The money that dolts like you spend hiring people and setting up remote software distributions I use to grow my business.
We still have a few HP DOS 3.3 machines in our shipping department hooked to ancient Epson dot matrix printers. Why should I spend $1000 for a warehouse worker to print a bill of lading? Those machines will be replaced when they break, which is unlikely to happen soon.
The world changes and standards evolve, quite true. We adapt to new standards when it becomes economically viable.
Would it have made sense to waste $200,000 on Oracle 7 licenses in 1995 on overpriced Sun hardware when buying big RDBMS systems were all the rage? Today you can get 100% of what Oracle offered 7-8 years ago for FREE on commodity hardware.
If we did what you suggest, we would have bought Oracle in '95 for $200k and would have been paying $30-40k annually in maintainance for the software alone. We'd probaly be on our second generation of overpriced hardware too.
Most on/. are stupid college kids and 20-somethings who lack a clue and have an inflated ego.
People with big egos (even clueless people) think that they are indispensible because they can string something together with Perl or setup a linux system. They usually don't have families, and if they do, they value their jobs higher than their family.
That's why you can talk to some exploited "department manager" at Wal-Mart who is getting paid for 40 hours of work @ $9/hour to work 60 hours and week and they'll tell you how wonderful their job is and how awful unions are. If you tell someone that they are important, eventually they will believe it.
What are you going to suggest next, labor unions? Do you think that you and your buddies are entitled to be treated like human beings?
If you were a real man, you'd volunteer to work 80 hour weeks and come up with a plan to replace all of your colleagues with contract developers from India and Romania.
The more options to tax, the more taxes to raise. I'd personally prefer either a return to the excise tax model (maybe the US would actually develop industry again) or VAT. Income tax has too many loopholes and involves too much work. I had to spend nearly 10 hours preparing taxes this year!
I never understood the attitudes towards government that people in the UK have. The notion that most of your life is being filmed by some cop with a closed-circuit television network is something I find more than a little disturbing.
So do you want a government funded by VAT and excise taxes?
That's probaly a good idea -- income tax is one of the more obnoxious and intrusive taxations schemes devised.
The only problem is that there are signifigant voting blocs (old people, poor people) who vote 95% democrat and pay no taxes. You'll never see a VAT replace income tax in the US.
And when I make the mistake of employing some shit for brains sysadmin or programmer who believes that "upgrade your shit" is the fix for everything, that cretin is going to be headed back to the unemployment line real soon.
I'm afraid these guys aren't hippies, dude. Marijuana is alot bulkier and cheaper than drugs like cocaine, so the increased risk of getting caught at the border crossings makes growing in the US a better option.
To quote an article from a pro-legalization website:
"A lot of these guys don't want to be there," said Doug Babb, a recently retired Tulare County deputy. "We've talked to guys who say they're basically forced into slave labor."
The garden tenders are often violent. "These guys shoot people," said Ms. Mark, the Forest Service official. "They do not distinguish between police, hunters or campers. As far as they're concerned, everyone is a pot thief."
They have. Drug cartels have been growing alot of marijuana in national parks and forests for years. The advent of cheap GPS has fueled explosive growth in this area -- particularly since it has become somewhat more difficult to smuggle across the major border crossings lately. The FBI even found a 'geocached' supply of Al-Queda explosives and weapons in a desolate area of New Mexico after finding gps coordinates online.
Park rangers are really not suited to stop this sort of activity. Last year a family was shot at in Yoesemite National Park after stumbling upon a marijuana patch and there are sure to be more incidents between hikers and criminals.
Beta was better than VHS, MicroChannel was better than ISA.
The problem with token ring was that it was a proprietary technology hocked by IBM. If you aren't a large government or corporate entity, IBM doesn't give a shit about you.
The only problem is, after the entire new team of 75 IT people is finished making off-site backups with amanda, deleted and recreated all accounts, eliminated all Microsoft products, replaced Word with vi and excel with an abacus paid your $2.5 million insurance bill, and shipped your systems to a colo facility... all your real employees will have quit and you'll be out of cash.
The free speech argument doesn't hold water because the spammers are criminals.
Spammers illegally harvest email addresses, illegally steal computing resources from insecure servers, illegally hack servers to send email and take great pains to conceal their identity.
Everyone still has a voice on the internet -- as long as that voice isn't 12 million emails sent to millions of random people.
I should have worded my original post more accurately.
