I think you overestimate the power and influence IBM has these days, and I believe you also misjudge their intentions.
IBM practically invented software patent litigation and threats thereof. If IBM were to go to court to invalidate Microsoft's patents, then who's to say Microsoft or a 3rd party wouldn't take this as an invitation to go to court to invalidate some of IBM's patents. It's a slippery slope that the major tech companies don't really dare to tread.
IBM didn't take SCO to court to valiantly defend the open source movement against a patent litigation attack on their flagship operating system. SCO sued IBM over breach of contract. SCO and IBM had worked together on a new operating system, until that project was scrapped. SCO pretty much bet the shop on this project, so their going out of business (at least out of the software business) is partially the result of IBM scrapping it. The lawsuit is entirely about SCO going out of business because of a failed business deal with IBM, and trying to get some damages awarded for it.
Everything else, including the involvement of Linux, is just a side-issue. SCO also seem to believe (not entirely without justification) that IBM's support for Linux has given this free unix on x86 enough credibility to destroy the market for SCO's main product: a proprietary unix on x86. They hope to prove that IBM transferred technology from their cooperation with SCO to their contributions to Linux, in order to get more money from IBM if they win their case. It's all about their breach of contract case against IBM, and getting money, I'm sure noone at SCO believes they'll make Linux go away and go back into the unix on x86 business.
20 years ago, IBM was considered the evil Big Brother of the tech business by people who would have been slashdot readers today. I don't really believe in evil computer companies, but I certainly don't believe in altruistic ones.
No civilized country would ever extradite their own citizens. I'm pretty sure the US wouldn't.
My country however regularly extradites citizens to the US without protest. Only recently, a citizen of Iraqi descent was extradited to the US on very vague suspicions of terrorist sympathies. No evidence was offered or required for his extradition request (it was supposedly a national security secret).
In the US, with its one-tier winner-takes-all system, only the largest two parties are represented. That doesn't mean the US doesn't have political extremists, they just either don't bother to vote (50% turnout as opposed to 80% - 90% in many western European countries), or choose what they see as the lesser of two evils.
The Republican-style American right is comparable to the European conservative parties when it comes to political and economic ideals, it just 'sounds' like right-wing extremism to Europeans because the rhetoric differs. Flag waving and 'God and Country' type rhetoric has become associated with right wing extremism in post WW2 Europe, while in the US it is just a harmless display of pride.
It seems that a higher percentage of children wasting their pocket money sending each other inane text messages on their mobile phones (0.20 per message) and chatting on MSN via cable or ADSL instead of dial-up gives countries a higher ranking.
Yet again, insane amounts of money are spent on things with very little substance but a high internet buzzword count.
Like last time, eventually investors will panic when they contemplate the very expensive pile of hot air they will have accumulated, and yet again the bubble will burst dramatically, sucking up billions of dollars that could have been invested in companies that actually make something and / or actually provide a service, and causing another European and North American recession.
Meanwhile, I'm investing all of my money in tulip bulbs.
I reported this bug months ago when I ran into it with Visa-RC1. It was still there in RC2. Apparently it is still there in the release, I have no way of knowing.
It seems to be associated with calculating the space remaining on the remote share you're copying to on the fly. I don't know how this works internally, but it seems that when the answer to this probe doesn't come, or doesn't come quickly, the shell freezes and you end up having to reboot. This problem specifically showed up any time I tried to copy a file larger than a few K to a samba share.
That is because you all have insane wage demands. A programmer is just an office clerk, not a scientist or even a real engineer (with some exceptiosn, but they don't tend to be java programmers).
It is bewildering to see you all complain so much. Even with 30% less a programming job in the US would still land you a far fatter paycheck than the same job would in places like Japan, France, Germany.
Humans are a social species. A person who is alone, not part of a tribe, has no chance to reproduce, and even very little chance of surviving very long.
For hundreds of thousands of years, not to worship the right God in the right way has caused people to become social outcasts at best, but more likely stoned, burned or bludgeoned to death. To be a fitting member of one's tribe and to worship in the same way as the majority of that tribe has usually protected an individual against such a threat to their reproductive success.
Hitting one or two could be a mistake, but several? It really sounds more like she was surfing for pr0n in the classroom, and using "teh spyware" as an excuse. And of course, Slashdot fell for it. Again.
Even if she intentionally showed porn to children, a more appropriate response would be to fire her. A felony charge for multiple counts of endangerment of children is very far over the top. Forty years in prison, for accidentally exposing some children to dirty pictures is just insane. That's a roughly equivalent to a murder conviction. It this, even if it were intentional, really as bad as murder?
my real point is- radio waves do not respect borders....
