We can assume this happened because that is historically the age that MOST people have gone through puberty.
Except that would be an incorrect assumption. It was historically not uncommon for women to start having periods as late as 15 or 16. In 1830, it was approximately 15.5, depending on the population sampled. Even as recently as 1928, the average (c=10,000) age at menarche was 13.9 years. Today, it's around 12.6. (See various studies here.) That seems like a fairly significant decline to me.
This earlier onset is usually chalked up to improved nutrition, but the overall conclusion -- that traditional societies had women becoming fertile much later in life than they are today -- remains true. Women were often considered adults and/or married before they started menstruating and finished puberty. This long transitional time that we've created in a person's teenage years, when they aren't really an adult but have long since become one biologically, did not exist until fairly recently.
It isn't uniformly that way. It depends on the nature of the filtering process. A counter example is kids who come into school already reading. Their advantage is gone by grade 4. Why? All kids pass into the next grade so there is no filtering process.
Huh?
Care to explain that? Because my experience has been exactly the opposite. And I've heard a lot of stuff that would seem to suggest that children who learn to read earlier, tend to do better in school, and this success in elementary school translates on down the line.
This review study, Long-Term Effects of Early Childhood Programs on Cognitive and School Outcomes, says that of five studies reviewed "All five estimated that [early childhood reading education] had a large effect on the [high-school] graduation rate." (Only 3 of the 5 were statistically significant, the sample sizes of the other two were suggestive, but too small for significance.) That seems pretty good to me, although they do admit that children who read earlier often have adults who are more involved, etc., and that may contribute.
Anyway, I would argue that there definitely is a filtering effect in schools -- at least there used to be, anyway, back when they actually "held back" students who couldn't meet standards at the end of the year. I'm not sure that this is done in elementary schools as much as it once was, but you used to be able to pick out the under-performers pretty easily, because they were always the kids that were 2-3 years older than everybody else.
Putting the issue of academic standards aside for a second, there is an age cutoff for kindergarten in most school districts which is identical in effect to that you talked about there being in hockey. Usually in order to enter kindergarten, children have to be at least 4 years and 10 months old (so they have to have their fifth birthday before November of their kindergarten year); this probably varies from place to place. But the net effect is the same: there are some kids who will just miss that 'birthday cutoff' and end up being the oldest kids in their class, the year later. And there are some kids who will just barely sneak in, and be the youngest. Obviously, school is different from hockey, and there's (hopefully) less of an emphasis on physical size and strength, and kids mature at different speeds. But the result is the similar: in any given 'grade,' you're going to possibly get some kids who are a year older than each other. Even more, if you have a system that allows for the acceleration of gifted students and the holding back of underperforming ones.
I've never seen any studies relating birth month to later academic performance, that would show whether it's advantageous for parents to hold their kid back a year if they're near the birth-month cutoff for kindergarten. I suppose it might be tough to do, since places presumably have different standards. It would be interesting, though.
Islamic extremists embody the beliefs and practices of the majority of Muslims just as much as the Klu Klux Klan embodied the beliefs and practices on main stream Christianity.
I believe this also... yet, every time something horrific is perpetuated in the name of Islam and the Prophet, the people who have the authority to speak out and condemn it, seem rather reticent to say so.
Or at least if they are saying so, there's very little evidence of it in the media. When the US media goes looking for a Muslim apologist, they seem to always end up talking to some professor of Mid-East studies at some university somewhere. Why don't the 26 Clerics of the House of Saud or even the most high-profile Imams and clerics flood the Internet and subsequently the airwaves with pronouncements condemning these acts? It's not as if they don't have a soap box to stand on, or that the media wouldn't give them coverage. There's hardly a conspiracy afoot to black them out, if anything the news sources would love to have that.
It would seem as though extremism is a rather large problem facing the Muslim world community right now. I can't think of anything that would possibly be greater, in fact. It seems to me that if the religious leaders of various sects were really interested in doing anything about it, that they could get together and issue a strong condemnation of it, as one.
However, their silence -- or at most, seemingly week protestations -- is the norm, rather than the other way around.
To me, that silence is more damning a condemnation than a thousand suicide bombers' explosions.
One thing this DOES indicate is that extremist Muslims can't handle free speech. It doesn't say anything about anyone else.
Well said. And consider this: they've made it clear they can't even tolerate freedom of speech in another country, even one as far away and relatively insignificant as Denmark. How do you think that bodes for ever setting up any sort of truly free society in the Muslim world? Not very well, I'm afraid.
As for the kind of society they would set up, given any say in the matter -- I would say I'd just leave it to the reader's imagination, but why bother when you have Taliban Afghanistan as an abject example. I don't think you can ever come to any sort of compromise with these people -- there is simply no way to achieve what they want, within the framework of personal freedom that we value so highly in the West. Those two goals are mutually exclusive.
I don't have any cute solutions to propose. It seems like there are two ways that people seem to go on the issue of 'what to do,' neither of which I think will work. Solution 1 is, "we cannot negotiate with them, so we'll kill them." In addition to subverting one's own value system by blithely resorting to violence, I'm not sure that killing all the extremists is really a realistic objective. But the second popular solution, which is simply to deny that what the extremists are seeking really is all that extreme, and proceed under the illusion that they can be negotiated with and brought to see the benefits of a free society, is also false. Extremists don't see a free society where people have the ability to choose their religion and say whatever they want -- no matter how blasphemous -- as a good thing. And if you reject that basic premise, none of the other arguments that get made in favor of democracy make sense.
In the end, I think the US and Europe will tire of meddling in Middle-Eastern Muslim affairs, and let the place become a giant 12th Century theocracy. A new 'Iron Curtain' will be erected, except instead of between Democracy and Communism, it will be between Democracy and Theocracy. Eventually, and it's starting to happen already, people in the US are going to decide that the freedom of a bunch of questionably grateful people is not worth American lives. I think the only reason why you don't hear more calls for this right now is because of oil; even if you don't value freedom in the Middle East per se, a democratic Middle East is a friendly Middle East, and friendly equals a steady supply of oil. Once that oil is gone, and 'freedom' is the only thing left as a motivation, I think you'll see the same carelessness applied to the Arab nations as we saw applied to Somalia. The second Americans start getting killed, we'll pull back like a person who's been burned, and let the place eat itself alive.
I'm out of mod points, but I think you hit the nail on the head.
I want to add two points:
First, many of the Muslims who are being quoted in the media want apologies from or punishment given to the cartoonists themselves, not just the publishers. And that's completely out of line -- I can't imagine that it's actually consistent with most Muslim theological doctrine, either -- simply because a religion (any religion, take your pick) sets out rules for its own followers. It doesn't say anything about how other people should act. Jewish and Muslim people are proscribed from eating pork, but I've yet to have someone come up to me and tell me (a non-Jew and non-Muslim) that I can't eat pork. Likewise, Muslims are prohibited from making images of the Prophet, but I fail to see how that extends to others.
I'm not just criticizing Muslims here, I would make the same criticism in regards to Christians who try to apply their religion's idea of morality onto non-Christians.
