Seriously - this is NOT new. Not even in the software field.
First, a disclaimer. I was employee #4 at KhiMetrics, the company founded by Ken and Tim Ouimet (employees #1 and #2). They're mentioned in TFA. SAP bought KhiMetrics in January of 2006. Ken had been my office-mate in grad school. That said, I haven't seen Ken and Tim in years, and I have no financial stake in KhiMetrics or SAP anymore (SAP bought out the KhiMetrics stockholders with money, not shares of SAP stock).
Yes, it's true that humans doing pricing try to do the same things. But the thing is that software can do things a human mind cannot. Yes, the opposite is also true, but here software has a lot of advantages. In the case of the KhiMetrics (now SAP) software, it works on the category level, optimizing profit for the category as a whole, which can include taking losses on individual items. The software never makes the common mistakes human beings make. For example, different "flavors" of the same size package of the same product should come out at the same price, and the unit price of a given item should go down as the amount bought increases. I can tell you that I have seen examples where humans have screwed this up this week. When there are two sizes of a given product, let's say a certain laundry detergent, then the price per weight of the larger package better be less than the price per weight of the smaller package, or there's never any incentive for the customer to buy the larger package. Still, I see examples where the pricers have gotten this wrong. I've even asked people at the stores if they were trying to move the smaller packages because of having too much of that size in stock or something, and they told me that no, they had no such problem.
The other thing is that the KhiMetrics software uses actual sales data to determine how sensitive the customers are to the price of a given product. This can be done down to the SKU (individual item) level in the product dimension and down to the level of customers of a specific store in the geographic dimension. In other words, the KhiMetrics software is capable of determining the sensitivity of the customers of each individual store to the price of a specific product. No human being could do that at all, much less in the time the KhiMetrics software can do it. Even with a pricing team for each category in each store, which would end up costing a fortune in human resource costs, the result would not be as good as what KhiMetrics can deliver. Additionally, since the Ouimets "grew up in retail," the KhiMetrics software, since the beginning, has been compatible with things like Category Management and Efficient Replenishment, and able to take into account things like having different goals for different products in a category (loss leader, profit generator, traffic generator, etc.). The software takes into account complex factors like seasonality, promotion, and product visibility. Since I have a reasonably good idea of the internal workings of the software, I can tell you with some confidence that I, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, would not even want to try to tackle the problem of optimizing the prices for a subcategory of 20 products in a single store, much less the dozens of categories and tens of thousands of SKUs in the dozens of stores in a retail chain. KhiMetrics can do all that, basing itself on years of actual sales data, before breakfast.
There are experienced people in retail who are good at such things, but the software was created with people that have the same level of understanding of retail pricing, plus it has all the advantages of being able to do high-speed computerized analysis of huge amounts of price and sales data. I don't work for KhiMetrics anymore, nor for SAP, but I can say that if I were working in a retail company, I would definitely want us to be using software like this for pricing. And experienced retail people agree with me. One thing we saw back when I was with K
Unless you've got some other theory with fewer entities in your back pocket that can explain things like the two-slit experiment and the Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Mechanics is the only game in town.
Don't forget the photoelectric effect. Einstein is remembered more for the theory of Special Relativity, the theory of General Relativity, and for a letter he wrote to a US president than he is for his quantum mechanical explanation of the photoelectric effect, but when Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize, the committee said it was for "his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." ObWikiLink
Semi-interesting tidbit: the Stern-Gerlach experiment was performed the year after Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The parent post makes an excellent point. I just thought the example of the photoelectric effect was important to add. Anyone got a non-quantum theory that explains the photoelectric effect or the experiments mentioned in the parent post?
Please stop hacking my browser. When I visit my favorite site, Slashdot, your software's name keeps appearing on my browser. If you don't stop this at once, I will be forced to call the FBI and report your hacking.
I thought it said:
"OpenOffice.org Tries to Doo Well"
My experience was more horrifying. I saw "something something W. O'Dell." I'm pretty sure he's not even in charge over at Diebold anymore, but even something that looks remotely like his name still gives me the creeps.
I think you're missing the fact that she is no longer a stoned-looking 14-year-old, but a very hot redhead 19-year-old college student.:P I mean, my god man! Look at her eyes here!
Don't fall in! The lips aren't that unattractive, either. Ok, yeah, the rest may not be so hot (I've not seen any of her 'film acumen') but that much, at least, is.
I have to wonder if the "don't fall in" eyes have anything to do with pupil dilation because she filmed a scene in which her character was taking magic mushrooms...
That said, she kinda reminds me of Luana Piovani, a Brazilian model/actress/generally famous person that keeps most Brazilian men drooling.
Check out a pic of Luana here, or visit her official site (where I didn't see any pics in which she resembled the switcher girl quite so much).
That's actually kinda funny, because it was a sort of "open secret" for some time that Luana smoked the wacky tobacky, and then a few years ago she openly declared it, setting off a stupid controversy.
My only issue with VLC is still there, why cant the slider go where you click it, instead of randomly skipping in the direction you click. Why cant you click ahead to whatever part like every other media player ever?!
Clicking on the slider bar bumps the slider in the direction toward the mouse pointer. But if you want to move to a specific spot, click on the slider, hold the button, and drag the slider to wherever you want it.
Oops... gotta go. The VLC 0.8.6 download just finished.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Algorithmic Research (ARX) is a vendor of security solutions, including HSMs, and that ARX has been losing market share in that space for years and has a tiny market share (nCipher dominates the HSM market worldwide, Safenet, through acquisitions, has the next-largest market share, and then you start getting to competitors with very small market shares). I'm sure the researchers at ARX had no idea that almost all banks in the world use HSMs made by competitors of ARX and just wrote this paper to expose a very real security flaw, one that something tells me ARX HSMs don't allow...
FWIW, ARX was actually something of a leader and had some cool ideas... several years ago. I'm not sure whether it was because of financial trouble, incompetent management, neither, or both, but they were lapped by players like nCipher, Luna (now part of SafeNet), Utimaco, even Thales, which focuses on serving the credit card transaction market but doesn't have things like Diffie-Hellman key exchange because VISA and Mastercard don't require them, and yes, even the old low-cost option, Eracom (bought by Safenet in order to do away with a pesky competitor).
