Go Whigs!
Don't throw away your vote by voting Republican!
Note to moderators -- the above comment is not a troll but a way of wryly pointing out that in the past, the system *has* in fact changed, and the entrenched parties of the time would likely have used the same "don't throw your vote away" argument against the rising power that we hear from the entrenched parties of today.
Now as for what this mismoderation says about the Republicans who were offended by the comment, I'll leave that to the real trolls...
The systems are more streamlined in the sense that the party that gets elected will carry through it's agenda and not get stalled/sideswiped by others. In the US, you have 3 things you are electing at the federal level (president, senate, HoR). All it takes is one of them to completely stall legislation, sometimes indefinately.
Doubtless what you say is true, but that is the point of the system. After watching the breakdown of checks and balances during the runnup to the Iraq war, the last thing I want to see is more streamlining. Even if that means I stay uninsured.
While there were "perfect storm" conditions in this case -- an inept leader, a weak opposition party and a frightened populace -- it seems unwise to lower the bar for such conditions in the future.
Seriously, get your co to pay for training in the most interesting setting they'll allow, where you can score a free lunch.
If you have time to "take your time", where you'll really learn is by installing at home. Have the co fork over for VMWare, and set yourself up with a nice virtual network on your home machine. You'll learn way more than through any online training course. You may even want to do this for a few weeks before starting the official training course.
This is a little off beat, but if you're totally new to unix, it might be helpful to nab a copy of Solaris x86 and put that in a vmware machine. I hate to admit this, but when I was starting I had a hard time understanding the linux man pages. The Solaris documentation was just luxurious, and the main options for commands pretty much the same. It used to be (maybe still is) free so you can probably get a copy someplace.
ANYONE outside the us (approx 6 BILLION people) have NO idea what this story is about.
That's odd, news.google.com shows the story is being carried in Canada and Australia -- has there been an annexation? It's also been previously carried on/., which is where I heard about it.
Do you think everyone understands what every posting is about? All the little projects and personalities? If you don't know something and you're curious, just look it up. Googling "ken jennings" tells you everything you need to know.
For future reference, there are OTHER peoples, cultures, TV, etc. on this planet. Please dump your imperialist liquefactionism and accept the fact than when you visit a site run by people from another culture, not everything is going to be as familiar as your front yard.
Apparently, this is too much to ask of Europe. But then, it always has been.
Going to a US website and whining about US-centrism is like going to Paris and whining for a McDonalds.
Oh, and if you're ever in the US, be sure to check out google
while you're here. You'll find that simply looking up the answer to your question is a much faster (and more polite) resolution. Maybe they have something similar where you live, so you don't have to play the "Ugly Euro" every time you visit.
OoTP was lame. It was pedantic, obvious and linear.
The earlier volumes were filled with switchbacks and cul-de-sacs, inviting the reader to explore a detailed and exciting world with his own intelligence. The latest was just a long harrangue about a mean teacher.
Oh, and it probably outsold the winner by far more than one order of magnitude.
The thing I've been wishing for is that Transmeta would replace the AGP port on the efficeon with a second hypertransport port -- then you could just wire them together in the "glueless smp" configurations like AMD offers rather than mucking about with this micro-clustering.
Maybe someone can do it with the one port and an assortment of hypertransport hubs, but I'm not sure how that would work.
Anyway, I won't hold my breath, since Transmeta seems determined to keep making nothing but almost-but-not-quite useful uniprocessors.
If you're really interested, head over to www.forclark.com, make an account and check out the Clark blog. Since the campaign has ended, you'll mostly be picking up a conversation amongst diehards who know each other, but don't be shy. There are regular posters from Sweden, Australia and other countries, so you won't feel too out of place. We all know you can never learn about anything by seeing it through the eyes of the media, so do check it out for yourself.
As for what politics is "about", well, no man gets to choose the terms of his own existence, eh? I think if you spend some time chatting with folks on the blog you'll find many people just trying to make the best of the world as they find it. Give it a shot.