Your religion applies to YOU. It doesn't say anything about what I can and can't do. I'd like to believe that the majority of Muslims in the world understand this basic point (I think they do).
Second, I have no problem with Muslims boycotting countries they don't like. I think it's stupid, because I happen to agree with the goverment and people of Denmark in thinking that free speech and a free press is a Good Thing, but people should be free to buy their goods wherever they want to. Likewise, the Danes and countries friendly to them (the rest of the E.U.) have a right to decide that they will stop buying or importing things from countries that boycott Denmark. In the end, we'll find out who wants whose goods more.
However, there is a fundamental difference between boycotting a country's goods and attacking their embassy. In fact, it's not just a 'difference,' it's a gaping fucking chasm. It's the same difference between holding a placard outside an abortion clinic, and taping some Semtex and nails to your chest and blowing yourself up in front of it. One is a civilized act, the other is indefensible.
And at the end of the day, that's the difference between a Muslim (or probably any kind of) fundamentalist's view of the world and the view held by the member of a liberal democracy, or a non-fundamentalist person: in one view, when you disagree with someone, you try to argue with them or failing that, just refuse to interact with them; in the fundamentalists' world, you try to kill them.
I live in the Wash., DC metro area right now, which has one of the best public transportation systems of any city in the US (your Federal tax dollars at work). It also has one of the worst traffic and parking problems I've ever seen -- although I've heard that Atlanta and LA are also as bad.
I have a 'reverse commute' -- I live in the city and work in the 'burbs, and although this doesn't eliminate the traffic completely (not even close), it does put me outside the worst of it. Getting into the office at 0700 and leaving by 1500 or so also helps.
By car, getting to the office takes me about 25-35 minutes for just about 15 miles, and if you write off my car as a sunk cost (and ignore the resale value, I'm not interested in giving it up as I use it for more than just commuting) the expense is wear-and-tear and gasoline. It averages 20MPG almost exactly and even if gas is $3.00/gal, the gasoline cost works out to about $4.50 a day. Not insignificant, but 40% less than the cost of the metro. Factoring wear-and-tear is tougher, but I'm sure it's less than 40% of my gas costs.
But the biggest deal for me is that my 35-minute commute becomes an almost 90-minute ordeal if I wanted to take public transportation. I've tried every combination of bus/rail that I can think of, peak and off-peak times, and it means almost an extra hour out of my day for each leg. I'm not willing to sacrifice that.
Public transportation would have to get a lot better, and gas would have to get a lot more expensive, for it to become a viable commuting option for me. As it is right now, my biggest use of public transportation is to go bar-hopping in the evenings, since it means not having to drive home afterwards. For that alone, it's great to have. And perhaps if I had the 'traditional commute,' of driving from the suburbs in the morning to the city during the day and back to the 'burbs at night, the time savings would be there. But there are a lot of people who would be willing to use public transportation if the time and money savings worked, and right now they just don't.
The other thing that needs to be considered is what kind of driving you do.
A gasoline hybrid like the Prius gets its best mileage in city, stop-and-go driving, because of the regenerative braking.
A diesel engine gets its best milage while cruising on the highway at a basically constant speed, in the transmission's highest gear.
I used to drive a diesel VW and *loved* it. It was fun to drive (torquey as hell) and had excellent highway range, well in excess of 500 miles to the tank. However that mileage went into the toilet if I had to do a lot of stop and go driving. Still better than a conventional gasoline car for the same driving, but nothing like a hybrid.
I think there will be a place for both types of vehicles in the future, and which one is most efficient for you depends on the type of driving you do. For me, it's almost highway driving -- a hybrid wouldn't have much of an advantage.
The other thing to consider is the air conditioning and heating requirements. I have heard it said that the hybrids derive a lot of their fuel savings by being able to shut off the gas engine when it's not needed (in city driving), but that if you have the A/C running, it won't shut off because there's no way to run the compressor electrically. If anyone can verify this I'd be interested... but if it's true, it could seriously impact the efficiency numbers in certain climates. A diesel engine sees some efficiency hit as a result of the A/C compressor, but its not that significant. (I measured the MPG of my VW with the compressor running and not, and could never get a good handle on what the change was. It was below the error caused by month-to-month differences in my driving style, anyway.) I don't know about anybody else, but I am not prepared to drive without air conditioning, at least until gas is well into the double-digit dollars per gallon.
What I would like to see is a diesel-electric hybrid: combine the best of both worlds.
I also wish that there was some sort of tax relief for diesel passenger vehicles on the diesel fuel taxes, which are really excessive. They're aimed at truckers, but they've had the side-effect of making diesel artifically expensive relative to gasoline, and hurting diesel car development in the US. This is too bad, because it's a technology that really has a lot of potential. There are better/alternative ways of taxing trucking than putting a tax on diesel fuel. At the very least, we should have some sort of rebate program to allow diesel passenger car owners to get back the difference in taxes they pay over an equivalent amount of gasoline (if not the amount of gasoline that they would have needed to buy to drive the same number of miles, which would be more fair).
It's my (possibly flawed) understanding that RAID-0 was a sort of backronym; it was created later, after the other common RAID levels, in order to refer to something "beneath" RAID-1 on the scale of redundancy/safety.
I remember when RAID was a new thing, and I don't recall anyone talking about "level zero" initially. People talked about striping, and then the various RAID levels, and JBOD, but I think the "RAID-0" term came a little later. I'm also fairly certain that disk striping in order to get performance improvements weren't a new idea, and they were just referred to as 'striping' before RAID became a household term.
Anyway, I agree with you -- it really shouldn't be called a RAID-level-anything at all. It's disk striping, and redundancy doesn't enter into it.
Both OS's can provide methods to do this automatically, but that does not take the onus of backups off the user.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but I wondered if you'd elaborate on the included automatic backup tools on Windows.
On Linux/BSD/Darwin/MacOS, you can put together a backup strategy using cron(tab) and rsync that will spread your data across multiple machines, securely, and once it's set up do it regularly without user intervention. Granted I wouldn't call it exactly simple to set up, but I'm not much of a UNIX guru and I just did it over my lunch break by SSHing into the two machines.
As I'm forced to use a Windows machine at work, I'd be interested to know if something similar was possible. It was my understanding that to get the same type of system, you'd have to invest in a commercial product. Is there a way to do it, 'out of the box,' that I'm just not aware of?
You really want to Google for 'using crontab' since that's the userland tool for setting up cron jobs.
If you run that search, you get this page as the first result, which is pretty good.
And crontab will use whichever editor you specify in your shell's EDITOR variable, the default is vi on some systems, but you can just as easily put a line or two in your/etc/profile file to fix this.
It would look like (correct me if I'm wrong here) EDITOR="/usr/bin/pico" export EDITOR
Obviously, you can replace the path to pico with whatever other editor you prefer.
I just set up a crontab task on my Mac OS X box at home to back up my Documents directory over rsync every night at 0330 to a remote machine, and send the results to me in an email on the local system, following these pretty-good instructions: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/07/02/t erminal_5.html I don't guarantee that those instructions will help you on a non-Darwin based system, though. The mail trick requires sendmail to be installed and working, for one.
