Income tax is the right way to do it. O how I wished everyone just used income tax. A few percentage points to the feds, a few to the state, and a few to the city/county. It would be so easy and clear cut. Any other form of taxation increases the scarcity of valuable goods. If the state needs more they raise the income tax a percentage point. Heck, if 10% is good enough for the Lord, it ought to be good enough for the government.
"government spending" -- eh. What I would like to see is a place on my taxes to allocate percentages to various projects. That way I could make my taxes look something like this:
medicare: 0% (and I don't want any)
medicaid: 0% (and I don't want any)
social security: 0% and I don't want any
homeland defense: 20%
public properites and planning: 20%
space defense: 20%
space exploration: 40%
I don't think they have 100% of anything posted on the internet.
Here are some things I'd like to research (aka, put this on the internet): how many employees are there in the various government departments, particularly the IRS? Can I get this data for the past 150 years? How much money goes to each department? Can I do a word search on all our current laws? Which bills are currently active and which are not? What's the constitutional basis for each bill currently in effect? (O wait -- like that will ever happen...)
I've been thinking a lot about starting my own political party that is entirely web-based in its voting and block meetings. This is looking to be an ugly challenge. In the first place, most states require a paper voter registration. The voter party registration data isn't available online and isn't updated often. Second, what is a good method to verify address for voters? Or, assuming you can get the party registration record and it's up to date, can you really trust the address on the voter registration?
Public education is the one and only welfare system that seems to have any positive benefit. I would think that all you socialists on Slashdot would be utterly against vouchers. Of course vouchers aren't a very complete solution for conservatives either. It's just hard to measure whether or not a person without children going to school is getting benefit from their taxes going to education.
I truly believe it should be up to the local community; if everyone in the community wants to send their kids to private schools -- great! No school taxes for them. That plan seems to work fine for car insurance; the law requires it but does not provide it. If a community cares for and wants their education to match that of Finland, they should pay for some UNESCO certification or something. Screw the US Federal Board of Education. I don't want my taxes going to that!
Honestly, do you possibly think you could recover that much money with goods from Yahoo? This crazy idea to buy Yahoo was a combination of two things: ignoramus upper management and pressure from Google. Too many businessmen only understand how to make money from advertising. Who put them in charge? You need to weed them out and put in upper management that understand the beauties in your software that is currently making you money. Let Google make the money in the internet. Quit worrying about them or your silly MSN or other sundry internet ventures.
Instead, you should invest that money in your operating system, the APIs for your OS, the tools to make it easy to create applications for your OS. Make a serious real time OS. Unify your OSs. Architect them so that you can crank them out faster and safer. Make your driver model easy to understand and code for. DirectX seems to do good for you, but you had better keep up on it. The same is true of C#. Give these Java folks some stiff competition in language, libraries, and tools. Make the speed of your CLR rock. Make it vectorize, use the SIMD, automatically use multiple cores, etc.
In summary, make businesses want to run on your platform, develop for your platform. You want every office to use your software tools. It won't matter if every office uses your search engine when they go to get info off the internet. That's not the most effective way for you -- a company with an already vast installation base -- to make money.
So where do I turn in my Chinese exchange student? The kid showed up with $3k of illegal software on his laptop and claimed it came with all that software installed. I'd like to "level the playing field" with China.
Orson Scott Card recently wrote a great article on the whole "world without cars" thing. I really like his ideas about when you do and don't need a car.
Having worked in the business (and competition) of automating vehicles for some time now, here's a list of our biggest challenges:
1. You can coordinate 100 vehicles with a serious piece of hardware. Coordinating 10000 would be unthinkable with current algorithms and hardware.
2. You can make a car stay on the road, but you can't make a road engineer get the map data right, current, repaired, expanded, with sidewalk curbs, or (especially) published.
3. You can detect small children in the road but you can't detect pot holes the size of a small child.
4. The clothoid math is killer for people and computers.
Not in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Let me tell you about their genius there. Once upon a time there was no Wal-Mart in Idaho Falls. K-Mart was in a good location near the freeway where many people from the surrounding area went to shop. Then, over a short period of time, the east side of the city became popular (even though it took 20min from the freeway to get across town). The mall was there. A new Wal-Mart went in there. Etc. So what does K-Mart do? They up and move across town into a fancy new building right next to Wal-Mart. Genius, I tell ya. That made thousands of people drive across town cussing on their way to Wal-Mart. Within three years K-Mart was gone. They gave up a great location for what reason? None of us could ever figure it out... If K-Mart were smart, they'd move away from Wal-Mart, not towards it. The exact same situation exists in my current town. Wal-Mart and K-Mart are on one end of town with Wal-Mart being 200 yards closer to the population. If K-Mart were on the other end of town (20 min away), they'd be doing fine. The one grocery store on that lonely end of town makes a killing.
