To the tune of David Lee Roth's "Just a Gigolo" (actually a cover of Louis Prima song but I don't know the original)
I'm just a gigabyte, everywhere I go people want to store stuff on me
Toggle every bit I don't care if it is hard core porn or MP3s
There will come a day I lose a crucial save then what will they say about me
When the end comes I know they'll say just a gigabyte as life goes on without me
'Cause I ain't got no parity no parity, no parity, one plus one is three I'm so slow and lossy slow and lossy, slow and lossy Won't some cheap coder come and make a RAID with me cause I ain't so bad.
I've heart one engineer refer to a gigahert. As in "We downmodulated the signal from 30 gigahertz to one gigahert." With a hard g of course. I prefer a hard g since a soft g reminds me of "gigilo" (which I pronounce as giga-low with a soft g). I pronounce silicon both ways with a preference for silikhan. I pronounce GIF the Compuserve (and peanut butter) way.
Fortunately, Webster's says that both a hard and soft g are ok for giga-and that silikahn and silikin are both ok for silicon.
The US is not completetely socialist, By the same token we're not completely capitalist either. Otherwise how do you explain social security, environmental regulations, zoning requirements, or anti-trust restrictions. The laws of this country state that you can't use a monopoly in restraint of trade. In practice this means that most companies seeking monopolies are acting in an illegal manner. In the case of cable companies, they have a natural monopoly (it is impractical to have too many wires to the home), and in exchange for their monopoly powers, they exist under regulations.
As we have seen with the "deregulation" (really just different regulation) of long distance and local telephone operations, the society gets the most benefit when businesses are allowed to compete in a free-market capitalist manner on every piece of the network other than the small piece that is a natural monopoly. --
The admissability or strength of wiretap evidence isn't the real issue. After all, if there is a criminal case in a court it means that the government is pretty much playing by the rules. What is much more of a concern, and the reason the Bill of Rights was drafted in the first place, is the ease with which the government can probe and harass private citizens without a specific suspicion or for suspicions of political, not criminal activity. --
Linus is part of the Swedish speaking minority (6%) of Finland. Swedish is one of the two official languages of Finland. I found this out from esr's Rampantly Unofficial Linus Torvalds FAQ --
If you really want a geeky pronunciation argument, try any of the following:
csh tcsh lilo cache ~ # !
For the record I'm:
cee-ess-aich teesh lie-low cash tild-ah, although I'm gravitating towards twiddle hash bang
--
Re:Linux on Jeopardy (and other unimportant things
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 2
The Redhat interview is saw was on CNN's Moneyline sometime this weekend, they asked Bob Young about the MS case (who had a 6.0 box in the background, apparently they haven't upgraded the PR studio), he said his favorite remedy was a perpetual investigation. They also asked him about the Cobalt IPO (I think the interviewer thought it was a direct competitor), he said the more Linux companies the better. Redhat gets a lot of press since the IPO so the fact of a Redhat interview isn't really news.
The latest linux story on NPR is here. It was a pretty well informed interview with John Dodge, the editor of PC Week. You can find archives for most NPR shows at www.npr.org. The first story I could find using their search engine was in April of 1998.
I would have said D.C., but that's probably a threat to the President and I'd have the Secret Service on my ass and have to give them my por^H^H^Hcomputer files.
(note to the humor impaired: I don't condone nuking anybody or even killing anybody for that matter, even criminals. I know Microsoft is mostly in another town next to Redmond.) --
While there is a lot of uneccessary drug testing going on in the US, I don't think there are many companies that demand drug tests for engineers or other white collar workers. Too many of their productive employees would have to be let go.
If drug testing is common in engineering jobs in the States I'd like to know, so I don't go to work and find myself forced to resign, because I'll be damned if I have to pee in a cup for somebody to tell if I'm a good worker. --
Communism doesn't kill people. People kill people. Humans have an innate tendency to obey and to act in groups, even if it violates their individual moral limits. If you want to read some objectively verified TRUTH, try Milgram's electric shock experiment. In this experiment, the vast majority of normal individuals administered what they thought was a lethal electric shock (it wasn't) as punishment for incorrect answers in a psychological test.
