The target price is $100. It's just more because they don't have all the volume discounts at the production level they're starting with. It's using a number of parts that aren't in current consumer devices; once they've got the volume up, the price of the system will be below $100. They've gone over this with their suppliers already.
This suggests a lot of differences from the original plan.
The original deadline was ODF at the start of 2007. The general plan was to get a suitable plugin for existing MS Office deployments to keep using the same MS licenses, but save all documents as ODF. This plugin would also be available to recipients of the documents, so that they could read documents in the new format. The original plan did not include using a different office suite, open-source or otherwise, as part of this directive (although the directive would obviously facilitate later transitions).
It looks to me like MA has outwitted MS here; MS's FUD about this directive has convinced everybody that MA is ditching MS Office, to the point where MA can make a concession where they switch to OpenOffice later than the deadline, when their original position was not to switch at all.
Now, it's possible that the new CIO is unaware that the old CIO had made the current plan originally, and actually thinks that he was supposed to get new software in place, and thinks he's missing that milestone. But, most likely, he's just making it sound that way so the disablity groups can feel victorious, when their concerns were already handled in the general goal of continuing to use existing working software deployments.
If he were addressing the policy groups for distributions, how difficult it is to get these things working would be a relevant issue. But he was addressing "the community", which is generally interpreted as the development community, which has solved all these problems ages ago. (And I'm just not a good judge of how difficult it is to do things with systems other than a few obscure ones I use; as far as I can tell, it's practically impossible to do anything with Windows, for example, but other people seem to manage it on occasion. It may be just as easy to get all of these things working with Fedora as with Gentoo, and I'd have no idea.)
There's an open-source, patent licensed MP3 codec. Now the patent license doesn't extend to modified versions, but OEMs and retail stores aren't going to modify the codec anyway.
He's absolutely right that, in order to stay relevant, Linux will have to be able to work with iPods, MP3s, and Windows Media. It's a good thing that it works with all of these, and has for a long time. I'm not sure how easy distributions make it, but the support definitely exists, so it's now not a technical problem but a distribution policy issue, and isn't at all a matter of using proprietary software, which is neither necessary nor particularly helpful.
There are certain vague caveats: there are some theoretical issues with valid patents related to MP3. But the holder doesn't seem to want to cause problems, unlike the holders of invalid patents on practically everything else. Getting the latest and best support for Windows Media files requires using a freely-available but proprietary codec as a plugin to the player program.
The actual issue, so far as I can tell, is that people conflate the iTunes Music Store with iPods, and so they ask ESR about iPods (which are easy) when they mean to ask about the iTunes Music Store (which is difficult).
Actually, their mission statement is to bankrupt the US and its allies. They had so much fun with the Soviets that they had to do it again. The point is to make the west financially unable to interfere in the middle east. Killing infidels is just a recruiting tactic, and a way of getting the west to spend more money. If they actually wanted to kill as many infidels as possible, they wouldn't have anything to do with blowing up airplanes; they'd blow up backpack bombs in the lines at security checkpoints, where the same people who end up on planes are packed together and there's no security. But their goal is to give the west some reason to spend even more on security, and unstoppable killings don't do that.
I doubt it will show up in any provider's package offerings, so it won't go mass market that way. But it could go mass-market perfectly well as a device that users just buy and use with service bought separately. I mean, lots of people bought PDAs for a while, and lots of people buy mp3 players, and neither of these get packages offerings from anybody.
If the device comes with a CD of the original firmware, a bootloader that can't be modified and can reflash the firmware regardless of what you do to the device with software, and a good way of backing up your personal data before trying out potentially-broken firmware, I think it would be fine for the general public.
The way cell phone sales go currently is that just about nobody actually goes out and buys a cell phone. What people do is get a package deal on a cell phone plus service, where there's not much up-front cost, and they make up the cost of the device from the price of the service (which is spread out over time). In this case, chances are that the providers won't carry these, so customers would have to actually buy an expensive phone themselves, with a high up-front cost and probably no discount on service.
