How can you prove this is related to Sarbanes-Oxley? Or that they're not just invoking the specter of SOX to generate more $$$? It seems to me if they really wanted to thumb their nose at the new rules, they'd be charging $0.01 to let everyone know how silly it all is. Sure would net a C|Net article, at the least.
What kind of electronic equipment could handle that sort of acceleration? My college physics are a bit rusty but I think the initial velocity would be like sqrt(-2GM(1/r'-1/r_0)), where r_0 and r' are the radii of the earth and earth + 95 miles. Comes out to like.86 kilometers a second. If the gun is say 10m long and the acceleration is linear that's 37.3 km/s^2, approximately 3700 g's. (Someone please check my math:-) If that's right, what kind of electronics could possibly survive that? And I thought my Toughbook was durable.
You should check your connection. I have 768kb DSL, less than.5 times the standard US broadband connection, and YouTube has never lagged for me. Click-n-watch.
Ahh yes, but we are special. We are the only organism in the entire 3 billion-year history of life as we know it that was able to single-handedly knock the beautiful, complex ecology out of equilibrium. And we did it in just 2000 years--most of it in the last 200! That should give you pause. First, because it's disgusting, and I agree with you that we all deserve to be destroyed as a result. Second, this isn't a normal planetary event we're causing, or even an extreme version of a normal one. This is something completely new. And I'm not sure that nature really does know how to deal with us.
MacOS X is beating the crap out of everybody right now on the desktop and I for one don't see the point in chasing that market. Why is everyone so obsessed with desktop Linux anyways? Having a huge desktop userbase would be a quantum leap for Linux and the principles of OSS, yes, but the amount of resources that would have to be expended to beat Apple at its own game would make it a Pyrrhic victory. I look around and I see all sorts of smart, tech-savvy people who would have been running Linux five years ago, running Mac. If Linux can't attract those people, what's the use courting the rest?
And what more would desktop Linux offer anyways? The Mac OS I can buy today is stable, fast and runs Unix. Add to that a kickass, extremely well thought-out GUI that's years ahead of anyone else (don't agree with me? They do.) and I just don't see the point.
I'm not trying to diss on open source. I have all the respect in the world for the smart developers who gave me millions of dollars worth of free software which I employ on a daily basis. But let's admit it: usability has never been its strong point. And that's fine, because the tradeoff is increased power, and many of us are happy taking extra time to learn complicated tools that enable us to do, well, everything. My vote is for sticking to what we know best: stable, reliable software that looks great on an 80x25 text console.
Allow me to quantify that. The combined market share of IE, FireFox, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla is 94%. I'm willing to be most of the remaining 6% were also a browser that supports JS (Konqueror, Safari. Yes there are even text browsers that support it.) If you scroll further down, that have statistics showing 9/10 people browse with JS enabled.
I personally think JS as it stands today is dandy in terms of what be accomplished on the client side. There is a tendency to forget that most people still have a modem, and adding 70kb worth of libraries to every single page load is simply ridiculous (scriptaculous, I'm looking at you.) But some of the newer lightweight libraries are just amazing. Everything is moving in that direction; hell, even/. recently picked up some JS functionality, so you know it must be ubiquitous:)
My background is in econ and I always find medical studies of this nature to be highly suspect, statistically speaking. Correlation and causality are too often conflated. The "drinking makes you live longer" meme is perhaps the worst offender. I haven't read the actual article (don't have access to the Archives of Internal Medicine), but I'd really like to see what sort of structure they imposed to obtain their results. My guess is, whatever their design, it's not enough; you could easily (as you have) concoct a scenario demonstrating potential selection bias, simultaneity, and/or omitted variables.
In an increasing number of fields (including my own, as of about 10 years ago), the only thing that really passes for "proof" anymore is a double-blind or something similar like a quasi-experiment. Maybe when they figure out how to make the control taste like real booze, we'll finally figure this out.:-)
I hate Microsoft because they aren't innovators. They piggyback off of others' great ideas and then employ their own special brand of legal/political/economic strongarming/weaseling/nepotism/FUD to gain advantage. Combine that with an incredibly arrogant marketing machine and you the recipe for odiousness.
