Often the best way to make an insane amount of money is to invest in a company before, or during its IPO. The herd mentality of investers will do the rest.
HP is hoping that it will be able to take advantage of the internet stock frenzy, and increase revenues. Imagine if Amazon had sold 3-5% of its equity for a mainframe-- before the IPO.
What makes me somewhat leary is that last payment option:
"Give us your comapany, and we'll give you a mainframe..."
In terms of information, the Internet has had a history of publishing rather arcane and esoteric material. Texts and ideas which were not accepted by mainstream media now had the potential to reach many more minds. The internet, by altering the concept of "freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press," has liberated ideas from economic constraints, as long as the intended audiences had access to a computer and the net. In this way, the culture of net publishing resembles the enlightenment's tradition of small "vanity presses", intended not to make a profit, but to publish the ideas of its patrons.
But is this modern enlightenment really akin to that of the 1700s? A great many users of the internet very rarely contribute, and very few sites have as much profile, or as much bandwidth, as those owned by traditional media corporations (New York Times, CNN, ZD-net). It's also going to get worse. Altavista has recently indicated that a site can pay for a higher profile in the search engine's database.
Scientific journals are ending their traditional print runs, in favour of "pay-for access" online publishing. In some university libraries, access to these data repositories, is restricted to students and faculty of the university, ending the university libray's role as a public depository.
There's also a problem of closed minds. Some people are taking the view that traditional media has nothing to offer, and are conducting research almost entirely on-line, even though in some fields, the amount of off-line information exceeds that of on-line information.
The first enlightenment was conducted in a era before copyright. In some ways, information did want to be free. The second internet "enlightenment" will be fettered by the concept of intellectual property.
Microsoft's codecs may be more efficient than MP3, but how difficult is it to compress audio in that format? I am guessing that it takes quite a bit of computing power to encode. Does it work well for all types of music? MP3s currently sound pretty good on a computer system, but I am told that the flaws in the format become pretty visible when the MP3 is played on a good stereo. I am assumming that the new format has the same problems. We should be keeping our ears open for truly high fidelity formats, like DVD-Audio, not tuning them to "enjoy" sub CD-quality music. DVD-RAM audio-- no that would be something.
24bits 96Khz. Somehow I don't think this will spark much of a revolution. After all, many geeks seem to think that listening to MP3s through a soundcard is good enough for them.
Yeah, but PV=nRT is an ideal gas law-- it doesn't take into account various other forces that make almost all materials deviate from the ideal gas law. If it wasn't for non-ideal gases, modern refrigeration (based on the fact that some gases absorb heat upon expansion) would be impossible.
Now an ice cream bar served as Bose-Einstein Condensate might be interesting...
try Jack's Chipset Comparison Guide. Personally, I have a i740, so I don't know much about the high end stuff. (It was the cheapest way to get OpenGL ICD support (on Windows) and has a fairly decent closed source driver for XFree86, so I'm not complaining.
Personally, I think viruses are interesting in that they are, in a sense, artificial life. Of course, I wouldn't want to be infected. I recognize the unique vulnerability of Windows 95, yet due to my "interest in gaming." it has become my primary platform. I'd like to have the flaws of my operating system proven by a capable virus writer, but on the other hand, I have no faith whatsoever in Microsoft to fix these flaws.
The larger problem raised by the attention of Melissa and other high profile "cracking" cases is that, if this trend continues, we may have a far more draconian regime unleshed upon us. Look at it this way-- it wasn't until the fundies discovered the net that the CDA was born. All we need now is for some senator or congressperson to get hit with a mildly annoying virus or a novice cracking attempt-- and boom, agencies start to "crack down" and rev up their "asset forfeiture" programs into high gear.
AFAIK, the position of the United States is that POWs can result from a general class of armed conflicts that include, but are not limited to wars. The Vietnam "War" was never a declared war, yet captured soldiers were considered POWs.
Of course, it was also the position of the US that the Montenegro operation was a seperate conflict, and that their capture was "kidnapping." Either the Serbs are bound by the Geneva Convention, or they're international terrorists. Mistreatment of the prisoners is either an act of terrorism, or a war crime.
The Armed Forces do not and should not have any relationship to the "honor" of the United States. They are explicitly under civilian control. I'd much rather have president with no military service than one who believes it is the army's job to protect the country from the excesses of democracy. Let us also rememeber that JFK, LBJ, and Nixon all had military backgrounds-- yet the Vietnam Conflict was a bit of a disaster.