Hollywood is known for borderline illegal accounting practices, NO move has ever made a profit, so if you get net points on a film you are royally "fubared" you want gross points as those are the real pay dollars..... dont believe me? ask Stan Lee about the profits he recieved from his Net points on the Spiderman movies and the lawsuits he has going against the studio about it...
There is a long tradition of making up expenses to suck up all profits a film makes
There's a very famous example of this, and I've made a verb out of the name of the main person screwed by a movie studio in the story. From what Jackson says, it appears the studio tried to "Art Buchwald" him. Buchwald is a humorist whose newspaper columns I remember reading a few times. In the 1980s, he presented a script idea to Paramount. Much like what J. Michael Straczynski claims they later did to him, the folks at Paramount told Buchwald they weren't interested and then went ahead and used his idea anyway. Buchwald's idea became the Eddie Murphy-Arsenio Hall movie Coming to America. Buchwald sued and won; he was actually able to prove the idea was his and that Paramount had stolen it, and so he was awarded a percentage of the profits from Coming to America. Unfortunately for Buchwald, Paramount did some clever accounting and -whodathunkit?!- the studio didn't make any profit on the movie.
Does anyone know why entertainment companies get away with this kind of accounting shenanigans? The other great example is baseball teams. There's a line of billionaires around the block waiting to buy up baseball teams that the owners swear up and down are losing money. Of course, that's neglecting things like when the same entity owns the team, the stadium, and a TV station on which most of the team's games are played. A great example is the Tribune Corp, which owns the Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field, and WGN, the TV station on which most Cub games are broadcast. I think Time Warner still owns TBS, Turner Field (or whatever they call it now), and the Atlanta Braves too. Same kind of deal. Anyway, the team pays an outrageously expensive lease for the stadium and receives much less for the broadcast rights to the games than it could get if other TV stations were actually given a chance to get them in a fair bidding process. The result? On paper, the team spends a lot on a stadium lease and gets very little for the broadcast rights, but it's all going to the same owners. It's just being moved "from one pocket to another."
The media have plenty to say when a player gets a multi-year contract worth multiple millions per year, but never seem to dig into the bizarre claims of poverty Major League Baseball teams' owners make as their supposedly near-bankrupt franchises appreciate in value much faster than any stock market index.
Entertainment companies (examples include our friends from the RIAA and MPAA, plus sports teams) seem to always claim to be losing lots of money, yet they continue to stick around in the same business, and the valuations of their companies always seem to rise despite the dire financial circumstances they always claim to be facing. But the only place where I ever see any skepticism of their claims is on "nerd" web sites.
Actually- we've got something similar in our own cells- Mitochondria- a symbiotic sub-cellular life form that produces energy (chloroplasts in plants are a competing symbiotic life form that is similar). All he did was twist the word around somewhat and made them more powerful than normal.
Chlamydians
Some people have something similar in their um... anatomy. All Lucas did was twist the word around somewhat and make them slightly more irritating than normal.
This is the absolute worst thing for me in the whole prequel trilogy. Most fans seem to hate Jar Jar most. Not me. I loathe the unnecessary ST:TNG-esque technobabble explaining the Force. The only thing missing was a mention of tetrions. The thing is that there was no need to explain the Force. It was magic, dammit! But the prequel trilogy reduced the Force from something magical and mysterious to a mere blood condition.
I have to wonder: might a simple dose of penicillin have avoided the whole Darth Vader situation, and with it, the rise of the Emperor?
The weird thing is that as a result, there are super-up-to-date pix of remote parts of the rainforest in Google Earth, but some more densely populated regions have old pictures.
For example, I live in São Paulo, easily the largest and most important city in Latin America and in the Southern Hemisphere. For people who know US cities, here are some references: try and imagine a city that occupies a significantly larger area than Los Angeles, but has a density of buildings like Manhattan. It's just ridiculous. When you come in for a landing at the domestic airport in the south side of the city on a clear day, it looks like the buildings just go on forever.
Anyway, here I am in this metropolis, and yet the satellite photos of my neighborhood appear to be from about August of 1991, based on the state of the construction of two major condos in the neighborhood at the time the pictures were taken. Meanwhile, the pictures of remote parts of the rainforest are updated often enough that it can be used as a monitoring tool.
No, but neither were they called terrorists. The term wasn't much in use before 9/11.
That's bullshit. The term terrorist was in wide use before 9/11. I remember it being used in the 1980s - for example to describe the suicide truck bombing of American Marines stationed in Beruit. I also remember it being used to describe the Unabomber and the Oklahoma City bombing.
As another poster has pointed out, the term is much older than the 1980s. The entry at dictionary.com says it's from 1785-95, to be compared to the French word terroriste. The Wikipedia entry on "Terrorism" (really, wouldn't you check that before writing that the term "terrorism" wasn't much in use before the 11th of September of 2001?) says the Jacobins probably used the name to describe themselves in the period around the French Revolution (consistent with the dates from the dictionary.com entry). It also says the term was used quite a bit in the 19th and 20th Centuries (citing examples), and that the US government has kept official terrorism statistics since 1968.
The term "terrorists" was very widely used to describe Black September, the Palestinian group responsible for the Munich Massacre, the name given to the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and the term "terrorism" was used to describe what they did.
I was quite young at that time and honestly don't remember it, though I do have some memories from around that time and even a bit earlier. But I do recall the term "terrorist" being used a lot on the news in the 1970s. As a kid, I associated it with airplane hijacking, due to memories of stories on the news about planes hijacked by terrorists (that's what the news people called them) sitting on runways while negotiations went on about trading their hostages for whatever it was they were demanding.
The use of the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" to keep the people of the USA in constant fear and control every aspect of their lives is relatively new, having basically started at the time mentioned in the grandparent post. It's the Cold War, with much more exaggeration of the enemy's capabilities (not an easy task, mind you, as the "Red Menace" was greatly exaggerated during the Cold War), and with a much less clearly-defined enemy, so the "war on terror" doesn't suffer from the same defect as the Cold War: a possible eventual loss of the enemy. Just to be clear, I'm not saying the Soviet Union was not a threat, but that the threat, both in terms of the size and capabilities of its nuclear weapons, and in terms of its ability to covertly control groups and policies inside the USA, were tremendously exaggerated.
