For Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, other commerical) OSes, official version names are important to a degree which they aren't in the Linux world's enthusiastic, wacky developers and distro-suppliers, or in the BSD world's Castles of Smartness. That's because the name is as much (or more) a Marketing invention than a descriptive name.
For Microsoft, the name of the product is an important selling point. The naming structure of MS products with the ProductName (Year) format is part of their marketing scheme, and they will work toward deadlines to make things come out in the appropriate year, or at least aim for it. (Remember the release of Windows 95?). I'm not bashing this approach - it actually makes some things slightly more intuitive. It's a lot easier to know "Well, I need to have Money 2000 to exchange data with my software at work." than "Well, I need to have kernel 2.1.5 and a certain c library installed..." To linux experts, this probably seems more marginal than it does to me, a long-time but basically shallow linux user. Most computer users stay even closer to the shallow-end than I do, venture to guess.
With Linux distribs, they're not limited by the marketing need for a certain number, though, or at least they needn't be. Mandrake certainly isn't!
They can release a major version (with what sounds like quite a few new features) as 7 quite legitimately. I'd also like to see the things you'd like to in an upcoming version, but there's no point in saying that Mandrake should wait until perfection is arrived at on all fronts before releasing. In fact, all those nice GPL'd things released by Mandrake will help everyone (including Mandrake) toward this goal faster than if Mandrake were to wait till it had independently solved all of the Unsolved Problems.
XFree 4 - what, early / mid 2000? It sounds great! (And I'm lucky enough to have no graphical needs unmet as yet with 3.6)
KDE 2 - still a while 'til it's really there, though it, too, sounds great.
the new Kernel - soonish, ditto.
mozilla - well, it keeps getting better, and is quite nice at present, if it meets your needs. But waiting for the "finished" product before releasing a new Mandrake... you'd turn blue!
All that said, I must again praise the Mandrake (and underlying Red Hat (and underlying distro makers(and Alan Cox and other kernel developers (including Linus, as the colonel of the kernel's kernel)))) team for the greatness of Mandrake 6.1.
A friend of mine (brilliant but not into computers much) was amazed at how well put together Mandrake 6.1 was when she saw it at my place this week. "What are you running on your computer?" she asked. "That's Linux, with KDE." "Whoah! I didn't think Linux was so slick!"
DGregory wrote about wanting a Palm that used USB instead of serial... he's right!
3 months ago, I thought I would never want / need a Palm (OS / format) computer. Since then, there have been quite a few situations in my work (copy editor / proofreader / copywriter / etc) when I said "Boy, I wish I had a little Palm-type thingie!"
After that, the tempation has grown and grown, and I find myself in the bookstore wishing I could look at the notes that I scrawled to myself about a certain author the night before, but on a napkin in my other pants....
Then the Happy Hacker Palm Cradle comes out, removing the other major problem I had with the design of Palms, which is lack of a keyboard interface, which for me is much faster than writing by hand.
But I too want USB and not serial interface. So I've decided to wait for a Visor, and the Visor Happy Hacking Cradle, and (I guess) Linux kernel 2.4.3 or something.
Now this color stuff comes out, clouding the mix again;)
But for DGregory, a (better) Palm is available, with USB, unless you've got something against Visor. Better because the price is good, because an 8MB visor is cheaper than an 8MB palm, and because of the springboard modules. I have only played with others' of either variety, so take as many grains of salt as you'd like, but...
Isn't it time we came up with an appropriate TLA for devices like the TIVO?
Digital VCR is an OK analogy, but since that means "Video Cassette Recorder," it's a little silly to describe a device based on a hard drive. "VR" unforuntunately has other connotations already, and besides would not be very descriptive. "Video Recorder" is all that would be left.
How about "DVR"? (Digital Video Recorder) Or "CFT"? (Cool Toy)
It's true that for any given chunk of work, someone is going to pay for it.
However, given that the post office spends / will spend a bunch of time and money gathering information on our/your tab, is it fair that you're not allowed to see the fruit?
Sort of like if town funds were used to purchase and house some fine outdoor sculpture inside an old Quonset hut that belonged to a minicipality whose taxes were used to fund the purchase. For sensible completion of transaction those tax dollars were already used to begin, the town should open up the quonset hut so that the people who paid for it can benefit from the use of their money.
It wouldn't make sense for a town to build *most* of a bridge, would it?
And as far as TANSTAAFL, well, I'm all for the Post Office drying up and blowing away, or at least being opened to full and fair competition, but the government seems to enjoy maintaining a monopoly on first-class mail just fine, thanks very much. We could buy an awful lot of Bistro Meals by eliminating the coercive USPS altogether. The Constitution only says that the Feds are to *establish* post offices, right?
To deliberately change the order of what trims wrote;) --
"Honestly, people, we're getting really lazy these days," and "You can get the information from any Post Office you ask, but I'm sure it's not going to be in a nice electronic format. After all, you're getting it for free."
Well, ought not the government and quasi-government bodies you subsidize have their information in "nice electronic form," so we don't have to subsidize them more than we already do? (That is, by saving the work of mangling messy, difficult-to-understand data as collected into forms easily used by the folks at the Post Office...)
And laziness is an important human virtue -- at least if it is phrased as "the urge to avoid unnecessary work" rather than as "laziness.";)
It seems like the avoid-unnecessary-toil part of "laziness" ought to be integrated into the system, rather than only being the *delay* form of laziness. The people who would like to be able to read public information electronically / easily to me seem like the ones more in the right than the post office refusing to make their processes straightforwardly understandable.
Sure the zip code information is politically free but what about the people who sit around all day assigning zones and keeping the central database updated? What about the people that typeset that enormous tome chained to the post office counter? That's going to cost you money! This is a no brainer. The post office is in the right!
Actually, it's not quite the same as what Red Hat and other distros do. Rather, it might be what they *do* but differently funded.
Because it is an enforced monopoly, any work done by the USPS belongs to the taxpayers who funded it. True, it's not funded out of the general funds, but the end result for anyone who sends 1st class mail in the US is that you pay a tax because you're forced to subsidize the USPS' competition with FedEx, Avery, etc. In 1997 (according to a newspaper column I read, so the figure is somewhere between 'straight out of my butt' and 'the revealed knowlege of an omniscient God'), they cleared 50 million in profit on 1st class mail.
So I don't buy the argument that a subsidized government agency is *not* obligated to share the data it collects unless there is a good reason. So revealing *personal* information is not good, but geographic I think ought to be revealed unless there is compelling reason why not.
Otherwise, the USPS reveals its nature as (and as I think it really is!) a mercantilist rather than capitalist institution.
I'd say better for the DOL or other government agency get a few visible slaps for waste than the long term effects of looking at the world in as static a way as they seem to at present. Bureacracy means "tyranny of the desks" (or at least I once heard a smart person say so), and any three-letter government acronym I expect to live up to that idea. But I'd rather an agency be sued and embarrased into somewhat better habits than figure that it's OK to tolerate sloppy, wasteful, myopic spending and other habits. I think even in the medium term, a judgment against the DOL would save far more than the judgement itself would cost.
