Wow. Been a computer guy since the early 1980's. I know vapour when I smell it. Why are you people so gullible? How many times does Microsoft have to overpromise and underdeliver before you "get it"?
The current administration (neoconservetive/market fundamentalist/ultranationalist) attitude on monopolies and competition is; if they can find ANY relationship that can be twisted to sound like "competition", they'll use that. The ends justify the means, and if that means allowing US corporations to grow into monopolistic behemoths, then so be it. The end goal, of course, is to maintain economic dominance over European corporations, at all costs.
When the Microsoft/EU case develops a bit further, watch the Bush administration try to spin it as an Anti-US attack, and paint the EU as socialist dupes, a sign of the resurgence of the "Old Europe". Watch the UK do something to screw up the EU's resolve, and watch Microsoft get off scott-free. Again.
Because the current dogma of the Market Fundamentalist movement is that cutting supply decreases costs, and increases demand/price/profits.
I read an article in the paper last year about the "disaster" in the grape industry, because of a bumper crop of grapes. Grape farmers were all crying and wringing their hands over what to do about having too many grapes. Some of them were advocating a bill (supported by Republicans) that would force grape farmers to raze half their acrege, and pay them federal money to do so.
It's the new doublespeak. Abundance is bad. Shortages are good.
If you're wondering this summer, why you're paying $3/gal for gasoline after militarily conquering one of the largest oil supplying nations in the world - look no further than the Market Fundamentalists.
And then to spin the thing up to 1 gravity, you'll need the amount of energy that our sun puts out in 1000 years. In short, extremely difficult. Even then it's unstable.
Not that this is really any less difficult; You would construct segments in a much further out orbit, and then maneuver them closer to the sun, into the desired target orbit. The resulting conservation of momentum would result in the required velocity - but you'd need some way of attaching all the fragments together in a very short amount of time as they approach the desired target orbit, and prevent them from overshooting.
In the Ringworld Engineers book, they talked about how much of the manipulation was done by using the solar magnetic field, and there's proven science behind that. Just nowhere near on the scale necessary. My question is - how does one then build realistic terrain and weather systems (both of which were present on Ringworld), generate atmospheres, and establish a life-sustaining system without actual tectonics, which requires a spherical world, gravitational pressure, decaying radioactive elements, a molten core, all that good earthy stuff that spews gasses into our atmosphere, and gives us a nice magnetic field the keep it protected from the solar wind. Without that mechanism, you have a very high-maintenance system to deal with to preserve livability. (and even on our spherical neighbor, Mars, you can see that livability of any given rock doesn't last forever).
I'd really like to see a film where the alien invaders are not pure evil. Maybe they feel morally justified in attacking us because we're "wasting the planet".
Sort of like a "Day the Earth Stood Still"? Actually, with the recent trend of Video Game -> Movies, perhaps a "Halo" movie could work. It would be a case of Covanent religious persecution on humanity. . .
I've actually put a lot of thought to several "classic" sci-fi books, and how they'd make great movies by twisting and bending a little.
For War of the Worlds, there are a lot of great themes that could be explored:
- The Martians, because of their overly-agressive, militaristic society, never bothered to actually develop medical science. The problem of whether an infantrysquid gets wounded is resolved by replacing it with a fresh soldier. Their culture's all about fighting and agression and winning. They have the technology, and the muscle, and the agressive drive to mount an interplanetary invasion. So when they get to Earth, it's Earth's environment (germs) that proves deadly to them, not Earth's inhabitants. They have such a poor understanding of medicine, the result of narrow-mindedness, that they're all wiped out.
- . . . or, their lack of medical science could be the result of conservative religious extremism (see, US policy on stem-cell research).
- Now, looking at Independence Day - *that* movie was a War of the Worlds remake of a sort. But the aliens' weakness turned out to be a COMPUTER virus. Which is really a decent modern twist, as absurd as it sounds - the producers never bothered to explain the technical reasons why such an invincible aliend assault force didn't bother with computer security (and why their systems were binary compatible with macintosh) - it's a real stretch. Maybe Tom Cruise could be a biologist who creates a super-germ that wipes out the martians? (*appalling*) -
All that said - Hollywood has had a great opportunity with the surge in popularity of science fiction in the 1980's and 1990's, and has squandered it on flashy special effects, explosions, and cheezy plots. Oh well. I guess Union Caterers are more important than good screenwriters.
