Well, modular software is nice but it shifts the burden of arranging commands in the right order upon the user. Heck, I can't remember all the switches for ls, nevermind the complexity that is awk. People who use the computer want a few tasks predefined for them and a button to click for each task. You can see then that providing all combinations of simple commands is simple combinatorics and you can expect software to get bigger and fatter so long as it tries to fit what the users want. Think of a car. They don't sell you a car where you can plug in an engine and tires appropriate to your trip. Nor can you easily reconfigure cars to have two seats or four (not folding seats, but actually shorten car bed by one seat length). You can't even change a truck into a sports car by removing car bed associated with the cargo holding half. In short, modular design is a dream. Wake up.
Well, Real Alternative sucks donkey balls through a garden hoze in gulps. I just tried it and it seems incapable of playing real media on my hard drive. I have downloaded tons of music from bards.ru in.ra.ram format and none of it plays with the "Alternative". It's realplayer for me for now.
When you are a scientist, it is always a good idea to be a skeptic... I'll get excited when they can grow SWNT's of 1 m length and demonstrate no defects and high yield. Going from 1 m to 1000 m is probably not so hard once the earlier orders of magnitude are scaled. Fundamentally, the reson I am a skeptic is because carbon forms bonds too readily so getting all bonds to be aligned is hard. We are just now learning how to make small single crystal diamonds, HOPG is not even available in single crystal form (you always see that mosaicity quoted next to samples) and carbon nanotubes develop defects if you so much as bend them too much (heptagon-heptagon defects IIRC - our group has imaged those with STM). Growing single crystals of anything is hard, growing large single crystals is... well, can you give me one example of a large (building size) single crystal sample (and yes, man-made, not those burnt out stars).
Well, how about fining this guy $10 Mil or more. Plus of course, limit him to not move outside the county, auction off all his belonging immediately towards the debt and forbid him to use computers for say 10 years ala Mitnick. Now this guy is homeless jobless and likely skill-less. Seeing this guy starve under a dirty rug would be more satisfying than a Club Fed.
Sounds like your kinda thing. Although I personally am allergic to the name HC Protec because the first scope I bought was theirs and it started to fall apart about a year after we bought it. For serious work, Tek or Agilent are still what I would buy. For two days a year teaching duty, the above will do.
I would agree with you in most cases but not for this application. This is intended for teaching, so it needs to be simple, hence reconstructing signals is out. There is little simpler than saying: kids, here are the dots, connect the dots and you get the waveform.
The other thing is that the scope is often used in situations where it is a causal device, i.e. future data is unavailable.
Lastly, whenever I buy anything related to bandwidth I always follow the rule to carefully estimate what I need and then buy 2*pi times that. Whether you talk about filter boxes, scopes, spectrum analyzers or what have you, that extra bandwidth or that extra decade attenuation will help somewhere.
You don't want atomic commits you want changeset functionality. Just so the terminology is in tune with others. And subversion seems to have partial support for that. If you figure out what "implicit changeset" functionality is exactly...
I guess depends on the area of study. Going to Yale or Harvard may be a good thing if you intend to do law and/or go to politics. Business schools like Warton (sp?) help your resume too. OTOH in my field (physics) going Ivy is only justified if the guy you want to work for as a grad student is working there. Basically, in areas where social networking is everything a top school with leading profs matters, but as soon as skill or ability matters then choosing a school becomes more akin to choosing a reference book.
Well, first off my assumption is that I am dealing with honest people who charge me fair amount for their labor, rather than what they can get away with. See, if you guys always strived to charge as little as possible there would be little need to have an insurance company on our side, then more people would pay out of pocket and the entire insurance scam and the associated overhead would not be needed. But docs are greedy (as you have so beautifully illustrated above) so the overhead is needed but then you bitch that because you have to charge for overhead prices are high. Don't blame the HMOs or student loans or anything else. In the end, HMOs are needed so you don't overcharge, student loans are an empty excuse because prices don't come down once those are paid off and indeed the high cost of med school is only there because there is a concerted effort to keep the number of doctors down so their salaries are high. Imagine if every doctor paid 5% of their earnings for life to fund new medical school students. The numbers would go up, the tuition would go down, possibly to zero. AMA could do this if they wanted to. Someday someone will sue them for antitrust breach on these grounds. That, or we will have nationalized healthcare like Canada.
