Yeah, I think when the grandparent hears "polymer" he pictures a styrofoam cup or some other petroleum-based plastic. Not, say, RNA. There's no reason to expect polymers to be any less degradeable than anything else.
Turns out that Micro Center not only is out-selling Wal-Mart in Linux systems...
Never having seen a Linux system there, this surprised me. R'ingTFA shows that the real quote was "the small chain sells more of its Linux software than Wal-Mart."
1) That doesn't exactly shock me.
2) We're talking 500-1000 Linspire daily sales worldwide, so these aren't exactly huge numbers, anyway. (What the hell kind of ERP software do they have at Linspire? How can they not have more accurate sales figures than that?)
3) Micro Center is far and away the best computer chain store, although I've found they routinely pull bait-and-switches that proabbly get into the zone of illegality.
Yes, and no. He doesn't say "Linux is for losers" but I would say "scathing" is a pretty fair description of "It's terrible...Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"
Anyway, interesting in regard to yesterday's debate on "Whimsical Comments In Code: Vital Human Right Or Proof Of Idiocy?" is:
Lok Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of networking gear, started out using Linux in its equipment but switched to OpenBSD four years ago after company founder Simon Lok, who holds a doctorate in computer science, took a close look at the Linux source code.
"You know what I found? Right in the kernel, in the heart of the operating system, I found a developer's comment that said, 'Does this belong here?' "Lok says. "What kind of confidence does that inspire? Right then I knew it was time to switch."
Instead of me calling up Gateway and saying "Hey my modem is fried, I know what I'm doing with computers, send me a new one" I have to go through an hour of pointless troubleshooting.
The problem is that if they listened to everyone who says "I know what I'm doing with computers!", they'd spend all day shipping out new computers to thousands of people whose cat knocked the power cord out of the outlet.
If we were talking about going back to a blank sheet of paper, your points would be valid. But Windows XP is already designed, completed and being sold around the world. We're talking about taking a finished product and backing functionality out of it. That's only going to introduce instability, especially since -- and this is the key point! -- why should Microsoft put effort into making it work?
Why would an average user want to remove an MS player? Well, for two possible reasons...
I'm sorry -- "an average user" keeps additional players around in case they're needed. They don't buy operating systems with reduced functionality to avoid hypothetical vulnerabilities. Linux desktop users are hardly average users, but they have no objection to default installations with eight different terminals and twelve text editors.
The reason nobody is buying the "reduced" XP is that Microsoft have gone out of their way to make it sound inferior.
Please note that Microsoft isn't the problem here -- the problem is customers who selfishly prefer software with more functionality to the crippleware the bureaucrats have decided that they ought to be using.
You need to come up with a scheme to punish users until they get in line. (Unfortunately, Windows users already have a pretty high tolerance for punishment.)
The public doesn't feel hurt. Most of the public don't know the difference between Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, QuickTime Player....
It's simpler than that! Even if people did prefer a player other than WMP -- why on earth would they want a version of Windows with it removed?
I've been saying from the begining that this whole plan is moronic. The EU is demanding that Microsoft make a product that no one could possibly want, that can only be less functional and stable than normal Windows and that Microsoft has every reason to make work badly! And every time I said so, Slashbots chime in with "Well, I'd want a version of Windows with WMP torn out!" We'll see...
Looking at the Wal-Mart site now, I only see Linspire preloads, not Lycoris. Maybe they used to have Lycoris systems -- the Linux world has so much vaporous hype that I lose track of what did and didn't actually happen.
In any case, if either of those distros has reached a large userbase, it's not visible to the rest of the Linux world. I'm inclined to keep Lycoris filed under "minor", Wal-Mart or no.
Not sure why everyone saying this is getting modded down -- not only is Lycoris an interesting distro that is in no way "major", I'm amazed to see that it has enough of a zealot following to suport moderation abuse.
1) Yes, the grandparent got the x- and y-axis confused in his post.
2) The point of the graphs is that the Windows server has a roughly 75% performance advantage over Samba on both systems. The different y-axes are used because one system is twice as fast as the other and using the same scale on both graphs would leave half of one graph empty. I would say the choice of scales is entirely correct.
3) The x-axis is labelled in numbers, not intervals. Excel graphs place tickmarks between the labels. You can complain about them, but the author didn't place them there. In any case, Samba doesn't look any better no matter where you put them.
4) Sorry, the whining about the red is just weak. In any case, this is another case of an Excel default being used, not a malevolent anti-Lunix conspiracy...
Gee, I wonder how well the "study" in the previous article (Open Office "better" than Word based on startup time) complies with this standard...?