Your salary is really dependent on the perceived cost of replacing you, as a revenue-generating unit.
You might make a lot of money for your company, but if there are a line of people outside the door who are ready to and capable of taking over your job, you're not really in any position to ask for a raise.
The only place that the revenue you generate enters into the equation is in terms of what kind of person they'd need to find to replace you. If you generate x amount of revenue and have salary y, at the most basic level, your salary will never go up as long as there's another person who can be found that will also generate x amount of revenue whose salary is = y.
Of course this ignores a lot of things, like the ease of integrating a new person into an organization, individual social traits, etc., which might allow you to get your salary slightly higher than your 'replacement cost.' But in many industries, it's a fairly good model of how things work.
Right now, you pay for a cell phone if you want one. It's yours, it's private.
Nothing in this article proposes changing that. Nobody would be able to get tracking data off of your personal mobile phone.
What's basically happening is that companies are going to have ways of tracking THEIR mobile phones, which they give to employees. Nobody is saying that you have to carry this phone with you on the weekends, or use it for personal calls, or anything else.
However, there seems to be as assumption being made here that people will carry their employers' free phones with them everywhere, after work hours, and use them in lieu of a personally-owned phone. To me, that's basically like saying "we'll give you $25 a month in exchange for your privacy!" The assumption is that people will take their employers up on this offer, and stop paying for their own phones.
I think it's a stupid bargain -- I value my privacy more than $29 a month or whatever I pay for my personal cell service. But some people might not, and they ought to be able to make a pact with the devil, metaphorically speaking, if they so choose.
I would think that the company could tell you that they want you to use their phone during business hours. Whether you take that home with you at night or not is your business (assuming they allow you to).
It would be like offering to use your own notebook computer in lieu of the company one. Although I haven't personally tried (I use a Mac, anyway), I can imagine they might not be too keen on the idea. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they could track my position, based on the laptop, if they really wanted to. (Using reverse DNS lookups would give an approximation, or they could install a cellular Internet card that's GPS capable and do it that way.)
I have no problem in theory with my employer tracking my location during the working day. I could even see how it might be convenient (preventing a lot of "hey, are you working at site xyz today?" emails). I admit it has a certain potential for obnoxious use, but in the end, I think smart companies will realize that pestering their employees is counterproductive. If your most productive employee spends three hours a day eating lunch, who cares? As long as he or she is generating revenue for the company, a smart manager knows when not to get in the way. It's the same issue as Internet access. I think companies have the right to censor or filter their corporate intranets, but if they're smart, they won't.
I've worked for a bunch of high-tech firms, and none of them were laid-back, granola-munching hippie enterprises, yet none of them censored or blocked their Internet. How you got your work done was your business; if that included reading Slashdot or NFL News or whatever in the morning, more power to you. If you didn't perform, you got fired. That's the way it should be.
If you only do two hours of 'real work' a day, and spend the rest of the time reading Somethingawful, but do more in that two hours than everybody else does in eight, more power to you. If you work your butt off for ten hours a day, but do less in ten hours than most people do in two, you're fired. Nobody wants to know -- or cares -- how hard you work; what really matters is what you turn out at the end of the day/week/month/project.
If my company started getting on me about my Internet use, or (getting back to the article here) complaining because of where I was during the day based on cellphone-tracking data, and I was otherwise doing my job and generating revenue for the company, I'd quit. Not just out of spite because they're cutting into my Slashdot time, or hang-out-at-the-diner time, but because it would be indicative of a serious problem with how they were measuring performance.
So in short, the technology (cell phone tracking) isn't a problem. It's the companies who would use such a thing obnoxiously that are a problem, but in the end all they're going to do is hurt themselves by driving away good people to firms that have real performance-based metrics. I have some sympathy for somebody who works at a company that treats them like that, but only if it's a new situation. If you've been dealing with it for a while and it doesn't seem like it's going to change, dust off your resume and move along.
You don't need to have a PayPal account to send a credit card payment, you're correct.
What finially got to me was that in order to receive a credit card payment, they force you to upgrade your account to their "Premier" level, which then skims a percentage off of all your incoming transactions (I think it's 3%), regardless of whether or not they're credit-card based.
For someone who only does a small percentage of credit-card business, this is a real scam. I know that the credit card companies charge fees. I'm not faulting PayPal for charging for credit card service. What I do find obnoxious is that they want to charge you that percentage on EVERYTHING, rather than just on the incoming credit card transactions.
The other thing that I strongly dislike is that there's no way to advertise that you use PayPal, without having the credit card icons pop up. I'm more than willing to accept PayPal, but I'm not going to upgrade to a Premier account for one sale -- especially since PayPal will only let you downgrade back to the regular level of account ONCE. If you accept a second credit card transaction by mistake, you're stuck giving them 3%, permanently.
It's just one of the many reasons I have all but given up on eBay. The decline in the quality of the average merchandise, and the increased difficulty in actually contacting buyers and sellers directly (as opposed to through the eBay communication/payment system) is also a turnoff for me. I got a couple of bad pieces of gear, and I couldn't reach the seller until I left them bad feedback. And from what I've heard, this isn't uncommon -- it never used to be this much of a problem.
So... if this guy was unconscious in the driver's seat... or if it were a six-year-old driving... or if the accelerator were somehow stuck down, their lives would be forfeit as well? If the high-speed chase is occurring at midnight on a rural interstate highway, with zero traffic?
If it really was occuring on an empty interstate highway then the danger to others is more limited, obviously, and thus I think the police should use more restraint in stopping them.
However, if they were driving down that empty stretch of highway towards a more urban area, or if the highway was about to end and become surface-level streets, with traffic lights and other drivers and everything else, then I think it's entirely defensible for the police to use any means necessary to stop the car, even if doing so kills the driver as a side-effect.
The fact that their accellerator might be stuck down or that they might not know what they're doing (which would be the case if they're six years old, or mentally incompetent, or asleep) doesn't change the fact that they're putting the lives of other people at risk. That's unacceptable, and it's the job of the police to always put the lives of bystanders above the life of the person who's putting them at risk.
...and back *one release* of linux for each industry.
Everybody has their own pet theory that they use to explain why Linux on the desktop isn't quite there yet. Here's mine: it's because there isn't a "standard version" of Linux, and to a developer, that's scary.
That's not to say that there's just one version of Windows, but at least it's a pretty clear playing field. You can read a one-page summary and pretty much understand the various versions and who uses them and which one you want to develop for. With Linux, the situation isn't all that clear. If you make RHEL your target distro, are you going to be losing everyone who uses SuSE as potential customers? What about the Asian market and their distributions? Do you develop for KDE or Gnome? Or create your own widget set completely independent of either? What's your performance going to be like, and how do you ensure user experience without alienating customers? There are seemingly a lot more factors involved.
A while back, I thought we might get a partial solution to this problem (others would disagree with me as to whether it's a problem or not -- I think it is, because frankly, I want an OS and not an ecosystem) when IBM was talking about dumping Windows for Linux. That would have put 300,000 employees and a major software/hardware producer firmly behind one distribution (I think it was RHEL). Of course, it never happened -- maybe they were just wrangling for a better deal on XP licenses or something.
