You can't ask him to speculate as to what might have happened to the study if it had been unfavorable to Microsoft. His guess is no better than ours. What we can ask is:
"Have you ever performed a comparative study for a client that resulted in an unfavorable report? Did the client publish the results anyway? Who was the client?"
Oh, I don't know... that smug feeling you get is worth something.
Two years ago I stopped buying Belkin products after their routers started redirecting port 80 queries to their own adservers. Can't say that I miss 'em.
"So after I got frustrated with the distribution I had been trying in 2002, I decided to give Windows a try again. Windows certainly isn't perfect, but overall it has been a much less frustrating experience than Linux was."
Without trying to sell you on the features of my distribution, did you try others? There are big differences among the distros, and I'd hate for you to blame "Linux" when the real culprit was the distribution you were using.
While I hate the one-line summaries that are ascribed to various distributions ("for newbies"... "for ricers"... "for desktops"... "for servers") there is a germ of truth to them. If it was hard to upgrade your Linux box, then pick a distribution with a decent package manager. If you didn't like your KDE-centric OS, then pick one that integrates GNOME. If the installation process turned you off, pick one with a GUI installer.
Really, the distribution makes or breaks the product.
As you suggested, the ability of ISPs to block ports is, in many cases, a seemingly-necessary evil
Bellsouth blocks port 25 outbound and inbound, which irritates me no end. They started the latter when they upgraded my line to 3Mbps. They have no legitimate reason for this; it only serves to artificially push users to expensive "business" lines.
Would to Bog I could get Speakeasy in my neighborhood. Alas, too far from the CO. RR business class is competitive in my area, and they don't block ports last time I looked... so they're next on my things-to-investigate list.
"... using another company's name to advertise your products. wrong."
I'd like to see this extended to political campaigns. Imagine how much more pleasant campaign season would be if political ads were prohibited from mentioning the competition? No more negative ads, no more mudslinging, a much improved s/n ratio.
Indispensable! My daughter takes hers all over campus, taking notes at the library, holing up in a cozy place away from the dorm noise, working in the basement science labs at oh-dark-thirty, sitting on the lawn when spring rolls around.
Buy the lightest one you can get. Weight matters. We got her a Sony Vaio R505 a few years ago; the DVD and floppy drive stays with the dock station, and the ethernet/wireless interfaces travel with her. A really neat little machine that has held up well after three years of continuous use (a couple of keycaps are missing now; the Sony thieves will sell you a complete keyboard for 80 bucks but not keycaps).
... like the plague. It'll be massively crowded. SR 50 and 528 (east-west corridors) will be crowded also with people coming from Orlando. Allow plenty of time before and after.
You can't get a base pass at this late date. The river is closed past the causeway, and flight restrictions are in place. The closest you can get is six miles or so, and lots of people are trying to crowd in on that six mile line.
Thanks for the response: a gold mine of conversation starters if I ever saw one.
"young kids who don't understand why it's wrong in the first place"
"Kids don't live in reality, which is the reason we don't hold them up to adult standards."
"This kind of crime could be largely stopped with a marketing campaign"
I'm sorry, I give kids more respect than that, and expect better from them. You should too. They are inexperienced, but they aren't stupid, and they understand from a very early age that they should not slap others or take things that do not belong to them. Kids know right from wrong, and the excuse that they are "just kids" is patronizing at best.
I find it ironic that slashdot has many people who will defend your position, but at the same time identify with Ender Wiggin.
Ah well. We could go 'round and 'round over a pint or two. If you're trolling, you are very good at what you do, and I salute you. If you're not... well, I have a Guinness with your name on it if you're ever in Central Florida.
"This is cute, you actually believe that punishment is the right way to prevent inappropriate behavior."
Well, sure. All behavior is governed by a cost-benefit analysis, though we don't generally think of it in economic terms. It seems to me that if you want to discourage a particular behavior, you simply have to raise the price.
Let's just not do it emotionally, gassing the k1dd1es 'cause we can. Increase the penalty, measure, then increase again -- or decrease, based on your result. Double today's penalty, give 'em a year probation instead of six months. If it doesn't make a dent in the new virus rate, then double the penalty again and measure.