On the other hand, it's a perfectly reasonable device for Trolltech to produce, and they're not going to pull the usual annoying tricks because they're going for a savvy market segment and they know their device is not competitive on price. The phone companies only cooperate to the extent that they let people use GPRS/GSM modules with their networks; they're not going to be any more or less supportive of this than of GSM PCMCIA cards for laptops. Just because the system is presented to the user as a cell phone instead of a laptop or a PDA doesn't mean that the phone company has anything to do with it.
The main problem with LaTeX is that, if you use it for much of anything, you'll never have the patience to deal with a word processor again, and will therefore be unable to work with businesspeople on documents. And you'll be forever annoyed by the minor formatting flaws in everybody else's documents, like when paragraphs spanning page breaks have a single line on one of the pages.
I actually have the opposite experience: the better the programmer, the more likely they are to make mistakes that static analysis will find, because they're thinking about the more subtle issues, and don't notice that they've messed up a variable name. Most of the time, they write first versions of code which is well-designed, does things efficiently, and doesn't compile due to a couple of trivial typos, which they fix quickly by looking at the compiler output (which is, of course, a form of static analysis).
5 years ago, Apple didn't have the device cred to do a phone. And making a generic phone that people could just get and use regardless of their carrier was pretty much impossible. It's just now becoming plausible to buy an unlocked phone without going through some carrier, and that's a much more interesting market for Apple than the usual method of getting a phone from your carrier, where the carrier puts restrictions on the phone. Now there's the Hiptop 3, which it's plausible to get unlocked (as opposed to through T-Mobile); it's not that great a deal, but if you got the features of an iPod at the same time for not much more (than either of these alone), it would be a much better deal.
One thing, though: there's no chance that Apple will release the iPhone. They'd demo the new iPod, and during the demo, Steve would take a call on it. People don't want a phone from Apple. But if they happen to put their sim cards in their iPods, and they find they can make phone calls, that's a benefit. It's like how the Video iPod was going to be a flop, but nobody complained about their new iPod being able to do video, in addition to having more storage for the same price.
It wasn't specifically in any of them. It was a consequence of the fact that people in the game drop their inventory when they die, and money given to people goes into their inventory, and you can pay prostitutes. None of these mechanics was even particularly important in the game, let alone the combination.
A MECO is an odd variant of a black hole. The matter under debate is not whether these things exist, since we have plenty of evidence for them, but what happens to physics in these extreme conditions. The standard black hole theory, in addition to being the first to propose that there can be so much mass in a region that light can't escape, proposes details on what is going on inside this region. MECO theory proposes different details. Of course, they agree for most observed effects (the event horizon, bending light, Hawking radiation, and so forth); the main difference seems to be whether they can have a magnetic field: a standard black hole would have all of the mass at a single point, and therefore doesn't have room for charged particles to spin, so there's no magnetic field; a MECO would have the mass spread over an extremely small area, which is sufficient to have spinning charges and therefore generate a magnetic field. Of course, it's a bit tricky to determine if an object like a black hole has a magnetic field, because that field, if it exists, is practically in the noise compared to the gravitational field.
Once you have 8 cores, it becomes advantageous to have memory which is faster for each group of 4. At 8, you're on the edge where the advantage exists, but isn't sufficient to justify the additional architectural complexity. For 16 and up, it's much better to have 4-processor nodes each with its own memory (and slower access to memory on other nodes). It's unlikely that improvements in chip technology will change this. It's also not something about desktop computers; existing large machines use 4-processor nodes.
So he's right; before it makes sense to have more than 4 cores on a chip, you'll want multiple chips of 4 cores each with separate memory busses, and then system RAM on the processor chip (at which point the architecture is significantly different, because the system is asking the processor for memory values, rather than the opposite), and only then does it become efficient again to put more cores on the chip, as you can have a multiple-node chip.
This isn't a second code. The second code is the binding sites for proteins that activate and inhibit gene expression. Then there are a number of other codes already known that affect replication or expression in various ways.