But don't tell me the term "terrorists" wasn't used much before the September 11 attacks. And get the hell off my lawn!
alienfluid writes to mention that RC1 of Windows Vista is now complete. This 'nearly complete' version of the operating system is already available to beta testers, and will be available to everyone else soon.
From the article:
"You'll notice a lot of improvements since Beta 2. We've made some UI adjustments, added more device drivers, and enhanced performance. We're not done yet, however -- quality will continue to improve. We'll keep plugging away on application compatibility, as well as fit and finish, until RTM. If you are an ISV, RC1 is the build you should use for certifying your application."
"You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean."
I recently accessed the Bank of Brazil's online system, and they have a pretty neat way to turn keyloggers useless: they use a Java Applet that displays the valid digits you can use in your password, and you actually have to click on each key in order to enter your password (if you don't see the numbers, click the contrast "+"). Keyboards do not work on the password field.
Bradesco (the largest non-government bank in Brazil) is one example of a bank here in Brazil that, as the parent post says, has the same kind of virtual keyboard, with the physical keyboard disabled. That is cool, but there's a way to beat it. There are malware applications that take "snapshots" of a small region around the mouse pointer when the button is clicked. So the badguy who gets the data from the app can see which buttons on the virtual keyboard you clicked.
The third-largest non-government bank in Brazil, Unibanco, has an interesting solution to that: the identifying marks on the keys on the virtual keyboard disappear on mouseover. So to see where you need to click, you have to move the mouse pointer away, but when the mouse pointer is actually on the virtual keyboard, even a "snapshot" app can't "see" what key has been pressed (the virtual keyboard keys are arranged randomly each time) when you click on one of them. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
By the way, HSBC Brasil does not have the vulnerability described in TFA. Access to the HSBC Brasil internet banking app is different. Users of HSBC Brasil's internet banking have seven-character passwords. The 26 letters and ten numerals are, on each access attempt, arranged randomly into nine rows of four on a "virtual keyboard." The user clicks on the row containing each character of his password, and the seven blocks of four are sent for verification (another interesting detail is that the verification is done inside an HSM, so there's no way to hack the server and get at the user's password).
In my experience, the greatest work music is the Brandenburg Concertos. My sister gave me a 2 CD set back in about 1988 or so, and I've been using them for heavy studying or work ever since.
I very rarely listen to them just to enjoy them (it has been years since I did), but as the parent post notes, that actually makes them more effective as work music. When those CDs (or the MP3s I ripped from them) are playing, I find it much easier to get into "the zone" and work productively.
If we were smart we would pull a brazil and start producing more corn to use as ethanol. They will be oil-independent by next year. Sugar-based ethanol is something like 8 times more efficient then corn-based. Shows what we know right?
To "pull a Brazil," the USA would have to do a lot of things, and I don't think producing more corn would be one of them.
First, as the parent post notes, getting ethanol from sugar cane, as Brazil does, is much more efficient than getting ethanol from corn. With corn, depending on which estimates you believe, the energy you can get from burning the ethanol you get is anywhere from 0.8 to 1.3 times the amount of energy you put in to get the ethanol. With sugar cane, the ratio is about 8.
It is true that Brazil has major ethanol production from sugar cane, but Brazil is not going to be oil-independent by next year. However, Brazil is already independent of foreign petroleum right now. Brazil has its own petroleum and makes a lot of use of ethanol and natural gas. The situation in Bolivia complicates natural gas, but Brazil actually has its own natural gas too. Further, 96% of Brazil's electrical energy comes from hydroelectric plants (dams). Additionally, Brazil, a tropical country, does not have the heating needs a country like the USA does in the winter. Yes, in the south it can get down to freezing occasionally in the winter, and yes, I can tell you the mornings in São Paulo have been a bit chilly for the last several days (it's Autumn here now), but that's nothing compared to places where the temperature can be below freezing for months on end. The lowest overnight low I've ever seen in São Paulo was in the low 40s. I don't even have a heater in my apartment in São Paulo (tho' I do have an electric blanket I sometimes turn on for about 10 minutes to warm the bed before I get in it on the coldest nights of the winter... FWIW, the electric blanket isn't even on my bed right now). Yes, it's nice to have air conditioning in the summer, but for example, my apartment does not. My car does, and I feel any office that would ever require me to wear a suit better damn well have air conditioning, but it is possible to get by without it. Try getting through a Chicago, Minneapolis, or even New York or Boston winter without heat. Yikes!
And Brazil is a growing economic power, with major manufacturing, agricultural, mining, banking, and technology concerns. This is not just a bunch of peasants out in the fields, as anyone who has visited the megalopolis of greater São Paulo can attest. The fact that Brazil does not depend on foreign petroleum and is very close to being completely energy independent. Bolivian natural gas seems to be the last bit of dependence, and Evo Morales may end up forcing Brazil to accelerate development of its own natural gas resouces.
Brazil's government should be congratulated for having the vision and the drive to make Brazil independent of foreign petroleum.
They know that in vernacular English (rather than pedantic geekspeak), "PC" means "a computer running Windows". (Most non-dumb geeks are at least aware of this fact.)
There's one key difference between attacking "PCs" and attacking the real cause of the "PC" problems mentioned in the ads, and I think it's a crucial one. Apple should have mentioned Windows as the cause of restarts, virus problems, etc. By saying it's a "PC" problem, Apple is opening itself up to attacks when people use Boot Camp and then get viruses, BSODs, malware-induced freezes, and any other Windows-related problems on their Macs.
On the Apple web site, they say things like "Windows just wasn't built to bear the onslaught of attacks it suffers every day" and the "Word to the Wise" on the Boot Camp page:
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it'll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.
I think Apple's TV and print advertising, if it's going to attack Windows-related PC problems, ought to be just as explicit about the actual cause of those problems being Windows.
I read TFA a bit differently. It appeared to me that Stallman did this to limit demand, not to be compensated for the time it takes to sign and pose. He thought that signing thousands of convention badges and/or posing for hundreds of photos would take a long time. I thought Stallman himself made that pretty clear, but I guess YMMV.