So which "space" does fakeraid go in? It's kernel, isn't it? I don't even see a category for it on that wanted-drivers link. We've wanted fakeraid support for years in the kernel, the installer, and the bootloader. Nobody seems to care, though.
I interview people to work as software engineers all the time. I'd say 1 in 5 people with degrees can make a reasonable answer at these requirements for my company: Write a stack class on the board. Explain "mutex". Explain "pass by reference". Write a function to count the set bits in an integer. Two of the five I interviewed in the last month just stood there bewildered when they were asked to write a stack class on the board (in whatever language they wanted).
Here's three legit monopolies MS has that keep me from moving to Linux. First, I use WPF and WCF. They rock. It will be a while before they're supported on Linux. Second, Linux still refuses to support fakeraid out of the box. I don't understand it. It's been ten years. I don't care if fakeraid is stupid. I want it supported in the installer, the boot loader, and the OS out of the box. Third, Adaptec needs to ship Linux drivers. It takes two years before the current Adaptec hardware is supported in Linux. I assume MS paid them off....
I totally agree on the music. X-COM used to make me jump when the enemy would shoot at me out of the darkness. It was the music that was totally engrossing to the point that you forgot it wasn't real.
I also remember how excited I felt in Dragon Warrior 4 when I finally got to the chapter with my warrior that I created at the beginning of the game. I don't even know what pulled me into the game that much, but that was a great game.
My biggest complaint about the difference between Gimp and Photoshop is not the UI. Photoshop kills Gimp on performance for images greater than 3k x 3k pixels. I don't know what the deal is, but Gimp crawls when trying to touch up large images. Things like the airbrush seem relatively unaffected by size in Photoshop, but not in Gimp.
And to say that Gimp's scissor tool is the same as the one in Photoshop would be a farce. I think the one in Photoshop was purchased from BYU and is under some kind of NDA between the two. Can somebody confirm this? Dr. Morse?
I've been using WordPerfect now for 15 years. I learned the shortcuts for 5.1 and always found it easier to stick with them. And I always loved the "Reveal Codes" feature. Unfortunately, every new version is less stable than the previous version. The X3 version finally fixed the image importing so it's stable, but it has other issues with pasting HTML, etc. I never thought version 8 was that stable. I'm amazed it handles a 233 MB file for you. Consider yourself lucky.
Give the on board video chips some of there OWN RAM you can use a system like ati hypermemory and nvidia turbocache
I first read that as "give the on board video chips some of their own ram." I fully agree with that statement, although Intel has been giving their GPUs separate RAM for a few years now. What they haven't been doing is making stable graphics drivers. I've seen their latest graphics drivers literally destroy two computers. You want the drivers that originally shipped with the computer/laptop, not the latest from Intel's website. In general, it's a really bad idea to buy an Intel GPU. For a few bucks more you can get a budged GeForce/ATI GPU.
It's frustrating to me that we still lack fakeraid support in the installers, in the kernel, and in the boot loaders. What gives? I know that fakeraid is considered a crappy hack, but that's no excuse to upset the numerous people using it.
In an only-semi-related comment, I wish Adaptec would provide Linux drivers for all their raid controllers. And I wish Linux distros made it easy to use from the installer.
And can I get some midrange with that dynamic range request? I don't understand the (common) mentality of cranking the base and treble knobs for no apparent reason. You lose the midrange when you do that. And the music sounds crappy when you do that.
My car may have an OS. I want it to play nice with my other OSes. All I want is a USB port next to the ignition that I can plug my laptop into. I want the car to then tell me exactly WTF is wrong with it, how to fix it (with pictures), what parts to order, etc. If it's too difficult I'll take it to the shop.
"Sony Says Ultra Mass Destruction Is Here To Stay"
or at least that's how I first read it. However, they would certainly sell more than 11 "Ultra Mass Destruction" movies. I still think they need to go back and make some new Star Trek movies that are "so and so vs. so and so", "somebody vs. somebody's ship", etc.
...like solving string subsequence matching (comparing DNA sequences)...
Last year I worked on just that. The (Smith-Waterman) algorithm is well studied, so I didn't have to derive all the math for it. What I did have to derive is the speedup gained by using our hardware. That required some algebra. I also did Gaussian smoothing on the data. That required some image processing math. Once upon a time I coded PHP/MySQL stuff for various web companies. I had to do two different kinds of math with that: accounting and statistical work including Chi squared, etc. Graphing and displaying all that data was real simple algebra stuff. It wasn't satisfying for me so I looked into more serious science work.
