I just thought I'd mention that it is already possible to track replies to your comments by going to the preferences->user.info page.
This works quite well except that it isn't directly accessable from the little numpbacked navigation aid on the upper left corner. If you guys would add a link to the user page there, that would make getting to replies very easy.
In the night sky of Mars flies the 73rd wing of the South Mars Air Force. In their latest stealth interceptors this proud all volunteer force keeps guard over the peace and freedom of Mars. Successfully interdicting efforts of the FBI, NSA and OSHA to plant listening devices disguised as landing probes, self-concealing and buring cameras and taps into to Martian Internet for surreptitous ergonomics inspections, this team is widely hailed by all Mars citizens.
Just underneath the canopy of Col. Fthehwqq, wing leader, and lead trainer of the South Mars 'Top Gun' school are painted 4 icons resembling interplanetary probes. For it the much decorated Col. Fthehwqq who has recently repelled the latest dastardly attempts by Earth to usurp the soverignty of the free creatures of Mars.
Having a nice GUI isn't a real competitive advantage for long, with the progress being made in GNOME and X-windows, the advantages of Mac OS X will not last many months.
I disagree entirely, The Mac OS GUI is many YEARS ahead of what is offered in Linux, not only due to the GUI but the fact that Mac applications integrate with the GUI seamlessly and consistently. In addition the anti-aliasing feature you mentioned is only a tiny part of the advantages the Mac OS X display technology will have because of it's adopting of PDF.
People can make up Mac OS X themes all they want, but until the application software all integrates with the GUI, Gnome and K are not going to be a patch on the Mac OS X UI. Hell, you can't even cut and paste, or move a mouse cursor around consistently in Gnome or K, and these are things the Mac had on introduction in 1984, fifteen years ago.
In the long run you want to deal with an investment firm rather than a bank. The leaders are Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab. These companies are large enough to have a full range of services, have relatively low fees and a real investment orientation. A lot of people I know really like Vanguard because they do a good job of keeping the fees on their mutual funds at a minimum level. Schwab and Fidelity may be better known, but part of that reason is they spend a lot of money on marketing, and you pay for that in their fees.
You will probably still want a checking account at a local bank for more mundane tasks, especially for the convenience of an ATM machine without those damnable fees.
I wouldn't go near E-Trade etc. I just do not trust these outfits, and I think some day some of them are going to go belly-up leaving their users with a mess. The good thing is E-Trade and its ilk have done investors a lot of good by driving the cost of other services down.
If I covered my entire house with these things, I am entirely within my rights. The only problem is when you cover someone else's space with them.
Employers use the same logic to set up cameras in employee rest rooms, take blood for drug tests (including prescription drugs), use medical records to make employment decisions, require lie detector tests, read email and so on.
While your motivations are no doubt honorable, there have been a number of cases where equipment used to spy on baby sitters has been misused. It is not a black and white issue.
but what about a friendly nice notice first before raiding a store!
Laughing out Loud. Can you imagine it. Here I am, Mr. Terrorist/Drug Dealer/Other Felon and I get a phone call. "Hi - we are the Feds, and we are going to raid you next Tuesday looking for illegal stuff. Don't get upset or anything when we show up. Also please label any illegal stuff and prepare inventory sheets to say us some time when we get there".
Do you know what the feds will find when they arrive? Some empty rooms, that's what.
Continuing to torment the poor corpse of this once worthy soul is only going to cause nightmares and discomfort of the decendents who it will rise to haunt. If you are not careful it will come after you too.
It did nothing bad to you in life, but now it is dead. Don't play with the dead, it isn't polite or respectful to the its memory.
I have worked for 20 years in a technology related business for a major corporation. I have experience with patent lawyers, FDA regulatory laywers and seeing a lot of what passes for liability law in the US.
I have a lot of respect for patent lawyers. Many of them are extrodinarily intelligent people with not only a Ph.D. in their technical field, but a law degree as well. Good ones often understand the implications of a technology better than either the business management or the inventors. Clearly a techie does not understand law as well as these lawyers understand the technologies. Unfortunately the examiners at the patent office are no where near as competant. A patent lawyer at a large company often will be making decisions as to whether a proposed business endevor infringes or not that could be worth many millions of dollars.