This is way down on the list of discoveries of patterns in DNA, and it's really more a storage medium property than a code. This is more like sector markings on a hard drive platter than anything to do with data or filesystems. It's important, but because it will tell us where DNA is likely to get damaged, but these sequences are not functional components of the actual use of DNA.
Just because a group is mostly not journalists doesn't mean that the journalists in that group aren't journalists. There's even plenty of content in newspapers that isn't journalism, from opinion pieces to comics to movie reviews. Assuming that the 5% figure is correct, bloggers are far more likely than the rest of the population to be journalists, and they're probably more likely than the population of professional writers to be journalists.
It's a bit ironic that the article says that only a third of bloggers do journalistically appropriate tasks like linking to original sources, when Slashdot links to the original source, and the article doesn't.
If you just remove or escape any ' characters, you're depending on there not being any byte sequences that the database interprets as ' characters that your function doesn't. This has often turned out not to be the case, particularly with respect to invalid UTF-8 strings. The only safe method to avoid injection attacks is to make sure that no database code parses a statement including user input, because you never know exactly how the database parser will handle statements that programmers wouldn't send intentionally, and so you can never be sure that you're cleaning the input enough. (You can clean the input enough that the standards say it can't end the string, but then you're depending on the database's parser to be bug-free in this area, which has not historically been the case.)
Maybe they're trying to hide the real problems
on
Virus Jumps to RFID
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's possible that they put a virus on an RFID tag. You can also put a virus in a newspaper or transmit it by reading out a bunch of numbers. But that doesn't mean it will be received in a form that makes it do anything. Presumably, they've found a bug in some RFID-processing software similar to the bugs in lots of data-processing software. Of course, RFID systems are more likely to be completely immune to this sort of input-validation issue, because they're often designed to be full-packet binary database keys, and there is no invalid input that the reader can produce (sort of like how US postal bar codes always read as 11-digit numbers, and, while some of those numbers aren't used, they're always either a real place or no place, not something that breaks the system.
The real security issue is that it's trivial to clone an RFID tag. Using it for identification is like using a piece of paper that can be photocopied, except that the attacker doesn't have to swipe the paper to copy it. But if people only think about the non-fundamental and insignificant flaws with RFID, they can be distracted from the fact that it's entirely inappropriate in the first place.
The real point of the improvement isn't to give longer stability; it's that you can measure smaller units of time accurately with the new clock. A standard commercial cesium clock produces a clock signal at 5 MHz (and at 1 Hz), both extremely accurately. This is because, while the device is measuring an exactly 9.192631770 GHz frequency, this measurement can't just increase a counter each time; what it does is stabilize a quartz crystal oscillator, such that there is extremely little accumulating drift.
The new clock measures a higher frequency, which means that it can accumulate enough ticks to produce a stable output signal in a smaller amount of time, so the output signal can be both accurate and at a higher frequency. It is incidental that the long-term accuracy is better; the point is that it is no worse, and that the frequency of macroscopic ticks is higher. That means that this clock can time shorter periods: if you want to find out how long something takes, you can only give the result down to 200 nanoseconds with a standard clock, but the new clocks will give you more detail. It's like replacing an essentially perfect yard stick marked in inches with an also essentially perfect yard stick marked in thousandths of an inch: you won't care about improvement in the measurement of a foot, but it'll help a lot if you want to measure the size of a pencil lead.
Having accurate clocks on this scale isn't useful for synchronization, because there's more inaccuracy in distribution of the clock signal from the accurate clock to the transceiver, and more variability in the latency of the transmission than there is error in a standard atomic clock. Consider that modern communications within computers off-chip (and sometime on-chip) are asynchronous (the transmission is sampled to determine the bit synchronization, rather than the ends simply expecting to agree or have a shared reference), and that inaccuracy in GPS results comes more from variation in the speed of light in the atmosphere than the satellite clocks.
