And the fact that the parent poster knows about Thorpe and understands the inherent variance shows that this person knows what he/she is talking about. Read it and learn.
... yes, I know the gambling industry is frequently far from respectable.
Well, no. It is, these days, extremely respectable. It's one of the most highly regulated industries in the country. More to the point, so much money is at stake that it's really a dumb idea to risk it doing something stupid. So no one does. I'm afraid it's almost gotten to boring by now. In fact, I think I'd rather deal with the casino guys than with GE or Goldman-Sachs any day.
It's that too many people on open source projects are jerks and all too willing to jump from "your code's stupid" to "you're stupid" all too quickly. Now to allay all of the insecure ones' fears out there, not everyone working on FOSS projects are like this (and I've never been treated that way - I guess my code's OK enough). However, many FOSS project members, being geeks, well... let us simply say that "playing nice with others" has not always been high on their priority list. And it shows. You know, you can be respectful even when telling someone that their code sucks. Do that, and you'll have a lot more people, both men and women, contributing.
1. Check the software 2. It's probably the software 3. Really, it's going to be the software
...
87. OK, now you should run some diagnostics
Really. The bottom line is that computers and their parts (especially non-moving ones like processors and RAM), once they're burned in and assuming you don't try to run them overclocked for twenty years without rotating them out, are pretty reliable. I can't count more than a couple instances of hardware failure post burn-in across about fifteen different home machines over twenty years. And both times those were disk failures, which are usually obvious to diagnose (as are broken CPU fans, which happened to a friend). Contrast this to my experience with Windows machines, where bad drivers, creeping registry cruft, and general unpleasantness of management force you re re-install the OS every couple years (and why I'm switching as machines rotate out to either Linux or Macs).
Employed with care and attention, though, headhunters can bring something to your business that no other employee can: abject terror in those that oppose you.
The original IBM System 38 and its descendants, such as OS/400, OS/500, etc., had a 128-bit address space. In these architectures, the large number of address bits were used to provide an address space that spanned both memory and disks and was used to provide processor-level protection for objects stored there. Using large address spaces to ensure hardware protection of system objects is a good start on a highly secure OS and is probably where this is going.
And Intel is no stranger to hardware object protection, either. The iAPX-432 chipset, although not a commercial success, showed that hardware-level protection of objects is feasible, with more complex access controls than can be provided with reasonable performance than with software implementations of complex access control schemes (note I said complex - one of the reasons that the chip failed commercially is that, besides having a braindead two-chip implementation and instruction lengths that varied at the bit level, it could not support simple protection schemes as quickly as software was able to do). Intel is looking for what to do with the extra transistors that feature shrinks provide - adding better protection at the hardware level might be a win.
From a technical point of view, the CLR and C# in general are much better than Java at this point. Whether or not this technical superiority is negated by the undeniable fact that many of the.Net library elements are unavailable on any OS platform other than Windows is still debatable.
... and conservatives are trying to stop such actions (As the solution of the problem will do more harm then good).
Yes, because things like abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and equal rights for African-Americans (all things that the "conservatives" of the time were against) were the downfall of the country.
which makes this article about 8 years late. New record?
Sorry, no. The same kind of thing was said when time-sharing systems came out at MIT in the early sixties, when Englebart invented the mouse in the late sixties/Xerox PARC did the personal workstation thing in the early seventies, and when the PC came out in the mid-eighties. So it's more like fifty years late. The computer biz goes through boom and bust just like every other industry. And it seems to come in about ten year cycles. Web 2.0 didn't catch the wave because everyone with money was buying houses on Baltic Avenue and then the crash came. So call back in about five-to-seven when whatever's shiny in computers at that time takes hold and provides growth opportunity.
I think distributional assumptions are dangerous, particularly when you're modeling the behavior of crowds.
Yeah, that's true. But if you can model the behavior of the individuals as a simple enough Markov model (i.e., linear weight transitions) you can actually solve for exact moments. Scary. On the other hand, I have this odd feeling that most individuals aren't very linear.
And speaking of which, why did they name an element after a 1980's singer? Or being geeks (who probably post on Slashdot), did they just misspell the name of a 1960's cartoon character?
After all, you're daughter won't be living in "your" household anymore. She'll be living in her university's environment. It doesn't matter if you're a FOSS zealot. You won't be there to support her machine at 2am when she has a paper due the next morning. Nor will the normal student IT help drone who probably doesn't understand anything about Linux. Make it as simple for the people at the university to support her as possible. And, unfortunately, that usually means either a Windows box or a Mac box.
In the end, if you are choosing a college based on what OS'es they support, your priorities are way out of line (unless you happen to be RMS and you're looking outside of MIT for a school for your illegitimate love child). Your daughter, if she's smart enough for college, should be able to adapt to a new OS easily enough.
My recommendation? Get her a Mac. Almost all colleges support them and her time spent with the IT dweebs will be minimal (which will greatly enhance her college experience).