I mean, can you name a single idea that originated within Redmond (i.e. was not acquired) that went on to become as successful as Microsoft claimed it would be? The Zune is a great example. All indications are it's a laughablepiece of shit, and yet here you had that asshole Ballmer popping off for a year beforehand about what a kickass iPod crusher it's going to be. Let's see, more failures: WinFS, MS Bob, UltimateTV... oh damn, there's even a WikiPedia category for this, so I'll save my breath.
Such arrogance leads to complacency, and product quality suffers. All indications are Windows Vista is perhaps the largest clusterfuck ever to grace the commercial software industry. I'll bet a lot of people around here hate Microsoft in advance for the man-years of our lives we're going to lose fixing, deleting, and/or otherwise dealing with that piece of shit in situations where we have no choice: at work, at home, on Mom's computer, wherever. Just like we've been doing since Win 3.1. Cross-apply everything I just said to Internet Explorer, if you've ever designed web sites for a living.
I will give Microsoft credit for one thing: Office is pretty damn good. Whoever runs that division, props. There are some ludicrously half-baked features in there, like master/subdocuments in Word, the whole Word styling engine, all of Frontpage and Infopath, but the core apps are pretty good.
In case you're wondering like me why this wasn't already against the law, I looked it up and the relevant section of US code appears to apply only to bills and banknotes. I guess this also explains why those tourist-trap penny presses are also still around.
Haha, no, actually I wasn't referring to that at all. In fact I originally had a caveat in there about (good) interpreters of classical music, but I took it out thinking no one would nail me on it--or read the post. I'm a huge classical music fan and I have all the respect in the world for conductors and soloists.
That being said, what does the rest of the orchestra do all day long?
I disagree with what you're saying simply because it's wrong--this guy obviously grasps rhythm, melody and harmony; what you're claiming is ludicrous--but since 30 other people have written in to tell you that, I'd just like to point out that the standard by which any art should be judged is whether it's new, interesting, different, thought-provoking and/or aesthetically pleasing. I found this video to be at least four of those. If playing instruments well enables you to achieve that, that's good, but it's not really an end unto itself, artistically speaking. The world is full of extremely well-trained musicians who do nothing but play other peoples' work all day long and haven't a creative bone in their body. To me that's boring. Why do we need more of that? This guy is doing something fresh and innovative, and he deserves credit for it.
Actually, I've got a flight leaving in four hours to start a consulting gig for an island nation the South Pacific, and the situation there is pretty much exactly as I described it. My comment was mostly informed by my travels to the Pacific Islands, where I've spent some time, but I've traveled fare more widely than that, and I can tell you what I state is true at the very minimum for most of Indonesia, China and India, i.e. about half the world's population.
And I've gotta say, if you consider South Korea, or any other top 30 HDI country, to be a "developing," then it's you who doesn't get out very much.
I'm not being sarcastic, I think that this is really quite clever. Unfortunately, does it have any real world application? I can't see this taking off in the countries where it would be most needed. Outside of Europe and the US, electricity is expensive, broadband is nonexistent, and dialup internet sessions are metered by the minute. The notion of an always-on, 24/7 connected personal computer is laughable outside of select group of developed nations. Japan and coastal Oregon, rejoice, you have been saved.
Wow. And in other news, sales of Ferraris have dropped to a precipitous low on Tanzania, a Starbucks franchise is having real trouble getting off the ground in the Congo, and the Sierra Leone division of Sharper Image reported a record quarterly loss.
Wikipedia exists due to a vast army of bored office drones, programmers and college students. Surfing (and contributing to) it is like the most bourgeois thing. I don't find it all that surprising that a continent with ten million orphans, a complete lack of basic health care and sanitation, and insanely corrupt political regimes, can't find the time to log on and post a couple articles.
Mac OS X is going to beat Windows dominance on the desktop. Linux is not. (The iPod happens to work great with OS X.)
