what i've heard from sources within amazon was that they have only one gang of servers, all at the same physical location, with little if any provision for transferring the load to offsite servers, backing stuff up, etc.
and that it was giving them hell in trying to overhaul it into something sensible.
dunno how much of this is true, but i expect that they could be wiped out by a good trojan, or a local network outage.
i don't think they're as professional/paranoid as, say, MAE (which if the building had wheels, could be driven around with all the diesel they've got;)
Are you kidding? Drag and drop is more or less the GUI equivalent of pipes. What's wrong with that? (Admittedly, it would be nice to easily have a multi-step GUI pipe, but i'll take what i can get)
Futhermore, evidence that is acquired by private citizens is still (IIRC, IANAL) admissible, although if it was obtained illegally, they're liable for that.
What's really scary is that he might be able to claim protection under the DCMA!
-----
At any rate, isn't he obligated to distribute source to anyone, whether or not they go to his server? Source is customarily transfered over the net, true, but disks aren't exactly rare either.
While it's obvious that the 2nd amendment is flawed - insofar as nothing is absolutely perfect - I must disagree with you as to its continued utility.
Basically, I think that you're making the assumption that tools dictate behavior. Yes, while a gun's only purpose is to hurt people (it makes a lousy remote control or beer opener, but the ability of a gun to threaten is derived from its ability to harm), we exist in a world in which *people* decide to harm each other - guns become a tool. A very good tool, but they are still just a means to an end.
In order to accomplish your ideal (which I generally agree with, though I've been puzzling over the moral issues of suicide for years now) a dramatic shift in attitude would need to occur.
In a world without guns, but where people still behave as they do here, other means will be employed to harm people. This can run the gamut from nuclear/biological/chemical weapons to fists and clubs. Certainly people have killed one another in ages before the basic elements of firearms had been dreamed of.
So yes, guns can be considered to be an instrument of evil. The problem is that you won't have solved anything by removing that instrument - you will have merely effected the means chosen to achieve evil aims.
On a note more specific to the 2nd amendment, I feel that the reasoning, which I'll get into in a moment, is still valid. Basically the 2nd amendment is the check and balance of last resort.
Until we end up in the world without evil you wish for, we're stuck with this:
The government derives any and all authority it has, as well as any and all rights to exist from the consent of the governed.
Should this consent no longer generally exist, the people not only are within their rights, but have a moral imperative to overthrow the government. (note that it's very difficult for a minority to rebel in this case - at the least, the majority of the people must be indifferent, which was the case for a large part of the American Revolution)
Any government that is without the consent of the people, is willing to retain power in an immoral manner, by the use of force (or at least, this is a safe bet)
And so, in order for people to keep their natural rights in a situation in which force is being employed against them, their only serious recourse is going to be with opposing force.
It is unlikely that an oppressive, violent government will accept reasoned/non-violent arguments against itself.
And while it may be difficult to oppose such a government even by force, it cannot be considered impossible. Many countries do not have the will to turn on their own citizens so fully, nor do they wish to kill them all, due to the problems that arise when a significant part of the population is unable to help provide for other parts. (Yeah, there are lots of exceptions; someone insufficiently moral to accept that things ultimately rest with the people is probably not going to worry about these issues)
If you prefer a more polarized/Godwinian argument, would you prefer that the Jews: 1)Submit to the Nazis, since it would be evil to use guns to oppose them (even though the Nazis are already evil), or 2)Oppose the Nazis, since by performing one immoral act (killing) it can prevent other immoral acts from occuring
Me, I'd like no Nazis at all, but I don't count on it.
Well if you wanted to be really anal and efficient, you could build sunlight collectors that pipe light to the tank via fiber optics.
Set an engineer and a mathematician on the problem and you could probably end up with really high-efficency tanks that double as industrial art. Given as how a lot of cities require new construction projects to have art these days, this could be a nice way of saving money.
In fact, it is my understanding that most oil companies would *much* rather deal in things like plastics.
