that in the year 2025 futurists will be the second largest segment of America's economy, right after the service sector. As much as 30% of Americans will be hard at work figuring out what technologies smart people will come up with next.
Futurism: If you're not smart enough to make the future happen, why not predict it?
One element that is so frustrating with modern games, is that once something becomes technically possible, everyone feels compelled to implement it in their games, whether or not it improves the game itself.
We can discard levels now. Should we? Well, if your game is essentially a sandbox that you can run around in and do whatever, that's fine. If your game runs on a rail, or if you have any narrative story in it whatsoever, then the word level often just means chapter. It is a good thing to have because it breaks the story up into digestible chunks and gives a pause in the action where the user can feel comfortable saving his game and taking a break.
Also, from a technical standpoint levels break the game into a number of subgames that can be tested independently, without worrying about something that happens later in the game effecting something earlier. They also help to prevent the user from introducing unintended nonlinearity in the plot, and essentially breaking the story line. I've seen a lot of so called sandbox games with very fragile plots.
but my question is whether I can get my textbooks in ebook form. If I could do that, then I wouldn't need to carry heavy college textbooks to class. Hell, my laptop is lighter than any of my textbooks, I could use that. However, if all I can read are some random romance novels that were published in ebook form, I'm not going to go for it.
What's the availability of ebooks for college courses? Will they be compatible with this thing.
and would be great in combo with a fast harddrive. Also intel really needs to start using NUMA like AMD does. However, there doesn't seem to be much point to running a cpu with that high of a clock rate. All you do is chew up power and make your equipment hot with cycles that aren't going to bes used.
The core 2 duos are already pretty nice in terms of raw cpu speed, it is the rest of the system that could use a speedup.
What sort of electric devices even come with DC input? Most everything has a AC/DC converter built into it. Does that mean that every electronic device on the premises needs both a DC/AC converter and a AC/DC converter chained together? Wow...
There's nothing forcing anyone else in the world to use our domain name system. There are already alternative domain name systems that you can have your computer refer to.
The only reason that the Rusians or anyone else wants control of America's domain name system is so that they can censor the internet not just within their own countries, but globally.
I have a lot of respect for the UN and what it does, but it is important to remember that the UN is *not* a democratic institution and that many of the most powerful countries in the UN are communist or brutal dictatorships and have no respect whatsoever for the freedom of speech. Our friends as well as our enemies sit on the UN. So, while I respect the UN as an international mediator, any democratic country would have to be insane to allow the UN to interfere in domestic policy or allow them to have any authority over our national assets. The UN is not a "world government" and cannot be treated as such as long as countries like China and Russia sit on the security council.
Also, remember that calls to allow "third world nations" to have more say are essentially calls to allow the brutal dictators *running* those third world nations to have more say. I'm sympathetic to the plight of the poorer parts of the world, but one of the reasons they are still poor is that these countries have really crappy, corrupt, or dictatorial governments that we don't want interfering in our country's internal business.
ICANN isn't perfect in some ways, they've obviously allowed domain name parking to become somewhat obnoxious, but they have a good record on free speech. I can't even imagine anything the UN sets up not being routinely abused to censor sites that are unflattering to the security council members.
in actually it is common knowledge that the GPhone will have a 3d user touchscreen combined with psiso-optical megnetopherometer based inductance that will allow time travel along not just the normal time dimension, but along a 2nd heretofore undiscovered dimension of time, which Google has coined "GTime". Google is hoping to tap into the market of those who want to talk, check email, browse the web, and time travel on the go.
Before you mod me down, consider that I have exactly as much evidence for my conclusions as the person who posted the original slashdot article.
>Having access to papers is one step, but surely any fruits of this research should also be >placed in the public domain.
Place the fruits of research in the public domain? Let me ask you something, who do you think *does* research an *why*? Do you have any idea how much it costs to develop a new drug?
