".....was granted a patent for his invention of a Method and apparatus for ${TASK} which -- you guessed it -- employs the most appropriate ${TASK_OPTION}.....for the job."
There's a term for this - it's called Being An Engineer.
Sadly, the cash for clunkers scheme also meant that there are many thousands of perfectly good cars parked in fields that must legally be scrapped (i.e. they can't be resold). Technology does improve, but fuel-efficiency hasn't improved that much since 1999/2000.
The money wasn't just going straight to taxpayers - the whole point of the scheme was to help the car industry through a severe drop in demand. It basically kept the flow of cash going to (almost wholly foreign-owned) car companies. That said, it probably did keep car plants (and their associated suppliers) open, which might otherwise have closed.
I would like to live in a world where people are responsible for their actions, and everyone carries insurance to cover incidents like this one.
Yes, because losing a loved one means nothing when you can sue someone for money and buy yourself a nice flash car, an expensive foreign holiday, maybe a little holiday home in the country.....
At least I live in a world where people who think compulsory insurance against every conceivable accident for four-year-olds is needed, and that large sums of money makes everything OK, live in a country far away from me.
Sometime soon, the government will realise that another way of thinking about cutting off "10,000 pirates a day" is cutting off 10,000 voters a day (and their families).
Seriously, if that 10,000 per day number is anything near to being accurate, there's going to be a political shitstorm about this. Just think of the tens of thousands of adult voters who will think of themselves as having been branded as criminals (not to mention losing their internet access) because of something they didn't realise their kids were doing.
I suspect this is going to backfire hugely against Sarkozy and the party that brought in this legislation. If it does, expect other politicians in other countries to take note.
In the long term, if this proves to be a disastrous legislation, it could warn other countries off trying anything similar.
If you did in fact "walk your talk" then you would simply had committed suicide.
So, don't try to mask your pathetic misanthropy and psychopathy under this thin veneer of righteous ecology. Just because you hate the world and suffer from some mental illness...
Mental illness?!
With comments like those, be careful of the blackness, Mr Kettle.
Well the extra jobs claim is a nonsense, for starters.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that the software is already specified, designed, written and tested - no extra technical jobs needed there.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that the software was already widely known about - no extra jobs in sales and marketing needed there.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that those users are prepared to do without paid support - no extra jobs in support and maintenance needed there.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that the software is already distributed to those who are using it - no extra jobs in distribution needed there.
So what would also those extra jobs be used for? Counting the extra money?
Ah yes, the old "hang around in a bar until someone shouts out their address, and that they're going out of town for a while, then pull up outside their house in a car with cheap magnetic decals of a cable company" trick.
Funny how the cops never seem to think of going to the local magnetic-decals-of-cable-companies shop and asking questions, isn't it?
And Google Street View's a gift for casing the joint - checking houses without burglar alarms, or with old/cheap ones, checking access and escape routes, etc - with no suspicion whatsoever, and no chance of a neighbour being able to remember someone acting a bit strangely a few days before a burglary took place.
There's also a lot of people who do a good job, but just don't shout about it. The kind of person everyone else goes to for advice. The kind of person who never makes a fuss, just get on with it. Maybe they don't have the wherewithall, or even the desire, to push themselves forward and say "hey, look what I did" all the time.
Puppeteers?
Not saying it never happens, but I think there are more deserving targets for your cynicism.
"In other words, China has stacked the deck in its favor."
Isn't this the whole purpose of a government?
"Part of the problem is that China has not historically allowed its currency to float."
It's China's currency isn't it, not the USA's? Why should China have to do what the USA says with its own currency? Sounds a bit too much like "Hey weakling, give me your dinner money" to me.
Of course it is. It is not, however, the only factor, and other factors may indeed (and commonly do) outweigh it.
"IBM may have created a very highly clocked CPU and given it tons of transistors, but I seriously doubt if it will compete with a modern day server CPU from Intel or even AMD."
I think you underestimate IBM's technical ability. They do have some idea of what they're doing.
