Note that realistically, pretty much any problem has an exponential solution, so going beyond this isn't very interesting. There's a few problems related to the halting problem for which we know we simply can't provide a running time, and a couple other classes of problems that we don't know how to analyze, but they're not what I'd call real world problems. These facts, have, naturally, not stopped mathematicians from spending time talking about how to represent very large numbers; the Ackerman function is one such example.
So they take in enough to make things break even (at least). I don't think it changes the fundamental equation, although I'm sure it could be stated better. What I was trying to convey is that you can't keep taking losses year after year and remain in business.
Theoretically, competitive markets reduce the profits our guy running the pool can bring in. And it has happened, even in insurance; Freakanomics argues that the Internet brought down the price of term life insurance by making it very cheap to advertise prices. But I think it only really works for things that are very easily understood; it's hard to price shop when the fine print really matters.
But your paradox works both ways, suppose the pool guy can't figure out how to finger the guy, but you can, and know it's you. Signing up for the insurance sounds like a solid bet, plus you only need to pay when you know it's going to happen, right?
The whole thing's largely theoretical. Actuaries know at best a likelihood that some time in the future one you'll have a diagnosis, but can't say when. Your unlucky guy isn't a risk anymore, he's a fact. Adding the fact that probability exists can help a bit too; in your example, there's bound to be more than one group of thousand people in the world, meaning more than one of these "likely diagnosis" people exist, and can form a pool of their own surrounding the likelihood that one will not get diagnosed. I leave it to the readers to calculate what the cost would be if we knew that 1 in 10 of these "likely diagnosis" folk were to incur that 100,000 cost. It's not pretty, but is it any different than the parent's example?
The insurance companies make money by employing very large numbers of actuaries to sift through the data and find correlations. Why? So they can accurately predict how much it will cost them to insure you. In a more competitive market, you'd see this sort of non-smoker discount all over (assuming you don't already). BMI can be a flawed metric for this, of course, but it's already used in many medical analysis for determining when a procedure is okay.
The odds of anyone, including you, of being George Burns is something like 1 in 4 billion. Probably lower, since he's dead. I don't see the point of bringing up an anecdote here. The facts clearly suggest that obesity correlates with diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
Frankly, fuck you if you get injured sky diving. You clearly don't understand that insurance is a method to spread risk into something manageable, and that those who actively engage in trying to kill themselves through sport should either have a lessened expectation of coverage, or should expect to compensate monetarily for their activities. You're absolutely right, they're interested in maintaining a profit. And that's a good thing. Otherwise, they might as well just hand out coverage to anyone, charge nothing, and declare bankruptcy every year. Fundamental principle of market economics: you have to take in at least as much as you spend. By asking for universal nondiscriminatory government managed health care, you're asking me to cover the costs of your activities, and generally eliminating many incentives to reduce the need for medical services.
I can see lines to be drawn around tailoring insurance price to the person, but I think your actions are fair game.
This is merely a longer explanation for the long held adage: "The fastest way to learn how to do something with Linux is to claim on the Internet that it can't."
This is probably one of the most dangerous aspects of our democracy today. Would we organize the border patrol with unpaid volunteers, or military base security? If we can find the money and manpower to make these civic functions happen, why leave our most basic element of democracy in the hands of such people?
We spend hundreds of dollars on new voting machines -- but the League of Women's voters still volunteers to organize and canvass for free. As great as their contributions may be, from what you've said, the volunteering approach stands as an obstacle to improving elections.
Ronald Regan's administration formed what we might as well call the new Republican policy: cut taxes and outspend the democrats. His tax cuts are well known enough that they're now called "Reaganomics". He started the war on drugs. His policy during the cold war was to force the Soviet machine to spend so much to maintain equilibrium that they'd break. The Secretary of the Interior was discovered to be involved in directing HUD money to contractors in exchange for kickbacks. His administration retroactively removed tax loopholes, breaking business's assumption of a social contract, something even dear Ron Paul won't do with Social Security, ultimately contributing to the Savings & Loan scandal.
If this guy was the end of libertarian administration, it seemed like a pretty shitty way to go out. Or maybe libertarian philosophy is something that can exist only in the mind?
I'm no genius on the subject, but isn't there the case that divers have significant "explosion" resistant forces due to the water they're surrounded by?