If the system is done right, the fact that it's quick to implement initially means that there's not all that much code there (because you wouldn't have time to write it), which means that it's relatively small and therefore there isn't too much to maintain. Of course, this breaks down if you have code generated from templates, because the initial input is then smaller than the resulting source that needs to be maintained.
If you have a system where the default behavior is generally right, and where it's easy to get non-default behavior when necessary without losing the default behavior for everything else, then you can minimize the size of your code base, and therefore minimize your maintenence burden. My impression is that RoR takes pride in the brevity of the application, so there's got to be a certain amount of maintenence savings from this effect.
Re:There's an expression that idiots don't underst
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 1
Well, people on Wikipedia have a certain amount of pride in what they do, and they therefore want to address the complaints of people who have been legitimately slighted, as those indicate real flaws. So people with legitimate complaints tend to find that the article has been changed to essentially what it should say (although sometimes it takes a few rounds of corrections).
And how many people have really ever been power users of email clients? About the only advanced feature in sending email I've cared about is inserting files without word-wrapping them, while using word-wrapping for text written in the editor (which lets you send diffs to people such that they can read them and comment on them in a response, and also have them apply to the original files without fixing the whitespace). The sole newbieish thing that Pine seems to encourage is that it inserts a couple of blank lines at the top of the message when you reply, encouraging top-posting, which is widely considered bad form among the experts.
There's this general perception that people who stay newbies in their use of one sort of program are perpetually newbies in general. It's completely false. Someone could write a popular UNIX-like kernel, a C parser, compiler, and static checker, and a revolutionary version control system, and still be using Pine. In fact, the only person I know of with that resume is using Pine.
No, there's actually this effect where each generation (approximately) exhibits a different learned response to stress, based on what is the current expectation. It starts with enough people having the symptom due to physiological reasons that it becomes noticed, and then a lot more people, often with less reason to have the problem, start to show it in response to stress. For the Victorians, it was fainting spells, for Lay's generation it was heart attacks, and I'm in the generation that gets RSI. In general, if you're under stress too much, your body screws itself up, but the particular way it chooses to screw itself up is very dependant on your expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
The target price is $100. It's just more because they don't have all the volume discounts at the production level they're starting with. It's using a number of parts that aren't in current consumer devices; once they've got the volume up, the price of the system will be below $100. They've gone over this with their suppliers already.
This suggests a lot of differences from the original plan.
The original deadline was ODF at the start of 2007. The general plan was to get a suitable plugin for existing MS Office deployments to keep using the same MS licenses, but save all documents as ODF. This plugin would also be available to recipients of the documents, so that they could read documents in the new format. The original plan did not include using a different office suite, open-source or otherwise, as part of this directive (although the directive would obviously facilitate later transitions).
It looks to me like MA has outwitted MS here; MS's FUD about this directive has convinced everybody that MA is ditching MS Office, to the point where MA can make a concession where they switch to OpenOffice later than the deadline, when their original position was not to switch at all.
Now, it's possible that the new CIO is unaware that the old CIO had made the current plan originally, and actually thinks that he was supposed to get new software in place, and thinks he's missing that milestone. But, most likely, he's just making it sound that way so the disablity groups can feel victorious, when their concerns were already handled in the general goal of continuing to use existing working software deployments.
If he were addressing the policy groups for distributions, how difficult it is to get these things working would be a relevant issue. But he was addressing "the community", which is generally interpreted as the development community, which has solved all these problems ages ago. (And I'm just not a good judge of how difficult it is to do things with systems other than a few obscure ones I use; as far as I can tell, it's practically impossible to do anything with Windows, for example, but other people seem to manage it on occasion. It may be just as easy to get all of these things working with Fedora as with Gentoo, and I'd have no idea.)
There's an open-source, patent licensed MP3 codec. Now the patent license doesn't extend to modified versions, but OEMs and retail stores aren't going to modify the codec anyway.
Gentoo. Except, of course, that Gentoo doesn't come in boxes, and you have to know which things to ask for.
