What I found when the university I was working for contemplated a laptop requirement was that the labs were going to stay. The laptops work great for general purpose stuff like Office and even Photoshop. But the heavy duty CAD and engineering software was a no go. Firstly, a 15 inch screen just isn't adequate for working on a large 3D model in Pro/E. Our labs had 21" standard. Some vendors wouldn't compromise on licensing either so that ruled them out. We also had a number of apps that were specific to either Windows or Unix (Solaris mostly - this was about 6 years ago and we were just getting serious about Linux). And lastly, the powers that be decided that it wouldn't be fair to the students to have them buy a new laptop halfway through their studies to stay current. That meant that when they were seniors - when they really needed to do actual work - that they would be trying to run their simulations on 4 or 5 year old hardware. And so, the labs stayed. Which was a good thing, since my job at the time revolved around running them.
Actually, as I heard it reported, the MLK/Jack Johnson DVDs were being paired up with all kinds of other movies and products with no relation. Most of them with nothing for people to be offended by. It was just seing them alongside Planet of the Apes got some people riled up. Mostly, I suspect that since we're getting close to February - aka black history month - that WalMart was just trying to push some black merchandise.
Wrong! Supply is limited by the copyright holder. When a song is in high demand, you can get a lot of people to pay a higher price for it. Now, here's where it can really get interesting. You throw in an aftermarket for songs where people can sell back songs they've already bought and now, we really have market forces at work. New copies are selling against used copies that people no longer want. This is similar to what we have already with people buying and selling used CDs, with one difference. CDs get scratched and damaged and a used CD is inherently worth less than a new CD.
As for your 99 cents per song model, there's no wonder that it's working. In most cases, that's far less than people are paying for a new CD (on a per song scale). Furthermore, a lot of people are buying that new CD for only 2 or 3 songs on it and aren't that interested in the rest of the filler. So on a CD model, a lot of times people are paying $5 or more per song for the songs they actually want. The powers what is went along with 99 cents a song to let digital distribution get up and going, but 99 cents is no where near what a record label spends on production and promotion of a hit song. Especially if most people aren't buying the filler from the album. More likely what you'll see in the future is something like $4 per song or $10 for the whole album. 99 cents per song works because that's a bargain for consumers. The people that make the songs aren't making any money that way and they're getting pissed off.
No, it's better competition. Google does 2 things that scare the shit out of everyone else. The first is that their first goal isn't to see how much profit they can squeeze from a product. Profits take a back seat to making a better product. The second thing they do is they don't try to manipulate the markets for what they're selling. Their pricing on advertising is essentially pure free market capitalism. Compare this to, say, airlines, which have convoluted pricing structures which are designed to abuse their customers as much as is possible. Those 2 things are very contrary to typical business practices, and they're working. More than just being a better technology company, they've embraced free market economics with a success that is unprecedented. That's what's scaring people.
Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Bayes is statistics by induction. It accounts for the fact that if you roll two dice 200 times without hitting snake eyes, it might be possible that the dice are loaded. That's hard to anticipate with a more rigid statistical model.
Now, the first fallacy of the grandparent post is the assumption that a flu pandemic is a random event. Most of the major diseases that have affected humans originated in other species that we work closely with (ie, sheep, pigs, chickens, cows). The second fallacy is that it is also a singular probability. The truth is that it is a process with there are successive steps. One of the first is bird to human transmission. This is almost invariably a prerequisite for human to human transmission. It's rather like a lottery drawing. If you get the first ball and the second ball, your odds of getting all the balls are now much better than they were before any balls were drawn.
So will a human to human strain of H5N1 emerge? It's quite possible. Will it be 50% lethal? So far, it's only been lethal in 50% of diagnosed cases. There may have been hundereds or thousands who have been infected but didn't seek medical attention. Is this a more serious threat to humanity than global warming? You betcha.
Well, on the subject of what not to use, avoid Lotus Domino & Notes as well. Take your favorite horror story involving Exchange and substitute Domino for Exchange and Notes for Outlook and that's what it's like. Only Outlook is a much better mail client.