Most people agree that the current software patent system is bullshit, but even if you think software patents should be thrown out entirely, what about drug patents? Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug, or to publish the results of research. As it is, if pharma patents were removed, much of medical research would halt and never progress beyond where it is now.
We want researchers to publish the results of their research without worrying about giving away the product of their companies research to competitors. Currently, patents and only patents protect this system.
is still pretty derideable. Not so much because he's running microsoft into the ground or anything. Overall, Microsoft is doing pretty well, and I'd probably say their stock and outlook is a bit undervalued by most people.
However, he's screwed up on two major fronts and kind of failed to repent on at least one of them. 1. He let the vista development get strung out like it did. This probably isn't largely his fault, but as CEO he should have realized something was going very wrong and forced the development team to start removing features instead of pushing back the launch date. Windows is still Microsofts most important product, and he should have kept a better eye on it. 2. He seems to have some vendetta going with Google, for reasons that are totally beyond me. I honestly don't see how or why Microsoft and Google are in competition, and I tend to think that Microsoft is wasting a lot of money pretending that they are a serious search and ads company like Google or Yahoo. Maybe they'll prove me wrong in the long run, they did with the XBox, but I tend to see their web initiatives as a distraction from more promising products. 3. He seems to have encouraged a very inefficient corporate culture with a lot of levels of management and lots of meetings. I don't think the Google style flat management structure is an appropriate approach for a company the size of Microsoft (or a company the size of Google for that matter), but I think that something has to be done to address how sluggish the company has gotten. Something like Apple style skunkworks projects for some of their key projects would probably make sense.
I've heard a lot of people quote these 4 steps. I guess it is supposed to sound like something Gandhi said. Let me show you the list, and then point out a problem with it.
1. First they ignore you 2. They ridicule you 3. Then they fight you 4. Then you win
If you are talking about a social movement of an oppressed people (where your oppressors are the British), this makes sense. If you are a software system competing in a marketplace, 1,2, and 3 make sense, but 4 does not follow. When the British started fighting the uprisings in India, this generated sympathy for the people of India. However, Microsoft "fighting" with Linux doesn't mean anything involving guns or violence. It means developing features in their software which can compete with the features of Linux. Such actions don't give rise to sympathy for the competition in the marketplace, nor is "sympathy" a driving force of anything in the marketplace. Thus the analogy drawn between the progress of Linux and the liberation of India fails.
That said, I'm pretty optimistic about Google's new phone initiative. I'm just saying that the 1,2,3,4 motto is somewhat nonsensical.
There's obviously lots of version control systems for developers (svn) and business people (windows shadow copy) and there's even version control built into some applications like word, although few people know about it. The point of time machine is that it is rough grained general purpose version control for the average user who can't deal with the complexity and rough edges of svn. Version control for movies, pictures, and word documents with a slick interface.
This is really what apple is all about, taking existing technologies and making them accessible to joe user and useful for the sort of problems that joe user addresses. This simply reflects that apple is pretty much entirely a consumer technology company, whereas linux and even windows to some extent tend to be oriented towards professionals.
People tend to learn about windows at work, and then end up buying a windows home system, whereas people tend to learn about macs at home and, sometimes, end up bringing them to work.
It's true that obesity kills, but there are 4 categories the article identifies
1. underweight 2. at weight 3. overweight 4. obese
The article seems to indicate that the best categories to be in are 2 or 3, which shouldn't be that surprising. Being obese is horrible for your health, but there is a fairly wide range of weight around normal weight which remains healthy.
One thing that the article makes clear is that being *underweight* is pretty bad for you, and has much more problems associated with it than being overweight (but not obese). Again, this shouldn't be surprising. Being overweight just means that you are carrying around some excess fat, but is not an indication of malnutrition. Being underweight means that your body is nutrition deprived enough that it hasn't been able to build up a fat store. It also means, that since you don't have a significant fat store, your body starts to cannibalize muscle tissue whenever you go for a while without eating.
