It's depressing that I can see economic validity to the argument for hiding the limit. Shouldn't have read Freakonomics.
Meanwhile, I was quietly agreeing that 300gb is a *lot* until I started to think of it in terms of video data. I figure everything is doomed/destined to be routed over ethernet pretty soon: phone, video, radio, etc. At a few gigs per hour for video, and given the data is flying both ways if I'm a good torrenter with a 1:1 ratio, that'd be torrents for 50 hours of video. (300gigs is 100 hours of broadcast-quality video). Switching to a gig per hour video compression, like mpeg-4, we could make it 150 (300 hours divided by 2). In a house with 3 TV's, with my kids watching cartoons, me leaving CNN or something else on in the background while I work, it sounds pretty easy for a household to hit 300 gigs by 'lunchtime on the first Thursday of the month'.
And let's not even go to what it'll take to stream 3 residential channels of high-def...
A last thought: a couple years ago, after using a 150-TB drive array, I got to brainstorming. Trends say I'll live to see hundreds of terabytes selling for $100 in a highly portable package (and the physics aren't impossible). But *WHAT* would I ever need that much data for, I muttered to myself. This looks like the answer: portable terabyte drives to locally cache numerous broadcast feeds, refilled automatically and steadily like a Tivo... Caching creates 'apparent-on-demand', where most of the stuff I want is delivered/grabbed on schedule, so most of the more predictable gigs each of us consume don't overwhelm the feed bandwidth.
I recently watched 'Astronaut Farmer', and it was sorta fun. But I spent a lot of my time cringing. Not only was it rife with dumbass faux-engineering BS and technological impossibilities, but the whole NASA-monopoly-conspiracy theory seemed just absurd.
Meanwhile, even with all the technophiles here at slashdot, the overall IQ seems to drop a digit every time the subject of rockets, NASA or space engineering comes up. Time and again, when slashdotters turn their attention there, I find myself muttering: "That's why the cliche exists. Rocket science really *is* tough."
So, I'm pretty grateful that Carmack's got a bucket of cash and this apparent cowboy mentality. First, he probably *will* shave one or two costly and unneeded redundancies off as he crashes thru storefronts and forgets to pretest sensors before strapping them to a million bucks of hardware in an explosive-failure sort of test like this. Second, he's demonstrating repeatedly that rocket science is tough stuff. On the evening news. NASA doesn't need the bad PR, but most people don't comprehend just how amazing it is that NASA does this shit with as little failure as it does.
Mad props, John Carmack. You go. You *BE* that cautionary tale.
I live a *long* way from a netflix shipping facility, and in a couple years of having an account, I contacted them twice. Both times, they were the pinnacle of good customer service.
First one, the DVD arrived broken in half.
Second one, the DVD never got back to Netflix. They credited the return to my account, saying most times the DVD resurfaces within a month.
My longstanding gripe, and why I cancelled my account, was that I was receiving DVD's that were too scratched to watch. Multiple players, varying ages (early-gen Panasonic, a philips 642, and a fairly new $300 JVC VHS-DVDR hybrid).... all would skip. When this happened about 5 times in a month.
Meanwhile, a mom-n-pop video store 2 miles away *literally* buffs every DVD between uses. I stopped my Netflix account one summer and just haven't felt like I need to restart it.
You just made my day with your story about that classic car-jump scene from 'The Man With The Golden Gun'.
The junker car I drove while in college was a '74 Hornet. Then, a few years ago, watching some cable James Bond marathon, I got the biggest kick out of watching James Bond driving a '74 Hornet ('Hey, I used to own one of them!') and then pull that amazing stunt.
Learning it relied on real physics work, especially compared to the crap physics mentioned in this thread and the parallel crap physics journalism in the adjacent NASA story about Mira's tail... priceless.
Tell that to condors, whooping cranes, bison and all the other nearly-gones that still aren't gone. With the rather famous and depressing exception of condors, we're pretty good at getting numbers that stave off outright extinction.
In the case of these dolphins, getting a maintenance population the *hell* out of China seems more likely to work than refuge creation: china still doesn't seem to grok the 'canary in a coalmine' concept that rampant pollution and resource overuse has a limit that China is sprinting past. 'The solution to pollution is dilution' only works in moderation. Hundreds of people per square mile and unrestricted polluting aren't moderation.
What chaps my ass is the number of *people* that have excuses for extirpating or extincting species: no use to us, jobs creation is more important, 'god gave man dominion over animals', believing personal difficulties (can't find a job, cost of living, cost of college) make *them* endangered, etc.
