I find it doubtful that you could have an effective painkiller that
wasn't usable recreationally.
In that case expect it to be prohibited by the moral police the
moment it becomes available outside of the lab. With a name like
"opiorphin", the drug war overlords probably have their eye on it this
very moment. What a terrible choice of name - it sounds like a
combination of "opium" and "morphine" that just screams, "prohibit me
and throw the users in jail!" They should have called it something
like vitamin N or freeze-dried saliva extract.
Beside any psychological effect (which may well be habit-forming
in its own right), continued over-use of opiates can cause a reduction
in the body's endorphin production.
Yes, but chronic pain users can adapt themselves to very
large doses with no apparent ill effects, and have a very high
quality of life and normal life span, provided they have
continued access and don't have to put up with unpredictable and
irregular supplies from
doctors who are afraid to have their DEA/(UK equiv) license pulled.
At £1 a breath, a heroin habit is not a cheap habit unless you are a
rich rock star.
The substance itself is quite cheap. The problem is the prohibition
and its enforcement, which makes it extremely expensive (and hugely
profitable for the dealers).
Not to mention that it write-locks the file you're viewing,
even though it has read the whole thing into memory.
It gets tirng having to close/pdflatex/open all time instead of
just refresh.
Imagine, for example, if your browser did that while you were
working on a web page.
They have nearly a meg of images on their home page.
If they are really dying and their reps can't get through,
why don't they just have a simple 500-byte text first page
that says, "This is not YouTube.
Click here if you want the YouTube video site.
Click here to enter the
Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation site." or
something like that. All of a sudden they can handle 1000 times
the traffic.
Of course this isn't ideal, but it can allow their reps to
get in while they work on a permanent solution. Isn't that what is
important from a business perspective? I doubt this one extra click
they have to go through
would significantly impact sales (or at least much less than
people not being able to get in at all). Sure, it's a problem and
should be worked on and resolved, but there's no reason business has to come to
a standstill. Sometimes people don't seem to have common sense, or perhaps
they just like to complain to the media.
This reminds me of the copyright whiners who complain and
threaten lawsuits about search engine caching, instead of
just editing their robots.txt.
I agree this idea is stupid. Even more annoying to me, though, are the
categories they are asking for - love, hope, anger, sorrow, beauty, etc.
- with no category for scientific information. I would think that 99%
would be meaningless to an alien species. If I intercepted an alien
transmission, the first thing I'd wonder is what new knowledge it
encodes. If they had their Yahoo equivalent sending out their version
of this, scientists on earth might spend decades or centuries struggling
to decipher the meaning in some pattern detected in their alien
transmission. How disappointing it would be if it actually was nothing
more than an alien analogue of "music", that meant nothing at all
outside of the context of some peculiar wiring of the alien brain that
responds to that pattern.
It would be nice if they had a category for math and science,
starting with the basics of math and building up. That is an
interesting encoding problem in itself, to communicate that information
independent of human context. For a start, a sequence of prime numbers
might provide a clue that there is mathematical content in the
information. Then, mathematics starting from axioms could be
transmitted, (idealistically) building up to the general significant
areas of modern mathematics. Imagine the reverse: supposed we received
an alien transmission encoding proofs of outstanding Millenium
prizes (P=NP, etc.) and much, much more. How could the alien
communicate it to us, given that the alien would have zero knowledge of
anything human?
I don't know the best format for presenting mathematical knowledge
starting from a void, but the simplest language I know of that can
encode all of modern mathematics directly along with rigorous proofs, is
probably metamath.
A 300-line program can verify its proofs (unlike about 3000
lines for other proof languages). I believe an intelligent human looking at its
symbol strings in isolation, starting from the beginning, could probably
figure out the encoding eventually, and presumably an intelligent alien
could too. I think this would even be the case if you obfuscated all of
its tokens with meaningless symbols - that is an important test. If I
had a choice of one thing to transmit, it might be metamath's set theory
database, probably with the human comments stripped out. (There
are simpler universal languages such as SK combinatory logic, but they
are not practical for expressing deep math theorems beyond a certain
point.)