When these guys get a decent legal system to enforce IP laws, they'll start getting stuff like workplace safety regulations, environmental regulations, etc. Then the megacorps will dump them like so many high-priced American white-collar workers.
By that logic, comets are planets. And Pluto has an atmosphere today, but in a few more years, it's orbit takes it farther away from the sun, and that atmosphere will condense.
I think the best solution is to consider "Planet" to be an imprecise, layman's term. And use the term "object" when referring to "objects".
Frankly, "planet" shouldn't even include Uranus and Neptune - because they weren't included with the set of objects in the night sky that astronomers (and astrologers) referred to as "planets" for many, many centuries. If you're going to be pedantic about it - then that's the benchmark I'd use.
You CAN'T convey a given CPU chip's relative performance with a single number. Period. There are many different aspects of performance, and not all eve have anything to do with the CPU. FSB speed, and width, also figure in heavily. As well as HD speed, video card speed.
As far as marketing goes - I think the best thing to do is spit out a non-related marketing number, and separately provide different performance data. Similar to cars. 0-60, skidpad G's, 60-0 distance, etc. Americans, of course, are SUCKERS for the HP number, and soon learned that HP at a certain RPM doesn't necessarily mean USEFUL HP. Then there's torque, fuel economy, range, gear ratios, etc. The auto industy has it down pretty well by now. Why hasn't the very technical computer industry caught up? Because it's in their best interest to keep consumers confused, so they can keep screwing them.
He seems to think that filing totally meritless bogus lawsuits to be bought out is a fair and legitimate business model. He says that small companies like Redhat have no place in software business, as they cannot pay the protection money to the SCO mafia.
I can't think of a bigger threat to Capitalism and Free Enterprise than this man's attitude. Okay, maybe Stalinism was pretty bad, but they burned themselves out inside of 80 years. This kind of crap could theoretically go on forever. It's called Plutocracy. It ain't a good thing.
Gee, you think they're going to "Draft" Software Licenses to save money? Or are they going to keep throwing (borrowed) money at Microsoft, so they end up skimping on real warfighting equipment?
X-Prize is suborbital flight, with few public safety implications.
Spacelaunch for orbital flight, or interplanetary missions is a WHOLE differnt game. And when you have to guarantee the safety of people who live in cities downrange from your launch site, or the people onboard the craft, you're talking about a huge testing infrastructure cost, that you can't really do without. X-Prize is doing without, because these are suborbital flights, without the liability involved of having a booster stage, or an out of control rocket coming down into a populated area.
"Privatization" isn't some magic voodoo formula that automatically saves money and produces quality products in 1 tenth the time. All it is is a massive simplification of the rules that prevent abuses in traditional government contractor agencies. Once you cut out that regulatory structure, yes, things are cheaper, and business runs more smoothly - and the potential for abuse and fraud is multiplied 100-fold.
WORST OF ALL, is watching NASA channel's little promo video, with Bush giving his "heroic" speech about the US's future in space, complete with patriotic-sounding music, and background video of Apollo footage, and waving flags. It absolutely reminds me of the old Soviet propaganda films about their space program during the race to the moon.
The whole point of this is; to defund the programs that are doing science, and might give us clues to global warming or ozone depletion. The neocons feel; "why should we pay our tax dollars to learn facts which, ultimately, are going to cut into our profits."
I checked out the usgs site yesteday after I felt an earth tremor - (must have been a truck, because nothing was noted on their site) - and I saw a link to a Yellowstone Lake Bulge FAQ. And there they talked about the bulge in the lake, having nothing to do with any potential supervolcano eruption. Then this story comes out.
It's because you have to be creative to solve problems. Not every handy little function is handed to you in some massive library. Sometimes, you have to do some really klugy, ugly things to get it to work. And that's fun.
I moved away. 2000 miles. My mom refused to get a Mac. My brother in law, an educational consultant specializing in Lotus Notes talked her out of getting a Mac.
Guess what? He talked himself into supporting his mother in law. SUCKER!