I guess this situation, call it 'fragmentation' or 'diversity,' depending on your point of view, is the price you pay for not being held hostage by one vendor. However, I think there's a limit to how much marketshare an OS can have, when there isn't one widely-used and supported face for the outside world to deal with.
I think there are a lot of commercial software houses would make Linux versions, if there was such a thing as "Linux" to make a binary distribution for. I think, eventually, one of the major commercial distributions is going to come out as the clear winner and we'll effectively have this (like it or not), once the period of expansion into new markets that we're in right now stops.
I brought this up last week in a different discussion, but not only did they have a version for SGI at one point, they had a version for "UNIX" in the form of SunOS/SPARC. It was for SunOS 2.x and I think it was around Photoshop 3 or so.
Why don't they just send 1,000 free shares of their stock to every Linux developer, while they're at it? Hell, maybe Steve will dress up in a Santa Claus suit and give free iBooks to everyone, too.
Apple has created the MacOS so that it's easy to port Linux/UNIX applications to it, but they have no great incentive to create a path for porting applications away from it.
I can run the GIMP on MacOS if I want (and have been able to for a while, although it got easier recently, since the newer versions of the MacOS include X), but it'll be a cold day in hell before you can run a Carbonized app like Photoshop on Linux. And that's exactly the way Apple wants it.
It looks fairly impressive. The interface is honestly a clone of Photoshop, which is a huge plus in my book (nothing to relearn), it supposedly has CMYK support, works with TWAIN and SANE scanners, even does JPEG-2000.
Not bad for $32! The license lets you run it on multiple platforms also, and he's got versions for MacOS, MorphOS, Linux (x86 and PPC), BSD (x86), and a list of others.
I'll have to look into it more, but I might be cutting this guy a check soon, if it's for real and as good as advertised. I don't mind terribly the fact that it's not open-sourced, that's his choice as the developer, although it'd be nice to have some sort of promise that if he decides to stop developing it that he'll release it so it doesn't become abandonware. I suspect though in order to implement a lot of those features that there's a lot of licensed/patented code inside.
Not to mention the fact that it's a platform whose users, well, let's just say it's one whose users PREFER not to pay anything for software at all.
I would have said this differently:
Linux is a platform where there is a wide perception that its users will not pay for software.
Whether that perception is beared out in reality, is another thing entirely; there does seem to be a certain amount of truth to it (go do some Google searches for Cedega and you'll see some of the problems they have getting people to cough up $5/mo), and I think that Linux by its nature (free as in beer as well as free as in freedom) does attract quite a few people who are, frankly, cheapskates -- the kind of people that you hear saying things like "if I wanted to pay for software, I would have used Windows!" -- but I think it's also a lack-of-evidence problem because there aren't too many commercial software packages for Linux, outside of niche markets, thus it's nearly impossible to disprove.
I'm not exactly sure how we change this, as a community (or if we'd want to if we could). Obviously a big selling point of Linux is that there is a large software base which is free-as-in-beer.
I think the GGP (at least I think that's who it was who said it, somewhere higher up in the thread anyway) who said that what we need to do to get commercial software on Linux is increase userbase, and the best way to increase userbase is by having better free tools. That's, I think, probably the only way to break the chicken-and-egg problem that now exists. The thing that will bring commercial developers to the platform most quickly, is if there's a viable alternative to their product available on it for free. When they see it starting to cut into their marketshare, then they'll want to have a presence on the platform.
Uh... I'm going to take a stab at this one. It's because there's no advantage?
You have to look at it from the PHB's perspective, where running Linux isn't an end unto itself like it might be for you and me. Running Photoshop on top of OpenOffice (or WINE, etc.) still requires them to buy a license for Photoshop, so there's a big incentive out the window. Plus, the users aren't going to like it and are going to bitch and moan like crazy, because it's going to be slower than if it was running natively on the same hardware. While speed may not seem like a big deal (and might not be, if you were just doing 72 or 96 dpi web graphics), somebody working with 200MB drum scans and applying filters to them isn't going to be very happy that they just lost 10% (or whatever) to emulation overhead. Perhaps if you could prove that the speed decrease, both in terms of UI responsiveness and compute-intensive tasks, was trivial, you might have a case. But it's going to be an uphill battle.
Plus, there probably isn't going to be support for this configuration from Adobe, and companies are notoriously (and for good reason) unwilling to adopt unsupported or third-party-supported configurations on a wide basis.
I think, some day, Adobe is going to make Photoshop for Linux. But it's not going to be very soon, because I think they perceive (along with many other commercial developers) that the platform is too much of a moving target. Plus, I think the Gnome vs. KDE thing probably doesn't help either, even if it's not a significant technical hurdle anymore to run applications developed for either one on the other, it creates a perception of a schism.
I think the idea here is not to make the pursuit completely unnecessary, but to make the type of close, dangerous pursuits that sometimes happen when the police are trying to stay close to a fleeing driver less common.
The scenario would work something like this -- the perp starts fleeing, and the cops get close enough to paint it with a few trackers. Then they back off to a comfortable distance; maybe just enough to keep the car in sight, or even a little further. I don't think they'd just go home for donuts at this point, though. They're still in their cruiser, following along behind.
If the perp stopped to remove/smash the trackers, the cops -- who are still in a car -- would easily overtake them. Decelerating to a stop from 60MPH, getting out of the car, finding and destroying the trackers, all takes a significant amount of time. Even if the cops were hanging a quarter of a mile or so back, I doubt they would have much trouble catching up and doing a 'felony stop' (when they pull around the pursued car so that it can't easily drive forward and away). At that point, the pursuit is pretty much over (or it continues on foot, which is common but usually short-lived).
At any rate, if you have to make the pursued vehicle stop, and the driver get out of the car and smash/remove/disable the trackers, that's a big advantage. The police almost always have the upper hand in pursuits -- they have communication and the weight of numbers -- and the few seconds gained by causing the other car to stop seems like it could be pretty decisive.
Especially if you know that the other car is going to stop to remove the trackers at some point (i.e., if the trackers become common knowledge), you could easily just wait for that to happen, and then move in. It's the cars moving at high speed that are the real risk in pursuits, if you can make them stop their car, then you can move in and use more conventional tactics (like, say, shooting them) without risking a lot of bystanders.
Well, I'm planning on buying the package that puts the tagging rifle in a gimbaled gun turret on the hood, like an Apache gunship, and it's controlled by a eye-tracking device mounted to the driver's helmet.
I figure the way people drive around here, it's going to need to have a pretty high cyclic rate, and is going to have to use belt-fed ammunition, too.
What, you don't wear a flight helmet when you drive?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to do that, why not attach it to a large LED display, and let everyone who wants to talk to you "Please Take a Number?" :)
Then when you feel like turning around, you just work your way down the queue. I know I'd be loads more productive if this were the case.
We can assume this happened because that is historically the age that MOST people have gone through puberty.
