I think that you should have some discussion areas which are purposefully cross-departmental, and don't restrict discussion areas to a department until it has been demonstrated that doing so is necessary to keep signal/noise high.
Let me illustrate my cryptic advise with a fictional example of a company which is trying to put together a website. Marketing sees the site as a big brochure, support sees a way to ease the burden on the phone jockeys, sales sees a way to sell ('Just like Amazon!'), tech support sees a new toy and a new set of computers to maintain, management sees a cost without much benefit, and engineering sees another way that the customers will be screwed. But the company is not one of these departments, but all/none of them.
The way a company is seen by the world, by its customers, should be in the light of what the customer wants. That website must be built with the user in mind, not tech support. The best way to do this is to involve all of the departments in the design and maintenance of the website. This way, the website users are more likely to see something useful.
Think of the setup of your discussion groups in a similar light. The website visitors correspond to the employees who use the discussion areas, and those employees need
Information
Insight
Cooperation
New Perspectives
which they can get from other departments, if they are actively encouraged to talk to people in those other departments.
Maybe general discussion areas for each product/product line. Marketing could see what questions support asks engineering, sales could hear about the problems manufacturing is having which engineering can't solve. Problems might be caught earlier, products might get better.
Of course, all of this requires that people actually post to and read these forums, but you might be able to solve that by having low level managers make some of their announcements in the appropriate working-group level discussion group instead of in emails.
Getting people to start using these groups will be a challenge, but I think that it can prove invaluable. Good luck.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
I agree! SciFi beats almost anything else on cable. I played football in high school, but I'd rather watch anything on SciFi (except Tales From The Crypt) than NFL, NBA, NHL, or NCAA.
Maybe have a section with scifi movies playing:
Star Wars
Star Trek
Indiana Jones (OK, not truly scifi, but everyone loves Indy.)
Blade Runner (Lots of Harrison Ford.:)
MST3k
Babylon 5
... brain freezing, recall failing...
This could be great. Where would this be, which city? I'm moving to Seattle, so maybe I'll find something like this there.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Re:MP3 Recorders? How about Minidisc?
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In a way, that post is ASCII art. Very cool.... Oh, and I like the content too.:)
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
The reason this city agency needs to collect this data, is that when budget review comes around again, the Parks agency will be told to justify the spending it has done, and to justify the proposed increase in budget for the next year.
With more data on its users, the agency can say that there were X unique visitors last year, Y visitors who came 5 or more times, and Z visitors came from outside of the county. This information, and other data, will let the Parks department get the money it needs to operate the next year. Without it, they would be sunk.
Whether this is morally or economically right is a different question. But we were talking about the real world.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Re:A new way to design new cars?
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Add in the fact that since you're using computer modeling to design the cars, you can engineer the cars to tighter tolerances and get a much more reliable car.
Tolerances are driven mostly by manufacturing methods - the more expensive and precise your manufacturing method/system, the tighter the tolerances can be. CAD/CAE software does help tighten up tolerances, but only in that you can place the parts precisely in relation to each other in the simulation CAD allows exact placement in three dimensions, eliminating problems in translating 3D thoughts into 2D drawings and then back into 3D parts.
The software does help, but you can only design for tolerances which you can build to. If I specify a flat surface with +/-0.0005 inches over the square-foot area, but I smooth out that surface with a river rock, my tolerances mean squat. Designing parts and systems with tighter tolerances than can be built is pointless.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Perhaps trying to figure out better ways of de-salinating ocean water should be a little more important.
Unless you live at 7000 feet, 500 miles from the nearest large body of water, and the water table is 2000 feet down.
Granted, these types of cases are rare, and de-salinization is very important, but the people who are working on this wouldn't be working on de-sal processes or plants. So they might as well do something to keep people in water.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Your definitions are correct, but the story (despite what the Slashdot headline says) is actually about the "isotopic" (no "r") variety.
True, the article and the science concentrate on the isotopic (chemical) aspects of this new method, but those isotopic methods introduce isotRopic characteristics into the silicon.
To quote the FAQ, "By removing the different sized atoms, the lattice crystal structure becomes more uniform..." - isotRopic means 'the same throughout, uniform.' So making a silicon lattice structure more isotopically pure helped to make that structure more isotRopic.
