The book is based on people who clearly have an odd relationship with their sexuality and pornography, it wouldn't be interesting or controversial if it was based on the general population and because of that it comes to a predetermined conclusion as the author obviously desired. It's pseudo science rather than science. It's called self selection in the statistics field. The problem comes when the ignorant or more commonly, those with an agenda use such "research" to determine the freedoms of the people.
There are different types of sugars in different proportions, depending on where it comes from. They are metabolised differently and have different effects on your body. Go ask someone who is fructose intolerant.
The sugars in coke and pepsi are typically invert sugars hydrolyzed from sucrose and cellulose, mostly glucose and fructose. Both hit your bloodstream very very quickly indeed.
Were pretty much engines jury rigged on to carriage bodies. That's approximately the state of the art for spacecraft at the moment. To make space travel as accessible as road travel, it has to become cheap.
It doesn't have to be great, it doesn't even have to be good, it only has to be good enough.
The very first internal combusion engines could barely drive a horseless carriage at 10mph just a century ago. Today, Formula 1 are capable of 220+ mph and can go round bends with 5G of lateral acceleration.
I mean, the editors bsically just categorise articles as worth posting to the main page, that could be done automatically and probably with a higher duplicate detection ratio.
Seriously. We're talking about literally a 30 year old idea. By now it should really be built into every OS sold. The default configuration for every machine put on a network should link it into the existing network queueing system that you all have running at your sites.
The dollar has lost around 20% of it's value against the Indian Rupee over the last 5 years. Americans are now 20% cheaper to employ compared to Indians than they were 5 years ago.
That trend's going to continue until it isn't worth offshoring anything anymore. In the meantime the US standard of living hasn't changed much. The Indian standard of living has increased substantially, it'll continue increasing and they'll continue getting more expensive.
China is a problem. The problem with China is that they fix their exchange rate to the dollar.
This is why all the manufacturing has headed to China, guaranteed lower costs, for as long as the exchange rate is fixed.
You say they'll just offshore to the next cheapest country, well it's not that simple, language and education are huge barriers. The Indians have the language thanks to the British Empire and they have the education, it's easy offshoring there. The Chinese have the education but not the language, offshoring service jobs there is far more difficult. Most of the other developing countries have neither.
The key will be to get the Chinese government to allow the Yuan to float on international currency markets. International pressure on China to do this is rising.
All businesses, governments, individuals are going to have to face up to this.
The Information Revolution has made sure that digital information of any sort is not a scarce resource. It can trivially be copied and distributed, therefore the inherent economic price (not to say value) is going to tend towards zero. Attempting to try to make digital information of any sort a scarce resource is doomed to failure, the ecomonics guarantee that and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a dreamer.
Software development then is a service. And that includes business analysis, software design and coding itself. Some people will do the business analysis and design themselves and ship the spec over to India to have the coding done, some will do the analysis and design and code using rapid application design systems and build it out of off the shelf components, like free software.
Fundamentally, coders are going the way of the blacksmith. They're going to have to become engineers rather than blacksmiths if they want to make a living. Those who don't, won't or can't will have to find other employment.
A shell script from 30 years ago will run on a current/bin/sh. If you sit a 70 year old unix user from 30 years ago down in front of a terminal or terminal emulator they will be right at home.
So while the binaries change, the design is the same.
The fact that the Unix command line has stood the test of time when virtually everything else has been redesigned and redesigned and redesigned is an amazing testament to the thinking which went into it.
They basically got it right.
They must have, otherwise it *would* have been redesigned or have fallen by the wayside decades ago. Decades, in IT. *Decades*. Think about it.
Sure, something may well come along which is "a better way" but I doubt it'll be MS who come up with it, they don't have a philosophy so I don't see how they could.
(Most) Unix systems have had ACLs available for a *long* time. They tend not to be used because frankly they are a *pain in the arse* to administer. The effort required to administer ACLs on a set of files exponentially increases with the numbers of files and numbers of ACLs... Unless... You manage them in a Unix permission manner. And if you're going to do that then you might as well just use unix perms.
