1) There are only fixed costs associated with online delivery, and they are very low. After you reach your first reader, whether you reach your 2nd reader or your 2nd billion readers, your costs never change. The fixed costs of print (presses, pressmen, plants, etc.) are much greater than online production.
You need more than a cable modem to deliver to the Wall Street Journal, and as you reach more people you eventually need more servers which cost more electricity, and unles you host your own data center, cost you more a month. Its not quite at the point where each hit adds money to your costs, but there are relative costs per hit.
I have yet to understand why anyone ever wants to use the internal messaging on websites rather than email. Having to waste my time logging into a large number of websites in order to read and reply to messages instead of them all landing in my inbox is crazyness...
When I was in high school (Class of 99) and had AOL, many of my friends had AOL accounts and Juno accounts. I was mocked for having a hotmail account and trying to get my friends to do the same.
I really didn't see the point to juno accounts other than "everybody else was doing it". I remember AOL having a dial up, download mail, then sign off option. There was no web option for juno at the time so if you were downloading your juno email, you had to sign off of AOL and dial up with Juno.
Good points. This summer, a number of reactors in various countries had to be throttled back or shut down because of the heat load they were imposing on the rivers they were using to dump their waste heat into.
Use the heat for other things and the amount you have to dump goes down.
The problem is you have to get rid of the heat fast enough. Also, if your using steam to conduct the heat, your still drawing heat from rivers, and when the steam cools to water, you still have to dump the how water back somewhere like a river. The other option is to release all this steam into the atmosphere, which would drain the river, and probably cause cause greater environmental change. Plus you might accidentally create a wetland that you would be forced to sustain.
Half the fun of interacting with a dingo is getting accepted as a pack member. Even if your the type of person that can get a typical domesticated dog to listen to you in a few hours, a dingo will provide a nice challenge to you.
What you say is directly comparable to the internal combustion engine, say. It makes a lot of sense (and has done so for a lonnnnnng time now) not to use gasoline and to instead work on alternative engine technologies, compressed air, hydrogen, ethanol, and so forth.. but these things are still sideline projects.
Putting aside wars, and peak oil, and the envirorment gas is currently the best way to get an internal combustion engine from point a to b except for perhaps diesel. Diesel trades effeciency for acceleration. Ethanol has less hydrocarbons on a chain so gas will always outperform it unless we find a different exothermic reaction for it.
Hydrogen holds promise, but that research is probably going to come out of an independent party. I'd much rather see a non car manufacturer create a hydrogen powered V8 (if its a renewable clean fuel source there is no reason I can't be wasteful and drive a car that faster than I need it to be), and sell it to GM, Ford, Crystler, Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Toyota, and everyone else.
With so many other options for low cost linux based laptops coming up, how many would lap up the XOs? Yeah some geeks & some philanthropists... the tech loving & God fearing maybe... but will it sell like the Dells?
I think their going for the philanthropist geeks. If they sell a thousand at this price they can move towards lowering the price.
Do they say how much of the money is shipping to the third world country? I would think if they picked one Costal City for the initial recipients, it would be cheap to ship the laptops via ship and have a local volunteer or two distribute them to the children.
nazi == National Socialist (state control of industry) - them and liberals the same thing.
Laissez faire capitalism is another animal altogether.
Slashdot moderates us folks into oblivion.
Nazi's were Facists. They hated communism so much that what they became in practice was very similar to what communists became in practice.
State IDs are on the verge of being irrelelvant because the states are starting to issue them to non-citizens. There must be a way to discriminate between citizen and non-citizen for many essential foundations of any sovereign society such as voting. There are only two reasons I can imagine why the Democrats want to simultaneously prohibit Federal ID while destroying State ID integrity:
1) Dissolve US sovereignty
2) Weaken State sovereignty and strengthen Federal sovereignty
3) Contrariansm for the sake of contrarianism
4) Exacerbating the problem so they can "solve" it if they gain control of the Federal government
5) Illegals tend to vote democratic.
