For example, searching for: "Hail to the chief" would ignore to and the. In order to actually search for the phrase (which I indicated that I wanted to do by surrounding it in quotation marks), I would have to type "Hail +to +the chief". Hardly user-friendly.
And, actually, that's not quite right, either.
It's apparently always going to blow off your "the" (I just tried it). This is, alas, a
seriously hard problem. What you were doing
was looking for what actually amounts to a
single chunk of information: the title of a
fanfare played for the president. Unfortunately,
the English version of the title is four words
long although the title itself might in some cases act just like a single word (or noun phrase). So:
That was one of the worst "Hail to the chief"
s that I have every heard.
Yes, you might even pluralize it just like a noun.
So that's one problem right there: search terms
that really are tantamount to a single lexical item might be four or more words long, and might
even be inflected.
Ideally, you'd like to index
separately these multi-word chunks, especially if you can prove they occur way more often than expected. So in your example, "hail" and "chief"
co-occur on about 28,000 pages, while "hail" alone
is on 510,000 and "chief" alone is on over 1,500,000. If Google indexes 1.5 billion pages
(or so), and the terms were independent, then, you'd expect something like 5000 co-occurrences, and 28,000 is so outrageously out of line you would know that something is up.
Now, I'm guessing that *local* co-occurrence information is likely to eventually going to prove
even handier in this regard. So, for example,
"hail to" comes up 157,000 times, which is about
1/3 of all "hail" pages. That's very unlikely
unless there's something systematic (and very possibly exploitable) going on.
The big problem is that you can't really do much
with function words alone, since they're just
too staggeringly frequent. In running English text, the frequency of "the" is just about 70,000 per million. In other words, 7% of all English text consists of the definite article, and most web pages contain many distinct copies. You've
got to kill that. Unfortunately, by omitting
"the", you lose a lot of potentially useful information about definiteness of the noun phrase.
In the "hail to the chief" example, the song title
itself is just one example of a (somewhat) productive expression "hail to [definite-NP]",
which has a specific kind of meaning implied (interestingly, usually sarcastic or abusive). Picking up on this could be very useful.
So suppose I typed into deja "bush mass-mooning Gothenburg". I'll get 9 hits. That's nice,
but google might want to do more, and provide additional examples of president (or candidate)
Bush being derided in public. Or maybe give me pages that refer to the same incident being
described as the Swedish version of "hail to the chief".
So there is no doubt that function words need love, but I'd argue for a love that seeks to
understand them and their weird little contributions to meaning rather than just a
way to make sure you can nail a song title
exactly.
Re:Difference between "adjusted" and "reported"?
on
Red Hat In The Black
·
· Score: 2
Yup. That's exactly what I figured. Effectively RH borrows against future earnings to fund purchases today (borrowing meaning issuing shares, options, real loans etc.).
No, as other posters have pointed out, that's not
it. So, for example, yes, they bought Cygnus with stock, and, yes, that act did dilute the stock, but the dilution was essentially immediate as soon
as the shares go out. What you're seeing now
is something very different.
If you buy a company, that company has a "book value" that is supposed to be a dollar figure
that represents what the company would be worth
if we stopped it from being a going concern and
just sold everything in sight. For some kinds
of companies, this could be a lot: they might hold
lots of real estate, or be a closed end mutual
fund, or have a lot of cash hanging around (Think Apple or Microsoft here)... For something like
Cygnus, it could get down to "gee, so how much could
we get for that used workstation over there and
the change underneath the coke machine?":-) Obviously, Cygnus is "worth" more than the random
bits of tangible stuff you might find lying around
at the work place, but a lot of that value depends
on the so-called "good will" of the firm (the brand name, the likelihood that Cygnus programmers will continue to write good code, basically everything that's valuable about Cygnus). Clearly, this kind of intangible value is a bit
squishier and harder to evaluate than the cost of
the espresso machine. Now, on the one hand, the
value of an asset is assumed to be what you paid
for it, but on the other hand, the "hard" value
might be a lot less, and the difference between the two might, in the worst case, be very large.
In any case, you have to write it off (if you follow GAAP) over time. Obviously, if something
like Cygnus really does have value, it will contribute to your revenue in an obvious way down the line and in a form that you can easily value:
money. On the other hand, if one dotcom buys another for a billion in stock and the second dotcom only does $400K in revenue before every trace of it is gone, then the "goodwill" portion of the purchase price is huge, the loss is obvious, and the system again works just fine.
What RedHat did this quarter was make money on
what they were really doing (selling software while paying people to write/market/distribute
the software) while having to write down some more
goodwill from previous acquistions. But
no cash left the firm because of the loss, nor will any cash ever do so.
Which takes me back to my original point - if a company is going forward in cash flow, but significantly backward in book value (ie the "reported" value in the press release) then it's like borrowing a whole stack of money then saying you are better off because you have more in your wallet than you used to.
Not really. The money is already spent. The
only way you can go forward in cash flow is to...wait for it...get proportionately more money
than you spend. I mean, suppose you buy a MacDonald's franchise for (making up a number) $5
million. It wouldn't surprise me if the book value of one restaurant is something horrible like
$1 million (i.e., the value of the land and the building and a few other trinkets). But the restaurant should reliably crank out $500K in profit per year. Now, if you were accounting for
this transaction (let's keep it all cash for simplicity), then you'd start with $5 million, fork that over for the franchise, and say (originally)
that your asset is worth $5 million. But much of
that is good will. So let's say you write down
$1 million of that goodwill every year for the first five years, while making your expected $500K
per year. On paper, your cash flow is +$500K per year, but you'd be losing $500K per year due to the write-down of the goodwill. But after 5 years...you get the picture. (And, yes, this is drastically simplified.)
So, if I were an analyst looking at RedHat, I'd be much more interested in what I thought their revenue growth would be (it was pretty darn good given the dotcom meltdown), how aggressively they were controlling expenses (pretty aggressively, apparently), and whether I thought their previous company buys made sense (nobody wants to buy a company that pisses away stock and cash on useless things). As far as I can tell, RedHat ain't in bad shape at all by these standards, although they arguably overpaid for some of those acquisitions at the height of the bubble. Oh well, that does suck, and is accounted for, but doesn't change their cash flow any or their future prospects (unless management
habitually makes poor investments).
As the article points out, displays are getting cheaper at about 8% per year. That's a lot better than almost any other non-IC product. Be patient.
I try, but 8% per year is glacial compared to
the rates for ICs and for magnetic/optical (take
your pick) storage technology. Believe it or not, your average "good" PC system used to be equal parts (in cost) of RAM, mobo, disk, and display. Now, for systems that we'd really want, it's better than 50% display (thinking along the lines of a big Apple flat panel and even the most tricked out consumer-level PC).