The problem with ACLs? N^2 complexity. The more files you have the more ACLs the more complex it all gets, the more complex a system the less reliable it becomes. Unless you use them properly of course (Nobody does in real life).
The one killer feature I'd love Unix permissions to have from an ACL type permission system is groups within groups. It'd remove the linear increase in admin effort. Other than that Unix permissions are just about right in terms of security and ease of use.
Yeah, I looked at that and went with SGE (http://gridengine.sunsource.net/) at the time, mainly for political reasons. SGE gave me extra buy in from a couple of other departments. Works nicely and relatively transparently even for stuff like OpenOffice.org, Netscape and GIMP which you would normally run locally.
For fairly heavyweight apps we have the machines grouped e.g. There are a bunch of OO machines, GIMP, Mozilla machines etc. It takes advantage of shared libraries; OO is about 90Mb resident, but about 85Mb of that is shared. Along with large CPU caches and pre-loaded shared libraries there are some *huge* performance benefits to be had.
Closed source software infringes just as much as Open Source and Free software. The difference is that you can see the infringement in Free and Open Source software.
This is approximately how desktop systems should work... As standard in the daytime.
The typical user only makes use of around 1-5% of the power of their machine. That's 95% of your investment sitting doing sweet FA.
So, your OS should have network load balancing built in and when you start a process or sub process it should run on the fastest kit available.
It's very simple to tack this kind of functionality on to Unix (including Linux here). Mozix does it in a rather nicely integrated fashion, but you can add something like SGE and some wrappers to make any network of Unix boxes act as a coherent system with *very* serious horsepower, or Wattage since we're in the 21st century.
Battery technologies have been arriving at a faster and faster rate.
Lead acid - centuries. NiCd - couple of hundred years NiMH - Decades Li-ion - Just about a decade now. Next generation - Probably Li-S in a year or two.
Technologies inevitably arrive slower than demand. Fact of life. Demand says "Hey I need X" and someone goes away and makes X.
"Really the next power supply for small electronics will probably be micro fuel cells that are fueled with methanol."
Bet they won't. When you run out of methanol you can't just plug it into the mains and make more, you have to lug a bottle of the stuff around with you.
"any advancement in battery technology any (like the Li-Ion electrode materials advancement) will also be available to fuel cells".
Except that's fairly unlikely. You're talking about applying engineering solutions from one technology to another. Sure, they have a way of depositing Li to provide a very high surface area in a li-ion battery. Does that same technique apply to platinum in a fuel cell?
"I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish"
Except that money doesn't magically appear. His money came from somewhere and all those somewheres would have spent their money elsewhere making people less poor if it hadn't gone to Microsoft.
Thing is, as we've seen over the last 50 years, when you have trade barriers and subsidies in place all the aid in the world doesn't do shit.
Leasing assumes you can't find a use for obsolete kit. Plus it's a right royal pain in the arse to administer.
Well, if you design your systems correctly your kit will still be in use long after it has depreciated.
That means *don't* put the power on the desktop where it will be obsolete in 18 months. It also means make use of *all* of your computing power. It isn't difficult, there's loads of (free) software out there to help. e.g. http://gridengine.sunsource.net/ . Oh oh oh. Look! It has that "Grid" buzzword! Don't worry it's just a load balancing network queue system, been around for decades.
You can save a *bundle* by designing your network of servers & services properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, someone convince me of the economic viability of a 23,000 mile train journey. Not the technical viability, assume it can be done.
The book is based on people who clearly have an odd relationship with their sexuality and pornography, it wouldn't be interesting or controversial if it was based on the general population and because of that it comes to a predetermined conclusion as the author obviously desired. It's pseudo science rather than science. It's called self selection in the statistics field. The problem comes when the ignorant or more commonly, those with an agenda use such "research" to determine the freedoms of the people.
Insightful? Ignorant mods more like.
