There was a very interesting article in Glamour (I was just flipping through my girlfriend's copy, making fun of the ads!!! I promise!!!) in April, I think, about sexual harrassment at high-tech firms. It focused on Juno. The stories sounded pretty awful. While I do not know how prevalent sexual harrasment is as a whole, things like that aren't going to encourage women to enter the field, even if they occur in only a tiny fraction of high-tech firms.
Well, sure, it's sad and shouldn't be this way, but I'm not sure it's useless. You can't get much better protection against Japanese piracy than not actually releasing it in Japanese. It's that whole English-to-Japanese encryption system that'll get people:)
And while most Japanese people know some English, the vast majority cannot understand fast-paced conversation in movies.
Is this the same PC Expo talked about in this article? Which one's true? In this article they claim "fealty to Microsoft is the exception" and that everyone was talking about Linux. Surely things can't be THAT polar!
He didn't say more secure. He said you'd be more likely to hit bugs using the less-popular architecture. Think about, given a new program, which is it more likely to compile more easily on: redhat i386 or netbsd on MIPS? And which is more likely to work correctly after it compiles?
No, this is different. You know how when you search for something obscure (or mispelled) and you get a bunch of google/altavista/lycos-style links instead of the categorized stuff? That'll be provided by Google, not the categorized search results. The human-made index will still be there.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but wasn't it that RAM doubling product which didn't do anything? It had dials and stuff and claimed that it increased your memory, but it didn't do ANYTHING. Or maybe they've come up with doublers that work now. Has there ever been a successful memory compression program?
Well, I think Eiffel has it right, and there's a different way of looking at it. It's a good feature to know that all variables have default values. So references start as NULL/Nil, booleans start as false, etc. It saves you from having to initialize things yourself, and if the value's well-defined, it's a good thing
Oooo, I know something!!! I was doing research on urban sprawl last summer and read an article which cited a study (admittedly this was anti-sprawl) calculated what the tax on gasoline should be to take into account all the costs that are involved (including pollution, road wear, construction of subsidized interstates, and fighting the Gulf War). The tax is currently what, a quarter or two? It should be $6.50.
Minor nit: the genome is the nucleic acid sequence, not the amino acid sequence. Amino acids are what proteins are made of.
Well, it's both, to the effect that it would take a few lines of perl (maybe you could do it with tr?) to convert from one to the other. Three pairs of nucleic acids code for one amino acid. And arguably, the "amino acid sequence" is the one that people would be more concerned with. Once you have that, who cares what the nucleic acids were?
Even more immediate is the fact that DNA doesn't exactly encode for proteins. They encode for amino acids. It's pretty trivial to take a sequence of DNA and tell what the amino acid sequence it produces (it's just table lookup). Proteins are made of amino acids. But the properties of the proteins depend on what the 3D structure of the protein is. Going from amino acids to protein is REALLY hard. Protein folding is one of those nasty computer problems (is it NP-complete?), which barring any huge advances in algorithms will rely on the advances in hardware power for now.
Godel, Escher, Bach, by Hafstadter. It's about strange loops, recursion, logic, etc. Weird, but I hardly see how Cryptonomicon steals from it. I'm only 300 pages into GEB, and I can't see how anyone who didn't already know the math could stand reading that part (I skip over most of it). I do think it's interesting, but the ideas this poster is referring to hardly originated there. And you can't blame Stephenson for copying Turing's ideas; he's one of the characters!
Well, I don't know too much about commodity prices, but even if the US dollar were pretty stable, it's still under the control of the US government (mostly), meaning it's really stupid for another country to tie themselves to it. In fact, currencies don't really need to be tied to commodities anymore. The US dollar isn't. It's just backed by the US government's word that it's legal tender for all debts public and private. No gold, no banannas, nothing. Of course, the US does have some gold on hand, which justifies the currency. The problem is when other countries try to tie their currency to the dollar, they have to keep reserves of US dollars. Then when there currency starts to fail, they have to "sell" the US dollars to keep their currency fixed, and then they run out and have to let the currency float a lot all at once, causing great problems. They don't need to do that and should just base it on their word but allow it to float, with some US dollars or gold to back themselves up a little bit. Oh, and global currencies aren't a good idea (even the Euro is sort of pushing it, though I can see how it may be more useful than not), but that's another story.