In general, good nutrition is the key thing. Either overeating *or* dieting when you don't need to will damage your body and lower your life span. Remember, also you need some fat on your body for doing things like cushioning your heart, and for when you go a while without eating anything nutritious, which many people do without realizing it.
I'm very surprised it took this long for apple to take a look at the tablet form factor. It's already a proven design, and a I think that it only took them this long because of a "not invented here" attitude that apple has with some of its hardware designs (see apple mice).
If anything I've become more and more disillusioned with apple hardware over time. I still think that their software is great, but for a supposed hardware manufacturer, I increasingly think they aren't up to snuff and are more interested in coming up with a flashy design than making a usable product.
we would have no progress in medicine whatsoever. For any successful medical procedure, a great many were tried that were fatal. Even the successful ones need to be refined.
Without cutting some living thing open and watching its heart pump, we would never have learned about something as basic as circulation.
Without purposely exposing some poor sod to small pox, we would have never known that the vaccine worked.
The net result is that we have some basic understanding of the human body, and massive amounts of human suffering is alleviated.
Are these things unethical by most people's standards? Yes. Are they *worth it*? Obviously.
We need ethical standards in medicine, but you might consider that the sort of ethical standards that are imposed in a field that intensionally kills people are very different from what you might be used to.
The moral of the story is that nothing of value can be achieved without sacrifice.
He seems like the least suspicious person involved in this case. I can't imagine why the police let this go to trial with so little evidence. If they win, it's by pure luck or incompetence in Reiser's defence.
Windows copied Macintosh, which copied the Lisa (also from apple), which copied the Xerox Alto and Star, which copied the oNLine System (1965).
If by "copied" you mean "got ideas from." In science this is not considered cheating. It is considered doing your homework. If you don't look at other successful designs before making your own, there can be no progress. We'd end up reinventing the wheel 100 different broken ways, instead of coming up with better and better iterations on the same theme.
Linux was "inspired" by Minix, but succeeded in its place because of higher performance and a more open development environment.
Red hat refuses to ship anything that's no GPL'd, so it seems like their short on luck if someone chooses to ship the same thing for free.
They already do a pretty good job of making it impossible to download the distro in binary form from their website for free, so I think they've done about as much as they legally can.
Really, if a distro doesn't want to be undercut in this way, they need to be willing to add on closed source parts of their distro that can't be sold by someone else in this way. Suze does this, as does Xandros. Realistically, Suze may not have the best distro right now, but in the long run they have the better business model and have been more aggressive about pursuing new technologies (like mono and xen) and will probably beat red hat out of the market.
> those paying higher levels of income tax really don't get anything extra for their money either.
This isn't actually true. Figuring out how much people take out of the system, vs what they put in can be kind of tricky, but generally the richer you are the more government resources you use.
Obviously, the rich don't take out welfare. However, they do tend to spend more time in civil court. Additionally, the government is generally much more responsive to the needs of the wealthy than the poor. For instance, police tend to ignore crime in poor neighborhoods. If someone is murdered in a wealthy vs a poor neighborhood, it effects a lot whether any investigation or prosecution will happen. Generally the wealthy, who are potential campaign donors have their interests met by local, state, and federal politicians. Corporations in particular spend a lot of money on lobbiests to get special tax breaks and to have regulations changed to their benefit.
I'm generally in favor of lower taxes and a smaller government, but I have to admit that it's only fair that the wealthy pay for their larger stake in our society.
>The error you make is in assuming that article summaries on Slashdot should be read as if >they were scientific papers.
This is rudimentary logic we're talking about, not some high level jargon. If you can't make your sentences logically coherent, then you have no business saying anything ever. Saying something nonsensical is not contributing to a discussion.
Also, there's a difference between someone having a different definition of the word prove in a given context, and someone simply not knowing what the word prove *means*. The article summary clearly didn't understand the meaning of the word prove in any sense, and was just spouting nonsense. There was no logically coherant interpretation of the sentence.
of an uptake up apple systems, is the increase of viruses and spyware on the platform. Viruses can only exist if there's a certain density of compatible systems on the network.
