A car needs a semi-drivable asphalt / gravel / dirt road to drive on. There's endless miles of them that it wuold cost trillions to replace and billions to maintain per year. The vast, vast majority of people want a drive that takes them to the doorstep and ends in their driveway, not some railway station far off from which you need to carry all your belongings and goods. Most of those that can comfortably do without already take the bus / tram / metro / railway.
And even if you happened to be on the network, it still wouldn't replace the car unless all yours friends and family and shops and everything else you'd like to visit was on the network too. I don't have a car and as a result I need to have a taxi budget, if I needed it regularly I would without a doubt buy a car and an automated car system like you describe would be no substitute at all, exactly because all the odd places wouldn't be covered.
An automated driving system would have a huge advantage in that we could have it record all the video and sensor input to a black box that'd survive the crash meaning no more word against word. I would think as all the crap drivers got exposed through video recordings, the death and injury tolls and the insurance costs started dropping people would accept that it is not perfect but substantially better and can be continously improved unlike the average driver who is pretty much the way it is. If the US wants to be all legally retarded then it'll happen in Europe or some other area and eventually the US would get dragged along.
At least in theory you could have a java interpreter written in C, which would then run on every system C runs. The whole point of Java is that you write for a virtual machine specification that will be the same where ever it runs. You can only make C work "on hundreds of platforms" by writing hundreds of code paths. If java had a 36 bit integer, then every other java VM would have to emulate one.
In reference to what the grandparent said, I think so because he included this:
You don't get it for the entire.NET, but you do get it for the language itself, and for the most fundamental classes.
This is the "extend" part of the EEE strategy in reverse. You get free access to some subset of functionality (bait) but they're pretty sure they can move you to the full.NET (hook). You don't kill the bait, you kill anything that tries to replace the hook.
Many cultures use commas instaed of periods for the decimal mark. Specifically, see here.
Yes, but it doesn't necessarily imply the same is true of version numbers. Here in Norway we swap the dots and commas in numbers (1.234,55 vs 1,234.55) but I have never seen any software package, domestic or foreign, that uses anything but dots in their numbering. I think they're more considered dividers like in chapters, that do use dots like "3.4 Crossing the beams". And ok, so (float)7.5 makes sense but what exactly would a kernel version number of 2.6.36 mean? What when you go from 2.6.9 to 2.6.10? It does not make any sense, but if you consider them equal to chapters it makes perfect sense.
This is where humans are really fundamentally different. Some find that work is mind-numbingly boring, and when they go home they want something mentally challinging so they play a highly multitasking RTS, a twitching FPS or a deeply strategic TBS. Then there are the people that find that work is all the work they need, and when they come home they just want to zone out.
Not do nothing, because that is too boring but put on some light entertainment on TV. Read a tabloid or gossip magazine. Turn in to same "easy listening" radio channel. Farmville is a game for those people, or rather it's not a game and they don't play to win. It's just something they do to pass the time, just like watering the plants on the windowsill.
GNASH, Hurd, it's just another one of those GNU/anything projects that has become infected by RMS and think people will use a turd because it comes with a user friendly license. For the longest time they turned away any developer who has ever installed the real flash - perhaps they still do - due to a clause in the license that would get laughed out of court, it's equal to saying anyone who has ever agreed to a Windows EULA can't ever develop Linux. That has made sure the project is stock full of nothing but raving ideological fanatics and no actual doers. The only real traction has come from the Lightspark project, which has happened almost entirely outside the gnash project and is mainly run by one person called Alessandro Pignotti who has done more for flash support in Linux than gnash has done in years. Not to put too much weight on his shoulders, but he's the kind of doer it takes to build a real project just like Linus was for Linux and not just some ideological play toy.
This one has been happened for at least two years, by my count. It may not be high-definition, but most shows ARE put on the web the day after they air. Geographical boundaries are enforced, but that probably has more to do with broadcast rights than business models (if you've given your broadcast rights in Britain to the BBC, for example, you're not going to undercut them online).
If they made more money on a world wide online release than the reduction in broadcast right value, they'd do it. That would just be business. However, I suspect the TV networks intentionally price such a show unrealistically low to maintain their position. They absolutely don't want to teach people to go online and watch it, that would be shooting themselves in the foot. So as long as no one can do without broadcast income, they can effectively dictate the terms.
A Democracy allows you to execute a man with a simple majority vote. No need to prove guilt. It's a tyranny. It's what happened to Socrates. Rule by Law, like our Constitution, is preferable.
The constitution is ultimately just what a simple majority of what the founding fathers thought best. That they now require an even higher majority to change is just a built-in conservatism, and possibly also as a practical matter if it would hover around 50% support. That only works in the favor if justice if they were more "right" in the past than now, it is equally hard to change an unjust amendment as a just one.