At any rate, I disagree with his complaints about graphs. Choosing an appropriate y-axis scale obviously changes the impact of the presentation, but that hardly makes one scale more intrinsically "good" than another. In this case, Samba and Windows are compared on two different servers. One is twice as fast as the other, the software packages have similar relative performance and the graphs accurately reflect that. (Note: I'm only talking about the graphs. I have no idea about the technical merits of the underlying test, and don't care.)
Certainly, this is pretty thin gruel for the epitome of dishonest presentation. Let alone his complaints about the ethics of making the Linux curves red!
Regarding the x-axis -- I agree in the sense that not using round numbers is aesthetically unpleasing. (And, for heaven's sake, people -- use the same number of decimal places in each label! I grit my teeth whenever I see 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5,...) But there's hardly anything sleazy about kludgy spacing. It makes zero difference to the message.
How about his speech on Christian fundamentalists deliberately plotting to destroy the environment to bring on the Apocalypse? Hung primarily on an alleged quote from James Watt, which was not only fabricated but entirely ludicrous on its face?
Surely that knocks an ounce or two off Bill Moyers' pound...?
I would imagine that given the closer industry ties of human health-related research, there would be different, and perhaps greater, pressure to falsify data.
Like I said elsewhere -- in my experience, there is far less pressure to misrepresent your results (true falsification is very rare anywhere) in industry than in the publication-driven system of academia.
The thing is, real research is almost always less glamorous than the way you imagine it. A more typical scenario is this:
You're a fifth-year grad student. You've spent three years getting a series of experiments done, and it didn't quite work out well enough to publish. The alternatives are:
a) Stay in grad school, making a subminimum wage and going to the infirmary when you're sick, until you're 30.
b) Quit and become a sysadmin or a sales rep.
c) Fudge your data, get your degree and a postdoc and get the hell out of there, and hope things work better at the next stage.
Your "famous fraud" scenario only kicks in if you've gotten greedy and faked your way to a Nature cover. Otherwise, quite possibly no one will ever directly try to reproduce your work, and if they do and it doesn't pan out -- it's just one of those things. There's no shortage of work published in good faith that wasn't quite right.
It is unfortunate that such should occur, but I can see why it does happen. People want to be proven correct.
Well, that, but I think the biggest reason is that negative results are (almost always) unpublishable.
That's one of the many reasons I find research in industry so much more pleasureable than in academia. I'm given a problem, do the study and get paid whether the result is positive or negative, as long as it's right. There is so much less stress and so much less temptation to cut corners than when a negative result means "Goodbye tenure-track job, hello LSAT!"
It looks like the supply end of the curve is dropping as the demand curve goes up...a balance will soon have to be struck that will again restore tech workers to a thriving market in both America/Europe and India.
I don't see any issue of "MWHAHAHAHA" here -- the process you describe is how anyone with a shred of comprehension of economics understood this process was going to play out. There's plenty of work for everyone on the planet to do. Good for India, good for us!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I think when the grandparent hears "polymer" he pictures a styrofoam cup or some other petroleum-based plastic. Not, say, RNA. There's no reason to expect polymers to be any less degradeable than anything else.
Never having seen a Linux system there, this surprised me. R'ingTFA shows that the real quote was "the small chain sells more of its Linux software than Wal-Mart."
1) That doesn't exactly shock me.
2) We're talking 500-1000 Linspire daily sales worldwide, so these aren't exactly huge numbers, anyway. (What the hell kind of ERP software do they have at Linspire? How can they not have more accurate sales figures than that?)
3) Micro Center is far and away the best computer chain store, although I've found they routinely pull bait-and-switches that proabbly get into the zone of illegality.
Anyway, interesting in regard to yesterday's debate on "Whimsical Comments In Code: Vital Human Right Or Proof Of Idiocy?" is:
Not Xgrid -- I'm talking about something earlier.
The problem is that if they listened to everyone who says "I know what I'm doing with computers!", they'd spend all day shipping out new computers to thousands of people whose cat knocked the power cord out of the outlet.
The UK has particularly low thresholds for libel and slander claims. If one wished to sue a blacklister, the UK is definitely the place to do it.
IIRC, Steve made references to a spreadsheet-in-progress called "Grid". If this thing really is a spreadsheet, it's probably the same project.
That makes a defamation / slander / libel suit much easier, not harder.
"Y is the new X" is the new "Hello! 1993 called and they want their X back!"
If we were talking about going back to a blank sheet of paper, your points would be valid. But Windows XP is already designed, completed and being sold around the world. We're talking about taking a finished product and backing functionality out of it. That's only going to introduce instability, especially since -- and this is the key point! -- why should Microsoft put effort into making it work?
Why would an average user want to remove an MS player? Well, for two possible reasons...