>I still maintain that the Wikipedia is only an approximation of the truth, if even that.
To say that wikipedia is an approximation of the truth is meaningless. All encyclopedias and written sources contain errors. Wikipedia has been shown to contain *fewer* errors than most of the competing sources, and if you've ever read wikipedia articles, you know they are better edited than most books and are generally very readable.
>I must say that given the output of high-schools today, we should be attempting to >prevent students from contributing, not encouraging them. Off topic. Read the article, or at least the summary. The students are from the University of Washington (a very good school btw). They are not high school students.
>I mean, hearing Profs say that students can't do simple algebra or even remotely think >logically is now common place. Why do you think that is?
In the US we have extremely poor k through 12 education, and then some very excellent colleges (in most other countries it is the reverse.) US high schools are paid for by *local* property taxes, so kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods get an excellent education, and most kids who grow up in middle or lower class neighborhoods get no education whatsoever until college. Many of my generation skip high school altogether and go directly into community college. The school districts provide for this in tacit acknowledgment of how worthless public high schools are.
Students are essentially expected to make up for 12 years of non education in 4 years of college. Most high schools, including the one I went to, are just jails to keep kids off the street until they turn 18.
BTW. Some, such as myself, come out of that and go on to do well in college and get a good job, only to end up paying social security to provide for the retirement of a generation which wasn't interested in providing for my generation's education. This seems fairly nonsensical to us, and so we are disinclined to continue this practice of "social security". What goes around comes around.
>Hell, I've seen what these people produce, and the only excuse that one can have is that >English is/not/ the students first language. But, the problem is that it IS the students >first language. Hell, from what I've seen (several Universities over several years), >the foreigners do better with English than the "natives."
Languages evolve over time, and the previous generation always have the sense that the next generation is somehow speaking the language wrong. Your parents probably thought that there was something wrong in the way you talked as well. If you went to shakespeare's time, I'm sure people would think that you were some kind of idiot who couldn't speak properly.
The thing is, that english is *improving* not getting worse. Languages change in response to changing concepts, and the addition of new terminology. Modern english has extremely precise technical terminology embedded in it. Many things that were considered passive are now considered active, and so now are expressed as verbs instead of nouns. Many grammatical constructions have changed to allow for expressions that have become more common to be expressed more clearly and unambiguously. Many sophisticated systems for expressing common phrases in shorthand have developed so that ideas can be expressed more concisely.
You have to remember that no one ever *designed* the English language and that there *is no* authoritative English grammer or vocabulary because the English grammar and vocabularies are an *open set*.
The ability to construct language is genetically ingrained in all human beings, and if vocabulary or grammatical productions are ever missing or inadequate, we have the capacity to create them at will. If you leave some kids alone on an island and let them fend for themselves without teaching them any known human language, it has been demonstrated that they will generate their own complete language from the ground up in precisely 2 generations. This has been demonstrated many times. There is no real need for English language education for native speakers.
I think this (not allowing virtual servers on non apple hardware) demonstrates clearly that apple isn't serious enough about making inroads with OSX server. Apple has little to gain by forcing users to buy apple branded hardware for servers. There is no market to support such a thing, but there is a huge market for a good server OS on commodity hardware, which would be possible with virtualization.
As it is, there's just no good reason to do anything with OSX server. It just doesn't stand up to the competition price wise if you have to buy it in conjunction with apple's extra pricey hardware. Apple's server platform is a real "me too" effort right now. They might as well discontinue the line, I have a real hard time imagining anyone is buying OSX servers.
Presentation software powerful enough that several games (including the original myst) used it as their engine. *that's* what I want to use for presentations. Way niftier than anything currently on the market.
Slashdot Mirror
that in the year 2025 futurists will be the second largest segment of America's economy, right after the service sector. As much as 30% of Americans will be hard at work figuring out what technologies smart people will come up with next.