There are different types of sugars in different proportions, depending on where it comes from. They are metabolised differently and have different effects on your body. Go ask someone who is fructose intolerant.
The sugars in coke and pepsi are typically invert sugars hydrolyzed from sucrose and cellulose, mostly glucose and fructose. Both hit your bloodstream very very quickly indeed.
Were pretty much engines jury rigged on to carriage bodies. That's approximately the state of the art for spacecraft at the moment. To make space travel as accessible as road travel, it has to become cheap.
It doesn't have to be great, it doesn't even have to be good, it only has to be good enough.
The very first internal combusion engines could barely drive a horseless carriage at 10mph just a century ago. Today, Formula 1 are capable of 220+ mph and can go round bends with 5G of lateral acceleration.
Used for hundreds of years, medically proven to act as anti-anxiety/anti-depressant, the active components being Hypericin/Hyperforin.
I mean, the editors bsically just categorise articles as worth posting to the main page, that could be done automatically and probably with a higher duplicate detection ratio.
Seriously. We're talking about literally a 30 year old idea. By now it should really be built into every OS sold. The default configuration for every machine put on a network should link it into the existing network queueing system that you all have running at your sites.
e.g.
U SD&to=INR&amt=1&t=5y
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=
The dollar has lost around 20% of it's value against the Indian Rupee over the last 5 years. Americans are now 20% cheaper to employ compared to Indians than they were 5 years ago.
That trend's going to continue until it isn't worth offshoring anything anymore. In the meantime the US standard of living hasn't changed much. The Indian standard of living has increased substantially, it'll continue increasing and they'll continue getting more expensive.
China is a problem. The problem with China is that they fix their exchange rate to the dollar.
Compare the Chinese chart with the Indian chart:
U SD&to=CNY&amt=1&t=5y
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=
This is why all the manufacturing has headed to China, guaranteed lower costs, for as long as the exchange rate is fixed.
You say they'll just offshore to the next cheapest country, well it's not that simple, language and education are huge barriers. The Indians have the language thanks to the British Empire and they have the education, it's easy offshoring there. The Chinese have the education but not the language, offshoring service jobs there is far more difficult. Most of the other developing countries have neither.
The key will be to get the Chinese government to allow the Yuan to float on international currency markets. International pressure on China to do this is rising.
All businesses, governments, individuals are going to have to face up to this.
The Information Revolution has made sure that digital information of any sort is not a scarce resource. It can trivially be copied and distributed, therefore the inherent economic price (not to say value) is going to tend towards zero. Attempting to try to make digital information of any sort a scarce resource is doomed to failure, the ecomonics guarantee that and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a dreamer.
Software development then is a service. And that includes business analysis, software design and coding itself. Some people will do the business analysis and design themselves and ship the spec over to India to have the coding done, some will do the analysis and design and code using rapid application design systems and build it out of off the shelf components, like free software.
Fundamentally, coders are going the way of the blacksmith. They're going to have to become engineers rather than blacksmiths if they want to make a living. Those who don't, won't or can't will have to find other employment.
A shell script from 30 years ago will run on a current /bin/sh. If you sit a 70 year old unix user from 30 years ago down in front of a terminal or terminal emulator they will be right at home.
So while the binaries change, the design is the same.
Told you so.
Now bugger off and sort yourself out. In the meantime I'll be undercutting your prices.
The fact that the Unix command line has stood the test of time when virtually everything else has been redesigned and redesigned and redesigned is an amazing testament to the thinking which went into it.
They basically got it right.
They must have, otherwise it *would* have been redesigned or have fallen by the wayside decades ago. Decades, in IT. *Decades*. Think about it.
Sure, something may well come along which is "a better way" but I doubt it'll be MS who come up with it, they don't have a philosophy so I don't see how they could.
I hadn't heard that word before. Love it. I'll have to find ways of using it now.
(Most) Unix systems have had ACLs available for a *long* time. They tend not to be used because frankly they are a *pain in the arse* to administer. The effort required to administer ACLs on a set of files exponentially increases with the numbers of files and numbers of ACLs... Unless... You manage them in a Unix permission manner. And if you're going to do that then you might as well just use unix perms.
