...I've been learning the use (though not the spelling) of abacus and slide rule - true archaotech. Slide rules are likely to go the way of the dodo Real Soon Now (TM). As a math nerd, I'm also learning the theory - I can build one better than I can use one. A computerized emulator (ironic, no?) is available at: http://www.techweb.rfa.org/index.php?option=conten t&task=view&id=86&Itemid=114&limit=1&limitstart=3
I've done duty occasionally as an accountant/treasurer for various organizations, as well as property manager/stockist for several businesses. Bean counters have always been in demand.
I've done a fair trade on e-bay selling painted tabletop miniatures (toy soldiers). I'm pretty sure working full time I could have gotten on as an artisan - pottery decoration? illuminator?
Last but not least, I can carry a tune on about four or five woodwinds (sax, flute, recorder, tin whistle, little bit of clarinet). I'm not sure if I could've made it as an itinerant musician (maybe associated with a theater troupe), but it almost certainly would've appealed more than scratch farming.
All taken together, I'd bet on bean counter, though maybe travelling merchant..
OK, I'll be a mega-geek, and respond from the directors' commentaries on the series DVDs (yes, I did go through and listen to al the commentaries too...).
The first movie actually had everyone speaking divergent languages - though largely based on Egyptian/Sumerian, and dialectualized to hell and back through isolation-induced drift.
This is why the Daniel Jackson character is the translator/egyptologist/archaeologist from hell.
Well... when they went to series production, they just couldn't justify spending 1/3 of each 44-min episode with, "pardon? say again? could you point to the noun?". So they largely dropped the whole issue.
If you watch closely, the language issue does continue in a less-prominent form. The language of the Ancients is related to Latinates, the Asgard have a Germanic Ur-language, &c.
So, in short, they're employing a bit of artistic license and series-convention in allowing everyone to communicate fairly easily. Maybe some techno-babble would help buffer our suspension-of-disbelief (and probably introduce some additional plot capabilities), but short of a radical rewrite, the horse is out of the barn...
The Babbage Engine was, I believe, intended to be a general-puspose programmable compute device. Although never completed by its inventor (sometime in the 19th century), I believe several have been completed in the recent past. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/bab bage/in dex.asp
I grew up in a carrier environment. I was trained by old-line bell-heads. I have a profound allergy to anything that begins to whiff of a single-point-of-failure:) Bigger the impact, the more allergic I get.
Now if, on the other hand, you have a larger enterprise and can keep several forward-cached and forwarding instances of your authentication distributed in 2-3 locations - preferably with push-caching that allows reconstitution.... now then you have a solution that _I_ feel better about;) And before slashdot jumps on me, I _don't_ mean db-replicate synchronization, and i _don't_ have a particular implementation in mind - just "healthy" characteristics...
..and cut out your fire insurance, health insurance, and liability insurance. It'll save LOTS of money.
Just. Until. You. Really. REALLY. REEAALLY. Need it.
Same can be said of diversified and decentralized IT operations. Just wait until your central LDAP database goes up in flames, and it takes you a week to rebuild because there wasn't a warm standby (preferably in an off-site location).
Radical centralization to decrease costs is normally a recipe for radically increased dependence on a small number of critical assets - i.e. probability of failure rises somewhat, IMPACT of failure skyrockets. Because you haven't been paying your IT risk insurance premiums...
I don't want into the RT controls of my camera - they should just work. But my camera (Nikon 5000) has more bells and whistles than my Palm, and its UI is pretty lousy. I love the camera - don't get me wrong. It _has_ all the bells and whistles that I want and need for the mechanics of taking great pictures. I _would_ like an SDK to be able to better manipulate them, though, and to "enhance my end user experience".
My Nikon5000 has had numerous firmware upgrades - all to the good as far as I can tell. There are, however, a few things that I'd like to have fixed/improved (reset out of timer & macro mode after each picture in that mode - why?). There's also the issue of 3rd party plugins, like the remote that's been hacked for Nikons, and TTL flash interfaces that aren't.
I wonder how this will integrate with the sets of "erasable" "digital paper" folks have been working up? I know two of the issues there were: 1) mass production, and 2) I/O. This seems to fix #2 right up, and significantly ease #1.
Makes it that much closer to the "reloadable" newspapers I drooled over in Minority Report...
my brother-in-law has a congenital disability - nothing resembling standard fingerprints.
there is a substantial portion of the population that have lost fingers/hands through misadventure.
I have, as a hobby, craftwork that often leaves my thumbs sliced and cracked and useless for biometrics - the security office in my (biometrics-access-controlled) building looked at me really strangely when I told them I wanted to use my ring finger (which I don't abuse nearly as thoroughly)....and retinal scans are even worse - there're a million different ways that human variation can exclude people from use of retinal scans (or make retinal scans painful/damaging/unpleasant).