He's absolutely right that, in order to stay relevant, Linux will have to be able to work with iPods, MP3s, and Windows Media. It's a good thing that it works with all of these, and has for a long time. I'm not sure how easy distributions make it, but the support definitely exists, so it's now not a technical problem but a distribution policy issue, and isn't at all a matter of using proprietary software, which is neither necessary nor particularly helpful.
There are certain vague caveats: there are some theoretical issues with valid patents related to MP3. But the holder doesn't seem to want to cause problems, unlike the holders of invalid patents on practically everything else. Getting the latest and best support for Windows Media files requires using a freely-available but proprietary codec as a plugin to the player program.
The actual issue, so far as I can tell, is that people conflate the iTunes Music Store with iPods, and so they ask ESR about iPods (which are easy) when they mean to ask about the iTunes Music Store (which is difficult).
Actually, their mission statement is to bankrupt the US and its allies. They had so much fun with the Soviets that they had to do it again. The point is to make the west financially unable to interfere in the middle east. Killing infidels is just a recruiting tactic, and a way of getting the west to spend more money. If they actually wanted to kill as many infidels as possible, they wouldn't have anything to do with blowing up airplanes; they'd blow up backpack bombs in the lines at security checkpoints, where the same people who end up on planes are packed together and there's no security. But their goal is to give the west some reason to spend even more on security, and unstoppable killings don't do that.
I doubt it will show up in any provider's package offerings, so it won't go mass market that way. But it could go mass-market perfectly well as a device that users just buy and use with service bought separately. I mean, lots of people bought PDAs for a while, and lots of people buy mp3 players, and neither of these get packages offerings from anybody.
If the device comes with a CD of the original firmware, a bootloader that can't be modified and can reflash the firmware regardless of what you do to the device with software, and a good way of backing up your personal data before trying out potentially-broken firmware, I think it would be fine for the general public.
The way cell phone sales go currently is that just about nobody actually goes out and buys a cell phone. What people do is get a package deal on a cell phone plus service, where there's not much up-front cost, and they make up the cost of the device from the price of the service (which is spread out over time). In this case, chances are that the providers won't carry these, so customers would have to actually buy an expensive phone themselves, with a high up-front cost and probably no discount on service.
On the other hand, it's a perfectly reasonable device for Trolltech to produce, and they're not going to pull the usual annoying tricks because they're going for a savvy market segment and they know their device is not competitive on price. The phone companies only cooperate to the extent that they let people use GPRS/GSM modules with their networks; they're not going to be any more or less supportive of this than of GSM PCMCIA cards for laptops. Just because the system is presented to the user as a cell phone instead of a laptop or a PDA doesn't mean that the phone company has anything to do with it.
The main problem with LaTeX is that, if you use it for much of anything, you'll never have the patience to deal with a word processor again, and will therefore be unable to work with businesspeople on documents. And you'll be forever annoyed by the minor formatting flaws in everybody else's documents, like when paragraphs spanning page breaks have a single line on one of the pages.
I actually have the opposite experience: the better the programmer, the more likely they are to make mistakes that static analysis will find, because they're thinking about the more subtle issues, and don't notice that they've messed up a variable name. Most of the time, they write first versions of code which is well-designed, does things efficiently, and doesn't compile due to a couple of trivial typos, which they fix quickly by looking at the compiler output (which is, of course, a form of static analysis).
5 years ago, Apple didn't have the device cred to do a phone. And making a generic phone that people could just get and use regardless of their carrier was pretty much impossible. It's just now becoming plausible to buy an unlocked phone without going through some carrier, and that's a much more interesting market for Apple than the usual method of getting a phone from your carrier, where the carrier puts restrictions on the phone. Now there's the Hiptop 3, which it's plausible to get unlocked (as opposed to through T-Mobile); it's not that great a deal, but if you got the features of an iPod at the same time for not much more (than either of these alone), it would be a much better deal.
One thing, though: there's no chance that Apple will release the iPhone. They'd demo the new iPod, and during the demo, Steve would take a call on it. People don't want a phone from Apple. But if they happen to put their sim cards in their iPods, and they find they can make phone calls, that's a benefit. It's like how the Video iPod was going to be a flop, but nobody complained about their new iPod being able to do video, in addition to having more storage for the same price.