You say: "the software is meant to tie people together in a way suitable to a political cause, specifically to raise money" -- what's wrong with forum designed to allow people who support a cause to organize themselves more efficiently?
I spent a lot of time on a candidate blog this season, and thought it was a good experience. Moral support for activism, with a lot of discussion about what was working and what wasn't. I thought it was a very healthy experience.
As for money, what are we supposed to do? In Holland, maybe you can just shout and everybody will hear you. Here there are 300 million people scattered across four time zones, plus AK and HI. You need mass media to get your message out. People don't contribute because they're snookered into it, they do it to help spread a message they believe in.
The objections Einstein posed to quantum theory were not spurious fluff, but hard-nosed challenges that any successful theory would have to meet. He made Bohr sweat more than once.
Would you prefer we just let something as absurd as quantum mechanics just slide? Scientists might as well all join the monestaries again.
Your statement "pretty much known to be true" is timid and sugary. Bring on the Einsteins.
Most people are right handed. This means that the pointer will automatically be on the right side of the screen most of the time
You may not be kidding, but you are missing the point. The issue is not where the pointer is most of the time, the issue is where the pointer is when dialog boxes come up.
Look at the top of the program you are using now -- see where all the menus and buttons are? Where is the "foot" menu? Where are the menus on the desktop menu bar? To which side of the screen do your desktop icons automatically align themselves?
If we are designing things around the principle of where the right handed cursor usually lies, surely the whole enterprise is backwards. Is it? Suppose you say yes, arguing that the menus-buttons-icons should all be shifted over to the right side where they will be as easy to reach as the Yes button.
In that case, the current design is still wrong. The is because the dialogs generally appear in response to interaction with just these items! As it stands, we must move the mouse all the way over to the left, choose an action, then drag the mouse diagonally across the dialog just to confirm it. Ridiculous.
Left-to-right gives us compatibility with the dominant platform, conforms to the common yes-or-no speech pattern and provides the best ergonomic grouping.
In the 1990s, the NYPD developed an intensely data-driven style of policing centered around a program called CompStat, which basically tracks crimes and their locations, times, etc. This allows the police to see where things are heating up and deploy more and better-targeted resources to the area. It's been extremely effective, and crime has dropped about 60-70%.
Obviously, visualization tools mix well with this kind of system, but why a big board? One possible answer is that there is a whole culture of public accountability that goes along with CompStat -- local commanders are called in to group meetings and are expected to know the figures for their area and discuss plans for dealing with them. When you get a group talking about the same visual data, a shared image is really helpful. Since the idea seems to mesh well with the culture, and the culture has been successful, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
How can you argue with Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged?
Plus, it had the most balanced tone of the lot. Right between silliness of the first two and the moodiness of the last. Try listening to the read-by-the-author audiobook of the third and see if you're not missing something. It's just fantastic.
I recently decided to stop drinking soft drinks and go for water (Mountain Valley Spring Water), and I also noticed that I had much more concentration, my sleep schedule became more normalized and my attitude was generally more positive.
Wow, I had the exact opposite experience.
I recently switched from drinking water exclusively to 3+ liters/day of Dr. Pepper, Vanilla Coke and Mountain Dew (all diet). I've found my concentration and memory improved, my food intake cut by a third and my sleep requirements have gone from over eight hours a day to under six.
Heavy handed, poorly argued, ill-informed, amateur. It was the cheap authority of cocktail party talk run amok.
I've forgotten much, but one thing that stuck out in my head was his argument against the notion that Homer wrote down an oral poem rather than penning the epics himself. Cahill basically quotes segments of the poem, declares them too complex for mere oral traditions, and says anyone who doesn't agree with him has "a tin ear".
His other arguments followed the same general line:
Form hypothesis
Defend it with: "It just had to be that way"
Insult skeptics
Profit
I wanted to like the book when I picked it up, but quickly formed the impression that Cahill is a boorish simpleton, straining himself in self-congratulation for his dubious insights. I won't be reading his other works.
Here's another article snip (from a Newsday article):
"Right now, he said, the Carthage facility produces petroleum at the equivalent price of $15 per barrel -- about $5 more than what it costs a small oil company to find, extract and refine petroleum the conventional way.