I've been visiting this site since 1997 and I'm continually amazed at how often the "Linux will someday beat Windows" trope comes round. Once in a while, desktop Linux seems to score some isolated victory, particularly amongst cash-strapped school districts and municipal governments. But I'm guessing the non-top-down adoption rate on the desktop remains pegged where it was in 1997: zero. There's just not really any instances of normal, everyday (read: non-geek) people walking into Best Buy and walking out with a copy of Linux. To me that remains the benchmark of desktop adoption. Constructing a user-friendly desktop is really hard. It takes research into HID. It takes artists. It takes focus groups to see how people take to new features. It takes scads of documentation. These are all things that Apple does insanely well. These are all things that MSFT does sortakinda well. These are all things that a loose-knit bunch of hackers from across the globe, well, suck at. Can you really look at KDE or Gnome be reminded of anything other than a so-so imitation of Windows XP? I am considered pretty much a Unix wizard by friends and associates, and I can't even take the Linux GUI most of the time. I'm writing this on a laptop running XP. (Which will very soon be a Macbook Pro, just as soon as Merom ships:)
When Leopard comes out in early 2007, and Vista is still kicking around the halls of Redmond for another year, it's going to get interesting.
Haha.. oh that's rich. "Please Mr. Perelman--flee from the military-industrial complex. Come to a sanctum of human rights and democracy. Come to... [wait for it]... America!"
The reason they can't find him in Russia is because he's already living in Sweden.
Once upon a time, the only people who had SMP machines had spent a huge amount of money on them. Licensing per CPU was simply a smart way to discriminate your customer base and figure out who had a high willingness to pay. Maximize producer surplus and all that. SMP became more and more commoplace in the 90s and now, with the advent of dual core, every grandma on AOL will be running on two or more CPUs in a matter of years. Since performance gains seem to be oriented towards more parallelism and not more MHz nowadays, this effectively means that software that runs on only one CPU has reached a performance plateau compared with everything else. My guess is the software industry will wake up to this fact and stop licensing by CPU, unless they want to field all sorts of questions about why theirs runs twice as slow as the next guy's.
Slashdot Mirror
How can you prove this is related to Sarbanes-Oxley? Or that they're not just invoking the specter of SOX to generate more $$$? It seems to me if they really wanted to thumb their nose at the new rules, they'd be charging $0.01 to let everyone know how silly it all is. Sure would net a C|Net article, at the least.
What kind of electronic equipment could handle that sort of acceleration? My college physics are a bit rusty but I think the initial velocity would be like sqrt(-2GM(1/r'-1/r_0)), where r_0 and r' are the radii of the earth and earth + 95 miles. Comes out to like .86 kilometers a second. If the gun is say 10m long and the acceleration is linear that's 37.3 km/s^2, approximately 3700 g's. (Someone please check my math :-) If that's right, what kind of electronics could possibly survive that? And I thought my Toughbook was durable.
You should check your connection. I have 768kb DSL, less than .5 times the standard US broadband connection, and YouTube has never lagged for me. Click-n-watch.
Who in their right mind would allow advertising from a competitor in their own distribution or promotional channel?
Maybe someone who worried about losing fans by forcing them to swill that pisswater game after game.
I said the exact same thing about DVDs when they came out. Literally, the exact same thing.
And look where we are today.
Ahh yes, but we are special. We are the only organism in the entire 3 billion-year history of life as we know it that was able to single-handedly knock the beautiful, complex ecology out of equilibrium. And we did it in just 2000 years--most of it in the last 200! That should give you pause. First, because it's disgusting, and I agree with you that we all deserve to be destroyed as a result. Second, this isn't a normal planetary event we're causing, or even an extreme version of a normal one. This is something completely new. And I'm not sure that nature really does know how to deal with us.
MacOS X is beating the crap out of everybody right now on the desktop and I for one don't see the point in chasing that market. Why is everyone so obsessed with desktop Linux anyways? Having a huge desktop userbase would be a quantum leap for Linux and the principles of OSS, yes, but the amount of resources that would have to be expended to beat Apple at its own game would make it a Pyrrhic victory. I look around and I see all sorts of smart, tech-savvy people who would have been running Linux five years ago, running Mac. If Linux can't attract those people, what's the use courting the rest?
And what more would desktop Linux offer anyways? The Mac OS I can buy today is stable, fast and runs Unix. Add to that a kickass, extremely well thought-out GUI that's years ahead of anyone else (don't agree with me? They do.) and I just don't see the point.