The GUID only identifies the original creator of the docment. Theoretically, I could create a e-mail virus by starting with a Word file originally created by someone else. By erasing the document, adding in my own malicious code, and resaving, I can "frame" the creator of the original document file. The GUID is created by the File|New routine.
It's only a matter of time before newer viruses are developed. There are supposed to be a lot of interesting features in Melissa: apparently it resets Word to read macros without prompting the user.
The fact that it advertises pornography sites is peculiar. A much more effective virus would advertise "Make Money Fast." Another good place to insert viruses might be in resumes. Some HR departments require the use of MS Word attachments. Many of them may well have their email servers set up in a vulnerable fashion.
Sorry to be such a Marxist about this, but slavery has nothing to do with compensation. It has do with free will and the absence of, yes, freedom. Oracle is non-free. Administers of Oracle may recieve high salaries, but few of them have the freedom to modify Oracle and distribute those modifications. To deny a hacker the freedom to modify and create programming tools, is to deny her freedom. Oracle is positioning itself as a standard-- a closed standard. Such a standard in the Linux world will naturally create complacency and draw resources away from efforts to create a free alternative. A lot of people have turned to Linux for purely selfish reasons-- Linux was and continues to be more stable than its major competion: Windows 95/98/NT. These same people could care less about the philosophy of free software. To those who insist on equating slavery with iron manacles and the middle passage: many philosphers have talked of "being slaves to passion," and "slavish devotion" is not an uncommon turn of phrase.
HDTV uses a 16:9 (1.77:1) width ratio for its picture. While this is an improvement over current 4:3 (1.33:1), it still is a narrower picture than most movies (2.35:1). So a HDTV picture will still cut off parts of the frame.
Well, a painted scroll may be A4 size at 300 dpi *24 bit color when scanned into a computer, making a 25 MB file, but the level of addressable resoloution was never that small. Brushes and quills probably had a resolution closer to 10-15 dpi (~2-4 mm square). And the monks probably had no more than a few pigments, several of which were not amenable to mixing or dilution (gold leaf/ for example).
The non-availabily of good lenses made reading a problem as well.
We shouldn't be talking here of bps, but rather of baud. (I know, usually baud is inappropriate.) Baud refers to symbols per second.
In terms of art, this usually means a great deal. For instance, the depictions of saints were usually standardized, so a medieval illustrator probably could not stray very far from the norm. This further limits the amount of bandwidth in a tome.
Besides religious material, the other major illustrated works included armorial rolls. At perhaps 16-20 arms per page, it would seem that the depicted arms represented an enourmous bandwidth, armorial bearings can be fully described using blazon in no more than 15-20 words, and often in fewer. Since blazon is a precise, formal specification of an arms, it's (IMHO) probably the best subject for studies of medieval bandwidth.
I'm guessing that the lawyer's suggestion was a gesture of non-aggressiveness. Illiad's lawyer probably figures that if this unnamed company stayed unnamed, the company's reputation would remain unscathed.
It's similar to the oft-depicted hostage negotiation tactic of teling the armed man to "Just put the gun down."
If Illiad had revealed the name to be, say, Microsoft, the Redmond's legal department would have, from a PR standpoint, less to gain from volunatrily ending their threats.
The "liberal arts major" article was by far the more interesting (to me). World domination will require that Linux insinuates its way onto the desktop of the average consumer. Most consumers aren't techies.
But I think she got the wrong impression about what Linux should be. She entered the Linux world thinking that Linux was for geeks (only.) She evidently left with that same impression.
The traditional support method is through usenet. She went to Microsoft. She had her heart set on downloading a distribution from the net. She settled for a CD-ROM.
In other words, she viewed Microsoft as a natural ally, but sought out Linux with the expectation that it would be both authentically geeky and authentically hard. It's almost as if her review was geared towards fufilling those expectations.
Microsoft is too comfortable, but to be authentic, Linux has to be difficult. Maybe this is the consumer version of FUD.
Can the benchmark be reproduced
on
Few Quickies
·
· Score: 1
I believe companies are allowed to tweek their TPC testing machines in order to get maximum (if unrealistic) performance. So taking a stock Oracle, and a stock Cray isn't necessarilly going to provide the same results that Ellison and Gates got. After all, the whole purpose of this benchmarks is that it gives companies something to put in ad copy.
Maybe it's one of those corporate "training" packages-- and comes with a "instructor's guide" and "workbook." Personally, I can't wait until they come out with a "little red book" of Mr. Gates's "wisdom."