I'm sorry -- "an average user" keeps additional players around in case they're needed. They don't buy operating systems with reduced functionality to avoid hypothetical vulnerabilities. Linux desktop users are hardly average users, but they have no objection to default installations with eight different terminals and twelve text editors.
The reason nobody is buying the "reduced" XP is that Microsoft have gone out of their way to make it sound inferior.
But -- it is!!! That's precisely what it is!!!
You need to come up with a scheme to punish users until they get in line. (Unfortunately, Windows users already have a pretty high tolerance for punishment.)
It's simpler than that! Even if people did prefer a player other than WMP -- why on earth would they want a version of Windows with it removed?
I've been saying from the begining that this whole plan is moronic. The EU is demanding that Microsoft make a product that no one could possibly want, that can only be less functional and stable than normal Windows and that Microsoft has every reason to make work badly! And every time I said so, Slashbots chime in with "Well, I'd want a version of Windows with WMP torn out!" We'll see...
In any case, if either of those distros has reached a large userbase, it's not visible to the rest of the Linux world. I'm inclined to keep Lycoris filed under "minor", Wal-Mart or no.
Not sure why everyone saying this is getting modded down -- not only is Lycoris an interesting distro that is in no way "major", I'm amazed to see that it has enough of a zealot following to suport moderation abuse.
The others are expensive curated services, and are hardly playing in the same league as the free services.
2) The point of the graphs is that the Windows server has a roughly 75% performance advantage over Samba on both systems. The different y-axes are used because one system is twice as fast as the other and using the same scale on both graphs would leave half of one graph empty. I would say the choice of scales is entirely correct.
3) The x-axis is labelled in numbers, not intervals. Excel graphs place tickmarks between the labels. You can complain about them, but the author didn't place them there. In any case, Samba doesn't look any better no matter where you put them.
4) Sorry, the whining about the red is just weak. In any case, this is another case of an Excel default being used, not a malevolent anti-Lunix conspiracy...
At any rate, I disagree with his complaints about graphs. Choosing an appropriate y-axis scale obviously changes the impact of the presentation, but that hardly makes one scale more intrinsically "good" than another. In this case, Samba and Windows are compared on two different servers. One is twice as fast as the other, the software packages have similar relative performance and the graphs accurately reflect that. (Note: I'm only talking about the graphs. I have no idea about the technical merits of the underlying test, and don't care.)
Certainly, this is pretty thin gruel for the epitome of dishonest presentation. Let alone his complaints about the ethics of making the Linux curves red!
Regarding the x-axis -- I agree in the sense that not using round numbers is aesthetically unpleasing. (And, for heaven's sake, people -- use the same number of decimal places in each label! I grit my teeth whenever I see 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, ...) But there's hardly anything sleazy about kludgy spacing. It makes zero difference to the message.
Why would anyone possibly decide which office suite is "better" by how many minutes it takes to install it?
If I understand correctly, what he's done is this:
1) Devised a theory
2) Tested it on a sample set of emails from Enron
3) Gotten poor results
4) Blamed the failure on Enron, for being just *too* evil for his theory to work!
Yawn. Maybe he should save the press release until he's gotten something to work.
Surely that knocks an ounce or two off Bill Moyers' pound...?
Like I said elsewhere -- in my experience, there is far less pressure to misrepresent your results (true falsification is very rare anywhere) in industry than in the publication-driven system of academia.
You're a fifth-year grad student. You've spent three years getting a series of experiments done, and it didn't quite work out well enough to publish. The alternatives are:
a) Stay in grad school, making a subminimum wage and going to the infirmary when you're sick, until you're 30.
b) Quit and become a sysadmin or a sales rep.
c) Fudge your data, get your degree and a postdoc and get the hell out of there, and hope things work better at the next stage.
Your "famous fraud" scenario only kicks in if you've gotten greedy and faked your way to a Nature cover. Otherwise, quite possibly no one will ever directly try to reproduce your work, and if they do and it doesn't pan out -- it's just one of those things. There's no shortage of work published in good faith that wasn't quite right.
Well, that, but I think the biggest reason is that negative results are (almost always) unpublishable.
That's one of the many reasons I find research in industry so much more pleasureable than in academia. I'm given a problem, do the study and get paid whether the result is positive or negative, as long as it's right. There is so much less stress and so much less temptation to cut corners than when a negative result means "Goodbye tenure-track job, hello LSAT!"
Whatever the merits of that point, it has zero to do with nano- anything.
I don't see any issue of "MWHAHAHAHA" here -- the process you describe is how anyone with a shred of comprehension of economics understood this process was going to play out. There's plenty of work for everyone on the planet to do. Good for India, good for us!