I got the impression that you were spouting some religious predetermination nonsense. I was not trying to be mean; I thought you were a kook. If I was wrong, I apologize. I agree that we all die eventually. Then: Ringworld:-)
"But free will does not impact how and when you will die unless you choose to either:"
I think you are an idiot. Do you think that supersizing every meal will not affect when you die? Do you think not exercising does not change the probability that you will die at an earlier age? What are you smoking?
Note: I picked a
link the grandparent might like, which concludes "The Microsoft Corporation does not qualify as a monopoly, given the term's economic definition, however it can be ascertained that the company has engaged in anticompetitive, unfair strategies outlawed by antitrust legislation in the United States."
This is contrary to the
finding
of the court, which says, for example, "33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."
I am writing this just after posting the parent; I am curious to see if someone flames me (i.e. does not read the article) or points out the comment
"The Microsoft Corporation does not qualify as a monopoly" above.
(Who cares what the court says, anyway.)
"I find the entire issue of Microsoft packaging Media Player with Windows to be utterly ridiculous. It's their product. If they want to make it only work with other products of theirs, that's their right."
MS pressured OEMs to only ship computers with MS operating systems and used their
monopoly position to drive others out of "their market". I cannot see how you were modded anything but troll.
It is not clear to me that your mom's computer needs cannot be met using Linux together with
Win4Lin (also
here),
WineX (Cedega)
(also here),
wine,
VMWare, etc.
I suspect that not all of these would be needed by your mom and some things still might not work. However, not all (windows) applications she might want will run on Apple machines. In fact, not all windows applications will run on windows machines.
"Yes.... Stupid from a monetary reason. You are absolutely right, but from a value reason: No. The eMac is a perfect investment for people who have light computing needs and need a reliable platform. Windows XP on a Dell (or any OEM) is just not reliable."
What about buying an inexpensive computer with Linux. You could put
White Box Linux on it.
"What is the goal for White Box Linux?
"To provide an unencumbered RPM based Linux distribution that retains enough compatibility with Red Hat Linux to allow easy upgrades and to retain compatibility with their Errata srpms. Being based off of RHEL3 means that a machine should be able to avoid the upgrade treadmill until Oct 2008 since RHEL promises Errata availability for five years from date of initial release and RHEL3 shipped in Oct 2003."
The alternative to an eMac which you offer (a "Dell" with XP) is both more expensive (OS tax) and less secure. If you wanted an honest alternative, in my opinion you should have suggested a conservative version of Linux which will not change much (i.e. low maintainance) and will meet the "light computing needs" of potential users of the eMac.
From the ACM paper "bugs as deviant behavior", we find "We demonstrate that the approach works well on complex, real code by using it to find hundreds of errors in the Linux and OpenBSD operating systems. Many of our bugs have resulted in kernel patches."
This paper appeared in 2001 and represents the work of several researchers, some of whom were PhD students in CS. Some of them went on to form a private company (Coverity
) which plans to offer (for pay, of course) the use of their software to companies. It would be possible for Sun to use this software to look for errors in Solaris. However, the fact that the source codes for Linux and BSD were freely available allowed these researchers to test their prototype code and to submit bug reports years before Sun or MS had the option of using the tools developed by this group. Who knows what other groups of CS students or faculty are doing the same type of exercise right now; they may develop tools which will help private companies someday while using OSS to test their code now. (By the way, you might ask why such a group might help OSS projects. The answer is illustrated in the quote above; this company can already claim credit for finding bugs for which kernel patches have been released. You cannot buy better PR than this.)
But if we just dig in our heels and say, no you can't measure the progress of this program that we're paying millions/billions of dollars for, then the joke's on us either way.
Unlike many other countries, the national government does not provide a large proportion of higher education funding in the U.S. For public universities, it is much more important to get support from one's own state than from the federal government. Thus, if Bush wants to do something stupid and my state can be persuaded that this idea is stupid, then Bush's idea will fail.
All they really need to figure this out is to divide up the universities into 20 bands, top 5%, top 10%, etc."
