Ireland is popular (or was a couple years ago) for offshoring jobs from the US to. Why? Lower tax rates and a reasonably educated pool of people who can do the job.
Sure, you might be able to get 5% tax in Bumfuck, Wherever, but if the average man on the street is illiterate and has no life skills, companies won't send jobs there.
If the tax savings in the US combined with not having shit employees outweighs the very-low tax rates and shit employees, they'll put jobs here. "Simple." It's not just about the lowest cost (as Toyota plants in the US should demonstrate).
Statistics are, absolutely, one of the most useful. I'd wager you can improve your performance and ability to "get it done" in pretty much any professional field with a mastery of statistical analysis: anything from field biology/naturalist to burger flipper, really.
No, it might not be immediately or daily pertinent, but if you've got a non-trivial data set, you've got enough data to find a trend. Being able to prove a trend is better (by far) than an "instinctual" hunch, observation, or crudely derived "educated guess".
I use some form of statistical analysis almost weekly in my work (sysadmin for a small company). It's never a big study or anything like that; it's rarely even much more than "hmm, we've got a pattern" and deriving a result, but just the same, it's useful. It's actually one of the few "educational" things I wish I'd put more effort into due to its regular pertinence.
I agree: close the loops. And by "close the loops" I mean "lower taxes so companies don't have to find the loops to jump through them".
Lower taxes on corporations and you do several things:
1) Reduce corporate 2) Give an incentive for businesses to retain operations in-country, leading to: * increased employment * increased tax revenue from the employees as well as the corporations (none of which would be gotten if the operations were elsewhere) * increase national financial independence, leading to a stronger (less volatile) market 3) result in a more diverse domestic market, due to there being more jobs available which don't involve flipping burgers, resulting in fewer people going to college for stupid shit like Assoc. degrees in Business Analytics and MSc in Comparative Studies.
Actually, "Ubuntu is based on Debian" much more closely than than you appear to be aware; a better analogy would be "Knoppix is based on Debian". Many Debian packages have the same package maintainers as the Ubuntu package equivalent, and more often than not, many Ubuntu packages come straight from Debian's sid/testing/experimental releases.
What is this "dependency/DLL hell"? You're going to run into that issue with any binary distribution with a fairly determined set of packages and their versions, but the alternative is far more grisly: infinite combinations of installed packages.
From an administrative perspective, it is much, much more difficult to maintain and control when you're dealing with more than one system. There's a reason why the "proper" way to administer (say) FreeBSD machines is to use a single ports tree for all your machines: doing it otherwise is going to lead to a lot of inconsistency.
That inconsistency starts to become non-trivial when you've got 5 different versions of 4 different libraries on which half a dozen different packages depend - on 5 different hosts. It may or may not cause problems, but my experience is that it causes problems more often than binary packages do - both logistically, in that it's much more time consuming to stay on top of - and strategically, in that you've got a lot more "gotchas" when it comes to planning future systems/environments.
The only inherent advantage I can see in source based distributions is that you're able to much more finely customize your system. This can be very useful, and allows you to stick with a very specific version of a program while upgrading the library (or vice versa). The times when this is necessary, however, is slim. And it creates a system environment which, with each change from "baseline" creates something all that much more difficult to effectively support due to the 'fringe' nature of your install and the diminished knowledge/familiarity with the combinations of software. You better damn well need that heavy customization if you use it in a production environment.
These books are not likely to sell all that well on account of their computer-generated nature. People will buy them expecting one thing (on an impulse buy), and get something else.
On the other hand, if a publisher were to undertake the same thing this company is BUT have their books be topical while being accurately targeted...
For instance, you could make a selection of books such as:
* The Thralls of Greece - Greece, Past and Present * Castles of the World * Indigenous Cultures of The World * Common Diseases * Plants of North America * Pocket Guide to British Columbia * Military Ships of the Victorian * History of the British Royal Family
And so on. Granted, it would take a fair amount of human selection to get a quality publication, but such a publication would likely sell pretty well. No, they'd not be in-depth but they would provide a good high-level topical look at things which do not get covered in such detail in, say, a typical encyclopedia. There are many books out there that do this already, yes. But those sell; why couldn't these?
