Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
Yes, but consider the asymmetry: you get to gloat when you are right, but they don't get to say anything when they are right. Thus, the doomsday profits get to naysay in advance, and the rationalists get to gloat in the aftermath. It works out even.
The ship has sailed. While 100,000 of us spent the late 90s grousing on/. about how next year would finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, a company named Apple went out and actually built the thing. Unix on the desktop has been done and done right. Linux had a huge window of opportunity in the early part of the last decade, and blew it. Draw whatever conclusions from that you want about the free software "movement." Mark my words: barring a direct meteor hit on Cupertino, Linux will never, ever be a major player in the desktop market.
These idiots will rationalize for hours given half a chance. All this self-righteous, highfalutin BS does little to mask the fundamental, basic fact that most people are averse to paying for something that they can acquire for free. Spare us the crap--if you steal something (and who among us hasn't), you're just a thief. Ideology don't enter into it. The fact that the person you stole from gave you a soapbox to moralize on doesn't make you any less of one.
It's the law in France that handsets have to be sold unlocked. So if you find yourself on the continent anytime soon, it would probably be a lot cheaper to just buy one there.
(Incidentally, I'm going to France in October and plan on doing exactly this. Anyone do this with the 2.5G model and any tips? Thx)
Coconuts are able to float a long ways, but (almost) anyone who's in the business of picking up coconuts off the ground and eating them is going to have an infinite supply of fresh coconuts at their disposal, and won't be very interested in a waterlogged, half-rotten one.
--someone who used to live in the South Pacific:-)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say MIT uses Scheme, or some variant of Common LISP. My intro CS courses at Berkeley did the same. It was a real eye opener to build OOP and metaprogramming from scratch using the really quite simple constructs afforded to you in Scheme. Later on we used Java for data structures, but after a semester spent marveling at SICP and the elegance & power of functional programming, that was a painful experience indeed.
You are correct that scarcity will drive prices up. However, the presence of cheaper alternatives will drive it right back down, eventually. Furthermore, a great deal of the cost involved in the production of oil and coal is fixed. Variable costs are comparatively low. Even if Sergey and Larry showed up tomorrow with Mr. Fusion, it will still be very, very cheap to remove millions of years of stored energy from of the ground for a very long time, and there will be a plethora of cash-strapped third world countries lining up to buy it. Something to think about next time you catch yourself licking your lips in anticipation of the day we all kick the oil habit.
I keep hearing this described as the iPod for books, which strikes me as a really misguided goal. I don't want an iPod for books, and most serious readers I know wouldn't either. There's something fundamentally different between flipping wantonly through my ever-shifting collection of 10,000 albums and singles, and spending days or weeks immersed in a single great book. I couldn't give a hoot about being able to store 200 books, or download a new title at the drop of a hat. What is the point of wireless? The most voracious readers I know would not find themselves constrained by the need to occasionally hook up to a PC and 10 or 20 more titles. I could map out my entire reading for the next five years in about 5 minutes of downloading from Project Gutenberg. The reading world just doesn't spin as fast or as serially as the iPod world. It's off-putting to see it now falling under the iPod rubric, where it will be forced to compete for a dwindling slice of our increasingly short attention span.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely open to the idea of an e-book; as an environmentalist I positively love it. But it seems like too much attention has been focused on making an iKindle, to the detriment of the actual reading experience itself. e-ink is much better than LCD, certainly, but anybody who would claim it's is as pleasing to look at as even a $.99 paperback has pretty low standards. And I feel like a real opportunity has been missed in making it waterproof, too. Who wouldn't love to be able to read in the shower!:-) Anyways, going solely on what I've heard from reviews, I'd have to say I agree with the assessment that it probably should have gone on sale in time for Christmas `09. Technology will continue its inexorable march towards perfection, and in a couple years today's screens will look primitive. Early adopters and gadgeteers will snap this up, but readers will stick with our dead trees for a few years yet.
Dig a little deeper--you really think that large companies such as IBM, Sun, Google et al would spend tens of millions of dollars developing these products and not give thought to the basic issues you have raised? I know I know this is Slashdot and this sort of armchair quarterbacking is de rigeur, but still... every one of these issues has been addressed on Jonathan Schwartz's blog, to say nothing of the myriad of technical and marketing literature which I'm sure covers it in exhaustive detail. Here's a Blackbox getting hit with a 6.7 quake; here's where he talks about shipping it, and security as well (it comes equipped with tamper, motion and GPS sensors, to say nothing of simply hiring a night watchman to call the cops if somebody comes prowling;) and the answer to your last question is no, no it does not.
Doh. This is what happens when you can type faster than you can think:-) "Products of" enormous primes. Once upon a time I took a class where we studied RSA and I even understood it, I swear!
FireGPG. It frikkin sticks buttons onto the Gmail UI for sign, encrypt, decrypt, verify, etc. Doesn't get much easier than that folks.