Really, this isn't rocket science. You won't eradicate the problem, because some sociopaths can absorb any penalty you can invent. But you can make the price of admission too high for many would-be sociopaths, and that's what you want.
I don't disagree with any of the technical stuff in your post. But I do take issue with this:
"People don't rob banks because there are security cameras/devices and guards with guns, not because of the penalties."
So you suggest that if the bank guards simply do a catch-and-release that it would have the same effect as catch-and-send-to-prison? Not hardly! It's the fear of doing hard time and being sold for cigarettes that keeps people from robbing banks, not a fake camera hung on the wall for effect.
Look here, an unenforced law is an ineffective law. Try driving the speed limit in any metropolitan area in the U.S. and count how many cars you pass. Not many, I'll bet. The speed limits have lax enforcement, there's little chance that you'll be caught speeding and when you are, many states simply sign you up for a meaningless driving-school penance. So everybody speeds. The benefit of doing so outweighs the cost.
Probably too late to respond to you at this point.
Gentoo does binaries too, as someone reminded me recently. (I don't know what the status is of PPC binaries, sorry.)
Some of the USE flags I employ are to remove stuff that I find just plain annoying, such as the spellcheckers. I compile them out, since my spelling is already pretty good and the auto-highlighting of acronyms and proper names did nothing but irritate me. Some stuff I add in -- I compiled NPTL and thread support for a Lisp-based web app that needed the infrastructure.
I'll grant that most USE is to remove bloat (where "bloat" is a subjective term). I don't do crazy CFLAGS stuff, I stick with the stable toolkit, and I don't prelink, so I hardly qualify as a ricer. Still, bloat removal has a cumulative effect, and my grossly underpowered Gentoo box was noticeably more responsive than the same grossly underpowered box running Mandrake.
(To be fair, I'll point out that when I made the switch I jumped to kernel 2.6. Also I changed to a virgin reiser filesystem. so my performance improvement isn't due completely to Gentoo.)
Then find one that does fit. And by "fit", I mean that the penalty should be sufficiently painful to provide a deterrent to would-be vandals.
Today the consequences of prosecution are a slap on the wrist and a job offer at Securepoint.
Sure the death penalty is out of line, but you can agree with me that it would likely be effective as a deterrent. So let's ratchet up the penalties now, and keep cranking up the risk factor until we see a big decrease in antisocial behavior.
Once upon a time pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.
Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Poll however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored these conditions on the ground that they were unnecessary, and made her way amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns enveloped her on both sides. Tangents approached her surface; she became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself alone, apparently in a non-Euclidian space.
She was being watched however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear co-ordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate at once.
Hearing a vulgar fraction behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on no good.
"Eureka" she gasped.
"Ho Ho" he said, "what a symmetric little polynomial you are. I can see you're absolutely bubbling over with secs."
"Oh Sir", she protested, "keep away from me, I haven't got my brackets on."
"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary."
"i,i," she thought. "Perhaps he's homogeneous then."
"What order are you," the brute demanded.
"Seventeen", replied Polly.
Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet", he said.
"Come, come," said Curly, "lets off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit".
"Never" gasped Polly.
"EXCHLF" he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He started at her significant places and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly, all was up. She felt his digit tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence was gone for ever.
There was no mercy, for Curly was a Heavyside operator. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way round and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected at her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.
When Polly got home that evening her mother noticed that she was truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally, she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction.
The moral of the story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.
Poster was probably going for a +5 Funny rather than +5 Insightful. Nevertheless, Andreessen's MOSAIC was the first popular browser, incorporating a number of improvements (such as support for X, graphic attachments and forms) over the ViolaWWW prototype.
NCSA subsequently sold the commercial rights to MOSAIC to Spyglass, which in turn licensed its technologies to Microsoft and others.