I don't think a direct democracy would have any problem making a two-level set of decisions, one "fundamental" level and a "normal" level that can only act within the limits of the first one. You wouldn't simply be able to make one absurd decision without making the case that yes, this is important enough that "freedom of speech" or "innocent until proven guilty" has to be modified. Those kinds of changes would not happen easily.
The whole "majority vs minority" perspective is misleading, it's more like the 55% majority in 2010 loses to the 75% majority made in 1890 or what 51% felt was best in 1787. If they have never been in majority now or in the past, then at some point the majority must have shielded the minority. Why should not the same then be true of the here and now?
Ultimately a democracy exists on consent of the governed. Those long dead are no longer of the governed, so why should it matter what they believed? Why should we have to keep their laws unless we can raise a huge majority to change it? And if you think direct democracy and rule of law are opposites, well I guess you consider Switzerland to be lawless then. They have a rather well developed form of direct democracy...
Either the US market works differently than the Norwegian one, or you are wrong. With pretty much every condo here you get an ideal share of the grounds. What does that mean in practice? Well consider if you and your SO owned a house and it got split 50-50 in a divorce (and let's not get side tracked here) then it's not like each own their own square feet - even if you've lived that way. You both own an ideal half to the entire house, just as if you owned 50% of a company. In the same way, there's some 60-70 owners in my condo block and it's adjusted by apartment size but I own somewhere around 1% of it.
What does that mean it practice? From day to day it means very little, you can't really do anything with it on your own and it just tags along with the condo when you sell it. There's a lot of legalese giving the condo owner rights to the ground, so even if the board tried selling it out from under you it doesn't really work. In practice, it really only matters if it burns to the ground or the building is so old it has to be condemned. If it did, we combined would own a rather large chunk of prime downtown real estate and I'd get my $100k of a $10m value when we sold it to a real estate developer.
One of the ugly things about owning a large chunk of land where the property value is much greater than the building value is that a lot of it is potential that is up to the whims of politicians about zoning laws, permission to set up buildings and things like that. For example, I have a relative that owns a rather large farm which for some time now has been on the outskirts of town. As a land property, it doesn't give more crop than any other. As a housing area it would be worth at least ten times - maybe a hundred times as much. He has tried now for 30-40 years to make that happen, but the politicians have not wanted to expand the city in that direction so nothing has happened until some five years ago. Then he got to sell the area closest to the city, but he's still only realized at most 20% of the potential. Another ugly example is volume caps because an area is built too dense compared to what the politicians want, you rarely find about it until the grounds is bought and your building plans are rejected.
In that sense, a fully developed property is in ways safer because you're not so exposed to the whims of politicians. But that generally means lots of buildings, lots of people and not so much real estate. Or you could just buy a big luxurious property, there will be a market for that but it also usually means some fairly big expenses to maintain...
Just because the Al Capone and the Unabomber became known far outside the US borders, doesn't make them international mafia bosses or international terrorists. The logic doesn't work the way to claim it does.
I don't like him either. He's more lawyer than marine biologist, he does anything he wants and justifies it (I know it's funny when I say it too) but frankly there's nothing I hate more than running around in circles and WoW is doing exactly that.
I think the big news would be a lead game designer that can't justify the design even to himself. No matter what they decided there'd be flak coming because you can't please everyone, and part of his job is to sit there and take it saying "This is what we went with because we thought it was best."
Does it really matter that you're running in the same circles if you're doing them well? Lately I've been playing a lot of Civilization, and in many ways it hasn't changed since Civilization <voice="Scotty">N-C-C-1-7-0-1, no bloody A B C D or E</voice> but the essence of it is fun even though I'm playing it many times over. In fact I'm probably a bit too addictive to play WoW...
His ISP just needs a beating. I'm on cable, and just checked the ping time to a big local newspaper.
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.762/7.914/14.891/2.623 ms
That I can reach another server in less than 5ms means it's not the cable tech that is the problem, it's overloaded or oversold systems somewhere else.
And you really have to max out your character or play the way you need to play to win. I'm having great fun now in Civilization V, it's funny to not go for a domination victory even though that's by far the easiest...
Because one of the ways to get serious revenue is to be bought out by a bigger company with the resources to put behind your project and who is gonna wanna buy a FOSS software company now? They will look at Oracle and say they didn't get the code (because libreOffice is quickly taking that) and they didn't get the people (because they all split) so what did they get for all that money?
I've worked for a consulting company, and for most practical purposes we didn't have assets. The office was leased, the furniture was leased, the desktops were leased and the staff could be gone in three months (not two weeks like in the US, but close enough). You'd get some existing contracts, best practices and code templates but they'd be near worthless without the staff to deliver them. And the contents of the office supply room, I guess. If we were bought by the wrong people who caused a stampede out the door then 90%+ of the value would be lost within six months.
