I am very curious what happened between Wal-Mart and MS, to cause them to offer PCs without an OS. You know MS has to be mega-pissed about it, but I doubt they can do anything. There's a HUGE ancillary market, giving support for these OS-less PCs, though my suspicion would be that the vast majority of these units will wind up with bootleg copies of Windows.
Gateway is a real company? That's an interesting opinion; their products strike me as the unhappy successor to the Packard Bell line. More likely, they are setting the stage for a MS lawsuit to save their failing business. Let the feeding frenzy begin!
One thing that cartoon failed to mention about ether is its foul smell, almost nauseating. Another is that the effect of ether is closer to being drunk than dilation of time perception.
Maybe I don't quite understand the research, but it doesn't seem that surprising that the Marvel Universe does not follow real-world clustering patterns: many of the characters have dual identities, which I would think throw off the usual associative relationship of friends.
As an example, consider this scenario:
Jane Goodcitizen is friends with Peter Parker. Spiderman is friends with Captain America.(?-don't know, but let's just say)
In the real world, there would be a high correlation of friendship between Jane and Captain America, while the whole secret identity thing puts a monkey-wrench in the comic universe.
The closest real-world model would probably be the network of say traveling salesmen or spies.
The heart, epicenter, or focal point of the net is
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
that it has no top-down imposed heart, epicenter, or focal point. This is pull tech, whether you're talking web, usenet, or whatever. And when it does become push, people become irate (Spam anyone?). So, if you define the heart as whatever former Wired lackeys say, then it changes on a weekly basis, or its absence is lamented. If, however, you use the myriad abilities of the net daily, you know where its heart is, and not surprisingly, its close to your own.
So the value of a given item decreases over time, much in the manner of computer equipment, and for the same reason: the appearance of better stuff makes older stuff less valuable. Eight years ago, a 486/66 would have cost at least 2k, while today you'd have difficulty giving them away.
If one simply wanted to amass as much money as possible in the game, it would be best to sell items as soon as they are acquired because their value will only go down. Of course, such a behavior would probably negatively impact the ability to acquire more items.
Review of review
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The reviewer failed to grasp the significance of the science that was presented in this book. It is one of the few SciFi novels that realistically portrays the consequences of time dilation due to relativistic travel. In addition, the effects of attaining such speeds, i.e. accelerations involved, play a critical role at several points in the narrative. So, the physics is definitely there, just not as didactic as other noteworthy physics-friendly novels, such as Rendezvous with Rama.
This shouldn't be too surprising, as Haldeman was a physics major. More information about the author can be found at his website.
The Forever War has been called an "answer" to Starship Troopers. The main contrast between the two is that Rico volunteers, as does everyone else, for federal service, whereas Mandela is drafted. Rico knows his war to be just, whereas Mandela is never sure. Rico also revels in the destruction of the enemy of his own accord, while Mandela is forced to a bloodlust via post-hypnotic suggestion. Basically, Starship Troopers justifies its war by portraying an underestimated enemy that is ruthless, while the plot of The Forever War hints at the notion that it is mostly xenophobia and economics that drives the conflict. Rico grows to be eager to fight, of his own volition, while Mandela is coerced at every turn.
I suppose the over-riding thematic difference between the two would be that Heinlein's work portrays a protagonist that through the process of becoming more mature learns that societal duty is the highest, while Mandela has his cynicism and distrust of the powers that be confirmed.
I would imagine you could play a grown-up Brainchild, reduced to robbing convenience and video stores to fund a website where he explains that he is, in fact, not evil, rather misunderstood in a post-Columbine world.
I can almost hear The Tick's moralistic monologue: "The straight and narrow is a wide and twisting road, fraught with nefarious construction and tempting exits. So too is the internet, though at least there the "Under Construction" signs are animated. Brainchild learned, once again, that the straight and narrow is a hard road, but it feels so good. It feels so good."
It seems the relationship between The Tick and Arthur is similar to the one between Don Quixote and Sancho. Is this intentional, or merely reflecting the influence that book has had on "buddy" motifs in literature? Finally, have you considered a plot line involving invisible giants that only The Tick can see so that when Arthur is urged to join in battle against them, he can utter "What giants?"
With current drive technology, at around 150 Gb/in2, the magnetic energy holding bits in their recorded state will become equal to the ambient thermal energy within the disk drive itself.
So, a possible solution to overcoming this limit would be reducing the ambient thermal energy. This could be done with the overclockers favorite technique: Cooling!
This may not be sufficiently PC, but why is it necessary to appeal to women to "be out of the ghetto"? Is the makeup industry considered to be "in the ghetto" as it, for all practicality, completely cedes as lost 50% of the population? The very premise seems absurd.
The first atomic explosion was in June, 1945, after Germany had surrendered. If they had existed in 1944, I suspect the "Iron Curtain" would never have existed.
I agree, the sofa analogy is weak at best. However, it's not really a question of familiarity by the end-user, rather the matter of lack of interoperability problems with other furniture. Consider: when was the last time your sofa crashed because of compatibility problems with your coffee table? Granted, a sofa may clash with other interior design choices, but it will still maintain its design integrity and fulfill its role as a repository for posteriors.
