Re:they say cut back, we say FIGHT BACK!
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1
"Compaq and HP merging is like Kia and Saab merging."
Not really. Neither Saab nor Kia are independent. Saab is owned by GM, Kia by Hyundai (and 7% by Mazda, which is 33% owned by Ford). So HP/Compaq is more akin to GM/Ford.:-)
I find it hard to believe anyone could be concerned about or loyal to HP or Compaq's PC/Intel server operations. They're both commodity producers. I'm not in IT, but in my limited experience they both sometimes produce ok hardware, sometimes produce lemons. If they both disappear tomorrow, there will be plenty of commodity PC manufacturers/marketers (I don't know to what extent either actually manufactures PC hardware) remaining.
I actually think the merger could work, if the opportunity is taken to drop/sell all reduntant and (especially) nonperforming units. Some of the financial press has been telling HP to drop its PC operation for awhile. Perhaps they'll do this now that they have the Compaq PC operation.
All HP really needs to buy now are the remains of slashdot's owner.:-)
Re:The only chance the industry has against micros
on
Linux Office Suites
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· Score: 1
Wouldn't that require a port of KDE to Windows?... google... Nevermind, KDE on Cygwin is already underway. Kool.:-)
Star/OpenOffice is still the best near-term shot at displacing some MSOffice installations.
Re:The only chance the industry has against micros
on
Linux Office Suites
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· Score: 1
StarOffice has one key advantage over KOffice/Gnome Office/Siag Office: StarOffice runs on Windows. None of the others have any hope of deployment on the 90%+ installed base that runs Windows.
Too bad some dumb VC didn't give SourceGear umpteen millions to complete AbiSuite. AbiWord (now part of Gnome Office AFAIK) is quite nice, and runs on just about everywhere a semi-modern GUI is available.
There's an acute shortage of science and math teachers and an oversupply of other teachers. The unions constantly portray the situation incorrectly -- an overall shortage of teachers, brought on by substandard pay -- for obvious reasons.
The Wall Street Journal had an article last week about a superb maths teacher in NYC (he was previously coach for the Romanian national math team) who is thinking about leaving (much to the chagrin of students at his schools) because with his skills he can easily make much more. Same article quoted figures for one school district. I don't remember the exact figures or where the district was (I think a big east coast city), but the ration of applicants/open positions for math/science teachers was tiny, for English teachers that ratio was huge. Again, I don't remember the numbers, but my impression was that it would be easier to get into an ivy league school than to get an English teaching job in that school district.
What this says to me is that science/math teachers are underpaid, and other teachers are possibly overpaid. Unfortunately the teacher unions will never agree to allow differential pay. They won't even contemplate merit pay. It's just how long you've been in the system. What kind of results do you expect?
I don't and won't have kids, but if I did I would strongly consider homeschooling.
For files that are useful in many places (like those traded on gnutella and the like), metadata that is not only external to the file, but external to the filesystem/machine will be useful. What files do you trust, what files are "best", what is this file I have, really?
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. All programs using features of this software must have a name beginning with Gnu.
4. Neither the name of the Free Software Foundation nor the names of
its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS''
AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS
BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY,
OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF
SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
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Portland is at the forefront of passing laws and creating new jurisdictions that supposedly force smart growth. People cite Portland as an example of the "correct" way of doing things because people naively think that laws and the like have their intended consequences.
If cities are going to emulate Portland, they should make a lot of noise about density, then sprawl like crazy anyway. Portland has about 3.9k people per square mile. Compare to Seattle (6.7k), Los Angeles (7.9k) or San Francisco (16.6k). Portland isn't even that much denser than Phoenix (2.8k), for crying out loud! See a complete list of densitites for all US cities of with 50k or greater population.
Silicon Valley and Boston's tech roots go back many decades. State and local taxes weren't as much of an issue then -- state and local government has grown much faster than the federal government.
Every city wants to think of itself as a new high-tech mecca, though the two that arguably have the strongest qualifications, Austin and Seattle, each have an excellent university and no state income tax. I don't know whether there's a connection, but it would be an interesting question to study.
Another interesting coincidence: both Silicon Valley and Boston have relative tax havens in their backyards -- Nevada and New Hampshire respectively.
Tech/academic concentration of Silicon Valley or Boston
Low housing costs of Pittsburgh
Weather of San Diego (of much less importance)
I've been in San Francisco for 8 years, which I guess is sort of a compromise on all of the above. Nearly moved to Austin instead of SF out of school, which would've been a different compromise on all of the above.
When my current gig is up (hopefully a long time) I hope to move out of the US.