>> Now comcast charging me $50+ for 6mbit when i could get several times that for half the price in South Korea, that's about greed! >Isn't that more about cost of living?
Bandwidth prices reflect so much more than cost of living:
most of all: underlying infrastructure. Central Africa can't get cheap broadband like Norway can.
what the market will bear. This has *some* bearing on demographics and cost of living.
Equipment costs. New, faster gear at the ISP costs more.
Upstream costs. This kind of gets into underlying infrastructure, and kind of into backbone competition.
Market density: new, dense-construction deployment costs are way cheaper than retrofits and very rural areas.
Topography: we've got mountains and not many trees. Wireless is easy in the American west, which makes rural wifi an option. The same service would never work in flat, heavily forested areas like New Jersey.
Cost and availability of good techies to run the stuff. Again, reflects cost of living.
Good market penetration: divide the company payroll and capital depreciation by # of customers.
Competition within the market, especially if someone bundles to create asymmetric competition (Phone plus data vs. TV plus data)
How willing the market is to pay for the service. This matters all the way down to neighborhoods: last-mile fiber will be retrofitted into rich-geek neighborhoods before it'll go into a dilapidated warehouse district where nobody'll subscribe or care.
Greed -- I knew two companies (50 miles apart) that pioneered wireless high speed data in our area. Their price points were astronomically different ($125 / mo. vs. 750/mo.). The expensive guy had terrible service (he ran the whole business himself, so he was routinely 3+ days behind on service calls) and shut down after 2 years, but made a freakin' fortune in that time.
I'm sure there are more, and possibly are even some *big* ones. Economic influences aren't sterile, mathematical critters. That's why everyone else is nattering about this: there are *some* linkages (to Greed or to Cost Of Living), but there are also some sneaky coincidences and some costs that have nothing to do with cost of living. The resulting data becomes tantalizingly close to looking like there are pure relationships when many of these factors are identical for two places, but anyone trying to force the data into one reason sees that exceptions keep popping out, like some warped economic Whac-a-mole game.
I was initially surprised you got got all these replies. Then again, slashdotters' knack for dumbass comments on NASA should have primed me for this level of gap-filled reasoning on economic theory. Nerdcore egos aside, we really don't know everything about everything.
GP was hardly overdramatic. As a roving security contractor/consultant, I catch minor 'what do you mean you don't use windows on your desktop' flack *constantly* at each new site I work at. Not even remotely from everyone. But at each facility there's a (varying) population that's so comfortable with Microsoft lock-in that they're incredulous when you're *not*. Some get downright hostile about it, as if threatened by change.
And I intermittently *HAVE* to set up windows machines, or vmware instances, or on the rare occasions where I use my own hardware, Parallels. These windows installs are *always* XP (never Vista), and always happen because some in-house proprietary system demands that I have IE or Windows or ActiveX, or that I develop in Visual Studio. I wouldn't use words like attacks, angry or worshipers. But there is a rigid blind inflexibility to compatibility issues whenever I hit these. Remember the 'forgiveness rather than permission' cliche? Well, if I can't quietly personally find a short-circuit path around their needs... I always end up having to use windows. No other option or even THOUGHT of other options is even briefly countenanced by the people in charge of these locked-in systems.
After a while, it starts to resemble code-smell. Projects that are healthy usually are fairly OS/Browser-agnostic. Ones that are struggling or can't be upgraded because too much proprietary code has been glommed on... they're thick with restrictions. So in my reports, I've started including comments and warnings about systems that suffer other problems due to this sort of lock-in.
Right now, I'm lobbying my biggest client to leave an overmodified several-versions-old 'Remedy' ticketing system in place and just dedicate a new server to take a whole new install, because they've been unable to upgrade for *years* with client-based ticketing. As a result, nearly nobody uses it, despite there being half a dozen groups (hundreds of support staff) that WANT to embrace a centralized ticketing system to manage everything from facilities maintenance to patch rollouts. The VP I report to really got behind this idea when someone mentioned that the old 'can't live without it' system will wither and die faster this way than if he just leaves things alone. That *WASN'T* their intent-- the commenter was trying to protect the kludgey 'Remedy' install because he distrusts web-based systems.
I'm at times as big a grammar-fiend as you, but this one rubs me wrong. This isn't like your/you're or a funny dangling participle or 'for all intensive purposes' or 'mute points' (or Joey's 'moo point') or 'I could care less' or it's/its or quibbling about primates or ledes or terrific or other obscure meanings or words.