I don't know which one of us is not in touch with reality. The last time I went to a doctor with an ear infection, he took at most 10 minutes, prescribed some drops, notably didn't consult with any tests or with any other specialists, and charged me $300, which was under my deductible so I paid out of pocket. That was basically my life's savings for 10 minutes of work. Where is that magical $50 per visit bunch of doctors you mention. In Canada maybe but not this side of the border.
Well, as I see it, malpractice insurance is not what you take home so it doesn't figure in your earnings. Factoring that out as cost of doing business, you can certainly have a family and support yourself on 70K a year. Heck, the median income in the US is like $30K. Basically, what I am saying is that even if there were no malpractice insurance and even if you had to pay zero for med school, medical care would still be non-competitive costwise with India because doctor's earnings are too high. Put it differently: consider a case of a simple family doctor with a busy practice with one nurse helping. In my experience most doctor visits last on average 15 minutes, so we figure the doctor works 10 hours a day seven days a week with two weeks vacation. That's 40 patients a day for 350 days a year, i.e. 14000 visits per year. So not factoring malpractice insurance or debts into it such a doctor could charge $2 to $5 per visit and cover his salary. At $10 per visit he should be able to cover also the rent and nurse's salary. Maybe let's figure in subscription to med. journals and such and some equipment. $12 to $15 per visit. Now name a family doctor who charges anywhere near that. Or are you saying that malpractice insurance brings the rates up by an order of magnitude? Or maybe that doctors drop their rates once they have paid off med school loans?
I don't feel sorry for myself either. I am saying that if I can do it and if doctors don't do it for the money either then here is a reasonable payscale and workload.
Ok, how is this: I am physics graduate student, won't get PhD until I am 29 an until then I earn less than 20K a year while working basically every waking moment (about 14 hrs a day/ 7 days a week). I will then be a postdoc for a few years earning about 40K and then hopefully a professor earning 70K or so. If all doctors worked as much as I do and had pay schedules as low I do we'd have more or less affordable healthcare.
That is kinda true but what we really need is new software for mechanical cad. Autocad used to be OK, circa version 14, but now they added so much crap (e.g. it used to take one mouse click to finish an operation, now the same click produces a menu and you have to select Enter) that it is barely usable. If there were a product that looked and felt like Autocad 14 and had same shell commands and key bindings and with support, I am sure a lot of people (like our lab) would buy that instead of the bloated crap that is newer Autocad.
Remind me again why you'd send off a.doc file in the first place. You want to send a document to someone, why not pdf it. It preserves formatting more consistently than Word, which can even crash opening docs saved in Word. Save your customer some grief and use pdf.
Well, SCO is encumbered but is OpenServer and such? Unfortunately for SCO it is (AFAIK), namely by IBM's countersuit where they seek to bar SCO from selling more or less anything because of patent violations.
You could regard the entire distro war in Lunix as a bunch of forks in the sense that they take same code and package it to their liking. Sometimes even their Linux trees are a bit different. So I'd call that situation a fork.
No fork has ever caused a project to fail? Define fail. In many cases, esp. if they care about GUI giving users choice is abject failure. So for instance a big failure of Linux is the user having a choice between the looks and feels provided by different distros as opposed to one look and feel for Windows or OSX. This of course refers to system defaults since everyone allows you to customize. Similar fragmentation exists further down, so for instance users do not have ONE WAY of laying out their directory structure. Nor is there ONE WAY to install things. Do I need to mention many ways in which you can drag and drop. The latter is so bad that there are now two ways that coexist in most cases one being internal to X the other being provided by a library. It may seem counterintuitive but choice is not always good. Having one standard is often better. That said, it needs to be an open standard, so at the very least they should consider a java-like license: look but don't change, and if you have suggestions on changes send them to us so we can decide. And they should consider putting code in some sort of escrow so if they get tired of it then it becomes GPL or something. Otherwise it is unclear what the motivation is for someone to work on their system.