Except that would be an incorrect assumption. It was historically not uncommon for women to start having periods as late as 15 or 16. In 1830, it was approximately 15.5, depending on the population sampled. Even as recently as 1928, the average (c=10,000) age at menarche was 13.9 years. Today, it's around 12.6. (See various studies here.) That seems like a fairly significant decline to me.
This earlier onset is usually chalked up to improved nutrition, but the overall conclusion -- that traditional societies had women becoming fertile much later in life than they are today -- remains true. Women were often considered adults and/or married before they started menstruating and finished puberty. This long transitional time that we've created in a person's teenage years, when they aren't really an adult but have long since become one biologically, did not exist until fairly recently.
It isn't uniformly that way. It depends on the nature of the filtering process. A counter example is kids who come into school already reading. Their advantage is gone by grade 4. Why? All kids pass into the next grade so there is no filtering process.
Huh?
Care to explain that? Because my experience has been exactly the opposite. And I've heard a lot of stuff that would seem to suggest that children who learn to read earlier, tend to do better in school, and this success in elementary school translates on down the line.
This review study, Long-Term Effects of Early Childhood Programs on Cognitive and School Outcomes, says that of five studies reviewed "All five estimated that [early childhood reading education] had a large effect on the [high-school] graduation rate." (Only 3 of the 5 were statistically significant, the sample sizes of the other two were suggestive, but too small for significance.) That seems pretty good to me, although they do admit that children who read earlier often have adults who are more involved, etc., and that may contribute.
Anyway, I would argue that there definitely is a filtering effect in schools -- at least there used to be, anyway, back when they actually "held back" students who couldn't meet standards at the end of the year. I'm not sure that this is done in elementary schools as much as it once was, but you used to be able to pick out the under-performers pretty easily, because they were always the kids that were 2-3 years older than everybody else.
Putting the issue of academic standards aside for a second, there is an age cutoff for kindergarten in most school districts which is identical in effect to that you talked about there being in hockey. Usually in order to enter kindergarten, children have to be at least 4 years and 10 months old (so they have to have their fifth birthday before November of their kindergarten year); this probably varies from place to place. But the net effect is the same: there are some kids who will just miss that 'birthday cutoff' and end up being the oldest kids in their class, the year later. And there are some kids who will just barely sneak in, and be the youngest. Obviously, school is different from hockey, and there's (hopefully) less of an emphasis on physical size and strength, and kids mature at different speeds. But the result is the similar: in any given 'grade,' you're going to possibly get some kids who are a year older than each other. Even more, if you have a system that allows for the acceleration of gifted students and the holding back of underperforming ones.
I've never seen any studies relating birth month to later academic performance, that would show whether it's advantageous for parents to hold their kid back a year if they're near the birth-month cutoff for kindergarten. I suppose it might be tough to do, since places presumably have different standards. It would be interesting, though.
Islamic extremists embody the beliefs and practices of the majority of Muslims just as much as the Klu Klux Klan embodied the beliefs and practices on main stream Christianity.
... yet, every time something horrific is perpetuated in the name of Islam and the Prophet, the people who have the authority to speak out and condemn it, seem rather reticent to say so.
I believe this also
Or at least if they are saying so, there's very little evidence of it in the media. When the US media goes looking for a Muslim apologist, they seem to always end up talking to some professor of Mid-East studies at some university somewhere. Why don't the 26 Clerics of the House of Saud or even the most high-profile Imams and clerics flood the Internet and subsequently the airwaves with pronouncements condemning these acts? It's not as if they don't have a soap box to stand on, or that the media wouldn't give them coverage. There's hardly a conspiracy afoot to black them out, if anything the news sources would love to have that.
It would seem as though extremism is a rather large problem facing the Muslim world community right now. I can't think of anything that would possibly be greater, in fact. It seems to me that if the religious leaders of various sects were really interested in doing anything about it, that they could get together and issue a strong condemnation of it, as one.
However, their silence -- or at most, seemingly week protestations -- is the norm, rather than the other way around.
To me, that silence is more damning a condemnation than a thousand suicide bombers' explosions.
One thing this DOES indicate is that extremist Muslims can't handle free speech. It doesn't say anything about anyone else.
Well said. And consider this: they've made it clear they can't even tolerate freedom of speech in another country, even one as far away and relatively insignificant as Denmark. How do you think that bodes for ever setting up any sort of truly free society in the Muslim world? Not very well, I'm afraid.
As for the kind of society they would set up, given any say in the matter -- I would say I'd just leave it to the reader's imagination, but why bother when you have Taliban Afghanistan as an abject example. I don't think you can ever come to any sort of compromise with these people -- there is simply no way to achieve what they want, within the framework of personal freedom that we value so highly in the West. Those two goals are mutually exclusive.
I don't have any cute solutions to propose. It seems like there are two ways that people seem to go on the issue of 'what to do,' neither of which I think will work. Solution 1 is, "we cannot negotiate with them, so we'll kill them." In addition to subverting one's own value system by blithely resorting to violence, I'm not sure that killing all the extremists is really a realistic objective. But the second popular solution, which is simply to deny that what the extremists are seeking really is all that extreme, and proceed under the illusion that they can be negotiated with and brought to see the benefits of a free society, is also false. Extremists don't see a free society where people have the ability to choose their religion and say whatever they want -- no matter how blasphemous -- as a good thing. And if you reject that basic premise, none of the other arguments that get made in favor of democracy make sense.
In the end, I think the US and Europe will tire of meddling in Middle-Eastern Muslim affairs, and let the place become a giant 12th Century theocracy. A new 'Iron Curtain' will be erected, except instead of between Democracy and Communism, it will be between Democracy and Theocracy. Eventually, and it's starting to happen already, people in the US are going to decide that the freedom of a bunch of questionably grateful people is not worth American lives. I think the only reason why you don't hear more calls for this right now is because of oil; even if you don't value freedom in the Middle East per se, a democratic Middle East is a friendly Middle East, and friendly equals a steady supply of oil. Once that oil is gone, and 'freedom' is the only thing left as a motivation, I think you'll see the same carelessness applied to the Arab nations as we saw applied to Somalia. The second Americans start getting killed, we'll pull back like a person who's been burned, and let the place eat itself alive.
I'm out of mod points, but I think you hit the nail on the head.
I want to add two points:
First, many of the Muslims who are being quoted in the media want apologies from or punishment given to the cartoonists themselves, not just the publishers. And that's completely out of line -- I can't imagine that it's actually consistent with most Muslim theological doctrine, either -- simply because a religion (any religion, take your pick) sets out rules for its own followers. It doesn't say anything about how other people should act. Jewish and Muslim people are proscribed from eating pork, but I've yet to have someone come up to me and tell me (a non-Jew and non-Muslim) that I can't eat pork. Likewise, Muslims are prohibited from making images of the Prophet, but I fail to see how that extends to others.
I'm not just criticizing Muslims here, I would make the same criticism in regards to Christians who try to apply their religion's idea of morality onto non-Christians.
Your religion applies to YOU. It doesn't say anything about what I can and can't do. I'd like to believe that the majority of Muslims in the world understand this basic point (I think they do).