Must be nice that you, and everyone you know, lives in areas where broadband is available. In the Real World, they aren't. Unless you are lucky, or live in a rich suburb, you don't get broadband.
Now, this is an area where I would really like to
see some hard numbers provided by a neutral third
party. We all know that DSL might not be available even where it is listed as "available";
similarly, cable modem access that is "coming soon" could take weeks or years to arrive. My
best guess is that actual availability is not
as bad as you suggest. From some recent FCC data, I would guess at an availability rate of
between 50% and 70%, although costs might still
differ strongly from place to place.
Many small towns have neither cable modem or DSL, as there is no incentive for the companies to upgrade their systems to provide it. I suspect, based on what I saw while living in Utah, that 30 years from now there will still be substantial portions of the country on dial-up.
Small towns, by their very nature, are, well, small. They will never be on the leading edge
of anything much, which is of course both a plus
and a minus. What I think will be interesting is
whether the lack of access will become a material
factor in people's relocation decisions in the near future. If it does, we might see some *very* interesting changes in the pattern of urban, suburban, and exurban growth of the last several
decades. Population densities have been going way down in many places during the last century as the
car has become a dominant transportation mode. It
would be interesting if advances in communication
technology could reverse that trend.
The punchline: I live approximately 500 feet too far from the nearest DSL-equipped central office, and the plant in my neighborhood is so old and crappy that Qwest has no plans to do anything but patch it up forever. It's funny, because I get acceptable analog modem connections (48 Kbps most of the time). One would imagine DSL would be no problem here at some point. Yet, a pretty big wheel at Qwest said, "never." DSL may become
widespread, but it will never be ubiquitous, even if I am the only exception (which I seriously doubt).
Interesting. I was thinking recently about how or whether broadband internet access would start to shape the way we build cities. Historically, the form of a city has reflected the dominant transportation mode available at the time the area
was being built up, which takes you from the narrow foot/donkey paths of yore up to the 30 foot
wide cul-de-sacs of today. (And, similarly, from the 20,000+ people per square mile densities of old US cities to the 1500 people per square mile density of the Kansas City metro area.) And until recently, there was no universally compelling reason to expect any different pattern.
But, interestingly, sprawl has a serious cost
in terms of providing services like high-speed
internet access. Whatever you might think of
telecommuting (I think it will be a failure),
it's definitely the case that more time spent
on line means less time spent on the road. More
important in the short run is the fact that most
sprawly suburbs of the past several decades will either require a drastic rewiring (= $$$) to get
things like DSL ramped up. So it's just possible
that we might all decide we have to give up on
or scale back the one-house-per-acre kind of
development that makes this all so painful.
Indeed, it looks to be more and more the case that DSL is a very poor match for sprawling development; being 4 miles from the
CO suddenly has a huge penalty attached to it.
This would be interesting, and perhaps a positive
sign if you like old-style cities, except for
another nagging problem: Many inner city neighborhoods are not much better off in terms of
DSL-based broadband, because the cost of upgrading some of the oldest telephone systems doesn't make sense, either, especially as the growing importance of cellular networks make the existing copper wire infrastructure less relevant for telephony. I would have thought that cable modems
would pick up the slack there, but I know that
in the city where I live, (Columbia, Missouri)
the cable company isn't very interested in upgrading the system to provide service to the (poorer) urban core, and are fighting the satellite TV companies as hard as they can.
So, what to do? Build a whole new generation of
"internet-optimized" neighborhoods while pitching
the urbs and the exurbs alike? I'm not really
sure. One would think that wireless technologies
could really help a lot here, but then you should
note that they would tend to (strongly) favor
compact development. Indeed, as I have accidentally found out over the past year, your
802.11b network can be fairly easily shared with
your neighbors.:-) A generation or two down this
road might be very interesting indeed.
The apple was geared for both home and business; the vic-20 and C64 were toys from beginning to end. Popular toys, but they never had any aspirations at other markets.
Well, Commodore might not have
had any aspirations at other markets, but readers
of (say) Compute! magazine would know that many
peripheral add-on companies did not have the same
limitations in vision.:-) So I know you could get "accounting" software for at least the 64,
which pretty much boggles the mind.
But I think my favorite item along these line was the really fast mobius strip casette loop as a replacement for RAM product (primarily for the Vic 20, as I recall). If this sounds completely nutty to many readers that's because it was. You really
had to have been there.
The Vic was *not* a new design; it was a stripped down PET with color. The C64 was a vic with 64k.
Bzzt! The C64 was a lot more than a vic with 64K.
For one thing, the C64 had something almost like
real sound, and not just a way to buzz the speaker.:-) The color graphics were also much more capable; 98% of vic 20 graphics were generated via special characters from the keyboard.
Re:Jeez, where should I start ranting?
on
Make Way for Fiber
·
· Score: 2
I know for a fact that some railroads only purchased the rights to operate a (surface) railroad over the land in question, with the original property owner holding all remaining rights, even though it's difficult to do anything
with land with a railroad on it. Thus, when the railroad ceases operation, plans to turn the land into a bike path or whatever fall to pieces.
Well, they *can* fall to pieces, but it isn't
inevitable. Here in Missouri, they turned dozens
of miles of the old Katy railroad right-of-way
into the Katy Trail, a state park which is
essentially a bike path. And the city of Columbia
pulled a separate deal to turn a railroad spur
into that city into a separately run bike path.
The way this worked was via the little-known
National Trail Systems Act, which provides a
way for unused rail corridors to be set aside
for future transportation needs and used on
an "interim" basis as recreational trails.
You do have to pay for this, though, and a
lot can go wrong when you're trying to secure
a big contiguous chunk. In the case of the Katy
Trail, they now have 225 continuous miles of it,
which apparently generates a better return in terms of tourist spending and the like than the
railroad ever did.
Of course all figures are higly fictive, but you should be able to get the "point" of it.
In this way you will "loose" money for every book sold, but make enough money to cover that loss from fringe-business, such as advertising.
For some reason, nobody has mentioned what I
suspect will be the most valuable "fringe" of
this business, to the extent that it might
bail them out pretty nicely even if everything
they sell themselves only comes in at break-even:
Information on buying habits
Amazon has (and uses) a phenomenally large amount
of information about what their customers buy,
and the whole "customers who bought X often were
also interested in Y" angle of the site that always freaks people out at first, until they
realize how useful that can be.
I think that Bezos and company understood this
pretty quickly, which is why they wanted to get
into so many other product lines, since
the richness of the customer database goes way
up. It's nice and all to know that
households who buy Object-Oriented Perl also buy
the poetry of Wendy Cope, but it's way more
important to know that such people also buy
certain kinds of toys (for their kids), have a
taste for certain clothing lines, and probably
need a new car in the next 12 months. You don't
have to be an e-merchant to make money on info like that, friends.