What's interesting to me is that the article in Portuguese linked as the reference by "Han Solo, Jr." in the NewsForge article tells a slightly different version of the story. In that version, well... I'll just translate it:
An autograph from the software guru Richard Stallman was auctioned (emphasis mine ) for R$23 at FISL 7.0, on Saturday the 22nd. The initiative (the idea) came from Leonardo Vaz, from OPEN BSB inthe state of Rio Grande do Sul, who caused quite an uproar on this last day of the event when he went to personally deliver the money collected to Stallman, accompanied by about 100 persons.
So in that version, a single autograph was auctioned, but Stallman himself says he was charging R$10 for autographs and R$5 to pose for photos. By the way, "Han Solo, Jr.," in the NewsForge article, got the exchange rates wrong. According to this site in Brazil, the US dollar is at about 2.09 reais (it's over at the right side, under the heading "DÓLAR," and there are three rates given: the official bank rate, the tourism rate, and the "parallel" rate), and the currency converter at this site seems to agree.
Using rates closer to reality than the US-dollar-above-R$3 rate used in the NewsForge article (it's been some time since the dollar went that high), the values cited in these articles are:
The supposedly auctioned Stallman autograph (mentioned in the article in Portuguese): R$23=US$11
R$10 for Stallman to autograph your badge: US$4.78 (close to the value of US$5 cited by Stallman)
R$5 for Stallman to pose for a photograph: US$2.39 (again, close to the US$2.50 mentioned by Stallman).
The article in Portuguese goes on to say the following:
The auction idea sums up the relaxed atmosphere of this last day of FISL 7.0. Scheduled for 4:00 PM is the launch of GULA (Grupo de Usuários de Linux Alcoólatras, or Alchoholic Linux Users' Group), which promises to shake up the final hours of the event.
Ghandi never struck me as the kind of guy who trashtalks others. Well you learn something new everyday, I suppose.
Indeed. One wouldn't expect trash talk from practitioners of peace and Eastern meditation. On the other hand... http://www.glue.umd.edu/~chande/humor/yoga.html
Alternate link: http://www.globalserve.net/~sarlo/Yserenest.htm
The article was originally from the March 6, 1996 issue of The Onion, but the current archives at The Onion only go back as far as August of 1996, so I can't post a link to the article at its original site. It's one of my all-time favorite sports articles from The Onion, America's Finest News Source.
Libertarianism falls into the left wing of the traditional classification of politial thought in some ways and right wing in others.
I prefer to think of there being two perpendicular axes. This model is vastly superior to a single one-dimensional "left-right" scale. The Libertarian Party of the US uses one two-dimensional political scale, but I prefer the one used by The Political Compass, because I like the axes it uses. One axis is the economic left-right axis, where left is more (ECONOMICALLY) socialist, and right is more economically capitalist. The other axis is the libertarian-authoritarian axis. So there are both left-wing and right-wing libertarians, and both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians.
A two-dimensional model is not perfect, but it's much better than a one-dimensional scale. A few examples...
There are "anarcho-capitalists" who are economically on the right, but quite libertarian. The Libertarian Party in the USA is not as libertarian as I'd like, but it's better than the Republicans and Democrats on that score. It definitely falls on the right, and probably somewhere just into the libertarian half of the space. There are members of the Libertarian Party who are truly libertarian, and would fall further down into the bottom-right quadrant (on the Political Compass's scale, authoritarian is "up" and libertarian is "down"). But they are all pretty far from right-wing authoritarians like Pinochet and, yes, the Republican Party under George W. Bush. Pinochet and Bush would fall way up in the upper-right quadrant. The Democrats probably closer to the axis on the left-right scale, but still on the right side (in the US, Bill Clinton is considered a wild leftist. Anywhere else in the world, he'd be seen as a center-rightist), and in the authoritarian side too.
Stalin would be on the "left" side of things economically, but so would Gandhi, or the anarcho-syndicalists of Spain in the 1930s that Orwell came to admire. The difference is that Gandhi falls somewhere just into the libertarian-left (lower-left) quadrant, the anarcho-syndicalists fall way down inthe lower-left quadrant, and Stalin, with his authoritarianism, would come up somewhere in the upper-left quadrant.
The Political Compass site is interesting. It has a test you can take that places you on their scale. I've taken it several times, and my scores vary, but the overall conclusion is the same. I fall very safely into the same quadrant every time, and with my libertarian-authoritarian absolute value larger than my left-right absolute value. That seems just about right to me.
The cool thing about Political Compass's two-dimensional model is that it exposes as nonsense the assertions by lassez-faire capitalists (like the US Libertarian Party) that leftism is inherently authoritarian (the anarcho-syndicalists of Spain being a great counterexample), as well as the assertions of lefty types that capitalism is automatically authoritarian. Neither left nor right has a monopoly on authoritarianism, nor on libertarianism, and the Political Compass's model shows that and shows where real-world people would appear on their scales.
I'd buy one if, in addition, it were at least a "Sunbeam killer" and could toast English muffins and bagels.
But without that extra functionality, I don't see enough value in a device that "kills" only three industry-leading gadgets.
Adding a SureShot-killing 8 MP camera with integrated 20x optical zoon and a Fender-killing electric guitar would also be nice. The AIDS drug killer function mentioned in the parent could be nice too.
It slices! It dices! It juliennes! It plays MP3s! It has integrated 3G cellular technology! It plays games! And that's not all! It replaces broken or lost buttons on clothing! It toasts your bagel perfectly in HALF THE TIME! It prepares your Form 1040 in 15 minutes, GUARANTEED! It destroys HIV without inflicting damage on the host! It does away with your dependence on petroleum products! It elminates spyware! And best of all, it can be yours for the low, low price of...
and seconds after they turned it on, the sensor was activated by a passing UCSB undergrad...
I got my Ph.D. at UCSB, and I had to laugh when I read this.
Adam Sandler played some live shows at UCSB during my years there. The live recordings of at least the first couple of versions of the Chanukah/Hanukkah Song were recorded there, and inside the album What The Hell Happened To Me?, you can see pictures of Sandler at one of those shows, wearing a UCSB cap.