Don't know, and welcome corrections, but that's my guess.
It's a dillemma that all government spending creates: how do you pick the suppliers who will provide your (toilets / cafeteria service / word processor) *fairly*?
To my mind, in the end there are only more fair and less fair ways for govt. agencies to choose suppliers, no truly fair ones.
Why? Because unlike a private company (which can buy MS software all they want, for all I care, and more power to 'em, if that's what makes sense), government agencies are also simultaneously supposed to be stewarding the tax dollars of the taxpayers whose money allows them to function. Care to buy a toilet seat marked up by the Pentagon? Probably not -- because that 'stewardship' function often gets lost in the mix, since accountability is low / anonymity hight / consequences indirect / proof elusive.
The Labor Dept. may have sound, thought-out reasons why they want MS products: they've probably come up with a middle- or long-term scenario which says that preserving existing compatibilities is the most economical solution for them. No analysis of that kind is untainted by the assumption set of those who create it, of course -- all I'm saying is that it's likely that their analysis people say "For the reasons X, Y and Z, we need to stick with Word and Excel, therefore with Microsoft." Possibly very shortsighted, but then concrete reasons are often more persuasive than statements about principle and potential. Also, if I can *prove* (on paper, anyhow) that my answer will save you $500 a year, while your solution merely provides the *potential* to save $5,000 a year...
Arguments like "Shouldn't we be using open file formats like XML for all documents, so that the choice of application vendors becomes a fluid and mutable one?!" I bet don't get real far in the DOL.
And consider how strange it is that one arm of the US Fed. govt. is trying to chop up (or at least demote) Microsoft, while another says "Yep, these are the guys whose software we like!" Computer companies (hard and software) love Govt. sales, at least once the elaborate bidding and qualification process is over, because they know that once in the door, govt. bodies tend to re-order rather than switch vendors at the drop of a hat. Think Morton-Thiokol.
Shades of the two French senators... perhaps Messrs. Graham and Rudman would like to introduce a bill requiring that Free / free solutions be included in cost analyses for all Federal government computer purchases...
timothy
p.s. I think the Dept. of Labor should be jettisoned, anyhow. This here's just one more reason.
"I wonder how this censorship thing will turn out ? I believe that they have a similar system in Singapore. Does anybody know how well it works down there?" [emphasis mine.]
Well, depends what you mean by 'how well it works.' Mainstream Singaporean users cannot legally access many things that users in the US and many other places can. I think it's been discussed on Slashdot before, but I really don' know anything about the means used to implement the censorship, or if it's simply a matter of law, unlike what the ABA would like, which is prior review / approval of all materials. Someone from Singapore can probably enlighten us.
But you said how well it works... so what's the standard you would use to say whether it worked "well" or not? Whose objective? The broader question is "Is it right?" rather than "How well does it work." Like "How well would a large bandana work for strangling an infant?" The answer might be "Pretty well, friend," but that's an incomplete response to the question the question raises.
Or then again, maybe you just meant "How effectively are people actually blocked from the info. the government would like to block?" in which case I apologize.:) The answer there would probably have to be "Very, for the technically uninformed, and Not at All for wizards."
I'm glad you read what I wrote, even if you oviously don't agree.
I'm not a "gun nut," myself, or at least I don't see myself that way. Not everyone in favor of gun ownership is a big fan of the emotionalist stuff the NRA puts out! (I myself favor the emotionalist stuff put out by JPFO;) ).
You raise a good point, too, about the *will* that armed resistance requires (with plastic forks, guns, or whatever). Hopefully the same force which would make people reluctant to take arms against their friends and neighbors in the military would also prevent said friends and neighbors from following orders against *them*! However, military training in part is designed to allow soldiers to do just such things at their commanders' order. Ordinary people are no more susceptible to moral qualms (the soldiers I know are mostly thoughful, honorable people in their private lives), but they have not been specifically trained to disregard those qualms in many situations.
Indomitus wrote, regarding those in favor of preserving the freedom of Americans (in most states, in various degrees) to own guns:
They never mention the fact that our government has firepower the likes of which most Americans will never see, much less have the ability (or the will) to fight against. And the 'We did it to England and they had a real army' argument doesn't work either because the English had the same weapons as the Americans at the time, definately not true today.
1 - a high-powered sniper rifle is no match for a tank, if your goal is destructing a building. If the goal is resistance to armed tyranny, it may come out ahead because a rifle is concealable, holds many rounds of ammunition, can be wielded from a high window, etc. There is a reasonable threshold of deadliness which makes civilian arms worrisome to an invader. Ask the citizens of Switzerland, and each of the invaders who have conquered Switzerland lately.;)
2 - Actually, I think you can update the "We did it to England" story with "The Afgans did it to the Soviets." They got some US ordinance, but for the most part it was peristance and random small arms, along with local knowlege.
3 - Parsed a little larger, it's not guns per se to which the God-given right is, but self-defense. It's just that right now, guns are the most appropriate self-defense tools. That's why it was bad / unfair for non-Samurai to be denied sword ownership in feudal Japan. And peasants there were sometimes used as beheading targets, at the whim of Samurai, not all of whom subscribed to the legendary moral codes ascribed to them in comic books.
Maybe this is a little paranoid, but RedHat employs a large chunk of the Linux kernel developers (as well as apps). This is fine, because there are checks and balances in place (ie, Linus has the last laugh), but Alan controls the stable tree. This is not a good idea in my mind. I like the fact that Linus is employed by a company that has no immediate interest in the success or failure of Linux. It keeps Linus honest. Can we say the same for Alan?
Two things that this brings to mind:
1) Linux is inextricable from the GPL. Red Hat can succeed (and seems to be doing great, good luck to the stockholders!), but they're limited by the GPL. Yes, there are some software pieces that they can make proprietary, but they can't pre-empt Linus' approval for kernel changes. However, RH seems to put the vast majority (all?) of their software under the GPL anyhow, so it seems very appropriate that Alan Cox should be working there. In fact, it seems like the fastest way for changes to make themselves into the kernel, since RH sells / downloads so many copies...
2) I'm not convinced that Transmeta has no immediate interest in the success of failure of Linux. The strong impression I get is that Crusoe will run Linux as a base, whatever its transmogrifiability. I mean, isn't that why they hired Dr. Torvalds?
Yes, I have an IBM keyboard with a Trackpoint between the G & H keys. Unfortunately it has only two buttons (below the spacebar), but there is a passthrough port on the keyboard itself for a ps2 mouse. It is a traditional mechanical (loud) IBM keyboard that came with an old 486 (long since lost) and works great. IBM sells a newer version of this beast but I am not sure it is mechanical (then again, it isn't the "Quietkey" model): IBM PN 92G7461 (look under IBM Options).
Thanks for the info!
I remember the semester I spent at Univ of Michigan there were some keyboards in the undergrad library that had such pointer devices whose only fault was being membrane-based rather than mechanical.
