I looked at the cappucino, but it was too expensive. You might be interested in it.
Oddly enough I just ordered one. BTW, there are cheaper places to order it than Think Geek. I found a bare bones version for about $425 but I didn't want to screw it up and my fingers are a bit too big for that tight of place:-), so I ordered one pre-made w/512K mem, a 40Gb HD, and a DVD-ROM for about $900. Expensive, yes. But it's my one toy for the year, so...
I started making system purchasing decisions for other reasons around the 800 MHz point. My main issues now are size and silence. I could not care less that I could double my SETI@Home work units. The thing that allowed me to do that would still be noisy and clunky. Give me small and quiet any day.
one might think the physics community was full of frauds.
Well, it must be. Look what all of those fraudulant physicists did to suppress cold fusion. And they still haven't looked into the anti-gravity system and the infinite movement devices I've developed. And they're secretly loosening the straps that hold on my tin foil hat, too.
ALSO - If a group could QUICKLY get a DRM OS even in a shoddy developmental state, then MS's patent would be null and void.
Why? The patent would still be there. The new OS would not be prior art. I think you still hearken back to the days when you had to have an actual working model of something to be granted a patent. This has not been the case for several years.
... or does anyone else think that this could really suck big-time:
GM wants to build a common fuel cell based drive-by-wire chassis that it will mount the body panels, control systems, and passenger compartments
There's a reason that different cars have different chasses. I'd like to see the ride a Caddie body on a standard size frame gets. In addition, the fuel efficiency of a small car (and how small could you make it) on a standard chassis would suck, too. This would lead to a bunch of cookie-cutter cars, most of which have lousy handling, don't perform well, and are ugly to boot.
Oh yeah... I forgot. This is GM we're talking about. Never mind.
Symantec has a wide variety of products running on everything from x86's to S/390's. You might want to notice that their (almost) latest big announcement was a firewall product running on IBM iSeries Linux. I know that quite a few people dislike Symantec due to their BSA involvement, but their strategy as an enterprise security player makes them play in the UNIX and Linux arenas as well. And, like it or not, they do make the best AV products out there. You might want to get a knowledge upgrade before you shoot off your mouth again...
Consider the fact that there was a time before MAKE MONEY FAST.
But it didn't last very long. I've been on USENET since 1981 - back when E-mail was routed manually across Unix servers and even back then there were flames and spam. Not so much as now, but it was certainly not a "golden age of the internet" either. ARPANET folk thought that the net went to Hell when they started gatewaying UUCP news and mail traffic. Unix users though the world went to Hell after the first gateways between them and the unwashed masses (Prodigy, AOL, etc.) went up. Others think it went to Hell with the commodification of the Web. Most people remember the past more fondly than it should be remebered. We all have our "golden days". They weren't all that golden...
On the other hand, with this paradigm, there is the *risk* that the government starts displacing companies by releasing a free product.
A government that does *anything* cannot divorce itself from being an economic actor. Be it picking winners and losers WRT contracts or supporting research in a given area or deciding which third-world company to invade to get oil:-). If a government can provide a capability less expensively than the private sector can, it probably should. Contrawise, if a government can contract a service more inexpensively than by doing it itself, it probably should. Doing otherwise is wasting taxpayers' money.
That being said, one also has to look at the full cost of taking an action - looking at things like reliability of service, probability and cost of externalities, and issues of unfair competition (e.g., government can generally take control of a property more cheaply via eminent domain than a private firm via negotiation). However, I don't see many of those issues arising in this case. So go for it, Germany!
Not to mention that the narrow end of the fin contacting the substrate decreases channel/substrate leakage. This is a VERY cute idea. It probably can get better density, too, as it gets developed further.
Hell a group of about 100 of us now have our own private open nap network going and we have only high quality known good files.
And that's what the *AA want. As long as the networks split and isolate, they can monitor them and pick them off as they become big enough. Also, since being a member of a closed "pirating ring" is as good as an admission of conspiracy, they can start to use RICO laws, too. Yummy...
In reality, the only safety in P2P for illegal sharing was its ubiquity. Once that's gone, you become an easy target. It's a lot easier to control five people than a mob of thousands.
... is to buy a smaller, but better quality, diamond and then work with your jeweler to design a nice ring. You can also start with a multi-stone setting holding one smaller diamond and other. less expensive, stones. Then as you become more financially well off, replace the other stones with diamonds and use the original stones in neclaces, earrings, etc. I started with a setting holding a 2C diamond and four small topaz, and over the years have turned this into a ring holding the original diamond, two 1 C. diamonds and two 0.5C diamonds. the original and replacement stones went into two topaz pendants, two ruby earrings and two topaz earrings. Of course, the wife didn't mind me absconding with the ring for a couple of weeks before her birthday and was gracious about not having a clue what I was getting her:-).