There are dozens of perfectly good mail servers out there. The more features they have the more likely you are to have problems. It's a pretty simple equation.
And if all else fails, you can write your own. I've written one, it's not very difficult (hacked it out in C# in a weekend). It's a very simple plain text protocol. But I wouldn't run the company on something I wrote in C# in a weekend. I don't even use it myself anymore. I'm running Exchange now for my personal mail server as that's what we run at work.
No, I just felt like trolling. It looks like I snagged seven fish and a +1 mod on that one. Not bad, eh? As someone with a 5 digit/. id, you ought to be able to recognize that. TTFN - Ta Ta For Now.
Hello, and welcome to reality. IE is the standard. Any alternate browser that doesn't render a page exactly the same as IE is not standards compliant. I don't code to W3C standards, I code to IE, because that's what's on the desktops of my users.
As a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I prefer anonimity.
Really now... a true member of the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie Society would never dismiss it as a mere "tinfoil hat". Slapping a piece of foil on top of a baseball cap will do as much to protect you as a cheap umbrella in a hurricane. You think they are going to be stopped that easy? An AFDB must be engineered to the highest standards. They have an army of engineers dedicated to getting into your head. You need to keep up with the arms race.
Importantly, it has the clause "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"
Right, but in Eldrich the Surpreme court struck down that clause as being irrelevant fruity language. The ruling pretty much states that as long as copyright terms are technically finite, Congress has unfettered discretion in setting copyright law.
Microsoft is required to post a bond, though, to pay his salary and Google in case Msft loses. Usually, in a case like this, the parties will claim "time is of the essence" to try and get an expidited trial.
It's a prediction, and not a very good one. Here's a better prediction, the rise of the household file server - for more than just us geeks. People will need and want a central repository for their digital photos, music, recorded TV for watching later. While it will be all about the network, it will be more about the home network than the internet. Spam and viruses will continue to be an arms race. The advances in computing power will be eaten up by flashy graphics and the amount of time it takes to check a file against 1.7 million virus signatures. So all in all, I don't see a huge change except for maybe some legal and patent issues slowly clearing up.
More than that. She's creating a problem that we need her help to solve. Even if she doesn't go for the presidency, it'll keep her in office as a senator.
/If the Dems want to win the '08 election, they don't need Clark. They need a moderate southern governor. Virginia's Mark Warner springs immediately to mind.
You're 15, right? I can only assume that you weren't alive (or at least watching cartoons) in 1984. (or were unfortunate enough to live in a market that didn't get Voltron.)
Actually, not that it's relevant, they probably have been granted a monopoly in most areas. When cable was being rolled out to most areas it was usually the case that the local government would only allow one provider to lay and own cable as at the time, it was viewed in most areas that having 2 cable providers was economically unfeasible. As such, the market for cable TV and cable broadband is almost universally composed of regional monopolies. Monopolies that can then user their market power to prevent anyone else from laying cable. The only competition then for broadband is usually from the phone companies - and they often run into distance limitations. My point being, there's often a big difference between an ideal free market and reality.
This is very different from the "war" on drugs. One of the biggest things the US exports is intellectual property. Preventing the spread of pirated American works abroad and forcing foriegn user to buy legit copies puts money into the hands of US companies, and by extension their employees and stock holders.
By contrast, the War on Drugs is about control of the people. IE, the governement doesn't trust you to make good decisions for yourself. Chris Rock very accurately summed up the problem in one short sentance: "People want to get high." By restricting the supply of drugs, the government artificially raises the price of drugs making them a very lucrative business.
China has been a member of the Berne convention since 1992, but has done a poor job of living up to their obligations under the treaty. By allowing mass piracy (and we're not talking about a little bit of file sharing, we're talking about wholesale counterfitting) China is taking money away from US companies and handing it to counterfitters within their borders.
Now, there are a number of flaws with the Berne convention (like a life + 50 copyright minimum for starters), but the US would be remiss if it didn't protect its intrests under the treaty.
I think with today's employment situation, particularly in IT, these clauses should all be nullified.