It's not unusual today that the asset is in the living organization. Sure, there's a few that have vast manufacturing or software assets that just sit there and make money, but in most service industries you could run it to ground quickly. How fast do you think say an insurance company can die? One renewal cycle after you make some horrible policy changes most of your business would be gone. All it really says is that if that if Oracle wants to continue these business lines, they're doing it in a very wrong way.
Of course, Sun wasn't making money which is the real issue. Oracle's behavior is pretty much consistent with an organization that wants to bail out but try to monetize something on the way. Like say the OpenOffice name, I'm sure Oracle would sell it to them but not just give it away. I'm not that surprised, they paid for Sun and that leads to "I paid to get it from them, you pay to get it from me". I'm far more inclined to share something I got for free myself than something I paid for and you don't want to pay for.
As long as you don't run into issues, which you are far more likely to do on Linux. People have been using XP on the same desktop for 5-10 years and their hardware and driver setup basically does not change. If they want a new version of a piece of software, they install just that piece of software. On Linux, at least 9 out of 10 times the answer is to upgrade your distro unless it one of the few in backports, you find a PPA or have compile skills yourself. I mean it's free and usually things get better right?
Most of the time you're pushing hardware support for hardware the user doesn't have. Or software that does things the user doesn't want it to do. And I think we can all be honest about the fact that regressions do happen. Sometimes they push new stacks like PulseAudio and for Bluetooth and it doesn't work as well for what the user used to be doing. Or that they change the UI around in ways people don't like. All these other changes just come as part of the bargain, maybe some want to do a general refresh but also many don't.
Of course some see this as black and white so if you're happy with the old, stay with the old. That's silly, all it really takes is just one feature you really want like a new graphing feature in OpenOffice. It's new but it's just what you need so you're willing to live with a version that's 1.5 years newer than the LTS version. Or maybe you really do want to go all out and get the latest version before your distro's release. I bet you most of Ubuntu users either couldn't install a different version of a package than what's in a repository, or if they've learned the magic "./configure, make, make install" they can't undo it.
That is if you even could. Last I checked pretty much everything from KDE is locked at the same version through kdelibs, last I checked it wasn't possible to upgrade a single application without pulling in pretty much the whole of KDE in the upgrade. Again, everything just moves as one. Many people talk about Linux and choices, as always you have the theoretical freedom of pulling it off on your own but in practice in this area you get pushed through far more driver and core system changes than you'd choose.
Wait, did you just make an analogy where Steve Ballmer will side with Linux in the end to defeat the evil Apple empire? Pretty please can't we just do like in Space Balls and fast forward to there?
That's going way in the direction of overkill and would create a shadow market that operates independently of the official one, and even if it didn't it would take too long time for the market to settle after big stock news. I would say the point is to remove the dependence on your connection so that it's possible for everyone to submit orders without being ripped off by microsecond traders and "fake" orders that are immediately canceled.
It's well known that the human reaction time is around 300 ms if you're prepared for it, like watching a stock ticker and waiting with the finger on the submit key. If we say twice that and add in a generous 300 ms of round trip time (I get 150 ms Norway - California) then I think a one second pulse with 0.1s matching is fine. Any plain consumer DSL/cable line should do.
That way there's alway a risk that your order is matched and small traders are part of the same matching as everyone else. I suppose they could still play the sub-second high speed trading game between themselves, but I doubt it would be that interesting with only themselves playing. Of course computers can still try seeing macro trends in all the stocks and speculate in that, but that I consider "fair".
LOCs is roughly as meaningless as valuing a document by its word count. You could spend tons on research on something summed up in a few pages, or get an endless word diarrhea of mindless babble spewed out at 300 WPM. But people need to measure progress. Yes, I've seen how it gets when nobody measures progress and everyone pretends the last 10% of code will suddenly turn a turd into a gem, if so expect the people with survival skills to disappear some 80% into the project. Another disastrous variation is to leave it entirely up to the subjective opinion of the manager, which in any sizable company means your career depends on your favor with the PHB and his lying skills compared to the other PHBs.
Saying it's bad is like shooting fish in a barrel. Coming up with a good system of objectively measuring code design and quality that works in a large organization is ridiculously hard. Particularly since everybody tries to wiggle out of the definitions and go with what you measure, if you made avoiding LoC a metric then the lines would compacted to the point of obfuscation with hideous cross calling to save lines. You want people to hit a sane level of structuring and code reuse, neither LoC bloat nor 4k compos.