So I tell people: "Y'know that part of the Hanukkah Song when Sandler sings 'so drink your gin-and-tonica and smoke your marijuanica,' and the crowd goes nuts? Yep, that's where I got my Ph.D."
I have an ATM card from the largest non-government bank in Brazil (Bradesco), and I was required to come up with a PIN of six digits or more. This is the PIN I use for cash withdrawals or to authorize debit purchases at stores.
Interesting point: debit cards like the ones in the USA, the ones accepted as credit cards, but that "behind the scenes" just debit the money from the owner's account, do not appear to exist in Brazil. Here we have two different types of cards: credit cards and ATM (here called "debit") cards. The billing is different.
As many here know, there are financial rewards to being good at what you do in high-tech fields. I had a great job at a highly respected technology company in São Paulo. I worked in the business unit that makes software-based solutions for business problems. That business unit was producing the most innovative and interesting stuff in the company, and I was making a salary many people in Brazil would kill to have. I really liked and even admired some of my coworkers. But after a few years (and several years total in high-tech jobs), I found the work wasn't making me happy anymore. I tried and tried to think of something else to do, but with no success. My background is in physics, but I can't go back to physics research because there are people who have just finished their PhDs, and they would have a certain advantage, from having produced results more recently and from having more direct communication with researchers in the field. People completing first or second postdocs would have even more advantages. Additionally, I left physics in the first place because I didn't find the "rat race" aspects of fighting for grants appealing at all. So going back wasn't really interesting to me. When I tried to think of something else to do, I ended up not thinking of anything beyond other high tech jobs, and changing jobs in the same field didn't interest me much.
The idea of starting an ice cream company came to me three times (different things made me think about it), and I rejected it each time. When it appeared for the fourth time, I started taking it seriously. I went on vacation to Chile and met some Brazilians there. When we were getting to know each other and they asked me what I did, even I was surprised to hear myself saying "well, I work at a technology company, but I want to start an ice cream company."
After that, I intended to keep working at my job at the tech company and work on the business plan for my ice cream business in my spare time. Well, after a few months I discovered that this "spare time" didn't exist. I was basically waiting for a sign that it was time to take a risk and leave my job. Some changes happened at the company, and so I had a good opportunity to leave while minimizing the disruption for my coworkers. A few other things happened at the same time that convinced me it was time. I checked my finances and determined that the money I'd been saving to buy a home would support me for long enough for me to be able to give it a try. So I left the safety of a comfortable salary to chase after a dream.
People asked me if I was sure I wasn't making a big mistake, just walking away from a job with a good salary, and one at which I probably could have stayed until retirement. I wondered if I would ever have any doubts and look back and think I shouldn't do it, but my mind was made up, so I did leave the job. I never did second guess my decision. Even when money got tight for a while, I was sure I was on the right path.
I am a different person now than I was before. I used to be a very stressed-out person. I am now much calmer (one friend uses the term "serene"). I stopped biting my fingernails. In the last several months, three different women have made comments like "I wish I had nails like yours." This is a huge victory for somebody who used to chew his nails, giving him very ugly hands. I'm not tired all the time like I used to be. I'm enjoying life much more, and I have through all this time since leaving my job, even when my money started to run out early last year.
To summarize, I am happy. There's a really good way to express how happy I am in Portuguese that is a bit difficult to translate to English, and it will definitely lose something in the translation, but here goes...
In Portuguese, there are two verbs that work like the verb "to be" in English. One, estar is used for states that are subject to change in the short term, like "estou cansado," which means "I am tired." The other, ser, is used for states
Slashdot Mirror
First, a disclaimer. I was employee #4 at KhiMetrics, the company founded by Ken and Tim Ouimet (employees #1 and #2). They're mentioned in TFA. SAP bought KhiMetrics in January of 2006. Ken had been my office-mate in grad school. That said, I haven't seen Ken and Tim in years, and I have no financial stake in KhiMetrics or SAP anymore (SAP bought out the KhiMetrics stockholders with money, not shares of SAP stock).
Yes, it's true that humans doing pricing try to do the same things. But the thing is that software can do things a human mind cannot. Yes, the opposite is also true, but here software has a lot of advantages. In the case of the KhiMetrics (now SAP) software, it works on the category level, optimizing profit for the category as a whole, which can include taking losses on individual items. The software never makes the common mistakes human beings make. For example, different "flavors" of the same size package of the same product should come out at the same price, and the unit price of a given item should go down as the amount bought increases. I can tell you that I have seen examples where humans have screwed this up this week. When there are two sizes of a given product, let's say a certain laundry detergent, then the price per weight of the larger package better be less than the price per weight of the smaller package, or there's never any incentive for the customer to buy the larger package. Still, I see examples where the pricers have gotten this wrong. I've even asked people at the stores if they were trying to move the smaller packages because of having too much of that size in stock or something, and they told me that no, they had no such problem.
The other thing is that the KhiMetrics software uses actual sales data to determine how sensitive the customers are to the price of a given product. This can be done down to the SKU (individual item) level in the product dimension and down to the level of customers of a specific store in the geographic dimension. In other words, the KhiMetrics software is capable of determining the sensitivity of the customers of each individual store to the price of a specific product. No human being could do that at all, much less in the time the KhiMetrics software can do it. Even with a pricing team for each category in each store, which would end up costing a fortune in human resource costs, the result would not be as good as what KhiMetrics can deliver. Additionally, since the Ouimets "grew up in retail," the KhiMetrics software, since the beginning, has been compatible with things like Category Management and Efficient Replenishment, and able to take into account things like having different goals for different products in a category (loss leader, profit generator, traffic generator, etc.). The software takes into account complex factors like seasonality, promotion, and product visibility. Since I have a reasonably good idea of the internal workings of the software, I can tell you with some confidence that I, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, would not even want to try to tackle the problem of optimizing the prices for a subcategory of 20 products in a single store, much less the dozens of categories and tens of thousands of SKUs in the dozens of stores in a retail chain. KhiMetrics can do all that, basing itself on years of actual sales data, before breakfast.