So what?
Ending analogue transmissions isn't intended as a punitive or repressive measure, it's meant to save a laughably small amount of money by ending a service that wasn't really used much anymore.
All these foreign channels are available on their laughably small (analogue) cable networks, free for them to watch on their teeny tiny little TV sets in their silly little houses.
Think of a division as the reverse of multiplication:
6 / 2 = 3, which means 3 * 2 = 6
With a division by 0, this does not hold:
6 / 0 = x, there is no possible x for which x * 0 = 6 X can be no real number
However, 0/0 is different:
0 / 0 = x, but no matter what you fill in for x, x * 0 = 0 X can be any real or imaginary number, 0 * x is always 0
This is why A / 0 has no solution, unless A = 0, then A / 0 does have a solution, an infinite number of solutions in fact: all numbers are a correct solution.
This professor didn't invent it by the way. He just seems to be the first to bother explaining it to school children.
No, I live in a western European country. The highest tax bracket (over 50%) starts at roughly 50,000 euro. That is not as much as it sounds like, as the cost of living here is far higher than it is on your side of the Atlantic. And that is just income tax, it's far from the only tax. For example there is a 100% tax (really no exaggeration) on the purchase of a car, plus a monthly tax on any motorised vehicle. The beauty is that poor people vote, but receive more money in subsidies and benefits than they pay in taxes.
You can't use stats like those to compare different countries, only to show trends in the same country, because you're not comparing the same measurements. The million on disability pay are not included in the unemployment stats released by the government. The students, living on student benefits and not working aren't included. House wives are not included. Part-time employees, who work more than two hours a week are not included. People over 65 are not included. In full-time equivalents, only half the people work. The other half works to support them and hardly sees any benefit from their tax money, because nearly all of it is spent on free stuff for poor people. Roads are in disrepair, healthcare is in disrepair, higher education is in disrepair.
Remember that in any sufficiently large group, half the people are dumber than average. When they turn up to vote en masse, the situation above is what you get.
Dutch isn't very similar to English at all in terms of difficulty to learn.
This may be counter-intuitive, but for a native English speaker, French comes much closer. Most English words (though not most of the most frequently used words) are derived from French. English syntax is also more like a simplified French than like the other Germanic languages. The only real difficulty is the pronunciation, since English has lost a number of phonemes common in either French or Germanic languages.
I'm sorry, but when the unskilled workers saw their jobs move overseas, did educated people such as you or me so anything more than shrug? If they had put in a little more effort in school, they wouldn't have been in that situation right? We basically told them not to whine and develop some new skills.
So today we, educated people, buy Chinese made affordable clothes, gadgets and doodads at very low prices, and we have an incredibly high standard of living as a result: our income buys us far more luxury than a simple techie could afford 50 years ago.
Now the tables are turned, and we discover that people in the 3rd world can actually do more than just unskilled labor. Should that surprise us? I say good for them. The happy time is over, we can either adapt to performing our magic for normal mediocre office drone wages, or learn some new skills. A software company in India may be able to write your software for us, but designing it is still best done here, in close contact with the customer, rather than a 12 hour flight and a half dozen timezones away.
You are correct. Every operating system since the dawn of time has had the goal of making maximum use of hardware. Windows is the only OS designed to do the opposite: make your hardware less useful than it could be.
You are incorrect. IBM, Oracle and Sun do the same with their hard- and software. Others probably do too. When you buy a mainframe, for example, it usually comes with far more CPUs than you paid for. A phonecall to IBM and a higher monthly payment are needed to activate them. Oracle only uses the number of CPUs you paid for.
It is common practice, both in hardware and in software, to develop just One, completely full-featured version of the product in order to cut cost, and sell 'crippled' versions at a lower price. They cripple your version, so that they can charge a business slightly more for a less crippled version, and enterprises an awful lot more for full featured versions. This process is much more cost effective than developing separate Basic- Home- Business- and Ultimate product lines.
Alternatively, they could sell only the 'Ultimate' version of the product at the cost necessary for breaking even in a certain amount of time. Enterprises would see their costs decrease dramatically, and home users wouldn't be able to afford the product.
If you don't like this practice, by all means use Linux, so that you, and only you, get to decide what features you enable.
You can't compare Venus and Earth. Earth is about one and a half times as far from the sun, and Venus has an atmosphere that is about 100 times as dense as that of the earth, and consists of about 95% carbon dioxide. In the case of the earth's atmosphere, it is a matter of 0.03 percent, three hundredth of a percent, rising to about 0.04%.