How should a city handle growth? Build lots of highrises. Like Hong Kong or Vancouver. NIMBYs can go elsewhere.
Re:Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading
on
PDF Alternatives?
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· Score: 1
All of the first category are impossible for a web publisher to address. How many people use something other than Acrobat to read PDFs? Change program defaults? Use an alternative that supports incremental downloading?
In a vacuum, you're right, none of these are deficiencies of the file format itself. Web publishers don't live in a vacuum. If they did, PDF's market dominance wouldn't be a factor either.
Given these realities, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that most sites that publish PDF could improve usability by publishing their documents as HTML instead.
The vast majority of PDFs on the web shouldn't be. The same would go for any alternative print-perfect format. Jakob Nielsen says it well in Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading:
"PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed. But that is all it's good for. No matter how tempting it might be, you should never use PDF for content that you expect users to read online.
"Forcing users to browse PDF documents makes your website's usability about 300% worse relative to HTML pages."
There's some pretty well-informed discussion of GAC happening on the extropians mailing list. GAC's creator posted an interesting comment on the discussion, which is largely about whether GAC is really AI and/or useful. I think McKinstry's (GAC creator) message does a good job of describing what GAC actually is. One excerpt: "The primary purpose of GAC is to build a fitness test for humanness in a
binary response domain. This will in the future allow GAC to babysit a truly
evolving artificial consciousness, rewarding and punishing it as needed at
machine speeds."
I'm a long time Debian user, using RedHat for the first time because that's what a certain managed hosting facility provides. Manually taking care of dependencies is a huge PITA. I'm left wondering, "why would anyone use RedHat"? I guess because lots of people already do.
Anyway, is it possible to use apt or urpmi with RH6.2 and/or RH7.x? Pointers very much appreciated. Even google isn't very good about getting useful search results involving super-common terms like redhat, apt, rpm... Thanks!
Have you tried gnutella recently? It was nearly unusable for a long time, but for the last several months its been getting better and better. I haven't connected in a long time and seen less available than the most ever available on a single Napster server, and downloads have about the same rate of success for me on either network. The clients are also vastly improved. Try out Gnucleus or Bearshare (Windows) or Limewire (Java) or gnut (unix command line). You'll be pleasantly surprised.
For more in-depth discussion of these issues, check out InfoAnarchy. Slyway is a good guide to what's currently the best way to obtain music, movies, and software.
Coding at 1am perhaps. You don't need to eat just because you're awake. Try limiting yourself to three meals a day. You'll quickly find that your body adjusts -- you won't be having intense hunger pangs at 1am, and you'll feel much better the whole day. It will help to cut back on sugar. See Rick Mendosa's glycemic index pages.
Some may be interested in maximizing health and longevity, perhaps at the expense of looking "buff". Check out calorie restriction.
Programming Ruby is Free Documentation
on
Programming Ruby
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· Score: 1
Yes, Ruby is a cool language. The coolest thing about Programming Ruby the book is that it's libre, free as in free speech, even according to the Free Software Foundation.
John Udell once described Digital Creations' Zope as Python's killer app, the application that was going to have everyone scrambling to learn Python. It hasn't proved to be much of a killer though. Web designers looking for solutions to their documentation management problems routinely dismiss it as overkill, developers as underkill, or too hobbling.
I haven't taken much more than a cursory look at Zope (several times over the last couple years), though that's about the impression I got: too much complication for too little gain.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Neither Saab nor Kia are independent. Saab is owned by GM, Kia by Hyundai (and 7% by Mazda, which is 33% owned by Ford). So HP/Compaq is more akin to GM/Ford. :-)
I find it hard to believe anyone could be concerned about or loyal to HP or Compaq's PC/Intel server operations. They're both commodity producers. I'm not in IT, but in my limited experience they both sometimes produce ok hardware, sometimes produce lemons. If they both disappear tomorrow, there will be plenty of commodity PC manufacturers/marketers (I don't know to what extent either actually manufactures PC hardware) remaining.
I actually think the merger could work, if the opportunity is taken to drop/sell all reduntant and (especially) nonperforming units. Some of the financial press has been telling HP to drop its PC operation for awhile. Perhaps they'll do this now that they have the Compaq PC operation.
All HP really needs to buy now are the remains of slashdot's owner. :-)
Star/OpenOffice is still the best near-term shot at displacing some MSOffice installations.
Too bad some dumb VC didn't give SourceGear umpteen millions to complete AbiSuite. AbiWord (now part of Gnome Office AFAIK) is quite nice, and runs on just about everywhere a semi-modern GUI is available.