And it could be the arms, but not a "bug" as such. I don't think it's so easy that you just move your arms like you used to and the robot arms mimic it, you probably have to learn to control them. So he passed his driver's test, but that is usually not that stressful. Can you do emergency maneuvers under high stress? Ok, so many people can't even with two perfectly functioning arms but maybe he panicked and lost control of his arms. I mean most of us have a lifetime of muscle memory controlling our arms, even in a panic. In fact, as a matter of survival maybe especially when the adrenaline is pumping. Maybe he acted on the wrong instincts from back when he had real arms rather than controlling the robot arms, it doesn't take much of lapse to matter a lot.
His arms were probably just fitted for the quiet daily life of just getting around and doing day-to-day tasks. If he suspected or had noticed anything, I would not be surprised if he covered it up so he could keep driving just like far too many elderly do. I mean, did anyone really check? I would think the prosthetics company would be more than pleased with all the 99% he could do, not the 1% he couldn't. It sounded like he was given just a regular driving test, which wouldn't test it. I would like to think that this would have been caught somewhere, but maybe nobody did. After all, he was the first in the country so there wouldn't be any routines for it...
I think most chatbots act like the opening book of a chess program, they can repeat a conversation that looks like one of a million other conversations. If you try tripping them up with some question that requires them to actually understand the meaning, they're done for.
For example one I did this after someone kept insisting the bot was "almost human": Q: Are you a vegetarian? A: Yes Q: Do you like your beef rare, medium or well done?
There's only one right answer to that, and that is "Umm vegetarian... no meat" or something like that. Any human will connect the dots, but I haven't seen a chatbot that'll connect that vegetarian = no meat and beef is a subset of meat. If you're not intentionally trying to trip it up, try talking about music and dancing. Only certain things go together and it usually trips up all by itself.
The only reason that a chatbot works for a little while is that most chats don't start with any intelligent conversation. They start with a weed-out phase trying to find interesting people. There's no wrong answer to "what music do you like?", there's just people you'd like to keep talking to and not. Once you're past that stage, they flop faster and easier than a house of cards.
They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos.
I doubt that. They make good money selling Macs, not crazy amounts but it's an easy sell for people that want a similar interface like they have on their iPhone and iPad. It's a computer that'll always have a first-rate integration with everything else Apple does, particularly until something like AppleTV can stand on its own legs as an entertainment/console division. They got a long way to go, though I can see them push the iPad to the big screen with an iPhone-size controller. That would give them a quick huge library of games to kickstart it with.
They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications
Now this I do agree with. The Mac will exist to run iLife, iWork, iTunes, Final Cut Pro and other Mac branded applications. They got no particular interest in running databases, web servers, java or whatever else that you can run cheaper on any commodity server. You can probably still get X11, run Java over X11 and continue to work on your enterprise java beans, but that's just using it to work on another system. You won't write mac software with a mac UI with java.
Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
He's done more than that, he's established a standard. Apple is now getting tons and tons of free publicity by everyone who is advertising their iPhone app, from organizations that would never ever have bothered to make a Nokia app or a Sony Ericsson app or a Samsung app. That has made the iPhone far more useful than anything else on the market which has now lead to many "boring" industries picking it up. When even a friend of mine that works as a construction manager told me he too had gotten an iPhone, they've hit a far deeper home run than a fashion toy.
I think they appeal to some small subset of gamers, it's more that achievements in general don't bother those who don't care except the occasional "achievement unlock" popup. I don't think *most* people care, it's just something they could add to please another group of players without pissing off anyone else.
Exactly, even in the late 90s I heard professors talk about it being important knowing how much space a short took as opposed to an int as opposed to a long long and what'd it'd do for CPUs and registers and whatnot. People in the 70s and early 80s at the dawn of the PC skimped bits and bytes everywhere taking the century off the year and many other things that in retrospect seem stupid. But that kind of cost cutting could save you millions of dollars in reduced requirements back then. I'd love to go back and start off with Unicode/UTF8 instead of the abomination this is code pages and local 8 bit encoding for example. And a common standard for "\n" or "\r\n". To have all PCs use the system clock in UTC (or well GMT back then). The list goes on...
They were building a box car and people that asked those kind of questions sounded like "um, yeah but what about when we break the sound barrier?" It's only in the last decade after the y2k debacle that the motto has become "use 64 bit". 64 bits time_t, 64 bit pointers, 64 bits limits on files and sizes and now finally 64 bit sector counts on HDDs as we hit 3TB+ HDDs and maybe someday 2x64 bit IPv6 addresses, just the first 64 really do the trick the rest will be used for MACs. It's cheaper to spend another few bytes than run into another limit like that.
Everything would be so much simpler if you could look into a crystal ball and learn what the world is like 50 years from now. Also, I'd spend that power making myself ridiculously rich not change the IPv4 address size;)
Slashdot Mirror
A car needs a semi-drivable asphalt / gravel / dirt road to drive on. There's endless miles of them that it wuold cost trillions to replace and billions to maintain per year. The vast, vast majority of people want a drive that takes them to the doorstep and ends in their driveway, not some railway station far off from which you need to carry all your belongings and goods. Most of those that can comfortably do without already take the bus / tram / metro / railway.