Appel said those costs will go down as the plants get larger and more efficient. He talks of a utopia in which technical breakthroughs will allow even very small waste-to-oil plants to be profitable, thus spreading the wealth to family farms.
The secret to the technology, he said, is that it doesn't have to be as cheap as traditional oil refining, it simply needs to make high-quality products at a reasonably competitive price. The biggest savings will come, he said, because companies won't have to pay high prices to bury their waste in landfills, burn it in incinerators, or pay renderers to truck it away."
Is this a parallel implementation then? In that case performance is only doubled for processes that can be performed in parallel.
This is only accurate if you're describing single-task performance. System-wide performance may be *more* than doubled, if you're dealing with loads that are causing a lot of switching overhead.
And I don't think it's just a server thing. When my old dual cpu system finally died, I replaced it with a single cpu setup that ran nearly twice as fast (by MHz) as the two chips in the old system combined. Yet the feel of the system under load was substantially worse. I'm pretty stoked about this. I think it could improve the average user's desktop experience a great deal.
Oh, come on. Who modded this up? Funny, I could see, but "Interesting"?
The final step of the optimization was to convert the package database to a binary format, using a series of 'keys' encoded in a type of database, or 'registry'.
I had this problem writing an emulator -- code worked, unit tests passed, programs crashed. The problem was that the specs were not bug-compatible with the emulated hardware.
The solution was zen-like contemplation of assembly language logs. Grim, but my time with +Fravia paid off!
It's possible that IBM's legal team knew all along, but on the face of it those Baystar documents that Raymond posted seem to have provided a breech for IBM to charge into.
Slashdot Mirror
Go Whigs!
Don't throw away your vote by voting Republican!
Note to moderators -- the above comment is not a troll but a way of wryly pointing out that in the past, the system *has* in fact changed, and the entrenched parties of the time would likely have used the same "don't throw your vote away" argument against the rising power that we hear from the entrenched parties of today.
Now as for what this mismoderation says about the Republicans who were offended by the comment, I'll leave that to the real trolls...
The systems are more streamlined in the sense that the party that gets elected will carry through it's agenda and not get stalled/sideswiped by others. In the US, you have 3 things you are electing at the federal level (president, senate, HoR). All it takes is one of them to completely stall legislation, sometimes indefinately.
Doubtless what you say is true, but that is the point of the system. After watching the breakdown of checks and balances during the runnup to the Iraq war, the last thing I want to see is more streamlining. Even if that means I stay uninsured.
While there were "perfect storm" conditions in this case -- an inept leader, a weak opposition party and a frightened populace -- it seems unwise to lower the bar for such conditions in the future.
Yes, if monolithic linux included X, gnome, openGL and mozilla.
But it doesn't so, no, not like linux.
Seriously, get your co to pay for training in the most interesting setting they'll allow, where you can score a free lunch.
If you have time to "take your time", where you'll really learn is by installing at home. Have the co fork over for VMWare, and set yourself up with a nice virtual network on your home machine. You'll learn way more than through any online training course. You may even want to do this for a few weeks before starting the official training course.
This is a little off beat, but if you're totally new to unix, it might be helpful to nab a copy of Solaris x86 and put that in a vmware machine. I hate to admit this, but when I was starting I had a hard time understanding the linux man pages. The Solaris documentation was just luxurious, and the main options for commands pretty much the same. It used to be (maybe still is) free so you can probably get a copy someplace.
Good luck.
ANYONE outside the us (approx 6 BILLION people) have NO idea what this story is about.
That's odd, news.google.com shows the story is being carried in Canada and Australia -- has there been an annexation? It's also been previously carried on /., which is where I heard about it.
Do you think everyone understands what every posting is about? All the little projects and personalities? If you don't know something and you're curious, just look it up. Googling "ken jennings" tells you everything you need to know.
For future reference, there are OTHER peoples, cultures, TV, etc. on this planet. Please dump your imperialist liquefactionism and accept the fact than when you visit a site run by people from another culture, not everything is going to be as familiar as your front yard.