Someone mentioned Adesso as making keyboards with the trackpoint, and that sounds good, but to me adesso is a mixed bag -- many of them are crap (IMHO), and some, like the one I'm clicking on right now, are supreme examples of the species.
Nat Lanza pointed out that Adesso make some keyboard with nice pointers, but here's my question:
Does anyone make a keyboard that has the following two characteristics?
1) Built-in trackpoint type erasor pointer, and
2) clicky, mechanical keystrokes?
If so, I would pay well for it. Up to, say, $100, which is high for a "regular" keyboard (even with a biult-in pointer) and way low for most of the *serious* ergonomic ones (As opposed to simple split arangements).
I'll even pay a finders fee ($10 fair?) to the first person who can send me information which leads to the arrest and capture of an appropriate 'board.
A breakup is not the answer. The only answer that I can think of is market forbiddance. What do I mean? I mean Microsoft needs to be banned from certain markets. Productivity software, "full featured" web browsers, and proprietary programming languages.
and
Productivity software.. that's one of MS' biggest markets. Why ban them from there? Because they abuse their market share. Look at Office 2000's cost. MS Word for DOS used to be less than $50. Now they can justify over $1000 for a productivity suite, while I can get StarOffice (bloated bugware it is) for $50, and I can get Corel's suite for about $200? I'm sorry, no. Not to mention the fact that it ties in with the OS on top of it. Those of you who whine that that's unfair, no - it's not. Charging you $1000 for an annoying paperclip is unfair.
Three disclaimers: 1) What I'm about to say is not a flame of RISCy Buiness -- it's simple disagreement.It sounds like he / she has thought about this and formed a strong opinion.
2) I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products in general; Microsoft Word pains me daily, not to mention Outlook. But I don't agree with the prevailing wisdom/. that MS is of needs an evil company full of cretins. I have a feeling that their programmers and even some of the management;) are probably good, smart people. I even have some firsthand evidence of this, but that's NHNT.
3) All analogies fail at some point. My widgets thing below is strained, but it's only for convenience...
Here's why I disagree with the idea of "market forbiddance for Microsoft (or any company in any field, actually, so long as the business is not coercive): it places a roadblocks of arrogance and unctuousness in front of the businesses that are punished, and creates a favored class of the businesses that are ruled "the good guys."
Like this: If you want to sell widgets, fine. If you're very successful, fine. If you start to sell proprietary widgets that only work with the widget-installers that you also sell, fine -- so long as there is no force of law or force requiring that people choose that combination. It's easy to imagine that if your combination is Good Enough for most people and (I know, the analogy is stretching, but bear with me in good humor, OK?) perhaps even become dominant.
Now, someone else could come along with an Open Widget that works with universally available tools, can be re-designed without violating any patents or trademarks, etc... but can't require that anyone give up the proprietary widget they're comfortable with and used to.
Do you really want a Widget Commitee that determines what tools people ought to have available to them, "for their own good"?
I don't find it logical that markets will benefit by being rigidified by regulation, no matter how well-intentioned. Five years from now (or even three years ago, for that matter!), for instance, how firmly will people stick to the often-promulgated view that Web Browsers and Operating Systems are wholly separable? See the Ask Slashdot topic of a month or so ago about what even constitutes an Operating System without bringing that pickle into the picture. Microsoft could (improbable to me, but hey? the future is uncertain!) decide to get into... I dunno, cars. Quite aside from their having no inherent *right* to make them, Committees of Top-Down Decision Making for All simply aren't suited to making decisions that blur boundaries, cross boundaries of conventional wisdom, etc.
By saying it's OK for the government to decide on what your organization's stucture is (or as this poster I'm responding to says, what markets you're allowed to enter), you're also implicity ceding the definition of the market to rule-making bodies. Even the idea of whether software is properly a product or a service is one that ought be left to those who deal with it.
In fact, now I think I've arrived at my central criticism of those who would say the DOJ has legitimate power to decide "Well, Microsoft, you can sell a word processor, and maybe this spreadsheet, but only on different sides of the state line. And this combination product here is just too damn convenient for people to buy and they might cause themselves some tangible but hard-to-establish harm... so you can't sell it, because it's too "full-featured." That is, they seem to share either a fear of ambiguity or too strong a belief in definitions-as-currently-understood.
5 years from now, Microsoft could be gone, dead and buried, whatever the DOJ says. 5 years from now, Microsoft and Windows Solutions and Enterprise Software of Redmond and and Redmond Software Magic could all be laughing all the way to the bank. Breakup, no breakup, market rules that favor some companies over others... market rules are like rules of physics -- they can be distorted by factors which exert influence over your area of observation, but they cannot truly be broken.
The bulk of the investment in "CD technology" that Ex Machina refers to is not in *players*, but in media.
Mnay middle-class, wealthy and even some poorer Americans (adjust categories as you have the knowledge to for other countries) have tens, hundreds or even thousands of CDs -- but few people have all that many players, at least not that many players if you take into account their projected lifespan. (In other words, though I have quite a few CD players in form of a portable player, a couple of CD ROM drives, an old component deck or two, and a DVD deck that plays CDs -- sheesh! -- none of them would I necessarily expect to least more than 5 years... so they're going to get replaced piecemiel anyhow.)
As long as new players continue to play the old media, my investment in CDs is not lost. I see every reason to think that future players-of-little-flat-discs will continue to work well with my Dead Milkmen CD from 1990.
I have to disagree (with the above as one reason) that DVD Audio is doomed to failure. In fact, it seems like a great media / format combo for several purposes. Potentially very long playback times, potentially far-beyond-human-threshhold audio quality, and quite a few compromise points in between.
Yeah, the encryption stuff is a pain, but I think this is a baby/bathwater thing. I'd like to see a DVD-Audio player in the Volvo 240 turbo wagon that I don't yet own...:) I'd like to listen to timeshifted talk radio on cross-country trips on DVD-RAM discs playing on my in-car player...
I am not entirely familiar with the US system of government - but if the US had a republican president and a predominantly republican congress and senate, wouldn't the US be in a similar situation right now?
Well, no. At least, not based on the current evidence.
The dichotomy between Democrats and Republicans is more complex (and less extreme) than this snippet implies... I don't have the deepest understanding of every nuance of it, far from it, but there are a points to consider about the Demopublicans / Republicrats.
Al Gore is one of the chief backers of national ID cards. He's not a Republican! In fact, a Republican Congress would probably help retard moves in that direction should he become President; they've rejected already movies for centralized government repositories of medical information which were essentially the same thing. (In fact, the silly/. terrible moves toward socialized medical care in the US a few years ago would, if encacted, have practically necessitated that kind of mass information gathering. Again, opposed fervently by Republicans.)
There are both Democrats and Republicans on both sides of this issue, I'm sure, but often with different motivations. Both of the not-so-different mainstream political parties in the US claim to be for the American Way, the Constitution, blah blah blah, but they do not agree (evidently!) on what this means. Republicans tend more toward conservativism in their interpretation of laws, including the Constitution (hence their designation as conservatives, though they tend to be conservative in money matters as well for the same reasons); Democrats tend more toward liberal interpretation of the rightful powers of government, hence their designation as Liberals and their spending patterns.