The main thing missing from the browser that I see as a loss (and you didn't address in your post) is the password/personal security manager and the preference settings.
I am also concerned about the idea of using browser extensions for adding browser extensions. I've read posts on the Mozillazine boards which seemed to indicate that extensions will be used to add features and keep the browser as light as possible. Extensions are cool, but they're currenty uninstallable and not easily deployed to machines in an intranet.
Maybe I'm overreacting to things, but the monolithic Mozilla is a really great thing, and I worry that this seemingly big shift in the project will hurt Mozilla in the long run.
The real problem with Mozilla is that they are going from one extreme to another. The current "Mozilla" is a monolithic, complex app whose performance can be less than ideal on older systems.
Now instead of simply splitting off the mail/newgroup reader from the browser, html editing and chat apps, the Mozilla team has decided to produce a mail client and a stripped-down browser missing most of the really cool features of Mozilla.
Features that are disabled by default == features that will never be used.
Give me a break. Nobody ever heard of the Firebird Database project before this issue came out. Firebird SQL is just one more esoteric open source database.
The only reason the Firebird database even exists is that a few companies that foolishly decided to write custom apps with Borland Interbase find it too expensive to switch to one of the hundreds of other databases up there.
Re:how that thought even got in your head
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
Is it that great of a leap?
Should we be creating intelligence capable of handling several orders of magnitude more data than human beings?
We cannot really control people, so is it wise to create superior intelligence?
I don't think that our intelligence works in a yes/no, 0/1 system.
The problem with the whole notion of yes/no decision trees is that they are too computationally intensive. Having worked with large prolog-based rule systems, I simply do not believe that we could function with the millions of sensory inputs our mind receives every second.
Also consider that rules set boundaries for our behaviors. But what motivates our behavior? For a computer program, it's the will of the programmers/users. For the human mind, what is it? What makes a newborn breathe, cry or know that he is hungry?
Slashdot Mirror
1. Teach six year old to program in C and ECMAScript ...
2. Hire them out as cheap labor to fortune 500 companies.
3.
4. Profit!
The money that dolts like you spend hiring people and setting up remote software distributions I use to grow my business.
We still have a few HP DOS 3.3 machines in our shipping department hooked to ancient Epson dot matrix printers. Why should I spend $1000 for a warehouse worker to print a bill of lading? Those machines will be replaced when they break, which is unlikely to happen soon.
The world changes and standards evolve, quite true. We adapt to new standards when it becomes economically viable.
Would it have made sense to waste $200,000 on Oracle 7 licenses in 1995 on overpriced Sun hardware when buying big RDBMS systems were all the rage? Today you can get 100% of what Oracle offered 7-8 years ago for FREE on commodity hardware.
If we did what you suggest, we would have bought Oracle in '95 for $200k and would have been paying $30-40k annually in maintainance for the software alone. We'd probaly be on our second generation of overpriced hardware too.
Since most people these days save nothing and live paycheck to paycheck, self-respect comes in a distant second behind money.
You can go an flip burgers, but that won't pay your $1,200 mortgage payment.
Most on /. are stupid college kids and 20-somethings who lack a clue and have an inflated ego.
People with big egos (even clueless people) think that they are indispensible because they can string something together with Perl or setup a linux system. They usually don't have families, and if they do, they value their jobs higher than their family.
That's why you can talk to some exploited "department manager" at Wal-Mart who is getting paid for 40 hours of work @ $9/hour to work 60 hours and week and they'll tell you how wonderful their job is and how awful unions are. If you tell someone that they are important, eventually they will believe it.
Depends on what you do. I still get 2-3 phonecalls a week from various recruiters looking for contract staff.
The answer is Linux!
Make sure to impress on the children that SCO is bad at an early age too!
What are you going to suggest next, labor unions? Do you think that you and your buddies are entitled to be treated like human beings?
If you were a real man, you'd volunteer to work 80 hour weeks and come up with a plan to replace all of your colleagues with contract developers from India and Romania.
The more options to tax, the more taxes to raise. I'd personally prefer either a return to the excise tax model (maybe the US would actually develop industry again) or VAT. Income tax has too many loopholes and involves too much work. I had to spend nearly 10 hours preparing taxes this year!
I never understood the attitudes towards government that people in the UK have. The notion that most of your life is being filmed by some cop with a closed-circuit television network is something I find more than a little disturbing.
The problem with foreign credit cards is rampant fraud, particularly from eastern europe and asia.