Regulatory lawyers working in technical fields are a cut below patent lawyers, however a good regulatory law firm will usually have technical help on staff and approach the problem in question with a good sound technical understanding of what is going on. His job is to understand the law, and the basis for the law, and advise the client how to operate his business legally. The main complaint I have about regulatory law is that it is so incestuous. A good regulatory law firm will often have been established by a regualtory agency or congressional staff member who actually wrote the law, or was instrumental in casting the regulations. This gives the lawyer access to information regarding the genesis of the law or regulation that is not publically available. This information is a license to print money because this material is the only way to fully understand the regulation.
My experience with tort lawyers and science is that they are the lowest. They could care less about the science, except as it supports their case. If it doesn't support their case they will do anything to get it barred from the courtroom. There have been any number of liability cases that have been decided on erroneous science, and companies who have had to go into bankruptcy despite not having done their customers any damage. Thirty years later there is still no evidence that the wastes buried at Love Canal harmed one person.
The Judges that hear these cases are generally not qualified to handle the competing science claims. There are a lot of ongoing changes in the US court system as to how science is being handled as a result of these failures of justice.
I am not saying tort lawyers are bad in general - it is the the use of science in these cases that is the problem. Tort lawyers have also done a lot of good; what is happening to the US tobacco companies is a perfect example of why they can be beneficial.
I have seen a lot of people mention that in the US there is a much higher tendency to settle matters in the courtroom. There are good and bad aspects to this. The bad aspect is that it has become an industry that is self perpetuating. On the other hand there is a good aspect - legal redress is a very important avenue to justice. Maybe justice isn't always the result, but if you don't have access to the court, what chance do you have for justice?
This is still one area that NT kinda shows linux up.
Not by much, and not for long. NTFS sucks as an example of a journaling file system. ext3, ReiserFS and XFS will soon give Linux users lots of choices and some pretty strong advantages over NTFS.
The fractional horsepower electric motor. (spurred what is called the second industrial revolution)
The horse collar. (needed because of a labor shortage caused by the black plague). Advanced the standard of living in Europe immensely.
The chimney. (Made use of fire indoors possible - made cities practical)
The moldboard plow. (made planting the US midwest possible)
The Browning Automatic Rifle. (Invented prior to WWI, was so far in advance of anything else that the Army wouldn't equip soldiers going to Europe with it for fear Germans would copy it. US soldiers instead got crappy French machine gun that jammed and didn't have interchangable parts until Army wised up. The BAR design was still in use essentially unchanged in the Korean War).
NMR - see inside stuff on several scales; made modern chemistry possible by unambiguously identifying molecular structures. Same principle is used in MRI to view inside people.
Fourdriner paper machine - makes high volume production of paper cheap. A modern Fourdriner spits out paper 20' wide at 80 miles per hour when fed ground up tree parts suspended in water at back end.
Concrete - without it Rome would have been impossible.
I find it incredible that Europeans cannot post on/. without making the most insulting comments possible.
Not only is this poster incorrect in his criticism, but he manages to expose the fact that he is a boor who cannot communicate without being insulting in the process. The original poster is absolutely correct - there are no absolutes in transliteration.
If this is the typical European reaction to something as simple as a diacritical mark, there is no doubt as to the genesis of their many wars - complete provincialism and intolerance of any way of doing something slightly variant from their own.
After seeing the behaviour of Europeans on/. I am forever laying to rest the concept of the sophisticated, cosmopolitan European in my mind, and replacing it with the obvious facts put forth by these postings as to the true nature of the psyche of a European.
99.5% of management methodologies are marketing booshwah for consultant's services. The other 0.5% can make a huge positive impact in the effectiveness of a company.
Simply implementing Deming's 6 points would revolutionize the way most companies work - for these points prosletyze respect for the individual. Proper use of these ideas results in a corporate culture where each worker contributes to and takes pride in the result of his work. There is no more powerful way of improving the health of a company.