A lot of countries do that, even if it's generally not such a good idea (and it doesn't necessarily have to do with where your primary market is). In fact, that was one of the primary causes of the Asian economic crisis around 1997/98. The US dollar has at least for now replaced gold as the international currency standard.
For instance, I might just put a very short block (such as an if statement with a short 'then' clause) all on one line for economy of space.
Well, maybe you know this, but you can actually do that in python. "if a: b()" is valid. Interesting thing is that this is actually faster than putting it on two lines, since the python interpretor would have to increment the line number (so that an thrown exception prints the right line number, and other things).
Not that this makes your point invalid (I happen to like Python's indent stuff, but you're more than welcome to disagree); just thought I'd point it out.
No, more RAM is useful, quite useful. Sure, RAM and drives may have not been getting faster lately, but they have been getting larger, just as have everything else.
Hard drives are getting larger. Hard to aruge with that. RAM is getting larger. RAM is used to cache the hard drive. Caches are getting larger. RAM gets cached in the L1 and L2. And I don't follow that part too much, but I'm sure there are more registers now than there used to be, though I suspect that's a bit slower to change. And registers "cache" the cache. Well, sort of. You know what I mean.
So if you only care about latency, think of it this way: bigger RAM means faster hard drives. (well, this is non-volatile RAM anyway; it would replace hard drives). Wait a second, what are you complaining about anyway? Large non-volatile RAM is VERY useful. It's not supposed to replace the RAM in your computer).
Unfortunately, no. Witness the example of Unisys sitting around waiting for GIF to become popular and THEN saying, "Oh yeah, we have patent on bits of that; fork it over". Yes, they would be legally able to do so.
On a related note, something similar has happened every single time some new paradigm-changing industry has come into existence. Financial markets, cars, airplanes, biotech, and now internet. But very few people come out of it ok. Take airplanes for instance. I think it was in The Economist that I read that there was once a bubble in the airplane industry and that it was only in the early 90s that the entire grand total of all airlines in history broke even. Sooooo many of them failed in the early years that it took decades to make up the total loss. So, as with all paradigm shifts like this, people will probably be better off after all is said and done, but the people who will be better off are not necessarily those working at or owning the companies involved since so many of the will fail. True, it takes a lot less capital to run an Internet company than an airline, but you can't tell me you don't see ads for e-commerce places and think "Wow. They're so goin bankrupt."
Ok, I have to make my usual peltier public-service announcement.
A while ago I got a new K6-2-300 with a peltier, even though I don't overclock (don't ask). I also started running Linux on this computer. After about 2 months, the computer stopped working. It would give me some nice not-at-all informative beeps on bootup and that's about it. I couldn't understand it, until I finally thought to take out the processor. It was green.
You see, most linux distros run the HLT command out of box, which is a command which "diasbles" idle parts of your CPU to save power (it's used in the Win9x programs Rain and Waterfall). But when you're using the HLT command on a computer which is idle a whole lot and which has WAY more active cooling than it actually needs, water will condense on your processor. Fortunately, this was actually covered by the warranty. But BEWARE!
Now I disable the HLT command and test Mersenne primes just in case!
But mailorder has always been good at lobbying and has been small enough to be under the radar of most policy makers. E-commerce has neither of these advantages, and it will be taxed. If the government starts taxing e-commerce, you can be sure they'll start taxing mail order also.
It's a complicated problem to deal with (interstate sales taxes and all) and wasn't worth it for mailorder, since they represent a small part of the economy. But it's worth it to the government to figure out a solution for e-commerce, and once they have one it won't be much more effort to apply it to mailorder as well.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a very interesting article in Glamour (I was just flipping through my girlfriend's copy, making fun of the ads!!! I promise!!!) in April, I think, about sexual harrassment at high-tech firms. It focused on Juno. The stories sounded pretty awful. While I do not know how prevalent sexual harrasment is as a whole, things like that aren't going to encourage women to enter the field, even if they occur in only a tiny fraction of high-tech firms.