"End users just *don't care* [...] a selfish luser attitude"
I don't think that's fair. The end users, for the most part, have been handed a box that was advertised as an appliance: "Plug it in and you're good to go! Surf the net, download music, play games with your chums, get photos from the grandkids!"
Except that it wasn't just an appliance, was it? It was a bug ridden piece of manure that was delivered with known defects, to people who by and large don't have the wherewithal to work around those defects.
This is Microsoft's fault, plainly. Not the poor bastards who were taken in.
Because I'd like to go, and I can't... but I'm willing to send a proxy.
Because it's massively cool.
Because 30 years after the fact, there's been few things that have awed me more than that Saturn V night launch, that looked like the goddamn sun was rising over the Florida coast, with thunder that we heard 50 miles inland.
Because some bright boy is going to invent a nanobug that will be employed by a religious wacko, returning the cockroaches to their former place at the top of the food chain. Unless we spread ourselves out a little bit.
Because it serves me better than the $8.5B of federal tax dollars being poured into Boston's Big Dig. I'm not even getting any Velcro out of that.
... and then slipping delivery from 2004 to 2005 to 2006 to whenever.
It's hard to justify upgrading your stable W2K server to XP if a successor product is just around the corner. Longhorn has been "just around the corner" for years.
It's common practice for software vendors to preannounce product in order to keep customers from looking elsewhere. But sometimes the tactic can backfire.
When I first saw the name Harvard associated with the quote, I thought "Sure, the politically correct capital of the world". But I thought I'd give Pinker a fair shake.
Turns out that
Pinker was one of the defenders of President Summers' comments concerning gender. From the Harvard Crimson:
CRIMSON: Were President Summers' remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?
PINKER: Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa.
CRIMSON: Would it be normal to hear a similar set of hypotheses presented and considered at a conference of psychologists?
PINKER: Some psychologists are still offended by such hypotheses, but yes, they could certainly be considered at most major conferences in scientific psychology.
CRIMSON: Finally, did you personally find President Summers' remarks (or what you've heard/read of them) to be offensive?
PINKER: Look, the truth cannot be offensive. Perhaps the hypothesis is wrong, but how would we ever find out whether it is wrong if it is "offensive" even to consider it? People who storm out of a meeting at the mention of a hypothesis, or declare it taboo or offensive without providing arguments or evidence, don't get the concept of a university or free inquiry.
... who, BTW, also manufactures and markets disk array subsystems. When IBM's own array products floundered, they ended up remarketing STK's disk subsystem as the "IBM RAMAC Virtual Array", which arguably kept EMC from eating IBM's lunch.
"... geriatric technology..."
You ought to learn something about the "geriatric technology" before you take shots. Those nines of uptime come as a result of redundant design, high quality components and media, and a paranoid culture shared by both the vendors and practitioners.
"... boardroom relationship based Sales that go away with the boomers retiring in the next ten years."
If more PFCSKs would actually talk to the boomers then they might find that we solved a lot of their problems years ago. Businesses came to depend on automation during our watch, and we were required to make the automation reliable and continuously available. This meant expensive hardware, complex software, mountains of documentation and more bureaucracy than you can shake a stick at -- change management, capacity planning, maintenance procedures, quality control, all that stuff that you hate to do, that gets in the way of the stuff that you want to be doing, but which keeps your business running.
(Sidebar: bureaucracy isn't a dirty word. It keeps enterprises going even during periods when you have sickouts or turnover or hurricanes or management changes or... whatever. It's hard to change procedures in a running bureaucracy, but it's also hard to kill a well-running one.)
We boomers, along with our "geriatric technology" and our inflexible bureaucracies, operate an astonishing amount of business that most people simply take for granted. It's like picking up your telephone -- everyone just expects to hear a dial tone, and never stop to consider the combination of science, technology, sweat and (yes) bureaucracy that makes that dial tone available to you 24/7. It's disheartening, really. Figuratively speaking, we provided dial tone for years, and the PFCSKs come along with downloadable ring tones and now management oohs and aahs. Okay, so I guess we should have marketed ourselves better.
(And yes, I wish more boomers would listen to the PFCSKs, too.)