Or, if you think that trading in or selling info
on individuals really won't fly, you can aggregate
it and sell it to brick-and-mortar outfits so
that they can better plan where to put their next
round of locations. This can be seriously big
money, if you play the game right.
Airlines have done this extensively for years. The price of a ticket varies tremendously based on how full the flight is. The guy or gal sitting next to you may have paid twice what you did -- or half.
It is a bit of a different situation, since there's only X seats on a given flight. But still, I'm surprised that people don't find this objectionable.
Oh, they certainly do. You're just hanging out
with the wrong crowd.:-) More seriously, things
got to the point where nobody had a problem with
flights getting more expensive the closer you got
to the flight time, and everybody understood the
necessity of matching a competitor's low price
for a particular route.
But the latter point still leads to some really screwy things. We live in Columbia, MO, which is half-way between KC and St. Louis. When pricing
a flight back to Boston recently, we found out
that the KC-Boston routes were cheaper. Fair
enough, demand might be lower or competition more
severe. But many of the KC-Boston flights were
actually KC-St. Louis-Boston, and you were paying
almost $200 less to take the whole route compared to the St. Louis-Boston chunk. Intellectually,
I know why that happened, but that didn't make
me feel happy about it.
Now, the real fun came the evening when my wife
and I were tag-teaming the travel agency websites
from our two computers. At one point, we realized
that the more we looked at fares, the higher they
seemed to be getting. It got really tempting to
believe that we were the culprits by making so
many queries...somebody's code decides that X/100 of all queries become sales, so when Y queries
come in, you raise the price for query Y+1. This
could get really ugly.
(Though I'm more surprised that TicketMaster hasn't started using this approach for concert tickets...)
Me, too. But the most surprising lack of dynamic
pricing is for (in-season) ticket sales for sports
teams. Why on earth should a ticket to see the
Hated Yankees cost the same as a ticket to see
the Tigers?
That's why hardcover books
sell at a premium, and that's why hardcover books come out before the paperback version. What you're *really* paying for is the earlyness, not the hard cover. It's called "price differentiation".
Actually, the book question is a bit more complicated than that, albeit in a way that helps
prove your point. Libraries also buy hardcover books for reasons that are probably pretty obvious, so part of the hardcover premium is
really a "library tax". Then some publishers
really cracked wise and started to offer special
"archival quality" editions of books with better
bindings and completely acid-free paper and the
like. And a nice little business this was until
somebody figured out how to dematerialize the
books completely...but that's another story.
This may seem like a technicality, but as Internet access gradually becomes more important than long-distance, the baby bells have carved themselves out a very profitable niche-- and don't expect Congress to enact any new regulations anytime in the next 20 years.
Ah, another "Mountain Dew Monitor Moment" (MDMM).
Why on earth would you expect no congressional
action in the next 20 years? I think it will soon
become clear that the whole communications landscape has changed, which means that there will
be a new (or different than expected) set of winners and losers, and both groups, as usual, have every incentive to try and manipulate the
legislative and regulatory climate to strengthen
their interests. Now, it might not be an easy
matter to get any particular bill passed, but I
can't really go with any prediction that there
will be no change in the laws or regulations governing communications.
IBM deserves any and all DB misfortune (including pissing away a billion dollars) for the crime of destroying the far superior QUEL query language from Ingres with 'the EBCDIC of query languages', SQL!
But on the other hand, IBM deserves any and all
relational database glory for
employing E. F. Codd, who wrote the innocently
titled paper "A relational model of data for large shared databanks" in 1971, which started the whole
field. Given IBM's previous monopolistic tendencies, it's sweetly ironic that they end up
spending a billion dollars to gobble up *any*
other RDBMS provider when they used to *own* the field, lock, stock and barrel, starting with their own System R. Indeed, IBM Japan used to brag about it:
ALL YOUR DATABASE 'R' BELONG TO US!!
(Sorry...it just had to be said.:-)) Meanwhile,
with their purchase of Informix, IBM has probably
stomped out the last possibility that any form of QUEL would ever make any comeback, given that Informix had bought Illustra which had commercialized Postgres, which originally spoke Postquel, the follow-on to QUEL after Ingres had
gone commercial. That is, unless the developers in the PostgreSQL project miraculously resurrect
it themselves...
We think helping GNU parted to get ready is a much
nicer way to address this problem.
That would be great. But I have been wondering why parted gets so little recognition
these days. When last I used it (to resize a
FAT32 partition on an IBM Thinkpad), it Just Worked, which shocked me, considering that nobody in our well-informed Linux
users group (MLUG) had apparently ever tried to use it, despite the fact that the "non-destructive resizing" question is a true FAQ.
In my experience, unless your ISP artificially throttles back your available bandwidth, most people will find cable to be significantly faster than DSL. The concept of "shared" bandwidth is lost because in the end, everyone's sharing bandwidth from someone (even DSL). I would venture to say that unless you live in a heavy tech corridor, where all your neighbors have cable modem, you will not likely feel the pinch.
I live in Columbia, Missouri, which is at the high point of one of the largest geek concentration gradients you'll ever see (the university is here, but outside of town you're talking about 80 miles of crops in every direction). Unfortunately, the
total number of geeks is not so high that we have
chronic bandwidth shortages by Boston area standards, but, whenever the issue comes up on the Mizzou Linux Users Group mailing list, the eventual verdict is that cable modems provide much higher potential bandwidth (e.g., up to 3500kbps),
but are much more likely to experience unscheduled
down time, at least so far.
Before @Home started throttling upload bandwidth, there were more frequent bandwidth issues apparently due to the presence of many servers
that aren't technically allowed by @Home but which were tolerated.
Additionally, cable appears to be more readily available, and is cheaper than DSL access for the amount of bandwidth you get.
With taxes and other dorkiness, the second 12 months of @Home is like $41.96 in our market; I haven't tried to get a better rate from them
by threatening to hop onto DSL...yet.:-) In part because DSL is no cheaper at its cheapest, yet has
no bandwidth advantage at all.
I think this is the one Mac that has many Windows people caught with their mouths wide open.
Huh ? Excuse me? Where the hell are you living, in Poland or what? In rich countries, nobody cares about this toy, why would you when you can get a much more powerful PC that runs an OS that doesn't crash (Linux for instance, compare that to MacOS9!), all that for less money?
But this is just the point; what you say isn't true. Remember, I just bought a Thinkpad (you snipped that out of your
reply), so I *know* how much a decent quality notebook with a large screen costs. For almost exactly the same amount of money as I spent on an IBM Thinkpad A21m, I could have bought a Powerbook G4. Now, OS 9 isn't exactly
my cup of tea, but that's okay: I could download
Linux for it today, or shell out for Mac OS X.
