are adding value to it at your personal expense. BSD says that you are free to do whatever you want with the fruits of your labor, which includes keeping your value-added contributions propriatary. GPL confiscates your contributions and forces you to give them away if you want to share your work with others.
Think of the corpus of free code as a magical pile of bricks -- it's magical because no matter how many bricks you take, the pile never gets any smaller. Those bricks have value and utility in their own right, without any changes or additions.
Now, if you take bricks from the pile and combine them with bricks you made yourself to build a house, you've created something new which has more value than the sum of it's parts. If you took bricks from the public domain pile, the house belongs to you and you can lock people out of it (or charge admission) if you want to; if you used BSD bricks, it still belongs to you, but you have to put a sign out front saying "this house contains BSD bricks." However, if you took bricks from the GPL pile, you're not allowed to lock the doors and you must add any new bricks you created from scratch to the pile.
BSD gives you the liberty to decide whether or not you want to add your bricks to the pile; GPL forces you to contribute your bricks to the communal pile, whether you want to or not.