I'm not trying to diss on open source. I have all the respect in the world for the smart developers who gave me millions of dollars worth of free software which I employ on a daily basis. But let's admit it: usability has never been its strong point. And that's fine, because the tradeoff is increased power, and many of us are happy taking extra time to learn complicated tools that enable us to do, well, everything. My vote is for sticking to what we know best: stable, reliable software that looks great on an 80x25 text console.
Allow me to quantify that. The combined market share of IE, FireFox, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla is 94%. I'm willing to be most of the remaining 6% were also a browser that supports JS (Konqueror, Safari. Yes there are even text browsers that support it.) If you scroll further down, that have statistics showing 9/10 people browse with JS enabled.
/. recently picked up some JS functionality, so you know it must be ubiquitous :)
I personally think JS as it stands today is dandy in terms of what be accomplished on the client side. There is a tendency to forget that most people still have a modem, and adding 70kb worth of libraries to every single page load is simply ridiculous (scriptaculous, I'm looking at you.) But some of the newer lightweight libraries are just amazing. Everything is moving in that direction; hell, even
On one of the linked sites, the guy is claiming that he was 'under the influence' for the whole exchange and is 'seeking treatment'.
Wait, I thought it was something about a boyhood priest...
**rimshot**
Hear, hear. My kingdom for a fucking mod point right now.
My background is in econ and I always find medical studies of this nature to be highly suspect, statistically speaking. Correlation and causality are too often conflated. The "drinking makes you live longer" meme is perhaps the worst offender. I haven't read the actual article (don't have access to the Archives of Internal Medicine), but I'd really like to see what sort of structure they imposed to obtain their results. My guess is, whatever their design, it's not enough; you could easily (as you have) concoct a scenario demonstrating potential selection bias, simultaneity, and/or omitted variables.
:-)
In an increasing number of fields (including my own, as of about 10 years ago), the only thing that really passes for "proof" anymore is a double-blind or something similar like a quasi-experiment. Maybe when they figure out how to make the control taste like real booze, we'll finally figure this out.
I can't believe you didn't say "Linux vs. BSD among the /. crowd." :-)
I hate Microsoft because they aren't innovators. They piggyback off of others' great ideas and then employ their own special brand of legal/political/economic strongarming/weaseling/nepotism/FUD to gain advantage. Combine that with an incredibly arrogant marketing machine and you the recipe for odiousness.
I mean, can you name a single idea that originated within Redmond (i.e. was not acquired) that went on to become as successful as Microsoft claimed it would be? The Zune is a great example. All indications are it's a laughable piece of shit, and yet here you had that asshole Ballmer popping off for a year beforehand about what a kickass iPod crusher it's going to be. Let's see, more failures: WinFS, MS Bob, UltimateTV... oh damn, there's even a WikiPedia category for this, so I'll save my breath.
Such arrogance leads to complacency, and product quality suffers. All indications are Windows Vista is perhaps the largest clusterfuck ever to grace the commercial software industry. I'll bet a lot of people around here hate Microsoft in advance for the man-years of our lives we're going to lose fixing, deleting, and/or otherwise dealing with that piece of shit in situations where we have no choice: at work, at home, on Mom's computer, wherever. Just like we've been doing since Win 3.1. Cross-apply everything I just said to Internet Explorer, if you've ever designed web sites for a living.
I will give Microsoft credit for one thing: Office is pretty damn good. Whoever runs that division, props. There are some ludicrously half-baked features in there, like master/subdocuments in Word, the whole Word styling engine, all of Frontpage and Infopath, but the core apps are pretty good.
In case you're wondering like me why this wasn't already against the law, I looked it up and the relevant section of US code appears to apply only to bills and banknotes. I guess this also explains why those tourist-trap penny presses are also still around.
Haha, no, actually I wasn't referring to that at all. In fact I originally had a caveat in there about (good) interpreters of classical music, but I took it out thinking no one would nail me on it--or read the post. I'm a huge classical music fan and I have all the respect in the world for conductors and soloists.
That being said, what does the rest of the orchestra do all day long?