In both of these, I say 'tend' because neither side has a good, prudent spending record, and William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards, which publicize terrible spending projects, show that there are exceptions to both patterns.
I'm in neither one of those Parties, since (my opinion, natch) they're both basically composed of powerlusting estasblishmentarianists who spout off about trigger-issues fervently in public, but have in fact similar attitudes toward the public. There are smart people in or aligned with both of them, but that's no reason to join up as far as I can see.
Anyhow, my point is that I think if you are going to generalize one US political party as being in favor of national(ized) ID / information, it's *not* the Republicans, who tend to be more biased in the favor of individuals on issues like this. (Or at least no less biased -- there are data points all over the place and lots of interesting exceptions...)
Yeah, I think this is also a good idea. The problem with it is that search engines themselves can only supply answers based on statistics, not judgement. It would be useful to do a search engine search like you say, but the translator engine would have to have a good idea of what size chunks to divide the original text into.
Anyhow, no conflict here -- I think translation engines are going to have to use a number of strategies on every input text and see which ones make the most sense in the end, then applying the information that for text-chunk X, translation X-prime (or whichever) was the best translation. That way when phrasings similar / identical to ones in text-chunk X appear again, there is at least a reference to check against.
Some respondents have pointed out the difficulty in making translations contextually sensible... whether 'run' should be translated as 'execute,' rather than 'quick bipedal motion.'
I don't see an easy way to get out of this -- the needed 'world knowledge' that people have pointed out as necessary for this really is huge.
But (and this is why I mention slashdot's metamoderation), there is a certain amount of brute-forcing which could serve as a useful basis for creating improved context interpretation. For instance, let's say you visit this translation engine and choose some text for it to translate ("Mein Hund ist in dein Aktentasche," say). At the same time, there might be a few selections of recent translations requested by others, and the resultant translations, which could be shown to you based on the languages you know. (Not telepathically;) -- based on your own self-declaration, perhaps followed by a quiz to establish competency.)
The resultant translations could be joined with alternate tranlations / permutations, and each reader could (say), rank-order them, or choose the best one, as far as they can determine by context, etc.
And hopefully, the program can then be taught (wrong word, but I'm being figurative)that (anthropomorphically), something like "OK, if there are several computer-related terms in the translated text, like megabyte and power-supply, 'run' is likely to mean 'execute.' If 'run' however appears in a context which does not indicate computer use, and / or directly before the paired words 'away from,' it should probably be the bipedal-movement one. And if it's in front of a business-type name, like 'bank,' 'lemonade stand' or 'brothel,' then it is likely to mean 'manage' or 'administer."
In my (interested but ignorant layman's) understanding of AI translators, this is the kind of discrimination that they try to make, nothing out of the ordinary. But, because words can fit into so many categories, I think this sort of gradual, piecemiel accumulation holds hope of making it work better over the long haul. It would take too many linguists to account for all the wacky ways that words get used.
A lot of people posting here seem (despite misgivings about the specifics) to agree with the general thrust of the ADA / OSHA moves toward micro-regualtion of work environments.
I feel just the opposite, and here's why: by specifying "better" workplaces (certain fixed measurements / ratios or ranges of ratios / measurements for particular situations, say, or specifying the "correct" tilt of a keyboard) the government wraps a tourniquet about the leg of new ideas. (To forge an awful metaphor.) They also considerably raise the cost of entry to start-ups.
There are a lot of ergonomically awful products in the world -- keyboards that feel awful, chairs that suck. Why do they sell? Because in the short term, they often offer an acceptable solution, at least in light of the cost of other available solutions. I'm told that Hermann Miller Aeron chairs are very comfy; I'm promised one soon. The reason that not everyone is presently sitting in an Aeron is pretty simple - look at the pricetag!
And as others have pointed out, no amount of tables, graphs and statistics can account for the subtle things which make some people comfortable with desk Y and keyboard Z, and others not.
There's less incentive to work on radically *more* comfortable products if there is an accepted "Good Enough to Avoid Prosecution" level... has anyone tried a Twiddler keyboard? There's a learning curve (I'm no expert, but I like it) -- bureacratic rule-making tends to ignore things like this.
Government rule makers often do co-opt some good ideas (think the NHSTB invented the 3-point belt? Thank Volvo they didn't.), but there is a calcification which results when standards are legislated rather than allowed to bloom or die.
Some people counter this argument by saying that "We can't make compromises when it comes to safety!" Balderdash. I bet in 5 minutes you could think of a dozen examples where you've done exactly that, and with justification -- because a) perfect safety is an illusion and b) safety is just one of many factors acting on us. Have you ever gone 74 in a 70mph zone? Have you ever not worn a seatbelt on the way to the corner store? Have you ever biked without a helmet? Have you ever attended a concert without earplugs?
I don't like the term "safety Nazi" because I think it belittles the evil the Nazis perpetrated, but it would be accurate to call those who have been so labeled "safety fascists," because that is essentially is what fascism is all about: there is nominal private ownership of resources, but the disposition of those resources is in large part directed from above. "Sure, you own this small business. But unless you buy new (expensive) light fixtures, replace your old-style doorknobs with (more expensive) new-style ones, and install an elevator to the third floor for (potentially) diabled employees, afraid you can't run it without facing prosecution and possible fines. Oh, and by the way, you're guilty. Please direct all complaints to..."
SoftwareJanitor wrote: "...the K6-3 is a little more competitive in floating point and overall performance to the Celeron and Pentium II/III than the K6-2 and original K6 were. The K6-2 is, on the other hand usually significantly cheaper than even Celerons."
In fact, the prices of K6-2s are pretty amazing, considering. Last winter, having not followed the progress of PC processor speeds for a few years, I was blown away by the fact that an acquaintance of mine had a 400MHz computer with 128MB of RAM. (I think that memory is right - it wouldn't have already been 500, would it?). That computer cost around $2000. Now, pricewatch says I can get a 500MHz K6-2 for USD 89 plus shipping - so let's say $100.
Considering that my current processor, a K6-233 (truly) came out of a dumpster, more than doubling the processor speed for $100 sounds pretty nuts.
Price competitive is right. A Pentium II 450 (there is no 500 on pricewatch - is there one at all?) is $148 plus shipping, so let's say 160.
So for 60 dollars more and 50MHz less, you can own a genuine Intel chip from the official tailors of the emperor...
It's a pretty interesting take on the accuracies / inaccuracies of people's view of technology in S.America, has some points I hadn't thought about before.
S. America is not the entire South (one politicized word I think I'll adopt for now), but many of the things he says probably apply just as much to poor Africa, poor Asia, poor Eastern Europe, poor ex-SovUnion states, etc. (I say poor to distinguish from those parts of these places where relatively free markets have made this sort of topic less necessary, like Singapore, parts of South Africa, etc.)