The result is merely implementation detail that is the easy part. The hard part is putting the 6 principles into action.
The problem is that too many workers (and middle managers) have been through the management fad of the month; TQM, Re-engineering, etc. and have felt the effort was wasted. It's really sad to see the baby get thrown out with the bathwater.
the originality of his ideas (although quantum mechanics is equally daring in its willingness to question our deepest-held ideas)
Einstein actually played a quite significant role in the development of quantum mechanics on a statistical level. Everyone who has taken some stat mech knows of the Bose-Einstein statistics, and in fact his paper on the heat capacity of solids in 1906 is the first paper on the quantum theory of the solid state. And of course the photelectric effect for which he won the Nobel depends on QM considerations. Einstein is also responsible for the concept of particle-wave duality, light quanta and a description of black body radiation based on a QM theory.
Many people of the time hated QM for it's lack of elegance, Bohr included. But that didn't stop them from developing the theory. Einstein's work in this field is some of the earliest.
Ultimately however Einstein was unable to accept the interpetation of the square of the Schroedinger wave equation as a probability density, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for several years. This pretty much ended his contribution to quantum theory.
Later however he did accept QM, and was in fact the nominator of Heisenberg and Schroedinger for their Nobel Prizes.
Some people I have not seen mentioned that I think deserve respect:
Henry David Thoreau - profoundly influenced political thinking in the 20th century.
Claude Shannon - brilliant physicist who extended the concept of entropy to information theory. It took people a LONG time to understand his ideas.
Josiah Willard Gibbs - developed what we call thermodynamics. First American to be awarded a Ph.D. in physics and in engineering. Another person whose ideas were so far ahead of their time that they took decades to be appreciated.
James Clerk Maxwell - Brought completeness to the understanding of electromagnetism. His work withstood the revolution of both quantum mechanics and relativity. His later notes show that he was flirting with ideas that were very close to a theory of relativity. Given a few years we would probably be talking of him rather than Einstein as the founder of relativity. Probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein.
Umlaut does not exist in the English langauge. Any name that contains an umlaut when rendered in English is a transliteration and is thus subject to variable interpetation.
If I had to give the name of the ubergeek of all time, it would be him. The first physicist and the first mathematician. The FOUNDER of the systematic study of nature. Histories of western philosophy and thought usually start with this one man.
Indeed. But what is the comparative? How many BSD authors have had their code turned into money by others without their profitting?
In fact I thought that the argument proposed in the article for discussion was that you cannot make money from GPL software. Mr. Young seems to have made quite a lot of money from such software. Does this perhaps call into question the validity of the argument that you cannot make money from GPL software?
In addition, RedHat has funded the development of quite a bit of software that has been returned to the community under GPL. If RedHat had chosen the BSD licensed software they might have earned just as much money, and NOT returned anything in terms of code to the community with a free conscience. Organizations like SuSE, Corel, Mandrake and so on are following the same model. This model is generating quite a bit of new software under the GPL, as well as contributions to non-GPL software.
If commercial BSD suppliers had made such contributions, might BSD have benefited?
Slashdot Mirror
I just thought I'd mention that it is already possible to track replies to your comments by going to the preferences->user.info page.
This works quite well except that it isn't directly accessable from the little numpbacked navigation aid on the upper left corner. If you guys would add a link to the user page there, that would make getting to replies very easy.
In the night sky of Mars flies the 73rd wing of the South Mars Air Force. In their latest stealth interceptors this proud all volunteer force keeps guard over the peace and freedom of Mars. Successfully interdicting efforts of the FBI, NSA and OSHA to plant listening devices disguised as landing probes, self-concealing and buring cameras and taps into to Martian Internet for surreptitous ergonomics inspections, this team is widely hailed by all Mars citizens.
Just underneath the canopy of Col. Fthehwqq, wing leader, and lead trainer of the South Mars 'Top Gun' school are painted 4 icons resembling interplanetary probes. For it the much decorated Col. Fthehwqq who has recently repelled the latest dastardly attempts by Earth to usurp the soverignty of the free creatures of Mars.
if OS X delivers on the features it promises, what incentive do I have for choosing Linux over OS X?