I found the more serious work. My minor in math is, for the most part insufficient for my current work. In the past year I
1. Worked out an edge detection algorithm using wavelets. Wavelets use tensor math -- math not covered until the third and fourth year for math majors. I never could get a full grip on the math. Fortunately, I found and ended up using a book that had all the algorithms for it already coded.
2. Worked on path planning for robots using clothoids and Bezier curves. The algorithms to interpolate my existing data for those are too math-heavy for me. Have you ever tried to find the intersection point of two clothoids or Bezier curves? Find the nearest point on a clothoid to a given point? Or mix the two? It's tough stuff. It's loaded with numeric methods. My BS in computer science and minor in math didn't prepare me for that.
3. Worked on converting 3D data between various map projections.
4. Worked on CAD software that allows manipulation of 3D shapes in a 3D environment. It's loaded with trig and linear algebra.
I could go on with various little details. Suffice it to say that it's darn frustrating when you're supposed to code a fancy wavelet demo and you can't read any book on the topic because it's over your head.
I had a class in college on algorithms. The teacher was fantastic. He had an excellent skill at pointing out "now that's computer science becomes science." I remember his passion for back-propagation and all the little tricks to it he knew from study and experiment. That was fun.
That way no one who was old enough to remember what happened will be around to contradict the official version of events.
That's a bunch of crap in my book -- yet I fear that is too often the government's strategy. The government has a right to keep things secret to protect people's lives. If public knowledge of something doesn't endanger anyone's life, it should be public knowledge because the public (aka, me) paid for it, dang it.
I've never seen a virus as bad as the anti-virus software. I personally can't stand the stuff. I'm mandated to run a copy of AVG at work. It regularly wastes my time with little pop-up messages. Of the three machines (belonging to relatives) I've repaired with a virus, all three were running some form of anti-virus software that failed to catch the virus. Somebody should do a study to determine the CPU time used by anti-virus software vs. the downtime caused by a virus. Fortunately, system firewalls and education about email are greatly reducing the need for anti-virus software.
Slashdot Mirror
Income tax is the right way to do it. O how I wished everyone just used income tax. A few percentage points to the feds, a few to the state, and a few to the city/county. It would be so easy and clear cut. Any other form of taxation increases the scarcity of valuable goods. If the state needs more they raise the income tax a percentage point. Heck, if 10% is good enough for the Lord, it ought to be good enough for the government.
"government spending" -- eh. What I would like to see is a place on my taxes to allocate percentages to various projects. That way I could make my taxes look something like this:
medicare: 0% (and I don't want any)
medicaid: 0% (and I don't want any)
social security: 0% and I don't want any
homeland defense: 20%
public properites and planning: 20%
space defense: 20%
space exploration: 40%
"100% pure tedium"
I don't think they have 100% of anything posted on the internet.
Here are some things I'd like to research (aka, put this on the internet): how many employees are there in the various government departments, particularly the IRS? Can I get this data for the past 150 years? How much money goes to each department? Can I do a word search on all our current laws? Which bills are currently active and which are not? What's the constitutional basis for each bill currently in effect? (O wait -- like that will ever happen...)
I've been thinking a lot about starting my own political party that is entirely web-based in its voting and block meetings. This is looking to be an ugly challenge. In the first place, most states require a paper voter registration. The voter party registration data isn't available online and isn't updated often. Second, what is a good method to verify address for voters? Or, assuming you can get the party registration record and it's up to date, can you really trust the address on the voter registration?
Public education is the one and only welfare system that seems to have any positive benefit. I would think that all you socialists on Slashdot would be utterly against vouchers. Of course vouchers aren't a very complete solution for conservatives either. It's just hard to measure whether or not a person without children going to school is getting benefit from their taxes going to education.
I truly believe it should be up to the local community; if everyone in the community wants to send their kids to private schools -- great! No school taxes for them. That plan seems to work fine for car insurance; the law requires it but does not provide it. If a community cares for and wants their education to match that of Finland, they should pay for some UNESCO certification or something. Screw the US Federal Board of Education. I don't want my taxes going to that!
Honestly, do you possibly think you could recover that much money with goods from Yahoo? This crazy idea to buy Yahoo was a combination of two things: ignoramus upper management and pressure from Google. Too many businessmen only understand how to make money from advertising. Who put them in charge? You need to weed them out and put in upper management that understand the beauties in your software that is currently making you money. Let Google make the money in the internet. Quit worrying about them or your silly MSN or other sundry internet ventures.