And even if you happened to be on the network, it still wouldn't replace the car unless all yours friends and family and shops and everything else you'd like to visit was on the network too. I don't have a car and as a result I need to have a taxi budget, if I needed it regularly I would without a doubt buy a car and an automated car system like you describe would be no substitute at all, exactly because all the odd places wouldn't be covered.
An automated driving system would have a huge advantage in that we could have it record all the video and sensor input to a black box that'd survive the crash meaning no more word against word. I would think as all the crap drivers got exposed through video recordings, the death and injury tolls and the insurance costs started dropping people would accept that it is not perfect but substantially better and can be continously improved unlike the average driver who is pretty much the way it is. If the US wants to be all legally retarded then it'll happen in Europe or some other area and eventually the US would get dragged along.
At least in theory you could have a java interpreter written in C, which would then run on every system C runs. The whole point of Java is that you write for a virtual machine specification that will be the same where ever it runs. You can only make C work "on hundreds of platforms" by writing hundreds of code paths. If java had a 36 bit integer, then every other java VM would have to emulate one.
In reference to what the grandparent said, I think so because he included this:
You don't get it for the entire .NET, but you do get it for the language itself, and for the most fundamental classes.
This is the "extend" part of the EEE strategy in reverse. You get free access to some subset of functionality (bait) but they're pretty sure they can move you to the full .NET (hook). You don't kill the bait, you kill anything that tries to replace the hook.
Many cultures use commas instaed of periods for the decimal mark. Specifically, see here.
Yes, but it doesn't necessarily imply the same is true of version numbers. Here in Norway we swap the dots and commas in numbers (1.234,55 vs 1,234.55) but I have never seen any software package, domestic or foreign, that uses anything but dots in their numbering. I think they're more considered dividers like in chapters, that do use dots like "3.4 Crossing the beams". And ok, so (float)7.5 makes sense but what exactly would a kernel version number of 2.6.36 mean? What when you go from 2.6.9 to 2.6.10? It does not make any sense, but if you consider them equal to chapters it makes perfect sense.
This is where humans are really fundamentally different. Some find that work is mind-numbingly boring, and when they go home they want something mentally challinging so they play a highly multitasking RTS, a twitching FPS or a deeply strategic TBS. Then there are the people that find that work is all the work they need, and when they come home they just want to zone out.
Not do nothing, because that is too boring but put on some light entertainment on TV. Read a tabloid or gossip magazine. Turn in to same "easy listening" radio channel. Farmville is a game for those people, or rather it's not a game and they don't play to win. It's just something they do to pass the time, just like watering the plants on the windowsill.
GNASH, Hurd, it's just another one of those GNU/anything projects that has become infected by RMS and think people will use a turd because it comes with a user friendly license. For the longest time they turned away any developer who has ever installed the real flash - perhaps they still do - due to a clause in the license that would get laughed out of court, it's equal to saying anyone who has ever agreed to a Windows EULA can't ever develop Linux. That has made sure the project is stock full of nothing but raving ideological fanatics and no actual doers. The only real traction has come from the Lightspark project, which has happened almost entirely outside the gnash project and is mainly run by one person called Alessandro Pignotti who has done more for flash support in Linux than gnash has done in years. Not to put too much weight on his shoulders, but he's the kind of doer it takes to build a real project just like Linus was for Linux and not just some ideological play toy.
This one has been happened for at least two years, by my count. It may not be high-definition, but most shows ARE put on the web the day after they air. Geographical boundaries are enforced, but that probably has more to do with broadcast rights than business models (if you've given your broadcast rights in Britain to the BBC, for example, you're not going to undercut them online).
If they made more money on a world wide online release than the reduction in broadcast right value, they'd do it. That would just be business. However, I suspect the TV networks intentionally price such a show unrealistically low to maintain their position. They absolutely don't want to teach people to go online and watch it, that would be shooting themselves in the foot. So as long as no one can do without broadcast income, they can effectively dictate the terms.
A Democracy allows you to execute a man with a simple majority vote. No need to prove guilt. It's a tyranny. It's what happened to Socrates. Rule by Law, like our Constitution, is preferable.
The constitution is ultimately just what a simple majority of what the founding fathers thought best. That they now require an even higher majority to change is just a built-in conservatism, and possibly also as a practical matter if it would hover around 50% support. That only works in the favor if justice if they were more "right" in the past than now, it is equally hard to change an unjust amendment as a just one.