Semantics, semantics, some antics.:)
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
I didn't have a problem with banner ads. When I had a T1. Now that I'm connecting with 56K, banner ads frustrate me in that they take time to load. A lot of time. Which wouldn't be all that bad if the page would load first, but too many pages use tables or other tricks which don't seem to finish until the banner ad is done loading; assuming that the banner ad isn't forced to load first, which is the worst case for time use.
If I had a fast connection, they wouldn't bother me. But with a slow connection, they have a tendancy to bug me after a while. I'm not a zealot about it, but I understand "Banner-phobia".
Louis Wu
"One of life's hard lessons is that life's hard lessons are hard to learn."
Re:Double Taxation - was: IRS gets it all back ...
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True, however that doesn't answer my question. I have known for years what property taxes pay for, what I don't know is why the tax is based on the appraised value of the property (which can hurt fixed income retirees) instead of based upon the payments made on the property, such as rent or mortgage (sp?). If you can answer that, I'll be happier.
Thanks.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go...
Double Taxation - was: IRS gets it all back ...
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Quoth the raven, err, parent:
That would be double taxation and obviously wrong.
Bob works for GM, and saves money over the years. He invests some of his net pay (after tax pay) in mutual funds.
Then his friend Bill tells him that he's putting together a great startup, and asks for some Venture Capital. Bill tell's Bob that he would be pre-IPO, which clinches it for Bob.
So Bob takes some money out of his mutal fund, paying capital gains taxes on the amount over his investment. (BTW, this taxes the money created by inflation [which isn't truly a gain for Bob, just keeping up with the Federal Reserve], as well as the real profit.)
Bill and company do very well, and the IPO is wildly successful. But Bob doesn't have faith in Bill or his company, so Bob sells his stock a week after the IPO. And Bob pays capital gains taxes again.
Bob takes this money and buys a car to replace his 15 year old clunker, paying taxes on the car.
Bob decides to give up his apartment in the city and move to a small town, so he takes the rest of the profit from the IPO (and some other savings he was wise enough to keep away from Bill) and buys a house. Bob pays all sorts of taxes on this house, and he has to pay property tax each year. (Pet peeve: why is a property tax based upon the appraised value of the land and buildings? My grandparents paid off their house decades ago, why should they pay a few thousand dollars each year when they are just living at home? Property taxes have forced people to move because they couldn't pay the 'taxes' on land owned for decades, especially if the owners have fixed incomes.)
I agree that double taxation is wrong, but it seems to be the law of the land. I don't see any easy solutions. Sigh.
The letters only suggest which end of the scale you favor.
For instance, I have tested INTP a few times, but I have many Extroverted qualities (vs Introverted, E ---I), and I was chairman of a club of 150 people last year. It was hard, but I was told that I did a good job, so I don't think that I'm pure Introvert.
OTOH, my favorite places are all very isolated, usually involving nature. (I live in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, and if it were light out I could see Pine trees and Redwood trees out my window. NYC, yeech.:)
On the gripping hand, I've been told by two people who know me well that I am an Introvert who has successfully created a mask of Extroversion to allow me to live in this world. Seems reasonable, but I can't tell yet.
The quintissential example is pharmacuticals (drugs, for those of you in Rio Linda). You (or your company) spend 7 years and 100 Million dollars finding a drug which cures the common cold. It works in 99.44% of cases, and the FDA likes it. Producing this drug only costs (random guess) $0.01 per pill, and one pill will cure your cold for good.
So competitor company, let's call them MicroDrug, makes the same drug and sells it for $0.10 per pill. Consumers will gladly pay a dime (or quarter after middle-man and retail markup) to be rid of a cold at Christmas. But you have to charge a dollar a pill to make back the money you spent on research. So people don't buy your pills ('A buck, MicroDrug charges $0.15!!!! I'm not buying from that greedy bastard anymore, I'm sticking with MicroDrug.').
They buy MicroDrug's pills. And you go bankrupt. Which is too bad because you had some good ideas for a drug which might cure Alzheimer's disease, you just needed a few years and ten million dollars to make it work.
