Typical human holds 8 pints IIRC, that is much more than a 6" stain.
On the other hand, I've bled in all imaginable minor accidental ways (cuts to the scalp, cuts to the wrists, nose bleeds, broken teeth in a fistfight, cooking knife wounds, woodworking incidents, you name it), and I have never left a 6" stain in my wake. The only times I've seen anything that large were from cuts that required at substantial stitching. Yet, Reiser claims that the 6" stain comes from an "accidental" cut. I don't know if he is innocent or guilty, but the case is not as clear cut (no pun intended) as you make it sound.
and erroneously described as a "robot", although it is neither human-like in appearance nor autonomous in operation.
The formal definition of robot does not mention "human-like" or "autonomous" as a requirement:
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) a robot is a machine which can be programmed to perform tasks which involve manipulative and in some cases locomotive actions under automatic control.
The Swedish Industrial Robotics Association defines a robot as an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multi-purpose manipulative machine with or without locomotion for use in industrial automation applications.
A robot has three essential characteristics according to the Australian Robotics and Automation Association:
It possesses some form of mobility
It can be programmed to accomplish a large variety of tasks
After being programmed or commanded, it operates automatically
There are essentially two main types of robots: a manipulating robot (or mechanical manipulator or industrial robot) conformed of an arm and a general mobile robot with or without arm whose main function is as a transport. In this course we will study both types of robots.
The Japanese Industrial Robot Association defines six classes of industrial robots: 1. Manual manipulator.- Controlled by an operator (such as teleoperated robot). 2. Fixed sequence robot.- A stand alone robot operating in sequence and performing a predetermined and unchanging task. 3. Variable sequence robot.- Similar to Class 2 but with preset data that is easily modified. 4. Playback robot.- The robot is trained by a human operator and then repeatedly performs the requires steps in sequence. 5. Numerical control robot.- The human operator controls the robot through changing a program or entering numbers, rather than through training mode. 6. Intelligent robot.- The robot has the means to understand its environment and adapt to changing conditions as it completes its task.
Everything they do to one another is on a personal level. With men it is different.
My guess is that men had originally the same response, but we've been trained to sublimate it for longer, just like we have learned to not go around belching, farting and making crude passes at good looking female co-workers (for the most part anyhow).
Comparatively speaking women are new comers to the corporate ladder, and they have yet to develop a functional set of procedures that matches their own gender induced proclivities with healthy competition in the work environment.
The New York Times, LA Times, and many other newspapers were "Foxitized" well before Fox.
Not so. While the NYT has its own biases a key difference is that when the NYT runs into conclusive evidence that they are wrong, they as a general rule, promptly retract the story and quite publicly. Compare to the many proven falsehoods from Fox that they've never retracted. Salon magazine just recently ran a story on this.
that gets us to misperception #2: that a neutral unbiased media is even possible. it is impossible. the media is made by human beings. all human beings are biased in one way or another. everyone has an agenda. those who claim they are not biased, or actually fervently believe they are not biased, are in fact probably the most biased of all: blind to one's own nature
This is a cop-out and is false.
To have an unbiased news media one doesn't need unbiased editors. If editors were selected for their ability to be as rational as humanly possible and then we collected a sufficient number from different political and cultural perspectives of them one can obtain unbiased output. This is similar to using several independent noisy measurement devices (say radio telescopes) to obtain a signal many times clearer than what a single one alone could achieve.
(Does anyone have any studies, polls or surveys backing up either position?)
It's unscientific but a better sample than hardcore/. nerds here: an informal survey of CS undergrads reported that they liked Vista over XP in most all respects but one:..i..t..'..s....t..o..o....s..l..o..w..
It's unscientific but a better sample than hardcore/. nerds here: a straw poll of CS undergrads reported that they liked Vista over XP in most all respects but one:..i..t..'..s....t..o..o....s..l..o..w..
Quick, air brush Mr Gates out of the picture comrade Stalin.