'Begs the question' parses. As jarring to logicians as it is, the new meaning of 'begs the question' is a common-sense meaning. But you're demanding exclusivity in meaning to a flawed translation of an idiomatic expression (petitio principii) in a dead language (latin). You insist on only recognizing one meaning beecause the phrase has a rich history -- the latin phrase was coined by Aristotle and the English translation has been used for 420, becoming well-established in the jargon of logicians.
From that worldwidewords article by Quinion:
Most of our problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of it. The Latin might better be translated as "laying claim to the principle"...(snip)... The meaning you give is the newest. It is gaining ground, and one or two recent dictionaries claim that it is now acceptable -- the New Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, says it is "widely accepted in modern standard English". I wouldn't go so far myself.
So. Uh... you're claiming that jargon (based on a flawed translation) overrules dictionaries from Oxford and/or common sense. Yet you're expert on the subjects of of logical fallacies *and* grammar.
Since I have a quorum of grammar nazis at my disposal, help me out with another grammatical term that I struggle with... is that correctly called ironic?
Occam's Razor and Bertrand Russell do a decent job of convincing me here:
In one sense it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity results from the hypothsis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy. In dreams a very complicated world may seem to be present, and yet on waking we find it was a delusion; that is to say, we find that the sense-data in the dream do not appear to have corresponded with such physical objects as we should naturally infer from our sense-data. (It is true that, when the physical world is assumed, it is possible to find physical causes for the sense-data in dreams: a door banging, for instance, may cause us to dream of a naval engagement. But although, in this case, there is a physical cause for the sense-data, there is not a physical object corresponding to the sense-data in the way in which an actual naval battle would correspond.) There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations.
The way in which simplicity comes in from supposing that there really are physical objects is easily seen. If the cat appears at one moment in one part of the room, and at another in another part, it is natural to suppose that it has moved from the one to the other, passing over a series of intermediate positions. But if it is merely a set of sense-data, it cannot have ever been in any place where I did not see it; thus we shall have to suppose that it did not exist at all while I was not looking, but suddenly sprang into being in a new place. If the cat exists whether I see it or not, we can understand from our own experience how it gets hungry between one meal and the next; but if it does not exist when I am not seeing it, it seems odd that appetite should grow during non-existence as fast as during existence. And if the cat consists only of sense-data, it cannot be hungry, since no hunger but my own can be a sense-datum to me. Thus the behaviour of the sense-data which represent the cat to me, though it seems quite natural when regarded as an expression of hunger, becomes utterly inexplicable when regarded as mere movements and changes of patches of colour, which are as incapable of hunger as triangle is of playing football.
But the difficulty in the case of the cat is nothing compared to the difficulty in the case of human beings. When human beings speak -- that is, when we hear certain noises which we associate with ideas, and simultaneously see certain motions of lips and expressions of face -- it is very difficult to suppose that what we hear is not the expression of a thought, as we know it would be if we emitted the same sounds. Of course similar things happen in dreams, where we are mistaken as to the existence of other people. But dreams are more or less suggested by what we call waking life, and are capable of being more or less accounted for on scientific principles if we assume that there really is a physical world. Thus every principle of simplicity urges us to adopt the natural view, that there really are objects other than ourselves and our sense-data which have an existence not dependent upon our perceiving them.
As for objective vs. subjective realities, that's a pretty steep stretch to make what you said fit the common definition of reality. Like with Russell's simplicity argument above, I'd rather just believe you used the wrong word.
Except for that part about Unexplained Affluence. Not so common among Communists.
And how can the FBI (let alone some nitwit college Dean of Students) define odd work hours, interest in stuff outside of their area of work, and untracked time overseas when dealing with *COLLEGE STUDENTS*?! That seems to implicate Cramming, liberal arts degrees or changing majors, semesters abroad or trips home (since, I assume, we're going to pay particularly close attention to foreign nationals, even if we say otherwise) and so much else.
...few [google applications] outside of search have much of a following...
Yup. Just a few. Gmail, maps, froogle: I can't live without 'em. That's the few that have a solid following. Then there's phone-based search, the apps, code, blogs, google finance's awesome graphs/data. They're a bit more obscure. And finally, there's the rather substantial mountain of up-n-coming things: radio and TV ads, blogs and scientific journals, content of books, video, and the dozen(s) of other API's and products on the 'more' list when I pull up google to do a search. Yeah, they're small niches individually, but they're strong competitors in many of those niches.