I don't think a direct democracy would have any problem making a two-level set of decisions, one "fundamental" level and a "normal" level that can only act within the limits of the first one. You wouldn't simply be able to make one absurd decision without making the case that yes, this is important enough that "freedom of speech" or "innocent until proven guilty" has to be modified. Those kinds of changes would not happen easily.
The whole "majority vs minority" perspective is misleading, it's more like the 55% majority in 2010 loses to the 75% majority made in 1890 or what 51% felt was best in 1787. If they have never been in majority now or in the past, then at some point the majority must have shielded the minority. Why should not the same then be true of the here and now?
Ultimately a democracy exists on consent of the governed. Those long dead are no longer of the governed, so why should it matter what they believed? Why should we have to keep their laws unless we can raise a huge majority to change it? And if you think direct democracy and rule of law are opposites, well I guess you consider Switzerland to be lawless then. They have a rather well developed form of direct democracy...
Color me shocked.
Since we're so keen on using appropriate words, what color is "shocked" exactly?
Rule 3. If there is no ground for the suit it's easy to get it tossed out.
Yeah, that's why the SCO case was thrown out so quickly. Oh, wait...
Either the US market works differently than the Norwegian one, or you are wrong. With pretty much every condo here you get an ideal share of the grounds. What does that mean in practice? Well consider if you and your SO owned a house and it got split 50-50 in a divorce (and let's not get side tracked here) then it's not like each own their own square feet - even if you've lived that way. You both own an ideal half to the entire house, just as if you owned 50% of a company. In the same way, there's some 60-70 owners in my condo block and it's adjusted by apartment size but I own somewhere around 1% of it.
What does that mean it practice? From day to day it means very little, you can't really do anything with it on your own and it just tags along with the condo when you sell it. There's a lot of legalese giving the condo owner rights to the ground, so even if the board tried selling it out from under you it doesn't really work. In practice, it really only matters if it burns to the ground or the building is so old it has to be condemned. If it did, we combined would own a rather large chunk of prime downtown real estate and I'd get my $100k of a $10m value when we sold it to a real estate developer.
One of the ugly things about owning a large chunk of land where the property value is much greater than the building value is that a lot of it is potential that is up to the whims of politicians about zoning laws, permission to set up buildings and things like that. For example, I have a relative that owns a rather large farm which for some time now has been on the outskirts of town. As a land property, it doesn't give more crop than any other. As a housing area it would be worth at least ten times - maybe a hundred times as much. He has tried now for 30-40 years to make that happen, but the politicians have not wanted to expand the city in that direction so nothing has happened until some five years ago. Then he got to sell the area closest to the city, but he's still only realized at most 20% of the potential. Another ugly example is volume caps because an area is built too dense compared to what the politicians want, you rarely find about it until the grounds is bought and your building plans are rejected.
In that sense, a fully developed property is in ways safer because you're not so exposed to the whims of politicians. But that generally means lots of buildings, lots of people and not so much real estate. Or you could just buy a big luxurious property, there will be a market for that but it also usually means some fairly big expenses to maintain...
Just because the Al Capone and the Unabomber became known far outside the US borders, doesn't make them international mafia bosses or international terrorists. The logic doesn't work the way to claim it does.
I don't like him either. He's more lawyer than marine biologist, he does anything he wants and justifies it (I know it's funny when I say it too) but frankly there's nothing I hate more than running around in circles and WoW is doing exactly that.
I think the big news would be a lead game designer that can't justify the design even to himself. No matter what they decided there'd be flak coming because you can't please everyone, and part of his job is to sit there and take it saying "This is what we went with because we thought it was best."
Does it really matter that you're running in the same circles if you're doing them well? Lately I've been playing a lot of Civilization, and in many ways it hasn't changed since Civilization <voice="Scotty">N-C-C-1-7-0-1, no bloody A B C D or E</voice> but the essence of it is fun even though I'm playing it many times over. In fact I'm probably a bit too addictive to play WoW...
His ISP just needs a beating. I'm on cable, and just checked the ping time to a big local newspaper.
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4.762/7.914/14.891/2.623 ms
That I can reach another server in less than 5ms means it's not the cable tech that is the problem, it's overloaded or oversold systems somewhere else.
And you really have to max out your character or play the way you need to play to win. I'm having great fun now in Civilization V, it's funny to not go for a domination victory even though that's by far the easiest...
Because one of the ways to get serious revenue is to be bought out by a bigger company with the resources to put behind your project and who is gonna wanna buy a FOSS software company now? They will look at Oracle and say they didn't get the code (because libreOffice is quickly taking that) and they didn't get the people (because they all split) so what did they get for all that money?
I've worked for a consulting company, and for most practical purposes we didn't have assets. The office was leased, the furniture was leased, the desktops were leased and the staff could be gone in three months (not two weeks like in the US, but close enough). You'd get some existing contracts, best practices and code templates but they'd be near worthless without the staff to deliver them. And the contents of the office supply room, I guess. If we were bought by the wrong people who caused a stampede out the door then 90%+ of the value would be lost within six months.