The only way they can get people to look at their OS is to lottery off a computer. It reminds me of MS's latest commercials. You know, the one where Microsoft sends people into a store to find a cut-rate computer instead of a Macintosh? In the commercials, they're admitting that their OS is so bad they have to give people a free computer to take it. Now they're admitting that they have to pay people to even look at it. This has got to be the ugliest baby ever (well, not counting Balmer, of course).
How can the European Commission block the merger of two US firms?
The short answer is that they can't. The companies are free to go ahead and merge without receiving EU permission. They are also free to not sell anything in the EU or be fined heavily if they attempt to do so. I doubt that Oracle wants to give up this lucrative market.
Why do so many of my fellow Americans have trouble understanding this? Are you dense? Governments do this sort of thing. They actually want to have a say about what gets sold in their countries and by whom. And, frankly, what you think of the practice is irrelevant, unless you can get enough people to agree to convince our government to negotiate a treaty or declare war, since you have no voice in any government but that of the US. Suck it up...
Wow! And if he'd left out the political crap, hadn't had scenes jump back and forth like a monkey on crack, and left out the whole "the modern world is da bomb" preaching, he might have had a good start at it...
... when was the last time your dentist offered to regrow your tooth instead of using an implant?
On the other hand, implants are relatively new technology, too. Bridging is still the main form of treating missing teeth, mainly because of lack of practitioners trained to do implants and cost (i.e., read "unwillingness of insurance companies to pay for the procedure") but, even so, the number of implants is growing each year. My assumption is that by around 2025, implants will be the common way to deal with missing teeth (and, by then, regrowing will be the thing that the insurance companies refuse to pay for).
it's pretty naive to think he couldn't have just hopped a plane to say, Oregon, and offed himself there neatly and legally.
It's a pretty high bar to hop here in Oregon - you have to be diagnosed by two doctors, have to be certified as being of sound mind and not depressed, and also have less than six months left. We generally don't meet folks off the plane at PDX and ask "Hey! You want a cyanide capsule?" (well, except for Californians...).
Slashdot Mirror
And the fact that the parent poster knows about Thorpe and understands the inherent variance shows that this person knows what he/she is talking about. Read it and learn.
... yes, I know the gambling industry is frequently far from respectable.
Well, no. It is, these days, extremely respectable. It's one of the most highly regulated industries in the country. More to the point, so much money is at stake that it's really a dumb idea to risk it doing something stupid. So no one does. I'm afraid it's almost gotten to boring by now. In fact, I think I'd rather deal with the casino guys than with GE or Goldman-Sachs any day.
Instead they describe an anxiety-wracked marketplace full of bewildering rules, long odds, and little sense of control over one's success or failure.
So what you're saying is that it's a lot like trying to make a living selling anything else? Who'da thunk it...
It's that too many people on open source projects are jerks and all too willing to jump from "your code's stupid" to "you're stupid" all too quickly. Now to allay all of the insecure ones' fears out there, not everyone working on FOSS projects are like this (and I've never been treated that way - I guess my code's OK enough). However, many FOSS project members, being geeks, well... let us simply say that "playing nice with others" has not always been high on their priority list. And it shows. You know, you can be respectful even when telling someone that their code sucks. Do that, and you'll have a lot more people, both men and women, contributing.
1. Check the software
2. It's probably the software
3. Really, it's going to be the software
87. OK, now you should run some diagnostics
Really. The bottom line is that computers and their parts (especially non-moving ones like processors and RAM), once they're burned in and assuming you don't try to run them overclocked for twenty years without rotating them out, are pretty reliable. I can't count more than a couple instances of hardware failure post burn-in across about fifteen different home machines over twenty years. And both times those were disk failures, which are usually obvious to diagnose (as are broken CPU fans, which happened to a friend). Contrast this to my experience with Windows machines, where bad drivers, creeping registry cruft, and general unpleasantness of management force you re re-install the OS every couple years (and why I'm switching as machines rotate out to either Linux or Macs).
So as to my advice... see above.
Employed with care and attention, though, headhunters can bring something to your business that no other employee can: abject terror in those that oppose you.
And they throw fun Windows 7 launch parties, too.
Wow. And here I've lost my "-1, Retarded Nerd" mod. Why don't you hand out some old AOL CDs while you're at it?
The original IBM System 38 and its descendants, such as OS/400, OS/500, etc., had a 128-bit address space. In these architectures, the large number of address bits were used to provide an address space that spanned both memory and disks and was used to provide processor-level protection for objects stored there. Using large address spaces to ensure hardware protection of system objects is a good start on a highly secure OS and is probably where this is going.
And Intel is no stranger to hardware object protection, either. The iAPX-432 chipset, although not a commercial success, showed that hardware-level protection of objects is feasible, with more complex access controls than can be provided with reasonable performance than with software implementations of complex access control schemes (note I said complex - one of the reasons that the chip failed commercially is that, besides having a braindead two-chip implementation and instruction lengths that varied at the bit level, it could not support simple protection schemes as quickly as software was able to do). Intel is looking for what to do with the extra transistors that feature shrinks provide - adding better protection at the hardware level might be a win.