Fortunately, he's fairly clueful, and does a reasonably good job of keeping the machine's virus defs updated, and keeping spyware at bay. But I haven't convinced him yet on how Mozilla will save him many hours of headaches each week.
Oddly enough - the #1 problem seems to be ongoing issues with her crappy HP printer driver. Which is also the #1 issue with my wife's iMac! (seems as if the only way to fix it sometimes is to uninstall and reinstall the damn thing.) Note to self: next time, buy ANY printer brand but HP. well, last time it was buy any printer brand but Epson. hm.. . . .
A guy I knew on another product team was killed when his project came back from testing with over 200 bugs. When told the news, witnesses said he just sat there, his face turning redder and redder, then his head just exploded.
MBAs represent ALL that is evil and wrong in American Business today.
I don't know what they teach these guys in MBA school, but it sure isn't about Ethics. It doesn't even seem to be about smart business, because more often than not they tend to be the source of bad business decisions - decisions that look good on paper, or are profitable for a few guys at the top short-term, but in the long run, end up screwing everybody else.
Our president is an MBA. He said he was going to run this nation like a business. From the looks of things, he used Enron as an example.
The halftime show, and the cheerleaders, have been sexploitation for nigh on 20 years now. You would think that if The General Viewing Public were truly offended by this crap, they'd just stop watching the Superbowl, and hope that the ratings would go down enough that the broadcaster would change the content. But no. Sex sells. everybody knows it. And the more they push the limits, the more money they make.
So this year, they see a boob. They were too weak to turn off their TV, and NOW they're upset. So instead of voting with their feet, they call into the FCC and whine and complain. That just cranks the bar back, and over the next 10 years, that which titillates will be more tame, and they'll have to push the boundries back up until they hit the same, or some other limit.
But in the intervening time, it seems as if The People are incapable of exercising their judgement and making a tough decision.
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. . . and when Longhorn comes out. . .
Wow. Been a computer guy since the early 1980's. I know vapour when I smell it. Why are you people so gullible? How many times does Microsoft have to overpromise and underdeliver before you "get it"?
The current administration (neoconservetive/market fundamentalist/ultranationalist) attitude on monopolies and competition is; if they can find ANY relationship that can be twisted to sound like "competition", they'll use that. The ends justify the means, and if that means allowing US corporations to grow into monopolistic behemoths, then so be it. The end goal, of course, is to maintain economic dominance over European corporations, at all costs.
When the Microsoft/EU case develops a bit further, watch the Bush administration try to spin it as an Anti-US attack, and paint the EU as socialist dupes, a sign of the resurgence of the "Old Europe". Watch the UK do something to screw up the EU's resolve, and watch Microsoft get off scott-free. Again.
Because the current dogma of the Market Fundamentalist movement is that cutting supply decreases costs, and increases demand/price/profits.
I read an article in the paper last year about the "disaster" in the grape industry, because of a bumper crop of grapes. Grape farmers were all crying and wringing their hands over what to do about having too many grapes. Some of them were advocating a bill (supported by Republicans) that would force grape farmers to raze half their acrege, and pay them federal money to do so.
It's the new doublespeak. Abundance is bad. Shortages are good.
If you're wondering this summer, why you're paying $3/gal for gasoline after militarily conquering one of the largest oil supplying nations in the world - look no further than the Market Fundamentalists.
And then to spin the thing up to 1 gravity, you'll need the amount of energy that our sun puts out in 1000 years. In short, extremely difficult. Even then it's unstable.
Not that this is really any less difficult;
You would construct segments in a much further out orbit, and then maneuver them closer to the sun, into the desired target orbit. The resulting conservation of momentum would result in the required velocity - but you'd need some way of attaching all the fragments together in a very short amount of time as they approach the desired target orbit, and prevent them from overshooting.
In the Ringworld Engineers book, they talked about how much of the manipulation was done by using the solar magnetic field, and there's proven science behind that. Just nowhere near on the scale necessary. My question is - how does one then build realistic terrain and weather systems (both of which were present on Ringworld), generate atmospheres, and establish a life-sustaining system without actual tectonics, which requires a spherical world, gravitational pressure, decaying radioactive elements, a molten core, all that good earthy stuff that spews gasses into our atmosphere, and gives us a nice magnetic field the keep it protected from the solar wind. Without that mechanism, you have a very high-maintenance system to deal with to preserve livability. (and even on our spherical neighbor, Mars, you can see that livability of any given rock doesn't last forever).