Futurism: If you're not smart enough to make the future happen, why not predict it?
One element that is so frustrating with modern games, is that once something becomes technically possible, everyone feels compelled to implement it in their games, whether or not it improves the game itself.
We can discard levels now. Should we? Well, if your game is essentially a sandbox that you can run around in and do whatever, that's fine. If your game runs on a rail, or if you have any narrative story in it whatsoever, then the word level often just means chapter. It is a good thing to have because it breaks the story up into digestible chunks and gives a pause in the action where the user can feel comfortable saving his game and taking a break.
Also, from a technical standpoint levels break the game into a number of subgames that can be tested independently, without worrying about something that happens later in the game effecting something earlier. They also help to prevent the user from introducing unintended nonlinearity in the plot, and essentially breaking the story line. I've seen a lot of so called sandbox games with very fragile plots.
but my question is whether I can get my textbooks in ebook form. If I could do that, then I wouldn't need to carry heavy college textbooks to class. Hell, my laptop is lighter than any of my textbooks, I could use that. However, if all I can read are some random romance novels that were published in ebook form, I'm not going to go for it.
What's the availability of ebooks for college courses? Will they be compatible with this thing.
and would be great in combo with a fast harddrive. Also intel really needs to start using NUMA like AMD does. However, there doesn't seem to be much point to running a cpu with that high of a clock rate. All you do is chew up power and make your equipment hot with cycles that aren't going to bes used.
The core 2 duos are already pretty nice in terms of raw cpu speed, it is the rest of the system that could use a speedup.
keep using access? It is so dinky as a relational database... I'm not honestly sure what it *is* supposed to be used for.
What sort of electric devices even come with DC input? Most everything has a AC/DC converter built into it. Does that mean that every electronic device on the premises needs both a DC/AC converter and a AC/DC converter chained together? Wow...
There's nothing forcing anyone else in the world to use our domain name system. There are already alternative domain name systems that you can have your computer refer to.
The only reason that the Rusians or anyone else wants control of America's domain name system is so that they can censor the internet not just within their own countries, but globally.
I have a lot of respect for the UN and what it does, but it is important to remember that the UN is *not* a democratic institution and that many of the most powerful countries in the UN are communist or brutal dictatorships and have no respect whatsoever for the freedom of speech. Our friends as well as our enemies sit on the UN. So, while I respect the UN as an international mediator, any democratic country would have to be insane to allow the UN to interfere in domestic policy or allow them to have any authority over our national assets. The UN is not a "world government" and cannot be treated as such as long as countries like China and Russia sit on the security council.
Also, remember that calls to allow "third world nations" to have more say are essentially calls to allow the brutal dictators *running* those third world nations to have more say. I'm sympathetic to the plight of the poorer parts of the world, but one of the reasons they are still poor is that these countries have really crappy, corrupt, or dictatorial governments that we don't want interfering in our country's internal business.
ICANN isn't perfect in some ways, they've obviously allowed domain name parking to become somewhat obnoxious, but they have a good record on free speech. I can't even imagine anything the UN sets up not being routinely abused to censor sites that are unflattering to the security council members.
in actually it is common knowledge that the GPhone will have a 3d user touchscreen combined with psiso-optical megnetopherometer based inductance that will allow time travel along not just the normal time dimension, but along a 2nd heretofore undiscovered dimension of time, which Google has coined "GTime". Google is hoping to tap into the market of those who want to talk, check email, browse the web, and time travel on the go.
Before you mod me down, consider that I have exactly as much evidence for my conclusions as the person who posted the original slashdot article.
>Having access to papers is one step, but surely any fruits of this research should also be
>placed in the public domain.
Place the fruits of research in the public domain? Let me ask you something, who do you think *does* research an *why*? Do you have any idea how much it costs to develop a new drug?
Most people agree that the current software patent system is bullshit, but even if you think software patents should be thrown out entirely, what about drug patents? Without pharmaceutical patents, there's no reason whatsoever to develop a given drug, or to publish the results of research. As it is, if pharma patents were removed, much of medical research would halt and never progress beyond where it is now.