Well, sure, it's sad and shouldn't be this way, but I'm not sure it's useless. You can't get much better protection against Japanese piracy than not actually releasing it in Japanese. It's that whole English-to-Japanese encryption system that'll get people :)
And while most Japanese people know some English, the vast majority cannot understand fast-paced conversation in movies.
Is this the same PC Expo talked about in this article? Which one's true? In this article they claim "fealty to Microsoft is the exception" and that everyone was talking about Linux. Surely things can't be THAT polar!
He didn't say more secure. He said you'd be more likely to hit bugs using the less-popular architecture. Think about, given a new program, which is it more likely to compile more easily on: redhat i386 or netbsd on MIPS? And which is more likely to work correctly after it compiles?
Is that the one from Good Omens? The one in the shape of the symbol of the beast or something like that?
No, this is different. You know how when you search for something obscure (or mispelled) and you get a bunch of google/altavista/lycos-style links instead of the categorized stuff? That'll be provided by Google, not the categorized search results. The human-made index will still be there.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but wasn't it that RAM doubling product which didn't do anything? It had dials and stuff and claimed that it increased your memory, but it didn't do ANYTHING. Or maybe they've come up with doublers that work now. Has there ever been a successful memory compression program?
Well, I think Eiffel has it right, and there's a different way of looking at it. It's a good feature to know that all variables have default values. So references start as NULL/Nil, booleans start as false, etc. It saves you from having to initialize things yourself, and if the value's well-defined, it's a good thing
Oooo, I know something!!! I was doing research on urban sprawl last summer and read an article which cited a study (admittedly this was anti-sprawl) calculated what the tax on gasoline should be to take into account all the costs that are involved (including pollution, road wear, construction of subsidized interstates, and fighting the Gulf War). The tax is currently what, a quarter or two? It should be $6.50.
Minor nit: the genome is the nucleic acid sequence, not the amino acid sequence. Amino acids are what proteins are made of.
Well, it's both, to the effect that it would take a few lines of perl (maybe you could do it with tr?) to convert from one to the other. Three pairs of nucleic acids code for one amino acid. And arguably, the "amino acid sequence" is the one that people would be more concerned with. Once you have that, who cares what the nucleic acids were?
Even more immediate is the fact that DNA doesn't exactly encode for proteins. They encode for amino acids. It's pretty trivial to take a sequence of DNA and tell what the amino acid sequence it produces (it's just table lookup). Proteins are made of amino acids. But the properties of the proteins depend on what the 3D structure of the protein is. Going from amino acids to protein is REALLY hard. Protein folding is one of those nasty computer problems (is it NP-complete?), which barring any huge advances in algorithms will rely on the advances in hardware power for now.
photosynthesis. Some microbes do it too. Some also feed off of organic (but not alive) chemicals.
Pie menus! Pie menus! They need to incorporate the GTK pie menu widget into GTK and use it in GIMP! Sorry. Pie menus on the brain.
Godel, Escher, Bach, by Hafstadter. It's about strange loops, recursion, logic, etc. Weird, but I hardly see how Cryptonomicon steals from it. I'm only 300 pages into GEB, and I can't see how anyone who didn't already know the math could stand reading that part (I skip over most of it). I do think it's interesting, but the ideas this poster is referring to hardly originated there. And you can't blame Stephenson for copying Turing's ideas; he's one of the characters!
Well, I don't know too much about commodity prices, but even if the US dollar were pretty stable, it's still under the control of the US government (mostly), meaning it's really stupid for another country to tie themselves to it. In fact, currencies don't really need to be tied to commodities anymore. The US dollar isn't. It's just backed by the US government's word that it's legal tender for all debts public and private. No gold, no banannas, nothing. Of course, the US does have some gold on hand, which justifies the currency. The problem is when other countries try to tie their currency to the dollar, they have to keep reserves of US dollars. Then when there currency starts to fail, they have to "sell" the US dollars to keep their currency fixed, and then they run out and have to let the currency float a lot all at once, causing great problems. They don't need to do that and should just base it on their word but allow it to float, with some US dollars or gold to back themselves up a little bit. Oh, and global currencies aren't a good idea (even the Euro is sort of pushing it, though I can see how it may be more useful than not), but that's another story.