Come to think of it, YouTube and google video earn it a more-than-a-few count for how many apps have much of a following.
Three years ago, OpenOffice / StarOffice couldn't handle more complex documents and spreadsheets I'd try to import. Test failed, I told myself, and went back to MS Office.
Two years ago, someone emailed me an Open Office document attachment. That it was a nontechie... that raised an eyebrow.
A year ago, I checked OpenOffice again. Running under Ubuntu 6.06, I wasn't looking at the newest and the best I realized, so when 7.04 came out, I tried again just last month. Um... You said "at the moment it's a loooong ways away from being a big-time competitor to Office." I'd say "Not so much."
OpenOffice compatibility is better than what I dealt with when encountering format wars between Word vs. WordPerfect, back in the day. And I'm getting more attachments that way. And I'm getting positive feedback from OO users.
Meanwhile, I have yet to hear anyone say much good about Vista -- and users aren't sticking around long enough to give Office'07 a chance.
So... It's a damn sight closer than a long ways. It isn't transparent, and it has flaws... but OpenOffice is at the threshold of being a bigtime competitor to Office.
What we need now is for *ESTABLISHED MUSICIANS* that hate the RIAA to contact allofmp3.com, asking for their royalties.
RIAA becomes (slightly) marginalized, musician gets some cash and manages to drive a wedge between RIAA and the courts. After all, an international takedown would harm citizens (those musicians) that had come to depend on a Allofmp3.com as a source of revenue.
So... anyone know an established artist that's stood up to the RIAA for musicians' rights and wants some more slashdot publicity!?
I'm tellin' you, I just loved that movie. A whole raft of city vs. country stereotypes, hot grits, and who could forget Alyssa Milano (note how I mentioned Milano and hot grits in the same sentence!)......oh, that was My Cousin Vinny?... er... uh...
Well, then who the fsck is Jimmy Valvano? I mean, hooray for stickin' it to the RIAA, but was this Jimmy dude even a nerd? I've got this nagging dread that he's a jock. That's pretty much a given when someone is elevated to mythic status for getting sick. And what moron expects that 'fighting spirit of...' to be part of the canon of nerd knowledge?!
Twice you unilaterally declare wikipedia is subpar. 'usually poorly written' and 'most wikipedia entries are great examples of what not to do'. The irony of a slashdotter poppin' off like this is pretty fsckin' rich.
When I want ignorant hyperbole on nasa, microsoft, medicine, baseball, the economics of making movies (not the MPAA, just the bottom line), film/music/TV/fiction criticism or recommendations... slashdot is my monkey.
When I want to check dates and details about Kurt Vonnegut, look up the Malliard effect, research computer protocols or the battle of Hastings... I go to wikipedia. First. No popups, no nuisance of bogus search results to get a click-thru, no surprises. And the articles are orderly, much better detailed than any encylopedia I've ever seen, cross-indexed to interesting terms, and in general a treat.
But hey, if one takes the premise I've just set down (slashdot == flippant dipshits, wikipedia == detailed reference on esoterica), this posting of mine is arguably redundant. So, try this experiment, all you wikipedia haters: Click the 'random article' several times. Glance at the articles. Score the articles a point each for: accurate, organized, detailed, unbiased and adequate. Skip articles that scream out for commit wars and opinionated edits and controversial activity (George Bush, Kurdish independence, Intelligent Design, Ayn Rand, or anything else political, nationalistically colored, partisan (sports or otherwise), or vulnerable to heated debates and strong differences of opinion. Or just count them separately. When I do that, I get an average score of 3.8 over a few dozen articles, with 2 that I felt might be partisan-biased.
I agree that editing/writing wikipedia is a great lesson for children. But not like you're saying. I'd say the lessons are almost opposite what you claim. There are plenty of lessons (organization, fact-checking, proof-reading, deliberating/debating with other editors/writers, getting smacked upside-the-head by editors when you screw up, and the glory of occasionally being *THE* source in a global encyclopedia). By the time they're done, they'll be better writers than 9/10ths of the students I had when I taught/graded undergrad physics labs.
(NO, I am not a regular editor/writer for Wikipedia. I have an account that has about 10-20 edits, many of which were little typos and other things I notice while lookin' stuff up on the site).
Nah, your plan will never work. Tiny brains and open source don't mix. See the comment upthread about products designed by engineers vs. designers vs. an integrated team and tell me most open source doesn't stink of overengineering.