Good one! But like I said, it was just a random sampling to demonstrate the point. And despite the objection in this same heirarchy by osu-neko, even if it's not technically accurate (I have no idea whether he pulled this figure out of his navel, or if it's right on), the number is still one that sticks anytime I see that particular cart... not that I'm obsessed with grovery carts, they just make a handy example of how we assign arbitrary connections. Just how brains work, I say.
OK: Let's say that you want to ship a package via Timothy's Overnight Delivery. (Me;) )
If I take your insurance money and invest it in a lucrative (or even semi-lucrative) venture, but keep enough in reserve to pay you off if I damage your shipment, guess what? It means I can take less in premium for the same size potential payout than if that money were going to just sit still and do nothing.
So if 5$ gets you $1000 worth of coverage (or whatever), from whatever carrier, the use the money's put to between when it leaves your hand (you're billed for the level of insurance coverage you select) to when you collect (in the event ot a mishap) is bookkeeping, one way or the other. If it doesn't affect your payout (as in, *all* of the money is invested and they won't compensate you for damage), I don't see what right you'd have to object.
Take your logic just a step further - would you make the same demand about the shipping fee itself you make about the insurance money? (that is, that all the money you put toward shipping *must* be used for shipping expenses)? Well, UPS has advertising, marketing, brown shorts, brown paint, probably bribes in some places etc etc to pay in order to effect their shipping system as a whole. Not to mention computer systems. If they invest some of the insurance money, it just seems like good business, and hopefully allows them to trim certain more visible costs.
Slashdot Mirror
For Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, other commerical) OSes, official version names are important to a degree which they aren't in the Linux world's enthusiastic, wacky developers and distro-suppliers, or in the BSD world's Castles of Smartness. That's because the name is as much (or more) a Marketing invention than a descriptive name.
..." To linux experts, this probably seems more marginal than it does to me, a long-time but basically shallow linux user. Most computer users stay even closer to the shallow-end than I do, venture to guess.
... you'd turn blue!
For Microsoft, the name of the product is an important selling point. The naming structure of MS products with the ProductName (Year) format is part of their marketing scheme, and they will work toward deadlines to make things come out in the appropriate year, or at least aim for it. (Remember the release of Windows 95?). I'm not bashing this approach - it actually makes some things slightly more intuitive. It's a lot easier to know "Well, I need to have Money 2000 to exchange data with my software at work." than "Well, I need to have kernel 2.1.5 and a certain c library installed
With Linux distribs, they're not limited by the marketing need for a certain number, though, or at least they needn't be. Mandrake certainly isn't!
They can release a major version (with what sounds like quite a few new features) as 7 quite legitimately. I'd also like to see the things you'd like to in an upcoming version, but there's no point in saying that Mandrake should wait until perfection is arrived at on all fronts before releasing. In fact, all those nice GPL'd things released by Mandrake will help everyone (including Mandrake) toward this goal faster than if Mandrake were to wait till it had independently solved all of the Unsolved Problems.
XFree 4 - what, early / mid 2000? It sounds great! (And I'm lucky enough to have no graphical needs unmet as yet with 3.6)
KDE 2 - still a while 'til it's really there, though it, too, sounds great.
the new Kernel - soonish, ditto.
mozilla - well, it keeps getting better, and is quite nice at present, if it meets your needs. But waiting for the "finished" product before releasing a new Mandrake
All that said, I must again praise the Mandrake (and underlying Red Hat (and underlying distro makers(and Alan Cox and other kernel developers (including Linus, as the colonel of the kernel's kernel)))) team for the greatness of Mandrake 6.1.
A friend of mine (brilliant but not into computers much) was amazed at how well put together Mandrake 6.1 was when she saw it at my place this week. "What are you running on your computer?" she asked. "That's Linux, with KDE."
"Whoah! I didn't think Linux was so slick!"
(Heavy paraphrase, but the spirit is correct.)
timothy
DGregory wrote about wanting a Palm that used USB instead of serial ... he's right!
....
;)
...
3 months ago, I thought I would never want / need a Palm (OS / format) computer. Since then, there have been quite a few situations in my work (copy editor / proofreader / copywriter / etc) when I said "Boy, I wish I had a little Palm-type thingie!"
After that, the tempation has grown and grown, and I find myself in the bookstore wishing I could look at the notes that I scrawled to myself about a certain author the night before, but on a napkin in my other pants
Then the Happy Hacker Palm Cradle comes out, removing the other major problem I had with the design of Palms, which is lack of a keyboard interface, which for me is much faster than writing by hand.
But I too want USB and not serial interface. So I've decided to wait for a Visor, and the Visor Happy Hacking Cradle, and (I guess) Linux kernel 2.4.3 or something.
Now this color stuff comes out, clouding the mix again
But for DGregory, a (better) Palm is available, with USB, unless you've got something against Visor. Better because the price is good, because an 8MB visor is cheaper than an 8MB palm, and because of the springboard modules. I have only played with others' of either variety, so take as many grains of salt as you'd like, but
timothy
Isn't it time we came up with an appropriate TLA for devices like the TIVO?
Digital VCR is an OK analogy, but since that means "Video Cassette Recorder," it's a little silly to describe a device based on a hard drive. "VR" unforuntunately has other connotations already, and besides would not be very descriptive. "Video Recorder" is all that would be left.
How about "DVR"? (Digital Video Recorder)
Or "CFT"? (Cool Toy)
timothy
It's true that for any given chunk of work, someone is going to pay for it.
However, given that the post office spends / will spend a bunch of time and money gathering information on our/your tab, is it fair that you're not allowed to see the fruit?
Sort of like if town funds were used to purchase and house some fine outdoor sculpture inside an old Quonset hut that belonged to a minicipality whose taxes were used to fund the purchase. For sensible completion of transaction those tax dollars were already used to begin, the town should open up the quonset hut so that the people who paid for it can benefit from the use of their money.
It wouldn't make sense for a town to build *most* of a bridge, would it?
And as far as TANSTAAFL, well, I'm all for the Post Office drying up and blowing away, or at least being opened to full and fair competition, but the government seems to enjoy maintaining a monopoly on first-class mail just fine, thanks very much. We could buy an awful lot of Bistro Meals by eliminating the coercive USPS altogether. The Constitution only says that the Feds are to *establish* post offices, right?
timothy
just because they weren't the ones you'd like to see posed against each other doensn't mean they were exactly the same.
...
If the debate were about the nature of gravity, would you want to have one scientist in favor, and one against?
I'm all for voluntary filtering of any kind, just not decisions from the top down to save us from ourselves
timothy
Well, ought not the government and quasi-government bodies you subsidize have their information in "nice electronic form," so we don't have to subsidize them more than we already do? (That is, by saving the work of mangling messy, difficult-to-understand data as collected into forms easily used by the folks at the Post Office
And laziness is an important human virtue -- at least if it is phrased as "the urge to avoid unnecessary work" rather than as "laziness."