Instead, you should invest that money in your operating system, the APIs for your OS, the tools to make it easy to create applications for your OS. Make a serious real time OS. Unify your OSs. Architect them so that you can crank them out faster and safer. Make your driver model easy to understand and code for. DirectX seems to do good for you, but you had better keep up on it. The same is true of C#. Give these Java folks some stiff competition in language, libraries, and tools. Make the speed of your CLR rock. Make it vectorize, use the SIMD, automatically use multiple cores, etc.
In summary, make businesses want to run on your platform, develop for your platform. You want every office to use your software tools. It won't matter if every office uses your search engine when they go to get info off the internet. That's not the most effective way for you -- a company with an already vast installation base -- to make money.
Two Frenchmen were walking in the desert. The first says to the second, "What will we do when we run out of water, Pierre?"
So where do I turn in my Chinese exchange student? The kid showed up with $3k of illegal software on his laptop and claimed it came with all that software installed. I'd like to "level the playing field" with China.
Orson Scott Card recently wrote a great article on the whole "world without cars" thing. I really like his ideas about when you do and don't need a car.
Having worked in the business (and competition) of automating vehicles for some time now, here's a list of our biggest challenges:
1. You can coordinate 100 vehicles with a serious piece of hardware. Coordinating 10000 would be unthinkable with current algorithms and hardware.
2. You can make a car stay on the road, but you can't make a road engineer get the map data right, current, repaired, expanded, with sidewalk curbs, or (especially) published.
3. You can detect small children in the road but you can't detect pot holes the size of a small child.
4. The clothoid math is killer for people and computers.
K-Mart is still around?
Not in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Let me tell you about their genius there. Once upon a time there was no Wal-Mart in Idaho Falls. K-Mart was in a good location near the freeway where many people from the surrounding area went to shop. Then, over a short period of time, the east side of the city became popular (even though it took 20min from the freeway to get across town). The mall was there. A new Wal-Mart went in there. Etc. So what does K-Mart do? They up and move across town into a fancy new building right next to Wal-Mart. Genius, I tell ya. That made thousands of people drive across town cussing on their way to Wal-Mart. Within three years K-Mart was gone. They gave up a great location for what reason? None of us could ever figure it out... If K-Mart were smart, they'd move away from Wal-Mart, not towards it. The exact same situation exists in my current town. Wal-Mart and K-Mart are on one end of town with Wal-Mart being 200 yards closer to the population. If K-Mart were on the other end of town (20 min away), they'd be doing fine. The one grocery store on that lonely end of town makes a killing.
So which "space" does fakeraid go in? It's kernel, isn't it? I don't even see a category for it on that wanted-drivers link. We've wanted fakeraid support for years in the kernel, the installer, and the bootloader. Nobody seems to care, though.
I interview people to work as software engineers all the time. I'd say 1 in 5 people with degrees can make a reasonable answer at these requirements for my company: Write a stack class on the board. Explain "mutex". Explain "pass by reference". Write a function to count the set bits in an integer. Two of the five I interviewed in the last month just stood there bewildered when they were asked to write a stack class on the board (in whatever language they wanted).
Here's three legit monopolies MS has that keep me from moving to Linux. First, I use WPF and WCF. They rock. It will be a while before they're supported on Linux. Second, Linux still refuses to support fakeraid out of the box. I don't understand it. It's been ten years. I don't care if fakeraid is stupid. I want it supported in the installer, the boot loader, and the OS out of the box. Third, Adaptec needs to ship Linux drivers. It takes two years before the current Adaptec hardware is supported in Linux. I assume MS paid them off....
Master of Magic was a great game. Microprose, come back! Where are you when we need you?!
I totally agree on the music. X-COM used to make me jump when the enemy would shoot at me out of the darkness. It was the music that was totally engrossing to the point that you forgot it wasn't real.
I also remember how excited I felt in Dragon Warrior 4 when I finally got to the chapter with my warrior that I created at the beginning of the game. I don't even know what pulled me into the game that much, but that was a great game.
My biggest complaint about the difference between Gimp and Photoshop is not the UI. Photoshop kills Gimp on performance for images greater than 3k x 3k pixels. I don't know what the deal is, but Gimp crawls when trying to touch up large images. Things like the airbrush seem relatively unaffected by size in Photoshop, but not in Gimp.
And to say that Gimp's scissor tool is the same as the one in Photoshop would be a farce. I think the one in Photoshop was purchased from BYU and is under some kind of NDA between the two. Can somebody confirm this? Dr. Morse?