Yes, I know that drug companies aren't all saintly, I doubt if any are saintly. But it makes good business sense to do research on new drugs if you can recover those expenses and make a little money when you sell the researched drugs. Without a patent, or some way to restrict 'embrace and extend' by generic drug companies, the big researchers will not do research. Period. No more new drugs. The only research will be done in universities, and those wonderful people will not be able to do as much work as an entire company.
This is one example of why we need protection for the solutions of the second type of problem you noted, the ones where all the work is done up front in brains and computers, and the actual gains can be had quite easily.
Books are a good example too. Tom Clancy needs an economic incentive to write a sequel to The Bear and The Dragon. He does great amounts of work in creating the book, and I get the benefit in a few days by reading it. I don't like paying $20 for it, but the other options are illegal or take a few years.
If I am to pay less, and others are allowed to use it as the basis of their own work (GPL for books?), Mr. Clancy will still need a monetary incentive to write the book in the first place. How do we solve these problems? What ways are their to inexpensively obtain these works (drugs, books, software, engineering designs, music, etc.) while still providing an appropriate incentive to the people who do the hardest part of creating these things?
The only idea I have which might help solve this would have to be a small part of an overall solution, but we could have a Creation Cost (which could be amortized over the first production run) which the 'creator' would be guarantteed to receive. There would also be a Profit Sharing percentage, much like the residuals actors get when their shows run in syndication. (Trivia: the contracts the Star Wars cast signed for the first movie didn't have much in the way of provisions for residuals, which was fixed for the second and third movies. Um, fifth and sixth movies? Whatever. It seems that they saw the popularity the movies would have in the future.) So if your creation was immensely successful, you would get paid in proportion to how successful it was. Put both Creation Cost and Profit Sharing together, and you let a programmer sell her software for money she can count on, and if she did a good job and it get's really popular, she'll get more money.
I don't know if it would work, but it seems reasonable before holes have been shot all through it.
Unlimited $: Convert all of the books that I own/have-read/want-to-read to electronic format. Make me a book reader which is comfortable on my eyes, portable, and rugged. And I want to have the entire collection in the reader at all times. (Tall order, but money's no object.)
$300-$1500: A second hand computer to put another Open OS on.
Well, she's right, from a certain point of view. (Luke, I am your father.:)
'Centrifugal force' is a force defined from a non-Newtonian reference frame, and as such, is not a true force. A force can only be defined from within a Newtonian reference frame, so your implication that she is incorrect is correct. (Does that make sense?)
What your wife is actually feeling (aside from the bump) is her linear inertia taking her in a straight line while the car turns away from that line. So, she bumps into the window.
When she asks you what she is feeling ("I'm feeling something, so what is it, Mr. Smary-Pants?"), you can tell her that what people typically call 'centrifugal force' is actually the other side of 'centripetal force'. Centripetal force is the tension in the string when you swing a Yo-Yo over your head; centripetal force keeps an object traveling in a circle.
Try this, Newton's first law of motion says that it takes force to move something or change it's straight line motion at constant speed (in Newton's world being at rest and traveling with a constant velocity are the same thing, the first glimpse of relativity), and you are traveling in your car in a straight line, with constant speed. You turn the wheel and the car starts turning, which means that acceleration is being applied to the car to change it's velocity. This acceleration is called centripetal acceleration.
In conclusion, there is no centrifugal force, although it appears to be a force, but it is measured from the wrong reference.
If Netscape 4.7+ and IE 4+ claim that they can accept gzipped data, they had better know how to handle it.
So IE's claims are true?;)
I was thinking more along the lines of NS for *nix might be able to handle it, but the Win version might not be able to. I just went from a T1 in my college dorm to a 56k on my dad's computer at home, and anything to speed up the downloads would keep hair in my head. So my original question stands,
Does anyone know if gzip downloads are even theoretically possible for a Windows machine?
This is something I don't know how to test, and I don't know where to start an intelligent search, so if anyone has a good place for me to start looking, I would be grateful. Thanks.
BTW, my criteria for a new place to live just grew to include DSL/cable modem access. How do people live on 56k?
Since I'm stuck with Windows for a couple more months, I'm wondering if this will work on Netscape 4.7+ for Windows. Or even IE 4+ for Windows. Does Opera do this?