Apparently, this is too much to ask of Europe. But then, it always has been.
Oh, for pity's sake.
Complain to ICANN, then, but quit embarrassing yourself with this nonsense.
Going to a US website and whining about US-centrism is like going to Paris and whining for a McDonalds.
Oh, and if you're ever in the US, be sure to check out google while you're here. You'll find that simply looking up the answer to your question is a much faster (and more polite) resolution. Maybe they have something similar where you live, so you don't have to play the "Ugly Euro" every time you visit.
OoTP was lame. It was pedantic, obvious and linear.
The earlier volumes were filled with switchbacks and cul-de-sacs, inviting the reader to explore a detailed and exciting world with his own intelligence. The latest was just a long harrangue about a mean teacher.
Oh, and it probably outsold the winner by far more than one order of magnitude.
The second law of thermodynamics is more abused on slashdot than copyright law.
Or do you think fusion bombs have to use five million tons of TNT as primer to release the other five megatons of energy?
The thing I've been wishing for is that Transmeta would replace the AGP port on the efficeon with a second hypertransport port -- then you could just wire them together in the "glueless smp" configurations like AMD offers rather than mucking about with this micro-clustering.
Maybe someone can do it with the one port and an assortment of hypertransport hubs, but I'm not sure how that would work.
Anyway, I won't hold my breath, since Transmeta seems determined to keep making nothing but almost-but-not-quite useful uniprocessors.
If you're really interested, head over to www.forclark.com, make an account and check out the Clark blog. Since the campaign has ended, you'll mostly be picking up a conversation amongst diehards who know each other, but don't be shy. There are regular posters from Sweden, Australia and other countries, so you won't feel too out of place. We all know you can never learn about anything by seeing it through the eyes of the media, so do check it out for yourself.
As for what politics is "about", well, no man gets to choose the terms of his own existence, eh? I think if you spend some time chatting with folks on the blog you'll find many people just trying to make the best of the world as they find it. Give it a shot.
Isn't that a perhaps obstructively cynical?
You say: "the software is meant to tie people together in a way suitable to a political cause, specifically to raise money" -- what's wrong with forum designed to allow people who support a cause to organize themselves more efficiently?
I spent a lot of time on a candidate blog this season, and thought it was a good experience. Moral support for activism, with a lot of discussion about what was working and what wasn't. I thought it was a very healthy experience.
As for money, what are we supposed to do? In Holland, maybe you can just shout and everybody will hear you. Here there are 300 million people scattered across four time zones, plus AK and HI. You need mass media to get your message out. People don't contribute because they're snookered into it, they do it to help spread a message they believe in.
Wasted? Nonsense.
The objections Einstein posed to quantum theory were not spurious fluff, but hard-nosed challenges that any successful theory would have to meet. He made Bohr sweat more than once.
Would you prefer we just let something as absurd as quantum mechanics just slide? Scientists might as well all join the monestaries again.
Your statement "pretty much known to be true" is timid and sugary. Bring on the Einsteins.
Most people are right handed. This means that the pointer will automatically be on the right side of the screen most of the time
You may not be kidding, but you are missing the point. The issue is not where the pointer is most of the time, the issue is where the pointer is when dialog boxes come up.
Look at the top of the program you are using now -- see where all the menus and buttons are? Where is the "foot" menu? Where are the menus on the desktop menu bar? To which side of the screen do your desktop icons automatically align themselves?
If we are designing things around the principle of where the right handed cursor usually lies, surely the whole enterprise is backwards. Is it? Suppose you say yes, arguing that the menus-buttons-icons should all be shifted over to the right side where they will be as easy to reach as the Yes button.
In that case, the current design is still wrong. The is because the dialogs generally appear in response to interaction with just these items! As it stands, we must move the mouse all the way over to the left, choose an action, then drag the mouse diagonally across the dialog just to confirm it. Ridiculous.
Left-to-right gives us compatibility with the dominant platform, conforms to the common yes-or-no speech pattern and provides the best ergonomic grouping.