There are experienced people in retail who are good at such things, but the software was created with people that have the same level of understanding of retail pricing, plus it has all the advantages of being able to do high-speed computerized analysis of huge amounts of price and sales data. I don't work for KhiMetrics anymore, nor for SAP, but I can say that if I were working in a retail company, I would definitely want us to be using software like this for pricing. And experienced retail people agree with me. One thing we saw back when I was with K
Sir Dennis Eton-Hogg: "And so say all of us: TAP into the environmental protection movement!"
Nigel Tufnel: "It's like, how much more back could Spinal Tap be? and the answer is none. None more back"
ObWikiLink
Semi-interesting tidbit: the Stern-Gerlach experiment was performed the year after Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The parent post makes an excellent point. I just thought the example of the photoelectric effect was important to add. Anyone got a non-quantum theory that explains the photoelectric effect or the experiments mentioned in the parent post?
Dear CentOS developers,
Please stop hacking my browser. When I visit my favorite site, Slashdot, your software's name keeps appearing on my browser. If you don't stop this at once, I will be forced to call the FBI and report your hacking.
Thank you.
That said, she kinda reminds me of Luana Piovani, a Brazilian model/actress/generally famous person that keeps most Brazilian men drooling.
Check out a pic of Luana here, or visit her official site (where I didn't see any pics in which she resembled the switcher girl quite so much).
That's actually kinda funny, because it was a sort of "open secret" for some time that Luana smoked the wacky tobacky, and then a few years ago she openly declared it, setting off a stupid controversy.
Oops... gotta go. The VLC 0.8.6 download just finished.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Algorithmic Research (ARX) is a vendor of security solutions, including HSMs , and that ARX has been losing market share in that space for years and has a tiny market share (nCipher dominates the HSM market worldwide, Safenet, through acquisitions, has the next-largest market share, and then you start getting to competitors with very small market shares). I'm sure the researchers at ARX had no idea that almost all banks in the world use HSMs made by competitors of ARX and just wrote this paper to expose a very real security flaw, one that something tells me ARX HSMs don't allow...
FWIW, ARX was actually something of a leader and had some cool ideas... several years ago. I'm not sure whether it was because of financial trouble, incompetent management, neither, or both, but they were lapped by players like nCipher, Luna (now part of SafeNet), Utimaco, even Thales, which focuses on serving the credit card transaction market but doesn't have things like Diffie-Hellman key exchange because VISA and Mastercard don't require them, and yes, even the old low-cost option, Eracom (bought by Safenet in order to do away with a pesky competitor).
Does anyone know why entertainment companies get away with this kind of accounting shenanigans? The other great example is baseball teams. There's a line of billionaires around the block waiting to buy up baseball teams that the owners swear up and down are losing money. Of course, that's neglecting things like when the same entity owns the team, the stadium, and a TV station on which most of the team's games are played. A great example is the Tribune Corp, which owns the Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field, and WGN, the TV station on which most Cub games are broadcast. I think Time Warner still owns TBS, Turner Field (or whatever they call it now), and the Atlanta Braves too. Same kind of deal. Anyway, the team pays an outrageously expensive lease for the stadium and receives much less for the broadcast rights to the games than it could get if other TV stations were actually given a chance to get them in a fair bidding process. The result? On paper, the team spends a lot on a stadium lease and gets very little for the broadcast rights, but it's all going to the same owners. It's just being moved "from one pocket to another."
The media have plenty to say when a player gets a multi-year contract worth multiple millions per year, but never seem to dig into the bizarre claims of poverty Major League Baseball teams' owners make as their supposedly near-bankrupt franchises appreciate in value much faster than any stock market index.
Entertainment companies (examples include our friends from the RIAA and MPAA, plus sports teams) seem to always claim to be losing lots of money, yet they continue to stick around in the same business, and the valuations of their companies always seem to rise despite the dire financial circumstances they always claim to be facing. But the only place where I ever see any skepticism of their claims is on "nerd" web sites.
Some people have something similar in their um... anatomy. All Lucas did was twist the word around somewhat and make them slightly more irritating than normal.
This is the absolute worst thing for me in the whole prequel trilogy. Most fans seem to hate Jar Jar most. Not me. I loathe the unnecessary ST:TNG-esque technobabble explaining the Force. The only thing missing was a mention of tetrions. The thing is that there was no need to explain the Force. It was magic, dammit! But the prequel trilogy reduced the Force from something magical and mysterious to a mere blood condition.
I have to wonder: might a simple dose of penicillin have avoided the whole Darth Vader situation, and with it, the rise of the Emperor?
The weird thing is that as a result, there are super-up-to-date pix of remote parts of the rainforest in Google Earth, but some more densely populated regions have old pictures.
For example, I live in São Paulo, easily the largest and most important city in Latin America and in the Southern Hemisphere. For people who know US cities, here are some references: try and imagine a city that occupies a significantly larger area than Los Angeles, but has a density of buildings like Manhattan. It's just ridiculous. When you come in for a landing at the domestic airport in the south side of the city on a clear day, it looks like the buildings just go on forever.
Anyway, here I am in this metropolis, and yet the satellite photos of my neighborhood appear to be from about August of 1991, based on the state of the construction of two major condos in the neighborhood at the time the pictures were taken. Meanwhile, the pictures of remote parts of the rainforest are updated often enough that it can be used as a monitoring tool.
The term "terrorists" was very widely used to describe Black September, the Palestinian group responsible for the Munich Massacre, the name given to the kidnapping and murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and the term "terrorism" was used to describe what they did.
I was quite young at that time and honestly don't remember it, though I do have some memories from around that time and even a bit earlier. But I do recall the term "terrorist" being used a lot on the news in the 1970s. As a kid, I associated it with airplane hijacking, due to memories of stories on the news about planes hijacked by terrorists (that's what the news people called them) sitting on runways while negotiations went on about trading their hostages for whatever it was they were demanding.