Does this trick need gzip installed already, or is it included in the huge download of NS?
... "if you want to exercise your right to free speech, you have to be prepared to spend money to defend that right." I disagree that this should ever be the case...
Should is the key word. What is and what should be are not the same here.
If you're going to bother at all with the whole "right to free speech" rigamarole, you have to be prepared to go all the way.
Why? If I want to say a few words on a website, but I don't want to put myself through the hassle of legal proceedings, am I silly for getting some sound advice (on/. ?) on what may happen and how I can protect myself? Some people balance the costs of their actions, and some of those find expression (on some subjects) unworthy of jail time or legal action.
There was an Ask Slashdot at the end of February about Wiring Your Home which you might find useful if you make your own 'Geek House'. There were a number of good comments on geek home improvement (Yeah, I wrote a couple, that's why I remember.).
When I first started reading HTML: The Definitive Guide(now in 4th edition), I was impressed by how a markup language which was designed to present academic papers could be so snazy. And then I looked at the source of many popular sites, and I bought CSS: The Definitive Guide.
I appreciate that/. allows some content tags (em, strong, div), but I want some more (cite, code, dl {for definition lists}). I feel kinda dirty using a physical style tag when I should be using a content tag, even if it is only a weblog.
8) Information architecture - 'architect' your information before you design your site! Organize that information into the LOGICAL segments that your USERS WILL EXPECT (how do you know what they'll expect? Find out from them what they expect, dummy!) Once you've got your information organized, only THEN can you begin to design the site!
Yup, and O'Reilly agrees with you. They have a book about Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (BTW, I want a 'cite' tag for Slashdot, <i> isn't quite right.) I haven't read the book, but the blurbs look good.;)
The blurb from the above web page:
Learn how to merge aesthetics and mechanics to design web sites that "work." This book shows how to apply principles of architecture and library science to design cohesive web sites and intranets that are easy to use, manage, and expand. Covers building complex sites, hierarchy design and organization, and techniques to make your site easier to search. For webmasters, designers, and administrators.
Or you can read the 'Full Description':
Some web sites "work" and some don't. Good web site consultants know that you can't just jump in and start writing HTML,
the same way you can't build a house by just pouring a foundation and putting up some walls. You need to know who will be
using the site, and what they'll be using it for. You need some idea of what you'd like to draw their attention to during their visit.
Overall, you need a strong, cohesive vision for the site that makes it both distinctive and usable.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is about applying the principles of architecture and library science to web
site design. Each web site is like a public building, available for tourists and regulars alike to breeze through at their leisure. The
job of the architect is to set up the framework for the site to make it comfortable and inviting for people to visit, relax in, and
perhaps even return to someday.
Most books on web development concentrate either on the aesthetics or the mechanics of the site. This book is about the
framework that holds the two together. With this book, you learn how to design web sites and intranets that support growth,
management, and ease of use. Special attention is given to:
The process behind architecting a large, complex site
Web site hierarchy design and organization
Techniques for making your site easier to search
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web is for webmasters, designers, and anyone else involved in building a web
site. It's for novice web designers who, from the start, want to avoid the traps that result in poorly designed sites. It's for
experienced web designers who have already created sites but realize that something "is missing" from their sites and want to
improve them. It's for programmers and administrators who are comfortable with HTML, CGI, and Java but want to understand
how to organize their web pages into a cohesive site.
The authors are two of the principals of Argus Associates, a web consulting firm. At Argus, they have created information
architectures for web sites and intranets of some of the largest companies in the United States, including Chrysler Corporation,
Barron's, and Dow Chemical.
Wow, that is really long. Hope the info justifies the length
Yeah, you're right. They are very different in philosophy and performance. But I'm making my machine a little more free with the presence of Emacs, Perl, and Python. While they are Win9x versions, the programs are still mainly Free. And their presence puts the rest of the programs on my computer to shame. (See my previous post about my Emacs habits and my preferences.)
But identifying an entire OS by the kernel also seems weird. (I'm not running "Kernel32", I'm running Windows.) So saying that I have GNU/Windows elevates MS a bit, and indicates that the GNU programs on my machine really matter to me. They aren't just Window dressing. (PUNishing, ain't it?;)
So if I ran GNU tools on Windows, you would call it GNU/Windows?