"pure performance maybe, but definitely not price-performance or performance-per-watt"
That's like saying a Ferrari is a poor performance car because it can't compete against a Ford Focus on cost-per-max-speed or miles-per-gallon.
Actually I think this mainframe is for getting the last little bit of performance out of thirty year old cobol code. And the original top notch programmers are long dead.
Considering that life expectancy in the developed world is in the region of 80 years, there is a reasonable chance that programmers who were under 50 when they wrote code thirty years age are still alive.
They may have little recollection of what they did 30 years ago, but to say they are all "long dead" is somewhat of an exaggeration.
How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?
Is it like comparing 0-60 times for cars (a decent indication of performance, though not the best)? Or is a bit like measuring the time from 0-10 in first gear - a rather insiginificant proportion of the whole time taken to render a cross-section of typical web pages?
Do sites just concentrate of JavaScript performance so much because it's easier to measure?
As Apple very well knows from the early desktop days, once a competitor has a solid lead in the market share it is very, very difficult to get the market back.
So why did Apple ever produce the iPhone, when Microsoft was already several iterations into Windows Mobile smartphones?
(Answering my own question: Because they recognise an poor, awkward-to-use product when they see one. Existing market share can be overcome with a significantly-better product).
That's the equivalent of saying a fully-fledged mobile Linux computer (with a really nice front-end) is nothing but a nice browser, while the other platforms do so much more...
Slashdot Mirror
"I also think it is somewhat childish to start every application with a K...but hey."
And then Apple copied them with the letter i, and I've never heard anyone describe that as childish.
...around once a year. Usually around the same time to boot.
Man, they need to work on those init scripts. Get some services starting in parallel.....
More generally:
".....was granted a patent for his invention of a Method and apparatus for ${TASK} which -- you guessed it -- employs the most appropriate ${TASK_OPTION}.....for the job."
There's a term for this - it's called Being An Engineer.
Sadly, the cash for clunkers scheme also meant that there are many thousands of perfectly good cars parked in fields that must legally be scrapped (i.e. they can't be resold). Technology does improve, but fuel-efficiency hasn't improved that much since 1999/2000.
The money wasn't just going straight to taxpayers - the whole point of the scheme was to help the car industry through a severe drop in demand. It basically kept the flow of cash going to (almost wholly foreign-owned) car companies. That said, it probably did keep car plants (and their associated suppliers) open, which might otherwise have closed.
I would like to live in a world where people are responsible for their actions, and everyone carries insurance to cover incidents like this one.
Yes, because losing a loved one means nothing when you can sue someone for money and buy yourself a nice flash car, an expensive foreign holiday, maybe a little holiday home in the country.....
At least I live in a world where people who think compulsory insurance against every conceivable accident for four-year-olds is needed, and that large sums of money makes everything OK, live in a country far away from me.
We'd love to draw him, but it's too difficult using the GIMP.
The Chinese deliberately hold vast amounts of western debt...
Then perhaps we shouldn't deliberately sell it to them then?
Sometime soon, the government will realise that another way of thinking about cutting off "10,000 pirates a day" is cutting off 10,000 voters a day (and their families).
Seriously, if that 10,000 per day number is anything near to being accurate, there's going to be a political shitstorm about this. Just think of the tens of thousands of adult voters who will think of themselves as having been branded as criminals (not to mention losing their internet access) because of something they didn't realise their kids were doing.
I suspect this is going to backfire hugely against Sarkozy and the party that brought in this legislation. If it does, expect other politicians in other countries to take note.
In the long term, if this proves to be a disastrous legislation, it could warn other countries off trying anything similar.
If you did in fact "walk your talk" then you would simply had committed suicide.
So, don't try to mask your pathetic misanthropy and psychopathy under this thin veneer of righteous ecology. Just because you hate the world and suffer from some mental illness...
Mental illness?!
With comments like those, be careful of the blackness, Mr Kettle.
Must have been some kind of byte-overflow error.