The use of the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" to keep the people of the USA in constant fear and control every aspect of their lives is relatively new, having basically started at the time mentioned in the grandparent post. It's the Cold War, with much more exaggeration of the enemy's capabilities (not an easy task, mind you, as the "Red Menace" was greatly exaggerated during the Cold War), and with a much less clearly-defined enemy, so the "war on terror" doesn't suffer from the same defect as the Cold War: a possible eventual loss of the enemy. Just to be clear, I'm not saying the Soviet Union was not a threat, but that the threat, both in terms of the size and capabilities of its nuclear weapons, and in terms of its ability to covertly control groups and policies inside the USA, were tremendously exaggerated.
But don't tell me the term "terrorists" wasn't used much before the September 11 attacks. And get the hell off my lawn!
"You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean."
The third-largest non-government bank in Brazil, Unibanco, has an interesting solution to that: the identifying marks on the keys on the virtual keyboard disappear on mouseover. So to see where you need to click, you have to move the mouse pointer away, but when the mouse pointer is actually on the virtual keyboard, even a "snapshot" app can't "see" what key has been pressed (the virtual keyboard keys are arranged randomly each time) when you click on one of them. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
By the way, HSBC Brasil does not have the vulnerability described in TFA. Access to the HSBC Brasil internet banking app is different. Users of HSBC Brasil's internet banking have seven-character passwords. The 26 letters and ten numerals are, on each access attempt, arranged randomly into nine rows of four on a "virtual keyboard." The user clicks on the row containing each character of his password, and the seven blocks of four are sent for verification (another interesting detail is that the verification is done inside an HSM, so there's no way to hack the server and get at the user's password).
In my experience, the greatest work music is the Brandenburg Concertos. My sister gave me a 2 CD set back in about 1988 or so, and I've been using them for heavy studying or work ever since. I very rarely listen to them just to enjoy them (it has been years since I did), but as the parent post notes, that actually makes them more effective as work music. When those CDs (or the MP3s I ripped from them) are playing, I find it much easier to get into "the zone" and work productively.
First, as the parent post notes, getting ethanol from sugar cane, as Brazil does, is much more efficient than getting ethanol from corn. With corn, depending on which estimates you believe, the energy you can get from burning the ethanol you get is anywhere from 0.8 to 1.3 times the amount of energy you put in to get the ethanol. With sugar cane, the ratio is about 8.
It is true that Brazil has major ethanol production from sugar cane, but Brazil is not going to be oil-independent by next year. However, Brazil is already independent of foreign petroleum right now . Brazil has its own petroleum and makes a lot of use of ethanol and natural gas. The situation in Bolivia complicates natural gas, but Brazil actually has its own natural gas too. Further, 96% of Brazil's electrical energy comes from hydroelectric plants (dams). Additionally, Brazil, a tropical country, does not have the heating needs a country like the USA does in the winter. Yes, in the south it can get down to freezing occasionally in the winter, and yes, I can tell you the mornings in São Paulo have been a bit chilly for the last several days (it's Autumn here now), but that's nothing compared to places where the temperature can be below freezing for months on end. The lowest overnight low I've ever seen in São Paulo was in the low 40s. I don't even have a heater in my apartment in São Paulo (tho' I do have an electric blanket I sometimes turn on for about 10 minutes to warm the bed before I get in it on the coldest nights of the winter... FWIW, the electric blanket isn't even on my bed right now). Yes, it's nice to have air conditioning in the summer, but for example, my apartment does not. My car does, and I feel any office that would ever require me to wear a suit better damn well have air conditioning, but it is possible to get by without it. Try getting through a Chicago, Minneapolis, or even New York or Boston winter without heat. Yikes!
And Brazil is a growing economic power, with major manufacturing, agricultural, mining, banking, and technology concerns. This is not just a bunch of peasants out in the fields, as anyone who has visited the megalopolis of greater São Paulo can attest. The fact that Brazil does not depend on foreign petroleum and is very close to being completely energy independent. Bolivian natural gas seems to be the last bit of dependence, and Evo Morales may end up forcing Brazil to accelerate development of its own natural gas resouces.
Brazil's government should be congratulated for having the vision and the drive to make Brazil independent of foreign petroleum.
On the Apple web site, they say things like "Windows just wasn't built to bear the onslaught of attacks it suffers every day" and the "Word to the Wise" on the Boot Camp page: I think Apple's TV and print advertising, if it's going to attack Windows-related PC problems, ought to be just as explicit about the actual cause of those problems being Windows.
What's interesting to me is that the article in Portuguese linked as the reference by "Han Solo, Jr." in the NewsForge article tells a slightly different version of the story. In that version, well... I'll just translate it: So in that version, a single autograph was auctioned, but Stallman himself says he was charging R$10 for autographs and R$5 to pose for photos. By the way, "Han Solo, Jr.," in the NewsForge article, got the exchange rates wrong. According to this site in Brazil, the US dollar is at about 2.09 reais (it's over at the right side, under the heading "DÓLAR," and there are three rates given: the official bank rate, the tourism rate, and the "parallel" rate), and the currency converter at this site seems to agree.
Using rates closer to reality than the US-dollar-above-R$3 rate used in the NewsForge article (it's been some time since the dollar went that high), the values cited in these articles are:
The supposedly auctioned Stallman autograph (mentioned in the article in Portuguese): R$23=US$11
R$10 for Stallman to autograph your badge: US$4.78 (close to the value of US$5 cited by Stallman)
R$5 for Stallman to pose for a photograph: US$2.39 (again, close to the US$2.50 mentioned by Stallman).
The article in Portuguese goes on to say the following:
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~chande/humor/yoga.html
Alternate link:
http://www.globalserve.net/~sarlo/Yserenest.htm
The article was originally from the March 6, 1996 issue of The Onion, but the current archives at The Onion only go back as far as August of 1996, so I can't post a link to the article at its original site. It's one of my all-time favorite sports articles from The Onion, America's Finest News Source.
A two-dimensional model is not perfect, but it's much better than a one-dimensional scale. A few examples...