Given that I'm writing almost everything on my Win98 laptop from GNU Emacs, yes.
I have a very hard time typing more than a few sentences on other editors, like this web-form I'm using to type to you. [Part of me wants to go up a few lines (C-p) to make that a blockquote (C-d C-d... C-e Meta-b Meta-b Meta-b... C-n C-n C-n).] I find the off-home keys I want to use (End, Home, Page-Up, Page-Down, arrow keys) hard to hit without striking another key, and I want my convenient editor/movement commands (forward/backward one word, move to end/beginning of line, move text so cursor is at center of screen, multiple paste) to be ready from the home keys.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me illustrate my cryptic advise with a fictional example of a company which is trying to put together a website. Marketing sees the site as a big brochure, support sees a way to ease the burden on the phone jockeys, sales sees a way to sell ('Just like Amazon!'), tech support sees a new toy and a new set of computers to maintain, management sees a cost without much benefit, and engineering sees another way that the customers will be screwed. But the company is not one of these departments, but all/none of them.
The way a company is seen by the world, by its customers, should be in the light of what the customer wants. That website must be built with the user in mind, not tech support. The best way to do this is to involve all of the departments in the design and maintenance of the website. This way, the website users are more likely to see something useful.
Think of the setup of your discussion groups in a similar light. The website visitors correspond to the employees who use the discussion areas, and those employees need
- Information
- Insight
- Cooperation
- New Perspectives
which they can get from other departments, if they are actively encouraged to talk to people in those other departments.Maybe general discussion areas for each product/product line. Marketing could see what questions support asks engineering, sales could hear about the problems manufacturing is having which engineering can't solve. Problems might be caught earlier, products might get better.
Of course, all of this requires that people actually post to and read these forums, but you might be able to solve that by having low level managers make some of their announcements in the appropriate working-group level discussion group instead of in emails.
Getting people to start using these groups will be a challenge, but I think that it can prove invaluable. Good luck.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Maybe have a section with scifi movies playing:
- Star Wars
- Star Trek
- Indiana Jones (OK, not truly scifi, but everyone loves Indy.)
- Blade Runner (Lots of Harrison Ford.
:)
- MST3k
- Babylon 5
- ... brain freezing, recall failing
...
This could be great. Where would this be, which city? I'm moving to Seattle, so maybe I'll find something like this there.Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
With more data on its users, the agency can say that there were X unique visitors last year, Y visitors who came 5 or more times, and Z visitors came from outside of the county. This information, and other data, will let the Parks department get the money it needs to operate the next year. Without it, they would be sunk.
Whether this is morally or economically right is a different question. But we were talking about the real world.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
The software does help, but you can only design for tolerances which you can build to. If I specify a flat surface with +/-0.0005 inches over the square-foot area, but I smooth out that surface with a river rock, my tolerances mean squat. Designing parts and systems with tighter tolerances than can be built is pointless.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
Granted, these types of cases are rare, and de-salinization is very important, but the people who are working on this wouldn't be working on de-sal processes or plants. So they might as well do something to keep people in water.
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
To quote the FAQ, "By removing the different sized atoms, the lattice crystal structure becomes more uniform ..." - isotRopic means 'the same throughout, uniform.' So making a silicon lattice structure more isotopically pure helped to make that structure more isotRopic.
Semantics, semantics, some antics. :)
Louis Wu
"One of life's hardest lessons is that life's lessons are hard to learn."
If I had a fast connection, they wouldn't bother me. But with a slow connection, they have a tendancy to bug me after a while. I'm not a zealot about it, but I understand "Banner-phobia".
Louis Wu
"One of life's hard lessons is that life's hard lessons are hard to learn."
Thanks.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
- Bob works for GM, and saves money over the years. He invests some of his net pay (after tax pay) in mutual funds.
- Then his friend Bill tells him that he's putting together a great startup, and asks for some Venture Capital. Bill tell's Bob that he would be pre-IPO, which clinches it for Bob.
- So Bob takes some money out of his mutal fund, paying capital gains taxes on the amount over his investment. (BTW, this taxes the money created by inflation [which isn't truly a gain for Bob, just keeping up with the Federal Reserve], as well as the real profit.)