Similarly, it would be interesting to try to communicate physics from
the ground up, starting with the axioms for what we know, and even eventually
building up to chemistry and even biology. That might be a daunting and
hopeless task, I don't know, but the problem of how to encode it is intriguing.
Presumably math would come first, and physics would add its axioms and
build on it. Or something like that.
Yes, the video should be viewed in the context of the final image it
reconstructs. Once you see the final image - shown on the
article page for the 99% of readers who clicked on the video
but
didn't RTFA (a hyperlink labeled "video" being the/. equivalent of "ooh, shiny
button") - it is pretty damn impressive that the information can be
extracted from such "crude"-looking stroking. Although it's somewhat
eerie that the original sculpture looks vaguely "female", whereas the
reconstructed image looks vaguely "male". Also, the video was painful
to look at - I grimaced at the thought of that thing poking me in the
eye...
My experience was the opposite. I'm only very mildly affected by most
cats - we have a tabby at the moment - but a few years ago we had a
Siberian. We gave it away because my eyes would water so badly when I
was around it. (OK, I was constantly brushing it, too, which didn't
help. Unfortunately it would only let me touch him, and in fact
developed such a strong attachment to me, constantly begging for
attention, that it was a nuisance.)
I had never heard this anecdotal evidence. Perhaps if I had, the
problem wouldn't have happened, because I would so strongly believe that
it couldn't? Mind over body can be mysterious...
A very odd mathematician
on
Divine Proportions
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The author,
Norman Wildberger, is one strange mathematician. I could hardly
believe his
rant
against set theory, which borderlines on crankish or at the very
minimum appallingly uninformed.
For example, he calls the ZF (Zermelo-Fraenkel) axioms a "sorry list of
assertions" - "these statements are awash with difficulties. What is a
property? What is a parameter? What is a function? What is a family
of sets? Where is the explanation of what all the symbols mean, if
indeed they have any meaning? How many further assumptions are hidden
behind the syntax and logical conventions assumed by these postulates?"
In fact, these axioms are very precisely defined, and
rank among mankind's greatest achievements.
(For the uninformed, consult
Wikipedia. For a very
precise breakdown of these axioms translated to primitve
symbols - Wikipedia still includes some higher-level defined symbols that
Wildberger objects to because he can't seem to
understand them - see the
metamath version. In other words, there is nothing
fuzzy or ambiguous about these axioms.)
His set theory rant created quite a furor on Usenet,
here and
here.
It won't be billions of years, it will be in 1999 when there will
be a nuclear explosion on the far side of the moon. Then it will
travel throughout the galaxy, on the way picking up a hot alien
called Maya as its science advisor.
In your earlier post you say you've sold 10 copies total. In this
post you say, "during my last week I made roughly half of my sales through Google AdWords, at the cost of roughly $10-15 per sale depending on the campaign" which
sounds like you're selling many copies per week. I'm confused. So you've
only been selling it for a couple of weeks, with 10 copies total,
and already multiple cracker groups have independently "broken my just-enough-to-keep-honest-men-honest registration scheme"?
And these other cracker groups are also selling your cracked program (presumably
for less) since you have to bid against them "on my own program name as an AdWords keyword"? I can't
pin it down, but something
just doesn't seem right about your story. What is the name of the program
you are selling?
Would someome please mod parent up? Finally someone asks an intelligent
question. The abstract of the article in question say "HF" and nothing
about GPS. In fact, GPS uses 1.5 GHz, which is UHF, not HF (2.3 to
26 MHz). UHF does not bounce off the atmosphere (or does so only under
extremely rare conditions), which is why TV stations are ordinarily
limited to line-of-sight, unlike shortwave radio. The whole "GPS"
aspect appears to have been invented by the news reporter for
sensationalism.