The infra red absorbtion by CO2 is dwarfed by that of water, which has absorbtion bands that largely overlap those of CO2. There is a CO2 effect, but comparing it to Venus is silly.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. It was pretty cold 12K years ago, as it was near the end of the last ice age. It is not correct that we have no data about global temperatures longer than 12K years ago. Data does get less fine-grained, the further you go back. For today we have the ability to measure the average temperature over an interval of seconds. This interval gets longer the further you go back. We know what the average temperatures in a region were like 100,000 years ago, but not the exact temperature in Atlanta at 12:00pm, October 1st, 100,004 BC.
1) Do we, as a species, WANT global temperatures to reach levels not seen since the Holocene period ?
The holocene period is the period since the last ice age and temperatures are still moving towards the maximum of this interglacial. The global temperatures have been gradually rising during the entire holocene. In some interglacials before the previous, exceptionally cold ice age, global temperatures were slightly higher than they are now, and lions and forest elephants were to be found in northern Europe. The end of the last ice age caused extinctions, as did its beginning.
The cycle of ice ages is almost certainly not over. This inter glacial period called the holocene will inevitably keep warming up, until it reaches a maximum, after which it will gradually cool down again until glaciers cover Northern Europe, Canada and Siberia again. If there is a human influence, it is certainly not the only one.
I am not one of these anti-environment right-wingers, but the debate on human-caused global warming is not just one of smart, responsible people vs stupid, conservative people. A causal relation was found between pollution -> acid rain -> dying forests and lakes; therefor reducing SO2 emissions has been noticeably improving this situation (there's a long way to go though). A mechanism was found linking CFC's with the hole in the ozone layer; therefor investing in reducing CFC emissions was a sensible thing to do, and we are already beginning to see the results. There is no clear mechanism for increased CO2 levels leading to climate change. Ice core samples have shown a relationship between CO2 levels and temperatures, but the causal relationship also goes the other way: a rise in temperature also causes an increase in CO2 levels through increased biological activity. In how far have CO2 levels been the cause and in how far the effect of global warming in the past?
Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs would very much disagree.
Are you sure? Apple isn't slowly moving away from the whole desktop business and focusing more and more on gadgets?
I think you overestimate the power and influence IBM has these days, and I believe you also misjudge their intentions.
IBM practically invented software patent litigation and threats thereof. If IBM were to go to court to invalidate Microsoft's patents, then who's to say Microsoft or a 3rd party wouldn't take this as an invitation to go to court to invalidate some of IBM's patents. It's a slippery slope that the major tech companies don't really dare to tread.
IBM didn't take SCO to court to valiantly defend the open source movement against a patent litigation attack on their flagship operating system. SCO sued IBM over breach of contract. SCO and IBM had worked together on a new operating system, until that project was scrapped. SCO pretty much bet the shop on this project, so their going out of business (at least out of the software business) is partially the result of IBM scrapping it. The lawsuit is entirely about SCO going out of business because of a failed business deal with IBM, and trying to get some damages awarded for it.
Everything else, including the involvement of Linux, is just a side-issue. SCO also seem to believe (not entirely without justification) that IBM's support for Linux has given this free unix on x86 enough credibility to destroy the market for SCO's main product: a proprietary unix on x86. They hope to prove that IBM transferred technology from their cooperation with SCO to their contributions to Linux, in order to get more money from IBM if they win their case. It's all about their breach of contract case against IBM, and getting money, I'm sure noone at SCO believes they'll make Linux go away and go back into the unix on x86 business.
20 years ago, IBM was considered the evil Big Brother of the tech business by people who would have been slashdot readers today. I don't really believe in evil computer companies, but I certainly don't believe in altruistic ones.
No civilized country would ever extradite their own citizens. I'm pretty sure the US wouldn't.
My country however regularly extradites citizens to the US without protest. Only recently, a citizen of Iraqi descent was extradited to the US on very vague suspicions of terrorist sympathies. No evidence was offered or required for his extradition request (it was supposedly a national security secret).
You are comparing apples and oranges.
In the US, with its one-tier winner-takes-all system, only the largest two parties are represented. That doesn't mean the US doesn't have political extremists, they just either don't bother to vote (50% turnout as opposed to 80% - 90% in many western European countries), or choose what they see as the lesser of two evils.
The Republican-style American right is comparable to the European conservative parties when it comes to political and economic ideals, it just 'sounds' like right-wing extremism to Europeans because the rhetoric differs. Flag waving and 'God and Country' type rhetoric has become associated with right wing extremism in post WW2 Europe, while in the US it is just a harmless display of pride.