The other thing to do is to work with a small local jeweler, rather than a big chain. Your stones will generally be of higher quality and they usually want your repeat business so they'll try to get you a good deal. They're also even more appreciative in these troubled economic times.
That you are intelligent does not mean everyone else is dumb.
No, but consider that the average IQ is 100. And, if IQ is well-modeled as a gaussian distribution*, then 50%+ of the population has lower IQ than anyone of "above average" intelligence. Besides, most of the comments about Joe Sixpack/Joe Average/Joe Q. Public are not necessarily about innate intelligence, only about his ability to be engaged and to care about these issues enough to become educated on them. And, sadly, this puts their intelligence about these issues squarely in the red zone.
* Gratuitous assumption on my part, not lately having checked the graphs. As far as I know, we may have a skewed or bimodal distribution by now. Even so, my point still stands - there are a great many people of below average intelligence out there. And extra points to anyone who can turn this into a trolling rant about how IQ doesn't mean anything. Yeah, it sucks, but it's one of the few widely used quantitative cognative comparatives out there - deal with it...
... but they knew what they were about. COBOL was about records and batch processing, Fortran and APL were about arrays and procedural programming, SNOBOL was for strings, and Lisp was about LISt Processing. These languages, although having expanded their paradigms, are still the best ones for doing those types of tasks. They (Lisp and COBOL, in particular) have seamlessly integrated more paradigms and are fully usable.
Also, despite what you say, well formatted Fortran code is no more ugly than most other code (and a hell of a lot nicer looking than your average Perl code:-().
I don't know why people believe that newer languages are automatically better. At the end of the day, you got storage, you got ops screwing around with the storage, and you got a mess of control flow holding the guts together. Just because I'm some hotshot wanting to get my name in the (geek-) papers with my shiny new syntax doesn't mean it's any different. And it certainly doesn't mean it's any better.
So go ahead and learn Fortran. Learn about the joys of representing linked lists as a set of next indices into an array. Learn about dimension statements and equivalence blocks. Learn how to squeeze down your numeric processing into the nub of a kernel of procedural truth. You'll end up being a better programmer.
After reading the initial criticism of Bruce's talk here, I am amazed. Wow! How dare an artist take some of our precious geektime to explain things in a different context! Doesn't he understand that Open Source is serious business? My God, next thing you know, we might actually have to learn that the rest of the world doesn't think like we do and that's OK.
I really get tired of a bunch of whiney geeks bitching because people want to sully their precious, insulated geekspace with cultural issues (outside games and anime and Libetarianism, which, for some unfathomable reason, seem to be perfectly OK). Is that the key item to being a geek? A uncontrolled but always frustrated little ego that says "Bow down before me in my magnificent geektitude and don't ever mention the outside world because I can't handle that!"? Sheesh...
Well, at one time you folks wanted it all, and at one time, you folks didn't want parts of MI or WI... Make up your minds!
Well, I guess I'll take it, if nobody else wants it (except for the icy bits, unless they hold oil or gas). I'll pay you a US dollar and Canadian dollar so the contract will be nice and legal, even in that pesky internantional court thingy the UN wants to be settin' up. Please send me an address so my boy Col... -- uh, Secretary Powell -- can mail the contract to y'all.
"I want to use Word." They don't care if the system starts a new copy, or if it brings to the front an existing copy.
Actually, because of the way Word works, I do care. If I open an existing copy, there are already one or more documents open in there. Sometimes I want the control that associating a window with a document - rather than an app - gives me (e.g., editing defaults, etc.).
In fact, I believe that Word should be more mono-document-centric rather than multi-document-centric - after all, most people use Word to create and edit single documents. This means that there should be one entity on the screen (window, icon, whatever) for each document - not one application window with multiple documents hidden inside of it.
I know that most programmers think that programs are the most important things, but to most people, it's what the program works with that's the most important. Failing to realize this is the largest UI error most designers make...
We can't be good little libertarians one day and protectionists the next.
Well, since I'm not a "good little libertarian" any day, I figure I can talk. And, BTW, there is a whole range of grey in between the "black" of a fully open economy and the "white" of a fully centralized economy. I'd thank Libertarians to try to remember that their bi-colored modality is not necessarily the only correct model of the economy.
A government whose sole responsibility seems to be that its companies only pay its workers peasant wages will end up ruling a country of peasants. As the corporations increase their heavy hand, the government will lose more and more legitimacy until revolution ensues. In their own self interest, governments are better off trying to balance these things. Of course, "good little libertarians" will never understand this...
You either bring Adit over here on an H1B, or send the software to India to be written by his company in Bangalore.
They'll try. But most companies don't have the maturity in specification and acceptance testing to allow in-house contracted services, let alone offshore. So they'll fail. Maybe then they'll hire local talent...