Personally, I don't recycle plastic b/c I'd rather store as much fresh petroleum as plastic (which can be recycled whenever we run out of oil in the ground) rather than waste it by burning the stuff.
A bit of research shows that if the Woz didn't invent sub-pixel anti-aliasing, he at least got a patent for it a long time ago (US Patent #4,278,972 - invented 1976, filed 1980, recieved 1981) His technique used a neat hack of the NTSC standard that's used for color TV in the US, because a color LCD panel would have cost an insane amount of money - assuming that they had been invented at that time.
Admittedly, anti-aliasing wasn't his particular goal, but he still did it (think Wrong Way Corrigan;)
So I think that I safely assume that you either: 1) meant to say that "Cleartype *IS* the same. As has been pointed out countless times." 2) or are totally clueless
Well, a lot of the Open Source philosophy comes from (imho) the Unix philosophy of 'many little tools working together.'
From that viewpoint it's weird to build tools that are like swiss army knives with a jillion functions. Instead, create smaller programs that do limited things but which work very well together.
What's weird is that this leads us ultimately to something like OpenDoc, which was a good idea, but got screwed up massively in the implementation.
Well the book starts out at MS, and all of the main characters are MS employees (who eventually leave).
What got me though, was that it described the MS campus as having a lot of woods and green space and crap. I moved to the area recently (I don't work for MS, thank god) and that hasn't been my impression at all. Just lots of cookie-cutter office buildings crammed together with creative names (like 'Building 28')
Just checking, but you are aware that this technique was developed by someone else about 20 years ago. (iirc it was the Woz)
If MS does any research at all, I can't imagine what it is. Bob is about the only thing I can think of that has MS's fingerprints all over it, and even that idea had been kicking around for a while (look at some of the old General Magic interfaces...)
Trust me, a totally capitalist country would be suprisingly unhealthy to live in for a number of reasons.
The US system is intended not to satisfy the dreams of businessmen, but to create the most hospitable environment for consumers. That it tends to achieve the former is more of a happy coincidence than anything else.
So with regards to monopolies, the thinking is that it is better for everyone when a number of companies compete against each other. When one company completely dominates a market it tends to stifle and progress that might be made due to the lack of competition. This can also be seen when a cartel of companies colludes to dominate a market.
Business practices such as these not only harm consumers, but they harm the entire economy because it is no longer advancing in response to market pressures - save for the most extreme ones. While any given monopolist might be many more times successful than the most successful business in a competitive market, it is not as successful as all of the businesses that might be competing in that market.
Monopolies are generally seen as a drag on the economy. MS might have created a lot of new jobs and might bring a lot of money into the US, but there's a very good chance that if multiple companies had ended up competing in the OS market much more money and jobs would be around.
Imagine living in a world where MS, Commodore, Apple, Be and others all fought to get your money and mindshare. We'd probably see a lot more happening in the computer world than talking paperclips.
Yes, but the government gets to decide (for some reason - most likely tax related) what kind of employment you're actually in, no matter what employers or employees might argue.
If the govt. says that the permatemp contractors are de facto employees, then that's what they end up being.
Having worked as a temp, I personally would side with the permatemps. Relatively few people, in my experience, worked as temps b/c they enjoyed it. Instead we wanted permanent jobs, with standard benefits packages, etc. For various reasons, these never materialized. Of all the many temps I know, I never heard of one getting a temp to permanent job that actually worked out.
Myself, I met the guy I currently work for while on a different job, but that's old fashioned networking. The agency never helped me out one bit, and I was too glad to be rid of them.
Oh I dunno - there's a goodly number of small and pirate radio broadcasters out there and with the proliferation of digital camcorders and non-linear editing systems (i mean heck - you could create a TV show with a nice camcorder and an iMac) there are probably tons of people that would at least like to give it a shot.
Additionally, I'd be perfectly willing to give money to someone that made a show I really liked if they need the money - though I'd be against someone who was in it for the money and not the art.