It seems that a higher percentage of children wasting their pocket money sending each other inane text messages on their mobile phones (0.20 per message) and chatting on MSN via cable or ADSL instead of dial-up gives countries a higher ranking.
Yet again, insane amounts of money are spent on things with very little substance but a high internet buzzword count.
Like last time, eventually investors will panic when they contemplate the very expensive pile of hot air they will have accumulated, and yet again the bubble will burst dramatically, sucking up billions of dollars that could have been invested in companies that actually make something and / or actually provide a service, and causing another European and North American recession.
Meanwhile, I'm investing all of my money in tulip bulbs.
I reported this bug months ago when I ran into it with Visa-RC1. It was still there in RC2. Apparently it is still there in the release, I have no way of knowing.
It seems to be associated with calculating the space remaining on the remote share you're copying to on the fly. I don't know how this works internally, but it seems that when the answer to this probe doesn't come, or doesn't come quickly, the shell freezes and you end up having to reboot. This problem specifically showed up any time I tried to copy a file larger than a few K to a samba share.
That is because you all have insane wage demands. A programmer is just an office clerk, not a scientist or even a real engineer (with some exceptiosn, but they don't tend to be java programmers).
It is bewildering to see you all complain so much. Even with 30% less a programming job in the US would still land you a far fatter paycheck than the same job would in places like Japan, France, Germany.
Humans are a social species. A person who is alone, not part of a tribe, has no chance to reproduce, and even very little chance of surviving very long.
For hundreds of thousands of years, not to worship the right God in the right way has caused people to become social outcasts at best, but more likely stoned, burned or bludgeoned to death. To be a fitting member of one's tribe and to worship in the same way as the majority of that tribe has usually protected an individual against such a threat to their reproductive success.
Even if she intentionally showed porn to children, a more appropriate response would be to fire her. A felony charge for multiple counts of endangerment of children is very far over the top. Forty years in prison, for accidentally exposing some children to dirty pictures is just insane. That's a roughly equivalent to a murder conviction. It this, even if it were intentional, really as bad as murder?
my real point is- radio waves do not respect borders....
So what?
Ending analogue transmissions isn't intended as a punitive or repressive measure, it's meant to save a laughably small amount of money by ending a service that wasn't really used much anymore.
All these foreign channels are available on their laughably small (analogue) cable networks, free for them to watch on their teeny tiny little TV sets in their silly little houses.
It wasn't meant as a mathematical proof, it was meant as a simple illustration why 0/0 is a special case of division by zero.
0/0 is special, explained:
Think of a division as the reverse of multiplication:
6 / 2 = 3, which means 3 * 2 = 6
With a division by 0, this does not hold:
6 / 0 = x, there is no possible x for which x * 0 = 6
X can be no real number
However, 0/0 is different:
0 / 0 = x, but no matter what you fill in for x, x * 0 = 0
X can be any real or imaginary number, 0 * x is always 0
This is why A / 0 has no solution, unless A = 0, then A / 0 does have a solution, an infinite number of solutions in fact: all numbers are a correct solution.
This professor didn't invent it by the way. He just seems to be the first to bother explaining it to school children.
No, you are mistaken.
If you have a group of 4 people with an IQ of 40 and one person with an IQ of 200, 80% have a below average IQ.
No, I live in a western European country. The highest tax bracket (over 50%) starts at roughly 50,000 euro. That is not as much as it sounds like, as the cost of living here is far higher than it is on your side of the Atlantic. And that is just income tax, it's far from the only tax. For example there is a 100% tax (really no exaggeration) on the purchase of a car, plus a monthly tax on any motorised vehicle. The beauty is that poor people vote, but receive more money in subsidies and benefits than they pay in taxes.
You can't use stats like those to compare different countries, only to show trends in the same country, because you're not comparing the same measurements. The million on disability pay are not included in the unemployment stats released by the government. The students, living on student benefits and not working aren't included. House wives are not included. Part-time employees, who work more than two hours a week are not included. People over 65 are not included. In full-time equivalents, only half the people work. The other half works to support them and hardly sees any benefit from their tax money, because nearly all of it is spent on free stuff for poor people. Roads are in disrepair, healthcare is in disrepair, higher education is in disrepair.
Yes, the 80% to 90% turnout is a reality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout
Remember that in any sufficiently large group, half the people are dumber than average. When they turn up to vote en masse, the situation above is what you get.
Dutch isn't very similar to English at all in terms of difficulty to learn.
This may be counter-intuitive, but for a native English speaker, French comes much closer. Most English words (though not most of the most frequently used words) are derived from French. English syntax is also more like a simplified French than like the other Germanic languages. The only real difficulty is the pronunciation, since English has lost a number of phonemes common in either French or Germanic languages.