We want researchers to publish the results of their research without worrying about giving away the product of their companies research to competitors. Currently, patents and only patents protect this system.
is still pretty derideable. Not so much because he's running microsoft into the ground or anything. Overall, Microsoft is doing pretty well, and I'd probably say their stock and outlook is a bit undervalued by most people.
However, he's screwed up on two major fronts and kind of failed to repent on at least one of them.
1. He let the vista development get strung out like it did. This probably isn't largely his fault, but as CEO he should have realized something was going very wrong and forced the development team to start removing features instead of pushing back the launch date. Windows is still Microsofts most important product, and he should have kept a better eye on it.
2. He seems to have some vendetta going with Google, for reasons that are totally beyond me. I honestly don't see how or why Microsoft and Google are in competition, and I tend to think that Microsoft is wasting a lot of money pretending that they are a serious search and ads company like Google or Yahoo. Maybe they'll prove me wrong in the long run, they did with the XBox, but I tend to see their web initiatives as a distraction from more promising products.
3. He seems to have encouraged a very inefficient corporate culture with a lot of levels of management and lots of meetings. I don't think the Google style flat management structure is an appropriate approach for a company the size of Microsoft (or a company the size of Google for that matter), but I think that something has to be done to address how sluggish the company has gotten. Something like Apple style skunkworks projects for some of their key projects would probably make sense.
I've heard a lot of people quote these 4 steps. I guess it is supposed to sound like something Gandhi said. Let me show you the list, and then point out a problem with it.
1. First they ignore you
2. They ridicule you
3. Then they fight you
4. Then you win
If you are talking about a social movement of an oppressed people (where your oppressors are the British), this makes sense. If you are a software system competing in a marketplace, 1,2, and 3 make sense, but 4 does not follow. When the British started fighting the uprisings in India, this generated sympathy for the people of India. However, Microsoft "fighting" with Linux doesn't mean anything involving guns or violence. It means developing features in their software which can compete with the features of Linux. Such actions don't give rise to sympathy for the competition in the marketplace, nor is "sympathy" a driving force of anything in the marketplace. Thus the analogy drawn between the progress of Linux and the liberation of India fails.
That said, I'm pretty optimistic about Google's new phone initiative. I'm just saying that the 1,2,3,4 motto is somewhat nonsensical.
There's obviously lots of version control systems for developers (svn) and business people (windows shadow copy) and there's even version control built into some applications like word, although few people know about it. The point of time machine is that it is rough grained general purpose version control for the average user who can't deal with the complexity and rough edges of svn. Version control for movies, pictures, and word documents with a slick interface.
This is really what apple is all about, taking existing technologies and making them accessible to joe user and useful for the sort of problems that joe user addresses. This simply reflects that apple is pretty much entirely a consumer technology company, whereas linux and even windows to some extent tend to be oriented towards professionals.
People tend to learn about windows at work, and then end up buying a windows home system, whereas people tend to learn about macs at home and, sometimes, end up bringing them to work.
It's true that obesity kills, but there are 4 categories the article identifies
1. underweight
2. at weight
3. overweight
4. obese
The article seems to indicate that the best categories to be in are 2 or 3, which shouldn't be that surprising. Being obese is horrible for your health, but there is a fairly wide range of weight around normal weight which remains healthy.
One thing that the article makes clear is that being *underweight* is pretty bad for you, and has much more problems associated with it than being overweight (but not obese). Again, this shouldn't be surprising. Being overweight just means that you are carrying around some excess fat, but is not an indication of malnutrition. Being underweight means that your body is nutrition deprived enough that it hasn't been able to build up a fat store. It also means, that since you don't have a significant fat store, your body starts to cannibalize muscle tissue whenever you go for a while without eating.