I don't have an underlying issue with biometrics as an identifier, but we need to have flexible, multi-modal systems that can readily accomodate the breadth of human variation.... but the next step is implantation of RFID chips with cryptographic identity and security management...
along with all the other presidentially-labelled "terrorists" in holding cells, immune to habeus corpus, undocumented, and without a reasonable expectation of fair and speedy trial. Oh, and this is "going on your permanent record" - hope you never need to board a plane again.
Welcome to the Patriot Act, Enemy Combatant, Ashcroft-driven, new-Supreme Court approved view of "uniting" the country...
And all the people who work for Haliburton, [...] and the welfare recipients whose checks are paid by Haliburton taxes, etc., etc., etc. But Haliburton won't be paying any taxes under a bush administration, now will they?
Anyway, I like target shooting, the ability to keep my hard-earned money, and being able to choose for myself whether or not I need health insurance and where I want to invest my retirement dollars. What I don't understand is why so many people have a problem with this. target shooting: OK, but please not with an AK-47 keep your money: OK, but please stop using MINE to buy bombers choosing health insurance: because your decision to opt out doesn't change the fact that moral and compassionate people will treat you when you're ill - opting NOT to have health insurance effectively pick society's pocket. Opting not to cover your children is child abuse, picks society's pocket, and saddles both society and your child with decades-long obligations. choosing retirement investment options: assuming this means social security private accounts... because we won't let those who choose poorly starve in their old age. because SS has enough fiscal problems (like being continuously raided) without slicing out a good chunk of its revenue.
BECAUSE IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT "ME ME ME"
To me, 'liberal' is quite often near-synonymous with with this definition: Someone who wants to tell me where to spend my money, um.. like the current round of 'conservative' protectionism? how to spend my money, like no-bid contracts awarded to haliburton? like making me buy bombers and battleships I don't want? where to work, like 'go soldiering in Iraq'? like, anywhere other than in a mosque? how to work, like tracking what you're borrowing from the library? like the redefinition of "management" for purposes of overtime? how much to work, you mean like relaxing the standards for required rest on interstate truck drivers? what I can and cannot own, like a right to privacy? and what I can and cannot do with my property. such as same-sex couples having survivorship rights on retirement accounts, mortgages, &c.?
Oh, you mentioned 'logging' in your post. I don't know where you are from, but here in Oregon I've personally witnessed a few big burly loggers in tears begging one of our Senators (you guess which one) to oppose unbalanced and extreme anti-logging legislation that put them out of work and threatened to put their children out of work and destroy the economic basis of their entire communities. I know a lot of japaneese whalers that have the same kind of issue. and the people who were making aerosols with CFCs in 'em also lost out on their jobs. Nuclear weapons designers too... Maybe, just maybe, those loggers should find a _new_ economic basis for their community, rather than whining (oh wait..) about the fate of logging. Maybe they should take up FORESTRY, or generate some eco-tourism industries (which has worked amazingly well in Costa Rica and Honduras). And maybe their children will have jobs. and their children, and their children...
On a personal note, my wife's grandfather was a millworker. It's shut down two of three lines and laid hundreds of people off. Her father was also a millworker, that mill is now closed. Was your great-uncle a buggy-whip maker too? have you figured out how to blame that on the liberals? Last I checked, global free trade was a CONSERVATIVE core value - and most of the mills have been outcompeted (what - free markets?) by low-cost overseas labor. The classic CONSERVATIVE, FREE-MARKETS response is to find a new economic basis in which you have greater competitive advantage.
I haven't got the full form handy, but these're the three dimensional equations for motion of fluids.. very elegant, very complete, and spawns a huge mass of special cases.
As a former Aerospace student, I just had to pitch for good-old N-S:)
erm. not quite right on the definition of median (which is a VERY useful measure - IMHO mode is the least useful...).
Median is a value such that half the values in the population are greater, and half are lower.
Such a value plays down the impact of extreme outliers (Bill Gates really changes the value of mean income, but doesn't much affect the median), which tends to show the "middle" of the pack. The mean can be unduly impacted by extreme outliers, such that a single very large or very small value can throw the mean entirely outside of the "meat" of the distribution.
So... for most social sciences or business applications, median actually makes the most sense as a good "summary value" for the data.