Anybody notice that the only links embedded in the article were stock tickers? If I were a buyer of high speed chips (I've only got a 233 MHz PII), I'd be more interested in downloading the clock testing program than in Intel's stock price.
Normally, punctuation marks are place within quotation marks. In the computer science community, however, it is often counter-productive to follow this rule, since quotationmarks often deliminate input. Periods, commas, and other punctuation marks are often not desirable in a input stream. So, some people have endevoured to popularize the "punctuation outside of quotations" rule. After all, the suggestion 'Type "enter."' is awfully ambiguous to a first time computer user.
The special made it seem like the only real controversy in modern Egyptology was whether the pyramids were built by Martians or Atlanteans. The director of antiquities was visibly squirming at some point when he heard some of those theories. Apparently, the whole thing was funded by followers of Edgar Case (a real nut), who have thrown this money about in order to "prove" Mr Case's deranged prophecies. The style of the show was also surreal. It reminded me of the Winter Olympics... ("And later, we'll go to the burial venue, for a live preview of tonight's mummification competition. But first, Maury Povich, with a moving story about a Egyptologist who will touch our hearts...) But hey, can one really expect responsible journalism from FOX?
Perhaps the end result will be compiler much like pgcc-- which adds -mpentium and -mpentiumpro to gcc's -m486.
Of course, most people who use Redhat and their handy dandy RPMs will still be stuck with 386 binaries, as RH doesn't really make a point of using RPM_OPT_FLAGS in all its SRPMs.
By your definition of faith (which is pretty straight forward), faith is totally antithetical to rationalist thought. It means classifying certain issues as impervious to investigation and experimentation.
The Bible defines pi as 3.0. The Bible has a lot of stuff in genesis that anathema to modern biology and biochemistry. The Bible contains stuff about the "sun standing still." It's closer to a Ptolemaic than a Keplerian view of the solar system.
Now, if the bible is to taken as "literally true", much of modern science goes out the window, because acceptance of the bible is based on faith, not reason, and faith trumps reason. There goes science.
I suppose that the bible can be accepted as allegory, but then, it's been wrong on so many things...
Slashdot Mirror
Often the best way to make an insane amount of money is to invest in a company before, or during its IPO. The herd mentality of investers will do the rest.
HP is hoping that it will be able to take advantage of the internet stock frenzy, and increase revenues. Imagine if Amazon had sold 3-5% of its equity for a mainframe-- before the IPO.
What makes me somewhat leary is that last payment option:
"Give us your comapany, and we'll give you a mainframe..."
It sounds unhealthy. It's almost as if it were grinding away. I wonder what the server's uptime will be before it crashes to the floor.
In terms of information, the Internet has had a history of publishing rather arcane and esoteric material. Texts and ideas which were not accepted by mainstream media now had the potential to reach many more minds. The internet, by altering the concept of "freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press," has liberated ideas from economic constraints, as long as the intended audiences had access to a computer and the net. In this way, the culture of net publishing resembles the enlightenment's tradition of small "vanity presses", intended not to make a profit, but to publish the ideas of its patrons.
But is this modern enlightenment really akin to that of the 1700s? A great many users of the internet very rarely contribute, and very few sites have as much profile, or as much bandwidth, as those owned by traditional media corporations (New York Times, CNN, ZD-net). It's also going to get worse. Altavista has recently indicated that a site can pay for a higher profile in the search engine's database.
Scientific journals are ending their traditional print runs, in favour of "pay-for access" online publishing. In some university libraries, access to these data repositories, is restricted to students and faculty of the university, ending the university libray's role as a public depository.
There's also a problem of closed minds. Some people are taking the view that traditional media has nothing to offer, and are conducting research almost entirely on-line, even though in some fields, the amount of off-line information exceeds that of on-line information.
The first enlightenment was conducted in a era before copyright. In some ways, information did want to be free. The second internet "enlightenment" will be fettered by the concept of intellectual property.
Microsoft's codecs may be more efficient than MP3, but how difficult is it to compress audio in that format? I am guessing that it takes quite a bit of computing power to encode. Does it work well for all types of music? MP3s currently sound pretty good on a computer system, but I am told that the flaws in the format become pretty visible when the MP3 is played on a good stereo. I am assumming that the new format has the same problems.
We should be keeping our ears open for truly high fidelity formats, like DVD-Audio, not tuning them to "enjoy" sub CD-quality music. DVD-RAM audio-- no that would be something.