How do you propose to do this? Every example of a rating of universities that I have seen is a complete joke. One of the better rating systems looks at the number of Nobel prizes, Fields metals, articles in Science or Nature, etc. There are many universities and relatively few Nobel prize or Fields metal winners; this clearly is an inadequate metric. If you add in the fact that some universities (i.e. Harvard) buy Nobel prize winners so these universities looks good (even though these people are well past their prime), this aspect of the metric may be measuring the amount of money a university has rather than the quality of the education or research at that university.
With respect to publishing in Science or Nature, there is a well known quote which goes something like "You can find a complete record of the progress in physics in the articles rejected by Science and Nature". These journals tend to accept articles which are obvious and written by very well known researchers; they rarely publish new ideas which lead to big advances in science.
Most ratings of universities are based on "reputation". I hope you understand that this is a complete joke; it is a form of the "old boys club". An editor at one rag (U.S. News & World Report ?) was fired (5-10 years ago) because CalTech was listed as the top university rather than Harvard or Princeton.
Your comment ignores the fact that a university education is an individual issue. A really good student who attends a less well known university may get more individual attention and an opportunity to participate in research at an earlier stage than he/she would at a much better known university. I have a
joint paper with a student who was an undergraduate here; he also has joint publications with a professor at Cornell for results obtained during a R.E.U. at Cornell. This students has an invitation to work on his PhD in math here or at Cornell or at Stanford; he is working in NYC right now (at a very nice job) and is deciding what he wants to do. The quality of an individual's education is not determined by the reputation of the university.
Just for clarification of the one reason, I consider their legal campaign to be a part of their entertainment value. One might also include their demand for $699, PR campaign, etc. as additional entertainment value.
I can think of one reason SCO deserves some money from us; they are providing us with a lot of entertainment and they are illustrating how not to conduct legal affairs. I believe that we should all contribute to a pool to improve the lives of (former) SCO (related) employees who are (or will be) housed in our wonderful incarceration facilities. This may need to be a large fund since I suspect that some Canapy Group employees might need some free government lodging. I think we should put PJ in charge of distributing the money; imagine Darl asking PJ for just a little money for a snickers bar.
"IBM's products are manufactured almost exclusively"
Are the rest hatched (from an egg), grown (like wheat), replicated (ala Star Trek), or what? I thought all computers were "manufactured".
"GPLv3 should also talk about patents" Has this (GPLv3) been released? (I have not been paying attention to the new GPL since I assume(d) a new release would be followed by lots of publicity.)
If yes, then what does it say about patents?
If no, then how do you know what it will say? Are you saying that if the new Sun license and the GPLv3 both include the word "patent", then they are "ethically" or "morally" equivalent?
I am neither an extreme libertarian nor an outright anarchist; I am a university professor. I believe your statement "You've got to have some trust with your government" is incorrect. You should trust your government if it has earned this trust. With respect to an universal database with name, SSN, etc., one should look at the individuals/groups which can access this database and then consider the track record of these database users. I believe each person needs to judge for him/her self and then support or oppose this database.
For universities, this will be a terrible development. First, fewer foreign students will come to the U.S. because some will have concerns about being on such a database; I think this problem will be fairly minor. Second, political groups (e.g. Congress) will look at the data and criticize particular universities (or groups of universities) for this or that. Perhaps Bush does not like Harvard and Harvard graduates fewer female literature majors; let's have a hearing and criticize Harvard for this failing. In any large body of (real) data, one can find some category in which one's "opponents" have not performed as well as the "average" and can therefore be attacked.
Our university (approximately 15000 students) has an entire office (Institutional Research) devoted to this kind of thing. "... even disaster victims. I threw up my hands at the last one- I've got not an arsing clue what that even means."
My uninformed guess is that you should reply "no statistics available" or "unreported" (or something like this), indicating that your university does not keep data on this topic; you might say that you are allowed to only collect certain information (why? perhaps federal law?) and the information requested is inappropriate (if it actually is).
We can't say the politicians should do something about our poor education, but then flout every attempt they make with these paranoid attacks.
Our K-12 education is broken. Our university systems work very well. We have the best universities in the world. Look at the list of top 50 universities. Look at the number of international students who study at universities in the US.