Funny selection of programs; I don't see rsync on the list.
From the article: DHS wants to reinforce the quality of open-source
programs supporting the U.S. infrastructure.
So, XMMS (an MP3 player) is more important
to the U.S. infrastructure than
rsync?
A 9v battery is enough to kill someone, even if it is unlikely.
You're probably thinking of the 1999 Darwin Award for a sailor who
was supposed killed while measuring his skin resistance with a Simpson
260 meter. This is supposedly from a "US Navy safety publication", but
there is no further info to be found, and it seems this may have
originally been invented as a humorous story. Not only that, it wasn't
even the 9-v battery directly, but via the current-limited meter probes
that measure resistance. What is the guy's name? What is this safety
publication? Why aren't there dire warnings on 9v batteries by mfrs
terrified of liability suits? I call BS.
A person's heart can be stopped with as little as 20mA. The
resistance of a person is almost exclusively due to the skin.
Right, but the current of 10 or 20ma (?) from a phone line will be
more or less evenly distributed throughout the entire chest cavity, not
focused exclusively on the heart.
All in all, I won't say that an electrocution from a phone line or
even a 9-v battery is theoretically impossible under optimal conditions,
but I haven't been able to find a single confirmed incident of either.
Sadly, regs are less about saftey and more about comprimises with
grandfathered systems.
So what are you trying to say? That
they should have set them to a safer 45V (or whatever) and scrapped the
entire telephone infrastructure?
Of course regs are about compromise.
Everything in life involves some small amount of risk, otherwise
crossing the street or buying a bed elevated more than 1 inch above the
floor would be illegal. You temper regs with common sense (or should;
one could argue that's become rarer these days when fingernail clippers
are confiscated at airports and kids are expelled from school for
possessing an aspirin).
BTW I have never heard of anyone dying from
the 48V of a phone system. Has anyone? I suppose it's theoretically
possible if the current passes just the right way through the heart, but
I've been shocked a number of times by a phone line without ill effects. I don't even
feel it when holding the wires directly; if I touch them together then
release, there is a small spark, and
the inductive kickback from the relay in the exchange produces
a shock. DC requires more voltage than AC to produce a shock.
And except for ringing current, the short-circuit phone line current is
limited to a few mA - enough to cause heart fibrillation in the worst case,
I think, but I've never heard of it. I've been shocked by a phone wire from one hand
to another presumably through my chest and survived (although I try to avoid that
of course).
ClearType has some serious problems with smaller fonts. I
like to use Andale Mono 8 pt. for text editing because I can fit a lot a
characters on the screen. I have tweaked and tuned ClearType with about
every possible setting, and I still cannot distinguish a comma and a
period in Andale Mono 8 pt. So for me it is not only useless, it is
worse than useless. With individual crisp pixels, distinguishing a
comma and period is easy with that font. (Yes, I have an LCD, not a CRT.)
Well, I wouldn't call it a total loss, since presumably it enhanced your reputation.
Being
selected by PC Magazine as one of the top 5 is quite an honor and a real
gem to add to your resume. Heck, I might write a program for free
(i.e. with no expectation of donations) if I could achieve that. In the long
run that might be worth more than a few hundreds or even thousands in donations
in terms of the impression you make on potential employers for negotiating
salary, etc.
Also, have you considered open-sourcing it for enhancement/porting by others,
since apparently there's no
economic incentive to keep it closed source (assuming it is, like most freeware)?
That way your contribution can live on forever, beyond the life of the current
OS it happens to run on.
I like to do old-fashioned CLI C programs, and pretty much all of my
word processing is with
LaTeX source code. I survived quite well and was extremely
productive back in the VT220 days, and wouldn't mind having a little
equivalent I could carry everywhere.
So here's what I would like, although the market is probably too
small to justify. Or maybe it exists and I'm not aware of it.