Really, I'd say conciousness for 10-15 seconds, and risk of death approaching 100 percent at 2 minutes, based on the link. Remember, the 2-3 minutes guy was examined by autopsy.
It seems the comment nesting system has lead you astray. I was replying directly to the flamebait, as the formatting might have suggested. I get what non-free is, and have heard of Linux Mint before.
Idiot, they aren't even close to being the same thing. The Klite codec pack is a collection of codecs wrapped in a fairly hostile windows installer - gstreamer is a multimedia API. Gstreamer is a great API, that's getting better and more popular by the minute. And Ubuntu might want to consider moving the fluendo gstreamer mp3 package into restricted or main and install by default. By similar I meant the large collection of gstreamer packages that Ubuntu creates for codecs, bundled into -good, -bad, and -ugly, but mostly w32codecs, which is nearly EXACTLY like K-Lite, without the spyware. While it's not terribly hard to find infringing users once you nab the server, I don't think the codec owners are likely to go as far as RIAA has in suing their users.
And as I already said, end users don't care -- they want zero cost software, so they'll continue to download warez and ignore intellectual property, and generally ignore efforts to fix the legal code they live under. The people who host should care whether they have permission to distribute things they don't own, as should the people who believe that the GPL should be respected. The GPL provides extra rights above and beyond simple fair use to all people on the basis of copyright; the way to promote it certainly not by disrespecting other people's copyright.
Mplayer hosts several binary codec packages. It's not clear to me whether they have rights to distribute copies of someone else's codecs, and it seems like the sort of thing that they should have better documentation of. If they do in fact have permission to redistribute those DLLs, then Ubuntu may have a chance to provide these in multiverse.
Medibuntu is the group currently hosting w32codecs and other things Ubuntu refuses to package "for legal reasons". They provide the software under a bullshit "it's up to you to determine whether this software is legal for you." They can do this because they don't have to worry about taking an entire distro down with them; Ubuntu is gaining more and more OEM support, and it's likely causing Microsoft pain at contract negotiation time. I'd think if Ubuntu went around distributing Microsoft software within Ubuntu, or even adding the Medibuntu repo by default, they'd quickly find out how many lawyers the 10 million in the Ubuntu Foundation's name would garner them.
The copyright holders on the w32codecs is not mplayer. By distributing, you are likely making a copy without permission, ie infringing on copyright. K-Lite is similar to w32codecs and gstreamer. It includes many of the FFShow plugins, which are open source so no special permission is needed. It also makes available some codecs that have no suitable open source alternative, and w32codecs uses things like these. The question is whether anyone has permission to do so. For example, the DiVX license as provided by K-Lite:
"DivXNetworks, Inc. (the "Licensor") grants to you this personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-assignable license solely to use in a single copy of the Licensed Works on a single computer for use by a single concurrent user only, and solely provided that you adhere to all of the terms and conditions of this Agreement" Which is hinting that you can't copy from windows to linux, and certainly if I distribute the binaries, I can't distribute the license. But it contines further down:
"RESTRICTIONS:
(a) You are expressly prohibited from copying, modifying, merging, selling, leasing, redistributing, assigning, or transferring in any matter, Licensed Works or any portion thereof.
(b) You may take a single copy of materials within the package or otherwise related to Licensed Works only as required for backup purposes." I've seen no evidence that anyone's gone through to make sure that they can actually use the binaries they put in w32codecs. The DivX EULA suggests no, but it's not clear how w32codecs aquired divxc32.dll. They might not be able to discover that you as a user are infringing, but definitely mplayer, mediubuntu etc are at risk.
Canonical did exactly that, but it turns out there's two problems. * It's hard to get people to give you permission to redistribute their software * It's hard to get people to allow the above without per copy costs
Many of the people who follow both those guidelines already have their own repos set up. Opera hosts a debian repo, for example. Arguably, it's much better for these descriptions to be available in one place, like Canonical's commercial repo, and some smart companies get that. But I doubt you'll ever see w32codecs available like this.
Automatix provides w32codecs, a package that's likely to be illegal in most countries that respect copyright. It's a set of DLLs and other code libraries used for decoding videos in Windows. It has about 60 codecs from unidentified sources with no particular attention to licensing that I can see. This package is often used as a workaround for Linux's generally poor support for video playback.