So do you want a government funded by VAT and excise taxes?
That's probaly a good idea -- income tax is one of the more obnoxious and intrusive taxations schemes devised.
The only problem is that there are signifigant voting blocs (old people, poor people) who vote 95% democrat and pay no taxes. You'll never see a VAT replace income tax in the US.
Are you on crack?
I worked in a government agency who struggled with the obscene costs of upgrading thousands of Windows clients and servers.
Although MS was expensive, we had confidence that we would have a fully functional Windows 2000 environment two years later.
If we had switched to a massive Linux rollout, I just don't know where we would have been at the end of the day.
And when I make the mistake of employing some shit for brains sysadmin or programmer who believes that "upgrade your shit" is the fix for everything, that cretin is going to be headed back to the unemployment line real soon.
Reasonably modern versions of IE do not support png.
Plenty of commercial environments don't have the resources to update pc's.
Call them idiots, but most people could really give a shit about the computer sitting on their desk.
To quote an article from a pro-legalization website:
http://www.marijuana.com/article.php?sid=4954They have. Drug cartels have been growing alot of marijuana in national parks and forests for years. The advent of cheap GPS has fueled explosive growth in this area -- particularly since it has become somewhat more difficult to smuggle across the major border crossings lately. The FBI even found a 'geocached' supply of Al-Queda explosives and weapons in a desolate area of New Mexico after finding gps coordinates online.
Park rangers are really not suited to stop this sort of activity. Last year a family was shot at in Yoesemite National Park after stumbling upon a marijuana patch and there are sure to be more incidents between hikers and criminals.
the children will be protected from the filth & violence on tv!
Whopptie-doo.
Beta was better than VHS, MicroChannel was better than ISA.
The problem with token ring was that it was a proprietary technology hocked by IBM. If you aren't a large government or corporate entity, IBM doesn't give a shit about you.
I love that easy to read neon purple color scheme... it puts any site to shame.
You're a clever one...
The only problem is, after the entire new team of 75 IT people is finished making off-site backups with amanda, deleted and recreated all accounts, eliminated all Microsoft products, replaced Word with vi and excel with an abacus paid your $2.5 million insurance bill, and shipped your systems to a colo facility... all your real employees will have quit and you'll be out of cash.
Get a clue, fucktard.
The free speech argument doesn't hold water because the spammers are criminals.
Spammers illegally harvest email addresses, illegally steal computing resources from insecure servers, illegally hack servers to send email and take great pains to conceal their identity.
Everyone still has a voice on the internet -- as long as that voice isn't 12 million emails sent to millions of random people.
I should have worded my original post more accurately.
The main thing missing from the browser that I see as a loss (and you didn't address in your post) is the password/personal security manager and the preference settings.
I am also concerned about the idea of using browser extensions for adding browser extensions. I've read posts on the Mozillazine boards which seemed to indicate that extensions will be used to add features and keep the browser as light as possible. Extensions are cool, but they're currenty uninstallable and not easily deployed to machines in an intranet.
Maybe I'm overreacting to things, but the monolithic Mozilla is a really great thing, and I worry that this seemingly big shift in the project will hurt Mozilla in the long run.
The real problem with Mozilla is that they are going from one extreme to another. The current "Mozilla" is a monolithic, complex app whose performance can be less than ideal on older systems.
Now instead of simply splitting off the mail/newgroup reader from the browser, html editing and chat apps, the Mozilla team has decided to produce a mail client and a stripped-down browser missing most of the really cool features of Mozilla.
Features that are disabled by default == features that will never be used.
Give me a break. Nobody ever heard of the Firebird Database project before this issue came out. Firebird SQL is just one more esoteric open source database.
The only reason the Firebird database even exists is that a few companies that foolishly decided to write custom apps with Borland Interbase find it too expensive to switch to one of the hundreds of other databases up there.
Is it that great of a leap?
Should we be creating intelligence capable of handling several orders of magnitude more data than human beings?
We cannot really control people, so is it wise to create superior intelligence?
I don't think that our intelligence works in a yes/no, 0/1 system.
The problem with the whole notion of yes/no decision trees is that they are too computationally intensive. Having worked with large prolog-based rule systems, I simply do not believe that we could function with the millions of sensory inputs our mind receives every second.
Also consider that rules set boundaries for our behaviors. But what motivates our behavior? For a computer program, it's the will of the programmers/users. For the human mind, what is it? What makes a newborn breathe, cry or know that he is hungry?