There was a time when people rooted for the little guy (microsoft) against the big blue behemoth (IBM). That came to an end around the late 80s. My guess is that you were still a teenager (at best) back then which is why you have no memory of those times. You can read it up about it in old issues of Byte, if you know what that is.
It is interesting to see the Dr. Watsons of slashdot criticizing the MIT Sherlocks for the obviousness of their inventions. Akamai's redirection trick was an "aha!" moment that was missed by all the early literature on web caching ([sarcasm] literature you surely are throughly familiar with, Dr Watson? [/sarcasm]).
Ten years later, what was an insightful trick is the technique de rigeur. Think packet switched networ for something that is now obvious but at the time was so revolutionary that it got its creators a Turing Award.
I was doing web caching at the time (I had my hands very early on on the original hotspots paper by Akamai's founders). When I learned of the embedded elements redirection I found the Akamai idea totally non-obvious and far more reaching in terms of web caching than their hotspots contribution. Of course, once I saw it, all I could say was "what didn't I think of that, its so obvious!"
The employees that were left had their institutional knowledge too diluted and strung out trying to teach new H1B and college hires while managing Chinese and Indian outsource firms doing half the work.
My take exactly. Microsoft did not seem to have enough senior people to effectively pass knowledge to their otherwise very smart new college hires.
In other words be lear of any field in which the prefered mode of publication is the press release e.g. AI a la MIT Media Lab, complexity (Santa Fe Institute), semantic web, etc.
Yeah, because the toilet seat mac laptop in cheap plastic was such an epithomy of design. Have you run into one lately or an old original iMac? They are butt ugly, yet people were going gagga over them when first released. Talk about reality distortion field! The original iPod now looks klunky and unfinished.
In fact the MacAir with its tapered looks is also vaguely reminiscent of a toilet seat. I had a peek at a production model about a week before it was announced and my only thought was "this is ugly" (the laptop was open, otherwise perhaps the thinness would have stood out more).
p.s. The design of the white powerbooks, the thin white iMacs and the smaller iPods have stood better to ageing.
There are easy solutions to these problems is you so wish.
I have a solution that costs the same and there is no need to lug bulky external peripherals or depends on the airplane being hotwired for electricity like you suggested. You might have heard of it: it's called Lenovo X300.
They bought "Word" and (depending on how you interpret it) they bought "Dos".
They didn't buy Word and anyway you interpret it, they bought Dos from Patterson (for about $50K upfront, and eventual payments of $500K to resolve some licensing issues later on).
then they bought "Internet Explorer" and... well you know how that turned out.
They bought the code base of Spyglass. They would have been better off starting from scratch, so the first IE based on Spyglass was a joke, the second IE based on internal development efforts was much better.
Microsoft has been overconfident in its approach to the internet from day one. First by believing they could deploy an alternative, then ignoring the Netscape threat early on instead of buying them outright (back when they were still up for sale for a few hundred million). They repeated the same mistake with the search engine market, with a myriad of failed search engine initiatives from within rather than buying outright an external player.
About a decade ago, Microsoft balked at paying $8M for one of the key players, about three years ago, they were wincing at spending $20M in a decent search engine effort. "You'll end up paying billions for a search engine company if you don't spend this money now", was my advice. They didn't listen and here we are $46 billion dollars later after the FAST and Yahoo! acquisition.
Why would you make such strong impressions of a world-wide microsoft culture of 80,000 people based on whatever you saw in redmond? Or that of the mid/upper management you've probably never met?
I met with a cross cut of the entire organization, from recent hires to direct reports to Ballmer (Ballmer was out of town otherwise it would have included him to). At a later date I also met with some of the SQL Server and Vista key players, who gave a candid impression of the development process inside Microsoft.
what properties does Yahoo have that Microsoft doesn't have a fairly strong competitor to?
Mainly the search engine.
Instead, they're probably after the market-share and engineering talent.