I admittedly don't know the ratios and numbers, and I'm running late so I can't dig...
Do you have the ratios and calcuations upside-down in what you just wrote?
It seems like Hydrogen at 120 MJ/kg is 4x as energy-rich as gasoline, not 1/4th. Ditto on the engine efficiency. Isn't a 65% efficient engine 2x as good as a 30% efficient one?
Now see if you can guess the real reason a lot of managers get irritated by sites like this. Hint: It's nothing about being forced to pay what's fair.
Most sensible managers will want to pay a fair salary for the job they're having done simply because it attracts good applicants and a basis of fairness improves morale and hence productivity. Granted, not all managers are good or sensible but, honestly, most do try to be. Unfortunately, sites like salary.com, through their inherrent generalizations, often give thoroughly skewed impressions of what's fair and can cause all kinds of problems once someone that is fairly treated gets the impression they're being taken advantage of.
The flip side works against employees too... The last thing an employee wants is an ignorant manager finding a far less skilled job that kind of sounds similar and deciding 20% pay cuts or terminations and new hires are merrited.
Sure, they're a useful tool - but be seriously careful about building assumptions off over generalized data.
What I heard:
a lot of managers get irritated by... being forced to pay what's fair...will try... through their inherrent generalizations... give thoroughly skewed impressions of what's fair. An ignorant manager -- that kind of sounds similar -- Sure, they're a... tool -- be seriously careful.
There *are* places like you describe. I've worked at a couple. But I've also worked in several other much-worse places. And my wife worked several years in a fortune-500 corporation's HR (human resources) as a recruiter. She got out because the entire HR department, like IT, is considered a bottom-line *LOSS* that senior management is always trying to minimize. Her firm's too-obvious euphemisms for this were 'profit centers' and 'cost centers'. As a cost-center, HR were always overworked and underpaid. As for fair pay, her job performance was literally based on dumbass metrics *INCLUDING* the percentage saved vs. national salary average in new hires. Yup, this pretty much guarantees that HR becomes a backwards mediocrity filter.
Slashdot Mirror
It's depressing that I can see economic validity to the argument for hiding the limit. Shouldn't have read Freakonomics.
Meanwhile, I was quietly agreeing that 300gb is a *lot* until I started to think of it in terms of video data. I figure everything is doomed/destined to be routed over ethernet pretty soon: phone, video, radio, etc. At a few gigs per hour for video, and given the data is flying both ways if I'm a good torrenter with a 1:1 ratio, that'd be torrents for 50 hours of video. (300gigs is 100 hours of broadcast-quality video). Switching to a gig per hour video compression, like mpeg-4, we could make it 150 (300 hours divided by 2). In a house with 3 TV's, with my kids watching cartoons, me leaving CNN or something else on in the background while I work, it sounds pretty easy for a household to hit 300 gigs by 'lunchtime on the first Thursday of the month'.
And let's not even go to what it'll take to stream 3 residential channels of high-def...
A last thought: a couple years ago, after using a 150-TB drive array, I got to brainstorming. Trends say I'll live to see hundreds of terabytes selling for $100 in a highly portable package (and the physics aren't impossible). But *WHAT* would I ever need that much data for, I muttered to myself. This looks like the answer: portable terabyte drives to locally cache numerous broadcast feeds, refilled automatically and steadily like a Tivo... Caching creates 'apparent-on-demand', where most of the stuff I want is delivered/grabbed on schedule, so most of the more predictable gigs each of us consume don't overwhelm the feed bandwidth.
I recently watched 'Astronaut Farmer', and it was sorta fun. But I spent a lot of my time cringing. Not only was it rife with dumbass faux-engineering BS and technological impossibilities, but the whole NASA-monopoly-conspiracy theory seemed just absurd.
Meanwhile, even with all the technophiles here at slashdot, the overall IQ seems to drop a digit every time the subject of rockets, NASA or space engineering comes up. Time and again, when slashdotters turn their attention there, I find myself muttering: "That's why the cliche exists. Rocket science really *is* tough."
So, I'm pretty grateful that Carmack's got a bucket of cash and this apparent cowboy mentality. First, he probably *will* shave one or two costly and unneeded redundancies off as he crashes thru storefronts and forgets to pretest sensors before strapping them to a million bucks of hardware in an explosive-failure sort of test like this. Second, he's demonstrating repeatedly that rocket science is tough stuff. On the evening news. NASA doesn't need the bad PR, but most people don't comprehend just how amazing it is that NASA does this shit with as little failure as it does.