Problem solved. As far as speed goes, I am dead certain I could buy notebooks that are actually faster, but not for very much less, at least if we
hold the design of the thing constant. Which is
why I pointed out the importance of seeing one of
these in person. Until you do, you would probably shrug over it just like me. Now, I have no doubt that some PC maker could duplicate the Powerbook G4 essentially feature for feature, but nobody has done this...yet.
Its not that the music industry has failed to realize this. Its that they will not take advantage of it until they can assure they will have utmost control in the new medium. They could've started sellign MP3s years ago, but they
feared that without control, piracy would run rampant (and it probably would).
Piracy is only piracy if copying is necessarily
stealing. I have no time for arguing with people
of the gimme gimme gimme generation who believe everything should be cost-free, but it's so easy to see how you could
solve the on-line music distribution problem that
it's frankly not funny.
In a recent column,
Robert X. Cringely pointed out that it would be a comparatively trivial matter to end up charging
for music copying by just slapping a tax onto every blank CD-R and CD-RW sold that could be distributed to artists and recording labels according to their total "burning share", which you could estimate via reasonable statistical sampling of on-line traffic or polling. Yes, there are always weirdos who will buy an extra 80 gig of disk just for the sheer thrill of not paying for what they use, but they aren't going away in any event.
But for the vast majority of cases, everybody can get paid, if everybody agreed to do this. The problem, of course, is that record labels probably have zero long-term incentive to participate in this, since a world that distributes music primarily on-line is a world that really doesn't need the value-added services of record companies.
Music retailers could be in an even worse bind.
And I don't know how you solve the political problem to get the recordables tax passed in the first place.
Here's one of my BIG complaints about Apple. Can I get the same iMac 600MHz, let's see, I don't need the 56k internal modem, I have DSL, I don't need VGA video mirroring, don't need the fancy speakers, dont need their crappy 1 button mouse, I'd like to have a 4 button model Kensington instead. Don't need the CD-RW, I'd like to use the external SCSI one I already have.
I think the problem here is that you personally
do not want any iMac at any price. The point of
the iMac is that it's an ultra-quiet luggable one-piece solution with cheap wireless networking,
USB-only peripherals, and a firewire hookup for your digital camera. If you want to plug in all
kinds of other stuff and swap components until
you get exactly what you want, you want one of
the G4 models.
Similarly, if you want a relatively inexpensive
one-piece (no dongles) and indestructible notebook, you might want an iBook. Otherwise, you don't.
But if you don't want an iBook, you probably *do* want a Powerbook G4. I honestly haven't yet met anybody who didn't. In all seriousness, I think this is the one Mac that has many Windows people caught with their mouths wide open. I'll confess that I didn't get the point of this machine until
I saw one up close and personal, and then cursed the fact that I'd went and bought a (very, very nice) ThinkPad.:-(
The big problem with Apple wasn't the current iMac configuration per se, but the fact that they didn't offer an iMac with a built-in CD-RW at any price a year ago, when they could have and should have done so.
I understand your position. However, as another web designer, I would love to at least have easy access to your preferences. Typically the browser settings would be a good indication of the user preferences. Possibly a better solution would be a "preferences" header. This way each user could set up things like "prefered size", "prefered resolution", "prefered font and size". These could be transmitted to the server and utilized appropriately.
And this is where I always wonder about web designers, including Earthlink. On the one hand,
I could understand how some of this could be important if we were talking about sending full-fledged web apps to the user. On the other
hand, it appears that what most web designers really want is the ability to send me content that would be far better off rendered as
a pdf file. There are exceptions, but most of those are better handled using CSS (and we know how popular *that* sensible solution is). I
mean, I know what my preferred fonts and sizes are. I set them up in my browser, and 98% of everybody who *doesn't* try to give me some kind of special web experience and just sends me html
ends up giving me something I'm happy to look at.
Again, I really wouldn't mind too much if designers at least used CSS consistently, since I can arrange things there so that nothing too horrible happens.
But that leaves all the rest of you, and I'll guess we'll just have to wait until you either learn or lose your jobs.
The teacher then walked towards his office to read for an hour, when young Carl Gauss announced
"I'm done!!! The answer is 5050." Flabbergasted, the teacher demanded to know where Carl got the answer. Turns out that Gauss discovered the formula
sum = (n(n+1)/2)
Thus began the career of a brillian mathematician.
Basically right, except you leave out the really important part, which is where Gauss explains his work and makes it accessible even to his teacher. How he did this was to argue
that the sum of the numbers from 1 to n is half
of twice that sum. Okay...we can go for that.
But then he points out that this double sum can
be written as n terms that combine the ascending and descending series like this:
Now, each of these terms has the sum (n+1), and
there are n such terms since there are n terms in
the original series. So the double sum is just
n*(n+1), and the sum we want is just half of that.
The ISS is such a budget drain it is bad for the space program. It only ever existed for the political reason of outspending the Russians in the cold war. The money spent on the ISS could have put a man on Mars by now.
Yes, and no. The ISS is not just bad for the
space program; it is bad news for all
science. The billions that go for
this could be spent in so many other ways that
would produce greater benefit for almost any
field of inquiry on space or on earth. While
I don't doubt that there was some Cold War thinking go on in the original design of the
space station, a lot of it was also NASA and
other governmental officials wanting to do
meat in space ASAP. Truth to be told, probably 95% of all taxpayers don't understand most of the science that is funded by the US government, but
everybody understands a Teacher in Space.
Now, I am not by any means against space exploration, manned or un-manned, but everybody on slashdot probably understands the huge costs involved with premature deployment of any technology. Indeed, that was the most compelling
argument against the Superconducting Supercollider: in a few years, we could probably
drastically reduce the cost of the apparatus. A
similar argument was brought forth against the
Human Genome Project: the expectation was that this would take years longer than it did, but the
HGP was more likely to create the tools for its
own boot-strapping, which is what happened.
If, instead of blowing cash on the ISS, we instead declared this decade the decade of Genomics, Materials Science and Robotics, we could probably
leap far ahead of our current schedule to achieve
the real goals of Space Science, with much smaller
likelihoods of killing astronauts and creating a
PR disaster (for all science) in the process.
This patent is incredibly broad, covering any URL which identifies the document to be delivered, the intended recipient, and "other parameters". Everyone who handled user login using querystring data (remember the good ol' days before cookies?) has prior art on this. I've got sites dating back to '95 and '96 that do this, and I certainly got the idea from someone who came before.