Now of course software choices may also exhibit these distasteful clashes and still function; perhaps running exchange and mysql on the same server would be an example. However, unlike the the furniture analogy, these two may not peacefully co-exist upon install. I suppose with the advent of "smart furniture", where the items have the built in capability to rearrange other pieces or the fundamental geometry of the room in question, we may start to see very similar problems in furniture space. However, at present tech levels, the analogy is suspect.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, it is in a superposition of states comprised of "gone off" and "not gone off" until a measurement operator is applied. That is, until someone listens to it.
You are correct if the question was posed by someone under contract. However, if one is a full-time employee, then the odds are that an explicit contract does not exist. As the person in question is hourly, this is almost certainly the case. Regardless of the situation of the original poser, it is an relevant question to which the response "See a contract lawyer" is not suitable to many IT workers.
Re-phrasing the question may be of benefit:
What are the standards of practice for on-call duty?
Are you compensated for time on-call, or only for the time actually needed to respond to an emergency?
If you are paid for time on-call, what is the rate?
You sir have a very good point. I find it very interesting that the quality and drama of miracles has been inversely proportional to time, and more to the point, inversely proportional to technical development. Hmmmmm.
Actually, modeling the situation gives us the following:
It is generally agreed upon that in a given field of study, the total knowledge in that field doubles every T years. If we average over all fields of inquiry, we have aggregate knowledge increasing at an exponetial rate characterized by the time constant TK.
K = K(t=0)*exp(t/TK)
where of course K is total knowledge.
In contrast, the "quality" of miracles has been observed to decrease with time. Above I conjectured an inverse relationship, but I suspect an exponential decay is more apropos for western civilization: many big miracles around t=0 (~1-30 A.D.), some smaller ones later in the same millenium, decreasing even moreso in the first half of the second millenium, and all but disappearing in the second half of the second millenium. This is more characteristic of an exponential decay than a simple inverse power. Thus we can model:
M(t) =M(0)*exp(-t/TM)
where M(0) is the "miracle-value" at t= 0 and TM is the decay constant for the miracle function.
If we were to multiply these two quantites, we obtain:
MK(t)=K(t)*M(t)=MK(0)* exp[t((1/TK) - (1/TM)]
where MK is the Miracle-Knowledge function. My contention, then, is that TK = TM, which leads to a constant value of the MK function for all time.
Since it has been uttered on more than one occasion that "It would take a miracle to get adequate tech support from a help desk", it seems natural to apply the above results to the topic at hand. Therefore, applying this to tech support, if you have ever found tech support helpful, then you will always find it helpful as MK is a constant in time. If you have had one experience when it wasn't helpful, don't bother ever calling again, as the same constancy of results applies.
Slashdot Mirror
Would that be 1,000,000 or 1,048,576 people?
I am very curious what happened between Wal-Mart and MS, to cause them to offer PCs without an OS. You know MS has to be mega-pissed about it, but I doubt they can do anything. There's a HUGE ancillary market, giving support for these OS-less PCs, though my suspicion would be that the vast majority of these units will wind up with bootleg copies of Windows.
Gateway is a real company? That's an interesting opinion; their products strike me as the unhappy successor to the Packard Bell line. More likely, they are setting the stage for a MS lawsuit to save their failing business. Let the feeding frenzy begin!
One thing that cartoon failed to mention about ether is its foul smell, almost nauseating. Another is that the effect of ether is closer to being drunk than dilation of time perception.
Obiously, Taco was quoting 1952 in base 10.0205844652164, which in the more mundane base 10 gives the value 1962.
Maybe I don't quite understand the research, but it doesn't seem that surprising that the Marvel Universe does not follow real-world clustering patterns: many of the characters have dual identities, which I would think throw off the usual associative relationship of friends.
As an example, consider this scenario:
Jane Goodcitizen is friends with Peter Parker.
Spiderman is friends with Captain America.(?-don't know, but let's just say)
In the real world, there would be a high correlation of friendship between Jane and Captain America, while the whole secret identity thing puts a monkey-wrench in the comic universe.
The closest real-world model would probably be the network of say traveling salesmen or spies.
Actually that project has been going on since 1998: Missiplicity Project
that it has no top-down imposed heart, epicenter, or focal point. This is pull tech, whether you're talking web, usenet, or whatever. And when it does become push, people become irate (Spam anyone?). So, if you define the heart as whatever former Wired lackeys say, then it changes on a weekly basis, or its absence is lamented. If, however, you use the myriad abilities of the net daily, you know where its heart is, and not surprisingly, its close to your own.
So the value of a given item decreases over time, much in the manner of computer equipment, and for the same reason: the appearance of better stuff makes older stuff less valuable. Eight years ago, a 486/66 would have cost at least 2k, while today you'd have difficulty giving them away.
If one simply wanted to amass as much money as possible in the game, it would be best to sell items as soon as they are acquired because their value will only go down. Of course, such a behavior would probably negatively impact the ability to acquire more items.
This shouldn't be too surprising, as Haldeman was a physics major. More information about the author can be found at his website.