Mad props, John Carmack. You go. You *BE* that cautionary tale.
I'm shocked, *shocked* I tell you, to discover that the slashdot editors don't RTFA.
Seriously, once we get this web 2.0 schnizzit worked out, can we get someone to create slashdot 2.0?!
--d2
I live a *long* way from a netflix shipping facility, and in a couple years of having an account,
I contacted them twice. Both times, they were the pinnacle of good customer service.
First one, the DVD arrived broken in half.
Second one, the DVD never got back to Netflix. They credited the return to my account, saying most
times the DVD resurfaces within a month.
My longstanding gripe, and why I cancelled my account, was that I was receiving DVD's that were too
scratched to watch. Multiple players, varying ages (early-gen Panasonic, a philips 642, and a fairly
new $300 JVC VHS-DVDR hybrid).... all would skip. When this happened about 5 times in a month.
Meanwhile, a mom-n-pop video store 2 miles away *literally* buffs every DVD between uses. I stopped
my Netflix account one summer and just haven't felt like I need to restart it.
You just made my day with your story about that classic car-jump scene from 'The Man With The Golden Gun'.
The junker car I drove while in college was a '74 Hornet. Then, a few years ago, watching some cable James Bond marathon, I got the biggest kick out of watching James Bond driving a '74 Hornet ('Hey, I used to own one of them!') and then pull that amazing stunt.
Learning it relied on real physics work, especially compared to the crap physics mentioned in this thread and the parallel crap physics journalism in the adjacent NASA story about Mira's tail... priceless.
Um... isn't the *dielectric* what is usually toxic? The dielectric that is off-handedly mentioned as something we just soak into the paper?
Tell that to condors, whooping cranes, bison and all the other nearly-gones that still aren't gone. With the rather famous and depressing exception of condors, we're pretty good at getting numbers that stave off outright extinction.
In the case of these dolphins, getting a maintenance population the *hell* out of China seems more likely to work than refuge creation: china still doesn't seem to grok the 'canary in a coalmine' concept that rampant pollution and resource overuse has a limit that China is sprinting past. 'The solution to pollution is dilution' only works in moderation. Hundreds of people per square mile and unrestricted polluting aren't moderation.
What chaps my ass is the number of *people* that have excuses for extirpating or extincting species: no use to us, jobs creation is more important, 'god gave man dominion over animals', believing personal difficulties (can't find a job, cost of living, cost of college) make *them* endangered, etc.
>Isn't that more about cost of living?
Bandwidth prices reflect so much more than cost of living:
I'm sure there are more, and possibly are even some *big* ones. Economic influences aren't sterile, mathematical critters. That's why everyone else is nattering about this: there are *some* linkages (to Greed or to Cost Of Living), but there are also some sneaky coincidences and some costs that have nothing to do with cost of living. The resulting data becomes tantalizingly close to looking like there are pure relationships when many of these factors are identical for two places, but anyone trying to force the data into one reason sees that exceptions keep popping out, like some warped economic Whac-a-mole game.
I was initially surprised you got got all these replies. Then again, slashdotters' knack for dumbass comments on NASA should have primed me for this level of gap-filled reasoning on economic theory. Nerdcore egos aside, we really don't know everything about everything.
GP was hardly overdramatic. As a roving security contractor/consultant, I catch minor 'what do you mean you don't use windows on your desktop' flack *constantly* at each new site I work at. Not even remotely from everyone. But at each facility there's a (varying) population that's so comfortable with Microsoft lock-in that they're incredulous when you're *not*. Some get downright hostile about it, as if threatened by change.
And I intermittently *HAVE* to set up windows machines, or vmware instances, or on the rare occasions where I use my own hardware, Parallels. These windows installs are *always* XP (never Vista), and always happen because some in-house proprietary system demands that I have IE or Windows or ActiveX, or that I develop in Visual Studio. I wouldn't use words like attacks, angry or worshipers. But there is a rigid blind inflexibility to compatibility issues whenever I hit these. Remember the 'forgiveness rather than permission' cliche? Well, if I can't quietly personally find a short-circuit path around their needs... I always end up having to use windows. No other option or even THOUGHT of other options is even briefly countenanced by the people in charge of these locked-in systems.