All you need is a perverse leader like Hitler or Stalin and an authoritarian society and lots of people die, the ideology doesn't matter much. A libertarian government is by definition not authoritarian, but I don't see how this could be persistant given the human tendency to follow blindly. --
In case it matters, I am an American, I speak very poor Spanish dispite having a wife who is a native Spanish speaker. I spent 2 years at an international school, the Armand Hammer United World College, and have spent about 3 months of my life outside the US on various occasions. I use "Americans" in this comment to refer to United Statesians alone, and not to other inhabitants of the Americas.
Clearly geography is part of the answer, European countries are much smaller and more integrated with their neighbors than the US. Near the US/Mexico border, there are a large number of English speaking people that speak at least enough Spanish to conduct a simple consumer transaction. As you note, the only good way of learning a language is by being immersed in the language and culture.
Dominance is another part of the answer. In a world that is dominated by English speaking powers, particularily in economics and entertainment, most people an English speaker interacts with will have a working command of English. I suspect that when French (the original lingua franca) was dominant in diplomatic circles, that there was a similar lassitude on the part of French speakers.
However, neither of these factors explain the aggressiveness with which Americans are monolingual. In California, where there is a large population of native Spanish speakers, bilinugal education has been banned in public schools. Elsewhere, language education for childern is half-hearted at best, if it exists at all. As one of my Spanish professors told me, the stated purpose of most elementary foreign language education in the US is to assist in the teaching of English grammar and vocabulary, not to teach for fluency.
I think that the reason for the resistance to language education comes down to xenophobia and racism. Americans fear cultural encroachment, particularily by an increasingly large hispanic population. (This is of course ironic considering the cultural encroachment on the rest of the world by American culture, but Americans, as a rule, are poor connoisseurs of irony). Language is a particularly feared element of this cultural encroachment since language is so central to culture, and conversely a shared language connotes a certain degree of shared culture. There is of course a large measure of racism encapsulated in this fear. If Americans did not feel that immigrants were inferior, we would welcome their cultural and linguistic contributions.
As with any prejudice, there are legitimate fears as well as ignorant ones. Since preserving language is essential for preserving culture, a multi-lingual society is a more multi-cultural one, and multi-cultural societies, notwithstanding their benefits, are more suceptible to internal conflict.
In the midst of all this racism, xenophobia, and legitimate desire for a unifying national identity, the majority opinion is that immigrants should assimilate and learn English. This opinion is in fact shared by many if not most immigrants. Unfortunately, in the push to teach everybody English we come to the idea that not only should all immigrants learn English, but that the whole world should learn English.
So what's the solution? I wish I knew. If you come up with a solution that doesn't involve a gun I'll vote for you. --
Thanks, that was a funny thread. I think there should be a special hall of fame for funny threads. My vote goes to a decent first post. Actually a lot of the posts in that article are pretty funny. --
DSL works well with competitive ISP's because the ISP can either colocate equipment in the CO to service the loop directly or pay the phone company to service the loop and feed a frame relay or other digital link to the ISP. In either case the IP address for the end user comes from the ISP's pool and the phone company is only responsible for maintaining the hardware and virtual circuit. Since the DSL loop is dedicated, the ISP can reserve enough bandwidth to service it's customer at the maximum rate, regardless of the activities of other subscribers hosted by the phone company. (That's not to say that ISP's actually reserve this bandwidth, but they could).
In the case of a cable loop, all the subscribers are effectively sharing an ethernet segment. An individual subscriber does not get dedicated bandwidth and gets his IP address from the cable provider. While clearly you could have competitive services such as mail, web, news, and DNS servers without much trouble, it would seem to be difficult to offer competitive ISP service on equitable terms when a number of subscribers share the same local loop. I'd be interested in learning more about how those who propose opening cable (a good idea, all else being equal) plan to do so. --
23.