It's not unusual today that the asset is in the living organization. Sure, there's a few that have vast manufacturing or software assets that just sit there and make money, but in most service industries you could run it to ground quickly. How fast do you think say an insurance company can die? One renewal cycle after you make some horrible policy changes most of your business would be gone. All it really says is that if that if Oracle wants to continue these business lines, they're doing it in a very wrong way.
Of course, Sun wasn't making money which is the real issue. Oracle's behavior is pretty much consistent with an organization that wants to bail out but try to monetize something on the way. Like say the OpenOffice name, I'm sure Oracle would sell it to them but not just give it away. I'm not that surprised, they paid for Sun and that leads to "I paid to get it from them, you pay to get it from me". I'm far more inclined to share something I got for free myself than something I paid for and you don't want to pay for.
There's a long standing belief
As long as you don't run into issues, which you are far more likely to do on Linux. People have been using XP on the same desktop for 5-10 years and their hardware and driver setup basically does not change. If they want a new version of a piece of software, they install just that piece of software. On Linux, at least 9 out of 10 times the answer is to upgrade your distro unless it one of the few in backports, you find a PPA or have compile skills yourself. I mean it's free and usually things get better right?
Most of the time you're pushing hardware support for hardware the user doesn't have. Or software that does things the user doesn't want it to do. And I think we can all be honest about the fact that regressions do happen. Sometimes they push new stacks like PulseAudio and for Bluetooth and it doesn't work as well for what the user used to be doing. Or that they change the UI around in ways people don't like. All these other changes just come as part of the bargain, maybe some want to do a general refresh but also many don't.
Of course some see this as black and white so if you're happy with the old, stay with the old. That's silly, all it really takes is just one feature you really want like a new graphing feature in OpenOffice. It's new but it's just what you need so you're willing to live with a version that's 1.5 years newer than the LTS version. Or maybe you really do want to go all out and get the latest version before your distro's release. I bet you most of Ubuntu users either couldn't install a different version of a package than what's in a repository, or if they've learned the magic "./configure, make, make install" they can't undo it.
That is if you even could. Last I checked pretty much everything from KDE is locked at the same version through kdelibs, last I checked it wasn't possible to upgrade a single application without pulling in pretty much the whole of KDE in the upgrade. Again, everything just moves as one. Many people talk about Linux and choices, as always you have the theoretical freedom of pulling it off on your own but in practice in this area you get pushed through far more driver and core system changes than you'd choose.
Wait, did you just make an analogy where Steve Ballmer will side with Linux in the end to defeat the evil Apple empire? Pretty please can't we just do like in Space Balls and fast forward to there?
That's going way in the direction of overkill and would create a shadow market that operates independently of the official one, and even if it didn't it would take too long time for the market to settle after big stock news. I would say the point is to remove the dependence on your connection so that it's possible for everyone to submit orders without being ripped off by microsecond traders and "fake" orders that are immediately canceled.
It's well known that the human reaction time is around 300 ms if you're prepared for it, like watching a stock ticker and waiting with the finger on the submit key. If we say twice that and add in a generous 300 ms of round trip time (I get 150 ms Norway - California) then I think a one second pulse with 0.1s matching is fine. Any plain consumer DSL/cable line should do.
That way there's alway a risk that your order is matched and small traders are part of the same matching as everyone else. I suppose they could still play the sub-second high speed trading game between themselves, but I doubt it would be that interesting with only themselves playing. Of course computers can still try seeing macro trends in all the stocks and speculate in that, but that I consider "fair".
LOCs is roughly as meaningless as valuing a document by its word count. You could spend tons on research on something summed up in a few pages, or get an endless word diarrhea of mindless babble spewed out at 300 WPM. But people need to measure progress. Yes, I've seen how it gets when nobody measures progress and everyone pretends the last 10% of code will suddenly turn a turd into a gem, if so expect the people with survival skills to disappear some 80% into the project. Another disastrous variation is to leave it entirely up to the subjective opinion of the manager, which in any sizable company means your career depends on your favor with the PHB and his lying skills compared to the other PHBs.
Saying it's bad is like shooting fish in a barrel. Coming up with a good system of objectively measuring code design and quality that works in a large organization is ridiculously hard. Particularly since everybody tries to wiggle out of the definitions and go with what you measure, if you made avoiding LoC a metric then the lines would compacted to the point of obfuscation with hideous cross calling to save lines. You want people to hit a sane level of structuring and code reuse, neither LoC bloat nor 4k compos.