The smallest, lightest device possible with (1) >=128M RAM, (2)
several GB disk or maybe no disk and just a USB port for a thumbdrive,
(3) >=250MHz CPU, (3) long long battery life, (4) a screen sufficient to
display a bash shell, (5) runs Linux, (6) a small keyboard that is just
large enough for comfortable touch-typing.
It would be somewhat like a glorified PDA, but with a somewhat larger
screen that's easy to read and a built-in keyboard that's large enough
to touch-type on. In a nutshell, a little VT220 with a built-in
computer. Hopefully cheaper than a laptop.
I'm sorry, but this is, without a doubt, the stupidest post I've ever
seen on slashdot (and I've been reading a long time). That's the
guiding principle of EVERY COMPANY EVER. It's so much a guiding
principle that it isn't even bothered to be said. Of COURSE they are
trying to maximize revenue.
The guiding principle of every company ever (including Microsoft)
is to maximize profit. For most companies, this is
not same as maximizing revenue, because their products
are physical objects that typically require a significant amount
of labor and materials to produce. They could maximize revenue by selling
at a loss, since everyone would flock to them instead of their
competitors, but they would eventually go out of business.
In the long term, that is certainly not in the shareholders'
best interest.
A key difference in Microsoft's case is that their products cost
essentially nothing to produce. So once their R&D costs are
recouped, it is truly a case of revenues = profits.
All that counts is
maximizing price times units sold.
(Just in case anyone doesn't know, BPO means "Business Process Outsourcing".)
that middle class is very important to any economy. Costco's CEO
[reclaimdemocracy.org], who earns 200K a year, gets this.
Wal-mart does not.
Are you saying that a CEO who pays himself modestly
"gets it", whereas Walmart's CEO, because he is paid $5M a year
does not? I don't know how much stock Walmart's CEO has - I don't
think it's much compared to the Waltons - but Costco's CEO (Him Sinegal)
owns $120 million of stock, so his salary is more or less a token.
If he paid himself nothing it would barely make a dent in his life.
I'm not saying he should be paid less or more - that's
not my business - but things should be put in perspective. What
about Google's CEO, who pays himself $1 a year? (There is
something annoyingly arrogant about that, but I won't go there.)
My own guess is that the $200k salary is as much to make a
statement than anything else. It sets a kind of imaginary "upper
limit" standard for what any employee should be worth. As a
result, it is easier to keep salaries in general suppressed,
say to 1/5 the CEO's on average. Keeping up this kind of perception
probably has a far greater impact on Sinegal's net worth than would
increasing his salary to $500K. In fact doing latter might end up
making him poorer by raising the bar for everyone else.
I am also reminded of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, where (many
years ago) the highest paid employee, including themselves, was paid
no more than 5 times the lowest paid employee. And, of course,
they paid themselves modestly. This had an incredible public
relations benefit, where they were hailed as these great
enlightened
egalitarian leaders in the press. Never mind that by keeping the
average employee's salary suppressed, it made them far richer,
since after all they owned the company.
For example, a pile of paper is not optimal because it is hard to
search something in it.
Even though my office is messy, to a large extent I know where
things are. I'm not denying that things sometimes get lost, but I do
know that if a well-meaning person straightens up and organizes my
office when I'm away, when I return I will experience a sense of panic
and become lost for days trying to find things. The point is that there
is a subtle order to the mess, that makes sense only to me. Sure, it's
not optimal. But on a computer, there are other ways to search anyway
if you've "lost" something in the piles - those will not go away with
this metaphor. The idea is that this metaphor can complement existing
ways to organize things, not replace them.
How I am to know that 10 years from now my archived files won't be
permanently lost because the closed-source SureCrypt no longer runs on
the then-current Windows? This is one of several reasons I wouldn't touch
a closed-source encryption program with a 10-foot pole. (Other reasons
include no assurance of encryption strength and no assurance that there
isn't a backdoor key. Plus it won't run on Linux, and afaik has no
command-line interface for scripting even on Windows.)