End-to-end design does not only promote innovation by creating the opportunity for innovators to offer services to the network. In our view, the effect comes as well from the expectation that innovation will not be countered by strategic actors who might control the flow of commerce. The potential of an actor in the distributional network to act strategically is a cost to innovation. The expectation that an actor can act strategically is an expected cost to innovation. Thus to the extent an actor is structurally capable of acting strategically, the rational innovator will reckon that capacity as a cost of innovation. Compromising End-to-End will, then, tend to undermine innovation.[emphasis added]
Overall I found this brief to be clear and understandable, but I can't make sense of third sentence on in the above paragraph. Anyone care to translate?
If you spam filter first and then send all the suspected spammers instructions on resending, your false positives go way down. Procmail is a good way to go in a unix environment, since there are a number of kill files floating around that do a good job of spam filtering. If you're interested, email me and I'll send you mine (the email address above is legit, incidentally I get very little spam that I can trace to slashdot postings, go figure). --
Pine is a text based email program that handles HTML mail pretty well.
-Mike --
Re:What else do you do with an insane market cap ?
on
Red Hat Buying Cygnus?
·
· Score: 2
Mergers these days are typically stock swap deals. The purchasing company issues new stock and gives a certain number of shares to each stockholder of the purchased company. Deals can also be all cash or some combination of cash and stock. You are right in that this process is dilutive in that it means there is more stock issued. The main point investors look for, however, is whether earnings will be diluted, i.e. whether the P.E. ratio of the combined company will be smaller or greater than the expected P.E. ratio of the purchasing company alone. Of course in the topsy-turvy world of tech startups, earnings are less important than growth, so investors will be looking at how the combined company will grow in comparison to Redhat alone. Incidentally, most mergers are not as good as the investors expected them to be.
As for the money generated by the IPO, indeed IPO companies do use IPOs to generate inexpensive capital, but the main concern in most IPOs is to create a market into which the founders and venture capitalists can later sell their stock. In a typical IPO plan, venture capitalists are looking for a 10x return on invested capital. To that end, the venture capitalists, founders, and private placement retain about 90% ownership and invest around 10% of the total capital of the company, whereas the public invests 90% of the capital and gets 10% of the ownership. A pretty nice deal huh?
Slashdot Mirror
--
The Gods will frown on me, I made a spelling error in a pronunciation thread.
--
"fisk"
or when I'm feeling verbose
"f-s-check"
--
I've heart one engineer refer to a gigahert. As in "We downmodulated the signal from 30 gigahertz to one gigahert." With a hard g of course. I prefer a hard g since a soft g reminds me of "gigilo" (which I pronounce as giga-low with a soft g). I pronounce silicon both ways with a preference for silikhan. I pronounce GIF the Compuserve (and peanut butter) way.
Fortunately, Webster's says that both a hard and soft g are ok for giga-and that silikahn and silikin are both ok for silicon.
--
Brain Panic
(the fsck on reboot will be a bitch too)
I say 'fisk' in case you're wondering.
--
The US is not completetely socialist,
By the same token we're not completely capitalist either. Otherwise how do you explain social security, environmental regulations, zoning requirements, or anti-trust restrictions. The laws of this country state that you can't use a monopoly in restraint of trade. In practice this means that most companies seeking monopolies are acting in an illegal manner. In the case of cable companies, they have a natural monopoly (it is impractical to have too many wires to the home), and in exchange for their monopoly powers, they exist under regulations.
As we have seen with the "deregulation" (really just different regulation) of long distance and local telephone operations, the society gets the most benefit when businesses are allowed to compete in a free-market capitalist manner on every piece of the network other than the small piece that is a natural monopoly.
--
"...I mean 'What is Linux, eh?"
--
The admissability or strength of wiretap evidence isn't the real issue. After all, if there is a criminal case in a court it means that the government is pretty much playing by the rules. What is much more of a concern, and the reason the Bill of Rights was drafted in the first place, is the ease with which the government can probe and harass private citizens without a specific suspicion or for suspicions of political, not criminal activity.