It seems like the avoid-unnecessary-toil part of "laziness" ought to be integrated into the system, rather than only being the *delay* form of laziness. The people who would like to be able to read public information electronically / easily to me seem like the ones more in the right than the post office refusing to make their processes straightforwardly understandable.
timothy
Actually, it's not quite the same as what Red Hat and other distros do. Rather, it might be what they *do* but differently funded.
Because it is an enforced monopoly, any work done by the USPS belongs to the taxpayers who funded it. True, it's not funded out of the general funds, but the end result for anyone who sends 1st class mail in the US is that you pay a tax because you're forced to subsidize the USPS' competition with FedEx, Avery, etc. In 1997 (according to a newspaper column I read, so the figure is somewhere between 'straight out of my butt' and 'the revealed knowlege of an omniscient God'), they cleared 50 million in profit on 1st class mail.
So I don't buy the argument that a subsidized government agency is *not* obligated to share the data it collects unless there is a good reason. So revealing *personal* information is not good, but geographic I think ought to be revealed unless there is compelling reason why not.
Otherwise, the USPS reveals its nature as (and as I think it really is!) a mercantilist rather than capitalist institution.
timothy
I'd say better for the DOL or other government agency get a few visible slaps for waste than the long term effects of looking at the world in as static a way as they seem to at present. Bureacracy means "tyranny of the desks" (or at least I once heard a smart person say so), and any three-letter government acronym I expect to live up to that idea. But I'd rather an agency be sued and embarrased into somewhat better habits than figure that it's OK to tolerate sloppy, wasteful, myopic spending and other habits. I think even in the medium term, a judgment against the DOL would save far more than the judgement itself would cost.
Don't know, and welcome corrections, but that's my guess.
timothy
It's a dillemma that all government spending creates: how do you pick the suppliers who will provide your (toilets / cafeteria service / word processor) *fairly*?
...
... perhaps Messrs. Graham and Rudman would like to introduce a bill requiring that Free / free solutions be included in cost analyses for all Federal government computer purchases ...
To my mind, in the end there are only more fair and less fair ways for govt. agencies to choose suppliers, no truly fair ones.
Why? Because unlike a private company (which can buy MS software all they want, for all I care, and more power to 'em, if that's what makes sense), government agencies are also simultaneously supposed to be stewarding the tax dollars of the taxpayers whose money allows them to function. Care to buy a toilet seat marked up by the Pentagon? Probably not -- because that 'stewardship' function often gets lost in the mix, since accountability is low / anonymity hight / consequences indirect / proof elusive.
The Labor Dept. may have sound, thought-out reasons why they want MS products: they've probably come up with a middle- or long-term scenario which says that preserving existing compatibilities is the most economical solution for them. No analysis of that kind is untainted by the assumption set of those who create it, of course -- all I'm saying is that it's likely that their analysis people say "For the reasons X, Y and Z, we need to stick with Word and Excel, therefore with Microsoft." Possibly very shortsighted, but then concrete reasons are often more persuasive than statements about principle and potential. Also, if I can *prove* (on paper, anyhow) that my answer will save you $500 a year, while your solution merely provides the *potential* to save $5,000 a year
Arguments like "Shouldn't we be using open file formats like XML for all documents, so that the choice of application vendors becomes a fluid and mutable one?!" I bet don't get real far in the DOL.
And consider how strange it is that one arm of the US Fed. govt. is trying to chop up (or at least demote) Microsoft, while another says "Yep, these are the guys whose software we like!" Computer companies (hard and software) love Govt. sales, at least once the elaborate bidding and qualification process is over, because they know that once in the door, govt. bodies tend to re-order rather than switch vendors at the drop of a hat. Think Morton-Thiokol.
Shades of the two French senators
timothy
p.s. I think the Dept. of Labor should be jettisoned, anyhow. This here's just one more reason.
Well, depends what you mean by 'how well it works.' Mainstream Singaporean users cannot legally access many things that users in the US and many other places can. I think it's been discussed on Slashdot before, but I really don' know anything about the means used to implement the censorship, or if it's simply a matter of law, unlike what the ABA would like, which is prior review / approval of all materials. Someone from Singapore can probably enlighten us.
But you said how well it works
Or then again, maybe you just meant "How effectively are people actually blocked from the info. the government would like to block?" in which case I apologize.
timothy
Indomitus:
;) ).
I'm glad you read what I wrote, even if you oviously don't agree.
I'm not a "gun nut," myself, or at least I don't see myself that way. Not everyone in favor of gun ownership is a big fan of the emotionalist stuff the NRA puts out! (I myself favor the emotionalist stuff put out by JPFO
You raise a good point, too, about the *will* that armed resistance requires (with plastic forks, guns, or whatever). Hopefully the same force which would make people reluctant to take arms against their friends and neighbors in the military would also prevent said friends and neighbors from following orders against *them*! However, military training in part is designed to allow soldiers to do just such things at their commanders' order. Ordinary people are no more susceptible to moral qualms (the soldiers I know are mostly thoughful, honorable people in their private lives), but they have not been specifically trained to disregard those qualms in many situations.
Cheers,
timothy
1 - a high-powered sniper rifle is no match for a tank, if your goal is destructing a building. If the goal is resistance to armed tyranny, it may come out ahead because a rifle is concealable, holds many rounds of ammunition, can be wielded from a high window, etc. There is a reasonable threshold of deadliness which makes civilian arms worrisome to an invader. Ask the citizens of Switzerland, and each of the invaders who have conquered Switzerland lately.;)
2 - Actually, I think you can update the "We did it to England" story with "The Afgans did it to the Soviets." They got some US ordinance, but for the most part it was peristance and random small arms, along with local knowlege.
3 - Parsed a little larger, it's not guns per se to which the God-given right is, but self-defense. It's just that right now, guns are the most appropriate self-defense tools. That's why it was bad / unfair for non-Samurai to be denied sword ownership in feudal Japan. And peasants there were sometimes used as beheading targets, at the whim of Samurai, not all of whom subscribed to the legendary moral codes ascribed to them in comic books.
timothy
Two things that this brings to mind:
1) Linux is inextricable from the GPL. Red Hat can succeed (and seems to be doing great, good luck to the stockholders!), but they're limited by the GPL. Yes, there are some software pieces that they can make proprietary, but they can't pre-empt Linus' approval for kernel changes. However, RH seems to put the vast majority (all?) of their software under the GPL anyhow, so it seems very appropriate that Alan Cox should be working there. In fact, it seems like the fastest way for changes to make themselves into the kernel, since RH sells / downloads so many copies
2) I'm not convinced that Transmeta has no immediate interest in the success of failure of Linux. The strong impression I get is that Crusoe will run Linux as a base, whatever its transmogrifiability. I mean, isn't that why they hired Dr. Torvalds?
Maybe I'm silly, and await corrections
:)
timothy
Thanks for the info!
I remember the semester I spent at Univ of Michigan there were some keyboards in the undergrad library that had such pointer devices whose only fault was being membrane-based rather than mechanical.