24bits 96Khz. Somehow I don't think this will spark much of a revolution. After all, many geeks seem to think that listening to MP3s through a soundcard is good enough for them.
Yeah, but PV=nRT is an ideal gas law-- it doesn't take into account various other forces that make almost all materials deviate from the ideal gas law. If it wasn't for non-ideal gases, modern refrigeration (based on the fact that some gases absorb heat upon expansion) would be impossible.
Now an ice cream bar served as Bose-Einstein Condensate might be interesting...
try Jack's Chipset Comparison Guide. Personally, I have a i740, so I don't know much about the high end stuff. (It was the cheapest way to get OpenGL ICD support (on Windows) and has a fairly decent closed source driver for XFree86, so I'm not complaining.
Personally, I think viruses are interesting in that they are, in a sense, artificial life. Of course, I wouldn't want to be infected. I recognize the unique vulnerability of Windows 95, yet due to my "interest in gaming." it has become my primary platform. I'd like to have the flaws of my operating system proven by a capable virus writer, but on the other hand, I have no faith whatsoever in Microsoft to fix these flaws.
The larger problem raised by the attention of Melissa and other high profile "cracking" cases is that, if this trend continues, we may have a far more draconian regime unleshed upon us. Look at it this way-- it wasn't until the fundies discovered the net that the CDA was born. All we need now is for some senator or congressperson to get hit with a mildly annoying virus or a novice cracking attempt-- and boom, agencies start to "crack down" and rev up their "asset forfeiture" programs into high gear.
AFAIK, the position of the United States is that POWs can result from a general class of armed conflicts that include, but are not limited to wars. The Vietnam "War" was never a declared war, yet captured soldiers were considered POWs.
Of course, it was also the position of the US that the Montenegro operation was a seperate conflict, and that their capture was "kidnapping." Either the Serbs are bound by the Geneva Convention, or they're international terrorists.
Mistreatment of the prisoners is either an act of terrorism, or a war crime.
The Armed Forces do not and should not have any relationship to the "honor" of the United States. They are explicitly under civilian control. I'd much rather have president with no military service than one who believes it is the army's job to protect the country from the excesses of democracy.
Let us also rememeber that JFK, LBJ, and Nixon all had military backgrounds-- yet the Vietnam Conflict was a bit of a disaster.
The GUID only identifies the original creator of the docment. Theoretically, I could create a e-mail virus by starting with a Word file originally created by someone else. By erasing the document, adding in my own malicious code, and resaving, I can "frame" the creator of the original document file. The GUID is created by the File|New routine.
It's only a matter of time before newer viruses are developed. There are supposed to be a lot of interesting features in Melissa: apparently it resets Word to read macros without prompting the user.
The fact that it advertises pornography sites is peculiar. A much more effective virus would advertise "Make Money Fast." Another good place to insert viruses might be in resumes. Some HR departments require the use of MS Word attachments. Many of them may well have their email servers set up in a vulnerable fashion.
Sorry to be such a Marxist about this, but slavery has nothing to do with compensation. It has do with free will and the absence of, yes, freedom.
Oracle is non-free. Administers of Oracle may recieve high salaries, but few of them have the freedom to modify Oracle and distribute those modifications. To deny a hacker the freedom to modify and create programming tools, is to deny her freedom.
Oracle is positioning itself as a standard-- a closed standard. Such a standard in the Linux world will naturally create complacency and draw resources away from efforts to create a free alternative.
A lot of people have turned to Linux for purely selfish reasons-- Linux was and continues to be more stable than its major competion: Windows 95/98/NT. These same people could care less about the philosophy of free software.
To those who insist on equating slavery with iron manacles and the middle passage: many philosphers have talked of "being slaves to passion," and "slavish devotion" is not an uncommon turn of phrase.
HDTV uses a 16:9 (1.77:1) width ratio for its picture. While this is an improvement over current 4:3 (1.33:1), it still is a narrower picture than most movies (2.35:1). So a HDTV picture will still cut off parts of the frame.
Well, a painted scroll may be A4 size at 300 dpi *24 bit color when scanned into a computer, making a 25 MB file, but the level of addressable resoloution was never that small. Brushes and quills probably had a resolution closer to 10-15 dpi (~2-4 mm square). And the monks probably had no more than a few pigments, several of which were not amenable to mixing or dilution (gold leaf/ for example).
The non-availabily of good lenses made reading a problem as well.
We shouldn't be talking here of bps, but rather of baud. (I know, usually baud is inappropriate.) Baud refers to symbols per second.