Second, I have no problem with Muslims boycotting countries they don't like. I think it's stupid, because I happen to agree with the goverment and people of Denmark in thinking that free speech and a free press is a Good Thing, but people should be free to buy their goods wherever they want to. Likewise, the Danes and countries friendly to them (the rest of the E.U.) have a right to decide that they will stop buying or importing things from countries that boycott Denmark. In the end, we'll find out who wants whose goods more.
However, there is a fundamental difference between boycotting a country's goods and attacking their embassy. In fact, it's not just a 'difference,' it's a gaping fucking chasm. It's the same difference between holding a placard outside an abortion clinic, and taping some Semtex and nails to your chest and blowing yourself up in front of it. One is a civilized act, the other is indefensible.
And at the end of the day, that's the difference between a Muslim (or probably any kind of) fundamentalist's view of the world and the view held by the member of a liberal democracy, or a non-fundamentalist person: in one view, when you disagree with someone, you try to argue with them or failing that, just refuse to interact with them; in the fundamentalists' world, you try to kill them.
I'm with you here.
I live in the Wash., DC metro area right now, which has one of the best public transportation systems of any city in the US (your Federal tax dollars at work). It also has one of the worst traffic and parking problems I've ever seen -- although I've heard that Atlanta and LA are also as bad.
I have a 'reverse commute' -- I live in the city and work in the 'burbs, and although this doesn't eliminate the traffic completely (not even close), it does put me outside the worst of it. Getting into the office at 0700 and leaving by 1500 or so also helps.
By car, getting to the office takes me about 25-35 minutes for just about 15 miles, and if you write off my car as a sunk cost (and ignore the resale value, I'm not interested in giving it up as I use it for more than just commuting) the expense is wear-and-tear and gasoline. It averages 20MPG almost exactly and even if gas is $3.00/gal, the gasoline cost works out to about $4.50 a day. Not insignificant, but 40% less than the cost of the metro. Factoring wear-and-tear is tougher, but I'm sure it's less than 40% of my gas costs.
But the biggest deal for me is that my 35-minute commute becomes an almost 90-minute ordeal if I wanted to take public transportation. I've tried every combination of bus/rail that I can think of, peak and off-peak times, and it means almost an extra hour out of my day for each leg. I'm not willing to sacrifice that.
Public transportation would have to get a lot better, and gas would have to get a lot more expensive, for it to become a viable commuting option for me. As it is right now, my biggest use of public transportation is to go bar-hopping in the evenings, since it means not having to drive home afterwards. For that alone, it's great to have. And perhaps if I had the 'traditional commute,' of driving from the suburbs in the morning to the city during the day and back to the 'burbs at night, the time savings would be there. But there are a lot of people who would be willing to use public transportation if the time and money savings worked, and right now they just don't.
The other thing that needs to be considered is what kind of driving you do.
... but if it's true, it could seriously impact the efficiency numbers in certain climates. A diesel engine sees some efficiency hit as a result of the A/C compressor, but its not that significant. (I measured the MPG of my VW with the compressor running and not, and could never get a good handle on what the change was. It was below the error caused by month-to-month differences in my driving style, anyway.) I don't know about anybody else, but I am not prepared to drive without air conditioning, at least until gas is well into the double-digit dollars per gallon.
A gasoline hybrid like the Prius gets its best mileage in city, stop-and-go driving, because of the regenerative braking.
A diesel engine gets its best milage while cruising on the highway at a basically constant speed, in the transmission's highest gear.
I used to drive a diesel VW and *loved* it. It was fun to drive (torquey as hell) and had excellent highway range, well in excess of 500 miles to the tank. However that mileage went into the toilet if I had to do a lot of stop and go driving. Still better than a conventional gasoline car for the same driving, but nothing like a hybrid.
I think there will be a place for both types of vehicles in the future, and which one is most efficient for you depends on the type of driving you do. For me, it's almost highway driving -- a hybrid wouldn't have much of an advantage.
The other thing to consider is the air conditioning and heating requirements. I have heard it said that the hybrids derive a lot of their fuel savings by being able to shut off the gas engine when it's not needed (in city driving), but that if you have the A/C running, it won't shut off because there's no way to run the compressor electrically. If anyone can verify this I'd be interested
What I would like to see is a diesel-electric hybrid: combine the best of both worlds.
I also wish that there was some sort of tax relief for diesel passenger vehicles on the diesel fuel taxes, which are really excessive. They're aimed at truckers, but they've had the side-effect of making diesel artifically expensive relative to gasoline, and hurting diesel car development in the US. This is too bad, because it's a technology that really has a lot of potential. There are better/alternative ways of taxing trucking than putting a tax on diesel fuel. At the very least, we should have some sort of rebate program to allow diesel passenger car owners to get back the difference in taxes they pay over an equivalent amount of gasoline (if not the amount of gasoline that they would have needed to buy to drive the same number of miles, which would be more fair).
It's my (possibly flawed) understanding that RAID-0 was a sort of backronym; it was created later, after the other common RAID levels, in order to refer to something "beneath" RAID-1 on the scale of redundancy/safety.
I remember when RAID was a new thing, and I don't recall anyone talking about "level zero" initially. People talked about striping, and then the various RAID levels, and JBOD, but I think the "RAID-0" term came a little later. I'm also fairly certain that disk striping in order to get performance improvements weren't a new idea, and they were just referred to as 'striping' before RAID became a household term.
Anyway, I agree with you -- it really shouldn't be called a RAID-level-anything at all. It's disk striping, and redundancy doesn't enter into it.
Both OS's can provide methods to do this automatically, but that does not take the onus of backups off the user.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but I wondered if you'd elaborate on the included automatic backup tools on Windows.
On Linux/BSD/Darwin/MacOS, you can put together a backup strategy using cron(tab) and rsync that will spread your data across multiple machines, securely, and once it's set up do it regularly without user intervention. Granted I wouldn't call it exactly simple to set up, but I'm not much of a UNIX guru and I just did it over my lunch break by SSHing into the two machines.
As I'm forced to use a Windows machine at work, I'd be interested to know if something similar was possible. It was my understanding that to get the same type of system, you'd have to invest in a commercial product. Is there a way to do it, 'out of the box,' that I'm just not aware of?
You really want to Google for 'using crontab' since that's the userland tool for setting up cron jobs.
/etc/profile file to fix this.
t erminal_5.html
If you run that search, you get this page as the first result, which is pretty good.
And crontab will use whichever editor you specify in your shell's EDITOR variable, the default is vi on some systems, but you can just as easily put a line or two in your
It would look like (correct me if I'm wrong here)
EDITOR="/usr/bin/pico"
export EDITOR
Obviously, you can replace the path to pico with whatever other editor you prefer.
I just set up a crontab task on my Mac OS X box at home to back up my Documents directory over rsync every night at 0330 to a remote machine, and send the results to me in an email on the local system, following these pretty-good instructions:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/07/02/
I don't guarantee that those instructions will help you on a non-Darwin based system, though. The mail trick requires sendmail to be installed and working, for one.
salary is = y.
