Actually, a powerbook G3 might be better - with two batteries you can actually get close to 10 hours unplugged. The screen is still great, and you should be able to find one for close to $1000.
I've been trying to cancel my Verizon Wireless contract for several months now (I no longer use my cell phone) but they've refused to let me out of the contract without paying them $170.
After reading this article, I called them.
Me: Hi, I just read an article that said that people are stealing social security numbers out of your databases and posting them on the Internet. I wanted to know what personal information of mine you have in your database.
Verizon: Hold on, let me check
Verizon: We have your ssn, but not your date of birth or driver's license number.
Me: Can you remove my ssn from your database?
Verizon: Hold on, let me check...
Verizon: No, we need to have that number for credit reporting purposes.
Me: Well, I'm really concerned about identity theft....
Verizon: All I can offer is that we can close your account at no charge, or we can put a password on it.
Me: Well, I guess I'm going to have to close my account...
And in less than 10 minutes, I got around the early termination fee!
Complex systems are not chaotic, though they do depend on variation in order to adapt, or change
the equilibrium point.
Err... "complex systems" is a very very wide term (usually meaning "I can't understand how it works and I've
been looking at it for five minutes already!") and generally chaotic systems are treated as a subset of
complex systesm.?
Chaos, in the sense the review meant, is a phenomenon (namely stochastic behavior in a deterministic system). A chaotic system would, then, be any system that displays the phenomenon of chaos.
A complex system usually has some chaotic behavior within it, but the chaos usually not the interesting part to so-called "complexity researchers". Rather, people like to study the emergent structures that form as a result of the interactions within the system. I think the reviewer meant to highlight the distinction, while still acknowledging that there are relationships between the concepts of complexity and chaos.
Actually, if half of the 90 million people who don't vote because they thing Bush and Gore are a waste of time would vote for Ralph Nader, a third-party victory would be possible, and we might see some real change
Nader's really quite interesting because he's the only candidate to strongly oppose corporate funding of government, the only candidate to support universal health care, and the only candidate who really supports worker's rights.
If you're not familiar with his platform, you should at least give it a chance; it's much more reasonable than other third party alternatives.
Also, it's worth thinking about signing the petition to get Nader into the debates. Right now the Democrats and Republicans have created a system that prevents third parties from being heard in the national debates. They don't want a repeat of what happened when Perot was in the debates in '92. But third party candidates are critical in that they bring up issues that the other candidates don't want to consider. This is important regardless of whether you support Nader as a candidate.
Sorry to rant about politics, but I think Nader provides an alternative to the republicrats with which so many of the/. readers seem to be dissatisfied.
Your mention of Solitaire as a separate app is interesting. Solitaire is there primarily to teach people how to use the mouse very quickly by requiring clicking and dragging in an environment most can understand.
It's not clear what would be gained by separating it from the OS.
Typically in such a school, portfolios are reviewed by a panel of teachers and peers. The student has to defend the portfolio in order to graduate, much like defending a PhD dissertation.
There's a book about the Central Park East school system in NYC called The Power of Their Ideas. It's a really interesting read on ways of saving public education.
It seems that the law requires that anyone sending out commercial mail must mark it with an ADV header. It's easy to not be in violation of the law - just include this header, and allow people to opt out. You don't need to determine whether individuals live in Colorado - just do this for everyone.
Last spring I developed a site for a small business using OpenMarket's ShopSite. It sells for $495, and has a great backend for keeping track of products and orders. It's quite flexible, though it could be more flexible. Overall, it's a really good product - easy to use for the client, and I haven't had many callbacks for support, though they have done a substantial amount of business.
My company broadcasts streaming media over the net. One big disadvantage of QuickTime is that you can't run multiple encoders on one machine, and you need separate encoders for each bitrate much like the old RealServer.
The newer versions of Real can serve multiple bitrates off of a single encoder. So in terms of hardware, serving QT requires more of a financial outlay than Real.
Furthermore, Real streams now renegotiate at different bitrates while the stream is being played, rather than continually rebuffering. This is good for users on slow/inconsistent connections.
MS doesn't support, and probably won't support, some critical client platforms that we want to support (i.e. Linux), so we'd rather not use it.
If you're designing a large normalized database that includes address information for any purpose, commercial or not, you really don't want to include city, state, and zip for every address, because you get a lot of redundant data. Instead, you probably want to include only the zip code in your address, and have a zipcode/city/state lookup table that's separate. A problem arises when the first person to enter a particular zip makes a mistake. So it's desirable to have the lookup table pre-populated. It's easy to think of non-commercial databases that could benefit from such a table.
According to Microsoft, Linux has not affected sales of Windows NT..