Someone mentioned Adesso as making keyboards with the trackpoint, and that sounds good, but to me adesso is a mixed bag -- many of them are crap (IMHO), and some, like the one I'm clicking on right now, are supreme examples of the species.
Tim
p.s. Is your IBM for sale?!
Nat Lanza pointed out that Adesso make some keyboard with nice pointers, but here's my question:
Does anyone make a keyboard that has the following two characteristics?
1) Built-in trackpoint type erasor pointer, and
2) clicky, mechanical keystrokes?
If so, I would pay well for it. Up to, say, $100, which is high for a "regular" keyboard (even with a biult-in pointer) and way low for most of the *serious* ergonomic ones (As opposed to simple split arangements).
I'll even pay a finders fee ($10 fair?) to the first person who can send me information which leads to the arrest and capture of an appropriate 'board.
timothy
and
Three disclaimers:
1) What I'm about to say is not a flame of RISCy Buiness -- it's simple disagreement.It sounds like he / she has thought about this and formed a strong opinion.
2) I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products in general; Microsoft Word pains me daily, not to mention Outlook. But I don't agree with the prevailing wisdom
3) All analogies fail at some point. My widgets thing below is strained, but it's only for convenience
Here's why I disagree with the idea of "market forbiddance for Microsoft (or any company in any field, actually, so long as the business is not coercive): it places a roadblocks of arrogance and unctuousness in front of the businesses that are punished, and creates a favored class of the businesses that are ruled "the good guys."
Like this: If you want to sell widgets, fine. If you're very successful, fine. If you start to sell proprietary widgets that only work with the widget-installers that you also sell, fine -- so long as there is no force of law or force requiring that people choose that combination. It's easy to imagine that if your combination is Good Enough for most people and (I know, the analogy is stretching, but bear with me in good humor, OK?) perhaps even become dominant.
Now, someone else could come along with an Open Widget that works with universally available tools, can be re-designed without violating any patents or trademarks, etc
Do you really want a Widget Commitee that determines what tools people ought to have available to them, "for their own good"?
I don't find it logical that markets will benefit by being rigidified by regulation, no matter how well-intentioned. Five years from now (or even three years ago, for that matter!), for instance, how firmly will people stick to the often-promulgated view that Web Browsers and Operating Systems are wholly separable? See the Ask Slashdot topic of a month or so ago about what even constitutes an Operating System without bringing that pickle into the picture. Microsoft could (improbable to me, but hey? the future is uncertain!) decide to get into
By saying it's OK for the government to decide on what your organization's stucture is (or as this poster I'm responding to says, what markets you're allowed to enter), you're also implicity ceding the definition of the market to rule-making bodies. Even the idea of whether software is properly a product or a service is one that ought be left to those who deal with it.
In fact, now I think I've arrived at my central criticism of those who would say the DOJ has legitimate power to decide "Well, Microsoft, you can sell a word processor, and maybe this spreadsheet, but only on different sides of the state line. And this combination product here is just too damn convenient for people to buy and they might cause themselves some tangible but hard-to-establish harm
5 years from now, Microsoft could be gone, dead and buried, whatever the DOJ says. 5 years from now, Microsoft and Windows Solutions and Enterprise Software of Redmond and and Redmond Software Magic could all be laughing all the way to the bank. Breakup, no breakup, market rules that favor some companies over others
Ramble, ramble, ramble.
timothy
The bulk of the investment in "CD technology" that Ex Machina refers to is not in *players*, but in media.
... so they're going to get replaced piecemiel anyhow.)
... :) I'd like to listen to timeshifted talk radio on cross-country trips on DVD-RAM discs playing on my in-car player ...
Mnay middle-class, wealthy and even some poorer Americans (adjust categories as you have the knowledge to for other countries) have tens, hundreds or even thousands of CDs -- but few people have all that many players, at least not that many players if you take into account their projected lifespan. (In other words, though I have quite a few CD players in form of a portable player, a couple of CD ROM drives, an old component deck or two, and a DVD deck that plays CDs -- sheesh! -- none of them would I necessarily expect to least more than 5 years
As long as new players continue to play the old media, my investment in CDs is not lost. I see every reason to think that future players-of-little-flat-discs will continue to work well with my Dead Milkmen CD from 1990.
I have to disagree (with the above as one reason) that DVD Audio is doomed to failure. In fact, it seems like a great media / format combo for several purposes. Potentially very long playback times, potentially far-beyond-human-threshhold audio quality, and quite a few compromise points in between.
Yeah, the encryption stuff is a pain, but I think this is a baby/bathwater thing. I'd like to see a DVD-Audio player in the Volvo 240 turbo wagon that I don't yet own
timothy
Well, no. At least, not based on the current evidence.
The dichotomy between Democrats and Republicans is more complex (and less extreme) than this snippet implies
Al Gore is one of the chief backers of national ID cards. He's not a Republican! In fact, a Republican Congress would probably help retard moves in that direction should he become President; they've rejected already movies for centralized government repositories of medical information which were essentially the same thing. (In fact, the silly
There are both Democrats and Republicans on both sides of this issue, I'm sure, but often with different motivations. Both of the not-so-different mainstream political parties in the US claim to be for the American Way, the Constitution, blah blah blah, but they do not agree (evidently!) on what this means. Republicans tend more toward conservativism in their interpretation of laws, including the Constitution (hence their designation as conservatives, though they tend to be conservative in money matters as well for the same reasons); Democrats tend more toward liberal interpretation of the rightful powers of government, hence their designation as Liberals and their spending patterns.
In both of these, I say 'tend' because neither side has a good, prudent spending record, and William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards, which publicize terrible spending projects, show that there are exceptions to both patterns.
I'm in neither one of those Parties, since (my opinion, natch) they're both basically composed of powerlusting estasblishmentarianists who spout off about trigger-issues fervently in public, but have in fact similar attitudes toward the public. There are smart people in or aligned with both of them, but that's no reason to join up as far as I can see.
Anyhow, my point is that I think if you are going to generalize one US political party as being in favor of national(ized) ID / information, it's *not* the Republicans, who tend to be more biased in the favor of individuals on issues like this. (Or at least no less biased -- there are data points all over the place and lots of interesting exceptions
timothy
Yeah, I think this is also a good idea. The problem with it is that search engines themselves can only supply answers based on statistics, not judgement. It would be useful to do a search engine search like you say, but the translator engine would have to have a good idea of what size chunks to divide the original text into.
Anyhow, no conflict here -- I think translation engines are going to have to use a number of strategies on every input text and see which ones make the most sense in the end, then applying the information that for text-chunk X, translation X-prime (or whichever) was the best translation. That way when phrasings similar / identical to ones in text-chunk X appear again, there is at least a reference to check against.
timothy
Some respondents have pointed out the difficulty in making translations contextually sensible ... whether 'run' should be translated as 'execute,' rather than 'quick bipedal motion.'
;) -- based on your own self-declaration, perhaps followed by a quiz to establish competency.)