Slashdot Mirror
Two years ago I stopped buying Belkin products after their routers started redirecting port 80 queries to their own adservers. Can't say that I miss 'em.
While I hate the one-line summaries that are ascribed to various distributions ("for newbies" ... "for ricers" ... "for desktops" ... "for servers") there is a germ of truth to them. If it was hard to upgrade your Linux box, then pick a distribution with a decent package manager. If you didn't like your KDE-centric OS, then pick one that integrates GNOME. If the installation process turned you off, pick one with a GUI installer.
Really, the distribution makes or breaks the product.
Would to Bog I could get Speakeasy in my neighborhood. Alas, too far from the CO. RR business class is competitive in my area, and they don't block ports last time I looked... so they're next on my things-to-investigate list.
Buy the lightest one you can get. Weight matters. We got her a Sony Vaio R505 a few years ago; the DVD and floppy drive stays with the dock station, and the ethernet/wireless interfaces travel with her. A really neat little machine that has held up well after three years of continuous use (a couple of keycaps are missing now; the Sony thieves will sell you a complete keyboard for 80 bucks but not keycaps).
the netscape dorm
my employer can blow me
resignation and postmortem
netscape and aol
You can't get a base pass at this late date. The river is closed past the causeway, and flight restrictions are in place. The closest you can get is six miles or so, and lots of people are trying to crowd in on that six mile line.
Bring beer, and don't be in a hurry to leave.
I'm sorry, I give kids more respect than that, and expect better from them. You should too. They are inexperienced, but they aren't stupid, and they understand from a very early age that they should not slap others or take things that do not belong to them. Kids know right from wrong, and the excuse that they are "just kids" is patronizing at best.
I find it ironic that slashdot has many people who will defend your position, but at the same time identify with Ender Wiggin.
Ah well. We could go 'round and 'round over a pint or two. If you're trolling, you are very good at what you do, and I salute you. If you're not... well, I have a Guinness with your name on it if you're ever in Central Florida.
Well, sure. All behavior is governed by a cost-benefit analysis, though we don't generally think of it in economic terms. It seems to me that if you want to discourage a particular behavior, you simply have to raise the price.
Let's just not do it emotionally, gassing the k1dd1es 'cause we can. Increase the penalty, measure, then increase again -- or decrease, based on your result. Double today's penalty, give 'em a year probation instead of six months. If it doesn't make a dent in the new virus rate, then double the penalty again and measure.
Really, this isn't rocket science. You won't eradicate the problem, because some sociopaths can absorb any penalty you can invent. But you can make the price of admission too high for many would-be sociopaths, and that's what you want.
I don't disagree with any of the technical stuff in your post. But I do take issue with this:
So you suggest that if the bank guards simply do a catch-and-release that it would have the same effect as catch-and-send-to-prison? Not hardly! It's the fear of doing hard time and being sold for cigarettes that keeps people from robbing banks, not a fake camera hung on the wall for effect.Look here, an unenforced law is an ineffective law. Try driving the speed limit in any metropolitan area in the U.S. and count how many cars you pass. Not many, I'll bet. The speed limits have lax enforcement, there's little chance that you'll be caught speeding and when you are, many states simply sign you up for a meaningless driving-school penance. So everybody speeds. The benefit of doing so outweighs the cost.
Gentoo does binaries too, as someone reminded me recently. (I don't know what the status is of PPC binaries, sorry.)
Some of the USE flags I employ are to remove stuff that I find just plain annoying, such as the spellcheckers. I compile them out, since my spelling is already pretty good and the auto-highlighting of acronyms and proper names did nothing but irritate me. Some stuff I add in -- I compiled NPTL and thread support for a Lisp-based web app that needed the infrastructure.
I'll grant that most USE is to remove bloat (where "bloat" is a subjective term). I don't do crazy CFLAGS stuff, I stick with the stable toolkit, and I don't prelink, so I hardly qualify as a ricer. Still, bloat removal has a cumulative effect, and my grossly underpowered Gentoo box was noticeably more responsive than the same grossly underpowered box running Mandrake.