The Patriot Act gets a lot of negative comments here on Slashdot but some aspects of it are really, really good. For example, it's a lot easier for the Police to quickly determine if a person has an outstanding warrant in another state. I've personally seen how it allows the Police and credit card companies track use of stolen cards in real time and catch the thieves in the process of using the stolen cards within 30 minutes of the theft. That kind of integrated data couldn't happen without some form of co-operation.
The problem is the patriot act is very large. Its like saying you agree wholeheartedly with the constitution. I'm a big fan of it, but I would like a line item veto amendment and a repeal of the income tax amendment. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad.
Selling out is the American way! It's going to happen to Slashdot eventually. For proof, look at the great rock band the Who. First, they're bathing in baked beans on the cover of a record, and next their tunes are being hacked up for the opening music on three different CSI TV shows. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing is more American than making a buck.
There was no compromise of principals there. They sold the rights to existing back catalog material.
It seems that NOWHERE in corporate America does any company trust it's employees (at least the male ones) to not steal the paper towels out of the mens room. The dispenser is ALWAYS locked up !
It really comes down to the fact that paper towel technology has reached the point that the right balance of security and usability has been achieved. In IT we have to pick an extreme.
It's fair enough in some respects; their job isn't to maintain websites, it's more mine. But there are some clients who e-mail me things to post to a CMS where they themselves can post.
That being said, you can now hire drupal experts as opposed to programmers to do day to day maintenance. I would expect those to come cheaper and be more interested and suited to the tasks of good aesthetic design.
No, it's not just an issue of one error. It's an intrinsic flaw in the concept of veropedia.
How do you determine whether an article is accurate or not? You can't practically fact-check for every article you read, and if you could, then you would go to the primary sources to begin with and never mind an encyclopedia. So fundamentally, it boils down to trust. In a traditional encyclopedia, you trust the knowledge of experts. In wikipedia, you trust the knowledge of the mob. In veropedia, you have neither. Once an article is imported from wiki to vero, it is deemed "stable" and you don't have constant feedback correcting its mistakes as you would in a regular wikipedia article. Whatever mistakes slip through remain.
So quote the FAQ:
So is this an expert-driven project, like Citizendium?
Not at all. Our material is written by Wikipedia contributors. The role of experts and academics will be to check it and, ideally, approve it. Their comments will be given back to our contributors to incorporate back into the articles to make them even better. We provide a meta-layer for Wikipedia, or in simpler terms, if you think of Wikipedia as a diamond mine, we think of ourselves as jewelers who provide a finished product to the public. We think of this as true collaboration.
What if I find a mistake on Veropedia?
Please let us know! Send us an email, and we will do our best to correct it as quickly as possible. This includes any instances of non-free use of media that have managed to make their way into our site as we were building it.
So articles that qualify have to be verified by an expert, and they have a feedback mechanism for errors found. Also, you never explained how you found the issue with hydrogen.
Such a project is totally useless. Ten seconds of google search (the website was already down) led to an error: under Hydrogen, there is listed the origin "Latin: hydrogenium". Hydrogen was derived from French "hydrogene". Although the construction "hydrogenium" does exist, it's a rare (possibly obsolete?) usage that was coined in English to emphasize in certain contexts the metal-like properties of hydrogen. And oops, Wiktionary could have told them that: Wiktionary on Hydrogenium
So you found one error, based on some obscure piece of knowledge so specific, you probably either have gotten into edit wars over. Or perhaps you check every document that defines hydrogen, and find this error in most publications written for people lacking postgraduate degrees in the sciences. If my guess is correct you only prove that veriopedia is as bad as "respectable" references.
If the brush is burning and the official fire departments aren't working on it, a New York City firefighter would be a damn good backup. I think the people here are overstating the whole kernel vs. userspace dichotomy; we're not talking about a plumber trying to rewire an electrical system. The skillsets aren't that far away from each other.