Uh, sorry to be pedantic, but I think by "the electron flow around a
trace" you mean the electromagnetic field around the trace. Electrons
themselves never leave a printed circuit trace, i.e. the copper
cladding "wire," but instead travel inside of it (or on its surface at
high frequencies, resulting in "skin effect"). It sounds like they were
modeling the transmission-line and crosstalk characteristics of the PC
board.
Although the concept struck me as amusing,
given that carrier-grade requires
99.999 (5 nines)
to 99.9999 (6 nines) percent reliability, still I couldn't
imagine that MS would allow itself to be trumped by this.
And, sure enough:
from Google, "carrier grade Linux" - 114000 hits, "carrier grade
Windows" - 17 hits (but still, not 0). The top Windows hit is from 1998: "a Microsoft
white paper available at SUPERCOMM '98 will discuss carrier-grade
Windows NT Server-based systems." Well, at least they talked about it,
you gotta give them credit for that. Haven't heard much about it since, though.
For distros that are moving targets by design (Gentoo, Arch,
Debian)...
Perhaps it's a matter of opinion, but I'd hardly call
Debian stable (plus security updates, of course) a "moving target".
Isn't the real reason that LSB requires RPM?
(Not wanting to start a flame war, the greatest benefit I
found when I switched from R.H. to Debian was no longer having
to use RPM. But that's just my personal preference, I guess.)
In fact a search leads us to
Red Hat package manager for LSB package building which says,
"This is a version of rpm built to create rpm v3 packages as used in the Linux Standards Base. You should need this package only if you are developing LSB packages; you do not need it to install or use LSB packages on Debian."
..the two roommates will not be returning to their dorm room
next year, since they flunked out by neglecting their coursework.
[Been there (MIT), seen that. Some of the most amazing projects
were done by students who never completed their studies.
Of course, many of them went on to be entrepreneurial millionaires,
while the rest of us became 9-5 drones...]
Slashdot Mirror
In that case expect it to be prohibited by the moral police the moment it becomes available outside of the lab. With a name like "opiorphin", the drug war overlords probably have their eye on it this very moment. What a terrible choice of name - it sounds like a combination of "opium" and "morphine" that just screams, "prohibit me and throw the users in jail!" They should have called it something like vitamin N or freeze-dried saliva extract.
Beside any psychological effect (which may well be habit-forming in its own right), continued over-use of opiates can cause a reduction in the body's endorphin production.
Yes, but chronic pain users can adapt themselves to very large doses with no apparent ill effects, and have a very high quality of life and normal life span, provided they have continued access and don't have to put up with unpredictable and irregular supplies from doctors who are afraid to have their DEA/(UK equiv) license pulled.
At £1 a breath, a heroin habit is not a cheap habit unless you are a rich rock star.
The substance itself is quite cheap. The problem is the prohibition and its enforcement, which makes it extremely expensive (and hugely profitable for the dealers).
Not to mention that it write-locks the file you're viewing, even though it has read the whole thing into memory. It gets tirng having to close/pdflatex/open all time instead of just refresh. Imagine, for example, if your browser did that while you were working on a web page.
Of course this isn't ideal, but it can allow their reps to get in while they work on a permanent solution. Isn't that what is important from a business perspective? I doubt this one extra click they have to go through would significantly impact sales (or at least much less than people not being able to get in at all). Sure, it's a problem and should be worked on and resolved, but there's no reason business has to come to a standstill. Sometimes people don't seem to have common sense, or perhaps they just like to complain to the media.
This reminds me of the copyright whiners who complain and threaten lawsuits about search engine caching, instead of just editing their robots.txt.
It would be nice if they had a category for math and science, starting with the basics of math and building up. That is an interesting encoding problem in itself, to communicate that information independent of human context. For a start, a sequence of prime numbers might provide a clue that there is mathematical content in the information. Then, mathematics starting from axioms could be transmitted, (idealistically) building up to the general significant areas of modern mathematics. Imagine the reverse: supposed we received an alien transmission encoding proofs of outstanding Millenium prizes (P=NP, etc.) and much, much more. How could the alien communicate it to us, given that the alien would have zero knowledge of anything human?