I don't see an easy way to get out of this -- the needed 'world knowledge' that people have pointed out as necessary for this really is huge.
But (and this is why I mention slashdot's metamoderation), there is a certain amount of brute-forcing which could serve as a useful basis for creating improved context interpretation. For instance, let's say you visit this translation engine and choose some text for it to translate ("Mein Hund ist in dein Aktentasche," say). At the same time, there might be a few selections of recent translations requested by others, and the resultant translations, which could be shown to you based on the languages you know. (Not telepathically
The resultant translations could be joined with alternate tranlations / permutations, and each reader could (say), rank-order them, or choose the best one, as far as they can determine by context, etc.
And hopefully, the program can then be taught (wrong word, but I'm being figurative)that (anthropomorphically), something like "OK, if there are several computer-related terms in the translated text, like megabyte and power-supply, 'run' is likely to mean 'execute.' If 'run' however appears in a context which does not indicate computer use, and / or directly before the paired words 'away from,' it should probably be the bipedal-movement one. And if it's in front of a business-type name, like 'bank,' 'lemonade stand' or 'brothel,' then it is likely to mean 'manage' or 'administer."
In my (interested but ignorant layman's) understanding of AI translators, this is the kind of discrimination that they try to make, nothing out of the ordinary. But, because words can fit into so many categories, I think this sort of gradual, piecemiel accumulation holds hope of making it work better over the long haul. It would take too many linguists to account for all the wacky ways that words get used.
Just thoughts,
timothy
A lot of people posting here seem (despite misgivings about the specifics) to agree with the general thrust of the ADA / OSHA moves toward micro-regualtion of work environments.
... has anyone tried a Twiddler keyboard? There's a learning curve (I'm no expert, but I like it) -- bureacratic rule-making tends to ignore things like this.
..."
I feel just the opposite, and here's why: by specifying "better" workplaces (certain fixed measurements / ratios or ranges of ratios / measurements for particular situations, say, or specifying the "correct" tilt of a keyboard)
the government wraps a tourniquet about the leg of new ideas. (To forge an awful metaphor.) They also considerably raise the cost of entry to start-ups.
There are a lot of ergonomically awful products in the world -- keyboards that feel awful, chairs that suck. Why do they sell? Because in the short term, they often offer an acceptable solution, at least in light of the cost of other available solutions. I'm told that Hermann Miller Aeron chairs are very comfy; I'm promised one soon. The reason that not everyone is presently sitting in an Aeron is pretty simple - look at the pricetag!
And as others have pointed out, no amount of tables, graphs and statistics can account for the subtle things which make some people comfortable with desk Y and keyboard Z, and others not.
There's less incentive to work on radically *more* comfortable products if there is an accepted "Good Enough to Avoid Prosecution" level
Government rule makers often do co-opt some good ideas (think the NHSTB invented the 3-point belt? Thank Volvo they didn't.), but there is a calcification which results when standards are legislated rather than allowed to bloom or die.
Some people counter this argument by saying that "We can't make compromises when it comes to safety!" Balderdash. I bet in 5 minutes you could think of a dozen examples where you've done exactly that, and with justification -- because a) perfect safety is an illusion and b) safety is just one of many factors acting on us. Have you ever gone 74 in a 70mph zone? Have you ever not worn a seatbelt on the way to the corner store? Have you ever biked without a helmet? Have you ever attended a concert without earplugs?
I don't like the term "safety Nazi" because I think it belittles the evil the Nazis perpetrated, but it would be accurate to call those who have been so labeled "safety fascists," because that is essentially is what fascism is all about: there is nominal private ownership of resources, but the disposition of those resources is in large part directed from above. "Sure, you own this small business. But unless you buy new (expensive) light fixtures, replace your old-style doorknobs with (more expensive) new-style ones, and install an elevator to the third floor for (potentially) diabled employees, afraid you can't run it without facing prosecution and possible fines. Oh, and by the way, you're guilty. Please direct all complaints to
timothy
SoftwareJanitor wrote: ...the K6-3 is a little more competitive in floating point and overall performance to the Celeron and Pentium II/III than the K6-2 and original K6 were. The K6-2 is, on the other hand usually significantly cheaper than even Celerons."
...
"
In fact, the prices of K6-2s are pretty amazing, considering. Last winter, having not followed the progress of PC processor speeds for a few years, I was blown away by the fact that an acquaintance of mine had a 400MHz computer with 128MB of RAM. (I think that memory is right - it wouldn't have already been 500, would it?). That computer cost around $2000. Now, pricewatch says I can get a 500MHz K6-2 for USD 89 plus shipping - so let's say $100.
Considering that my current processor, a K6-233 (truly) came out of a dumpster, more than doubling the processor speed for $100 sounds pretty nuts.
Price competitive is right. A Pentium II 450 (there is no 500 on pricewatch - is there one at all?) is $148 plus shipping, so let's say 160.
So for 60 dollars more and 50MHz less, you can own a genuine Intel chip from the official tailors of the emperor
timothy
It's a pretty interesting take on the accuracies / inaccuracies of people's view of technology in S.America, has some points I hadn't thought about before.
S. America is not the entire South (one politicized word I think I'll adopt for now), but many of the things he says probably apply just as much to poor Africa, poor Asia, poor Eastern Europe, poor ex-SovUnion states, etc. (I say poor to distinguish from those parts of these places where relatively free markets have made this sort of topic less necessary, like Singapore, parts of South Africa, etc.)
timothy
Good one! But like I said, it was just a random sampling to demonstrate the point. And despite the objection in this same heirarchy by osu-neko, even if it's not technically accurate (I have no idea whether he pulled this figure out of his navel, or if it's right on), the number is still one that sticks anytime I see that particular cart ... not that I'm obsessed with grovery carts, they just make a handy example of how we assign arbitrary connections. Just how brains work, I say.
timothy
OK: Let's say that you want to ship a package via Timothy's Overnight Delivery. (Me ;) )
If I take your insurance money and invest it in a lucrative (or even semi-lucrative) venture, but keep enough in reserve to pay you off if I damage your shipment, guess what? It means I can take less in premium for the same size potential payout than if that money were going to just sit still and do nothing.
So if 5$ gets you $1000 worth of coverage (or whatever), from whatever carrier, the use the money's put to between when it leaves your hand (you're billed for the level of insurance coverage you select) to when you collect (in the event ot a mishap) is bookkeeping, one way or the other. If it doesn't affect your payout (as in, *all* of the money is invested and they won't compensate you for damage), I don't see what right you'd have to object.
Take your logic just a step further - would you make the same demand about the shipping fee itself you make about the insurance money? (that is, that all the money you put toward shipping *must* be used for shipping expenses)? Well, UPS has advertising, marketing, brown shorts, brown paint, probably bribes in some places etc etc to pay in order to effect their shipping system as a whole. Not to mention computer systems. If they invest some of the insurance money, it just seems like good business, and hopefully allows them to trim certain more visible costs.
just thoughts,
timothy