In general, good nutrition is the key thing. Either overeating *or* dieting when you don't need to will damage your body and lower your life span. Remember, also you need some fat on your body for doing things like cushioning your heart, and for when you go a while without eating anything nutritious, which many people do without realizing it.
I'm very surprised it took this long for apple to take a look at the tablet form factor. It's already a proven design, and a I think that it only took them this long because of a "not invented here" attitude that apple has with some of its hardware designs (see apple mice).
If anything I've become more and more disillusioned with apple hardware over time. I still think that their software is great, but for a supposed hardware manufacturer, I increasingly think they aren't up to snuff and are more interested in coming up with a flashy design than making a usable product.
we would have no progress in medicine whatsoever. For any successful medical procedure, a great many were tried that were fatal. Even the successful ones need to be refined.
Without cutting some living thing open and watching its heart pump, we would never have learned about something as basic as circulation.
Without purposely exposing some poor sod to small pox, we would have never known that the vaccine worked.
The net result is that we have some basic understanding of the human body, and massive amounts of human suffering is alleviated.
Are these things unethical by most people's standards? Yes. Are they *worth it*? Obviously.
We need ethical standards in medicine, but you might consider that the sort of ethical standards that are imposed in a field that intensionally kills people are very different from what you might be used to.
The moral of the story is that nothing of value can be achieved without sacrifice.
to believe that he killed her.
He seems like the least suspicious person involved in this case. I can't imagine why the police let this go to trial with so little evidence. If they win, it's by pure luck or incompetence in Reiser's defence.
and sometimes the only way to get that is to get a divorce. Which is what he did. Why do you need to demonize him for that?
and minix copied unix, which copied multix.
Windows copied Macintosh, which copied the Lisa (also from apple), which copied the Xerox Alto and Star, which copied the oNLine System (1965).
If by "copied" you mean "got ideas from." In science this is not considered cheating. It is considered doing your homework. If you don't look at other successful designs before making your own, there can be no progress. We'd end up reinventing the wheel 100 different broken ways, instead of coming up with better and better iterations on the same theme.
Linux was "inspired" by Minix, but succeeded in its place because of higher performance and a more open development environment.
Red hat refuses to ship anything that's no GPL'd, so it seems like their short on luck if someone chooses to ship the same thing for free.
They already do a pretty good job of making it impossible to download the distro in binary form from their website for free, so I think they've done about as much as they legally can.
Really, if a distro doesn't want to be undercut in this way, they need to be willing to add on closed source parts of their distro that can't be sold by someone else in this way. Suze does this, as does Xandros. Realistically, Suze may not have the best distro right now, but in the long run they have the better business model and have been more aggressive about pursuing new technologies (like mono and xen) and will probably beat red hat out of the market.
> those paying higher levels of income tax really don't get anything extra for their money either.
This isn't actually true. Figuring out how much people take out of the system, vs what they put in can be kind of tricky, but generally the richer you are the more government resources you use.
Obviously, the rich don't take out welfare. However, they do tend to spend more time in civil court. Additionally, the government is generally much more responsive to the needs of the wealthy than the poor. For instance, police tend to ignore crime in poor neighborhoods. If someone is murdered in a wealthy vs a poor neighborhood, it effects a lot whether any investigation or prosecution will happen. Generally the wealthy, who are potential campaign donors have their interests met by local, state, and federal politicians. Corporations in particular spend a lot of money on lobbiests to get special tax breaks and to have regulations changed to their benefit.
I'm generally in favor of lower taxes and a smaller government, but I have to admit that it's only fair that the wealthy pay for their larger stake in our society.
>The error you make is in assuming that article summaries on Slashdot should be read as if
>they were scientific papers.
This is rudimentary logic we're talking about, not some high level jargon. If you can't make your sentences logically coherent, then you have no business saying anything ever. Saying something nonsensical is not contributing to a discussion.