I'll agree that if I lived in the area affected by the fires, and I knew a plane of New York City firefighters and volunteer firefighters from the surrounding suburbs was header here and there only brush fire training was going to be delivered to them via instructors on the plane, I would hope that the ones operating near my house were FDNY, or volunteers that were retired FDNY.
I'm sure these people are all capable of becoming good CUPS hackers, but once again you have the issues of politics and motivation. I'm sure Larry Wall or Damon Conway would be great at writing PHP PECL modules. I don't think anyone would suggest them doing such.
What a pompous tagline...."many developers, few challenges" (or however they're trying to pitch it) and then a disclaimer that they can't be bothered to work on the MAJOR printer driver issue (*cough--Lexmark--cough*) because printing takes place "in userspace"? What the hell does that even mean?
Lets just start with what the hell the drivers are in userspace means. It means they are not part of the kernel, do not use the kernel API, and kernel developers would not necessarily have the skillset to develop them. These people are about as qualified to write printer drivers as New York City firefighters are trained to handle the California Brush fires.
Now the firefighter analogy goes leads nicely into the second issue, different areas of control. Those in charge of the kernel and those in charge of CUPS (the userland tool that handles printing) are different people. There are different politics, different leaders, and different cultures. Just as a different fire department handles fires in New York City and Jersey City, different developers handle integrating drivers into the kernel and CUPS.
So yes, if thes people are all bored, and generalyl intelligent people, it might be a good idea to talk to the CUPS people, learn to write printer drivers and create a joint task force. However, that would require a lot of political work.
They were open source, and they sold up to MS. Now their code is being slowly neutered. In another year or two their really useful utilities (FileMon, RegMon, et al) will either be history or blind to accesses to 'sensitive' information.
The/. Borg icon is right on the money...
First of all they were never truly open source. They released the source code to their command line apps, but not the cool gui ones. Thats not to say the source code wasn't useful, but it was more of a learning tool than anything, and they were not fostering community development. Their apps continue to improve I'm not a full time windows admin so I haven't noticed any reduced functionality. Feel free to point out specific examples.
What we lost from sysinternals getting acquired was we no longer have an independent person dedicated to figuring out the internals of the windows kernel and core api. He lost editorial control of himself. We also lost the source to the command line utilities, but copies of it exist, so we lose potential new source code. We also lose the potential of Mark writing articles where he proves how to do odd things like run windows without lsass.exe.
Nothing scares me more than 75 year old people approving software patents.
FTA: Patent officials are looking at hiring back retirees to work on the patent backlog and at revising "duty station" requirements so the agency can expand into a nationwide workforce.
I would assume that patent officers get to retire after 20 years with half pension like most government employees.
1. The average useful OSS project is not a headless zombie with a bunch of peace-loving anarchists running around it. There's somebody that has FULL control of the project. In fact they all have better organization than all of the big companies I've ever worked for.
Not necessarily all or even most. But the ones that are any good sure do. The problem is badly run companies are able to tred water longer becasue people are in it for the money. Most small projects have small checks and balances as appropriate for their size. You submit a patch or two and if they are good, you are granted commit bits to the source control system. As the project grows process must grow. If the process hinders the project, people leave be3casue its not feeding their families.
Are you kidding? He's from Michigan, he'd go the Henry Ford route. He'll shuffle in from a long trip, see the brand new product/code they want to surprise him with, he'll proceed to destroy it and anyone that had anything to do with it. Just to show that he is still in control, that it's still his baby.
Could you provide a link to the Henry Ford story this was based on?
Um, organic as in taking it as a whole, and not only by section or phrase.
My apologies. Wiktionary lacked such definition but definition 7 of on dictionary.com had a definition that matched your usage.
However, do to the obscure usage, and ability to inflame the constitution originalists that misinterperet the word, I suggest you use different wording.