It's a question of whether you want to gamble that large software companies will continue to look the other way on your infringement or not.
Commonly, because it offers point and click access to w32codecs, mp3 playback and stuff like opera that is not packaged by Ubuntu. Canonical tried to solve this by hosting a commercial repository, but some of the things users want are simply not legally compatible with distributing software for free.
Actually, the large ball design isn't too bad at rest. You place your thumb on the left of the ball, and click with with that thumb (some models apparently also had another button or wheel there). For fine motions the large size of the ball is an advantage, and for broad motions the ball glides on the posts pretty easily, so you don't have to follow the motion with your hand as much as control it. This also allows for some impressive acrobatics in games that don't anticipate this;)
Indeed, chipping on drops seems more likely in the large ball design, as it has nothing securing it in place. Seems I'm not the only person in the thread to experience that.
Which old days, exactly are we referring to? The term "payola" is cited as originating in the late 30s or early 40s, depending on the dictionary, to describe a practice that had probably been going on since nearly the birth of public broadcast radio stations.
My previous mouse was a Trackman Marble FX. This is the model that has one large ball primarily controlled by the middle and index fingers. I can't imagine using the thumb marble versions it seems like a fast track to tendonitis-ville. The worst thing about mine is after the ball fell out once, it managed to get a nice chip in the finish, and now the thing gets stuck on one of the metal supports it slides on every 15 minutes. On the plus side, it was easily capable of doing several 360s, with the DPI turned up, or with a very controlled spin throw of the ball.
What you're talking about is true, in theory, and the reason why it was rated funny. Plenty of places use incentive programs for salesmen, and for cost cutting ideas. However, what we're talking about is not overt rewards for behaviors, but subtle perceptions by people in corporations. Many times, a manager's perceived status is determined in part by how many people are below them, and affects promotion opportunities. If you're a CIO of a large company with only ten full time subordinates, you might be a fantastic CIO, but nobody's going to trust you to manage a company of thousands. (Even though you likely know much about what all those thousands to by means of providing IT resources). And furthermore, who would hire you to provide the same CIO function under a staff of 200?
The theoretical solution would be to pay the dude a high salary, and he likely does earn one. But don't think you'll avoid "budget as synonymous with importance" disease by leaving IT for accounting. Hell, that's probably where it started, since accounting firms are about billable hours.
The important question was how the two distributions performed without massive re-engineering. When I read CIO evaluations, I expect a perspective that includes how organizations can create and deploy changes to the base platform. I know places that revert the Windows XP theme to "Classic", as it's more familiar to their people. If you're considering deploying Linux, you would do well to consider hiring a Linux expert to help you with such things, just as you hire Windows experts. Honestly, I understand your compatriot didn't write this article, but the level of detail offered is no substitute for expert advice. Perhaps there's a whitepaper report for sale in the works?
There are some important problems to recognize, although I hope you can pardon my amazement that people still want to listen to MIDIs at all. MIDI playback in Ubuntu is not as simple as it could be. While I don't know why this matters as an evaluation of 40,000 user base suitability, it might be the best example for the state of Ubuntu usability. At the moment, MIDI is recognized as a music filetype by GNOME, but gstreamer (and totem as a consequence) can't handle it. So first instinct when something doesn't work is to check the repos. There are 87 hits for "midi" in my apt-cache search. Once you exclude the libraries and random extra hits for midi maze clones and the like, you get about ten options. The first one is kmid. kmid looks like it would work out great in kubuntu, but I'm guessing it can't handle the lack of artsd running in the background or something, as I heard no sound. The last one on the list is timidity++. It works fine on the command line, but even if you install the extra interfaces, the interface isn't that great.
Gutsy (to be released in October) handles it slightly differently. If you double click to open a.mid, by default it opens up an install applications dialog, suggesting amarok or kmid. Timidity is tragically absent, and kmid still doesn't work after installation. Ideally, midi playback should be part of the gstreamer set of plugins, and MIDI would work out of the box with the default totem GUI. In practice, work has been done in gstreamer that basically ports timidity to the gstreamer framework (as well as wildmidi, another midi library). This work was started in February 2007, so I can understand why it didn't make it into the current release. The better question, and one I don't immediately have an answer for, is why it's not yet hit development branch in Ubuntu. There exists a bounty to bring this functionality to life, so if anyone's looking to earn what appears to be around 200 dollars, this whole problem could be wrapped up by October or sooner.