I don't know the best format for presenting mathematical knowledge starting from a void, but the simplest language I know of that can encode all of modern mathematics directly along with rigorous proofs, is probably metamath. A 300-line program can verify its proofs (unlike about 3000 lines for other proof languages). I believe an intelligent human looking at its symbol strings in isolation, starting from the beginning, could probably figure out the encoding eventually, and presumably an intelligent alien could too. I think this would even be the case if you obfuscated all of its tokens with meaningless symbols - that is an important test. If I had a choice of one thing to transmit, it might be metamath's set theory database, probably with the human comments stripped out. (There are simpler universal languages such as SK combinatory logic, but they are not practical for expressing deep math theorems beyond a certain point.)
Similarly, it would be interesting to try to communicate physics from the ground up, starting with the axioms for what we know, and even eventually building up to chemistry and even biology. That might be a daunting and hopeless task, I don't know, but the problem of how to encode it is intriguing. Presumably math would come first, and physics would add its axioms and build on it. Or something like that.
Yes, the video should be viewed in the context of the final image it reconstructs. Once you see the final image - shown on the article page for the 99% of readers who clicked on the video but didn't RTFA (a hyperlink labeled "video" being the /. equivalent of "ooh, shiny
button") - it is pretty damn impressive that the information can be
extracted from such "crude"-looking stroking. Although it's somewhat
eerie that the original sculpture looks vaguely "female", whereas the
reconstructed image looks vaguely "male". Also, the video was painful
to look at - I grimaced at the thought of that thing poking me in the
eye...
I had never heard this anecdotal evidence. Perhaps if I had, the problem wouldn't have happened, because I would so strongly believe that it couldn't? Mind over body can be mysterious...
(For the uninformed, consult Wikipedia. For a very precise breakdown of these axioms translated to primitve symbols - Wikipedia still includes some higher-level defined symbols that Wildberger objects to because he can't seem to understand them - see the metamath version. In other words, there is nothing fuzzy or ambiguous about these axioms.)
His set theory rant created quite a furor on Usenet, here and here.
It won't be billions of years, it will be in 1999 when there will be a nuclear explosion on the far side of the moon. Then it will travel throughout the galaxy, on the way picking up a hot alien called Maya as its science advisor.
In your earlier post you say you've sold 10 copies total. In this post you say, "during my last week I made roughly half of my sales through Google AdWords, at the cost of roughly $10-15 per sale depending on the campaign" which sounds like you're selling many copies per week. I'm confused. So you've only been selling it for a couple of weeks, with 10 copies total, and already multiple cracker groups have independently "broken my just-enough-to-keep-honest-men-honest registration scheme"? And these other cracker groups are also selling your cracked program (presumably for less) since you have to bid against them "on my own program name as an AdWords keyword"? I can't pin it down, but something just doesn't seem right about your story. What is the name of the program you are selling?
Would someome please mod parent up? Finally someone asks an intelligent question. The abstract of the article in question say "HF" and nothing about GPS. In fact, GPS uses 1.5 GHz, which is UHF, not HF (2.3 to 26 MHz). UHF does not bounce off the atmosphere (or does so only under extremely rare conditions), which is why TV stations are ordinarily limited to line-of-sight, unlike shortwave radio. The whole "GPS" aspect appears to have been invented by the news reporter for sensationalism.
Funny selection of programs; I don't see rsync on the list. From the article: DHS wants to reinforce the quality of open-source programs supporting the U.S. infrastructure. So, XMMS (an MP3 player) is more important to the U.S. infrastructure than rsync?