From a technical point of view, the CLR and C# in general are much better than Java at this point. Whether or not this technical superiority is negated by the undeniable fact that many of the .Net library elements are unavailable on any OS platform other than Windows is still debatable.
... to talk about, I'd choose "A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison.
Of course, if you're trying to keep your job...
... and conservatives are trying to stop such actions (As the solution of the problem will do more harm then good).
Yes, because things like abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and equal rights for African-Americans (all things that the "conservatives" of the time were against) were the downfall of the country.
Adrian's Law: Once you start using the musings of Clarence Thomas to justify your legal position, you have lost.
which makes this article about 8 years late. New record?
Sorry, no. The same kind of thing was said when time-sharing systems came out at MIT in the early sixties, when Englebart invented the mouse in the late sixties/Xerox PARC did the personal workstation thing in the early seventies, and when the PC came out in the mid-eighties. So it's more like fifty years late. The computer biz goes through boom and bust just like every other industry. And it seems to come in about ten year cycles. Web 2.0 didn't catch the wave because everyone with money was buying houses on Baltic Avenue and then the crash came. So call back in about five-to-seven when whatever's shiny in computers at that time takes hold and provides growth opportunity.
I'd rather be a lawyer. At least then I'd still be getting rich doing crap work.
Not until you make partner and can get other people to do the crap work for you. Really.
Wow! It's a box! With an ugly logo. I'm impressed...
I think distributional assumptions are dangerous, particularly when you're modeling the behavior of crowds.
Yeah, that's true. But if you can model the behavior of the individuals as a simple enough Markov model (i.e., linear weight transitions) you can actually solve for exact moments. Scary. On the other hand, I have this odd feeling that most individuals aren't very linear.
You forgot the obligatory link.
Personally, I think we should rethink breeder reactors.
Hell, no! Pretty soon we'd have reactors running around everywhere!
You can't build them until you can find an effective method of birth control for them!
Adamantium is hard.
And speaking of which, why did they name an element after a 1980's singer? Or being geeks (who probably post on Slashdot), did they just misspell the name of a 1960's cartoon character?
After all, you're daughter won't be living in "your" household anymore. She'll be living in her university's environment. It doesn't matter if you're a FOSS zealot. You won't be there to support her machine at 2am when she has a paper due the next morning. Nor will the normal student IT help drone who probably doesn't understand anything about Linux. Make it as simple for the people at the university to support her as possible. And, unfortunately, that usually means either a Windows box or a Mac box.
In the end, if you are choosing a college based on what OS'es they support, your priorities are way out of line (unless you happen to be RMS and you're looking outside of MIT for a school for your illegitimate love child). Your daughter, if she's smart enough for college, should be able to adapt to a new OS easily enough.
My recommendation? Get her a Mac. Almost all colleges support them and her time spent with the IT dweebs will be minimal (which will greatly enhance her college experience).
The only way they can get people to look at their OS is to lottery off a computer. It reminds me of MS's latest commercials. You know, the one where Microsoft sends people into a store to find a cut-rate computer instead of a Macintosh? In the commercials, they're admitting that their OS is so bad they have to give people a free computer to take it. Now they're admitting that they have to pay people to even look at it. This has got to be the ugliest baby ever (well, not counting Balmer, of course).
How can the European Commission block the merger of two US firms?
The short answer is that they can't. The companies are free to go ahead and merge without receiving EU permission. They are also free to not sell anything in the EU or be fined heavily if they attempt to do so. I doubt that Oracle wants to give up this lucrative market.
Why do so many of my fellow Americans have trouble understanding this? Are you dense? Governments do this sort of thing. They actually want to have a say about what gets sold in their countries and by whom. And, frankly, what you think of the practice is irrelevant, unless you can get enough people to agree to convince our government to negotiate a treaty or declare war, since you have no voice in any government but that of the US. Suck it up...
Wow! And if he'd left out the political crap, hadn't had scenes jump back and forth like a monkey on crack, and left out the whole "the modern world is da bomb" preaching, he might have had a good start at it...
... when was the last time your dentist offered to regrow your tooth instead of using an implant?
On the other hand, implants are relatively new technology, too. Bridging is still the main form of treating missing teeth, mainly because of lack of practitioners trained to do implants and cost (i.e., read "unwillingness of insurance companies to pay for the procedure") but, even so, the number of implants is growing each year. My assumption is that by around 2025, implants will be the common way to deal with missing teeth (and, by then, regrowing will be the thing that the insurance companies refuse to pay for).
it's pretty naive to think he couldn't have just hopped a plane to say, Oregon, and offed himself there neatly and legally.
It's a pretty high bar to hop here in Oregon - you have to be diagnosed by two doctors, have to be certified as being of sound mind and not depressed, and also have less than six months left. We generally don't meet folks off the plane at PDX and ask "Hey! You want a cyanide capsule?" (well, except for Californians...).