As an aside, I do appreciate the implication that Debian is the mother of all Linux. And we should recognize that organizations, hired bounties, or outside firms like SuSE, can make these re-engineering feats simple via open source.
Pray tell, what exactly is the point of these alternative benchmarks? The point here is to see how performance degrades under load. Ie, tasks ready to run. The bigger question is, in what way does Igno's OR yours represent real world usage? I can't recall the last time I was playing q3 with seti@home running in the background. From a gamer's standpoint, these benchmarks are bogus. In all cases, the FPS drops with increased load, so the solution is to reduce load as much as possible. That might mean turning off updatedb if you're a late night gamer, etc.
This said, the 3d benchmarking is seemingly not that great, and I've yet to see quality linux benchmarking. Maybe it's time for phoronix to lead the way? I agree that average, min and max fps are important parts. 50 fps vs 60 fps isn't as bad as 55 fps average with occasional 20 fps drops.
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Note that realistically, pretty much any problem has an exponential solution, so going beyond this isn't very interesting. There's a few problems related to the halting problem for which we know we simply can't provide a running time, and a couple other classes of problems that we don't know how to analyze, but they're not what I'd call real world problems. These facts, have, naturally, not stopped mathematicians from spending time talking about how to represent very large numbers; the Ackerman function is one such example.
So they take in enough to make things break even (at least). I don't think it changes the fundamental equation, although I'm sure it could be stated better. What I was trying to convey is that you can't keep taking losses year after year and remain in business.
Theoretically, competitive markets reduce the profits our guy running the pool can bring in. And it has happened, even in insurance; Freakanomics argues that the Internet brought down the price of term life insurance by making it very cheap to advertise prices. But I think it only really works for things that are very easily understood; it's hard to price shop when the fine print really matters.
But your paradox works both ways, suppose the pool guy can't figure out how to finger the guy, but you can, and know it's you. Signing up for the insurance sounds like a solid bet, plus you only need to pay when you know it's going to happen, right?
The whole thing's largely theoretical. Actuaries know at best a likelihood that some time in the future one you'll have a diagnosis, but can't say when. Your unlucky guy isn't a risk anymore, he's a fact. Adding the fact that probability exists can help a bit too; in your example, there's bound to be more than one group of thousand people in the world, meaning more than one of these "likely diagnosis" people exist, and can form a pool of their own surrounding the likelihood that one will not get diagnosed. I leave it to the readers to calculate what the cost would be if we knew that 1 in 10 of these "likely diagnosis" folk were to incur that 100,000 cost. It's not pretty, but is it any different than the parent's example?
The insurance companies make money by employing very large numbers of actuaries to sift through the data and find correlations. Why? So they can accurately predict how much it will cost them to insure you. In a more competitive market, you'd see this sort of non-smoker discount all over (assuming you don't already). BMI can be a flawed metric for this, of course, but it's already used in many medical analysis for determining when a procedure is okay.
The odds of anyone, including you, of being George Burns is something like 1 in 4 billion. Probably lower, since he's dead. I don't see the point of bringing up an anecdote here. The facts clearly suggest that obesity correlates with diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
Frankly, fuck you if you get injured sky diving. You clearly don't understand that insurance is a method to spread risk into something manageable, and that those who actively engage in trying to kill themselves through sport should either have a lessened expectation of coverage, or should expect to compensate monetarily for their activities. You're absolutely right, they're interested in maintaining a profit. And that's a good thing. Otherwise, they might as well just hand out coverage to anyone, charge nothing, and declare bankruptcy every year. Fundamental principle of market economics: you have to take in at least as much as you spend. By asking for universal nondiscriminatory government managed health care, you're asking me to cover the costs of your activities, and generally eliminating many incentives to reduce the need for medical services.
I can see lines to be drawn around tailoring insurance price to the person, but I think your actions are fair game.
This is merely a longer explanation for the long held adage: "The fastest way to learn how to do something with Linux is to claim on the Internet that it can't."