To a large extent I agree. That is part of my point. Microsoft is short in engineering talent. They have a large stable of very talented people who are experts in developing straightforward apps, but when it comes to things like OS and operating systems they are not so good. Usually their best minds in those areas are not home grown but brought in from outside.
The only decent OS that has ever come out of Redmond is the NT kernel, which quite tellingly was developed by an outsider. Microsoft culture is to grab smart kids straight out of college, and turn them into generalists by moving them around the company. This works great for simple apps, as it keeps people interested but it is a disaster for complicated projects which require high levels of expertise, e.g. think of all the knowledge that the Linux head honchos have acquired over the years.
Why would Microsoft buy technology that it arguably already has or could build cheaper?
Microsoft has tried for over ten years to develop a decent search engine without success. They also failed miserably at developing the new, advanced, start from scratch version of their OS (i.e. Vista).
So exactly how can one assume they already have the technology or can build it cheaper?
p.s. I've seen this overconfidence firsthand in Redmond where the thinking is that they can develop anything they want. This might be true for simple straightforward apps (even if massive) such as word processors and web browsers, but it is not so for complex, state-of-the-art code such as an OS or a search engine. You wouldn't happen to work there by any chance?
You do realise that Canada isn't a capitalist state, right?
You do realise that "not unabashedly capitalist" is not the same as "socialist", right? just like not being a teetotaler is not the same as being an alcoholic.
I mention this because many people in America (and particularly in Fox News) seem to have trouble grasping the distinction.
please spend a few days researching AIDS dissidents
I have, and their research is total garbage. Back in the day, they raised a few valid objections which over the years were dealt with experimentally. Today someone who denies the AIDS-HIV link is out there with flat-earth types.
Few people seem to have noticed, but Google started returning results based on synonyms and homonyms a few weeks ago. There have been some significant algorithm changes recently.
I've noticed because the quality of the results went down noticeably.
Slashdot Mirror
Typical human holds 8 pints IIRC, that is much more than a 6" stain.
On the other hand, I've bled in all imaginable minor accidental ways (cuts to the scalp, cuts to the wrists, nose bleeds, broken teeth in a fistfight, cooking knife wounds, woodworking incidents, you name it), and I have never left a 6" stain in my wake. The only times I've seen anything that large were from cuts that required at substantial stitching. Yet, Reiser claims that the 6" stain comes from an "accidental" cut. I don't know if he is innocent or guilty, but the case is not as clear cut (no pun intended) as you make it sound.
and erroneously described as a "robot", although it is neither human-like in appearance nor autonomous in operation.
The formal definition of robot does not mention "human-like" or "autonomous" as a requirement:
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) a robot is a machine which can be programmed to perform tasks which involve manipulative and in some cases locomotive actions under automatic control.
The Swedish Industrial Robotics Association defines a robot as an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multi-purpose manipulative machine with or without locomotion for use in industrial automation applications.
A robot has three essential characteristics according to the Australian Robotics and Automation Association:
It possesses some form of mobility
It can be programmed to accomplish a large variety of tasks
After being programmed or commanded, it operates automatically
There are essentially two main types of robots: a manipulating robot (or mechanical manipulator or industrial robot) conformed of an arm and a general mobile robot with or without arm whose main function is as a transport. In this course we will study both types of robots.
The Japanese Industrial Robot Association defines six classes of industrial robots:
1. Manual manipulator.- Controlled by an operator (such as teleoperated robot).
2. Fixed sequence robot.- A stand alone robot operating in sequence and performing a predetermined and unchanging task.
3. Variable sequence robot.- Similar to Class 2 but with preset data that is easily modified.
4. Playback robot.- The robot is trained by a human operator and then repeatedly performs the requires steps in sequence.
5. Numerical control robot.- The human operator controls the robot through changing a program or entering numbers, rather than through training mode.
6. Intelligent robot.- The robot has the means to understand its environment and adapt to changing conditions as it completes its task.