After a while, it starts to resemble code-smell. Projects that are healthy usually are fairly OS/Browser-agnostic. Ones that are struggling or can't be upgraded because too much proprietary code has been glommed on... they're thick with restrictions. So in my reports, I've started including comments and warnings about systems that suffer other problems due to this sort of lock-in.
Right now, I'm lobbying my biggest client to leave an overmodified several-versions-old 'Remedy' ticketing system in place and just dedicate a new server to take a whole new install, because they've been unable to upgrade for *years* with client-based ticketing. As a result, nearly nobody uses it, despite there being half a dozen groups (hundreds of support staff) that WANT to embrace a centralized ticketing system to manage everything from facilities maintenance to patch rollouts. The VP I report to really got behind this idea when someone mentioned that the old 'can't live without it' system will wither and die faster this way than if he just leaves things alone. That *WASN'T* their intent-- the commenter was trying to protect the kludgey 'Remedy' install because he distrusts web-based systems.
'Begs the question' parses. As jarring to logicians as it is, the new meaning of 'begs the question' is a common-sense meaning. But you're demanding exclusivity in meaning to a flawed translation of an idiomatic expression (petitio principii) in a dead language (latin). You insist on only recognizing one meaning beecause the phrase has a rich history -- the latin phrase was coined by Aristotle and the English translation has been used for 420, becoming well-established in the jargon of logicians.
From that worldwidewords article by Quinion:
So. Uh... you're claiming that jargon (based on a flawed translation) overrules dictionaries from Oxford and/or common sense. Yet you're expert on the subjects of of logical fallacies *and* grammar.
Since I have a quorum of grammar nazis at my disposal, help me out with another grammatical term that I struggle with... is that correctly called ironic ?
As for objective vs. subjective realities, that's a pretty steep stretch to make what you said fit the common definition of reality. Like with Russell's simplicity argument above, I'd rather just believe you used the wrong word.
Um, about that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Except for that part about Unexplained Affluence. Not so common among Communists.
And how can the FBI (let alone some nitwit college Dean of Students) define odd work hours, interest in stuff outside of their area of work, and untracked time overseas when dealing with *COLLEGE STUDENTS*?! That seems to implicate Cramming, liberal arts degrees or changing majors, semesters abroad or trips home (since, I assume, we're going to pay particularly close attention to foreign nationals, even if we say otherwise) and so much else.
Man, you're a walkin' punchline:
-- I think it is so cool that your nick reflects your mindset.
-- Taco, someone's hacking the slashcode and renaming users instead of modding 'em.
-- Erroneous, you're eponymous.
-- Um, so you *DO* care? Or you don't? I'm confused. Hell, at least I'm not erroneous.
Wicked funny. One suggested edit: RIAA-approved musical instruments with names ending in -phone (saxophone, xylophone, sousaphone)...
Yup. Just a few. Gmail, maps, froogle: I can't live without 'em. That's the few that have a solid following. Then there's phone-based search, the apps, code, blogs, google finance's awesome graphs/data. They're a bit more obscure. And finally, there's the rather substantial mountain of up-n-coming things: radio and TV ads, blogs and scientific journals, content of books, video, and the dozen(s) of other API's and products on the 'more' list when I pull up google to do a search. Yeah, they're small niches individually, but they're strong competitors in many of those niches.
Come to think of it, YouTube and google video earn it a more-than-a-few count for how many apps have much of a following.
Three years ago, OpenOffice / StarOffice couldn't handle more complex documents and spreadsheets I'd try to import. Test failed, I told myself, and went back to MS Office.
... that raised an eyebrow.
Two years ago, someone emailed me an Open Office document attachment. That it was a nontechie
A year ago, I checked OpenOffice again. Running under Ubuntu 6.06, I wasn't looking at the newest and the best I realized, so when 7.04 came out, I tried again just last month. Um... You said "at the moment it's a loooong ways away from being a big-time competitor to Office." I'd say "Not so much."
OpenOffice compatibility is better than what I dealt with when encountering format wars between Word vs. WordPerfect, back in the day. And I'm getting more attachments that way. And I'm getting positive feedback from OO users.
Meanwhile, I have yet to hear anyone say much good about Vista -- and users aren't sticking around long enough to give Office'07 a chance.
So... It's a damn sight closer than a long ways. It isn't transparent, and it has flaws... but OpenOffice is at the threshold of being a bigtime competitor to Office.
Hmm, indeed.
What we need now is for *ESTABLISHED MUSICIANS* that hate the RIAA to contact allofmp3.com, asking for their royalties.