There is supposed to be a "less than or equal to" in there, but it didn't go through. Plain Old Text, indeed.
Your salary is really dependent on the perceived cost of replacing you, as a revenue-generating unit.
You might make a lot of money for your company, but if there are a line of people outside the door who are ready to and capable of taking over your job, you're not really in any position to ask for a raise.
The only place that the revenue you generate enters into the equation is in terms of what kind of person they'd need to find to replace you. If you generate x amount of revenue and have salary y, at the most basic level, your salary will never go up as long as there's another person who can be found that will also generate x amount of revenue whose salary is = y.
Of course this ignores a lot of things, like the ease of integrating a new person into an organization, individual social traits, etc., which might allow you to get your salary slightly higher than your 'replacement cost.' But in many industries, it's a fairly good model of how things work.
I see it as the other way around.
Right now, you pay for a cell phone if you want one. It's yours, it's private.
Nothing in this article proposes changing that. Nobody would be able to get tracking data off of your personal mobile phone.
What's basically happening is that companies are going to have ways of tracking THEIR mobile phones, which they give to employees. Nobody is saying that you have to carry this phone with you on the weekends, or use it for personal calls, or anything else.
However, there seems to be as assumption being made here that people will carry their employers' free phones with them everywhere, after work hours, and use them in lieu of a personally-owned phone. To me, that's basically like saying "we'll give you $25 a month in exchange for your privacy!" The assumption is that people will take their employers up on this offer, and stop paying for their own phones.
I think it's a stupid bargain -- I value my privacy more than $29 a month or whatever I pay for my personal cell service. But some people might not, and they ought to be able to make a pact with the devil, metaphorically speaking, if they so choose.
I would think that the company could tell you that they want you to use their phone during business hours. Whether you take that home with you at night or not is your business (assuming they allow you to).
It would be like offering to use your own notebook computer in lieu of the company one. Although I haven't personally tried (I use a Mac, anyway), I can imagine they might not be too keen on the idea. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they could track my position, based on the laptop, if they really wanted to. (Using reverse DNS lookups would give an approximation, or they could install a cellular Internet card that's GPS capable and do it that way.)
I have no problem in theory with my employer tracking my location during the working day. I could even see how it might be convenient (preventing a lot of "hey, are you working at site xyz today?" emails). I admit it has a certain potential for obnoxious use, but in the end, I think smart companies will realize that pestering their employees is counterproductive. If your most productive employee spends three hours a day eating lunch, who cares? As long as he or she is generating revenue for the company, a smart manager knows when not to get in the way. It's the same issue as Internet access. I think companies have the right to censor or filter their corporate intranets, but if they're smart, they won't.
I've worked for a bunch of high-tech firms, and none of them were laid-back, granola-munching hippie enterprises, yet none of them censored or blocked their Internet. How you got your work done was your business; if that included reading Slashdot or NFL News or whatever in the morning, more power to you. If you didn't perform, you got fired. That's the way it should be.
If you only do two hours of 'real work' a day, and spend the rest of the time reading Somethingawful, but do more in that two hours than everybody else does in eight, more power to you. If you work your butt off for ten hours a day, but do less in ten hours than most people do in two, you're fired. Nobody wants to know -- or cares -- how hard you work; what really matters is what you turn out at the end of the day/week/month/project.
If my company started getting on me about my Internet use, or (getting back to the article here) complaining because of where I was during the day based on cellphone-tracking data, and I was otherwise doing my job and generating revenue for the company, I'd quit. Not just out of spite because they're cutting into my Slashdot time, or hang-out-at-the-diner time, but because it would be indicative of a serious problem with how they were measuring performance.
So in short, the technology (cell phone tracking) isn't a problem. It's the companies who would use such a thing obnoxiously that are a problem, but in the end all they're going to do is hurt themselves by driving away good people to firms that have real performance-based metrics. I have some sympathy for somebody who works at a company that treats them like that, but only if it's a new situation. If you've been dealing with it for a while and it doesn't seem like it's going to change, dust off your resume and move along.
You don't need to have a PayPal account to send a credit card payment, you're correct.
What finially got to me was that in order to receive a credit card payment, they force you to upgrade your account to their "Premier" level, which then skims a percentage off of all your incoming transactions (I think it's 3%), regardless of whether or not they're credit-card based.
For someone who only does a small percentage of credit-card business, this is a real scam. I know that the credit card companies charge fees. I'm not faulting PayPal for charging for credit card service. What I do find obnoxious is that they want to charge you that percentage on EVERYTHING, rather than just on the incoming credit card transactions.
The other thing that I strongly dislike is that there's no way to advertise that you use PayPal, without having the credit card icons pop up. I'm more than willing to accept PayPal, but I'm not going to upgrade to a Premier account for one sale -- especially since PayPal will only let you downgrade back to the regular level of account ONCE. If you accept a second credit card transaction by mistake, you're stuck giving them 3%, permanently.
It's just one of the many reasons I have all but given up on eBay. The decline in the quality of the average merchandise, and the increased difficulty in actually contacting buyers and sellers directly (as opposed to through the eBay communication/payment system) is also a turnoff for me. I got a couple of bad pieces of gear, and I couldn't reach the seller until I left them bad feedback. And from what I've heard, this isn't uncommon -- it never used to be this much of a problem.
So... if this guy was unconscious in the driver's seat... or if it were a six-year-old driving... or if the accelerator were somehow stuck down, their lives would be forfeit as well? If the high-speed chase is occurring at midnight on a rural interstate highway, with zero traffic?
If it really was occuring on an empty interstate highway then the danger to others is more limited, obviously, and thus I think the police should use more restraint in stopping them.
However, if they were driving down that empty stretch of highway towards a more urban area, or if the highway was about to end and become surface-level streets, with traffic lights and other drivers and everything else, then I think it's entirely defensible for the police to use any means necessary to stop the car, even if doing so kills the driver as a side-effect.
The fact that their accellerator might be stuck down or that they might not know what they're doing (which would be the case if they're six years old, or mentally incompetent, or asleep) doesn't change the fact that they're putting the lives of other people at risk. That's unacceptable, and it's the job of the police to always put the lives of bystanders above the life of the person who's putting them at risk.
Everybody has their own pet theory that they use to explain why Linux on the desktop isn't quite there yet. Here's mine: it's because there isn't a "standard version" of Linux, and to a developer, that's scary.
That's not to say that there's just one version of Windows, but at least it's a pretty clear playing field. You can read a one-page summary and pretty much understand the various versions and who uses them and which one you want to develop for. With Linux, the situation isn't all that clear. If you make RHEL your target distro, are you going to be losing everyone who uses SuSE as potential customers? What about the Asian market and their distributions? Do you develop for KDE or Gnome? Or create your own widget set completely independent of either? What's your performance going to be like, and how do you ensure user experience without alienating customers? There are seemingly a lot more factors involved.
A while back, I thought we might get a partial solution to this problem (others would disagree with me as to whether it's a problem or not -- I think it is, because frankly, I want an OS and not an ecosystem) when IBM was talking about dumping Windows for Linux. That would have put 300,000 employees and a major software/hardware producer firmly behind one distribution (I think it was RHEL). Of course, it never happened -- maybe they were just wrangling for a better deal on XP licenses or something.