Any economist will tell you that frictional unemployment is 6%
And fourty years ago, the figure was 4%. The fact that people have had more economic opportunity during the last 10 year boom to loaf between jobs automatically raises this rate. In general, it is a bogus statistic. Better rates to track this type of number is either average # of weeks on unemployment (don't forget to adjust upward for those whose unemployment has run out) or % of people working below skill level. You can get more data on the first than the second (available via US Dept. of Labor).
However you want to slice it, there is a programmer glut right now. As a (not currently) hiring manager, I see the number of resumes that come in for each job and I have the less than enviable task to select which of these people will be re-employed and which will not. To me, cutting the number of H1-B visas (not, as suggested in some posts, kicking out people), seems to be prudent at this time.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough I just ordered one. BTW, there are cheaper places to order it than Think Geek. I found a bare bones version for about $425 but I didn't want to screw it up and my fingers are a bit too big for that tight of place :-), so I ordered one pre-made w/512K mem, a 40Gb HD, and a DVD-ROM for about $900. Expensive, yes. But it's my one toy for the year, so...
I started making system purchasing decisions for other reasons around the 800 MHz point. My main issues now are size and silence. I could not care less that I could double my SETI@Home work units. The thing that allowed me to do that would still be noisy and clunky. Give me small and quiet any day.
Well, it must be. Look what all of those fraudulant physicists did to suppress cold fusion. And they still haven't looked into the anti-gravity system and the infinite movement devices I've developed. And they're secretly loosening the straps that hold on my tin foil hat, too.
Physicists... Bah!
Why? The patent would still be there. The new OS would not be prior art. I think you still hearken back to the days when you had to have an actual working model of something to be granted a patent. This has not been the case for several years.
GM wants to build a common fuel cell based drive-by-wire chassis that it will mount the body panels, control systems, and passenger compartments
There's a reason that different cars have different chasses. I'd like to see the ride a Caddie body on a standard size frame gets. In addition, the fuel efficiency of a small car (and how small could you make it) on a standard chassis would suck, too. This would lead to a bunch of cookie-cutter cars, most of which have lousy handling, don't perform well, and are ugly to boot.
Oh yeah... I forgot. This is GM we're talking about. Never mind.
Symantec has a wide variety of products running on everything from x86's to S/390's. You might want to notice that their (almost) latest big announcement was a firewall product running on IBM iSeries Linux. I know that quite a few people dislike Symantec due to their BSA involvement, but their strategy as an enterprise security player makes them play in the UNIX and Linux arenas as well. And, like it or not, they do make the best AV products out there. You might want to get a knowledge upgrade before you shoot off your mouth again...
But it didn't last very long. I've been on USENET since 1981 - back when E-mail was routed manually across Unix servers and even back then there were flames and spam. Not so much as now, but it was certainly not a "golden age of the internet" either. ARPANET folk thought that the net went to Hell when they started gatewaying UUCP news and mail traffic. Unix users though the world went to Hell after the first gateways between them and the unwashed masses (Prodigy, AOL, etc.) went up. Others think it went to Hell with the commodification of the Web. Most people remember the past more fondly than it should be remebered. We all have our "golden days". They weren't all that golden...
A government that does *anything* cannot divorce itself from being an economic actor. Be it picking winners and losers WRT contracts or supporting research in a given area or deciding which third-world company to invade to get oil :-). If a government can provide a capability less expensively than the private sector can, it probably should. Contrawise, if a government can contract a service more inexpensively than by doing it itself, it probably should. Doing otherwise is wasting taxpayers' money.
That being said, one also has to look at the full cost of taking an action - looking at things like reliability of service, probability and cost of externalities, and issues of unfair competition (e.g., government can generally take control of a property more cheaply via eminent domain than a private firm via negotiation). However, I don't see many of those issues arising in this case. So go for it, Germany!
Not to mention that the narrow end of the fin contacting the substrate decreases channel/substrate leakage. This is a VERY cute idea. It probably can get better density, too, as it gets developed further.
... don't forget This Modern World, a pithy look at our modern-day politics delivered fresh to your screen evry Monday.
Because you would not want to live in a society that normally applied that rule to you. It's called self interest...
An unobtainable part for most geeks. No wonder they need the microprocessors...
And that's what the *AA want. As long as the networks split and isolate, they can monitor them and pick them off as they become big enough. Also, since being a member of a closed "pirating ring" is as good as an admission of conspiracy, they can start to use RICO laws, too. Yummy...
In reality, the only safety in P2P for illegal sharing was its ubiquity. Once that's gone, you become an easy target. It's a lot easier to control five people than a mob of thousands.
Silly programmer! The 0 ordinates are for the walls next to the west and south side (see the rules)...