The Forever War has been called an "answer" to Starship Troopers. The main contrast between the two is that Rico volunteers, as does everyone else, for federal service, whereas Mandela is drafted. Rico knows his war to be just, whereas Mandela is never sure. Rico also revels in the destruction of the enemy of his own accord, while Mandela is forced to a bloodlust via post-hypnotic suggestion. Basically, Starship Troopers justifies its war by portraying an underestimated enemy that is ruthless, while the plot of The Forever War hints at the notion that it is mostly xenophobia and economics that drives the conflict. Rico grows to be eager to fight, of his own volition, while Mandela is coerced at every turn.
I suppose the over-riding thematic difference between the two would be that Heinlein's work portrays a protagonist that through the process of becoming more mature learns that societal duty is the highest, while Mandela has his cynicism and distrust of the powers that be confirmed.
Finally, a country with a sensible policy!
That's a very good point.
I would imagine you could play a grown-up Brainchild, reduced to robbing convenience and video stores to fund a website where he explains that he is, in fact, not evil, rather misunderstood in a post-Columbine world.
I can almost hear The Tick's moralistic monologue: "The straight and narrow is a wide and twisting road, fraught with nefarious construction and tempting exits. So too is the internet, though at least there the "Under Construction" signs are animated. Brainchild learned, once again, that the straight and narrow is a hard road, but it feels so good. It feels so good."
It seems the relationship between The Tick and Arthur is similar to the one between Don Quixote and Sancho. Is this intentional, or merely reflecting the influence that book has had on "buddy" motifs in literature? Finally, have you considered a plot line involving invisible giants that only The Tick can see so that when Arthur is urged to join in battle against them, he can utter "What giants?"
From the article:
"I'm really think twice (sic) before going offline for two weeks again, especially when I get a real job. That makes me a POW."
Actutally, wouldn't that make him a POE, with all the Stragelovian connotations?
Gentleman, you can't IM in here, this is the telecom room!
Why would you ever turn off your computer?
With current drive technology, at around 150 Gb/in2, the magnetic energy holding bits in their recorded state will become equal to the ambient thermal energy within the disk drive itself.
So, a possible solution to overcoming this limit would be reducing the ambient thermal energy. This could be done with the overclockers favorite technique: Cooling!
Where's Dr. Freeze when you need him?
This fungus was obviously spawned in the super-secret Redmond labs as a marketing tool to encourage .NET adoption.
So, has FPS finally entered the Fragbruary that never ends?
This may not be sufficiently PC, but why is it necessary to appeal to women to "be out of the ghetto"? Is the makeup industry considered to be "in the ghetto" as it, for all practicality, completely cedes as lost 50% of the population? The very premise seems absurd.
The first atomic explosion was in June, 1945, after Germany had surrendered. If they had existed in 1944, I suspect the "Iron Curtain" would never have existed.
Now of course software choices may also exhibit these distasteful clashes and still function; perhaps running exchange and mysql on the same server would be an example. However, unlike the the furniture analogy, these two may not peacefully co-exist upon install. I suppose with the advent of "smart furniture", where the items have the built in capability to rearrange other pieces or the fundamental geometry of the room in question, we may start to see very similar problems in furniture space. However, at present tech levels, the analogy is suspect.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, it is in a superposition of states comprised of "gone off" and "not gone off" until a measurement operator is applied. That is, until someone listens to it.
Re-phrasing the question may be of benefit:
What are the standards of practice for on-call duty?
Are you compensated for time on-call, or only for the time actually needed to respond to an emergency?
If you are paid for time on-call, what is the rate?
Actually, modeling the situation gives us the following:
It is generally agreed upon that in a given field of study, the total knowledge in that field doubles every T years. If we average over all fields of inquiry, we have aggregate knowledge increasing at an exponetial rate characterized by the time constant TK.
K = K(t=0)*exp(t/TK)
where of course K is total knowledge.
In contrast, the "quality" of miracles has been observed to decrease with time. Above I conjectured an inverse relationship, but I suspect an exponential decay is more apropos for western civilization: many big miracles around t=0 (~1-30 A.D.), some smaller ones later in the same millenium, decreasing even moreso in the first half of the second millenium, and all but disappearing in the second half of the second millenium. This is more characteristic of an exponential decay than a simple inverse power. Thus we can model:
M(t) =M(0)*exp(-t/TM)
where M(0) is the "miracle-value" at t= 0 and TM is the decay constant for the miracle function.
If we were to multiply these two quantites, we obtain:
MK(t)=K(t)*M(t)=MK(0)* exp[t((1/TK) - (1/TM)]
where MK is the Miracle-Knowledge function. My contention, then, is that TK = TM, which leads to a constant value of the MK function for all time.
Since it has been uttered on more than one occasion that "It would take a miracle to get adequate tech support from a help desk", it seems natural to apply the above results to the topic at hand. Therefore, applying this to tech support, if you have ever found tech support helpful, then you will always find it helpful as MK is a constant in time. If you have had one experience when it wasn't helpful, don't bother ever calling again, as the same constancy of results applies.
QED