(To be fair, I'll point out that when I made the switch I jumped to kernel 2.6. Also I changed to a virgin reiser filesystem. so my performance improvement isn't due completely to Gentoo.)
Today the consequences of prosecution are a slap on the wrist and a job offer at Securepoint.
Sure the death penalty is out of line, but you can agree with me that it would likely be effective as a deterrent. So let's ratchet up the penalties now, and keep cranking up the risk factor until we see a big decrease in antisocial behavior.
(Oh yeah -- same treatment for spammers.)
Gentoo is all about tailoring GNU/Linux to your needs, and not so much about "ricing" (an unfortunate term).
That's progress. Of a sort.
Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Poll however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored these conditions on the ground that they were unnecessary, and made her way amongst the complex elements.
Rows and columns enveloped her on both sides. Tangents approached her surface; she became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself alone, apparently in a non-Euclidian space.
She was being watched however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear co-ordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate at once.
Hearing a vulgar fraction behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms that he was bent on no good.
"Eureka" she gasped.
"Ho Ho" he said, "what a symmetric little polynomial you are. I can see you're absolutely bubbling over with secs."
"Oh Sir", she protested, "keep away from me, I haven't got my brackets on."
"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary."
"i,i," she thought. "Perhaps he's homogeneous then."
"What order are you," the brute demanded.
"Seventeen", replied Polly.
Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet", he said.
"Of course no," Polly exclaimed indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent".
"Come, come," said Curly, "lets off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit".
"Never" gasped Polly.
"EXCHLF" he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He started at her significant places and began smoothing her points of inflection. Poor Polly, all was up. She felt his digit tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence was gone for ever.
There was no mercy, for Curly was a Heavyside operator. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way round and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected at her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.
When Polly got home that evening her mother noticed that she was truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally, she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction.
The moral of the story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.
NCSA subsequently sold the commercial rights to MOSAIC to Spyglass, which in turn licensed its technologies to Microsoft and others.
Except that it wasn't just an appliance, was it? It was a bug ridden piece of manure that was delivered with known defects, to people who by and large don't have the wherewithal to work around those defects.
This is Microsoft's fault, plainly. Not the poor bastards who were taken in.
c XP "2003 Server" all
Because it's massively cool.
Because 30 years after the fact, there's been few things that have awed me more than that Saturn V night launch, that looked like the goddamn sun was rising over the Florida coast, with thunder that we heard 50 miles inland.
Because some bright boy is going to invent a nanobug that will be employed by a religious wacko, returning the cockroaches to their former place at the top of the food chain. Unless we spread ourselves out a little bit.
Because it serves me better than the $8.5B of federal tax dollars being poured into Boston's Big Dig. I'm not even getting any Velcro out of that.
It's hard to justify upgrading your stable W2K server to XP if a successor product is just around the corner. Longhorn has been "just around the corner" for years.
It's common practice for software vendors to preannounce product in order to keep customers from looking elsewhere. But sometimes the tactic can backfire.
These are available for download, but consider sending them $75US for the complete set of 17 DVDs. A great deal.
Turns out that Pinker was one of the defenders of President Summers' comments concerning gender. From the Harvard Crimson:
(Sidebar: bureaucracy isn't a dirty word. It keeps enterprises going even during periods when you have sickouts or turnover or hurricanes or management changes or... whatever. It's hard to change procedures in a running bureaucracy, but it's also hard to kill a well-running one.)
We boomers, along with our "geriatric technology" and our inflexible bureaucracies, operate an astonishing amount of business that most people simply take for granted. It's like picking up your telephone -- everyone just expects to hear a dial tone, and never stop to consider the combination of science, technology, sweat and (yes) bureaucracy that makes that dial tone available to you 24/7. It's disheartening, really. Figuratively speaking, we provided dial tone for years, and the PFCSKs come along with downloadable ring tones and now management oohs and aahs. Okay, so I guess we should have marketed ourselves better.
(And yes, I wish more boomers would listen to the PFCSKs, too.)