I believe this is not properly taking the entire document as an organic one.
The constitution is a living document indeed. The institution that it governs and amends it still exists, and it can be changed with the approval of the states and congress.
Even one sip will produce some level of intoxication. Although that amount is mainly topical absorption and its just a matter of the ethanol affecting the taste buds perception of the rest of the chemicals. A dram will affect a person in subtle but measurable ways.
As to whiskies, I recommend Glenmorangie (Highlands) or Lagavulin (Islay). Lagavulin, particularly, depends upon a certain tenacity to muscle past the initial "OMG, I'm drinking creosote!" reaction, but is rewarding by the second dram (IMO).
I've had Glenmorangie, a nice whisky indeed. I have a bottle at home that was aged in three different types of casks during its maturation that I am saving for a special occasion. I don't remember the brand. I shall take your other recommendations into consideration next time I purchase a bottle.
For starters Oban is not what I would suggest. It is good, but will reinforce what most people think about Scotch (that it is bog water in a bottle).
I would highly recommend one of the speyside malts to someone new to Scotch. Perhaps Aberlour 15 double cask, or Dalwhinnie 10. Then you start moving them down the hill till you get to Nam Biest.
My preferences run to Bowmore though.
-nB
I actually do drink single malt Scotch, although I mostly drink Glenfeddich 12 and Glenlivet 12 and 15. However, while I do drink those things for taste, as well as a wide variety of beers, few of which would be considered cheap. I think part of the experience is getting drunk along with the taste. Quite frankly I'm not sure I'd drink any form of alcohol without the intoxication of ethanol. It would just be weird. Part of the experience is getting intoxicated.
Slashdot Mirror
You need more than a cable modem to deliver to the Wall Street Journal, and as you reach more people you eventually need more servers which cost more electricity, and unles you host your own data center, cost you more a month. Its not quite at the point where each hit adds money to your costs, but there are relative costs per hit.
When I was in high school (Class of 99) and had AOL, many of my friends had AOL accounts and Juno accounts. I was mocked for having a hotmail account and trying to get my friends to do the same.
I really didn't see the point to juno accounts other than "everybody else was doing it". I remember AOL having a dial up, download mail, then sign off option. There was no web option for juno at the time so if you were downloading your juno email, you had to sign off of AOL and dial up with Juno.
Use the heat for other things and the amount you have to dump goes down.
The problem is you have to get rid of the heat fast enough. Also, if your using steam to conduct the heat, your still drawing heat from rivers, and when the steam cools to water, you still have to dump the how water back somewhere like a river. The other option is to release all this steam into the atmosphere, which would drain the river, and probably cause cause greater environmental change. Plus you might accidentally create a wetland that you would be forced to sustain.
Half the fun of interacting with a dingo is getting accepted as a pack member. Even if your the type of person that can get a typical domesticated dog to listen to you in a few hours, a dingo will provide a nice challenge to you.
Putting aside wars, and peak oil, and the envirorment gas is currently the best way to get an internal combustion engine from point a to b except for perhaps diesel. Diesel trades effeciency for acceleration. Ethanol has less hydrocarbons on a chain so gas will always outperform it unless we find a different exothermic reaction for it.
Hydrogen holds promise, but that research is probably going to come out of an independent party. I'd much rather see a non car manufacturer create a hydrogen powered V8 (if its a renewable clean fuel source there is no reason I can't be wasteful and drive a car that faster than I need it to be), and sell it to GM, Ford, Crystler, Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Toyota, and everyone else.
I think their going for the philanthropist geeks. If they sell a thousand at this price they can move towards lowering the price.
Do they say how much of the money is shipping to the third world country? I would think if they picked one Costal City for the initial recipients, it would be cheap to ship the laptops via ship and have a local volunteer or two distribute them to the children.
nazi == National Socialist (state control of industry) - them and liberals the same thing.
Laissez faire capitalism is another animal altogether.