I would like groups within groups though.
The problem with ACLs? N^2 complexity. The more files you have the more ACLs the more complex it all gets, the more complex a system the less reliable it becomes. Unless you use them properly of course (Nobody does in real life).
The one killer feature I'd love Unix permissions to have from an ACL type permission system is groups within groups. It'd remove the linear increase in admin effort. Other than that Unix permissions are just about right in terms of security and ease of use.
Yeah, I looked at that and went with SGE (http://gridengine.sunsource.net/) at the time, mainly for political reasons. SGE gave me extra buy in from a couple of other departments. Works nicely and relatively transparently even for stuff like OpenOffice.org, Netscape and GIMP which you would normally run locally.
For fairly heavyweight apps we have the machines grouped e.g. There are a bunch of OO machines, GIMP, Mozilla machines etc. It takes advantage of shared libraries; OO is about 90Mb resident, but about 85Mb of that is shared. Along with large CPU caches and pre-loaded shared libraries there are some *huge* performance benefits to be had.
Piracy in the UK:
4 406575.stm
Unlimited fine and 10 years in prison.
Vote rigging in the UK:
Unlimited fine and 2 years in prison...
e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/
Closed source software infringes just as much as Open Source and Free software. The difference is that you can see the infringement in Free and Open Source software.
This is approximately how desktop systems should work... As standard in the daytime.
The typical user only makes use of around 1-5% of the power of their machine. That's 95% of your investment sitting doing sweet FA.
So, your OS should have network load balancing built in and when you start a process or sub process it should run on the fastest kit available.
It's very simple to tack this kind of functionality on to Unix (including Linux here). Mozix does it in a rather nicely integrated fashion, but you can add something like SGE and some wrappers to make any network of Unix boxes act as a coherent system with *very* serious horsepower, or Wattage since we're in the 21st century.
Battery technologies have been arriving at a faster and faster rate.
Lead acid - centuries.
NiCd - couple of hundred years
NiMH - Decades
Li-ion - Just about a decade now.
Next generation - Probably Li-S in a year or two.
Technologies inevitably arrive slower than demand. Fact of life. Demand says "Hey I need X" and someone goes away and makes X.
"Really the next power supply for small electronics will probably be micro fuel cells that are fueled with methanol."
Bet they won't. When you run out of methanol you can't just plug it into the mains and make more, you have to lug a bottle of the stuff around with you.
"any advancement in battery technology any (like the Li-Ion electrode materials advancement) will also be available to fuel cells".
Except that's fairly unlikely. You're talking about applying engineering solutions from one technology to another. Sure, they have a way of depositing Li to provide a very high surface area in a li-ion battery. Does that same technique apply to platinum in a fuel cell?
"Everything we could possibly want to do in space can be done by robots!"
Except be flexible and respond to unexpected situations of course.
"I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish"
Except that money doesn't magically appear. His money came from somewhere and all those somewheres would have spent their money elsewhere making people less poor if it hadn't gone to Microsoft.
Thing is, as we've seen over the last 50 years, when you have trade barriers and subsidies in place all the aid in the world doesn't do shit.
Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance really has nothing to do with motorcycle maintenance. It's about Quality with a capital Q.
So can we please have fewer of these "Zen and the art of blahblahblah" books?
Leasing assumes you can't find a use for obsolete kit. Plus it's a right royal pain in the arse to administer.
Well, if you design your systems correctly your kit will still be in use long after it has depreciated.
That means *don't* put the power on the desktop where it will be obsolete in 18 months. It also means make use of *all* of your computing power. It isn't difficult, there's loads of (free) software out there to help. e.g. http://gridengine.sunsource.net/ . Oh oh oh. Look! It has that "Grid" buzzword! Don't worry it's just a load balancing network queue system, been around for decades.
You can save a *bundle* by designing your network of servers & services properly.