This is probably one of the most dangerous aspects of our democracy today. Would we organize the border patrol with unpaid volunteers, or military base security? If we can find the money and manpower to make these civic functions happen, why leave our most basic element of democracy in the hands of such people?
We spend hundreds of dollars on new voting machines -- but the League of Women's voters still volunteers to organize and canvass for free. As great as their contributions may be, from what you've said, the volunteering approach stands as an obstacle to improving elections.
Given the presence of absentee ballots, I'm pretty sure buying votes is illegal in all states that have absentee ballots.
Ronald Regan's administration formed what we might as well call the new Republican policy: cut taxes and outspend the democrats. His tax cuts are well known enough that they're now called "Reaganomics". He started the war on drugs. His policy during the cold war was to force the Soviet machine to spend so much to maintain equilibrium that they'd break. The Secretary of the Interior was discovered to be involved in directing HUD money to contractors in exchange for kickbacks. His administration retroactively removed tax loopholes, breaking business's assumption of a social contract, something even dear Ron Paul won't do with Social Security, ultimately contributing to the Savings & Loan scandal.
If this guy was the end of libertarian administration, it seemed like a pretty shitty way to go out. Or maybe libertarian philosophy is something that can exist only in the mind?
I'm no genius on the subject, but isn't there the case that divers have significant "explosion" resistant forces due to the water they're surrounded by?
Really, I'd say conciousness for 10-15 seconds, and risk of death approaching 100 percent at 2 minutes, based on the link. Remember, the 2-3 minutes guy was examined by autopsy.
It seems the comment nesting system has lead you astray. I was replying directly to the flamebait, as the formatting might have suggested. I get what non-free is, and have heard of Linux Mint before.
And as I already said, end users don't care -- they want zero cost software, so they'll continue to download warez and ignore intellectual property, and generally ignore efforts to fix the legal code they live under. The people who host should care whether they have permission to distribute things they don't own, as should the people who believe that the GPL should be respected. The GPL provides extra rights above and beyond simple fair use to all people on the basis of copyright; the way to promote it certainly not by disrespecting other people's copyright.
Mplayer hosts several binary codec packages. It's not clear to me whether they have rights to distribute copies of someone else's codecs, and it seems like the sort of thing that they should have better documentation of. If they do in fact have permission to redistribute those DLLs, then Ubuntu may have a chance to provide these in multiverse.
Medibuntu is the group currently hosting w32codecs and other things Ubuntu refuses to package "for legal reasons". They provide the software under a bullshit "it's up to you to determine whether this software is legal for you." They can do this because they don't have to worry about taking an entire distro down with them; Ubuntu is gaining more and more OEM support, and it's likely causing Microsoft pain at contract negotiation time. I'd think if Ubuntu went around distributing Microsoft software within Ubuntu, or even adding the Medibuntu repo by default, they'd quickly find out how many lawyers the 10 million in the Ubuntu Foundation's name would garner them.
The end users don't care, but anyone who's WHOIS has an address one could send a subpoena to has to be a bit cautious.
(a) You are expressly prohibited from copying, modifying, merging, selling, leasing, redistributing, assigning, or transferring in any matter, Licensed Works or any portion thereof.
(b) You may take a single copy of materials within the package or otherwise related to Licensed Works only as required for backup purposes." I've seen no evidence that anyone's gone through to make sure that they can actually use the binaries they put in w32codecs. The DivX EULA suggests no, but it's not clear how w32codecs aquired divxc32.dll. They might not be able to discover that you as a user are infringing, but definitely mplayer, mediubuntu etc are at risk.
Canonical did exactly that, but it turns out there's two problems.
* It's hard to get people to give you permission to redistribute their software
* It's hard to get people to allow the above without per copy costs
Many of the people who follow both those guidelines already have their own repos set up. Opera hosts a debian repo, for example. Arguably, it's much better for these descriptions to be available in one place, like Canonical's commercial repo, and some smart companies get that. But I doubt you'll ever see w32codecs available like this.
Automatix provides w32codecs, a package that's likely to be illegal in most countries that respect copyright. It's a set of DLLs and other code libraries used for decoding videos in Windows. It has about 60 codecs from unidentified sources with no particular attention to licensing that I can see. This package is often used as a workaround for Linux's generally poor support for video playback.
It's a question of whether you want to gamble that large software companies will continue to look the other way on your infringement or not.