While K-12 education in the US is very poor, university education is very good. Why? The political process has (mostly) left universities alone while they (local school boards, state boards of education, federal agencies, etc.) have been making public education a political football. If you want to ruin undergraduate and graduate education and academic research in the US, simply let the government become more involved in the university education system.
out the top of your head tell me how many MBAs participated in the making of the ISO 90001 standard.
The usual phrase is "off the top of your head" not "out the top of your head". Also, WTFC? Are you a complete idiot?
I understood the grandparent's post to reflect a concern that PHBs would ignore actual quality and claim to meet some quality standard which may not correspond to code of high quality (defined in an appropriate manner depending on the use to which the code will be put).
I have spent only a very limited amount of time in France, mostly in the Paris Nord train station. It was not much fun. However, I love Scotland, London, Leipzig, Pisa and Rome; Leipzig and Pisa (and Edinburgh) are my favorites. (You can have Frankfort and Milan.)
all the riff-raff,
Please do not talk about the French this way.:-)
(Did you mean the people of the world or just the citizens (voting or nonvoting) of the U.S.?)
If your prediction/concern were to be correct, then think of the bonus to NASA - 15 years of big budget increases and lots more copper bullets with which to hit it. (You could be on to something.)
"When the 21-year old John Nash wrote his 27-page dissertation outlining his "Nash Equilibrium" for strategic non-cooperative games, the impact was enormous. On the formal side, his existence proof was one of the first applications of Kakutani's fixed-point theorem later employed with so much gusto by Neo-Walrasians everywhere; on the conceptual side, he spawned much of the literature on non-cooperative game theory which has since grown at a prodigious rate - threatening, some claim, to overwhelm much of economics itself."
here and
"The concept we need is called the Nash Equilibrium, after Nobel Laureate (in economics) and mathematician John Nash. Nash, a student of Tucker's, contributed several key concepts to game theory around 1950. The Nash Equilibrium conception was one of these, and is probably the most widely used "solution concept" in game theory."
here
Slashdot Mirror
I got the impression that you were spouting some religious predetermination nonsense. I was not trying to be mean; I thought you were a kook. If I was wrong, I apologize. I agree that we all die eventually. Then: Ringworld :-)
"But free will does not impact how and when you will die unless you choose to either:"
I think you are an idiot. Do you think that supersizing every meal will not affect when you die? Do you think not exercising does not change the probability that you will die at an earlier age? What are you smoking?
Note: I picked a link the grandparent might like, which concludes
"The Microsoft Corporation does not qualify as a monopoly, given the term's economic definition, however it can be ascertained that the company has engaged in anticompetitive, unfair strategies outlawed by antitrust legislation in the United States."
This is contrary to the finding of the court, which says, for example,
"33. Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market. Moreover, it could do so for a significant period of time without losing an unacceptable amount of business to competitors. In other words, Microsoft enjoys monopoly power in the relevant market."
I am writing this just after posting the parent; I am curious to see if someone flames me (i.e. does not read the article) or points out the comment "The Microsoft Corporation does not qualify as a monopoly" above. (Who cares what the court says, anyway.)
"I find the entire issue of Microsoft packaging Media Player with Windows to be utterly ridiculous. It's their product. If they want to make it only work with other products of theirs, that's their right."
MS pressured OEMs to only ship computers with MS operating systems and used their monopoly position to drive others out of "their market". I cannot see how you were modded anything but troll.
It is not clear to me that your mom's computer needs cannot be met using Linux together with Win4Lin (also here), WineX (Cedega) (also here), wine, VMWare, etc.
I suspect that not all of these would be needed by your mom and some things still might not work. However, not all (windows) applications she might want will run on Apple machines. In fact, not all windows applications will run on windows machines.
"Yes.... Stupid from a monetary reason. You are absolutely right, but from a value reason: No. The eMac is a perfect investment for people who have light computing needs and need a reliable platform. Windows XP on a Dell (or any OEM) is just not reliable."
What about buying an inexpensive computer with Linux. You could put White Box Linux on it.
"What is the goal for White Box Linux?
"To provide an unencumbered RPM based Linux distribution that retains enough compatibility with Red Hat Linux to allow easy upgrades and to retain compatibility with their Errata srpms. Being based off of RHEL3 means that a machine should be able to avoid the upgrade treadmill until Oct 2008 since RHEL promises Errata availability for five years from date of initial release and RHEL3 shipped in Oct 2003."