--
Linus is part of the Swedish speaking minority (6%) of Finland. Swedish is one of the two official languages of Finland. I found this out from esr's Rampantly Unofficial Linus Torvalds FAQ
--
If you really want a geeky pronunciation argument, try any of the following:
csh
tcsh
lilo
cache
~
#
!
For the record I'm:
cee-ess-aich
teesh
lie-low
cash
tild-ah, although I'm gravitating towards twiddle
hash
bang
--
The Redhat interview is saw was on CNN's Moneyline sometime this weekend, they asked Bob Young about the MS case (who had a 6.0 box in the background, apparently they haven't upgraded the PR studio), he said his favorite remedy was a perpetual investigation. They also asked him about the Cobalt IPO (I think the interviewer thought it was a direct competitor), he said the more Linux companies the better. Redhat gets a lot of press since the IPO so the fact of a Redhat interview isn't really news.
The latest linux story on NPR is here. It was a pretty well informed interview with John Dodge, the editor of PC Week. You can find archives for most NPR shows at www.npr.org. The first story I could find using their search engine was in April of 1998.
--
but Redmond on the other hand....
I would have said D.C., but that's probably a threat to the President and I'd have the Secret Service on my ass and have to give them my por^H^H^Hcomputer files.
(note to the humor impaired: I don't condone nuking anybody or even killing anybody for that matter, even criminals. I know Microsoft is mostly in another town next to Redmond.)
--
While there is a lot of uneccessary drug testing going on in the US, I don't think there are many companies that demand drug tests for engineers or other white collar workers. Too many of their productive employees would have to be let go.
If drug testing is common in engineering jobs in the States I'd like to know, so I don't go to work and find myself forced to resign, because I'll be damned if I have to pee in a cup for somebody to tell if I'm a good worker.
--
FWIW, you can hear how Linus pronounces Linux.
More to the point, Jeopardy does not mark you wrong for unambiguous mispronunciations or spellings.
--
Communism doesn't kill people. People kill people. Humans have an innate tendency to obey and to act in groups, even if it violates their individual moral limits. If you want to read some objectively verified TRUTH, try Milgram's electric shock experiment. In this experiment, the vast majority of normal individuals administered what they thought was a lethal electric shock (it wasn't) as punishment for incorrect answers in a psychological test.
All you need is a perverse leader like Hitler or Stalin and an authoritarian society and lots of people die, the ideology doesn't matter much. A libertarian government is by definition not authoritarian, but I don't see how this could be persistant given the human tendency to follow blindly.
--
Was that the story where they put humans in missiles instead of expensive computers?
--
Or be prepared for a quizzical expression.
--
In case it matters, I am an American, I speak very poor Spanish dispite having a wife who is a native Spanish speaker. I spent 2 years at an international school, the Armand Hammer United World College, and have spent about 3 months of my life outside the US on various occasions. I use "Americans" in this comment to refer to United Statesians alone, and not to other inhabitants of the Americas.
Clearly geography is part of the answer, European countries are much smaller and more integrated with their neighbors than the US. Near the US/Mexico border, there are a large number of English speaking people that speak at least enough Spanish to conduct a simple consumer transaction. As you note, the only good way of learning a language is by being immersed in the language and culture.
Dominance is another part of the answer. In a world that is dominated by English speaking powers, particularily in economics and entertainment, most people an English speaker interacts with will have a working command of English. I suspect that when French (the original lingua franca) was dominant in diplomatic circles, that there was a similar lassitude on the part of French speakers.
However, neither of these factors explain the aggressiveness with which Americans are monolingual. In California, where there is a large population of native Spanish speakers, bilinugal education has been banned in public schools. Elsewhere, language education for childern is half-hearted at best, if it exists at all. As one of my Spanish professors told me, the stated purpose of most elementary foreign language education in the US is to assist in the teaching of English grammar and vocabulary, not to teach for fluency.