Mailing lists can be dealt with easily through a key-like system. The admin gives each new subscriber a digital certificate and email only gets forwarded to the list if a ceritificate is valid. If some certificate is traced to spamming, it gets deleted from permission database. Notice that all you need is to control the distribution channel, you do not need to trace IPs or identitites. You could also have a limit of giving out some defined number of certificates per time slot to prevent spammers from registering new certs. And you could limit the number of messages to list per cert per time slot to limit the damage any odd spammer can do before being shut down. You could also make mailing lists like web of trust where an owner of one cert has to vouch for a new applicant. Thus you could for example set the limit for an unvouched member to a couple of emails per week and vouched members could get unlimited access. So you see, a properly administered mailing list can function well without removing anonymity. And of course most lists are things like a departmental mailing list and such for which user identities are known so this would only be an issue for things like LKML.
Does that really work? I know it would work outside but in the worst case scenario (concrete bldg with steel armature and generally lots of metal in the walls) it probably won't. If your house is built like a bunker wireless might be tough, even to a point of needing a wap per room. So, get a wap, make or buy decent antennas, check signal strength, figure out how many you'd need, then you'd know the cost. Also, especially if you are willing to do work yourself, cabling the house might be cheapest. Wireless is not a universal access solution.
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Well, modular software is nice but it shifts the burden
of arranging commands in the right order upon the user.
Heck, I can't remember all the switches for ls,
nevermind the complexity that is awk.
People who use the computer want a few tasks
predefined for them and a button to click for each
task.
You can see then that providing all combinations
of simple commands is simple combinatorics and
you can expect software to get bigger and fatter
so long as it tries to fit what the users want.
Think of a car. They don't sell you a car where
you can plug in an engine and tires appropriate to
your trip. Nor can you easily reconfigure cars
to have two seats or four (not folding seats, but
actually shorten car bed by one seat length). You
can't even change a truck into a sports car by
removing car bed associated with the cargo holding
half.
In short, modular design is a dream. Wake up.
As soon as the cost of R&D on old version is recouped,
the decent thing to do is indeed to drop the price...
Well, Real Alternative sucks donkey balls through a .ra.ram format and none of it plays with the
garden hoze in gulps. I just tried it and it seems
incapable of playing real media on my hard drive.
I have downloaded tons of music from bards.ru in
"Alternative". It's realplayer for me for now.
The benefit to advertiser is clear: Google is the
ONLY place on the net where I click on ad links.
I am not alone...
When you are a scientist, it is always a good idea to ... well, can you give me
be a skeptic...
I'll get excited when they can grow SWNT's of 1 m length
and demonstrate no defects and high yield. Going from
1 m to 1000 m is probably not so hard once the earlier
orders of magnitude are scaled.
Fundamentally, the reson I am a skeptic is because
carbon forms bonds too readily so getting all bonds
to be aligned is hard. We are just now learning how
to make small single crystal diamonds, HOPG is not
even available in single crystal form (you always
see that mosaicity quoted next to samples) and
carbon nanotubes develop defects if you so much as
bend them too much (heptagon-heptagon defects IIRC - our group has imaged those with STM). Growing
single crystals of anything is hard, growing
large single crystals is
one example of a large (building size) single crystal
sample (and yes, man-made, not those burnt out stars).
Well, how about fining this guy $10 Mil or more.
Plus of course, limit him to not move outside the
county, auction off all his belonging immediately
towards the debt and forbid him to use computers for
say 10 years ala Mitnick. Now this guy is homeless
jobless and likely skill-less. Seeing this guy
starve under a dirty rug would be more satisfying
than a Club Fed.
Sounds like your kinda thing. Although I personally
am allergic to the name HC Protec because the first
scope I bought was theirs and it started to fall
apart about a year after we bought it.