It wasn't specifically in any of them. It was a consequence of the fact that people in the game drop their inventory when they die, and money given to people goes into their inventory, and you can pay prostitutes. None of these mechanics was even particularly important in the game, let alone the combination.
A MECO is an odd variant of a black hole. The matter under debate is not whether these things exist, since we have plenty of evidence for them, but what happens to physics in these extreme conditions. The standard black hole theory, in addition to being the first to propose that there can be so much mass in a region that light can't escape, proposes details on what is going on inside this region. MECO theory proposes different details. Of course, they agree for most observed effects (the event horizon, bending light, Hawking radiation, and so forth); the main difference seems to be whether they can have a magnetic field: a standard black hole would have all of the mass at a single point, and therefore doesn't have room for charged particles to spin, so there's no magnetic field; a MECO would have the mass spread over an extremely small area, which is sufficient to have spinning charges and therefore generate a magnetic field. Of course, it's a bit tricky to determine if an object like a black hole has a magnetic field, because that field, if it exists, is practically in the noise compared to the gravitational field.
Once you have 8 cores, it becomes advantageous to have memory which is faster for each group of 4. At 8, you're on the edge where the advantage exists, but isn't sufficient to justify the additional architectural complexity. For 16 and up, it's much better to have 4-processor nodes each with its own memory (and slower access to memory on other nodes). It's unlikely that improvements in chip technology will change this. It's also not something about desktop computers; existing large machines use 4-processor nodes.
So he's right; before it makes sense to have more than 4 cores on a chip, you'll want multiple chips of 4 cores each with separate memory busses, and then system RAM on the processor chip (at which point the architecture is significantly different, because the system is asking the processor for memory values, rather than the opposite), and only then does it become efficient again to put more cores on the chip, as you can have a multiple-node chip.
This was previously reported by another British group here: .
This isn't a second code. The second code is the binding sites for proteins that activate and inhibit gene expression. Then there are a number of other codes already known that affect replication or expression in various ways.
This is way down on the list of discoveries of patterns in DNA, and it's really more a storage medium property than a code. This is more like sector markings on a hard drive platter than anything to do with data or filesystems. It's important, but because it will tell us where DNA is likely to get damaged, but these sequences are not functional components of the actual use of DNA.
Just because a group is mostly not journalists doesn't mean that the journalists in that group aren't journalists. There's even plenty of content in newspapers that isn't journalism, from opinion pieces to comics to movie reviews. Assuming that the 5% figure is correct, bloggers are far more likely than the rest of the population to be journalists, and they're probably more likely than the population of professional writers to be journalists.
It's a bit ironic that the article says that only a third of bloggers do journalistically appropriate tasks like linking to original sources, when Slashdot links to the original source, and the article doesn't.
If you just remove or escape any ' characters, you're depending on there not being any byte sequences that the database interprets as ' characters that your function doesn't. This has often turned out not to be the case, particularly with respect to invalid UTF-8 strings. The only safe method to avoid injection attacks is to make sure that no database code parses a statement including user input, because you never know exactly how the database parser will handle statements that programmers wouldn't send intentionally, and so you can never be sure that you're cleaning the input enough. (You can clean the input enough that the standards say it can't end the string, but then you're depending on the database's parser to be bug-free in this area, which has not historically been the case.)
It's possible that they put a virus on an RFID tag. You can also put a virus in a newspaper or transmit it by reading out a bunch of numbers. But that doesn't mean it will be received in a form that makes it do anything. Presumably, they've found a bug in some RFID-processing software similar to the bugs in lots of data-processing software. Of course, RFID systems are more likely to be completely immune to this sort of input-validation issue, because they're often designed to be full-packet binary database keys, and there is no invalid input that the reader can produce (sort of like how US postal bar codes always read as 11-digit numbers, and, while some of those numbers aren't used, they're always either a real place or no place, not something that breaks the system.