You're probably thinking of the 1999 Darwin Award for a sailor who was supposed killed while measuring his skin resistance with a Simpson 260 meter. This is supposedly from a "US Navy safety publication", but there is no further info to be found, and it seems this may have originally been invented as a humorous story. Not only that, it wasn't even the 9-v battery directly, but via the current-limited meter probes that measure resistance. What is the guy's name? What is this safety publication? Why aren't there dire warnings on 9v batteries by mfrs terrified of liability suits? I call BS.
A person's heart can be stopped with as little as 20mA. The resistance of a person is almost exclusively due to the skin.
Right, but the current of 10 or 20ma (?) from a phone line will be more or less evenly distributed throughout the entire chest cavity, not focused exclusively on the heart.
All in all, I won't say that an electrocution from a phone line or even a 9-v battery is theoretically impossible under optimal conditions, but I haven't been able to find a single confirmed incident of either.
So what are you trying to say? That they should have set them to a safer 45V (or whatever) and scrapped the entire telephone infrastructure?
Of course regs are about compromise. Everything in life involves some small amount of risk, otherwise crossing the street or buying a bed elevated more than 1 inch above the floor would be illegal. You temper regs with common sense (or should; one could argue that's become rarer these days when fingernail clippers are confiscated at airports and kids are expelled from school for possessing an aspirin).
BTW I have never heard of anyone dying from the 48V of a phone system. Has anyone? I suppose it's theoretically possible if the current passes just the right way through the heart, but I've been shocked a number of times by a phone line without ill effects. I don't even feel it when holding the wires directly; if I touch them together then release, there is a small spark, and the inductive kickback from the relay in the exchange produces a shock. DC requires more voltage than AC to produce a shock. And except for ringing current, the short-circuit phone line current is limited to a few mA - enough to cause heart fibrillation in the worst case, I think, but I've never heard of it. I've been shocked by a phone wire from one hand to another presumably through my chest and survived (although I try to avoid that of course).
ClearType has some serious problems with smaller fonts. I like to use Andale Mono 8 pt. for text editing because I can fit a lot a characters on the screen. I have tweaked and tuned ClearType with about every possible setting, and I still cannot distinguish a comma and a period in Andale Mono 8 pt. So for me it is not only useless, it is worse than useless. With individual crisp pixels, distinguishing a comma and period is easy with that font. (Yes, I have an LCD, not a CRT.)
Well, I wouldn't call it a total loss, since presumably it enhanced your reputation. Being selected by PC Magazine as one of the top 5 is quite an honor and a real gem to add to your resume. Heck, I might write a program for free (i.e. with no expectation of donations) if I could achieve that. In the long run that might be worth more than a few hundreds or even thousands in donations in terms of the impression you make on potential employers for negotiating salary, etc. Also, have you considered open-sourcing it for enhancement/porting by others, since apparently there's no economic incentive to keep it closed source (assuming it is, like most freeware)? That way your contribution can live on forever, beyond the life of the current OS it happens to run on.
So here's what I would like, although the market is probably too small to justify. Or maybe it exists and I'm not aware of it.
The smallest, lightest device possible with (1) >=128M RAM, (2) several GB disk or maybe no disk and just a USB port for a thumbdrive, (3) >=250MHz CPU, (3) long long battery life, (4) a screen sufficient to display a bash shell, (5) runs Linux, (6) a small keyboard that is just large enough for comfortable touch-typing.
It would be somewhat like a glorified PDA, but with a somewhat larger screen that's easy to read and a built-in keyboard that's large enough to touch-type on. In a nutshell, a little VT220 with a built-in computer. Hopefully cheaper than a laptop.
The guiding principle of every company ever (including Microsoft) is to maximize profit. For most companies, this is not same as maximizing revenue, because their products are physical objects that typically require a significant amount of labor and materials to produce. They could maximize revenue by selling at a loss, since everyone would flock to them instead of their competitors, but they would eventually go out of business. In the long term, that is certainly not in the shareholders' best interest.
A key difference in Microsoft's case is that their products cost essentially nothing to produce. So once their R&D costs are recouped, it is truly a case of revenues = profits. All that counts is maximizing price times units sold.
that middle class is very important to any economy. Costco's CEO [reclaimdemocracy.org], who earns 200K a year, gets this. Wal-mart does not.