- Bill and company do very well, and the IPO is wildly successful. But Bob doesn't have faith in Bill or his company, so Bob sells his stock a week after the IPO. And Bob pays capital gains taxes again.
- Bob takes this money and buys a car to replace his 15 year old clunker, paying taxes on the car.
- Bob decides to give up his apartment in the city and move to a small town, so he takes the rest of the profit from the IPO (and some other savings he was wise enough to keep away from Bill) and buys a house. Bob pays all sorts of taxes on this house, and he has to pay property tax each year. (Pet peeve: why is a property tax based upon the appraised value of the land and buildings? My grandparents paid off their house decades ago, why should they pay a few thousand dollars each year when they are just living at home? Property taxes have forced people to move because they couldn't pay the 'taxes' on land owned for decades, especially if the owners have fixed incomes.)
I agree that double taxation is wrong, but it seems to be the law of the land. I don't see any easy solutions. Sigh.Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
For instance, I have tested INTP a few times, but I have many Extroverted qualities (vs Introverted, E ---I), and I was chairman of a club of 150 people last year. It was hard, but I was told that I did a good job, so I don't think that I'm pure Introvert.
OTOH, my favorite places are all very isolated, usually involving nature. (I live in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, and if it were light out I could see Pine trees and Redwood trees out my window. NYC, yeech. :)
On the gripping hand, I've been told by two people who know me well that I am an Introvert who has successfully created a mask of Extroversion to allow me to live in this world. Seems reasonable, but I can't tell yet.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
The quintissential example is pharmacuticals (drugs, for those of you in Rio Linda). You (or your company) spend 7 years and 100 Million dollars finding a drug which cures the common cold. It works in 99.44% of cases, and the FDA likes it. Producing this drug only costs (random guess) $0.01 per pill, and one pill will cure your cold for good.
So competitor company, let's call them MicroDrug, makes the same drug and sells it for $0.10 per pill. Consumers will gladly pay a dime (or quarter after middle-man and retail markup) to be rid of a cold at Christmas. But you have to charge a dollar a pill to make back the money you spent on research. So people don't buy your pills ('A buck, MicroDrug charges $0.15!!!! I'm not buying from that greedy bastard anymore, I'm sticking with MicroDrug.').
They buy MicroDrug's pills. And you go bankrupt. Which is too bad because you had some good ideas for a drug which might cure Alzheimer's disease, you just needed a few years and ten million dollars to make it work.
Yes, I know that drug companies aren't all saintly, I doubt if any are saintly. But it makes good business sense to do research on new drugs if you can recover those expenses and make a little money when you sell the researched drugs. Without a patent, or some way to restrict 'embrace and extend' by generic drug companies, the big researchers will not do research. Period. No more new drugs. The only research will be done in universities, and those wonderful people will not be able to do as much work as an entire company.
This is one example of why we need protection for the solutions of the second type of problem you noted, the ones where all the work is done up front in brains and computers, and the actual gains can be had quite easily.
Books are a good example too. Tom Clancy needs an economic incentive to write a sequel to The Bear and The Dragon. He does great amounts of work in creating the book, and I get the benefit in a few days by reading it. I don't like paying $20 for it, but the other options are illegal or take a few years.
If I am to pay less, and others are allowed to use it as the basis of their own work (GPL for books?), Mr. Clancy will still need a monetary incentive to write the book in the first place. How do we solve these problems? What ways are their to inexpensively obtain these works (drugs, books, software, engineering designs, music, etc.) while still providing an appropriate incentive to the people who do the hardest part of creating these things?
The only idea I have which might help solve this would have to be a small part of an overall solution, but we could have a Creation Cost (which could be amortized over the first production run) which the 'creator' would be guarantteed to receive. There would also be a Profit Sharing percentage, much like the residuals actors get when their shows run in syndication. (Trivia: the contracts the Star Wars cast signed for the first movie didn't have much in the way of provisions for residuals, which was fixed for the second and third movies. Um, fifth and sixth movies? Whatever. It seems that they saw the popularity the movies would have in the future.) So if your creation was immensely successful, you would get paid in proportion to how successful it was. Put both Creation Cost and Profit Sharing together, and you let a programmer sell her software for money she can count on, and if she did a good job and it get's really popular, she'll get more money.