Which of course contradicts the other lemma of Linux popularity: Linux can not become mainstream if I have to pay for it.
Commonly, because it offers point and click access to w32codecs, mp3 playback and stuff like opera that is not packaged by Ubuntu. Canonical tried to solve this by hosting a commercial repository, but some of the things users want are simply not legally compatible with distributing software for free.
Actually, it's not even always solvable! Just ask Professor Turing about it...
Actually, the large ball design isn't too bad at rest. You place your thumb on the left of the ball, and click with with that thumb (some models apparently also had another button or wheel there). For fine motions the large size of the ball is an advantage, and for broad motions the ball glides on the posts pretty easily, so you don't have to follow the motion with your hand as much as control it. This also allows for some impressive acrobatics in games that don't anticipate this ;)
Indeed, chipping on drops seems more likely in the large ball design, as it has nothing securing it in place. Seems I'm not the only person in the thread to experience that.
Which old days, exactly are we referring to? The term "payola" is cited as originating in the late 30s or early 40s, depending on the dictionary, to describe a practice that had probably been going on since nearly the birth of public broadcast radio stations.
My previous mouse was a Trackman Marble FX. This is the model that has one large ball primarily controlled by the middle and index fingers. I can't imagine using the thumb marble versions it seems like a fast track to tendonitis-ville. The worst thing about mine is after the ball fell out once, it managed to get a nice chip in the finish, and now the thing gets stuck on one of the metal supports it slides on every 15 minutes. On the plus side, it was easily capable of doing several 360s, with the DPI turned up, or with a very controlled spin throw of the ball.
What you're talking about is true, in theory, and the reason why it was rated funny. Plenty of places use incentive programs for salesmen, and for cost cutting ideas. However, what we're talking about is not overt rewards for behaviors, but subtle perceptions by people in corporations. Many times, a manager's perceived status is determined in part by how many people are below them, and affects promotion opportunities. If you're a CIO of a large company with only ten full time subordinates, you might be a fantastic CIO, but nobody's going to trust you to manage a company of thousands. (Even though you likely know much about what all those thousands to by means of providing IT resources). And furthermore, who would hire you to provide the same CIO function under a staff of 200?
The theoretical solution would be to pay the dude a high salary, and he likely does earn one. But don't think you'll avoid "budget as synonymous with importance" disease by leaving IT for accounting. Hell, that's probably where it started, since accounting firms are about billable hours.
There are some important problems to recognize, although I hope you can pardon my amazement that people still want to listen to MIDIs at all. MIDI playback in Ubuntu is not as simple as it could be. While I don't know why this matters as an evaluation of 40,000 user base suitability, it might be the best example for the state of Ubuntu usability. At the moment, MIDI is recognized as a music filetype by GNOME, but gstreamer (and totem as a consequence) can't handle it. So first instinct when something doesn't work is to check the repos. There are 87 hits for "midi" in my apt-cache search. Once you exclude the libraries and random extra hits for midi maze clones and the like, you get about ten options. The first one is kmid. kmid looks like it would work out great in kubuntu, but I'm guessing it can't handle the lack of artsd running in the background or something, as I heard no sound. The last one on the list is timidity++. It works fine on the command line, but even if you install the extra interfaces, the interface isn't that great.
Gutsy (to be released in October) handles it slightly differently. If you double click to open a
As an aside, I do appreciate the implication that Debian is the mother of all Linux. And we should recognize that organizations, hired bounties, or outside firms like SuSE, can make these re-engineering feats simple via open source.
Pray tell, what exactly is the point of these alternative benchmarks? The point here is to see how performance degrades under load. Ie, tasks ready to run. The bigger question is, in what way does Igno's OR yours represent real world usage? I can't recall the last time I was playing q3 with seti@home running in the background. From a gamer's standpoint, these benchmarks are bogus. In all cases, the FPS drops with increased load, so the solution is to reduce load as much as possible. That might mean turning off updatedb if you're a late night gamer, etc.
This said, the 3d benchmarking is seemingly not that great, and I've yet to see quality linux benchmarking. Maybe it's time for phoronix to lead the way? I agree that average, min and max fps are important parts. 50 fps vs 60 fps isn't as bad as 55 fps average with occasional 20 fps drops.