For serious work, Tek or Agilent are still what
I would buy. For two days a year teaching duty,
the above will do.
I would agree with you in most cases but not for this
application. This is intended for teaching, so it needs
to be simple, hence reconstructing signals is out.
There is little simpler than saying: kids, here are
the dots, connect the dots and you get the waveform.
The other thing is that the scope is often used in
situations where it is a causal device, i.e. future
data is unavailable.
Lastly, whenever I buy anything related to bandwidth
I always follow the rule to carefully estimate
what I need and then buy 2*pi times that. Whether
you talk about filter boxes, scopes, spectrum
analyzers or what have you, that extra bandwidth
or that extra decade attenuation will help somewhere.
Not only that, but I actually looked around AOpen
forums where people were uhm unhappy about lack of
Linux support.
It's a winmodem.
You don't want atomic commits you want changeset
functionality. Just so the terminology is in tune
with others. And subversion seems to have partial
support for that. If you figure out what "implicit
changeset" functionality is exactly...
I guess depends on the area of study. Going to
Yale or Harvard may be a good thing if you intend
to do law and/or go to politics. Business schools
like Warton (sp?) help your resume too. OTOH in
my field (physics) going Ivy is only justified if
the guy you want to work for as a grad student is
working there. Basically, in areas where social
networking is everything a top school with leading
profs matters, but as soon as skill or ability
matters then choosing a school becomes more akin to
choosing a reference book.
Well, first off my assumption is that I am dealing
with honest people who charge me fair amount for
their labor, rather than what they can get away
with. See, if you guys always strived to charge
as little as possible there would be little need
to have an insurance company on our side, then
more people would pay out of pocket and the entire
insurance scam and the associated overhead would
not be needed. But docs are greedy (as you have so
beautifully illustrated above) so the overhead is
needed but then you bitch that because you have to
charge for overhead prices are high.
Don't blame the HMOs or student loans or anything
else. In the end, HMOs are needed so you don't
overcharge, student loans are an empty excuse because
prices don't come down once those are paid off and
indeed the high cost of med school is only there
because there is a concerted effort to keep the
number of doctors down so their salaries are high.
Imagine if every doctor paid 5% of their earnings
for life to fund new medical school students. The
numbers would go up, the tuition would go down,
possibly to zero. AMA could do this if they wanted
to. Someday someone will sue them for antitrust
breach on these grounds. That, or we will have
nationalized healthcare like Canada.
I don't know which one of us is not in touch with
reality. The last time I went to a doctor with an
ear infection, he took at most 10 minutes, prescribed
some drops, notably didn't consult with any tests or
with any other specialists, and charged me $300,
which was under my deductible so I paid out of pocket.
That was basically my life's savings for 10 minutes
of work. Where is that magical $50 per visit bunch
of doctors you mention. In Canada maybe but not
this side of the border.
Well, as I see it, malpractice insurance is not
what you take home so it doesn't figure in your
earnings. Factoring that out as cost of doing business,
you can certainly have a family and support yourself
on 70K a year. Heck, the median income in the US
is like $30K.
Basically, what I am saying is that even if there
were no malpractice insurance and even if you had
to pay zero for med school, medical care would
still be non-competitive costwise with India because
doctor's earnings are too high.
Put it differently: consider a case of a simple
family doctor with a busy practice with one nurse
helping. In my experience most doctor visits last
on average 15 minutes, so we figure the doctor
works 10 hours a day seven days a week with two
weeks vacation. That's 40 patients a day for 350
days a year, i.e. 14000 visits per year. So not
factoring malpractice insurance or debts into it
such a doctor could charge $2 to $5 per visit and
cover his salary. At $10 per visit he should be able
to cover also the rent and nurse's salary. Maybe
let's figure in subscription to med. journals and
such and some equipment. $12 to $15 per visit.
Now name a family doctor who charges anywhere near
that. Or are you saying that malpractice insurance
brings the rates up by an order of magnitude?
Or maybe that doctors drop their rates once they
have paid off med school loans?