I'd really like to see a film where the alien invaders are not pure evil. Maybe they feel morally justified in attacking us because we're "wasting the planet".
Sort of like a "Day the Earth Stood Still"?
Actually, with the recent trend of Video Game -> Movies, perhaps a "Halo" movie could work. It would be a case of Covanent religious persecution on humanity. . .
I've actually put a lot of thought to several "classic" sci-fi books, and how they'd make great movies by twisting and bending a little.
For War of the Worlds, there are a lot of great themes that could be explored:
- The Martians, because of their overly-agressive, militaristic society, never bothered to actually develop medical science. The problem of whether an infantrysquid gets wounded is resolved by replacing it with a fresh soldier. Their culture's all about fighting and agression and winning. They have the technology, and the muscle, and the agressive drive to mount an interplanetary invasion. So when they get to Earth, it's Earth's environment (germs) that proves deadly to them, not Earth's inhabitants. They have such a poor understanding of medicine, the result of narrow-mindedness, that they're all wiped out.
- . . . or, their lack of medical science could be the result of conservative religious extremism (see, US policy on stem-cell research).
- Now, looking at Independence Day - *that* movie was a War of the Worlds remake of a sort. But the aliens' weakness turned out to be a COMPUTER virus. Which is really a decent modern twist, as absurd as it sounds - the producers never bothered to explain the technical reasons why such an invincible aliend assault force didn't bother with computer security (and why their systems were binary compatible with macintosh) - it's a real stretch. Maybe Tom Cruise could be a biologist who creates a super-germ that wipes out the martians? (*appalling*) -
All that said - Hollywood has had a great opportunity with the surge in popularity of science fiction in the 1980's and 1990's, and has squandered it on flashy special effects, explosions, and cheezy plots. Oh well. I guess Union Caterers are more important than good screenwriters.
Hopefully (having read the book);
War of the Worlds - Tom is the bestest alien-killing disease ever!
Cruise will probably push it more towards "Battlefield Earth".
Any bets on whether the aliens will look like clams?
I, for one, wish he'd run for President.
PREcisely.
China
India
Pakistan
Brazil
When these guys get a decent legal system to enforce IP laws, they'll start getting stuff like workplace safety regulations, environmental regulations, etc. Then the megacorps will dump them like so many high-priced American white-collar workers.
My wife works at Wal*Mart. Their policy bans Cell Phones for employees as well.
So, your company is in good company.
(/sarcasm)
By that logic, comets are planets.
And Pluto has an atmosphere today, but in a few more years, it's orbit takes it farther away from the sun, and that atmosphere will condense.
I think the best solution is to consider "Planet" to be an imprecise, layman's term. And use the term "object" when referring to "objects".
Frankly, "planet" shouldn't even include Uranus and Neptune - because they weren't included with the set of objects in the night sky that astronomers (and astrologers) referred to as "planets" for many, many centuries. If you're going to be pedantic about it - then that's the benchmark I'd use.
And the solution is:
You CAN'T convey a given CPU chip's relative performance with a single number. Period. There are many different aspects of performance, and not all eve have anything to do with the CPU. FSB speed, and width, also figure in heavily. As well as HD speed, video card speed.
As far as marketing goes - I think the best thing to do is spit out a non-related marketing number, and separately provide different performance data. Similar to cars. 0-60, skidpad G's, 60-0 distance, etc. Americans, of course, are SUCKERS for the HP number, and soon learned that HP at a certain RPM doesn't necessarily mean USEFUL HP. Then there's torque, fuel economy, range, gear ratios, etc. The auto industy has it down pretty well by now. Why hasn't the very technical computer industry caught up? Because it's in their best interest to keep consumers confused, so they can keep screwing them.
He seems to think that filing totally meritless bogus lawsuits to be bought out is a fair and legitimate business model.
He says that small companies like Redhat have no place in software business, as they cannot pay the protection money to the SCO mafia.
I can't think of a bigger threat to Capitalism and Free Enterprise than this man's attitude. Okay, maybe Stalinism was pretty bad, but they burned themselves out inside of 80 years.