I don't know if it would work, but it seems reasonable before holes have been shot all through it.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
'Centrifugal force' is a force defined from a non-Newtonian reference frame, and as such, is not a true force. A force can only be defined from within a Newtonian reference frame, so your implication that she is incorrect is correct. (Does that make sense?)
What your wife is actually feeling (aside from the bump) is her linear inertia taking her in a straight line while the car turns away from that line. So, she bumps into the window.
When she asks you what she is feeling ("I'm feeling something, so what is it, Mr. Smary-Pants?"), you can tell her that what people typically call 'centrifugal force' is actually the other side of 'centripetal force'. Centripetal force is the tension in the string when you swing a Yo-Yo over your head; centripetal force keeps an object traveling in a circle.
Try this, Newton's first law of motion says that it takes force to move something or change it's straight line motion at constant speed (in Newton's world being at rest and traveling with a constant velocity are the same thing, the first glimpse of relativity), and you are traveling in your car in a straight line, with constant speed. You turn the wheel and the car starts turning, which means that acceleration is being applied to the car to change it's velocity. This acceleration is called centripetal acceleration.
In conclusion, there is no centrifugal force, although it appears to be a force, but it is measured from the wrong reference.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
I was thinking more along the lines of NS for *nix might be able to handle it, but the Win version might not be able to. I just went from a T1 in my college dorm to a 56k on my dad's computer at home, and anything to speed up the downloads would keep hair in my head. So my original question stands,
This is something I don't know how to test, and I don't know where to start an intelligent search, so if anyone has a good place for me to start looking, I would be grateful. Thanks.BTW, my criteria for a new place to live just grew to include DSL/cable modem access. How do people live on 56k?
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Does this trick need gzip installed already, or is it included in the huge download of NS?
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Should is the key word. What is and what should be are not the same here.
If you're going to bother at all with the whole "right to free speech" rigamarole, you have to be prepared to go all the way.
Why? If I want to say a few words on a website, but I don't want to put myself through the hassle of legal proceedings, am I silly for getting some sound advice (on /. ?) on what may happen and how I can protect myself? Some people balance the costs of their actions, and some of those find expression (on some subjects) unworthy of jail time or legal action.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
When I first started reading HTML: The Definitive Guide (now in 4th edition), I was impressed by how a markup language which was designed to present academic papers could be so snazy. And then I looked at the source of many popular sites, and I bought CSS: The Definitive Guide .
I appreciate that /. allows some content tags (em, strong, div), but I want some more (cite, code, dl {for definition lists}). I feel kinda dirty using a physical style tag when I should be using a content tag, even if it is only a weblog.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
The blurb from the above web page:
Or you can read the 'Full Description': Wow, that is really long. Hope the info justifies the lengthLouis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
For the 17 Slashdotters for whom this might be an actual use/problem, I like it. For the rest of us who:
- have a Significant Other
- are trying to get a SO
- don't anticipate a SO in the next 6-18 months
- "what is this 'relationship' thing you are talking about" types
- and those sworn to celibacy as monks in service to the order of Linus the Wise
well, it is funny.Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
But identifying an entire OS by the kernel also seems weird. (I'm not running "Kernel32", I'm running Windows.) So saying that I have GNU/Windows elevates MS a bit, and indicates that the GNU programs on my machine really matter to me. They aren't just Window dressing. (PUNishing, ain't it? ;)
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...
Given that I'm writing almost everything on my Win98 laptop from GNU Emacs, yes.
I have a very hard time typing more than a few sentences on other editors, like this web-form I'm using to type to you. [Part of me wants to go up a few lines (C-p) to make that a blockquote (C-d C-d ... C-e Meta-b Meta-b Meta-b ... C-n C-n C-n).] I find the off-home keys I want to use (End, Home, Page-Up, Page-Down, arrow keys) hard to hit without striking another key, and I want my convenient editor/movement commands (forward/backward one word, move to end/beginning of line, move text so cursor is at center of screen, multiple paste) to be ready from the home keys.
Louis Wu
"Where do you want to go ...