Indeed. An interesting twist here is that a
patent cannot be covered by prior art, or merely
an obvious extension of prior art to a person of ordinary skill in the art. If "the art" here is
authenticating users to a web server, the use of
baroque URLs was quite well understood in the time before cookies became prevalent. Specifically,
I think that ordinary people, like even me, could
figure out how to do this after reading selections
from Phil Greenspun's
How to be a Web Whore Just Like Me which has
been around on the net for, god, forever, and was published as Database backed web sites in 1997.
Re:Did Vince McMahon just buy the XML?
on
Inside XML
·
· Score: 2
It's like the regular HTML, but we now have extra tags like:
<TAUNT>
<FLYING BUTTRICE>
<CHAIRWHIP>
Uh, scotch that. "flying buttrice" won't fly as
a tag name, as one can clearly see
from the spec. The BNF
(buttrice-naming form) clearly states that whitespace separates a tag name from an (optional) list of attributes or the final ">". Nobody wants a malformed buttrice.;-)
Sheldon asked:
At RedHat and VA Linux's burn rate of investment capital... Will they still be in existence in 3 years?
I don't know about VA, but according to RedHat their analysts predict profitability by 2002, and a 5 year growth rate of 50%. Their future sounds pretty good to me.
More to the point, Red Hat only lost $0.01 per
share last quarter, and still enjoys strong revenue growth. Their "burn rate" has gotten
extremely small. Even if a stalling economy slows their quest for profitability by a year or
two, they still have cash to make it through.
Now, as for VALinux, the situation does not look nearly as bright. There are more and stronger potential competitors out there for
them, and no hardware maker is making any money really for the next quarter or two.
[About some idea that this would be the last census.]
Wishful thinking by the Clinton regime.
They were trying to set a precedent that the census could be done by statistical sampling. If they had succeeded, they could then set up a "sampling" organization and make up any numbers they wanted.
Oh, my. I guess I would find your argument way more convincing if there were even a shred of evidence that what you say is true.
Seriously, I see the same old tripe parroted around by people who should really know better than this. So, as my daily dose of public service, let me point you towards an
on-line article by Anderson and Fienberg that
gives a solid introduction to the issues involved.
To cut to the chase here, it is incredibly difficult to find a trained statistician who believes that the naive counting approach to the census could not be substantially helped by incorporating some form of sampling procedure.
The problem, of course, is that it is incredibly difficult to find any *two* trained statisticians who agree with each other on what the best procedure would be, which gave politicians an easy way out ("See? Even the experts disagree...").
To give a little bit more away, the primary use of sampling being contemplated was actually targeted at non-respondents. The problem here is that while you could follow up on most non-respondents very easily, there are a lot of them, so it takes time. And, the more time that passes before you follow-up, the worse the data get, and what you really end up with is a systematic undercount.
Basically everybody on all sides of the political debate understands and agrees about this. What you should do about it is, of course, where the real fighting starts.
Since our number of genes is so surprisingly close to much much "simpler" (as perceived by the human ego) organisms, then genes can't be where it's at is no doubt going to be a popular conclusion.
I think this is a bit pessimistic. Yeah, people
might not dig the fruit fly comparisons, but I think that the comparisons with mice and other mammals are not as likely to provoke as much ire as they would have in the past. Basically, I don't think that people will see anything too weird about only having a thousand or fewer more genes than some creature that can be viewed as a loving pet.
Where things might get tricky is when people realize that the human superiority in gene number if one in fact exists is probably
mostly soaked up by recipes for how to make:
Like, yet Another Trivial Sub-type of GABA receptor (LATSO-GABA)
Assistant to the Counsel of the Junior Vice-Provost in Charge of Keeping a Lid on
Homeobox-containing Genes that would Otherwise
Pop Up in the Wrong Places (lots of these...)
Genes that Exists Solely to Become Mutated and Cause Weird Cancers.
Nth Assistant to the Gene that Exists Solely to Become Mutated and Cause Weird Cancers.
Slashdot Mirror
And, actually, that's not quite right, either. It's apparently always going to blow off your "the" (I just tried it). This is, alas, a seriously hard problem. What you were doing was looking for what actually amounts to a single chunk of information: the title of a fanfare played for the president. Unfortunately, the English version of the title is four words long although the title itself might in some cases act just like a single word (or noun phrase). So:
Yes, you might even pluralize it just like a noun. So that's one problem right there: search terms that really are tantamount to a single lexical item might be four or more words long, and might even be inflected.Ideally, you'd like to index separately these multi-word chunks, especially if you can prove they occur way more often than expected. So in your example, "hail" and "chief" co-occur on about 28,000 pages, while "hail" alone is on 510,000 and "chief" alone is on over 1,500,000. If Google indexes 1.5 billion pages (or so), and the terms were independent, then, you'd expect something like 5000 co-occurrences, and 28,000 is so outrageously out of line you would know that something is up.
Now, I'm guessing that *local* co-occurrence information is likely to eventually going to prove even handier in this regard. So, for example, "hail to" comes up 157,000 times, which is about 1/3 of all "hail" pages. That's very unlikely unless there's something systematic (and very possibly exploitable) going on.
The big problem is that you can't really do much with function words alone, since they're just too staggeringly frequent. In running English text, the frequency of "the" is just about 70,000 per million. In other words, 7% of all English text consists of the definite article, and most web pages contain many distinct copies. You've got to kill that. Unfortunately, by omitting "the", you lose a lot of potentially useful information about definiteness of the noun phrase. In the "hail to the chief" example, the song title itself is just one example of a (somewhat) productive expression "hail to [definite-NP]", which has a specific kind of meaning implied (interestingly, usually sarcastic or abusive). Picking up on this could be very useful.
So suppose I typed into deja "bush mass-mooning Gothenburg". I'll get 9 hits. That's nice, but google might want to do more, and provide additional examples of president (or candidate) Bush being derided in public. Or maybe give me pages that refer to the same incident being described as the Swedish version of "hail to the chief".
So there is no doubt that function words need love, but I'd argue for a love that seeks to understand them and their weird little contributions to meaning rather than just a way to make sure you can nail a song title exactly.
No, as other posters have pointed out, that's not it. So, for example, yes, they bought Cygnus with stock, and, yes, that act did dilute the stock, but the dilution was essentially immediate as soon as the shares go out. What you're seeing now is something very different.
If you buy a company, that company has a "book value" that is supposed to be a dollar figure that represents what the company would be worth if we stopped it from being a going concern and just sold everything in sight. For some kinds of companies, this could be a lot: they might hold lots of real estate, or be a closed end mutual fund, or have a lot of cash hanging around (Think Apple or Microsoft here)... For something like Cygnus, it could get down to "gee, so how much could we get for that used workstation over there and the change underneath the coke machine?" :-) Obviously, Cygnus is "worth" more than the random
bits of tangible stuff you might find lying around
at the work place, but a lot of that value depends
on the so-called "good will" of the firm (the brand name, the likelihood that Cygnus programmers will continue to write good code, basically everything that's valuable about Cygnus). Clearly, this kind of intangible value is a bit
squishier and harder to evaluate than the cost of
the espresso machine. Now, on the one hand, the
value of an asset is assumed to be what you paid
for it, but on the other hand, the "hard" value
might be a lot less, and the difference between the two might, in the worst case, be very large.