This is not altogether accurate. While sales of NT are in fact increasing, this is largely due to an expanding server market in general. The interesting thing is that NT's share of the server market is not growing, while Linux is growing in market share (as the article correctly stated). The Linux market is growing substantially faster (proportionately) than the NT market.
NT is not yet losing market share to Linux, although other vendors (i.e. Novell) are. I suspect that in the near future this may change.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, a powerbook G3 might be better - with two batteries you can actually get close to 10 hours unplugged. The screen is still great, and you should be able to find one for close to $1000.
I've been trying to cancel my Verizon Wireless contract for several months now (I no longer use my cell phone) but they've refused to let me out of the contract without paying them $170.
After reading this article, I called them.
Me: Hi, I just read an article that said that people are stealing social security numbers out of your databases and posting them on the Internet. I wanted to know what personal information of mine you have in your database.
Verizon: Hold on, let me check
Verizon: We have your ssn, but not your date of birth or driver's license number.
Me: Can you remove my ssn from your database?
Verizon: Hold on, let me check...
Verizon: No, we need to have that number for credit reporting purposes.
Me: Well, I'm really concerned about identity theft....
Verizon: All I can offer is that we can close your account at no charge, or we can put a password on it.
Me: Well, I guess I'm going to have to close my account...
And in less than 10 minutes, I got around the early termination fee!
Err... "complex systems" is a very very wide term (usually meaning "I can't understand how it works and I've been looking at it for five minutes already!") and generally chaotic systems are treated as a subset of complex systesm.?
Chaos, in the sense the review meant, is a phenomenon (namely stochastic behavior in a deterministic system). A chaotic system would, then, be any system that displays the phenomenon of chaos.
A complex system usually has some chaotic behavior within it, but the chaos usually not the interesting part to so-called "complexity researchers". Rather, people like to study the emergent structures that form as a result of the interactions within the system. I think the reviewer meant to highlight the distinction, while still acknowledging that there are relationships between the concepts of complexity and chaos.
Nader's really quite interesting because he's the only candidate to strongly oppose corporate funding of government, the only candidate to support universal health care, and the only candidate who really supports worker's rights.
If you're not familiar with his platform, you should at least give it a chance; it's much more reasonable than other third party alternatives.
Also, it's worth thinking about signing the petition to get Nader into the debates. Right now the Democrats and Republicans have created a system that prevents third parties from being heard in the national debates. They don't want a repeat of what happened when Perot was in the debates in '92. But third party candidates are critical in that they bring up issues that the other candidates don't want to consider. This is important regardless of whether you support Nader as a candidate.
Sorry to rant about politics, but I think Nader provides an alternative to the republicrats with which so many of the /. readers seem to be dissatisfied.
Your mention of Solitaire as a separate app is interesting. Solitaire is there primarily to teach people how to use the mouse very quickly by requiring clicking and dragging in an environment most can understand.
It's not clear what would be gained by separating it from the OS.
There's a book about the Central Park East school system in NYC called The Power of Their Ideas. It's a really interesting read on ways of saving public education.
-Alex
It seems that the law requires that anyone sending out commercial mail must mark it with an ADV header. It's easy to not be in violation of the law - just include this header, and allow people to opt out. You don't need to determine whether individuals live in Colorado - just do this for everyone.
I can never remember the URL for things like the US State Department, so this comes in handy.
Last spring I developed a site for a small business using OpenMarket's ShopSite. It sells for $495, and has a great backend for keeping track of products and orders. It's quite flexible, though it could be more flexible. Overall, it's a really good product - easy to use for the client, and I haven't had many callbacks for support, though they have done a substantial amount of business.
-Alex
The newer versions of Real can serve multiple bitrates off of a single encoder. So in terms of hardware, serving QT requires more of a financial outlay than Real.
Furthermore, Real streams now renegotiate at different bitrates while the stream is being played, rather than continually rebuffering. This is good for users on slow/inconsistent connections.
MS doesn't support, and probably won't support, some critical client platforms that we want to support (i.e. Linux), so we'd rather not use it.
-Alex
If you're designing a large normalized database that includes address information for any purpose, commercial or not, you really don't want to include city, state, and zip for every address, because you get a lot of redundant data.
Instead, you probably want to include only the zip code in your address, and have a zipcode/city/state lookup table that's separate. A problem arises when the first person to enter a particular zip makes a mistake. So it's desirable to have the lookup table pre-populated. It's easy to think of non-commercial databases that could benefit from such a table.
This is not altogether accurate. While sales of NT are in fact increasing, this is largely due to an expanding server market in general. The interesting thing is that NT's share of the server market is not growing, while Linux is growing in market share (as the article correctly stated). The Linux market is growing substantially faster (proportionately) than the NT market.
NT is not yet losing market share to Linux, although other vendors (i.e. Novell) are. I suspect that in the near future this may change.