BTW as rummy as this story is, it's also a good sign that the Feds doesn't possess some magical method of factoring enormous primes that they're not telling anyone about.
I hate RIAA but I have to say I'm surprised to see "the system" siding with the little guys and not the big corporations here. Certainly don't see much of that any more. Come on: everyone knows college students steal music. The people who got rounded up were breaking the law with 99% certainty. The law may be silly and outmoded, but it's still the law, and it's the job of the judges and attorneys general to uphold it. So I'm surprised to see them throwing up so many roadblocks. Usually the courts law enforcement and in this country adopt a very "can do" attitude when it comes to big companies getting screwed out of money that's rightfully theirs.
Just sign your name on the line, and then write in the following:
I refuse to comply with subsection III, paragraphs (a) through (f) because I disagree with them. It works for the president!
Yes, that is a lot of glowing reviews from males in the 25-34 age bracket. I can't help but wonder how many non-geeks would sign on to post a negative experience, if only they could figure out how to work this god-damned, dysfunctional non-Windows POS they bought for $200 from Wal-Mart:-)
Don't forget: The number of mobile phone users without a PC will soon be an order of magnitude higher than the number of PC users. There are close to a billion PC users, and there are six billion people on planet Earth, so no, there probably will not be that many more.
Of course, they can simply use the phone itself to call the restaurant and ask! Nice insight John! Lemme just use my phone to Google their phone number real q--oh wait...
Don't use Facebook! If you like privacy, don't put your private life online! I think this is less about the "erosion" of privacy than it is about people simply caring less about sharing things that would have formerly kept to themselves. One of my buddies was telling me about how someone added him to their friend list (or whatever) the other day:
Friend: Remember that girl I hooked up with in New Zealand? She added me to her Facebook the other day. Me: Hot. Friend: Yeah I wouldn't have remembered who she was but in her message she wrote "Hey remember me we hooked up in New Zealand!" Me: And the whole world can see that? Friend: Sure! Me: Weird. That's about the whole issue, in a nutshell. You either find things like that completely disturbing... or you're fine with it. Some of us take comfort in anonymity, and apparently many other people like they idea of having this virtual following of people who know (any maybe even care) about where they are, what they're doing, and who they slept with, every second of every day. Call it "indulging your inner rock star," I don't know. I just look at it all and boggle.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but consider the asymmetry: you get to gloat when you are right, but they don't get to say anything when they are right. Thus, the doomsday profits get to naysay in advance, and the rationalists get to gloat in the aftermath. It works out even.
The ship has sailed. While 100,000 of us spent the late 90s grousing on /. about how next year would finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, a company named Apple went out and actually built the thing. Unix on the desktop has been done and done right. Linux had a huge window of opportunity in the early part of the last decade, and blew it. Draw whatever conclusions from that you want about the free software "movement." Mark my words: barring a direct meteor hit on Cupertino, Linux will never, ever be a major player in the desktop market.
These idiots will rationalize for hours given half a chance. All this self-righteous, highfalutin BS does little to mask the fundamental, basic fact that most people are averse to paying for something that they can acquire for free. Spare us the crap--if you steal something (and who among us hasn't), you're just a thief. Ideology don't enter into it. The fact that the person you stole from gave you a soapbox to moralize on doesn't make you any less of one.
All the templates are done in HTML and code is in Java. Can't get any simpler than that.
No? I implore you to check out Rails, or better yet, Seaside.
The fact that it took the Java crowd a decade to "discover" the merit of POJOs speaks volumes. It can get way simpler.
It's the law in France that handsets have to be sold unlocked. So if you find yourself on the continent anytime soon, it would probably be a lot cheaper to just buy one there.
(Incidentally, I'm going to France in October and plan on doing exactly this. Anyone do this with the 2.5G model and any tips? Thx)
How complex can Twitter be on the inside? In the 1.5 years they've been publicly grousing about Rails they could have redone it ten times over.
Coconuts are able to float a long ways, but (almost) anyone who's in the business of picking up coconuts off the ground and eating them is going to have an infinite supply of fresh coconuts at their disposal, and won't be very interested in a waterlogged, half-rotten one.
:-)
--someone who used to live in the South Pacific
Presumably you would experience the same problems with Alienware, seeing as Dell owns them.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say MIT uses Scheme, or some variant of Common LISP. My intro CS courses at Berkeley did the same. It was a real eye opener to build OOP and metaprogramming from scratch using the really quite simple constructs afforded to you in Scheme. Later on we used Java for data structures, but after a semester spent marveling at SICP and the elegance & power of functional programming, that was a painful experience indeed.
It would be BMI. What could be worse than that?