There's only so much you can game. Sure, there'll be a "bump" in gaming at first once the marketeers figure it out, but as soon as the scientists notice this, we'll see bayesian type filtering looking for the drone accounts.
Sure, bots can fool some people, and there will eventually be some good ones. But it's just like spam: there are a lot of approaches to stop them at the gate, and if they get past it, most of them aren't that bright or humanly inconsistent.
I can't imagine that twitter won't have built-in anti-bot technology before long, either.
A person or group who figures out how to do one or the other (mainly the monitoring) well is going to make a lot of money. Wish I was better with programming and statistics (and had the time).
I had a friend who played quite a lot of Quake on a DX2 with (IIRC 8MB RAM, may have been 12 or 16 though, but I think it was 8). It ran at about 15fps - playable for him, at least. Caveat: he unloaded almost everything (custom "Quake only" cmd.com and the like) and ran the game in the "postage stamp" size "window". It was hilarious to watch: he would sit about 3" from the screen.
Yet the robot would still need to find the corners.
Whoever doesn't think this is amazing needs to pay attention to a young child sometime. This thing has more programmed dexterity than a 3-year-old: my daughter isn't stupid or anything, but I doubt she could neatly and consistently fold a towel or washcloth. Ask any parent: having young children "help" with the laundry ends up being more work.
Debian package manipulation tools are more advanced/mature and are able to gracefully deal with fringe conditions/scenarios than RPM. While the packages may be easier to make, the end result appears to be:
* Debian distros degrade much more gracefully over time/use. * Upgrades and non-standard (IE 3rd party repository) packages tend to not break things as severely. * The package system is somewhat more atomic, allowing for function even with broken packages. * You are able to (statefully) recover from source-based installs as well as non-packaged binary installs.
I used to hate Will Smith. Particularly around the time of Independence Day. Before Hitch, most of his stuff was crap, but Enemy of the State was quite (surprisingly) good, and the first acting I saw from the man that didn't agitate me.
Now, he's one of my favorites - not of all time, but certainly one of my favorite current actors. His movies have been predictably good for the past 5 or so years, and not only because they're "good movies":
Finding something on the web does not give you the legal authority to publish and redistribute it
At the same time, if he never agreed to the EULA (and they did not require him to do so in order to read the content) then he's probably over-reacting in deleting the data. What laws might he be breaking, here? I'm not aware of any - though he was certainly setting himself up for wanton litigation on account of the bad publicity.
This isn't wanton publishing of said data. It's a 'derivative work'. Think: someone canvasing an area for who has which kinds of grass is seeded in peoples' yards (and how well its growing) and selling that information.
Physical engineering (at least many of the fields) still use English units - inches, feet, yards, miles. Bridges, buildings, and most of what you see around you are
EE and manufacturing seem to use some of both, largely SI in small electronics and the like. But that isn't "every other field".
Honestly, it wouldn't be an issue either way: the problem is that the 'standard' isn't consistent across processing and storage (primary, secondary, etc.). Most architectures have used base-2 to represent these things because that is how the computer (binary) works, and using a base-10 method for representing it is a nonsensical abstraction as a result.
How would you know when they actually get good, on account of the hardware's crap performance?
I've yet to have an intel video chipset suspend properly - from the i8xx and i9xx series stuff and forward. The actual stability of the drivers weren't problematic while using them on X, but suspend hardly ever worked. (Ironically, the only time suspend worked consistently w/o resume causing all sorts of issues was about 6 years ago).
My wife has an AMD/ATI laptop. I've tried a dozen or so driver versions (Windows 7) and still have not gotten "full screen" video applications to work properly: they always hard lock the machine.
I've got onboard 3300 ATI video (can't recall the specific model name) on my board, but it suffers roughly the same problems. I sprung for a $25 nvidia card and called it good - in both Windows and Linux. (The onboard was not supported at all in Linux.)