Well the extra jobs claim is a nonsense, for starters.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that the software is already specified, designed, written and tested - no extra technical jobs needed there.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that the software was already widely known about - no extra jobs in sales and marketing needed there.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that those users are prepared to do without paid support - no extra jobs in support and maintenance needed there.
The very fact that the software was "pirated" means that the software is already distributed to those who are using it - no extra jobs in distribution needed there.
So what would also those extra jobs be used for? Counting the extra money?
The UK should respond by announcing that another UK citizen is never going to be allowed onto US soil.
PS: Check out the NASA Documents section.
Ah yes, the old "hang around in a bar until someone shouts out their address, and that they're going out of town for a while, then pull up outside their house in a car with cheap magnetic decals of a cable company" trick.
Funny how the cops never seem to think of going to the local magnetic-decals-of-cable-companies shop and asking questions, isn't it?
And Google Street View's a gift for casing the joint - checking houses without burglar alarms, or with old/cheap ones, checking access and escape routes, etc - with no suspicion whatsoever, and no chance of a neighbour being able to remember someone acting a bit strangely a few days before a burglary took place.
I thought Galileo Darwin had conclusively proved that the Earth evolves around the sun?
That's a very, very cynical point of view.
There's also a lot of people who do a good job, but just don't shout about it. The kind of person everyone else goes to for advice. The kind of person who never makes a fuss, just get on with it. Maybe they don't have the wherewithall, or even the desire, to push themselves forward and say "hey, look what I did" all the time.
Puppeteers?
Not saying it never happens, but I think there are more deserving targets for your cynicism.
"In other words, China has stacked the deck in its favor."
Isn't this the whole purpose of a government?
"Part of the problem is that China has not historically allowed its currency to float."
It's China's currency isn't it, not the USA's? Why should China have to do what the USA says with its own currency? Sounds a bit too much like "Hey weakling, give me your dinner money" to me.
"clockspeed is NOT related to throughput"
Of course it is. It is not, however, the only factor, and other factors may indeed (and commonly do) outweigh it.
"IBM may have created a very highly clocked CPU and given it tons of transistors, but I seriously doubt if it will compete with a modern day server CPU from Intel or even AMD."
I think you underestimate IBM's technical ability. They do have some idea of what they're doing.
"pure performance maybe, but definitely not price-performance or performance-per-watt"
That's like saying a Ferrari is a poor performance car because it can't compete against a Ford Focus on cost-per-max-speed or miles-per-gallon.
Actually I think this mainframe is for getting the last little bit of performance out of thirty year old cobol code. And the original top notch programmers are long dead.
Considering that life expectancy in the developed world is in the region of 80 years, there is a reasonable chance that programmers who were under 50 when they wrote code thirty years age are still alive.
They may have little recollection of what they did 30 years ago, but to say they are all "long dead" is somewhat of an exaggeration.
Let's hope they use it intelligently.
Why use a pretentious three-syllable management-wank-speak word in place of a perfectly acceptable single-syllable word which means the same thing?
A Microsoft developer and an Adobe developer try to walk into an Apple bar.
Neither succeeds.
Apple set the bar too high.
How important are JavaScript times to the overall speed of rendering pages?
Is it like comparing 0-60 times for cars (a decent indication of performance, though not the best)? Or is a bit like measuring the time from 0-10 in first gear - a rather insiginificant proportion of the whole time taken to render a cross-section of typical web pages?
Do sites just concentrate of JavaScript performance so much because it's easier to measure?
As Apple very well knows from the early desktop days, once a competitor has a solid lead in the market share it is very, very difficult to get the market back.
So why did Apple ever produce the iPhone, when Microsoft was already several iterations into Windows Mobile smartphones?
(Answering my own question: Because they recognise an poor, awkward-to-use product when they see one. Existing market share can be overcome with a significantly-better product).
As salespeople say: It isn't "selling" if you would have bought it anyway.
That's the equivalent of saying a fully-fledged mobile Linux computer (with a really nice front-end) is nothing but a nice browser, while the other platforms do so much more...