I don't feel sorry for myself either. I am saying that
if I can do it and if doctors don't do it for the
money either then here is a reasonable payscale and
workload.
I like what I do, thank you very much. And presumably
docs aren't in it for the money either, right?
Ok, how is this: I am physics graduate student,
won't get PhD until I am 29 an until then I earn
less than 20K a year while working basically
every waking moment (about 14 hrs a day/ 7 days a
week). I will then be a postdoc for a few years
earning about 40K and then hopefully a professor
earning 70K or so. If all doctors worked as much as
I do and had pay schedules as low I do we'd have
more or less affordable healthcare.
That is kinda true but what we really need is new
software for mechanical cad. Autocad used to be OK,
circa version 14, but now they added so much crap
(e.g. it used to take one mouse click to finish an
operation, now the same click produces a menu and you
have to select Enter) that it is barely usable.
If there were a product that looked and felt like
Autocad 14 and had same shell commands and key
bindings and with support, I am sure a lot of people
(like our lab) would buy that instead of the bloated
crap that is newer Autocad.
Remind me again why you'd send off a .doc file in the
first place. You want to send a document to someone,
why not pdf it. It preserves formatting more consistently
than Word, which can even crash opening docs saved in
Word. Save your customer some grief and use pdf.
Well, SCO is encumbered but is OpenServer and such?
Unfortunately for SCO it is (AFAIK), namely by
IBM's countersuit where they seek to bar SCO from
selling more or less anything because of patent
violations.
You could regard the entire distro war in Lunix as
a bunch of forks in the sense that they take same
code and package it to their liking. Sometimes
even their Linux trees are a bit different. So
I'd call that situation a fork.
No fork has ever caused a project to fail? Define
fail. In many cases, esp. if they care about GUI
giving users choice is abject failure. So for
instance a big failure of Linux is the user having
a choice between the looks and feels provided by
different distros as opposed to one look and feel
for Windows or OSX. This of course refers to
system defaults since everyone allows you to
customize.
Similar fragmentation exists further down, so for
instance users do not have ONE WAY of laying out
their directory structure. Nor is there ONE WAY
to install things. Do I need to mention many ways
in which you can drag and drop. The latter is so
bad that there are now two ways that coexist in
most cases one being internal to X the other being
provided by a library.
It may seem counterintuitive but choice is not
always good. Having one standard is often better.
That said, it needs to be an open standard, so
at the very least they should consider a java-like
license: look but don't change, and if you have
suggestions on changes send them to us so we can
decide. And they should consider putting code in
some sort of escrow so if they get tired of it
then it becomes GPL or something. Otherwise it is
unclear what the motivation is for someone to work
on their system.
Mailing lists can be dealt with easily through a
key-like system. The admin gives each new subscriber
a digital certificate and email only gets forwarded
to the list if a ceritificate is valid. If some
certificate is traced to spamming, it gets deleted
from permission database. Notice that all you need
is to control the distribution channel, you do not
need to trace IPs or identitites.
You could also have a limit of giving out some
defined number of certificates per time slot to
prevent spammers from registering new certs. And
you could limit the number of messages to list
per cert per time slot to limit the damage any
odd spammer can do before being shut down. You
could also make mailing lists like web of trust
where an owner of one cert has to vouch for a new
applicant. Thus you could for example set the
limit for an unvouched member to a couple of
emails per week and vouched members could get
unlimited access.
So you see, a properly administered mailing list
can function well without removing anonymity. And
of course most lists are things like a departmental
mailing list and such for which user identities
are known so this would only be an issue for
things like LKML.
Does that really work? I know it would work outside
but in the worst case scenario (concrete bldg with
steel armature and generally lots of metal in the
walls) it probably won't. If your house is built
like a bunker wireless might be tough, even to a
point of needing a wap per room.
So, get a wap, make or buy decent antennas, check
signal strength, figure out how many you'd need,
then you'd know the cost. Also, especially if you
are willing to do work yourself, cabling the house
might be cheapest. Wireless is not a universal
access solution.