I've been using WordPerfect now for 15 years. I learned the shortcuts for 5.1 and always found it easier to stick with them. And I always loved the "Reveal Codes" feature. Unfortunately, every new version is less stable than the previous version. The X3 version finally fixed the image importing so it's stable, but it has other issues with pasting HTML, etc. I never thought version 8 was that stable. I'm amazed it handles a 233 MB file for you. Consider yourself lucky.
Give the on board video chips some of there OWN RAM you can use a system like ati hypermemory and nvidia turbocache
I first read that as "give the on board video chips some of their own ram." I fully agree with that statement, although Intel has been giving their GPUs separate RAM for a few years now. What they haven't been doing is making stable graphics drivers. I've seen their latest graphics drivers literally destroy two computers. You want the drivers that originally shipped with the computer/laptop, not the latest from Intel's website. In general, it's a really bad idea to buy an Intel GPU. For a few bucks more you can get a budged GeForce/ATI GPU.
Better hardware support
It's frustrating to me that we still lack fakeraid support in the installers, in the kernel, and in the boot loaders. What gives? I know that fakeraid is considered a crappy hack, but that's no excuse to upset the numerous people using it.
In an only-semi-related comment, I wish Adaptec would provide Linux drivers for all their raid controllers. And I wish Linux distros made it easy to use from the installer.
And can I get some midrange with that dynamic range request? I don't understand the (common) mentality of cranking the base and treble knobs for no apparent reason. You lose the midrange when you do that. And the music sounds crappy when you do that.
My car may have an OS. I want it to play nice with my other OSes. All I want is a USB port next to the ignition that I can plug my laptop into. I want the car to then tell me exactly WTF is wrong with it, how to fix it (with pictures), what parts to order, etc. If it's too difficult I'll take it to the shop.
"Sony Says Ultra Mass Destruction Is Here To Stay"
or at least that's how I first read it. However, they would certainly sell more than 11 "Ultra Mass Destruction" movies. I still think they need to go back and make some new Star Trek movies that are "so and so vs. so and so", "somebody vs. somebody's ship", etc.
...like solving string subsequence matching (comparing DNA sequences)...
Last year I worked on just that. The (Smith-Waterman) algorithm is well studied, so I didn't have to derive all the math for it. What I did have to derive is the speedup gained by using our hardware. That required some algebra. I also did Gaussian smoothing on the data. That required some image processing math. Once upon a time I coded PHP/MySQL stuff for various web companies. I had to do two different kinds of math with that: accounting and statistical work including Chi squared, etc. Graphing and displaying all that data was real simple algebra stuff. It wasn't satisfying for me so I looked into more serious science work.
I found the more serious work. My minor in math is, for the most part insufficient for my current work. In the past year I
1. Worked out an edge detection algorithm using wavelets. Wavelets use tensor math -- math not covered until the third and fourth year for math majors. I never could get a full grip on the math. Fortunately, I found and ended up using a book that had all the algorithms for it already coded.
2. Worked on path planning for robots using clothoids and Bezier curves. The algorithms to interpolate my existing data for those are too math-heavy for me. Have you ever tried to find the intersection point of two clothoids or Bezier curves? Find the nearest point on a clothoid to a given point? Or mix the two? It's tough stuff. It's loaded with numeric methods. My BS in computer science and minor in math didn't prepare me for that.
3. Worked on converting 3D data between various map projections.
4. Worked on CAD software that allows manipulation of 3D shapes in a 3D environment. It's loaded with trig and linear algebra.
I could go on with various little details. Suffice it to say that it's darn frustrating when you're supposed to code a fancy wavelet demo and you can't read any book on the topic because it's over your head.
I had a class in college on algorithms. The teacher was fantastic. He had an excellent skill at pointing out "now that's computer science becomes science." I remember his passion for back-propagation and all the little tricks to it he knew from study and experiment. That was fun.
That way no one who was old enough to remember what happened will be around to contradict the official version of events.
That's a bunch of crap in my book -- yet I fear that is too often the government's strategy. The government has a right to keep things secret to protect people's lives. If public knowledge of something doesn't endanger anyone's life, it should be public knowledge because the public (aka, me) paid for it, dang it.
If WPF, the GDI+ rewrite, were multithreaded, why do I have a bazillion calls to Dispatcher.Invoke in my code?
I've never seen a virus as bad as the anti-virus software. I personally can't stand the stuff. I'm mandated to run a copy of AVG at work. It regularly wastes my time with little pop-up messages. Of the three machines (belonging to relatives) I've repaired with a virus, all three were running some form of anti-virus software that failed to catch the virus. Somebody should do a study to determine the CPU time used by anti-virus software vs. the downtime caused by a virus. Fortunately, system firewalls and education about email are greatly reducing the need for anti-virus software.