I love AMD processors (price and consistency, largely) but they need to get their act together with drivers for their platform stuff. It'd go a long way to broader adoption.
Let's not over-characterize a company trying different ways to make profits as being "Big Brother". That term has a specific meaning related to the government, go read some George Orwell if you've forgotten exactly what it means. Yes, some companies may use slight-of-hand and other tricks to get more money out of you but it's far from being "Big Brother".
In 1984, there was no distinction of the Corporation. That's not really surprising: in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and more recently in countries like Venezuela, there has been no distinction between the Corporation and the State because the Corporation is, essentially, dissolved into the state.
In such a situation, the corporation does the state's bidding and works in collusion with said state. They might do it openly or they might do it covertly. With ATT and others effectively working on the government's behalf to push the monitoring society forward, I'd not say the claim that ATT is part of Big Brother is that far off. But the same can (should) be said for pretty much every media organization (specifically) and organizations which have large amounts of personal data on our everyday lives.
You forgot: there are also fewer bearded women in the Windows Mobile world than the iPhone world. (Or maybe they're perpetually-pubescent men. Hard to tell.)
Unfortunately for hard disks, their reliability has also been horribly variable in the past year or so. We've had an obscene number of 6-month-or-newer disks fail recently, and it's been a huge pain in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily true.
Ireland is popular (or was a couple years ago) for offshoring jobs from the US to. Why? Lower tax rates and a reasonably educated pool of people who can do the job.
Sure, you might be able to get 5% tax in Bumfuck, Wherever, but if the average man on the street is illiterate and has no life skills, companies won't send jobs there.
If the tax savings in the US combined with not having shit employees outweighs the very-low tax rates and shit employees, they'll put jobs here. "Simple." It's not just about the lowest cost (as Toyota plants in the US should demonstrate).
Statistics are, absolutely, one of the most useful. I'd wager you can improve your performance and ability to "get it done" in pretty much any professional field with a mastery of statistical analysis: anything from field biology/naturalist to burger flipper, really.
No, it might not be immediately or daily pertinent, but if you've got a non-trivial data set, you've got enough data to find a trend. Being able to prove a trend is better (by far) than an "instinctual" hunch, observation, or crudely derived "educated guess".
I use some form of statistical analysis almost weekly in my work (sysadmin for a small company). It's never a big study or anything like that; it's rarely even much more than "hmm, we've got a pattern" and deriving a result, but just the same, it's useful. It's actually one of the few "educational" things I wish I'd put more effort into due to its regular pertinence.
I agree: close the loops. And by "close the loops" I mean "lower taxes so companies don't have to find the loops to jump through them".
Lower taxes on corporations and you do several things:
1) Reduce corporate
2) Give an incentive for businesses to retain operations in-country, leading to:
* increased employment
* increased tax revenue from the employees as well as the corporations (none of which would be gotten if the operations were elsewhere)
* increase national financial independence, leading to a stronger (less volatile) market
3) result in a more diverse domestic market, due to there being more jobs available which don't involve flipping burgers, resulting in fewer people going to college for stupid shit like Assoc. degrees in Business Analytics and MSc in Comparative Studies.
Actually, "Ubuntu is based on Debian" much more closely than than you appear to be aware; a better analogy would be "Knoppix is based on Debian". Many Debian packages have the same package maintainers as the Ubuntu package equivalent, and more often than not, many Ubuntu packages come straight from Debian's sid/testing/experimental releases.
What is this "dependency/DLL hell"? You're going to run into that issue with any binary distribution with a fairly determined set of packages and their versions, but the alternative is far more grisly: infinite combinations of installed packages.
From an administrative perspective, it is much, much more difficult to maintain and control when you're dealing with more than one system. There's a reason why the "proper" way to administer (say) FreeBSD machines is to use a single ports tree for all your machines: doing it otherwise is going to lead to a lot of inconsistency.