Slashdot moderates us folks into oblivion.
Nazi's were Facists. They hated communism so much that what they became in practice was very similar to what communists became in practice.
1) Dissolve US sovereignty
2) Weaken State sovereignty and strengthen Federal sovereignty
3) Contrariansm for the sake of contrarianism
4) Exacerbating the problem so they can "solve" it if they gain control of the Federal government
5) Illegals tend to vote democratic.
The Patriot Act gets a lot of negative comments here on Slashdot but some aspects of it are really, really good. For example, it's a lot easier for the Police to quickly determine if a person has an outstanding warrant in another state. I've personally seen how it allows the Police and credit card companies track use of stolen cards in real time and catch the thieves in the process of using the stolen cards within 30 minutes of the theft. That kind of integrated data couldn't happen without some form of co-operation.The problem is the patriot act is very large. Its like saying you agree wholeheartedly with the constitution. I'm a big fan of it, but I would like a line item veto amendment and a repeal of the income tax amendment. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad.
There was no compromise of principals there. They sold the rights to existing back catalog material.
It really comes down to the fact that paper towel technology has reached the point that the right balance of security and usability has been achieved. In IT we have to pick an extreme.
It's fair enough in some respects; their job isn't to maintain websites, it's more mine. But there are some clients who e-mail me things to post to a CMS where they themselves can post.
That being said, you can now hire drupal experts as opposed to programmers to do day to day maintenance. I would expect those to come cheaper and be more interested and suited to the tasks of good aesthetic design.
How do you determine whether an article is accurate or not? You can't practically fact-check for every article you read, and if you could, then you would go to the primary sources to begin with and never mind an encyclopedia. So fundamentally, it boils down to trust. In a traditional encyclopedia, you trust the knowledge of experts. In wikipedia, you trust the knowledge of the mob. In veropedia, you have neither. Once an article is imported from wiki to vero, it is deemed "stable" and you don't have constant feedback correcting its mistakes as you would in a regular wikipedia article. Whatever mistakes slip through remain.
So quote the FAQ:
So is this an expert-driven project, like Citizendium?Not at all. Our material is written by Wikipedia contributors. The role of experts and academics will be to check it and, ideally, approve it. Their comments will be given back to our contributors to incorporate back into the articles to make them even better. We provide a meta-layer for Wikipedia, or in simpler terms, if you think of Wikipedia as a diamond mine, we think of ourselves as jewelers who provide a finished product to the public. We think of this as true collaboration.
What if I find a mistake on Veropedia?Please let us know! Send us an email, and we will do our best to correct it as quickly as possible. This includes any instances of non-free use of media that have managed to make their way into our site as we were building it.
So articles that qualify have to be verified by an expert, and they have a feedback mechanism for errors found. Also, you never explained how you found the issue with hydrogen.
So you found one error, based on some obscure piece of knowledge so specific, you probably either have gotten into edit wars over. Or perhaps you check every document that defines hydrogen, and find this error in most publications written for people lacking postgraduate degrees in the sciences. If my guess is correct you only prove that veriopedia is as bad as "respectable" references.
I'll agree that if I lived in the area affected by the fires, and I knew a plane of New York City firefighters and volunteer firefighters from the surrounding suburbs was header here and there only brush fire training was going to be delivered to them via instructors on the plane, I would hope that the ones operating near my house were FDNY, or volunteers that were retired FDNY.
I'm sure these people are all capable of becoming good CUPS hackers, but once again you have the issues of politics and motivation. I'm sure Larry Wall or Damon Conway would be great at writing PHP PECL modules. I don't think anyone would suggest them doing such.
Lets just start with what the hell the drivers are in userspace means. It means they are not part of the kernel, do not use the kernel API, and kernel developers would not necessarily have the skillset to develop them. These people are about as qualified to write printer drivers as New York City firefighters are trained to handle the California Brush fires.