Slashdot Mirror
...I've been learning the use (though not the spelling) of abacus and slide rule - true archaotech. Slide rules are likely to go the way of the dodo Real Soon Now (TM). As a math nerd, I'm also learning the theory - I can build one better than I can use one. A computerized emulator (ironic, no?) is available at: http://www.techweb.rfa.org/index.php?option=conten t&task=view&id=86&Itemid=114&limit=1&limitstart=3
I've done duty occasionally as an accountant/treasurer for various organizations, as well as property manager/stockist for several businesses. Bean counters have always been in demand.
I've done a fair trade on e-bay selling painted tabletop miniatures (toy soldiers). I'm pretty sure working full time I could have gotten on as an artisan - pottery decoration? illuminator?
Last but not least, I can carry a tune on about four or five woodwinds (sax, flute, recorder, tin whistle, little bit of clarinet). I'm not sure if I could've made it as an itinerant musician (maybe associated with a theater troupe), but it almost certainly would've appealed more than scratch farming.
All taken together, I'd bet on bean counter, though maybe travelling merchant..
Distracting details.
The remainder is left as an exercise to the reader.
I live in VA. I travel to MD to buy a car, and pay MD state sales tax on that car.
I then bring that car back to VA and register it (so I can drive legally. I receive a tax bill for that car.
no. really.
OK, I'll be a mega-geek, and respond from the directors' commentaries on the series DVDs (yes, I did go through and listen to al the commentaries too...).
The first movie actually had everyone speaking divergent languages - though largely based on Egyptian/Sumerian, and dialectualized to hell and back through isolation-induced drift.
This is why the Daniel Jackson character is the translator/egyptologist/archaeologist from hell.
Well... when they went to series production, they just couldn't justify spending 1/3 of each 44-min episode with, "pardon? say again? could you point to the noun?". So they largely dropped the whole issue.
If you watch closely, the language issue does continue in a less-prominent form. The language of the Ancients is related to Latinates, the Asgard have a Germanic Ur-language, &c.
So, in short, they're employing a bit of artistic license and series-convention in allowing everyone to communicate fairly easily. Maybe some techno-babble would help buffer our suspension-of-disbelief (and probably introduce some additional plot capabilities), but short of a radical rewrite, the horse is out of the barn...
The Babbage Engine was, I believe, intended to be a general-puspose programmable compute device. Although never completed by its inventor (sometime in the 19th century), I believe several have been completed in the recent past.b bage/in dex.asp
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/ba
I grew up in a carrier environment. I was trained by old-line bell-heads. I have a profound allergy to anything that begins to whiff of a single-point-of-failure :) Bigger the impact, the more allergic I get.
;) And before slashdot jumps on me, I _don't_ mean db-replicate synchronization, and i _don't_ have a particular implementation in mind - just "healthy" characteristics...
Now if, on the other hand, you have a larger enterprise and can keep several forward-cached and forwarding instances of your authentication distributed in 2-3 locations - preferably with push-caching that allows reconstitution.... now then you have a solution that _I_ feel better about
..and cut out your fire insurance, health insurance, and liability insurance. It'll save LOTS of money.
Just. Until. You. Really. REALLY. REEAALLY. Need it.
Same can be said of diversified and decentralized IT operations. Just wait until your central LDAP database goes up in flames, and it takes you a week to rebuild because there wasn't a warm standby (preferably in an off-site location).
Radical centralization to decrease costs is normally a recipe for radically increased dependence on a small number of critical assets - i.e. probability of failure rises somewhat, IMPACT of failure skyrockets. Because you haven't been paying your IT risk insurance premiums...
fewer users -> fewer issues -> lower costs.
if it weren't for those pesky users...
I don't want into the RT controls of my camera - they should just work. But my camera (Nikon 5000) has more bells and whistles than my Palm, and its UI is pretty lousy. I love the camera - don't get me wrong. It _has_ all the bells and whistles that I want and need for the mechanics of taking great pictures. I _would_ like an SDK to be able to better manipulate them, though, and to "enhance my end user experience".
My Nikon5000 has had numerous firmware upgrades - all to the good as far as I can tell. There are, however, a few things that I'd like to have fixed/improved (reset out of timer & macro mode after each picture in that mode - why?).
There's also the issue of 3rd party plugins, like the remote that's been hacked for Nikons, and TTL flash interfaces that aren't.
I wonder how this will integrate with the sets of "erasable" "digital paper" folks have been working up? I know two of the issues there were: 1) mass production, and 2) I/O. This seems to fix #2 right up, and significantly ease #1.
Makes it that much closer to the "reloadable" newspapers I drooled over in Minority Report...
my brother-in-law has a congenital disability - nothing resembling standard fingerprints.
...and retinal scans are even worse - there're a million different ways that human variation can exclude people from use of retinal scans (or make retinal scans painful/damaging/unpleasant).