The real security issue is that it's trivial to clone an RFID tag. Using it for identification is like using a piece of paper that can be photocopied, except that the attacker doesn't have to swipe the paper to copy it. But if people only think about the non-fundamental and insignificant flaws with RFID, they can be distracted from the fact that it's entirely inappropriate in the first place.
The real point of the improvement isn't to give longer stability; it's that you can measure smaller units of time accurately with the new clock. A standard commercial cesium clock produces a clock signal at 5 MHz (and at 1 Hz), both extremely accurately. This is because, while the device is measuring an exactly 9.192631770 GHz frequency, this measurement can't just increase a counter each time; what it does is stabilize a quartz crystal oscillator, such that there is extremely little accumulating drift.
The new clock measures a higher frequency, which means that it can accumulate enough ticks to produce a stable output signal in a smaller amount of time, so the output signal can be both accurate and at a higher frequency. It is incidental that the long-term accuracy is better; the point is that it is no worse, and that the frequency of macroscopic ticks is higher. That means that this clock can time shorter periods: if you want to find out how long something takes, you can only give the result down to 200 nanoseconds with a standard clock, but the new clocks will give you more detail. It's like replacing an essentially perfect yard stick marked in inches with an also essentially perfect yard stick marked in thousandths of an inch: you won't care about improvement in the measurement of a foot, but it'll help a lot if you want to measure the size of a pencil lead.
Having accurate clocks on this scale isn't useful for synchronization, because there's more inaccuracy in distribution of the clock signal from the accurate clock to the transceiver, and more variability in the latency of the transmission than there is error in a standard atomic clock. Consider that modern communications within computers off-chip (and sometime on-chip) are asynchronous (the transmission is sampled to determine the bit synchronization, rather than the ends simply expecting to agree or have a shared reference), and that inaccuracy in GPS results comes more from variation in the speed of light in the atmosphere than the satellite clocks.
If the system is done right, the fact that it's quick to implement initially means that there's not all that much code there (because you wouldn't have time to write it), which means that it's relatively small and therefore there isn't too much to maintain. Of course, this breaks down if you have code generated from templates, because the initial input is then smaller than the resulting source that needs to be maintained.
If you have a system where the default behavior is generally right, and where it's easy to get non-default behavior when necessary without losing the default behavior for everything else, then you can minimize the size of your code base, and therefore minimize your maintenence burden. My impression is that RoR takes pride in the brevity of the application, so there's got to be a certain amount of maintenence savings from this effect.
Well, people on Wikipedia have a certain amount of pride in what they do, and they therefore want to address the complaints of people who have been legitimately slighted, as those indicate real flaws. So people with legitimate complaints tend to find that the article has been changed to essentially what it should say (although sometimes it takes a few rounds of corrections).
And how many people have really ever been power users of email clients? About the only advanced feature in sending email I've cared about is inserting files without word-wrapping them, while using word-wrapping for text written in the editor (which lets you send diffs to people such that they can read them and comment on them in a response, and also have them apply to the original files without fixing the whitespace). The sole newbieish thing that Pine seems to encourage is that it inserts a couple of blank lines at the top of the message when you reply, encouraging top-posting, which is widely considered bad form among the experts.
There's this general perception that people who stay newbies in their use of one sort of program are perpetually newbies in general. It's completely false. Someone could write a popular UNIX-like kernel, a C parser, compiler, and static checker, and a revolutionary version control system, and still be using Pine. In fact, the only person I know of with that resume is using Pine.
No, there's actually this effect where each generation (approximately) exhibits a different learned response to stress, based on what is the current expectation. It starts with enough people having the symptom due to physiological reasons that it becomes noticed, and then a lot more people, often with less reason to have the problem, start to show it in response to stress. For the Victorians, it was fainting spells, for Lay's generation it was heart attacks, and I'm in the generation that gets RSI. In general, if you're under stress too much, your body screws itself up, but the particular way it chooses to screw itself up is very dependant on your expectations.