I think the previous employer should be required to continue paying salary until the clause expires or is waived. If my previous employer is dictating what I can or can not do they ought to still be paying me. That, I would think, is the most balanced approach.
The issue revolves around some states whose Do Not Call laws are more strict than Federal law and which prohibit telemarketers from calling anyone on a Do Not Call, regardless of an existing business relationship.
Actually, I think this is a very reasonable question that needs to be addressed. If I have a company (and calling center) operating out of Minnesota and we have customers/former customers scattered around the country, I don't want to have to keep up on the particulars of laws in 49 other states. This is the sort of thing that the Commerce clause of the Constitution is meant for. If I call from Minnesota to Virginia, who's laws am I subject to? MN? VA? Both? This is a legitamate federal question.
On the other hand, if I'm in MN and calling a customer also in MN, then I should be only subject to MN law.
News flash: Microsoft doesn't want their customers switching to a rival product. In other news, water is wet, bees make honey. How can this possibly be news?
Well, I did write a chess program that learns from experiance. I used a rather simple chess engine that could play a full game against itself in about 7 seconds. All it did was log board conditions and the result of the games where that position was played and fed that back into its decision making. I never did get all the bugs out (it had a problem with draws), but it was a fun project to work on. As you might expect, it was weakest in the middle game.
Not to pick your nits, but water+ethanol has a higher boiling point. Impurities tend to keep substances in the liquid state (lower freezing point, higher boiling point). Otherwise you're correct. Typically to get around this problem a third chemical (benzene, for example) is added to the mix allowing a pure faction of ethanol to be distilled. At least that's how it was taught to me as a ChemEng major a decade ago. In any event, distillation of ethanol is terribly inefficient. That's the biggest problem with it. Someday, I figure Monsanto will develop a very oily soybean and we'll be driving biodiesel instead. Production there is a lot simpler, anyway.
See, here's the really funny thing: You can't make a case against anyone because only the CIA knows if she was NOC and I don't think they would care to testify in court about who is and isn't NOC. Ironic, eh?
Wow, so you're paying $45/month to watch TV? Your box was then most definately not free. It's either a rental, or its part of the cost of programming. Furthermore, I bet it doesn't convert ATSC broadcast signals.
Oh, I've already experianced some pain. Disk 3 for Darklands won't read. That one died on me years ago. On the other hand, nearly all of my old 5.25 Apple ][ floppies are still readable. Except I threw out the Apple ][ when I last moved (east coast to midwest. Truck wasn't quite big enough, so something had to be cut.) A lot of items that I have on 3.5 floppy don't read anymore. In fairness, they were cheap disks. But I have felt a good deal of pain. If I ever find the time, I intend to image them all (the ones that are still readable) and archive them to CD. On the other hand, most of the games that I want to go back and play I've picked up on various CD anthologies (ie, Wasteland, Ultimas 1-6) except for the old, legendary, SSI Gold Box series.
Slashdot Mirror
What I found when the university I was working for contemplated a laptop requirement was that the labs were going to stay. The laptops work great for general purpose stuff like Office and even Photoshop. But the heavy duty CAD and engineering software was a no go. Firstly, a 15 inch screen just isn't adequate for working on a large 3D model in Pro/E. Our labs had 21" standard. Some vendors wouldn't compromise on licensing either so that ruled them out. We also had a number of apps that were specific to either Windows or Unix (Solaris mostly - this was about 6 years ago and we were just getting serious about Linux). And lastly, the powers that be decided that it wouldn't be fair to the students to have them buy a new laptop halfway through their studies to stay current. That meant that when they were seniors - when they really needed to do actual work - that they would be trying to run their simulations on 4 or 5 year old hardware. And so, the labs stayed. Which was a good thing, since my job at the time revolved around running them.
Actually, as I heard it reported, the MLK/Jack Johnson DVDs were being paired up with all kinds of other movies and products with no relation. Most of them with nothing for people to be offended by. It was just seing them alongside Planet of the Apes got some people riled up. Mostly, I suspect that since we're getting close to February - aka black history month - that WalMart was just trying to push some black merchandise.
(hey economist guy: the supply is unlimited!)