Also, there's a difference between someone having a different definition of the word prove in a given context, and someone simply not knowing what the word prove *means*. The article summary clearly didn't understand the meaning of the word prove in any sense, and was just spouting nonsense. There was no logically coherant interpretation of the sentence.
of an uptake up apple systems, is the increase of viruses and spyware on the platform. Viruses can only exist if there's a certain density of compatible systems on the network.
>I still maintain that the Wikipedia is only an approximation of the truth, if even that.
/not/ the students first language. But, the problem is that it IS the students
To say that wikipedia is an approximation of the truth is meaningless. All encyclopedias and written sources contain errors. Wikipedia has been shown to contain *fewer* errors than most of the competing sources, and if you've ever read wikipedia articles, you know they are better edited than most books and are generally very readable.
>I must say that given the output of high-schools today, we should be attempting to
>prevent students from contributing, not encouraging them.
Off topic. Read the article, or at least the summary. The students are from the University of Washington (a very good school btw). They are not high school students.
>I mean, hearing Profs say that students can't do simple algebra or even remotely think
>logically is now common place.
Why do you think that is?
In the US we have extremely poor k through 12 education, and then some very excellent colleges (in most other countries it is the reverse.) US high schools are paid for by *local* property taxes, so kids who grow up in rich neighborhoods get an excellent education, and most kids who grow up in middle or lower class neighborhoods get no education whatsoever until college. Many of my generation skip high school altogether and go directly into community college. The school districts provide for this in tacit acknowledgment of how worthless public high schools are.
Students are essentially expected to make up for 12 years of non education in 4 years of college. Most high schools, including the one I went to, are just jails to keep kids off the street until they turn 18.
BTW. Some, such as myself, come out of that and go on to do well in college and get a good job, only to end up paying social security to provide for the retirement of a generation which wasn't interested in providing for my generation's education. This seems fairly nonsensical to us, and so we are disinclined to continue this practice of "social security". What goes around comes around.
>Hell, I've seen what these people produce, and the only excuse that one can have is that
>English is
>first language. Hell, from what I've seen (several Universities over several years),
>the foreigners do better with English than the "natives."
Languages evolve over time, and the previous generation always have the sense that the next generation is somehow speaking the language wrong. Your parents probably thought that there was something wrong in the way you talked as well. If you went to shakespeare's time, I'm sure people would think that you were some kind of idiot who couldn't speak properly.
The thing is, that english is *improving* not getting worse. Languages change in response to changing concepts, and the addition of new terminology. Modern english has extremely precise technical terminology embedded in it. Many things that were considered passive are now considered active, and so now are expressed as verbs instead of nouns. Many grammatical constructions have changed to allow for expressions that have become more common to be expressed more clearly and unambiguously. Many sophisticated systems for expressing common phrases in shorthand have developed so that ideas can be expressed more concisely.
You have to remember that no one ever *designed* the English language and that there *is no* authoritative English grammer or vocabulary because the English grammar and vocabularies are an *open set*.
The ability to construct language is genetically ingrained in all human beings, and if vocabulary or grammatical productions are ever missing or inadequate, we have the capacity to create them at will. If you leave some kids alone on an island and let them fend for themselves without teaching them any known human language, it has been demonstrated that they will generate their own complete language from the ground up in precisely 2 generations. This has been demonstrated many times. There is no real need for English language education for native speakers.
I think this (not allowing virtual servers on non apple hardware) demonstrates clearly that apple isn't serious enough about making inroads with OSX server. Apple has little to gain by forcing users to buy apple branded hardware for servers. There is no market to support such a thing, but there is a huge market for a good server OS on commodity hardware, which would be possible with virtualization.
As it is, there's just no good reason to do anything with OSX server. It just doesn't stand up to the competition price wise if you have to buy it in conjunction with apple's extra pricey hardware. Apple's server platform is a real "me too" effort right now. They might as well discontinue the line, I have a real hard time imagining anyone is buying OSX servers.
viva la hypercard.
Presentation software powerful enough that several games (including the original myst) used it as their engine. *that's* what I want to use for presentations. Way niftier than anything currently on the market.