A lot of countries do that, even if it's generally not such a good idea (and it doesn't necessarily have to do with where your primary market is). In fact, that was one of the primary causes of the Asian economic crisis around 1997/98. The US dollar has at least for now replaced gold as the international currency standard.
For instance, I might just put a very short block (such as an if statement with a short 'then' clause) all on one line for economy of space.
Well, maybe you know this, but you can actually do that in python. "if a: b()" is valid. Interesting thing is that this is actually faster than putting it on two lines, since the python interpretor would have to increment the line number (so that an thrown exception prints the right line number, and other things).
Not that this makes your point invalid (I happen to like Python's indent stuff, but you're more than welcome to disagree); just thought I'd point it out.
Which part deals with them bundling Internet Explorer with their operating system, the entire reason the trial was started?
No, more RAM is useful, quite useful. Sure, RAM and drives may have not been getting faster lately, but they have been getting larger, just as have everything else.
Hard drives are getting larger. Hard to aruge with that. RAM is getting larger. RAM is used to cache the hard drive. Caches are getting larger. RAM gets cached in the L1 and L2. And I don't follow that part too much, but I'm sure there are more registers now than there used to be, though I suspect that's a bit slower to change. And registers "cache" the cache. Well, sort of. You know what I mean.
So if you only care about latency, think of it this way: bigger RAM means faster hard drives. (well, this is non-volatile RAM anyway; it would replace hard drives). Wait a second, what are you complaining about anyway? Large non-volatile RAM is VERY useful. It's not supposed to replace the RAM in your computer).
Unfortunately, no. Witness the example of Unisys sitting around waiting for GIF to become popular and THEN saying, "Oh yeah, we have patent on bits of that; fork it over". Yes, they would be legally able to do so.
"A human does inhuman things and saves world"
Hey, that's not a particularly new storyline, anyway. See also "Gilgamesh", the New Testament, Beowulf, etc.
If copying that general plotline counts as being unoriginal, there hasn't been much original work in the past few thousand years.
On a related note, something similar has happened every single time some new paradigm-changing industry has come into existence. Financial markets, cars, airplanes, biotech, and now internet. But very few people come out of it ok. Take airplanes for instance. I think it was in The Economist that I read that there was once a bubble in the airplane industry and that it was only in the early 90s that the entire grand total of all airlines in history broke even. Sooooo many of them failed in the early years that it took decades to make up the total loss. So, as with all paradigm shifts like this, people will probably be better off after all is said and done, but the people who will be better off are not necessarily those working at or owning the companies involved since so many of the will fail. True, it takes a lot less capital to run an Internet company than an airline, but you can't tell me you don't see ads for e-commerce places and think "Wow. They're so goin bankrupt."
So we don't like the first guy for spamming his list onto all the members, and his punishment is to have his site linked to Slashdot?! Hmmm.
Ok, I have to make my usual peltier public-service announcement.
A while ago I got a new K6-2-300 with a peltier, even though I don't overclock (don't ask). I also started running Linux on this computer. After about 2 months, the computer stopped working. It would give me some nice not-at-all informative beeps on bootup and that's about it. I couldn't understand it, until I finally thought to take out the processor. It was green.
You see, most linux distros run the HLT command out of box, which is a command which "diasbles" idle parts of your CPU to save power (it's used in the Win9x programs Rain and Waterfall). But when you're using the HLT command on a computer which is idle a whole lot and which has WAY more active cooling than it actually needs, water will condense on your processor. Fortunately, this was actually covered by the warranty. But BEWARE!
Now I disable the HLT command and test Mersenne primes just in case!
But mailorder has always been good at lobbying and has been small enough to be under the radar of most policy makers. E-commerce has neither of these advantages, and it will be taxed. If the government starts taxing e-commerce, you can be sure they'll start taxing mail order also.
It's a complicated problem to deal with (interstate sales taxes and all) and wasn't worth it for mailorder, since they represent a small part of the economy. But it's worth it to the government to figure out a solution for e-commerce, and once they have one it won't be much more effort to apply it to mailorder as well.