For a server Linux will be a lot better. For a desktop machine, you are going to want Mac OS X.
Having a nice GUI isn't a real competitive advantage for long, with the progress being made in GNOME and X-windows, the advantages of Mac OS X will not last many months.
I disagree entirely, The Mac OS GUI is many YEARS ahead of what is offered in Linux, not only due to the GUI but the fact that Mac applications integrate with the GUI seamlessly and consistently. In addition the anti-aliasing feature you mentioned is only a tiny part of the advantages the Mac OS X display technology will have because of it's adopting of PDF.
People can make up Mac OS X themes all they want, but until the application software all integrates with the GUI, Gnome and K are not going to be a patch on the Mac OS X UI. Hell, you can't even cut and paste, or move a mouse cursor around consistently in Gnome or K, and these are things the Mac had on introduction in 1984, fifteen years ago.
Gee that's too bad. You may as well go on and pay your higher fees to other FUD brokerages like Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab.
The fee difference is trivial unless you are trading every day. If you are, you are lost anyway.
Jumpline has been reliable for me, and they offer a pretty good feature set too.
In the long run you want to deal with an investment firm rather than a bank. The leaders are Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab. These companies are large enough to have a full range of services, have relatively low fees and a real investment orientation. A lot of people I know really like Vanguard because they do a good job of keeping the fees on their mutual funds at a minimum level. Schwab and Fidelity may be better known, but part of that reason is they spend a lot of money on marketing, and you pay for that in their fees.
You will probably still want a checking account at a local bank for more mundane tasks, especially for the convenience of an ATM machine without those damnable fees.
I wouldn't go near E-Trade etc. I just do not trust these outfits, and I think some day some of them are going to go belly-up leaving their users with a mess. The good thing is E-Trade and its ilk have done investors a lot of good by driving the cost of other services down.
If I covered my entire house with these things, I am entirely within my rights. The only problem is when you cover someone else's space with them.
Employers use the same logic to set up cameras in employee rest rooms, take blood for drug tests (including prescription drugs), use medical records to make employment decisions, require lie detector tests, read email and so on.
While your motivations are no doubt honorable, there have been a number of cases where equipment used to spy on baby sitters has been misused. It is not a black and white issue.
Fight for your freedom and liberty before it is gone.
How does freedom and liberty have anything to do with equipment like:
PB-1 Telephone Transmitter CLK-3000WT Disguised Clock w/audio
ME-2000 MicroEye Camera/Transmitter SMK-3000WT Disguised Smoke w/audio
They're all about spying on people! Look here at a product sold my Damark They describe it as "Mini pinhole 1/3" camera"
My understanding is the Damark is OK because they are not selling the camera INSTALLED in a smoke detector etc.
Ramsey was.
but what about a friendly nice notice first before raiding a store!
Laughing out Loud. Can you imagine it. Here I am, Mr. Terrorist/Drug Dealer/Other Felon and I get a phone call. "Hi - we are the Feds, and we are going to raid you next Tuesday looking for illegal stuff. Don't get upset or anything when we show up. Also please label any illegal stuff and prepare inventory sheets to say us some time when we get there".
Do you know what the feds will find when they arrive? Some empty rooms, that's what.
they don't have to find devices hidden in clocks and picture frames (which is what they apparently were looking for)
Ramsey's problem is that they did sell concealed items like this; here are two from their web site catalog:
PB-1 Telephone Transmitter CLK-3000WT Disguised Clock w/audio
ME-2000 MicroEye Camera/Transmitter SMK-3000WT Disguised Smoke w/audio
These look to be clearly illegal under the cited statute.
You may not like the law, of the style of the FBI, but there it is.
It's dead. Why not let it rest in peace?
Continuing to torment the poor corpse of this once worthy soul is only going to cause nightmares and discomfort of the decendents who it will rise to haunt. If you are not careful it will come after you too.
It did nothing bad to you in life, but now it is dead. Don't play with the dead, it isn't polite or respectful to the its memory.