There are "anarcho-capitalists" who are economically on the right, but quite libertarian. The Libertarian Party in the USA is not as libertarian as I'd like, but it's better than the Republicans and Democrats on that score. It definitely falls on the right, and probably somewhere just into the libertarian half of the space. There are members of the Libertarian Party who are truly libertarian, and would fall further down into the bottom-right quadrant (on the Political Compass's scale, authoritarian is "up" and libertarian is "down"). But they are all pretty far from right-wing authoritarians like Pinochet and, yes, the Republican Party under George W. Bush. Pinochet and Bush would fall way up in the upper-right quadrant. The Democrats probably closer to the axis on the left-right scale, but still on the right side (in the US, Bill Clinton is considered a wild leftist. Anywhere else in the world, he'd be seen as a center-rightist), and in the authoritarian side too.
Stalin would be on the "left" side of things economically, but so would Gandhi, or the anarcho-syndicalists of Spain in the 1930s that Orwell came to admire. The difference is that Gandhi falls somewhere just into the libertarian-left (lower-left) quadrant, the anarcho-syndicalists fall way down inthe lower-left quadrant, and Stalin, with his authoritarianism, would come up somewhere in the upper-left quadrant.
The Political Compass site is interesting. It has a test you can take that places you on their scale. I've taken it several times, and my scores vary, but the overall conclusion is the same. I fall very safely into the same quadrant every time, and with my libertarian-authoritarian absolute value larger than my left-right absolute value. That seems just about right to me.
The cool thing about Political Compass's two-dimensional model is that it exposes as nonsense the assertions by lassez-faire capitalists (like the US Libertarian Party) that leftism is inherently authoritarian (the anarcho-syndicalists of Spain being a great counterexample), as well as the assertions of lefty types that capitalism is automatically authoritarian. Neither left nor right has a monopoly on authoritarianism, nor on libertarianism, and the Political Compass's model shows that and shows where real-world people would appear on their scales.
I'd buy one if, in addition, it were at least a "Sunbeam killer" and could toast English muffins and bagels.
But without that extra functionality, I don't see enough value in a device that "kills" only three industry-leading gadgets.
Adding a SureShot-killing 8 MP camera with integrated 20x optical zoon and a Fender-killing electric guitar would also be nice. The AIDS drug killer function mentioned in the parent could be nice too.
It slices! It dices! It juliennes! It plays MP3s! It has integrated 3G cellular technology! It plays games! And that's not all! It replaces broken or lost buttons on clothing! It toasts your bagel perfectly in HALF THE TIME! It prepares your Form 1040 in 15 minutes, GUARANTEED! It destroys HIV without inflicting damage on the host! It does away with your dependence on petroleum products! It elminates spyware! And best of all, it can be yours for the low, low price of...
Adam Sandler played some live shows at UCSB during my years there. The live recordings of at least the first couple of versions of the Chanukah/Hanukkah Song were recorded there, and inside the album What The Hell Happened To Me?, you can see pictures of Sandler at one of those shows, wearing a UCSB cap.
So I tell people: "Y'know that part of the Hanukkah Song when Sandler sings 'so drink your gin-and-tonica and smoke your marijuanica,' and the crowd goes nuts? Yep, that's where I got my Ph.D."
I have an ATM card from the largest non-government bank in Brazil (Bradesco), and I was required to come up with a PIN of six digits or more. This is the PIN I use for cash withdrawals or to authorize debit purchases at stores.
Interesting point: debit cards like the ones in the USA, the ones accepted as credit cards, but that "behind the scenes" just debit the money from the owner's account, do not appear to exist in Brazil. Here we have two different types of cards: credit cards and ATM (here called "debit") cards. The billing is different.
As many here know, there are financial rewards to being good at what you do in high-tech fields. I had a great job at a highly respected technology company in São Paulo. I worked in the business unit that makes software-based solutions for business problems. That business unit was producing the most innovative and interesting stuff in the company, and I was making a salary many people in Brazil would kill to have. I really liked and even admired some of my coworkers. But after a few years (and several years total in high-tech jobs), I found the work wasn't making me happy anymore. I tried and tried to think of something else to do, but with no success. My background is in physics, but I can't go back to physics research because there are people who have just finished their PhDs, and they would have a certain advantage, from having produced results more recently and from having more direct communication with researchers in the field. People completing first or second postdocs would have even more advantages. Additionally, I left physics in the first place because I didn't find the "rat race" aspects of fighting for grants appealing at all. So going back wasn't really interesting to me. When I tried to think of something else to do, I ended up not thinking of anything beyond other high tech jobs, and changing jobs in the same field didn't interest me much.
The idea of starting an ice cream company came to me three times (different things made me think about it), and I rejected it each time. When it appeared for the fourth time, I started taking it seriously. I went on vacation to Chile and met some Brazilians there. When we were getting to know each other and they asked me what I did, even I was surprised to hear myself saying "well, I work at a technology company, but I want to start an ice cream company."
After that, I intended to keep working at my job at the tech company and work on the business plan for my ice cream business in my spare time. Well, after a few months I discovered that this "spare time" didn't exist. I was basically waiting for a sign that it was time to take a risk and leave my job. Some changes happened at the company, and so I had a good opportunity to leave while minimizing the disruption for my coworkers. A few other things happened at the same time that convinced me it was time. I checked my finances and determined that the money I'd been saving to buy a home would support me for long enough for me to be able to give it a try. So I left the safety of a comfortable salary to chase after a dream.
People asked me if I was sure I wasn't making a big mistake, just walking away from a job with a good salary, and one at which I probably could have stayed until retirement. I wondered if I would ever have any doubts and look back and think I shouldn't do it, but my mind was made up, so I did leave the job. I never did second guess my decision. Even when money got tight for a while, I was sure I was on the right path.
I am a different person now than I was before. I used to be a very stressed-out person. I am now much calmer (one friend uses the term "serene"). I stopped biting my fingernails. In the last several months, three different women have made comments like "I wish I had nails like yours." This is a huge victory for somebody who used to chew his nails, giving him very ugly hands. I'm not tired all the time like I used to be. I'm enjoying life much more, and I have through all this time since leaving my job, even when my money started to run out early last year.
To summarize, I am happy. There's a really good way to express how happy I am in Portuguese that is a bit difficult to translate to English, and it will definitely lose something in the translation, but here goes...
In Portuguese, there are two verbs that work like the verb "to be" in English. One, estar is used for states that are subject to change in the short term, like "estou cansado," which means "I am tired." The other, ser, is used for states