And it could be the arms, but not a "bug" as such. I don't think it's so easy that you just move your arms like you used to and the robot arms mimic it, you probably have to learn to control them. So he passed his driver's test, but that is usually not that stressful. Can you do emergency maneuvers under high stress? Ok, so many people can't even with two perfectly functioning arms but maybe he panicked and lost control of his arms. I mean most of us have a lifetime of muscle memory controlling our arms, even in a panic. In fact, as a matter of survival maybe especially when the adrenaline is pumping. Maybe he acted on the wrong instincts from back when he had real arms rather than controlling the robot arms, it doesn't take much of lapse to matter a lot.
His arms were probably just fitted for the quiet daily life of just getting around and doing day-to-day tasks. If he suspected or had noticed anything, I would not be surprised if he covered it up so he could keep driving just like far too many elderly do. I mean, did anyone really check? I would think the prosthetics company would be more than pleased with all the 99% he could do, not the 1% he couldn't. It sounded like he was given just a regular driving test, which wouldn't test it. I would like to think that this would have been caught somewhere, but maybe nobody did. After all, he was the first in the country so there wouldn't be any routines for it...
I think most chatbots act like the opening book of a chess program, they can repeat a conversation that looks like one of a million other conversations. If you try tripping them up with some question that requires them to actually understand the meaning, they're done for.
For example one I did this after someone kept insisting the bot was "almost human":
Q: Are you a vegetarian?
A: Yes
Q: Do you like your beef rare, medium or well done?
There's only one right answer to that, and that is "Umm vegetarian... no meat" or something like that. Any human will connect the dots, but I haven't seen a chatbot that'll connect that vegetarian = no meat and beef is a subset of meat. If you're not intentionally trying to trip it up, try talking about music and dancing. Only certain things go together and it usually trips up all by itself.
The only reason that a chatbot works for a little while is that most chats don't start with any intelligent conversation. They start with a weed-out phase trying to find interesting people. There's no wrong answer to "what music do you like?", there's just people you'd like to keep talking to and not. Once you're past that stage, they flop faster and easier than a house of cards.
They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos.
I doubt that. They make good money selling Macs, not crazy amounts but it's an easy sell for people that want a similar interface like they have on their iPhone and iPad. It's a computer that'll always have a first-rate integration with everything else Apple does, particularly until something like AppleTV can stand on its own legs as an entertainment/console division. They got a long way to go, though I can see them push the iPad to the big screen with an iPhone-size controller. That would give them a quick huge library of games to kickstart it with.
They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications
Now this I do agree with. The Mac will exist to run iLife, iWork, iTunes, Final Cut Pro and other Mac branded applications. They got no particular interest in running databases, web servers, java or whatever else that you can run cheaper on any commodity server. You can probably still get X11, run Java over X11 and continue to work on your enterprise java beans, but that's just using it to work on another system. You won't write mac software with a mac UI with java.
Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
He's done more than that, he's established a standard. Apple is now getting tons and tons of free publicity by everyone who is advertising their iPhone app, from organizations that would never ever have bothered to make a Nokia app or a Sony Ericsson app or a Samsung app. That has made the iPhone far more useful than anything else on the market which has now lead to many "boring" industries picking it up. When even a friend of mine that works as a construction manager told me he too had gotten an iPhone, they've hit a far deeper home run than a fashion toy.
I think they appeal to some small subset of gamers, it's more that achievements in general don't bother those who don't care except the occasional "achievement unlock" popup. I don't think *most* people care, it's just something they could add to please another group of players without pissing off anyone else.
Exactly, even in the late 90s I heard professors talk about it being important knowing how much space a short took as opposed to an int as opposed to a long long and what'd it'd do for CPUs and registers and whatnot. People in the 70s and early 80s at the dawn of the PC skimped bits and bytes everywhere taking the century off the year and many other things that in retrospect seem stupid. But that kind of cost cutting could save you millions of dollars in reduced requirements back then. I'd love to go back and start off with Unicode/UTF8 instead of the abomination this is code pages and local 8 bit encoding for example. And a common standard for "\n" or "\r\n". To have all PCs use the system clock in UTC (or well GMT back then). The list goes on...
They were building a box car and people that asked those kind of questions sounded like "um, yeah but what about when we break the sound barrier?" It's only in the last decade after the y2k debacle that the motto has become "use 64 bit". 64 bits time_t, 64 bit pointers, 64 bits limits on files and sizes and now finally 64 bit sector counts on HDDs as we hit 3TB+ HDDs and maybe someday 2x64 bit IPv6 addresses, just the first 64 really do the trick the rest will be used for MACs. It's cheaper to spend another few bytes than run into another limit like that.
Everything would be so much simpler if you could look into a crystal ball and learn what the world is like 50 years from now. Also, I'd spend that power making myself ridiculously rich not change the IPv4 address size ;)