I'm sorry, but when the unskilled workers saw their jobs move overseas, did educated people such as you or me so anything more than shrug? If they had put in a little more effort in school, they wouldn't have been in that situation right? We basically told them not to whine and develop some new skills.
So today we, educated people, buy Chinese made affordable clothes, gadgets and doodads at very low prices, and we have an incredibly high standard of living as a result: our income buys us far more luxury than a simple techie could afford 50 years ago.
Now the tables are turned, and we discover that people in the 3rd world can actually do more than just unskilled labor. Should that surprise us? I say good for them. The happy time is over, we can either adapt to performing our magic for normal mediocre office drone wages, or learn some new skills. A software company in India may be able to write your software for us, but designing it is still best done here, in close contact with the customer, rather than a 12 hour flight and a half dozen timezones away.
You are correct. Every operating system since the dawn of time has had the goal of making maximum use of hardware. Windows is the only OS designed to do the opposite: make your hardware less useful than it could be.
You are incorrect. IBM, Oracle and Sun do the same with their hard- and software. Others probably do too.
When you buy a mainframe, for example, it usually comes with far more CPUs than you paid for. A phonecall to IBM and a higher monthly payment are needed to activate them. Oracle only uses the number of CPUs you paid for.
It is common practice, both in hardware and in software, to develop just One, completely full-featured version of the product in order to cut cost, and sell 'crippled' versions at a lower price. They cripple your version, so that they can charge a business slightly more for a less crippled version, and enterprises an awful lot more for full featured versions. This process is much more cost effective than developing separate Basic- Home- Business- and Ultimate product lines.
Alternatively, they could sell only the 'Ultimate' version of the product at the cost necessary for breaking even in a certain amount of time. Enterprises would see their costs decrease dramatically, and home users wouldn't be able to afford the product.
If you don't like this practice, by all means use Linux, so that you, and only you, get to decide what features you enable.
Technical merits aren't the only thing that matters.
If he's found guilty, I won't use ReiserFS again.
You can't compare Venus and Earth. Earth is about one and a half times as far from the sun, and Venus has an atmosphere that is about 100 times as dense as that of the earth, and consists of about 95% carbon dioxide. In the case of the earth's atmosphere, it is a matter of 0.03 percent, three hundredth of a percent, rising to about 0.04%.
The infra red absorbtion by CO2 is dwarfed by that of water, which has absorbtion bands that largely overlap those of CO2. There is a CO2 effect, but comparing it to Venus is silly.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. It was pretty cold 12K years ago, as it was near the end of the last ice age. It is not correct that we have no data about global temperatures longer than 12K years ago. Data does get less fine-grained, the further you go back. For today we have the ability to measure the average temperature over an interval of seconds. This interval gets longer the further you go back. We know what the average temperatures in a region were like 100,000 years ago, but not the exact temperature in Atlanta at 12:00pm, October 1st, 100,004 BC.
1) Do we, as a species, WANT global temperatures to reach levels not seen since the Holocene period ?
The holocene period is the period since the last ice age and temperatures are still moving towards the maximum of this interglacial. The global temperatures have been gradually rising during the entire holocene. In some interglacials before the previous, exceptionally cold ice age, global temperatures were slightly higher than they are now, and lions and forest elephants were to be found in northern Europe. The end of the last ice age caused extinctions, as did its beginning.
The cycle of ice ages is almost certainly not over. This inter glacial period called the holocene will inevitably keep warming up, until it reaches a maximum, after which it will gradually cool down again until glaciers cover Northern Europe, Canada and Siberia again. If there is a human influence, it is certainly not the only one.
I am not one of these anti-environment right-wingers, but the debate on human-caused global warming is not just one of smart, responsible people vs stupid, conservative people. A causal relation was found between pollution -> acid rain -> dying forests and lakes; therefor reducing SO2 emissions has been noticeably improving this situation (there's a long way to go though). A mechanism was found linking CFC's with the hole in the ozone layer; therefor investing in reducing CFC emissions was a sensible thing to do, and we are already beginning to see the results. There is no clear mechanism for increased CO2 levels leading to climate change. Ice core samples have shown a relationship between CO2 levels and temperatures, but the causal relationship also goes the other way: a rise in temperature also causes an increase in CO2 levels through increased biological activity. In how far have CO2 levels been the cause and in how far the effect of global warming in the past?
That's a bit too much honour for Charles Dickens
For thousands of years people lived entire lives without a computer. Maybe the guy just didn't need to browse the web or download mp3's.