That inconsistency starts to become non-trivial when you've got 5 different versions of 4 different libraries on which half a dozen different packages depend - on 5 different hosts. It may or may not cause problems, but my experience is that it causes problems more often than binary packages do - both logistically, in that it's much more time consuming to stay on top of - and strategically, in that you've got a lot more "gotchas" when it comes to planning future systems/environments.
The only inherent advantage I can see in source based distributions is that you're able to much more finely customize your system. This can be very useful, and allows you to stick with a very specific version of a program while upgrading the library (or vice versa). The times when this is necessary, however, is slim. And it creates a system environment which, with each change from "baseline" creates something all that much more difficult to effectively support due to the 'fringe' nature of your install and the diminished knowledge/familiarity with the combinations of software. You better damn well need that heavy customization if you use it in a production environment.
These books are not likely to sell all that well on account of their computer-generated nature. People will buy them expecting one thing (on an impulse buy), and get something else.
On the other hand, if a publisher were to undertake the same thing this company is BUT have their books be topical while being accurately targeted...
For instance, you could make a selection of books such as:
* The Thralls of Greece - Greece, Past and Present
* Castles of the World
* Indigenous Cultures of The World
* Common Diseases
* Plants of North America
* Pocket Guide to British Columbia
* Military Ships of the Victorian
* History of the British Royal Family
And so on. Granted, it would take a fair amount of human selection to get a quality publication, but such a publication would likely sell pretty well. No, they'd not be in-depth but they would provide a good high-level topical look at things which do not get covered in such detail in, say, a typical encyclopedia. There are many books out there that do this already, yes. But those sell; why couldn't these?
There's only so much you can game. Sure, there'll be a "bump" in gaming at first once the marketeers figure it out, but as soon as the scientists notice this, we'll see bayesian type filtering looking for the drone accounts.
Sure, bots can fool some people, and there will eventually be some good ones. But it's just like spam: there are a lot of approaches to stop them at the gate, and if they get past it, most of them aren't that bright or humanly inconsistent.
I can't imagine that twitter won't have built-in anti-bot technology before long, either.
A person or group who figures out how to do one or the other (mainly the monitoring) well is going to make a lot of money. Wish I was better with programming and statistics (and had the time).
I had a friend who played quite a lot of Quake on a DX2 with (IIRC 8MB RAM, may have been 12 or 16 though, but I think it was 8). It ran at about 15fps - playable for him, at least. Caveat: he unloaded almost everything (custom "Quake only" cmd.com and the like) and ran the game in the "postage stamp" size "window". It was hilarious to watch: he would sit about 3" from the screen.
Yet the robot would still need to find the corners.
Whoever doesn't think this is amazing needs to pay attention to a young child sometime. This thing has more programmed dexterity than a 3-year-old: my daughter isn't stupid or anything, but I doubt she could neatly and consistently fold a towel or washcloth. Ask any parent: having young children "help" with the laundry ends up being more work.
Debian package manipulation tools are more advanced/mature and are able to gracefully deal with fringe conditions/scenarios than RPM. While the packages may be easier to make, the end result appears to be:
* Debian distros degrade much more gracefully over time/use.
* Upgrades and non-standard (IE 3rd party repository) packages tend to not break things as severely.
* The package system is somewhat more atomic, allowing for function even with broken packages.
* You are able to (statefully) recover from source-based installs as well as non-packaged binary installs.
It's probably something to do with the fact that: eh, you can:
1) leave the site and have them keep all the data, while at the same time not be able to view your friends' profiles again
2) stay
Bill Pullman is also the best God our generation will ever know.
I used to hate Will Smith. Particularly around the time of Independence Day. Before Hitch, most of his stuff was crap, but Enemy of the State was quite (surprisingly) good, and the first acting I saw from the man that didn't agitate me.