I guess this situation, call it 'fragmentation' or 'diversity,' depending on your point of view, is the price you pay for not being held hostage by one vendor. However, I think there's a limit to how much marketshare an OS can have, when there isn't one widely-used and supported face for the outside world to deal with.
I think there are a lot of commercial software houses would make Linux versions, if there was such a thing as "Linux" to make a binary distribution for. I think, eventually, one of the major commercial distributions is going to come out as the clear winner and we'll effectively have this (like it or not), once the period of expansion into new markets that we're in right now stops.
I brought this up last week in a different discussion, but not only did they have a version for SGI at one point, they had a version for "UNIX" in the form of SunOS/SPARC. It was for SunOS 2.x and I think it was around Photoshop 3 or so.
s t/photoshopSun.pdf
This place has a PDF version of the Adobe product brochure:
http://computing.ee.ethz.ch/sepp/photoshop-3.0.1-
Ah, you have a fine sense of humor, my friend.
Why don't they just send 1,000 free shares of their stock to every Linux developer, while they're at it? Hell, maybe Steve will dress up in a Santa Claus suit and give free iBooks to everyone, too.
Apple has created the MacOS so that it's easy to port Linux/UNIX applications to it, but they have no great incentive to create a path for porting applications away from it.
I can run the GIMP on MacOS if I want (and have been able to for a while, although it got easier recently, since the newer versions of the MacOS include X), but it'll be a cold day in hell before you can run a Carbonized app like Photoshop on Linux. And that's exactly the way Apple wants it.
Wow, I was totally unaware of that program.
Here's a link to his actual page (with screenshots):
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=5
It looks fairly impressive. The interface is honestly a clone of Photoshop, which is a huge plus in my book (nothing to relearn), it supposedly has CMYK support, works with TWAIN and SANE scanners, even does JPEG-2000.
Not bad for $32! The license lets you run it on multiple platforms also, and he's got versions for MacOS, MorphOS, Linux (x86 and PPC), BSD (x86), and a list of others.
I'll have to look into it more, but I might be cutting this guy a check soon, if it's for real and as good as advertised. I don't mind terribly the fact that it's not open-sourced, that's his choice as the developer, although it'd be nice to have some sort of promise that if he decides to stop developing it that he'll release it so it doesn't become abandonware. I suspect though in order to implement a lot of those features that there's a lot of licensed/patented code inside.
Not to mention the fact that it's a platform whose users, well, let's just say it's one whose users PREFER not to pay anything for software at all.
I would have said this differently:
Linux is a platform where there is a wide perception that its users will not pay for software.
Whether that perception is beared out in reality, is another thing entirely; there does seem to be a certain amount of truth to it (go do some Google searches for Cedega and you'll see some of the problems they have getting people to cough up $5/mo), and I think that Linux by its nature (free as in beer as well as free as in freedom) does attract quite a few people who are, frankly, cheapskates -- the kind of people that you hear saying things like "if I wanted to pay for software, I would have used Windows!" -- but I think it's also a lack-of-evidence problem because there aren't too many commercial software packages for Linux, outside of niche markets, thus it's nearly impossible to disprove.
I'm not exactly sure how we change this, as a community (or if we'd want to if we could). Obviously a big selling point of Linux is that there is a large software base which is free-as-in-beer.
I think the GGP (at least I think that's who it was who said it, somewhere higher up in the thread anyway) who said that what we need to do to get commercial software on Linux is increase userbase, and the best way to increase userbase is by having better free tools. That's, I think, probably the only way to break the chicken-and-egg problem that now exists. The thing that will bring commercial developers to the platform most quickly, is if there's a viable alternative to their product available on it for free. When they see it starting to cut into their marketshare, then they'll want to have a presence on the platform.
Uh ... I'm going to take a stab at this one. It's because there's no advantage?
You have to look at it from the PHB's perspective, where running Linux isn't an end unto itself like it might be for you and me. Running Photoshop on top of OpenOffice (or WINE, etc.) still requires them to buy a license for Photoshop, so there's a big incentive out the window. Plus, the users aren't going to like it and are going to bitch and moan like crazy, because it's going to be slower than if it was running natively on the same hardware. While speed may not seem like a big deal (and might not be, if you were just doing 72 or 96 dpi web graphics), somebody working with 200MB drum scans and applying filters to them isn't going to be very happy that they just lost 10% (or whatever) to emulation overhead. Perhaps if you could prove that the speed decrease, both in terms of UI responsiveness and compute-intensive tasks, was trivial, you might have a case. But it's going to be an uphill battle.
Plus, there probably isn't going to be support for this configuration from Adobe, and companies are notoriously (and for good reason) unwilling to adopt unsupported or third-party-supported configurations on a wide basis.
I think, some day, Adobe is going to make Photoshop for Linux. But it's not going to be very soon, because I think they perceive (along with many other commercial developers) that the platform is too much of a moving target. Plus, I think the Gnome vs. KDE thing probably doesn't help either, even if it's not a significant technical hurdle anymore to run applications developed for either one on the other, it creates a perception of a schism.
I think the idea here is not to make the pursuit completely unnecessary, but to make the type of close, dangerous pursuits that sometimes happen when the police are trying to stay close to a fleeing driver less common.
The scenario would work something like this -- the perp starts fleeing, and the cops get close enough to paint it with a few trackers. Then they back off to a comfortable distance; maybe just enough to keep the car in sight, or even a little further. I don't think they'd just go home for donuts at this point, though. They're still in their cruiser, following along behind.
If the perp stopped to remove/smash the trackers, the cops -- who are still in a car -- would easily overtake them. Decelerating to a stop from 60MPH, getting out of the car, finding and destroying the trackers, all takes a significant amount of time. Even if the cops were hanging a quarter of a mile or so back, I doubt they would have much trouble catching up and doing a 'felony stop' (when they pull around the pursued car so that it can't easily drive forward and away). At that point, the pursuit is pretty much over (or it continues on foot, which is common but usually short-lived).
At any rate, if you have to make the pursued vehicle stop, and the driver get out of the car and smash/remove/disable the trackers, that's a big advantage. The police almost always have the upper hand in pursuits -- they have communication and the weight of numbers -- and the few seconds gained by causing the other car to stop seems like it could be pretty decisive.
Especially if you know that the other car is going to stop to remove the trackers at some point (i.e., if the trackers become common knowledge), you could easily just wait for that to happen, and then move in. It's the cars moving at high speed that are the real risk in pursuits, if you can make them stop their car, then you can move in and use more conventional tactics (like, say, shooting them) without risking a lot of bystanders.
Well, I'm planning on buying the package that puts the tagging rifle in a gimbaled gun turret on the hood, like an Apache gunship, and it's controlled by a eye-tracking device mounted to the driver's helmet.
I figure the way people drive around here, it's going to need to have a pretty high cyclic rate, and is going to have to use belt-fed ammunition, too.
What, you don't wear a flight helmet when you drive?