I disagree with what you're saying simply because it's wrong--this guy obviously grasps rhythm, melody and harmony; what you're claiming is ludicrous--but since 30 other people have written in to tell you that, I'd just like to point out that the standard by which any art should be judged is whether it's new, interesting, different, thought-provoking and/or aesthetically pleasing. I found this video to be at least four of those. If playing instruments well enables you to achieve that, that's good, but it's not really an end unto itself, artistically speaking. The world is full of extremely well-trained musicians who do nothing but play other peoples' work all day long and haven't a creative bone in their body. To me that's boring. Why do we need more of that? This guy is doing something fresh and innovative, and he deserves credit for it.
Or better yet: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
This works in both hemispheres.
(Cool trick though.)
But why is it that so many torrent sites are so ugly?
:-)
You mean like, as ugly as Slashdot before three months ago?
Actually, I've got a flight leaving in four hours to start a consulting gig for an island nation the South Pacific, and the situation there is pretty much exactly as I described it. My comment was mostly informed by my travels to the Pacific Islands, where I've spent some time, but I've traveled fare more widely than that, and I can tell you what I state is true at the very minimum for most of Indonesia, China and India, i.e. about half the world's population.
And I've gotta say, if you consider South Korea, or any other top 30 HDI country, to be a "developing," then it's you who doesn't get out very much.
I'm not being sarcastic, I think that this is really quite clever. Unfortunately, does it have any real world application? I can't see this taking off in the countries where it would be most needed. Outside of Europe and the US, electricity is expensive, broadband is nonexistent, and dialup internet sessions are metered by the minute. The notion of an always-on, 24/7 connected personal computer is laughable outside of select group of developed nations. Japan and coastal Oregon, rejoice, you have been saved.
Wow. And in other news, sales of Ferraris have dropped to a precipitous low on Tanzania, a Starbucks franchise is having real trouble getting off the ground in the Congo, and the Sierra Leone division of Sharper Image reported a record quarterly loss.
Wikipedia exists due to a vast army of bored office drones, programmers and college students. Surfing (and contributing to) it is like the most bourgeois thing. I don't find it all that surprising that a continent with ten million orphans, a complete lack of basic health care and sanitation, and insanely corrupt political regimes, can't find the time to log on and post a couple articles.
Let's just cut to the chase. Six and a half inches. You?
Mac OS X is going to beat Windows dominance on the desktop. Linux is not. (The iPod happens to work great with OS X.)
:)
I've been visiting this site since 1997 and I'm continually amazed at how often the "Linux will someday beat Windows" trope comes round. Once in a while, desktop Linux seems to score some isolated victory, particularly amongst cash-strapped school districts and municipal governments. But I'm guessing the non-top-down adoption rate on the desktop remains pegged where it was in 1997: zero. There's just not really any instances of normal, everyday (read: non-geek) people walking into Best Buy and walking out with a copy of Linux. To me that remains the benchmark of desktop adoption. Constructing a user-friendly desktop is really hard. It takes research into HID. It takes artists. It takes focus groups to see how people take to new features. It takes scads of documentation. These are all things that Apple does insanely well. These are all things that MSFT does sortakinda well. These are all things that a loose-knit bunch of hackers from across the globe, well, suck at. Can you really look at KDE or Gnome be reminded of anything other than a so-so imitation of Windows XP? I am considered pretty much a Unix wizard by friends and associates, and I can't even take the Linux GUI most of the time. I'm writing this on a laptop running XP. (Which will very soon be a Macbook Pro, just as soon as Merom ships
When Leopard comes out in early 2007, and Vista is still kicking around the halls of Redmond for another year, it's going to get interesting.
Haha.. oh that's rich. "Please Mr. Perelman--flee from the military-industrial complex. Come to a sanctum of human rights and democracy. Come to ... [wait for it] ... America!"
The reason they can't find him in Russia is because he's already living in Sweden.
Once upon a time, the only people who had SMP machines had spent a huge amount of money on them. Licensing per CPU was simply a smart way to discriminate your customer base and figure out who had a high willingness to pay. Maximize producer surplus and all that. SMP became more and more commoplace in the 90s and now, with the advent of dual core, every grandma on AOL will be running on two or more CPUs in a matter of years. Since performance gains seem to be oriented towards more parallelism and not more MHz nowadays, this effectively means that software that runs on only one CPU has reached a performance plateau compared with everything else. My guess is the software industry will wake up to this fact and stop licensing by CPU, unless they want to field all sorts of questions about why theirs runs twice as slow as the next guy's.