Wrong! Supply is limited by the copyright holder. When a song is in high demand, you can get a lot of people to pay a higher price for it. Now, here's where it can really get interesting. You throw in an aftermarket for songs where people can sell back songs they've already bought and now, we really have market forces at work. New copies are selling against used copies that people no longer want. This is similar to what we have already with people buying and selling used CDs, with one difference. CDs get scratched and damaged and a used CD is inherently worth less than a new CD.
As for your 99 cents per song model, there's no wonder that it's working. In most cases, that's far less than people are paying for a new CD (on a per song scale). Furthermore, a lot of people are buying that new CD for only 2 or 3 songs on it and aren't that interested in the rest of the filler. So on a CD model, a lot of times people are paying $5 or more per song for the songs they actually want. The powers what is went along with 99 cents a song to let digital distribution get up and going, but 99 cents is no where near what a record label spends on production and promotion of a hit song. Especially if most people aren't buying the filler from the album. More likely what you'll see in the future is something like $4 per song or $10 for the whole album. 99 cents per song works because that's a bargain for consumers. The people that make the songs aren't making any money that way and they're getting pissed off.
Well it's good competition
No, it's better competition. Google does 2 things that scare the shit out of everyone else. The first is that their first goal isn't to see how much profit they can squeeze from a product. Profits take a back seat to making a better product. The second thing they do is they don't try to manipulate the markets for what they're selling. Their pricing on advertising is essentially pure free market capitalism. Compare this to, say, airlines, which have convoluted pricing structures which are designed to abuse their customers as much as is possible. Those 2 things are very contrary to typical business practices, and they're working. More than just being a better technology company, they've embraced free market economics with a success that is unprecedented. That's what's scaring people.
Bayes is statistics by induction. It accounts for the fact that if you roll two dice 200 times without hitting snake eyes, it might be possible that the dice are loaded. That's hard to anticipate with a more rigid statistical model.
Now, the first fallacy of the grandparent post is the assumption that a flu pandemic is a random event. Most of the major diseases that have affected humans originated in other species that we work closely with (ie, sheep, pigs, chickens, cows). The second fallacy is that it is also a singular probability. The truth is that it is a process with there are successive steps. One of the first is bird to human transmission. This is almost invariably a prerequisite for human to human transmission. It's rather like a lottery drawing. If you get the first ball and the second ball, your odds of getting all the balls are now much better than they were before any balls were drawn.
So will a human to human strain of H5N1 emerge? It's quite possible. Will it be 50% lethal? So far, it's only been lethal in 50% of diagnosed cases. There may have been hundereds or thousands who have been infected but didn't seek medical attention. Is this a more serious threat to humanity than global warming? You betcha.
Well, on the subject of what not to use, avoid Lotus Domino & Notes as well. Take your favorite horror story involving Exchange and substitute Domino for Exchange and Notes for Outlook and that's what it's like. Only Outlook is a much better mail client.
There are dozens of perfectly good mail servers out there. The more features they have the more likely you are to have problems. It's a pretty simple equation.
And if all else fails, you can write your own. I've written one, it's not very difficult (hacked it out in C# in a weekend). It's a very simple plain text protocol. But I wouldn't run the company on something I wrote in C# in a weekend. I don't even use it myself anymore. I'm running Exchange now for my personal mail server as that's what we run at work.
No, I just felt like trolling. It looks like I snagged seven fish and a +1 mod on that one. Not bad, eh? As someone with a 5 digit /. id, you ought to be able to recognize that. TTFN - Ta Ta For Now.
Hello, and welcome to reality. IE is the standard. Any alternate browser that doesn't render a page exactly the same as IE is not standards compliant. I don't code to W3C standards, I code to IE, because that's what's on the desktops of my users.
As a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I prefer anonimity.
Really now... a true member of the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie Society would never dismiss it as a mere "tinfoil hat". Slapping a piece of foil on top of a baseball cap will do as much to protect you as a cheap umbrella in a hurricane. You think they are going to be stopped that easy? An AFDB must be engineered to the highest standards. They have an army of engineers dedicated to getting into your head. You need to keep up with the arms race.