I could easily live without network tv (possible exception - the Simpsons). I mean, gee, if the networks went down, then maybe some shows that don't pander to wealthy demographic groups, that are aimed above the lowest common denominator, might show up. Maybe independents could put stuff on the air that's far better than the crap that the networks show year after year.
I'm all for having many small independent broadcasters with tens of thousands of shows instead of a handful of large networks. I guess I'll have to ignore ads more often. Thanks!
Ooh! You've got a slightly faulty assumption there. TeX is a typesetting language. You use it to define what things *are* and what things look like.
PageMaker and Quark, while they have 'styles' which function similarly, are largely compositing programs. Most of what they do revolves around where things are placed on a page and how they interact with other things.
Layout is not the same as typesetting, though dtp has been blurring the lines for some years now.
At any rate, AFAIK there aren't any good Unix layout programs. Framemaker is more typesetting-oriented than layout-oriented. That's why it gets used more often for books or other large bodies of similar-looking papers and such.
(and don't get me started on why the gimp isn't ready for prime time....)
What? Sosumi appeared *before* the infamous PowerMac 7100 (iirc) did. For those not in the know, Apple codenames all of their projects - Lisa and Macintosh were originally code names that stuck. My (large) Apple Extended II Keyboard was named 'Nimitz' because it's roughly the size of an aircraft carrier.
The 1st generation Power Macs were named after hoaxes. Piltdown Man, Sagan, and Cold Fusion. Sagan (or his lawyers anyway) took offense at the use of his name and demanded that it be changed, despite the fact that it was for internal use only and was never ever going to be made public by Apple if the lawyers hadn't brought it up.
So they changed it. To BHA - Butt Head Astronomer.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that it was Music, Movies, Microcode and High-Speed Pizza Delivery ;)
what i've heard from sources within amazon was that they have only one gang of servers, all at the same physical location, with little if any provision for transferring the load to offsite servers, backing stuff up, etc.
;)
and that it was giving them hell in trying to overhaul it into something sensible.
dunno how much of this is true, but i expect that they could be wiped out by a good trojan, or a local network outage.
i don't think they're as professional/paranoid as, say, MAE (which if the building had wheels, could be driven around with all the diesel they've got
Are you kidding? Drag and drop is more or less the GUI equivalent of pipes. What's wrong with that? (Admittedly, it would be nice to easily have a multi-step GUI pipe, but i'll take what i can get)
mp3? How quaint ;)
320Kbps mp2 for me. (what the hell - disk space is cheap and i only listen to 'em on the computer)
Futhermore, evidence that is acquired by private citizens is still (IIRC, IANAL) admissible, although if it was obtained illegally, they're liable for that.
Well, the joke for some time has been that the Orgasmatron was invented *years* ago, but that the inventor still hasn't made it to the patent office ;)
What's really scary is that he might be able to claim protection under the DCMA!
;)
-----
At any rate, isn't he obligated to distribute source to anyone, whether or not they go to his server? Source is customarily transfered over the net, true, but disks aren't exactly rare either.
Someone has called the RMS hotline, right?
While it's obvious that the 2nd amendment is flawed - insofar as nothing is absolutely perfect - I must disagree with you as to its continued utility.
Basically, I think that you're making the assumption that tools dictate behavior. Yes, while a gun's only purpose is to hurt people (it makes a lousy remote control or beer opener, but the ability of a gun to threaten is derived from its ability to harm), we exist in a world in which *people* decide to harm each other - guns become a tool. A very good tool, but they are still just a means to an end.
In order to accomplish your ideal (which I generally agree with, though I've been puzzling over the moral issues of suicide for years now) a dramatic shift in attitude would need to occur.
In a world without guns, but where people still behave as they do here, other means will be employed to harm people. This can run the gamut from nuclear/biological/chemical weapons to fists and clubs. Certainly people have killed one another in ages before the basic elements of firearms had been dreamed of.