In any case, you have to write it off (if you follow GAAP) over time. Obviously, if something
like Cygnus really does have value, it will contribute to your revenue in an obvious way down the line and in a form that you can easily value:
money. On the other hand, if one dotcom buys another for a billion in stock and the second dotcom only does $400K in revenue before every trace of it is gone, then the "goodwill" portion of the purchase price is huge, the loss is obvious, and the system again works just fine.
What RedHat did this quarter was make money on what they were really doing (selling software while paying people to write/market/distribute the software) while having to write down some more goodwill from previous acquistions. But no cash left the firm because of the loss, nor will any cash ever do so.
Not really. The money is already spent. The only way you can go forward in cash flow is to...wait for it...get proportionately more money than you spend. I mean, suppose you buy a MacDonald's franchise for (making up a number) $5 million. It wouldn't surprise me if the book value of one restaurant is something horrible like $1 million (i.e., the value of the land and the building and a few other trinkets). But the restaurant should reliably crank out $500K in profit per year. Now, if you were accounting for this transaction (let's keep it all cash for simplicity), then you'd start with $5 million, fork that over for the franchise, and say (originally) that your asset is worth $5 million. But much of that is good will. So let's say you write down $1 million of that goodwill every year for the first five years, while making your expected $500K per year. On paper, your cash flow is +$500K per year, but you'd be losing $500K per year due to the write-down of the goodwill. But after 5 years...you get the picture. (And, yes, this is drastically simplified.)
So, if I were an analyst looking at RedHat, I'd be much more interested in what I thought their revenue growth would be (it was pretty darn good given the dotcom meltdown), how aggressively they were controlling expenses (pretty aggressively, apparently), and whether I thought their previous company buys made sense (nobody wants to buy a company that pisses away stock and cash on useless things). As far as I can tell, RedHat ain't in bad shape at all by these standards, although they arguably overpaid for some of those acquisitions at the height of the bubble. Oh well, that does suck, and is accounted for, but doesn't change their cash flow any or their future prospects (unless management habitually makes poor investments).
I try, but 8% per year is glacial compared to the rates for ICs and for magnetic/optical (take your pick) storage technology. Believe it or not, your average "good" PC system used to be equal parts (in cost) of RAM, mobo, disk, and display. Now, for systems that we'd really want, it's better than 50% display (thinking along the lines of a big Apple flat panel and even the most tricked out consumer-level PC).
Under these conditions, patience is hard.
Now, this is an area where I would really like to see some hard numbers provided by a neutral third party. We all know that DSL might not be available even where it is listed as "available"; similarly, cable modem access that is "coming soon" could take weeks or years to arrive. My best guess is that actual availability is not as bad as you suggest. From some recent FCC data, I would guess at an availability rate of between 50% and 70%, although costs might still differ strongly from place to place.
Small towns, by their very nature, are, well, small. They will never be on the leading edge of anything much, which is of course both a plus and a minus. What I think will be interesting is whether the lack of access will become a material factor in people's relocation decisions in the near future. If it does, we might see some *very* interesting changes in the pattern of urban, suburban, and exurban growth of the last several decades. Population densities have been going way down in many places during the last century as the car has become a dominant transportation mode. It would be interesting if advances in communication technology could reverse that trend.
Interesting. I was thinking recently about how or whether broadband internet access would start to shape the way we build cities. Historically, the form of a city has reflected the dominant transportation mode available at the time the area was being built up, which takes you from the narrow foot/donkey paths of yore up to the 30 foot wide cul-de-sacs of today. (And, similarly, from the 20,000+ people per square mile densities of old US cities to the 1500 people per square mile density of the Kansas City metro area.) And until recently, there was no universally compelling reason to expect any different pattern.
But, interestingly, sprawl has a serious cost in terms of providing services like high-speed internet access. Whatever you might think of telecommuting (I think it will be a failure), it's definitely the case that more time spent on line means less time spent on the road. More important in the short run is the fact that most sprawly suburbs of the past several decades will either require a drastic rewiring (= $$$) to get things like DSL ramped up. So it's just possible that we might all decide we have to give up on or scale back the one-house-per-acre kind of development that makes this all so painful. Indeed, it looks to be more and more the case that DSL is a very poor match for sprawling development; being 4 miles from the CO suddenly has a huge penalty attached to it. This would be interesting, and perhaps a positive sign if you like old-style cities, except for another nagging problem: Many inner city neighborhoods are not much better off in terms of DSL-based broadband, because the cost of upgrading some of the oldest telephone systems doesn't make sense, either, especially as the growing importance of cellular networks make the existing copper wire infrastructure less relevant for telephony. I would have thought that cable modems would pick up the slack there, but I know that in the city where I live, (Columbia, Missouri) the cable company isn't very interested in upgrading the system to provide service to the (poorer) urban core, and are fighting the satellite TV companies as hard as they can.
So, what to do? Build a whole new generation of "internet-optimized" neighborhoods while pitching the urbs and the exurbs alike? I'm not really sure. One would think that wireless technologies could really help a lot here, but then you should note that they would tend to (strongly) favor compact development. Indeed, as I have accidentally found out over the past year, your 802.11b network can be fairly easily shared with your neighbors. :-) A generation or two down this
road might be very interesting indeed.
Well, Commodore might not have had any aspirations at other markets, but readers of (say) Compute! magazine would know that many peripheral add-on companies did not have the same limitations in vision. :-) So I know you could get "accounting" software for at least the 64,
which pretty much boggles the mind.
But I think my favorite item along these line was the really fast mobius strip casette loop as a replacement for RAM product (primarily for the Vic 20, as I recall). If this sounds completely nutty to many readers that's because it was. You really had to have been there.
Bzzt! The C64 was a lot more than a vic with 64K. For one thing, the C64 had something almost like real sound, and not just a way to buzz the speaker. :-) The color graphics were also much more capable; 98% of vic 20 graphics were generated via special characters from the keyboard.
For all six of you who really want to know more on the technical specs of these machines, you might try this page full of Commodore "Business" Machines trivia
Well, they *can* fall to pieces, but it isn't inevitable. Here in Missouri, they turned dozens of miles of the old Katy railroad right-of-way into the Katy Trail, a state park which is essentially a bike path. And the city of Columbia pulled a separate deal to turn a railroad spur into that city into a separately run bike path.