The alternative to an eMac which you offer (a "Dell" with XP) is both more expensive (OS tax) and less secure. If you wanted an honest alternative, in my opinion you should have suggested a conservative version of Linux which will not change much (i.e. low maintainance) and will meet the "light computing needs" of potential users of the eMac.
From the ACM paper "bugs as deviant behavior", we find
"We demonstrate that the approach works well on complex, real code by using it to find hundreds of errors in the Linux and OpenBSD operating systems. Many of our bugs have resulted in kernel patches."
This paper appeared in 2001 and represents the work of several researchers, some of whom were PhD students in CS. Some of them went on to form a private company (Coverity ) which plans to offer (for pay, of course) the use of their software to companies. It would be possible for Sun to use this software to look for errors in Solaris. However, the fact that the source codes for Linux and BSD were freely available allowed these researchers to test their prototype code and to submit bug reports years before Sun or MS had the option of using the tools developed by this group. Who knows what other groups of CS students or faculty are doing the same type of exercise right now; they may develop tools which will help private companies someday while using OSS to test their code now. (By the way, you might ask why such a group might help OSS projects. The answer is illustrated in the quote above; this company can already claim credit for finding bugs for which kernel patches have been released. You cannot buy better PR than this.)
But if we just dig in our heels and say, no you can't measure the progress of this program that we're paying millions/billions of dollars for, then the joke's on us either way.
Unlike many other countries, the national government does not provide a large proportion of higher education funding in the U.S. For public universities, it is much more important to get support from one's own state than from the federal government. Thus, if Bush wants to do something stupid and my state can be persuaded that this idea is stupid, then Bush's idea will fail.
All they really need to figure this out is to divide up the universities into 20 bands, top 5%, top 10%, etc."
How do you propose to do this? Every example of a rating of universities that I have seen is a complete joke. One of the better rating systems looks at the number of Nobel prizes, Fields metals, articles in Science or Nature, etc. There are many universities and relatively few Nobel prize or Fields metal winners; this clearly is an inadequate metric. If you add in the fact that some universities (i.e. Harvard) buy Nobel prize winners so these universities looks good (even though these people are well past their prime), this aspect of the metric may be measuring the amount of money a university has rather than the quality of the education or research at that university.
With respect to publishing in Science or Nature, there is a well known quote which goes something like "You can find a complete record of the progress in physics in the articles rejected by Science and Nature". These journals tend to accept articles which are obvious and written by very well known researchers; they rarely publish new ideas which lead to big advances in science.
Most ratings of universities are based on "reputation". I hope you understand that this is a complete joke; it is a form of the "old boys club". An editor at one rag (U.S. News & World Report ?) was fired (5-10 years ago) because CalTech was listed as the top university rather than Harvard or Princeton.
Your comment ignores the fact that a university education is an individual issue. A really good student who attends a less well known university may get more individual attention and an opportunity to participate in research at an earlier stage than he/she would at a much better known university. I have a joint paper with a student who was an undergraduate here; he also has joint publications with a professor at Cornell for results obtained during a R.E.U. at Cornell. This students has an invitation to work on his PhD in math here or at Cornell or at Stanford; he is working in NYC right now (at a very nice job) and is deciding what he wants to do. The quality of an individual's education is not determined by the reputation of the university.
Just for clarification of the one reason, I consider their legal campaign to be a part of their entertainment value. One might also include their demand for $699, PR campaign, etc. as additional entertainment value.
I can think of one reason SCO deserves some money from us; they are providing us with a lot of entertainment and they are illustrating how not to conduct legal affairs. I believe that we should all contribute to a pool to improve the lives of (former) SCO (related) employees who are (or will be) housed in our wonderful incarceration facilities. This may need to be a large fund since I suspect that some Canapy Group employees might need some free government lodging. I think we should put PJ in charge of distributing the money; imagine Darl asking PJ for just a little money for a snickers bar.
"IBM's products are manufactured almost exclusively"
Are the rest hatched (from an egg), grown (like wheat), replicated (ala Star Trek), or what? I thought all computers were "manufactured".