Are you saying that a CEO who pays himself modestly "gets it", whereas Walmart's CEO, because he is paid $5M a year does not? I don't know how much stock Walmart's CEO has - I don't think it's much compared to the Waltons - but Costco's CEO (Him Sinegal) owns $120 million of stock, so his salary is more or less a token. If he paid himself nothing it would barely make a dent in his life.
I'm not saying he should be paid less or more - that's not my business - but things should be put in perspective. What about Google's CEO, who pays himself $1 a year? (There is something annoyingly arrogant about that, but I won't go there.)
My own guess is that the $200k salary is as much to make a statement than anything else. It sets a kind of imaginary "upper limit" standard for what any employee should be worth. As a result, it is easier to keep salaries in general suppressed, say to 1/5 the CEO's on average. Keeping up this kind of perception probably has a far greater impact on Sinegal's net worth than would increasing his salary to $500K. In fact doing latter might end up making him poorer by raising the bar for everyone else.
I am also reminded of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, where (many years ago) the highest paid employee, including themselves, was paid no more than 5 times the lowest paid employee. And, of course, they paid themselves modestly. This had an incredible public relations benefit, where they were hailed as these great enlightened egalitarian leaders in the press. Never mind that by keeping the average employee's salary suppressed, it made them far richer, since after all they owned the company.
Even though my office is messy, to a large extent I know where things are. I'm not denying that things sometimes get lost, but I do know that if a well-meaning person straightens up and organizes my office when I'm away, when I return I will experience a sense of panic and become lost for days trying to find things. The point is that there is a subtle order to the mess, that makes sense only to me. Sure, it's not optimal. But on a computer, there are other ways to search anyway if you've "lost" something in the piles - those will not go away with this metaphor. The idea is that this metaphor can complement existing ways to organize things, not replace them.
I wonder what the software would end up doing with this: M.C. Escher's Waterfall. Would the program self-destruct like that robot in Star Trek?
How I am to know that 10 years from now my archived files won't be permanently lost because the closed-source SureCrypt no longer runs on the then-current Windows? This is one of several reasons I wouldn't touch a closed-source encryption program with a 10-foot pole. (Other reasons include no assurance of encryption strength and no assurance that there isn't a backdoor key. Plus it won't run on Linux, and afaik has no command-line interface for scripting even on Windows.)
Uh, sorry to be pedantic, but I think by "the electron flow around a trace" you mean the electromagnetic field around the trace. Electrons themselves never leave a printed circuit trace, i.e. the copper cladding "wire," but instead travel inside of it (or on its surface at high frequencies, resulting in "skin effect"). It sounds like they were modeling the transmission-line and crosstalk characteristics of the PC board.
And, sure enough: from Google, "carrier grade Linux" - 114000 hits, "carrier grade Windows" - 17 hits (but still, not 0). The top Windows hit is from 1998: "a Microsoft white paper available at SUPERCOMM '98 will discuss carrier-grade Windows NT Server-based systems." Well, at least they talked about it, you gotta give them credit for that. Haven't heard much about it since, though.
Perhaps it's a matter of opinion, but I'd hardly call Debian stable (plus security updates, of course) a "moving target". Isn't the real reason that LSB requires RPM? (Not wanting to start a flame war, the greatest benefit I found when I switched from R.H. to Debian was no longer having to use RPM. But that's just my personal preference, I guess.) In fact a search leads us to Red Hat package manager for LSB package building which says, "This is a version of rpm built to create rpm v3 packages as used in the Linux Standards Base. You should need this package only if you are developing LSB packages; you do not need it to install or use LSB packages on Debian."
[Been there (MIT), seen that. Some of the most amazing projects were done by students who never completed their studies. Of course, many of them went on to be entrepreneurial millionaires, while the rest of us became 9-5 drones...]