The way this worked was via the little-known National Trail Systems Act, which provides a way for unused rail corridors to be set aside for future transportation needs and used on an "interim" basis as recreational trails. You do have to pay for this, though, and a lot can go wrong when you're trying to secure a big contiguous chunk. In the case of the Katy Trail, they now have 225 continuous miles of it, which apparently generates a better return in terms of tourist spending and the like than the railroad ever did.
For some reason, nobody has mentioned what I suspect will be the most valuable "fringe" of this business, to the extent that it might bail them out pretty nicely even if everything they sell themselves only comes in at break-even:
Information on buying habits
Amazon has (and uses) a phenomenally large amount of information about what their customers buy, and the whole "customers who bought X often were also interested in Y" angle of the site that always freaks people out at first, until they realize how useful that can be.
I think that Bezos and company understood this pretty quickly, which is why they wanted to get into so many other product lines, since the richness of the customer database goes way up. It's nice and all to know that households who buy Object-Oriented Perl also buy the poetry of Wendy Cope, but it's way more important to know that such people also buy certain kinds of toys (for their kids), have a taste for certain clothing lines, and probably need a new car in the next 12 months. You don't have to be an e-merchant to make money on info like that, friends.
Or, if you think that trading in or selling info on individuals really won't fly, you can aggregate it and sell it to brick-and-mortar outfits so that they can better plan where to put their next round of locations. This can be seriously big money, if you play the game right.
Oh, they certainly do. You're just hanging out with the wrong crowd. :-) More seriously, things
got to the point where nobody had a problem with
flights getting more expensive the closer you got
to the flight time, and everybody understood the
necessity of matching a competitor's low price
for a particular route.
But the latter point still leads to some really screwy things. We live in Columbia, MO, which is half-way between KC and St. Louis. When pricing a flight back to Boston recently, we found out that the KC-Boston routes were cheaper. Fair enough, demand might be lower or competition more severe. But many of the KC-Boston flights were actually KC-St. Louis-Boston, and you were paying almost $200 less to take the whole route compared to the St. Louis-Boston chunk. Intellectually, I know why that happened, but that didn't make me feel happy about it.
Now, the real fun came the evening when my wife and I were tag-teaming the travel agency websites from our two computers. At one point, we realized that the more we looked at fares, the higher they seemed to be getting. It got really tempting to believe that we were the culprits by making so many queries...somebody's code decides that X/100 of all queries become sales, so when Y queries come in, you raise the price for query Y+1. This could get really ugly.
Me, too. But the most surprising lack of dynamic pricing is for (in-season) ticket sales for sports teams. Why on earth should a ticket to see the Hated Yankees cost the same as a ticket to see the Tigers?
Actually, the book question is a bit more complicated than that, albeit in a way that helps prove your point. Libraries also buy hardcover books for reasons that are probably pretty obvious, so part of the hardcover premium is really a "library tax". Then some publishers really cracked wise and started to offer special "archival quality" editions of books with better bindings and completely acid-free paper and the like. And a nice little business this was until somebody figured out how to dematerialize the books completely...but that's another story.
Ah, another "Mountain Dew Monitor Moment" (MDMM). Why on earth would you expect no congressional action in the next 20 years? I think it will soon become clear that the whole communications landscape has changed, which means that there will be a new (or different than expected) set of winners and losers, and both groups, as usual, have every incentive to try and manipulate the legislative and regulatory climate to strengthen their interests. Now, it might not be an easy matter to get any particular bill passed, but I can't really go with any prediction that there will be no change in the laws or regulations governing communications.
But on the other hand, IBM deserves any and all relational database glory for employing E. F. Codd, who wrote the innocently titled paper "A relational model of data for large shared databanks" in 1971, which started the whole field. Given IBM's previous monopolistic tendencies, it's sweetly ironic that they end up spending a billion dollars to gobble up *any* other RDBMS provider when they used to *own* the field, lock, stock and barrel, starting with their own System R. Indeed, IBM Japan used to brag about it:
ALL YOUR DATABASE 'R' BELONG TO US!!
(Sorry...it just had to be said. :-)) Meanwhile,
with their purchase of Informix, IBM has probably
stomped out the last possibility that any form of QUEL would ever make any comeback, given that Informix had bought Illustra which had commercialized Postgres, which originally spoke Postquel, the follow-on to QUEL after Ingres had
gone commercial. That is, unless the developers in the PostgreSQL project miraculously resurrect
it themselves...
That would be great. But I have been wondering why parted gets so little recognition these days. When last I used it (to resize a FAT32 partition on an IBM Thinkpad), it Just Worked, which shocked me, considering that nobody in our well-informed Linux users group (MLUG) had apparently ever tried to use it, despite the fact that the "non-destructive resizing" question is a true FAQ.
I live in Columbia, Missouri, which is at the high point of one of the largest geek concentration gradients you'll ever see (the university is here, but outside of town you're talking about 80 miles of crops in every direction). Unfortunately, the total number of geeks is not so high that we have chronic bandwidth shortages by Boston area standards, but, whenever the issue comes up on the Mizzou Linux Users Group mailing list, the eventual verdict is that cable modems provide much higher potential bandwidth (e.g., up to 3500kbps), but are much more likely to experience unscheduled down time, at least so far.
Before @Home started throttling upload bandwidth, there were more frequent bandwidth issues apparently due to the presence of many servers that aren't technically allowed by @Home but which were tolerated.
With taxes and other dorkiness, the second 12 months of @Home is like $41.96 in our market; I haven't tried to get a better rate from them by threatening to hop onto DSL...yet. :-) In part because DSL is no cheaper at its cheapest, yet has
no bandwidth advantage at all.
But this is just the point; what you say isn't true. Remember, I just bought a Thinkpad (you snipped that out of your reply), so I *know* how much a decent quality notebook with a large screen costs. For almost exactly the same amount of money as I spent on an IBM Thinkpad A21m, I could have bought a Powerbook G4. Now, OS 9 isn't exactly my cup of tea, but that's okay: I could download Linux for it today, or shell out for Mac OS X. Problem solved. As far as speed goes, I am dead certain I could buy notebooks that are actually faster, but not for very much less, at least if we hold the design of the thing constant. Which is why I pointed out the importance of seeing one of these in person. Until you do, you would probably shrug over it just like me. Now, I have no doubt that some PC maker could duplicate the Powerbook G4 essentially feature for feature, but nobody has done this...yet.