So yes, guns can be considered to be an instrument of evil. The problem is that you won't have solved anything by removing that instrument - you will have merely effected the means chosen to achieve evil aims.
On a note more specific to the 2nd amendment, I feel that the reasoning, which I'll get into in a moment, is still valid. Basically the 2nd amendment is the check and balance of last resort.
Until we end up in the world without evil you wish for, we're stuck with this:
It is unlikely that an oppressive, violent government will accept reasoned/non-violent arguments against itself.
And while it may be difficult to oppose such a government even by force, it cannot be considered impossible. Many countries do not have the will to turn on their own citizens so fully, nor do they wish to kill them all, due to the problems that arise when a significant part of the population is unable to help provide for other parts. (Yeah, there are lots of exceptions; someone insufficiently moral to accept that things ultimately rest with the people is probably not going to worry about these issues)
If you prefer a more polarized/Godwinian argument, would you prefer that the Jews:
1)Submit to the Nazis, since it would be evil to use guns to oppose them (even though the Nazis are already evil), or 2)Oppose the Nazis, since by performing one immoral act (killing) it can prevent other immoral acts from occuring
Me, I'd like no Nazis at all, but I don't count on it.
Next Wednesday. Didn't you get the memo?
Well if you wanted to be really anal and efficient, you could build sunlight collectors that pipe light to the tank via fiber optics.
Set an engineer and a mathematician on the problem and you could probably end up with really high-efficency tanks that double as industrial art. Given as how a lot of cities require new construction projects to have art these days, this could be a nice way of saving money.
In fact, it is my understanding that most oil companies would *much* rather deal in things like plastics.
Personally, I don't recycle plastic b/c I'd rather store as much fresh petroleum as plastic (which can be recycled whenever we run out of oil in the ground) rather than waste it by burning the stuff.
the trick is that 'good battery' thing.
;)
personally, i'd like to see electric cars powered by giant tesla coils on the side of the highway
A bit of research shows that if the Woz didn't invent sub-pixel anti-aliasing, he at least got a patent for it a long time ago (US Patent #4,278,972 - invented 1976, filed 1980, recieved 1981) His technique used a neat hack of the NTSC standard that's used for color TV in the US, because a color LCD panel would have cost an insane amount of money - assuming that they had been invented at that time.
Admittedly, anti-aliasing wasn't his particular goal, but he still did it (think Wrong Way Corrigan ;)
There's a handy page at http://grc.com/cleartype.htm, and several /. discussions of the issue: here, here and here.
So I think that I safely assume that you either:
1) meant to say that "Cleartype *IS* the same. As has been pointed out countless times."
2) or are totally clueless
Well, a lot of the Open Source philosophy comes from (imho) the Unix philosophy of 'many little tools working together.'
From that viewpoint it's weird to build tools that are like swiss army knives with a jillion functions. Instead, create smaller programs that do limited things but which work very well together.
What's weird is that this leads us ultimately to something like OpenDoc, which was a good idea, but got screwed up massively in the implementation.
Well the book starts out at MS, and all of the main characters are MS employees (who eventually leave).
What got me though, was that it described the MS campus as having a lot of woods and green space and crap. I moved to the area recently (I don't work for MS, thank god) and that hasn't been my impression at all. Just lots of cookie-cutter office buildings crammed together with creative names (like 'Building 28')
Just checking, but you are aware that this technique was developed by someone else about 20 years ago. (iirc it was the Woz)
If MS does any research at all, I can't imagine what it is. Bob is about the only thing I can think of that has MS's fingerprints all over it, and even that idea had been kicking around for a while (look at some of the old General Magic interfaces...)
Trust me, a totally capitalist country would be suprisingly unhealthy to live in for a number of reasons.
The US system is intended not to satisfy the dreams of businessmen, but to create the most hospitable environment for consumers. That it tends to achieve the former is more of a happy coincidence than anything else.
So with regards to monopolies, the thinking is that it is better for everyone when a number of companies compete against each other. When one company completely dominates a market it tends to stifle and progress that might be made due to the lack of competition. This can also be seen when a cartel of companies colludes to dominate a market.