RIAA becomes (slightly) marginalized, musician gets some cash and manages to drive a wedge between RIAA and the courts. After all, an international takedown would harm citizens (those musicians) that had come to depend on a Allofmp3.com as a source of revenue.
So... anyone know an established artist that's stood up to the RIAA for musicians' rights and wants some more slashdot publicity!?
I'm tellin' you, I just loved that movie. A whole raft of city vs. country stereotypes, hot grits, and who could forget Alyssa Milano (note how I mentioned Milano and hot grits in the same sentence!)... ...oh, that was My Cousin Vinny? ... er... uh...
Well, then who the fsck is Jimmy Valvano? I mean, hooray for stickin' it to the RIAA, but was this Jimmy dude even a nerd? I've got this nagging dread that he's a jock. That's pretty much a given when someone is elevated to mythic status for getting sick. And what moron expects that 'fighting spirit of...' to be part of the canon of nerd knowledge?!
Twice you unilaterally declare wikipedia is subpar. 'usually poorly written' and 'most wikipedia entries are great examples of what not to do'. The irony of a slashdotter poppin' off like this is pretty fsckin' rich.
When I want ignorant hyperbole on nasa, microsoft, medicine, baseball, the economics of making movies (not the MPAA, just the bottom line), film/music/TV/fiction criticism or recommendations... slashdot is my monkey.
When I want to check dates and details about Kurt Vonnegut, look up the Malliard effect, research computer protocols or the battle of Hastings... I go to wikipedia. First. No popups, no nuisance of bogus search results to get a click-thru, no surprises. And the articles are orderly, much better detailed than any encylopedia I've ever seen, cross-indexed to interesting terms, and in general a treat.
But hey, if one takes the premise I've just set down (slashdot == flippant dipshits, wikipedia == detailed reference on esoterica), this posting of mine is arguably redundant. So, try this experiment, all you wikipedia haters: Click the 'random article' several times. Glance at the articles. Score the articles a point each for: accurate, organized, detailed, unbiased and adequate. Skip articles that scream out for commit wars and opinionated edits and controversial activity (George Bush, Kurdish independence, Intelligent Design, Ayn Rand, or anything else political, nationalistically colored, partisan (sports or otherwise), or vulnerable to heated debates and strong differences of opinion. Or just count them separately. When I do that, I get an average score of 3.8 over a few dozen articles, with 2 that I felt might be partisan-biased.
I agree that editing/writing wikipedia is a great lesson for children. But not like you're saying. I'd say the lessons are almost opposite what you claim. There are plenty of lessons (organization, fact-checking, proof-reading, deliberating/debating with other editors/writers, getting smacked upside-the-head by editors when you screw up, and the glory of occasionally being *THE* source in a global encyclopedia). By the time they're done, they'll be better writers than 9/10ths of the students I had when I taught/graded undergrad physics labs.
(NO, I am not a regular editor/writer for Wikipedia. I have an account that has about 10-20 edits, many of which were little typos and other things I notice while lookin' stuff up on the site).
Nah, your plan will never work. Tiny brains and open source don't mix. See the comment upthread about products designed by engineers vs. designers vs. an integrated team and tell me most open source doesn't stink of overengineering.
"...Same thing we do every night, pinky..."
... you forgot option 3: Pascal's Wager. I've chosen to wait until the afterlife to find out if there are turtles all the way down.
I admittedly don't know the ratios and numbers, and I'm running late so I can't dig...
Do you have the ratios and calcuations upside-down in what you just wrote?
It seems like Hydrogen at 120 MJ/kg is 4x as energy-rich as gasoline, not 1/4th. Ditto on the engine efficiency. Isn't a 65% efficient engine 2x as good as a 30% efficient one?
I'd appreciate clarification...
What I heard:
There *are* places like you describe. I've worked at a couple. But I've also worked in several other much-worse places. And my wife worked several years in a fortune-500 corporation's HR (human resources) as a recruiter. She got out because the entire HR department, like IT, is considered a bottom-line *LOSS* that senior management is always trying to minimize. Her firm's too-obvious euphemisms for this were 'profit centers' and 'cost centers'. As a cost-center, HR were always overworked and underpaid. As for fair pay, her job performance was literally based on dumbass metrics *INCLUDING* the percentage saved vs. national salary average in new hires. Yup, this pretty much guarantees that HR becomes a backwards mediocrity filter.
(must resist urge to make lame one-handed dvorak v. pr0n joke)