"GPLv3 should also talk about patents"
Has this (GPLv3) been released? (I have not been paying attention to the new GPL since I assume(d) a new release would be followed by lots of publicity.)
If yes, then what does it say about patents?
If no, then how do you know what it will say? Are you saying that if the new Sun license and the GPLv3 both include the word "patent", then they are "ethically" or "morally" equivalent?
I am neither an extreme libertarian nor an outright anarchist; I am a university professor. I believe your statement "You've got to have some trust with your government" is incorrect. You should trust your government if it has earned this trust. With respect to an universal database with name, SSN, etc., one should look at the individuals/groups which can access this database and then consider the track record of these database users. I believe each person needs to judge for him/her self and then support or oppose this database.
For universities, this will be a terrible development. First, fewer foreign students will come to the U.S. because some will have concerns about being on such a database; I think this problem will be fairly minor. Second, political groups (e.g. Congress) will look at the data and criticize particular universities (or groups of universities) for this or that. Perhaps Bush does not like Harvard and Harvard graduates fewer female literature majors; let's have a hearing and criticize Harvard for this failing. In any large body of (real) data, one can find some category in which one's "opponents" have not performed as well as the "average" and can therefore be attacked.
(After getting the grant :^)
Our university (approximately 15000 students) has an entire office (Institutional Research) devoted to this kind of thing.
"... even disaster victims. I threw up my hands at the last one- I've got not an arsing clue what that even means."
My uninformed guess is that you should reply "no statistics available" or "unreported" (or something like this), indicating that your university does not keep data on this topic; you might say that you are allowed to only collect certain information (why? perhaps federal law?) and the information requested is inappropriate (if it actually is).
Leaking confidential information never happens.
We can't say the politicians should do something about our poor education, but then flout every attempt they make with these paranoid attacks.
Our K-12 education is broken. Our university systems work very well. We have the best universities in the world. Look at the list of top 50 universities. Look at the number of international students who study at universities in the US.
While K-12 education in the US is very poor, university education is very good. Why? The political process has (mostly) left universities alone while they (local school boards, state boards of education, federal agencies, etc.) have been making public education a political football. If you want to ruin undergraduate and graduate education and academic research in the US, simply let the government become more involved in the university education system.
out the top of your head tell me how many MBAs participated in the making of the ISO 90001 standard.
The usual phrase is "off the top of your head" not "out the top of your head". Also, WTFC? Are you a complete idiot?
I understood the grandparent's post to reflect a concern that PHBs would ignore actual quality and claim to meet some quality standard which may not correspond to code of high quality (defined in an appropriate manner depending on the use to which the code will be put).
I know several French people and they are very nice. I was told that people in Paris leave (or wish they could leave) in the summer.
I have spent only a very limited amount of time in France, mostly in the Paris Nord train station. It was not much fun. However, I love Scotland, London, Leipzig, Pisa and Rome; Leipzig and Pisa (and Edinburgh) are my favorites. (You can have Frankfort and Milan.)
all the riff-raff, :-)
Please do not talk about the French this way.
(Did you mean the people of the world or just the citizens (voting or nonvoting) of the U.S.?)
If your prediction/concern were to be correct, then think of the bonus to NASA - 15 years of big budget increases and lots more copper bullets with which to hit it. (You could be on to something.)
"When the 21-year old John Nash wrote his 27-page dissertation outlining his "Nash Equilibrium" for strategic non-cooperative games, the impact was enormous. On the formal side, his existence proof was one of the first applications of Kakutani's fixed-point theorem later employed with so much gusto by Neo-Walrasians everywhere; on the conceptual side, he spawned much of the literature on non-cooperative game theory which has since grown at a prodigious rate - threatening, some claim, to overwhelm much of economics itself." here and
"The concept we need is called the Nash Equilibrium, after Nobel Laureate (in economics) and mathematician John Nash. Nash, a student of Tucker's, contributed several key concepts to game theory around 1950. The Nash Equilibrium conception was one of these, and is probably the most widely used "solution concept" in game theory." here
Mod this Funny (or insightful if you wish).
What do you think of Nash's work on game theory? Does this influence your comment?