Business practices such as these not only harm consumers, but they harm the entire economy because it is no longer advancing in response to market pressures - save for the most extreme ones. While any given monopolist might be many more times successful than the most successful business in a competitive market, it is not as successful as all of the businesses that might be competing in that market.
Monopolies are generally seen as a drag on the economy. MS might have created a lot of new jobs and might bring a lot of money into the US, but there's a very good chance that if multiple companies had ended up competing in the OS market much more money and jobs would be around.
Imagine living in a world where MS, Commodore, Apple, Be and others all fought to get your money and mindshare. We'd probably see a lot more happening in the computer world than talking paperclips.
Yes, but the government gets to decide (for some reason - most likely tax related) what kind of employment you're actually in, no matter what employers or employees might argue.
If the govt. says that the permatemp contractors are de facto employees, then that's what they end up being.
Having worked as a temp, I personally would side with the permatemps. Relatively few people, in my experience, worked as temps b/c they enjoyed it. Instead we wanted permanent jobs, with standard benefits packages, etc. For various reasons, these never materialized. Of all the many temps I know, I never heard of one getting a temp to permanent job that actually worked out.
Myself, I met the guy I currently work for while on a different job, but that's old fashioned networking. The agency never helped me out one bit, and I was too glad to be rid of them.
Well, that study is absolutely right. I'm orange, and I rarely buy stuff. Most orange people are like that ;)
Oh I dunno - there's a goodly number of small and pirate radio broadcasters out there and with the proliferation of digital camcorders and non-linear editing systems (i mean heck - you could create a TV show with a nice camcorder and an iMac) there are probably tons of people that would at least like to give it a shot.
Additionally, I'd be perfectly willing to give money to someone that made a show I really liked if they need the money - though I'd be against someone who was in it for the money and not the art.
Cry me a river.
I could easily live without network tv (possible exception - the Simpsons). I mean, gee, if the networks went down, then maybe some shows that don't pander to wealthy demographic groups, that are aimed above the lowest common denominator, might show up. Maybe independents could put stuff on the air that's far better than the crap that the networks show year after year.
I'm all for having many small independent broadcasters with tens of thousands of shows instead of a handful of large networks. I guess I'll have to ignore ads more often. Thanks!
Funny how he doesn't discuss the downside to political parties, nor how a number of people were against the whole idea back in the 18th century.
(personally i can accept the idea of parties, but i hate that my taxes subsidize them)
Well... my apex dvd just arrived today. can't wait to set it up tonight.
anywho, check circuit city's website and you may be able to order one even if you can't in the retail stores.
Ooh! You've got a slightly faulty assumption there. TeX is a typesetting language. You use it to define what things *are* and what things look like.
PageMaker and Quark, while they have 'styles' which function similarly, are largely compositing programs. Most of what they do revolves around where things are placed on a page and how they interact with other things.
Layout is not the same as typesetting, though dtp has been blurring the lines for some years now.
At any rate, AFAIK there aren't any good Unix layout programs. Framemaker is more typesetting-oriented than layout-oriented. That's why it gets used more often for books or other large bodies of similar-looking papers and such.
(and don't get me started on why the gimp isn't ready for prime time....)
What? Sosumi appeared *before* the infamous PowerMac 7100 (iirc) did. For those not in the know, Apple codenames all of their projects - Lisa and Macintosh were originally code names that stuck. My (large) Apple Extended II Keyboard was named 'Nimitz' because it's roughly the size of an aircraft carrier.
The 1st generation Power Macs were named after hoaxes. Piltdown Man, Sagan, and Cold Fusion. Sagan (or his lawyers anyway) took offense at the use of his name and demanded that it be changed, despite the fact that it was for internal use only and was never ever going to be made public by Apple if the lawyers hadn't brought it up.
So they changed it. To BHA - Butt Head Astronomer.
;)