Bring it back.
In the 1990s, the NYPD developed an intensely data-driven style of policing centered around a program called CompStat, which basically tracks crimes and their locations, times, etc. This allows the police to see where things are heating up and deploy more and better-targeted resources to the area. It's been extremely effective, and crime has dropped about 60-70%.
Obviously, visualization tools mix well with this kind of system, but why a big board? One possible answer is that there is a whole culture of public accountability that goes along with CompStat -- local commanders are called in to group meetings and are expected to know the figures for their area and discuss plans for dealing with them. When you get a group talking about the same visual data, a shared image is really helpful. Since the idea seems to mesh well with the culture, and the culture has been successful, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Gotta love that renowned British subtlety.
The third was far and away the best.
How can you argue with Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged?
Plus, it had the most balanced tone of the lot. Right between silliness of the first two and the moodiness of the last. Try listening to the read-by-the-author audiobook of the third and see if you're not missing something. It's just fantastic.
I recently decided to stop drinking soft drinks and go for water (Mountain Valley Spring Water), and I also noticed that I had much more concentration, my sleep schedule became more normalized and my attitude was generally more positive.
Wow, I had the exact opposite experience.
I recently switched from drinking water exclusively to 3+ liters/day of Dr. Pepper, Vanilla Coke and Mountain Dew (all diet). I've found my concentration and memory improved, my food intake cut by a third and my sleep requirements have gone from over eight hours a day to under six.
I guess people are just different.
Heavy handed, poorly argued, ill-informed, amateur. It was the cheap authority of cocktail party talk run amok.
I've forgotten much, but one thing that stuck out in my head was his argument against the notion that Homer wrote down an oral poem rather than penning the epics himself. Cahill basically quotes segments of the poem, declares them too complex for mere oral traditions, and says anyone who doesn't agree with him has "a tin ear".
His other arguments followed the same general line:
I wanted to like the book when I picked it up, but quickly formed the impression that Cahill is a boorish simpleton, straining himself in self-congratulation for his dubious insights. I won't be reading his other works.
Here's another article snip (from a Newsday article):
"Right now, he said, the Carthage facility produces petroleum at the equivalent price of $15 per barrel -- about $5 more than what it costs a small oil company to find, extract and refine petroleum the conventional way.Appel said those costs will go down as the plants get larger and more efficient. He talks of a utopia in which technical breakthroughs will allow even very small waste-to-oil plants to be profitable, thus spreading the wealth to family farms.
The secret to the technology, he said, is that it doesn't have to be as cheap as traditional oil refining, it simply needs to make high-quality products at a reasonably competitive price. The biggest savings will come, he said, because companies won't have to pay high prices to bury their waste in landfills, burn it in incinerators, or pay renderers to truck it away."
http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2004/Changing-Wor
It remains to be seen how true the guy's claims are, but it does sound interesting.
Is this a parallel implementation then? In that case performance is only doubled for processes that can be performed in parallel.
This is only accurate if you're describing single-task performance. System-wide performance may be *more* than doubled, if you're dealing with loads that are causing a lot of switching overhead.
And I don't think it's just a server thing. When my old dual cpu system finally died, I replaced it with a single cpu setup that ran nearly twice as fast (by MHz) as the two chips in the old system combined. Yet the feel of the system under load was substantially worse. I'm pretty stoked about this. I think it could improve the average user's desktop experience a great deal.
Don't you mean "truly fearsome Paladins"?
Oh, come on. Who modded this up? Funny, I could see, but "Interesting"?
The final step of the optimization was to convert the package database to a binary format, using a series of 'keys' encoded in a type of database, or 'registry'.
It's a joke.
I had this problem writing an emulator -- code worked, unit tests passed, programs crashed. The problem was that the specs were not bug-compatible with the emulated hardware.
The solution was zen-like contemplation of assembly language logs. Grim, but my time with +Fravia paid off!
It's possible that IBM's legal team knew all along, but on the face of it those Baystar documents that Raymond posted seem to have provided a breech for IBM to charge into.
Kudos to him and his source.