Everything they do to one another is on a personal level. With men it is different.
My guess is that men had originally the same response, but we've been trained to sublimate it for longer, just like we have learned to not go around belching, farting and making crude passes at good looking female co-workers (for the most part anyhow).
Comparatively speaking women are new comers to the corporate ladder, and they have yet to develop a functional set of procedures that matches their own gender induced proclivities with healthy competition in the work environment.
The New York Times, LA Times, and many other newspapers were "Foxitized" well before Fox.
Not so. While the NYT has its own biases a key difference is that when the NYT runs into conclusive evidence that they are wrong, they as a general rule, promptly retract the story and quite publicly. Compare to the many proven falsehoods from Fox that they've never retracted. Salon magazine just recently ran a story on this.
that gets us to misperception #2: that a neutral unbiased media is even possible. it is impossible. the media is made by human beings. all human beings are biased in one way or another. everyone has an agenda. those who claim they are not biased, or actually fervently believe they are not biased, are in fact probably the most biased of all: blind to one's own nature
This is a cop-out and is false.
To have an unbiased news media one doesn't need unbiased editors. If editors were selected for their ability to be as rational as humanly possible and then we collected a sufficient number from different political and cultural perspectives of them one can obtain unbiased output. This is similar to using several independent noisy measurement devices (say radio telescopes) to obtain a signal many times clearer than what a single one alone could achieve.
(Does anyone have any studies, polls or surveys backing up either position?)
/. nerds here: an informal survey of CS undergrads reported that they liked Vista over XP in most all respects but one: ..i..t..'..s....t..o..o....s..l..o..w..
It's unscientific but a better sample than hardcore
It's unscientific but a better sample than hardcore
That is because there were no such days.
Quick, air brush Mr Gates out of the picture comrade Stalin.
There was a time when people rooted for the little guy (microsoft) against the big blue behemoth (IBM). That came to an end around the late 80s. My guess is that you were still a teenager (at best) back then which is why you have no memory of those times. You can read it up about it in old issues of Byte, if you know what that is.
It is interesting to see the Dr. Watsons of slashdot criticizing the MIT Sherlocks for the obviousness of their inventions. Akamai's redirection trick was an "aha!" moment that was missed by all the early literature on web caching ([sarcasm] literature you surely are throughly familiar with, Dr Watson? [/sarcasm]).
Ten years later, what was an insightful trick is the technique de rigeur. Think packet switched networ for something that is now obvious but at the time was so revolutionary that it got its creators a Turing Award.
I was doing web caching at the time (I had my hands very early on on the original hotspots paper by Akamai's founders). When I learned of the embedded elements redirection I found the Akamai idea totally non-obvious and far more reaching in terms of web caching than their hotspots contribution. Of course, once I saw it, all I could say was "what didn't I think of that, its so obvious!"
The employees that were left had their institutional knowledge too diluted and strung out trying to teach new H1B and college hires while managing Chinese and Indian outsource firms doing half the work.
My take exactly. Microsoft did not seem to have enough senior people to effectively pass knowledge to their otherwise very smart new college hires.
In other words be lear of any field in which the prefered mode of publication is the press release e.g. AI a la MIT Media Lab, complexity (Santa Fe Institute), semantic web, etc.
Yeah, because the toilet seat mac laptop in cheap plastic was such an epithomy of design. Have you run into one lately or an old original iMac? They are butt ugly, yet people were going gagga over them when first released. Talk about reality distortion field! The original iPod now looks klunky and unfinished.
In fact the MacAir with its tapered looks is also vaguely reminiscent of a toilet seat. I had a peek at a production model about a week before it was announced and my only thought was "this is ugly" (the laptop was open, otherwise perhaps the thinness would have stood out more).
p.s. The design of the white powerbooks, the thin white iMacs and the smaller iPods have stood better to ageing.
Click on middle button with thumb, while pushing trackpoint up/down with index finger.
There are easy solutions to these problems is you so wish.