The other thing to do is to work with a small local jeweler, rather than a big chain. Your stones will generally be of higher quality and they usually want your repeat business so they'll try to get you a good deal. They're also even more appreciative in these troubled economic times.
Good luck with the shopping and the engagement...
Well, it is now obvious that there should be one! We could call it the Jeri Unified Graphics Standard or, as an acronym, ... well, you get the idea.
No, but consider that the average IQ is 100. And, if IQ is well-modeled as a gaussian distribution*, then 50%+ of the population has lower IQ than anyone of "above average" intelligence. Besides, most of the comments about Joe Sixpack/Joe Average/Joe Q. Public are not necessarily about innate intelligence, only about his ability to be engaged and to care about these issues enough to become educated on them. And, sadly, this puts their intelligence about these issues squarely in the red zone.
* Gratuitous assumption on my part, not lately having checked the graphs. As far as I know, we may have a skewed or bimodal distribution by now. Even so, my point still stands - there are a great many people of below average intelligence out there. And extra points to anyone who can turn this into a trolling rant about how IQ doesn't mean anything. Yeah, it sucks, but it's one of the few widely used quantitative cognative comparatives out there - deal with it...
Also, despite what you say, well formatted Fortran code is no more ugly than most other code (and a hell of a lot nicer looking than your average Perl code :-().
I don't know why people believe that newer languages are automatically better. At the end of the day, you got storage, you got ops screwing around with the storage, and you got a mess of control flow holding the guts together. Just because I'm some hotshot wanting to get my name in the (geek-) papers with my shiny new syntax doesn't mean it's any different. And it certainly doesn't mean it's any better.
So go ahead and learn Fortran. Learn about the joys of representing linked lists as a set of next indices into an array. Learn about dimension statements and equivalence blocks. Learn how to squeeze down your numeric processing into the nub of a kernel of procedural truth. You'll end up being a better programmer.
I really get tired of a bunch of whiney geeks bitching because people want to sully their precious, insulated geekspace with cultural issues (outside games and anime and Libetarianism, which, for some unfathomable reason, seem to be perfectly OK). Is that the key item to being a geek? A uncontrolled but always frustrated little ego that says "Bow down before me in my magnificent geektitude and don't ever mention the outside world because I can't handle that!"? Sheesh...
Grow up.
Actually, if you read carefully, he prefers Free Software. He sees Open Source as a lesser evil when compared to the unholy of unholies.
Well, I guess I'll take it, if nobody else wants it (except for the icy bits, unless they hold oil or gas). I'll pay you a US dollar and Canadian dollar so the contract will be nice and legal, even in that pesky internantional court thingy the UN wants to be settin' up. Please send me an address so my boy Col... -- uh, Secretary Powell -- can mail the contract to y'all.
Sincerely,
G.W. Bush
P.S. Y'all have 30 days to vacate the premises.
Actually, because of the way Word works, I do care. If I open an existing copy, there are already one or more documents open in there. Sometimes I want the control that associating a window with a document - rather than an app - gives me (e.g., editing defaults, etc.).
In fact, I believe that Word should be more mono-document-centric rather than multi-document-centric - after all, most people use Word to create and edit single documents. This means that there should be one entity on the screen (window, icon, whatever) for each document - not one application window with multiple documents hidden inside of it.
I know that most programmers think that programs are the most important things, but to most people, it's what the program works with that's the most important. Failing to realize this is the largest UI error most designers make...
Well, since I'm not a "good little libertarian" any day, I figure I can talk. And, BTW, there is a whole range of grey in between the "black" of a fully open economy and the "white" of a fully centralized economy. I'd thank Libertarians to try to remember that their bi-colored modality is not necessarily the only correct model of the economy.
A government whose sole responsibility seems to be that its companies only pay its workers peasant wages will end up ruling a country of peasants. As the corporations increase their heavy hand, the government will lose more and more legitimacy until revolution ensues. In their own self interest, governments are better off trying to balance these things. Of course, "good little libertarians" will never understand this...
They'll try. But most companies don't have the maturity in specification and acceptance testing to allow in-house contracted services, let alone offshore. So they'll fail. Maybe then they'll hire local talent...
And fourty years ago, the figure was 4%. The fact that people have had more economic opportunity during the last 10 year boom to loaf between jobs automatically raises this rate. In general, it is a bogus statistic. Better rates to track this type of number is either average # of weeks on unemployment (don't forget to adjust upward for those whose unemployment has run out) or % of people working below skill level. You can get more data on the first than the second (available via US Dept. of Labor).
However you want to slice it, there is a programmer glut right now. As a (not currently) hiring manager, I see the number of resumes that come in for each job and I have the less than enviable task to select which of these people will be re-employed and which will not. To me, cutting the number of H1-B visas (not, as suggested in some posts, kicking out people), seems to be prudent at this time.