- 100,000 books were finished
- Somebody organized their sock drawer
- Painters painted
- 17 people got a promotion
- Progress was made towards curing cancer
- A group of climbers summited Everest
Put down the keyboard and go do something.You are correct that scarcity will drive prices up. However, the presence of cheaper alternatives will drive it right back down, eventually. Furthermore, a great deal of the cost involved in the production of oil and coal is fixed. Variable costs are comparatively low. Even if Sergey and Larry showed up tomorrow with Mr. Fusion, it will still be very, very cheap to remove millions of years of stored energy from of the ground for a very long time, and there will be a plethora of cash-strapped third world countries lining up to buy it. Something to think about next time you catch yourself licking your lips in anticipation of the day we all kick the oil habit.
I keep hearing this described as the iPod for books, which strikes me as a really misguided goal. I don't want an iPod for books, and most serious readers I know wouldn't either. There's something fundamentally different between flipping wantonly through my ever-shifting collection of 10,000 albums and singles, and spending days or weeks immersed in a single great book. I couldn't give a hoot about being able to store 200 books, or download a new title at the drop of a hat. What is the point of wireless? The most voracious readers I know would not find themselves constrained by the need to occasionally hook up to a PC and 10 or 20 more titles. I could map out my entire reading for the next five years in about 5 minutes of downloading from Project Gutenberg. The reading world just doesn't spin as fast or as serially as the iPod world. It's off-putting to see it now falling under the iPod rubric, where it will be forced to compete for a dwindling slice of our increasingly short attention span.
:-) Anyways, going solely on what I've heard from reviews, I'd have to say I agree with the assessment that it probably should have gone on sale in time for Christmas `09. Technology will continue its inexorable march towards perfection, and in a couple years today's screens will look primitive. Early adopters and gadgeteers will snap this up, but readers will stick with our dead trees for a few years yet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely open to the idea of an e-book; as an environmentalist I positively love it. But it seems like too much attention has been focused on making an iKindle, to the detriment of the actual reading experience itself. e-ink is much better than LCD, certainly, but anybody who would claim it's is as pleasing to look at as even a $.99 paperback has pretty low standards. And I feel like a real opportunity has been missed in making it waterproof, too. Who wouldn't love to be able to read in the shower!
Dig a little deeper--you really think that large companies such as IBM, Sun, Google et al would spend tens of millions of dollars developing these products and not give thought to the basic issues you have raised? I know I know this is Slashdot and this sort of armchair quarterbacking is de rigeur, but still... every one of these issues has been addressed on Jonathan Schwartz's blog, to say nothing of the myriad of technical and marketing literature which I'm sure covers it in exhaustive detail. Here's a Blackbox getting hit with a 6.7 quake; here's where he talks about shipping it, and security as well (it comes equipped with tamper, motion and GPS sensors, to say nothing of simply hiring a night watchman to call the cops if somebody comes prowling;) and the answer to your last question is no, no it does not.
--Cancer free since 1998.
Doh. This is what happens when you can type faster than you can think :-) "Products of" enormous primes. Once upon a time I took a class where we studied RSA and I even understood it, I swear!
FireGPG. It frikkin sticks buttons onto the Gmail UI for sign, encrypt, decrypt, verify, etc. Doesn't get much easier than that folks.
BTW as rummy as this story is, it's also a good sign that the Feds doesn't possess some magical method of factoring enormous primes that they're not telling anyone about.
I hate RIAA but I have to say I'm surprised to see "the system" siding with the little guys and not the big corporations here. Certainly don't see much of that any more. Come on: everyone knows college students steal music. The people who got rounded up were breaking the law with 99% certainty. The law may be silly and outmoded, but it's still the law, and it's the job of the judges and attorneys general to uphold it. So I'm surprised to see them throwing up so many roadblocks. Usually the courts law enforcement and in this country adopt a very "can do" attitude when it comes to big companies getting screwed out of money that's rightfully theirs.
Yes, that is a lot of glowing reviews from males in the 25-34 age bracket. I can't help but wonder how many non-geeks would sign on to post a negative experience, if only they could figure out how to work this god-damned, dysfunctional non-Windows POS they bought for $200 from Wal-Mart :-)
Moron.
Me: Hot.
Friend: Yeah I wouldn't have remembered who she was but in her message she wrote "Hey remember me we hooked up in New Zealand!"
Me: And the whole world can see that?
Friend: Sure!
Me: Weird. That's about the whole issue, in a nutshell. You either find things like that completely disturbing... or you're fine with it. Some of us take comfort in anonymity, and apparently many other people like they idea of having this virtual following of people who know (any maybe even care) about where they are, what they're doing, and who they slept with, every second of every day. Call it "indulging your inner rock star," I don't know. I just look at it all and boggle.
Why not do both? Last I checked the two aren't mutually exclusive. Every little bit helps.
1.6% of Facebook is a close MS partner. Not exactly hostile takeover territory there.