Now the firefighter analogy goes leads nicely into the second issue, different areas of control. Those in charge of the kernel and those in charge of CUPS (the userland tool that handles printing) are different people. There are different politics, different leaders, and different cultures. Just as a different fire department handles fires in New York City and Jersey City, different developers handle integrating drivers into the kernel and CUPS.
So yes, if thes people are all bored, and generalyl intelligent people, it might be a good idea to talk to the CUPS people, learn to write printer drivers and create a joint task force. However, that would require a lot of political work.
Thats to unbelievable a statement for me to accuse you of trolling. Go Ninja, Go Ninja, Go.
They were open source, and they sold up to MS. Now their code is being slowly neutered. In another year or two their really useful utilities (FileMon, RegMon, et al) will either be history or blind to accesses to 'sensitive' information.
The
First of all they were never truly open source. They released the source code to their command line apps, but not the cool gui ones. Thats not to say the source code wasn't useful, but it was more of a learning tool than anything, and they were not fostering community development. Their apps continue to improve I'm not a full time windows admin so I haven't noticed any reduced functionality. Feel free to point out specific examples.
What we lost from sysinternals getting acquired was we no longer have an independent person dedicated to figuring out the internals of the windows kernel and core api. He lost editorial control of himself. We also lost the source to the command line utilities, but copies of it exist, so we lose potential new source code. We also lose the potential of Mark writing articles where he proves how to do odd things like run windows without lsass.exe.
FTA:
Patent officials are looking at hiring back retirees to work on the patent backlog and at revising "duty station" requirements so the agency can expand into a nationwide workforce.
I would assume that patent officers get to retire after 20 years with half pension like most government employees.
Methinks the US congress should impliment a traceability act to render proxies obsolete.
Yeah more government, that will fix our bad government!!
Not necessarily all or even most. But the ones that are any good sure do. The problem is badly run companies are able to tred water longer becasue people are in it for the money. Most small projects have small checks and balances as appropriate for their size. You submit a patch or two and if they are good, you are granted commit bits to the source control system. As the project grows process must grow. If the process hinders the project, people leave be3casue its not feeding their families.
Could you provide a link to the Henry Ford story this was based on?
My apologies. Wiktionary lacked such definition but definition 7 of on dictionary.com had a definition that matched your usage.
However, do to the obscure usage, and ability to inflame the constitution originalists that misinterperet the word, I suggest you use different wording.
The constitution is a living document indeed. The institution that it governs and amends it still exists, and it can be changed with the approval of the states and congress.
I don't drink to the point of impairment, either.
Even one sip will produce some level of intoxication. Although that amount is mainly topical absorption and its just a matter of the ethanol affecting the taste buds perception of the rest of the chemicals. A dram will affect a person in subtle but measurable ways.
As to whiskies, I recommend Glenmorangie (Highlands) or Lagavulin (Islay). Lagavulin, particularly, depends upon a certain tenacity to muscle past the initial "OMG, I'm drinking creosote!" reaction, but is rewarding by the second dram (IMO).
I've had Glenmorangie, a nice whisky indeed. I have a bottle at home that was aged in three different types of casks during its maturation that I am saving for a special occasion. I don't remember the brand. I shall take your other recommendations into consideration next time I purchase a bottle.
I would highly recommend one of the speyside malts to someone new to Scotch. Perhaps Aberlour 15 double cask, or Dalwhinnie 10. Then you start moving them down the hill till you get to Nam Biest.
My preferences run to Bowmore though.
-nB
I actually do drink single malt Scotch, although I mostly drink Glenfeddich 12 and Glenlivet 12 and 15. However, while I do drink those things for taste, as well as a wide variety of beers, few of which would be considered cheap. I think part of the experience is getting drunk along with the taste. Quite frankly I'm not sure I'd drink any form of alcohol without the intoxication of ethanol. It would just be weird. Part of the experience is getting intoxicated.