... but the next step is implantation of RFID chips with cryptographic identity and security management...
there is a substantial portion of the population that have lost fingers/hands through misadventure.
I have, as a hobby, craftwork that often leaves my thumbs sliced and cracked and useless for biometrics - the security office in my (biometrics-access-controlled) building looked at me really strangely when I told them I wanted to use my ring finger (which I don't abuse nearly as thoroughly).
I don't have an underlying issue with biometrics as an identifier, but we need to have flexible, multi-modal systems that can readily accomodate the breadth of human variation.
along with all the other presidentially-labelled "terrorists" in holding cells, immune to habeus corpus, undocumented, and without a reasonable expectation of fair and speedy trial. Oh, and this is "going on your permanent record" - hope you never need to board a plane again.
Welcome to the Patriot Act, Enemy Combatant, Ashcroft-driven, new-Supreme Court approved view of "uniting" the country...
And all the people who work for Haliburton, [...] and the welfare recipients whose checks are paid by Haliburton taxes, etc., etc., etc.
But Haliburton won't be paying any taxes under a bush administration, now will they?
Anyway, I like target shooting, the ability to keep my hard-earned money, and being able to choose for myself whether or not I need health insurance and where I want to invest my retirement dollars. What I don't understand is why so many people have a problem with this.
target shooting: OK, but please not with an AK-47
keep your money: OK, but please stop using MINE to buy bombers
choosing health insurance: because your decision to opt out doesn't change the fact that moral and compassionate people will treat you when you're ill - opting NOT to have health insurance effectively pick society's pocket. Opting not to cover your children is child abuse, picks society's pocket, and saddles both society and your child with decades-long obligations.
choosing retirement investment options: assuming this means social security private accounts... because we won't let those who choose poorly starve in their old age. because SS has enough fiscal problems (like being continuously raided) without slicing out a good chunk of its revenue.
BECAUSE IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT "ME ME ME"
To me, 'liberal' is quite often near-synonymous with with this definition: Someone who wants to tell me where to spend my money,
um.. like the current round of 'conservative' protectionism?
how to spend my money,
like no-bid contracts awarded to haliburton? like making me buy bombers and battleships I don't want?
where to work,
like 'go soldiering in Iraq'? like, anywhere other than in a mosque?
how to work,
like tracking what you're borrowing from the library? like the redefinition of "management" for purposes of overtime?
how much to work,
you mean like relaxing the standards for required rest on interstate truck drivers?
what I can and cannot own,
like a right to privacy?
and what I can and cannot do with my property.
such as same-sex couples having survivorship rights on retirement accounts, mortgages, &c.?
Oh, you mentioned 'logging' in your post. I don't know where you are from, but here in Oregon I've personally witnessed a few big burly loggers in tears begging one of our Senators (you guess which one) to oppose unbalanced and extreme anti-logging legislation that put them out of work and threatened to put their children out of work and destroy the economic basis of their entire communities.
I know a lot of japaneese whalers that have the same kind of issue. and the people who were making aerosols with CFCs in 'em also lost out on their jobs. Nuclear weapons designers too...
Maybe, just maybe, those loggers should find a _new_ economic basis for their community, rather than whining (oh wait..) about the fate of logging. Maybe they should take up FORESTRY, or generate some eco-tourism industries (which has worked amazingly well in Costa Rica and Honduras). And maybe their children will have jobs. and their children, and their children...
On a personal note, my wife's grandfather was a millworker. It's shut down two of three lines and laid hundreds of people off. Her father was also a millworker, that mill is now closed.
Was your great-uncle a buggy-whip maker too? have you figured out how to blame that on the liberals? Last I checked, global free trade was a CONSERVATIVE core value - and most of the mills have been outcompeted (what - free markets?) by low-cost overseas labor.
The classic CONSERVATIVE, FREE-MARKETS response is to find a new economic basis in which you have greater competitive advantage.
I haven't got the full form handy, but these're the three dimensional equations for motion of fluids.. very elegant, very complete, and spawns a huge mass of special cases.
:)
As a former Aerospace student, I just had to pitch for good-old N-S
I swear that line included a colon when I wrote it. And it included unordered list and list item elements too...
erm. not quite right on the definition of median (which is a VERY useful measure - IMHO mode is the least useful...).
Median is a value such that half the values in the population are greater, and half are lower.
Such a value plays down the impact of extreme outliers (Bill Gates really changes the value of mean income, but doesn't much affect the median), which tends to show the "middle" of the pack. The mean can be unduly impacted by extreme outliers, such that a single very large or very small value can throw the mean entirely outside of the "meat" of the distribution.
So... for most social sciences or business applications, median actually makes the most sense as a good "summary value" for the data.