Now, he's one of my favorites - not of all time, but certainly one of my favorite current actors. His movies have been predictably good for the past 5 or so years, and not only because they're "good movies":
Finding something on the web does not give you the legal authority to publish and redistribute it
At the same time, if he never agreed to the EULA (and they did not require him to do so in order to read the content) then he's probably over-reacting in deleting the data. What laws might he be breaking, here? I'm not aware of any - though he was certainly setting himself up for wanton litigation on account of the bad publicity.
This isn't wanton publishing of said data. It's a 'derivative work'. Think: someone canvasing an area for who has which kinds of grass is seeded in peoples' yards (and how well its growing) and selling that information.
Yet, looking at crime statistics, it's quite easy to see that:
a) his fears are legitimate
b) your lack of fear is irrational
That makes you stupid; it doesn't make him a racist.
Two things to look into:
rsync snapshots
rsnapshot, for a better rsync snapshot
Physical engineering (at least many of the fields) still use English units - inches, feet, yards, miles. Bridges, buildings, and most of what you see around you are
EE and manufacturing seem to use some of both, largely SI in small electronics and the like. But that isn't "every other field".
Honestly, it wouldn't be an issue either way: the problem is that the 'standard' isn't consistent across processing and storage (primary, secondary, etc.). Most architectures have used base-2 to represent these things because that is how the computer (binary) works, and using a base-10 method for representing it is a nonsensical abstraction as a result.
the intel ones are pretty darn good these days.
How would you know when they actually get good, on account of the hardware's crap performance?
I've yet to have an intel video chipset suspend properly - from the i8xx and i9xx series stuff and forward. The actual stability of the drivers weren't problematic while using them on X, but suspend hardly ever worked. (Ironically, the only time suspend worked consistently w/o resume causing all sorts of issues was about 6 years ago).
Granted
I'm sorry, how does that work?
My wife has an AMD/ATI laptop. I've tried a dozen or so driver versions (Windows 7) and still have not gotten "full screen" video applications to work properly: they always hard lock the machine.
I've got onboard 3300 ATI video (can't recall the specific model name) on my board, but it suffers roughly the same problems. I sprung for a $25 nvidia card and called it good - in both Windows and Linux. (The onboard was not supported at all in Linux.)
I love AMD processors (price and consistency, largely) but they need to get their act together with drivers for their platform stuff. It'd go a long way to broader adoption.
Forget Quake 4, try Quake 3. It's a painful experience on all but the lowest settings.
Comparably, a Pentium 66MHz with 8Mb of RAM could play Quake roughly as acceptably.
Let's not over-characterize a company trying different ways to make profits as being "Big Brother". That term has a specific meaning related to the government, go read some George Orwell if you've forgotten exactly what it means. Yes, some companies may use slight-of-hand and other tricks to get more money out of you but it's far from being "Big Brother".
In 1984, there was no distinction of the Corporation. That's not really surprising: in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and more recently in countries like Venezuela, there has been no distinction between the Corporation and the State because the Corporation is, essentially, dissolved into the state.
In such a situation, the corporation does the state's bidding and works in collusion with said state. They might do it openly or they might do it covertly. With ATT and others effectively working on the government's behalf to push the monitoring society forward, I'd not say the claim that ATT is part of Big Brother is that far off. But the same can (should) be said for pretty much every media organization (specifically) and organizations which have large amounts of personal data on our everyday lives.
(But yes, OP did use it wrong.)
Corporations are amoral (immoral ?) actors. They do what is best for their organization/corporation and everyone else be damned.
Ironically, this seems to mean that Corporations, were they real persons, would be voting Democrat, not Republican.
What do you want to bet that teenage geeks will be borrowing their moms' ID to sign up for this thing and make a little extra money?
From what I've seen, they'd probably at least be more likely to sound like women than your typical female geek.
You forgot: there are also fewer bearded women in the Windows Mobile world than the iPhone world. (Or maybe they're perpetually-pubescent men. Hard to tell.)
Unfortunately for hard disks, their reliability has also been horribly variable in the past year or so. We've had an obscene number of 6-month-or-newer disks fail recently, and it's been a huge pain in the ass.