The Wall Street Journal had an article last week about a superb maths teacher in NYC (he was previously coach for the Romanian national math team) who is thinking about leaving (much to the chagrin of students at his schools) because with his skills he can easily make much more. Same article quoted figures for one school district. I don't remember the exact figures or where the district was (I think a big east coast city), but the ration of applicants/open positions for math/science teachers was tiny, for English teachers that ratio was huge. Again, I don't remember the numbers, but my impression was that it would be easier to get into an ivy league school than to get an English teaching job in that school district.
What this says to me is that science/math teachers are underpaid, and other teachers are possibly overpaid. Unfortunately the teacher unions will never agree to allow differential pay. They won't even contemplate merit pay. It's just how long you've been in the system. What kind of results do you expect?
I don't and won't have kids, but if I did I would strongly consider homeschooling.
I'm biased though, as I'm working on a global metadata repository.
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, August 2001
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. All programs using features of this software must have a name beginning
with Gnu.
4. Neither the name of the Free Software Foundation nor the names of
its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS''
AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS
BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY,
OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF
SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS
INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN
CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE)
ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF
THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Portland is at the forefront of passing laws and creating new jurisdictions that supposedly force smart growth. People cite Portland as an example of the "correct" way of doing things because people naively think that laws and the like have their intended consequences.
If cities are going to emulate Portland, they should make a lot of noise about density, then sprawl like crazy anyway. Portland has about 3.9k people per square mile. Compare to Seattle (6.7k), Los Angeles (7.9k) or San Francisco (16.6k). Portland isn't even that much denser than Phoenix (2.8k), for crying out loud! See a complete list of densitites for all US cities of with 50k or greater population.
Every city wants to think of itself as a new high-tech mecca, though the two that arguably have the strongest qualifications, Austin and Seattle, each have an excellent university and no state income tax. I don't know whether there's a connection, but it would be an interesting question to study.
Another interesting coincidence: both Silicon Valley and Boston have relative tax havens in their backyards -- Nevada and New Hampshire respectively.
Atlanta grew much faster than Silicon Valley in the 90s. See http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t3/ta b05.txt. The SF bay area attracted more VC money and more importantly, failed to build new housing.
- Scale/density/diversity of NYC
- Low taxes/regulation of Las Vegas or Houston
- Tech/academic concentration of Silicon Valley or Boston
- Low housing costs of Pittsburgh
- Weather of San Diego (of much less importance)
I've been in San Francisco for 8 years, which I guess is sort of a compromise on all of the above. Nearly moved to Austin instead of SF out of school, which would've been a different compromise on all of the above.When my current gig is up (hopefully a long time) I hope to move out of the US.
How should a city handle growth? Build lots of highrises. Like Hong Kong or Vancouver. NIMBYs can go elsewhere.
In a vacuum, you're right, none of these are deficiencies of the file format itself. Web publishers don't live in a vacuum. If they did, PDF's market dominance wouldn't be a factor either.
Given these realities, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that most sites that publish PDF could improve usability by publishing their documents as HTML instead.
Really ugly Replica document I created in 1993.
There's some pretty well-informed discussion of GAC happening on the extropians mailing list. GAC's creator posted an interesting comment on the discussion, which is largely about whether GAC is really AI and/or useful. I think McKinstry's (GAC creator) message does a good job of describing what GAC actually is. One excerpt: "The primary purpose of GAC is to build a fitness test for humanness in a binary response domain. This will in the future allow GAC to babysit a truly evolving artificial consciousness, rewarding and punishing it as needed at machine speeds."
I know about up2date. I don't want to register with or pay RH for this service. So my question remains: can apt or urpmi be used with RH?
Anyway, is it possible to use apt or urpmi with RH6.2 and/or RH7.x? Pointers very much appreciated. Even google isn't very good about getting useful search results involving super-common terms like redhat, apt, rpm... Thanks!
For more in-depth discussion of these issues, check out InfoAnarchy. Slyway is a good guide to what's currently the best way to obtain music, movies, and software.
Wind River isns't a small company: 1.4billion market cap, 2000 employees. I bet they compensate well, including insurance.
Some may be interested in maximizing health and longevity, perhaps at the expense of looking "buff". Check out calorie restriction.
Also at http://cryptome.org/sdmi-attack.zip. Unzip into your web directory, create another mirror, a la http://gondwanaland.com/ml/sdmi-attack/sdmi-attack .htm.
Kill me. I didn't click on the links in the article, one of which points to HAL. I'm going to bed now.
I assume this is what became of HAL Computer Systems? Their SPARC64 roadmap looks out of date.