This kind of crap could theoretically go on forever. It's called Plutocracy. It ain't a good thing.
. . . better you than me.
I've got a bum back anyway.
Gee, you think they're going to "Draft" Software Licenses to save money?
Or are they going to keep throwing (borrowed) money at Microsoft, so they end up skimping on real warfighting equipment?
X-Prize is suborbital flight, with few public safety implications.
Spacelaunch for orbital flight, or interplanetary missions is a WHOLE differnt game. And when you have to guarantee the safety of people who live in cities downrange from your launch site, or the people onboard the craft, you're talking about a huge testing infrastructure cost, that you can't really do without. X-Prize is doing without, because these are suborbital flights, without the liability involved of having a booster stage, or an out of control rocket coming down into a populated area.
"Privatization" isn't some magic voodoo formula that automatically saves money and produces quality products in 1 tenth the time. All it is is a massive simplification of the rules that prevent abuses in traditional government contractor agencies. Once you cut out that regulatory structure, yes, things are cheaper, and business runs more smoothly - and the potential for abuse and fraud is multiplied 100-fold.
WORST OF ALL, is watching NASA channel's little promo video, with Bush giving his "heroic" speech about the US's future in space, complete with patriotic-sounding music, and background video of Apollo footage, and waving flags. It absolutely reminds me of the old Soviet propaganda films about their space program during the race to the moon.
The whole point of this is;
to defund the programs that are doing science, and might give us clues to global warming or ozone depletion. The neocons feel; "why should we pay our tax dollars to learn facts which, ultimately, are going to cut into our profits."
I checked out the usgs site yesteday after I felt an earth tremor - (must have been a truck, because nothing was noted on their site) - and I saw a link to a Yellowstone Lake Bulge FAQ. And there they talked about the bulge in the lake, having nothing to do with any potential supervolcano eruption. Then this story comes out.
It's because you have to be creative to solve problems. Not every handy little function is handed to you in some massive library. Sometimes, you have to do some really klugy, ugly things to get it to work. And that's fun.
I moved away. 2000 miles.
My mom refused to get a Mac. My brother in law, an educational consultant specializing in Lotus Notes talked her out of getting a Mac.
Guess what? He talked himself into supporting his mother in law. SUCKER!
Fortunately, he's fairly clueful, and does a reasonably good job of keeping the machine's virus defs updated, and keeping spyware at bay. But I haven't convinced him yet on how Mozilla will save him many hours of headaches each week.
Oddly enough - the #1 problem seems to be ongoing issues with her crappy HP printer driver. Which is also the #1 issue with my wife's iMac! (seems as if the only way to fix it sometimes is to uninstall and reinstall the damn thing.) Note to self: next time, buy ANY printer brand but HP. well, last time it was buy any printer brand but Epson. hm.. . . .
A guy I knew on another product team was killed when his project came back from testing with over 200 bugs. When told the news, witnesses said he just sat there, his face turning redder and redder, then his head just exploded.
MBAs represent ALL that is evil and wrong in American Business today.
I don't know what they teach these guys in MBA school, but it sure isn't about Ethics. It doesn't even seem to be about smart business, because more often than not they tend to be the source of bad business decisions - decisions that look good on paper, or are profitable for a few guys at the top short-term, but in the long run, end up screwing everybody else.
Our president is an MBA. He said he was going to run this nation like a business. From the looks of things, he used Enron as an example.
When does something like this fall under RICO?
Or perhaps another round of Sherman Antitrust Act?
This is akin to the whole Superbowl flap.
The halftime show, and the cheerleaders, have been sexploitation for nigh on 20 years now. You would think that if The General Viewing Public were truly offended by this crap, they'd just stop watching the Superbowl, and hope that the ratings would go down enough that the broadcaster would change the content. But no. Sex sells. everybody knows it. And the more they push the limits, the more money they make.
So this year, they see a boob. They were too weak to turn off their TV, and NOW they're upset. So instead of voting with their feet, they call into the FCC and whine and complain. That just cranks the bar back, and over the next 10 years, that which titillates will be more tame, and they'll have to push the boundries back up until they hit the same, or some other limit.
But in the intervening time, it seems as if The People are incapable of exercising their judgement and making a tough decision.