In terms of art, this usually means a great deal. For instance, the depictions of saints were usually standardized, so a medieval illustrator probably could not stray very far from the norm. This further limits the amount of bandwidth in a tome.
Besides religious material, the other major illustrated works included armorial rolls. At perhaps 16-20 arms per page, it would seem that the depicted arms represented an enourmous bandwidth, armorial bearings can be fully described using blazon in no more than 15-20 words, and often in fewer. Since blazon is a precise, formal specification of an arms, it's (IMHO) probably the best subject for studies of medieval bandwidth.
I'm guessing that the lawyer's suggestion was a gesture of non-aggressiveness. Illiad's lawyer probably figures that if this unnamed company stayed unnamed, the company's reputation would remain unscathed.
It's similar to the oft-depicted hostage negotiation tactic of teling the armed man to "Just put the gun down."
If Illiad had revealed the name to be, say, Microsoft, the Redmond's legal department would have, from a PR standpoint, less to gain from volunatrily ending their threats.
But I think she got the wrong impression about what Linux should be. She entered the Linux world thinking that Linux was for geeks (only.) She evidently left with that same impression.
The traditional support method is through usenet. She went to Microsoft. She had her heart set on downloading a distribution from the net. She settled for a CD-ROM.
In other words, she viewed Microsoft as a natural ally, but sought out Linux with the expectation that it would be both authentically geeky and authentically hard. It's almost as if her review was geared towards fufilling those expectations.
Microsoft is too comfortable, but to be authentic, Linux has to be difficult. Maybe this is the consumer version of FUD.
I believe companies are allowed to tweek their TPC testing machines in order to get maximum (if unrealistic) performance. So taking a stock Oracle, and a stock Cray isn't necessarilly going to provide the same results that Ellison and Gates got. After all, the whole purpose of this benchmarks is that it gives companies something to put in ad copy.
Maybe it's one of those corporate "training" packages-- and comes with a "instructor's guide" and "workbook."
Personally, I can't wait until they come out with
a "little red book" of Mr. Gates's "wisdom."
Anybody notice that the only links embedded in the article were stock tickers? If I were a buyer of high speed chips (I've only got a 233 MHz PII), I'd be more interested in downloading the clock testing program than in Intel's stock price.
But then again, I'm not a technology executive...
Chlamydia, ghonorrhoea, HIV, herpes simplex, syphilis, children...
Normally, punctuation marks are place within quotation marks. In the computer science community, however, it is often counter-productive to follow this rule, since quotationmarks often deliminate input. Periods, commas, and other punctuation marks are often not desirable in a input stream. So, some people have endevoured to popularize the "punctuation outside of quotations" rule.
After all, the suggestion 'Type "enter."' is awfully ambiguous to a first time computer user.
The special made it seem like the only real controversy in modern Egyptology was whether the pyramids were built by Martians or Atlanteans. The director of antiquities was visibly squirming at some point when he heard some of those theories. Apparently, the whole thing was funded by followers of Edgar Case (a real nut), who have thrown this money about in order to "prove" Mr Case's deranged prophecies.
The style of the show was also surreal. It reminded me of the Winter Olympics... ("And later, we'll go to the burial venue, for a live preview of tonight's mummification competition. But first, Maury Povich, with a moving story about a Egyptologist who will touch our hearts...)
But hey, can one really expect responsible journalism from FOX?
Perhaps the end result will be compiler much like pgcc-- which adds -mpentium and -mpentiumpro to gcc's -m486.
Of course, most people who use Redhat and their handy dandy RPMs will still be stuck with 386 binaries, as RH doesn't really make a point of using RPM_OPT_FLAGS in all its SRPMs.
By your definition of faith (which is pretty straight forward), faith is totally antithetical to rationalist thought. It means classifying certain issues as impervious to investigation and experimentation.
:)
The Bible defines pi as 3.0. The Bible has a lot of stuff in genesis that anathema to modern biology and biochemistry. The Bible contains stuff about the "sun standing still." It's closer to a Ptolemaic than a Keplerian view of the solar system.
Now, if the bible is to taken as "literally true", much of modern science goes out the window, because acceptance of the bible is based on faith, not reason, and faith trumps reason. There goes science.
I suppose that the bible can be accepted as allegory, but then, it's been wrong on so many things...
I know, I'm damned to hell
Why do I think that this development might just herald the return of the space-cadet keyboard?
] )
(The keyboard equivalent of this command is [left-pedal]+[right-pedal]+[meta]+[left-shift]+[Q