I have worked for 20 years in a technology related business for a major corporation. I have experience with patent lawyers, FDA regulatory laywers and seeing a lot of what passes for liability law in the US.
I have a lot of respect for patent lawyers. Many of them are extrodinarily intelligent people with not only a Ph.D. in their technical field, but a law degree as well. Good ones often understand the implications of a technology better than either the business management or the inventors. Clearly a techie does not understand law as well as these lawyers understand the technologies. Unfortunately the examiners at the patent office are no where near as competant. A patent lawyer at a large company often will be making decisions as to whether a proposed business endevor infringes or not that could be worth many millions of dollars.
Regulatory lawyers working in technical fields are a cut below patent lawyers, however a good regulatory law firm will usually have technical help on staff and approach the problem in question with a good sound technical understanding of what is going on. His job is to understand the law, and the basis for the law, and advise the client how to operate his business legally. The main complaint I have about regulatory law is that it is so incestuous. A good regulatory law firm will often have been established by a regualtory agency or congressional staff member who actually wrote the law, or was instrumental in casting the regulations. This gives the lawyer access to information regarding the genesis of the law or regulation that is not publically available. This information is a license to print money because this material is the only way to fully understand the regulation.
My experience with tort lawyers and science is that they are the lowest. They could care less about the science, except as it supports their case. If it doesn't support their case they will do anything to get it barred from the courtroom. There have been any number of liability cases that have been decided on erroneous science, and companies who have had to go into bankruptcy despite not having done their customers any damage. Thirty years later there is still no evidence that the wastes buried at Love Canal harmed one person.
The Judges that hear these cases are generally not qualified to handle the competing science claims. There are a lot of ongoing changes in the US court system as to how science is being handled as a result of these failures of justice.
I am not saying tort lawyers are bad in general - it is the the use of science in these cases that is the problem. Tort lawyers have also done a lot of good; what is happening to the US tobacco companies is a perfect example of why they can be beneficial.
I have seen a lot of people mention that in the US there is a much higher tendency to settle matters in the courtroom. There are good and bad aspects to this. The bad aspect is that it has become an industry that is self perpetuating. On the other hand there is a good aspect - legal redress is a very important avenue to justice. Maybe justice isn't always the result, but if you don't have access to the court, what chance do you have for justice?
This is still one area that NT kinda shows linux up.
Not by much, and not for long. NTFS sucks as an example of a journaling file system. ext3, ReiserFS and XFS will soon give Linux users lots of choices and some pretty strong advantages over NTFS.
Dams are not gadgets, they are sick and wrong, choking our beutiful rivers of life.
Yeah! Go Luddites!
Water power, flood control and irrigation are fairly important.
THE
Static Byte Dwinkelizer!
Woohoo!
The fractional horsepower electric motor. (spurred what is called the second industrial revolution)
The horse collar. (needed because of a labor shortage caused by the black plague). Advanced the standard of living in Europe immensely.
The chimney. (Made use of fire indoors possible - made cities practical)
The moldboard plow. (made planting the US midwest possible)
The Browning Automatic Rifle. (Invented prior to WWI, was so far in advance of anything else that the Army wouldn't equip soldiers going to Europe with it for fear Germans would copy it. US soldiers instead got crappy French machine gun that jammed and didn't have interchangable parts until Army wised up. The BAR design was still in use essentially unchanged in the Korean War).
NMR - see inside stuff on several scales; made modern chemistry possible by unambiguously identifying molecular structures. Same principle is used in MRI to view inside people.
Fourdriner paper machine - makes high volume production of paper cheap. A modern Fourdriner spits out paper 20' wide at 80 miles per hour when fed ground up tree parts suspended in water at back end.
Concrete - without it Rome would have been impossible.
Don't be an idiot.
/. without making the most insulting comments possible.
/. I am forever laying to rest the concept of the sophisticated, cosmopolitan European in my mind, and replacing it with the obvious facts put forth by these postings as to the true nature of the psyche of a European.