Piracy is only piracy if copying is necessarily stealing. I have no time for arguing with people of the gimme gimme gimme generation who believe everything should be cost-free, but it's so easy to see how you could solve the on-line music distribution problem that it's frankly not funny. In a recent column, Robert X. Cringely pointed out that it would be a comparatively trivial matter to end up charging for music copying by just slapping a tax onto every blank CD-R and CD-RW sold that could be distributed to artists and recording labels according to their total "burning share", which you could estimate via reasonable statistical sampling of on-line traffic or polling. Yes, there are always weirdos who will buy an extra 80 gig of disk just for the sheer thrill of not paying for what they use, but they aren't going away in any event.
But for the vast majority of cases, everybody can get paid, if everybody agreed to do this. The problem, of course, is that record labels probably have zero long-term incentive to participate in this, since a world that distributes music primarily on-line is a world that really doesn't need the value-added services of record companies. Music retailers could be in an even worse bind.
And I don't know how you solve the political problem to get the recordables tax passed in the first place.
I think the problem here is that you personally do not want any iMac at any price. The point of the iMac is that it's an ultra-quiet luggable one-piece solution with cheap wireless networking, USB-only peripherals, and a firewire hookup for your digital camera. If you want to plug in all kinds of other stuff and swap components until you get exactly what you want, you want one of the G4 models.
Similarly, if you want a relatively inexpensive one-piece (no dongles) and indestructible notebook, you might want an iBook. Otherwise, you don't.
But if you don't want an iBook, you probably *do* want a Powerbook G4. I honestly haven't yet met anybody who didn't. In all seriousness, I think this is the one Mac that has many Windows people caught with their mouths wide open. I'll confess that I didn't get the point of this machine until I saw one up close and personal, and then cursed the fact that I'd went and bought a (very, very nice) ThinkPad. :-(
The big problem with Apple wasn't the current iMac configuration per se, but the fact that they didn't offer an iMac with a built-in CD-RW at any price a year ago, when they could have and should have done so.
And this is where I always wonder about web designers, including Earthlink. On the one hand, I could understand how some of this could be important if we were talking about sending full-fledged web apps to the user. On the other hand, it appears that what most web designers really want is the ability to send me content that would be far better off rendered as a pdf file. There are exceptions, but most of those are better handled using CSS (and we know how popular *that* sensible solution is). I mean, I know what my preferred fonts and sizes are. I set them up in my browser, and 98% of everybody who *doesn't* try to give me some kind of special web experience and just sends me html ends up giving me something I'm happy to look at. Again, I really wouldn't mind too much if designers at least used CSS consistently, since I can arrange things there so that nothing too horrible happens.
But that leaves all the rest of you, and I'll guess we'll just have to wait until you either learn or lose your jobs.
Basically right, except you leave out the really important part, which is where Gauss explains his work and makes it accessible even to his teacher. How he did this was to argue that the sum of the numbers from 1 to n is half of twice that sum. Okay...we can go for that. But then he points out that this double sum can be written as n terms that combine the ascending and descending series like this:
(1+(n)), (2+(n-1), (3+(n-2), ... ((n-1)+2), ((n)+1)
Now, each of these terms has the sum (n+1), and there are n such terms since there are n terms in the original series. So the double sum is just n*(n+1), and the sum we want is just half of that.
And that is why he's Gauss, and you're not. :-)
Yes, and no. The ISS is not just bad for the space program; it is bad news for all science. The billions that go for this could be spent in so many other ways that would produce greater benefit for almost any field of inquiry on space or on earth. While I don't doubt that there was some Cold War thinking go on in the original design of the space station, a lot of it was also NASA and other governmental officials wanting to do meat in space ASAP. Truth to be told, probably 95% of all taxpayers don't understand most of the science that is funded by the US government, but everybody understands a Teacher in Space. Now, I am not by any means against space exploration, manned or un-manned, but everybody on slashdot probably understands the huge costs involved with premature deployment of any technology. Indeed, that was the most compelling argument against the Superconducting Supercollider: in a few years, we could probably drastically reduce the cost of the apparatus. A similar argument was brought forth against the Human Genome Project: the expectation was that this would take years longer than it did, but the HGP was more likely to create the tools for its own boot-strapping, which is what happened.
If, instead of blowing cash on the ISS, we instead declared this decade the decade of Genomics, Materials Science and Robotics, we could probably leap far ahead of our current schedule to achieve the real goals of Space Science, with much smaller likelihoods of killing astronauts and creating a PR disaster (for all science) in the process.
Indeed. An interesting twist here is that a patent cannot be covered by prior art, or merely an obvious extension of prior art to a person of ordinary skill in the art. If "the art" here is authenticating users to a web server, the use of baroque URLs was quite well understood in the time before cookies became prevalent. Specifically, I think that ordinary people, like even me, could figure out how to do this after reading selections from Phil Greenspun's How to be a Web Whore Just Like Me which has been around on the net for, god, forever, and was published as Database backed web sites in 1997.
Uh, scotch that. "flying buttrice" won't fly as a tag name, as one can clearly see from the spec. The BNF (buttrice-naming form) clearly states that whitespace separates a tag name from an (optional) list of attributes or the final ">". Nobody wants a malformed buttrice. ;-)
More to the point, Red Hat only lost $0.01 per share last quarter, and still enjoys strong revenue growth. Their "burn rate" has gotten extremely small. Even if a stalling economy slows their quest for profitability by a year or two, they still have cash to make it through.
Now, as for VALinux, the situation does not look nearly as bright. There are more and stronger potential competitors out there for them, and no hardware maker is making any money really for the next quarter or two.
Oh, my. I guess I would find your argument way more convincing if there were even a shred of evidence that what you say is true. Seriously, I see the same old tripe parroted around by people who should really know better than this. So, as my daily dose of public service, let me point you towards an on-line article by Anderson and Fienberg that gives a solid introduction to the issues involved. To cut to the chase here, it is incredibly difficult to find a trained statistician who believes that the naive counting approach to the census could not be substantially helped by incorporating some form of sampling procedure. The problem, of course, is that it is incredibly difficult to find any *two* trained statisticians who agree with each other on what the best procedure would be, which gave politicians an easy way out ("See? Even the experts disagree...").
To give a little bit more away, the primary use of sampling being contemplated was actually targeted at non-respondents. The problem here is that while you could follow up on most non-respondents very easily, there are a lot of them, so it takes time. And, the more time that passes before you follow-up, the worse the data get, and what you really end up with is a systematic undercount. Basically everybody on all sides of the political debate understands and agrees about this. What you should do about it is, of course, where the real fighting starts.
I think this is a bit pessimistic. Yeah, people might not dig the fruit fly comparisons, but I think that the comparisons with mice and other mammals are not as likely to provoke as much ire as they would have in the past. Basically, I don't think that people will see anything too weird about only having a thousand or fewer more genes than some creature that can be viewed as a loving pet.
Where things might get tricky is when people realize that the human superiority in gene number if one in fact exists is probably mostly soaked up by recipes for how to make: