I would guess that Windows NT clients are the most valuable bits, as its just one machine word which goes up to number of licences the user has. This has made billions of dollars for Microsoft, so its not a once-off thing either.
Its not about pity at all, lest it be self pity. Perspective is achieved by getting outside your environment, not by remaining within it. I chose this term carefully as to not lead the reader into pre-conceived conclusions. Truly I say unto you, go to Africa and get some perspective. Then tell me if your happiness is damaged or uplifted.
You talking to me? Who are people like me? Do you mean the whiny socialists or the greedy capitalist? Where do you think I'm coming from?
Go to Africa. Learn what poor means.
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We as Americans are vaguely aware that we are better off that most people in the world. I thought I 'got it' before I travelled a bit. I know I could have been the one who posted how hard it is to raise a family in New York. No.
I tell you truly: a homeless person anywhere in the US is far better off than the average African. We are so steeped in wealth, what one person I met called "an embarrassment of riches", we have no perspective.
We truly do not understand what poor means. Not a clue. The average american roughing it in the great outdoors brings more stuff in his backpack than the average african ever owns.
No running water. No electricity (ha!). No roof. No car. No bus. No sidewalks or pavement. No shoes. Nothing.
Disease is rampant; 80% of the population is HIV positive in Malawi. The average age is 15.
If the world is getting you down, take a trip to Malawi. It will change your perspective.
Your point 1 implies a deep misunderstanding of market economics. OEMs ship windows because thats what the users demand. The customers do prefer windows. Cold hard fact.
point 2: window has been around since 1984. It is an extension of MSDOS which was from 1980. Anyway, I think most of the real progress in bringing linux to the masses has been done in the past 5 years. My opinion only.
point 6: I run mandrake and windows, mainly for xplatform coding. The UI for KDE3 just isnt there yet, nor GNOME or what-have-you. I rate the usability (for naive users) of Linux below Windows 3.0. And thats pretty sucky. In fact, usability and polish is the main weakness of Linux. Only honest usability testing with naive so-called-morons will get the OS past this hurdle.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe linux doesn't have viruses because nobody cares about linux? That maybe there is something you are missing in the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people who are more willing to pay for Windows than get linux for free? That maybe calling people who don't use linux morons isn't the best way to attract users? Linux does have potential, and has made great strides is a short time, but until the community gets past its attitude problem, it will be self-limited to a niche of geeky tech boys. Linux is too difficult for end users, and yes it has bugs. Rather than calling the users stupid for not being able to patch the code, why not get busy and fix the bugs, and do a little usability testing after.
Now that I have read more of Mills stuff, I am not so sure he and Puthoff are in sync. Mills ideas seem to eschew QM weirdness while Puthoff's stuff seems to embrace it.
Just the other day I was reading a paper by our favorite fringe scientist Dr Puthoff. Unlike most scientists, he gets to speculate about earth shattering possibilities with no basis but how valuable it would be if it was true. So he has a fun job. [He might get lucky one day and then we'll all be eating crow!]
In the paper he was talking about his new favorite topic, Zero Point Energy. ZPE is the natural energy of the vacuum that is required by QM to exist in order to satisfy the Uncertainty principle. Direct evidence of ZPE was shown a long time ago by a guy named Casimir, who has an effect named after him. Casimir reasoned that if you take two metal plates and put them next to each other with a small enough gap, parts of the frequencies of the zero point virtual particles wouldnt be able to 'virtually exist' because the gap was smaller than their wavelength, so the net effect is that the plates will be pulled together by the imbalance in virtual energy in the gap. And in fact this is well established fact.
Now the ZPE guys say you can somehow harness this effect to get energy. The most brilliant idea is that maybe what holds the electron in its orbit is actually zero point energy being tapped by the electron in an analogous way as the Casimir effect. The electron effectively creates a region too narrow for all the frequencies of the vacuum to fit, so there is an energy differential which exactly holds the electron in orbit (where classical theory states it will eventually spiral into the nucleus). It is possible that this is true; Quantum mechanics describes how the atom works, but not why it works that way. This theory gives an explanation for that behavior. I believe it is this same theory that hydrinos are based upon; if you can manipulate the field near the nucleus of the atom just so, you may be able to find an new viable energy state for the atom, and in the transition, get some of the ZPE for free. This is a very exciting theory. Its the kind that makes you say Nobel Prize to the mirror. And of course thats the kind of stuff that these sorts of scientists are drawn to. Its like crack for them. And Mr Puthoff job is entirely to entertain these sorts of ideas. Good job if you can get it!
It is completely obvious to me that you have never dealt with law enforcement. They don't do anything. Nothing. You can call them till the cows come home, but you won't get one useful bit of information from them. Its not like on TV at all. I don't want to believe it either, but in the past year I have dealt with the FBI and the police on several unrelated incidences including check and credit card fraud, a psycho stalker, internet fraud, and outright assault. In each case, they put up barriers which prevented me from making any progress. I now know that their whole job is to blow you off and get paid doing it.
hahahahahaa the FBI will never call you back. You've never dealt with them before have you? They do nothing whatsover. You've been watching too much tv.
Wow, they let a hot-head like you do air traffic control? Settle down now. Pilots are trained for these sorts of eventualities, and in fact do land at fields which have no ATC at all. In the event of total failure in conditions you suggest, the pilots would negotiate the landing sequence, and some would land at alternate airports. They would not panic, they would not argue. They would get the job done. Thats why they are the ones with final say in the air.
I am a private pilot. Even if ATC completely shut down aircraft would not start falling out of the sky. Airplanes are flown by pilots who are trained to operate the aircraft completely independently from air traffic control.
Think of air-traffic control as stop-lights for automobiles; when the stop lights go down, do traffic accidents start happening? No, you just get a little less efficient traffic flow (in some cases it gets more efficent...). Drivers know how to take turns just like they do at stop signs.
Analagously, pilots know how to take turns and fly safe just like they do at 90% of the airports in the world that don't have 24x7 air traffic control.
If the street lights start malfunctioning and giving wacky signals, the hazard of accidents might go up, but would not neccessariy lead to catastrophe. The ananology for aicraft is even stronger: if an ATC controller went mad and decided to purposefully cause an accident, he probably would not succeed since he would have to fool two pilots who are trained to be wary of ATCs command and to overrride them when they are in error.
Bottom line: airplanes are flown by pilots, not traffic controllers, so breathe easy.
Getting too caught up in programming models early in as students training will almost certainly inspire them to build complex systems with huge over-generalized models. Programming models should come later, after basic syntactical and functional issues are addressed. The only model fledgling students should learn is to keep it simple. Teach them to solve problems with the least lines of codes possible, and the simplest data structures.
I have tried out retinal scanners and I say they are not the wave of the future. First off, its like looking through a keyhole, which is fatiguing. Next, its grainy the same way a laser hologram is grainy [so its not just a problem of low resolution]. After using one for only about 5 minutes, I got one of the worst headaches I've ever had. My eyes hurt for hours afterwards, and were photo sensitive. I do not see this technology becoming mainstream for a very long time, but probably relegated to special uses similar to what holography and other 3d tricks are used for today.
For those who don't know, an N-gram is data structure which encodes the statistics of word order in a language. These are used to greatly improve the accuracy of language pattern matchers such as speech recognition. A typical speech recognizer might use a 3 word N-gram (tri-gram), which keeps track of all probable words which follow and thier likelyhoods. The probabilities are calculated by running terabytes of english text (books, magazines, internet chat boards) through a word counting program. Thus, "green eggs and" will get a very high probability for "ham", but low for "jam", so it can bias a sound that seems to match "mam" acoustically to the more likely linquistic match "ham".
Rock on man. My grandmother gave cases of Ramen. Now I hate Ramen, but I still love grandma. What freaks me out about most of the posts is how party oriented they are. Having to pay my way through school really set my priorities for me. I am not paying 18 grand(!!) a year of my own money to swizzle cheap beer out of a tin can!
Today Im young and retired, while my classmates are whining about being laid off in the slump. They should have laid off of the booze and drugs and got busy.
I went out and bought this book, read it, and say categorically that it is a waste of time. It looks like yet another boy genius has gone off the deep end full of himself. The first clue is how he keeps claiming big discoveries and how great he is. The big discovery is...simple algorithms make complex shit. The universe is complex. So the universe must be a simple algorithm. But of course, it probably looks like a Cellular Automata because thats what the author has been obsessively thinking about for twenty years.
There are hundreds of pages of automata output that are supposed to mean something; looks like a bunch of core dumps to me.
Oh, and he runs on and on. Most PHDs hide the irrelevance of their discoveries in diabolical symbolic swamps, but Wolfram does something new. The epitome of clarity from sentence to sentence even a child could follow, for a thousand pages saying absolutely nothing useful, but to slyly take credit for things done by others years ago.
The book could easily be a PR stunt; knowing that it will take sometime for people to read the book, they hope to cash in on the fame of the author before the jig is up.
It seems likely to me that the so-called uber hackers are really the police. Look at the the people involved in this: pimps and smut sellers and Gambino's [and somehow Kevin Mitnik]. The mobsters were caught in a sting when they tried to "muscle-in" on the phone racket. They could only have been caught if the Law knew what was going on.
Last time I went to Vegas, it was much cleaned up from several years ago. Almost no porn and fewer hooker adds. Used to be you couldnt see the sidewalk for them. I say the police did it by jamming the unsavory's phones.
While I havent done it myself, I worked with others that have, and seen success and catastrophe. Whatever you do, don't hire somebody who is going to hedge the truth about progress. Ive seen projects completely cave in when the found out that their oversees components were months behind schedule, but the managers lied and said everything was going great. Remember they may not have the same American get-it-done attitude you have. Also, make sure they have the same scheduling paradigm you have; for some reason a lot of people think that estimating a schedule means padding by tenfold, others think it means come up with the shortest conceivable timeline to please the boss.
Yes PR firms can use internet as a way to anonymously persuade people to believe what their clients want them to believe. The glorious thing is, you can to! In the past, all they had to do influence an editor, or buy some adspace. Today, they have to influence everyone.
My opinion is this: it is unethical to try to convince people of things that you yourself believe are untrue, but that you benefit from. Ye old biblical false witness. If you truly believe something, there is nothing wrong with paying a professional writer to make your views clear. So let them spend their money.
All you have to do is hone your own writing skills and reposte vigorously.
Slashdot Mirror
I would guess that Windows NT clients are the most valuable bits, as its just one machine word which goes up to number of licences the user has. This has made billions of dollars for Microsoft, so its not a once-off thing either.
There is a prototype called Mipad that does exactly this!
download and unzip the video from the mipad link
I could only find a zipped copy of the video, but its worth watching.
Its not about pity at all, lest it be self pity. Perspective is achieved by getting outside your environment, not by remaining within it. I chose this term carefully as to not lead the reader into pre-conceived conclusions.
Truly I say unto you, go to Africa and get some perspective. Then tell me if your happiness is damaged or uplifted.
You talking to me? Who are people like me? Do you mean the whiny socialists or the greedy capitalist? Where do you think I'm coming from?
We as Americans are vaguely aware that we are better off that most people in the world. I thought I 'got it' before I travelled a bit. I know I could have been the one who posted how hard it is to raise a family in New York.
No.
I tell you truly: a homeless person anywhere in the US is far better off than the average African. We are so steeped in wealth, what one person I met called "an embarrassment of riches", we have no perspective.
We truly do not understand what poor means. Not a clue. The average american roughing it in the great outdoors brings more stuff in his backpack than the average african ever owns.
No running water. No electricity (ha!). No roof. No car. No bus. No sidewalks or pavement. No shoes. Nothing.
Disease is rampant; 80% of the population is HIV positive in Malawi. The average age is 15.
If the world is getting you down, take a trip to Malawi. It will change your perspective.
Your point 1 implies a deep misunderstanding of market economics. OEMs ship windows because thats what the users demand. The customers do prefer windows. Cold hard fact.
point 2: window has been around since 1984. It is an extension of MSDOS which was from 1980. Anyway, I think most of the real progress in bringing linux to the masses has been done in the past 5 years. My opinion only.
point 6: I run mandrake and windows, mainly for xplatform coding. The UI for KDE3 just isnt there yet, nor GNOME or what-have-you. I rate the usability (for naive users) of Linux below Windows 3.0. And thats pretty sucky. In fact, usability and polish is the main weakness of Linux. Only honest usability testing with naive so-called-morons will get the OS past this hurdle.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe linux doesn't have viruses because nobody cares about linux? That maybe there is something you are missing in the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people who are more willing to pay for Windows than get linux for free? That maybe calling people who don't use linux morons isn't the best way to attract users?
Linux does have potential, and has made great strides is a short time, but until the community gets past its attitude problem, it will be self-limited to a niche of geeky tech boys. Linux is too difficult for end users, and yes it has bugs. Rather than calling the users stupid for not being able to patch the code, why not get busy and fix the bugs, and do a little usability testing after.
Now that I have read more of Mills stuff, I am not so sure he and Puthoff are in sync. Mills ideas seem to eschew QM weirdness while Puthoff's stuff seems to embrace it.
Just the other day I was reading a paper by our favorite fringe scientist Dr Puthoff. Unlike most scientists, he gets to speculate about earth shattering possibilities with no basis but how valuable it would be if it was true. So he has a fun job. [He might get lucky one day and then we'll all be eating crow!]
In the paper he was talking about his new favorite topic, Zero Point Energy. ZPE is the natural energy of the vacuum that is required by QM to exist in order to satisfy the Uncertainty principle. Direct evidence of ZPE was shown a long time ago by a guy named Casimir, who has an effect named after him. Casimir reasoned that if you take two metal plates and put them next to each other with a small enough gap, parts of the frequencies of the zero point virtual particles wouldnt be able to 'virtually exist' because the gap was smaller than their wavelength, so the net effect is that the plates will be pulled together by the imbalance in virtual energy in the gap. And in fact this is well established fact.
Now the ZPE guys say you can somehow harness this effect to get energy. The most brilliant idea is that maybe what holds the electron in its orbit is actually zero point energy being tapped by the electron in an analogous way as the Casimir effect. The electron effectively creates a region too narrow for all the frequencies of the vacuum to fit, so there is an energy differential which exactly holds the electron in orbit (where classical theory states it will eventually spiral into the nucleus).
It is possible that this is true; Quantum mechanics describes how the atom works, but not why it works that way. This theory gives an explanation for that behavior.
I believe it is this same theory that hydrinos are based upon; if you can manipulate the field near the nucleus of the atom just so, you may be able to find an new viable energy state for the atom, and in the transition, get some of the ZPE for free.
This is a very exciting theory. Its the kind that makes you say Nobel Prize to the mirror. And of course thats the kind of stuff that these sorts of scientists are drawn to. Its like crack for them. And Mr Puthoff job is entirely to entertain these sorts of ideas. Good job if you can get it!
It is completely obvious to me that you have never dealt with law enforcement. They don't do anything. Nothing. You can call them till the cows come home, but you won't get one useful bit of information from them. Its not like on TV at all.
I don't want to believe it either, but in the past year I have dealt with the FBI and the police on several unrelated incidences including check and credit card fraud, a psycho stalker, internet fraud, and outright assault. In each case, they put up barriers which prevented me from making any progress. I now know that their whole job is to blow you off and get paid doing it.
Yah mon, your right, I don't value your life that much. You go out there and taste the blood. I'll be right behind you..real soon now.
hahahahahaa the FBI will never call you back. You've never dealt with them before have you? They do nothing whatsover. You've been watching too much tv.
Wow, they let a hot-head like you do air traffic control? Settle down now. Pilots are trained for these sorts of eventualities, and in fact do land at fields which have no ATC at all. In the event of total failure in conditions you suggest, the pilots would negotiate the landing sequence, and some would land at alternate airports. They would not panic, they would not argue. They would get the job done. Thats why they are the ones with final say in the air.
I am a private pilot. Even if ATC completely shut down aircraft would not start falling out of the sky. Airplanes are flown by pilots who are trained to operate the aircraft completely independently from air traffic control.
Think of air-traffic control as stop-lights for automobiles; when the stop lights go down, do traffic accidents start happening? No, you just get a little less efficient traffic flow (in some cases it gets more efficent...). Drivers know how to take turns just like they do at stop signs.
Analagously, pilots know how to take turns and fly safe just like they do at 90% of the airports in the world that don't have 24x7 air traffic control.
If the street lights start malfunctioning and giving wacky signals, the hazard of accidents might go up, but would not neccessariy lead to catastrophe.
The ananology for aicraft is even stronger: if an ATC controller went mad and decided to purposefully cause an accident, he probably would not succeed since he would have to fool two pilots who are trained to be wary of ATCs command and to overrride them when they are in error.
Bottom line: airplanes are flown by pilots, not traffic controllers, so breathe easy.
Getting too caught up in programming models early in as students training will almost certainly inspire them to build complex systems with huge over-generalized models. Programming models should come later, after basic syntactical and functional issues are addressed. The only model fledgling students should learn is to keep it simple. Teach them to solve problems with the least lines of codes possible, and the simplest data structures.
I have tried out retinal scanners and I say they are not the wave of the future. First off, its like looking through a keyhole, which is fatiguing. Next, its grainy the same way a laser hologram is grainy [so its not just a problem of low resolution]. After using one for only about 5 minutes, I got one of the worst headaches I've ever had. My eyes hurt for hours afterwards, and were photo sensitive. I do not see this technology becoming mainstream for a very long time, but probably relegated to special uses similar to what holography and other 3d tricks are used for today.
For those who don't know, an N-gram is data structure which encodes the statistics of word order in a language. These are used to greatly improve the accuracy of language pattern matchers such as speech recognition.
A typical speech recognizer might use a 3 word N-gram (tri-gram), which keeps track of all probable words which follow and thier likelyhoods. The probabilities are calculated by running terabytes of english text (books, magazines, internet chat boards) through a word counting program.
Thus, "green eggs and" will get a very high probability for "ham", but low for "jam", so it can bias a sound that seems to match "mam" acoustically to the more likely linquistic match "ham".
Rock on man. My grandmother gave cases of Ramen. Now I hate Ramen, but I still love grandma.
What freaks me out about most of the posts is how party oriented they are. Having to pay my way through school really set my priorities for me. I am not paying 18 grand(!!) a year of my own money to swizzle cheap beer out of a tin can!
Today Im young and retired, while my classmates are whining about being laid off in the slump. They should have laid off of the booze and drugs and got busy.
I went out and bought this book, read it, and say categorically that it is a waste of time. It looks like yet another boy genius has gone off the deep end full of himself.
The first clue is how he keeps claiming big discoveries and how great he is. The big discovery is...simple algorithms make complex shit. The universe is complex. So the universe must be a simple algorithm.
But of course, it probably looks like a Cellular Automata because thats what the author has been obsessively thinking about for twenty years.
There are hundreds of pages of automata output that are supposed to mean something; looks like a bunch of core dumps to me.
Oh, and he runs on and on. Most PHDs hide the irrelevance of their discoveries in diabolical symbolic swamps, but Wolfram does something new. The epitome of clarity from sentence to sentence even a child could follow, for a thousand pages saying absolutely nothing useful, but to slyly take credit for things done by others years ago.
The book could easily be a PR stunt; knowing that it will take sometime for people to read the book, they hope to cash in on the fame of the author before the jig is up.
Screw powering a laptop, I'm gonna take a couple million of these and sew them into my persian rug and fly around like aladdin.
It seems likely to me that the so-called uber hackers are really the police. Look at the the people involved in this: pimps and smut sellers and Gambino's [and somehow Kevin Mitnik]. The mobsters were caught in a sting when they tried to "muscle-in" on the phone racket. They could only have been caught if the Law knew what was going on.
Last time I went to Vegas, it was much cleaned up from several years ago. Almost no porn and fewer hooker adds. Used to be you couldnt see the sidewalk for them. I say the police did it by jamming the unsavory's phones.
While I havent done it myself, I worked with others that have, and seen success and catastrophe. Whatever you do, don't hire somebody who is going to hedge the truth about progress. Ive seen projects completely cave in when the found out that their oversees components were months behind schedule, but the managers lied and said everything was going great. Remember they may not have the same American get-it-done attitude you have.
Also, make sure they have the same scheduling paradigm you have; for some reason a lot of people think that estimating a schedule means padding by tenfold, others think it means come up with the shortest conceivable timeline to please the boss.
Yes PR firms can use internet as a way to anonymously persuade people to believe what their clients want them to believe.
The glorious thing is, you can to!
In the past, all they had to do influence an editor, or buy some adspace. Today, they have to influence everyone.
My opinion is this: it is unethical to try to convince people of things that you yourself believe are untrue, but that you benefit from. Ye old biblical false witness. If you truly believe something, there is nothing wrong with paying a professional writer to make your views clear. So let them spend their money.
All you have to do is hone your own writing skills and reposte vigorously.
This company was obviously the epitome of efficiency, since they only need 79 employees to keep the name server running.
Their business plan was to make money off Microsoft. They failed to please their primary client and lost their business. Now they are out of business.
.COMs, its just silly.
Now they are blaming Microsoft for their own short sightedness.
Microsoft has no obligation to keep these people in business just for the sake of keeping them in jobs.
Their weird naming standards didn't make much sense in the first place, with the crash of the