I think that the reason for the resistance to language education comes down to xenophobia and racism. Americans fear cultural encroachment, particularily by an increasingly large hispanic population. (This is of course ironic considering the cultural encroachment on the rest of the world by American culture, but Americans, as a rule, are poor connoisseurs of irony). Language is a particularly feared element of this cultural encroachment since language is so central to culture, and conversely a shared language connotes a certain degree of shared culture. There is of course a large measure of racism encapsulated in this fear. If Americans did not feel that immigrants were inferior, we would welcome their cultural and linguistic contributions.
As with any prejudice, there are legitimate fears as well as ignorant ones. Since preserving language is essential for preserving culture, a multi-lingual society is a more multi-cultural one, and multi-cultural societies, notwithstanding their benefits, are more suceptible to internal conflict.
In the midst of all this racism, xenophobia, and legitimate desire for a unifying national identity, the majority opinion is that immigrants should assimilate and learn English. This opinion is in fact shared by many if not most immigrants. Unfortunately, in the push to teach everybody English we come to the idea that not only should all immigrants learn English, but that the whole world should learn English.
So what's the solution? I wish I knew. If you come up with a solution that doesn't involve a gun I'll vote for you.
--
Thanks, that was a funny thread. I think there should be a special hall of fame for funny threads. My vote goes to a decent first post. Actually a lot of the posts in that article are pretty funny.
--
DSL works well with competitive ISP's because the ISP can either colocate equipment in the CO to service the loop directly or pay the phone company to service the loop and feed a frame relay or other digital link to the ISP. In either case the IP address for the end user comes from the ISP's pool and the phone company is only responsible for maintaining the hardware and virtual circuit. Since the DSL loop is dedicated, the ISP can reserve enough bandwidth to service it's customer at the maximum rate, regardless of the activities of other subscribers hosted by the phone company. (That's not to say that ISP's actually reserve this bandwidth, but they could).
In the case of a cable loop, all the subscribers are effectively sharing an ethernet segment. An individual subscriber does not get dedicated bandwidth and gets his IP address from the cable provider. While clearly you could have competitive services such as mail, web, news, and DNS servers without much trouble, it would seem to be difficult to offer competitive ISP service on equitable terms when a number of subscribers share the same local loop. I'd be interested in learning more about how those who propose opening cable (a good idea, all else being equal) plan to do so.
--
Overall I found this brief to be clear and understandable, but I can't make sense of third sentence on in the above paragraph. Anyone care to translate?
--
Film at 11.
--
If you spam filter first and then send all the suspected spammers instructions on resending, your false positives go way down. Procmail is a good way to go in a unix environment, since there are a number of kill files floating around that do a good job of spam filtering. If you're interested, email me and I'll send you mine (the email address above is legit, incidentally I get very little spam that I can trace to slashdot postings, go figure).
--
Pine is a text based email program that handles HTML mail pretty well.
-Mike
--
Mergers these days are typically stock swap deals. The purchasing company issues new stock and gives a certain number of shares to each stockholder of the purchased company. Deals can also be all cash or some combination of cash and stock. You are right in that this process is dilutive in that it means there is more stock issued. The main point investors look for, however, is whether earnings will be diluted, i.e. whether the P.E. ratio of the combined company will be smaller or greater than the expected P.E. ratio of the purchasing company alone. Of course in the topsy-turvy world of tech startups, earnings are less important than growth, so investors will be looking at how the combined company will grow in comparison to Redhat alone. Incidentally, most mergers are not as good as the investors expected them to be.
As for the money generated by the IPO, indeed IPO companies do use IPOs to generate inexpensive capital, but the main concern in most IPOs is to create a market into which the founders and venture capitalists can later sell their stock. In a typical IPO plan, venture capitalists are looking for a 10x return on invested capital. To that end, the venture capitalists, founders, and private placement retain about 90% ownership and invest around 10% of the total capital of the company, whereas the public invests 90% of the capital and gets 10% of the ownership. A pretty nice deal huh?
--