I have a solution that costs the same and there is no need to lug bulky external peripherals or depends on the airplane being hotwired for electricity like you suggested. You might have heard of it: it's called Lenovo X300.
Actually, the X61 has as an option SXGA+ TFT with 1400×1050 resolution.
They bought "Word" and (depending on how you interpret it) they bought "Dos".
They didn't buy Word and anyway you interpret it, they bought Dos from Patterson (for about $50K upfront, and eventual payments of $500K to resolve some licensing issues later on).
then they bought "Internet Explorer" and... well you know how that turned out.
They bought the code base of Spyglass. They would have been better off starting from scratch, so the first IE based on Spyglass was a joke, the second IE based on internal development efforts was much better.
Microsoft has been overconfident in its approach to the internet from day one. First by believing they could deploy an alternative, then ignoring the Netscape threat early on instead of buying them outright (back when they were still up for sale for a few hundred million). They repeated the same mistake with the search engine market, with a myriad of failed search engine initiatives from within rather than buying outright an external player.
About a decade ago, Microsoft balked at paying $8M for one of the key players, about three years ago, they were wincing at spending $20M in a decent search engine effort. "You'll end up paying billions for a search engine company if you don't spend this money now", was my advice. They didn't listen and here we are $46 billion dollars later after the FAST and Yahoo! acquisition.
Why would you make such strong impressions of a world-wide microsoft culture of 80,000 people based on whatever you saw in redmond? Or that of the mid/upper management you've probably never met?
I met with a cross cut of the entire organization, from recent hires to direct reports to Ballmer (Ballmer was out of town otherwise it would have included him to). At a later date I also met with some of the SQL Server and Vista key players, who gave a candid impression of the development process inside Microsoft.
what properties does Yahoo have that Microsoft doesn't have a fairly strong competitor to?
Mainly the search engine.
Instead, they're probably after the market-share and engineering talent.
To a large extent I agree. That is part of my point. Microsoft is short in engineering talent. They have a large stable of very talented people who are experts in developing straightforward apps, but when it comes to things like OS and operating systems they are not so good. Usually their best minds in those areas are not home grown but brought in from outside.
The only decent OS that has ever come out of Redmond is the NT kernel, which quite tellingly was developed by an outsider. Microsoft culture is to grab smart kids straight out of college, and turn them into generalists by moving them around the company. This works great for simple apps, as it keeps people interested but it is a disaster for complicated projects which require high levels of expertise, e.g. think of all the knowledge that the Linux head honchos have acquired over the years.
Why would Microsoft buy technology that it arguably already has or could build cheaper?
Microsoft has tried for over ten years to develop a decent search engine without success. They also failed miserably at developing the new, advanced, start from scratch version of their OS (i.e. Vista).
So exactly how can one assume they already have the technology or can build it cheaper?
p.s. I've seen this overconfidence firsthand in Redmond where the thinking is that they can develop anything they want. This might be true for simple straightforward apps (even if massive) such as word processors and web browsers, but it is not so for complex, state-of-the-art code such as an OS or a search engine. You wouldn't happen to work there by any chance?
You do realise that Canada isn't a capitalist state, right?
You do realise that "not unabashedly capitalist" is not the same as "socialist", right? just like not being a teetotaler is not the same as being an alcoholic.
I mention this because many people in America (and particularly in Fox News) seem to have trouble grasping the distinction.
please spend a few days researching AIDS dissidents
I have, and their research is total garbage. Back in the day, they raised a few valid objections which over the years were dealt with experimentally. Today someone who denies the AIDS-HIV link is out there with flat-earth types.
The death penalty is not a deterrent for anything.
The death penalty is a deterrent for reincidence.
So are prison sentences for that matter: they make reincidences less frequent.
Few people seem to have noticed, but Google started returning results based on synonyms and homonyms a few weeks ago. There have been some significant algorithm changes recently.
I've noticed because the quality of the results went down noticeably.