I find it incredible that Europeans cannot post on
Not only is this poster incorrect in his criticism, but he manages to expose the fact that he is a boor who cannot communicate without being insulting in the process. The original poster is absolutely correct - there are no absolutes in transliteration.
If this is the typical European reaction to something as simple as a diacritical mark, there is no doubt as to the genesis of their many wars - complete provincialism and intolerance of any way of doing something slightly variant from their own.
After seeing the behaviour of Europeans on
99.5% of management methodologies are marketing booshwah for consultant's services. The other 0.5% can make a huge positive impact in the effectiveness of a company.
Simply implementing Deming's 6 points would revolutionize the way most companies work - for these points prosletyze respect for the individual. Proper use of these ideas results in a corporate culture where each worker contributes to and takes pride in the result of his work. There is no more powerful way of improving the health of a company.
The result is merely implementation detail that is the easy part. The hard part is putting the 6 principles into action.
The problem is that too many workers (and middle managers) have been through the management fad of the month; TQM, Re-engineering, etc. and have felt the effort was wasted. It's really sad to see the baby get thrown out with the bathwater.
the originality of his ideas (although quantum mechanics is equally daring in its willingness to question our deepest-held ideas)
Einstein actually played a quite significant role in the development of quantum mechanics on a statistical level. Everyone who has taken some stat mech knows of the Bose-Einstein statistics, and in fact his paper on the heat capacity of solids in 1906 is the first paper on the quantum theory of the solid state. And of course the photelectric effect for which he won the Nobel depends on QM considerations. Einstein is also responsible for the concept of particle-wave duality, light quanta and a description of black body radiation based on a QM theory.
Many people of the time hated QM for it's lack of elegance, Bohr included. But that didn't stop them from developing the theory. Einstein's work in this field is some of the earliest.
Ultimately however Einstein was unable to accept the interpetation of the square of the Schroedinger wave equation as a probability density, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for several years. This pretty much ended his contribution to quantum theory.
Later however he did accept QM, and was in fact the nominator of Heisenberg and Schroedinger for their Nobel Prizes.
Some people I have not seen mentioned that I think deserve respect:
Henry David Thoreau - profoundly influenced political thinking in the 20th century.
Claude Shannon - brilliant physicist who extended the concept of entropy to information theory. It took people a LONG time to understand his ideas.
Josiah Willard Gibbs - developed what we call thermodynamics. First American to be awarded a Ph.D. in physics and in engineering. Another person whose ideas were so far ahead of their time that they took decades to be appreciated.
James Clerk Maxwell - Brought completeness to the understanding of electromagnetism. His work withstood the revolution of both quantum mechanics and relativity. His later notes show that he was flirting with ideas that were very close to a theory of relativity. Given a few years we would probably be talking of him rather than Einstein as the founder of relativity. Probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein.
Umlaut does not exist in the English langauge. Any name that contains an umlaut when rendered in English is a transliteration and is thus subject to variable interpetation.
I nominate the geeks with no name.
Reasonable enough, however the examples you chose are all from much more than a 1000 years ago.
Also, if you are going to talk about the 'guy who invented math', there is actually a candidate for this who we know the name of...
Thales of Io.
If I had to give the name of the ubergeek of all time, it would be him. The first physicist and the first mathematician. The FOUNDER of the systematic study of nature. Histories of western philosophy and thought usually start with this one man.
How much money did Mr Young make off your work?
Indeed. But what is the comparative? How many BSD authors have had their code turned into money by others without their profitting?
In fact I thought that the argument proposed in the article for discussion was that you cannot make money from GPL software. Mr. Young seems to have made quite a lot of money from such software. Does this perhaps call into question the validity of the argument that you cannot make money from GPL software?
In addition, RedHat has funded the development of quite a bit of software that has been returned to the community under GPL. If RedHat had chosen the BSD licensed software they might have earned just as much money, and NOT returned anything in terms of code to the community with a free conscience. Organizations like SuSE, Corel, Mandrake and so on are following the same model. This model is generating quite a bit of new software under the GPL, as well as contributions to non-GPL software.
If commercial BSD suppliers had made such contributions, might BSD have benefited?