Importantly, it has the clause "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"
Right, but in Eldrich the Surpreme court struck down that clause as being irrelevant fruity language. The ruling pretty much states that as long as copyright terms are technically finite, Congress has unfettered discretion in setting copyright law.
Microsoft is required to post a bond, though, to pay his salary and Google in case Msft loses. Usually, in a case like this, the parties will claim "time is of the essence" to try and get an expidited trial.
Blocked as well. The security guys won't let me into their office. I don't know the secret handshake.
It's a prediction, and not a very good one. Here's a better prediction, the rise of the household file server - for more than just us geeks. People will need and want a central repository for their digital photos, music, recorded TV for watching later. While it will be all about the network, it will be more about the home network than the internet. Spam and viruses will continue to be an arms race. The advances in computing power will be eaten up by flashy graphics and the amount of time it takes to check a file against 1.7 million virus signatures. So all in all, I don't see a huge change except for maybe some legal and patent issues slowly clearing up.
More than that. She's creating a problem that we need her help to solve. Even if she doesn't go for the presidency, it'll keep her in office as a senator.
/If the Dems want to win the '08 election, they don't need Clark. They need a moderate southern governor. Virginia's Mark Warner springs immediately to mind.
You're 15, right? I can only assume that you weren't alive (or at least watching cartoons) in 1984. (or were unfortunate enough to live in a market that didn't get Voltron.)
Actually, not that it's relevant, they probably have been granted a monopoly in most areas. When cable was being rolled out to most areas it was usually the case that the local government would only allow one provider to lay and own cable as at the time, it was viewed in most areas that having 2 cable providers was economically unfeasible. As such, the market for cable TV and cable broadband is almost universally composed of regional monopolies. Monopolies that can then user their market power to prevent anyone else from laying cable. The only competition then for broadband is usually from the phone companies - and they often run into distance limitations. My point being, there's often a big difference between an ideal free market and reality.
This is very different from the "war" on drugs. One of the biggest things the US exports is intellectual property. Preventing the spread of pirated American works abroad and forcing foriegn user to buy legit copies puts money into the hands of US companies, and by extension their employees and stock holders.
By contrast, the War on Drugs is about control of the people. IE, the governement doesn't trust you to make good decisions for yourself. Chris Rock very accurately summed up the problem in one short sentance: "People want to get high." By restricting the supply of drugs, the government artificially raises the price of drugs making them a very lucrative business.
China has been a member of the Berne convention since 1992, but has done a poor job of living up to their obligations under the treaty. By allowing mass piracy (and we're not talking about a little bit of file sharing, we're talking about wholesale counterfitting) China is taking money away from US companies and handing it to counterfitters within their borders.
Now, there are a number of flaws with the Berne convention (like a life + 50 copyright minimum for starters), but the US would be remiss if it didn't protect its intrests under the treaty.
I think with today's employment situation, particularly in IT, these clauses should all be nullified.
I think the previous employer should be required to continue paying salary until the clause expires or is waived. If my previous employer is dictating what I can or can not do they ought to still be paying me. That, I would think, is the most balanced approach.
The issue revolves around some states whose Do Not Call laws are more strict than Federal law and which prohibit telemarketers from calling anyone on a Do Not Call, regardless of an existing business relationship.
Actually, I think this is a very reasonable question that needs to be addressed. If I have a company (and calling center) operating out of Minnesota and we have customers/former customers scattered around the country, I don't want to have to keep up on the particulars of laws in 49 other states. This is the sort of thing that the Commerce clause of the Constitution is meant for. If I call from Minnesota to Virginia, who's laws am I subject to? MN? VA? Both? This is a legitamate federal question.
On the other hand, if I'm in MN and calling a customer also in MN, then I should be only subject to MN law.
News flash: Microsoft doesn't want their customers switching to a rival product. In other news, water is wet, bees make honey. How can this possibly be news?
Well, I did write a chess program that learns from experiance. I used a rather simple chess engine that could play a full game against itself in about 7 seconds. All it did was log board conditions and the result of the games where that position was played and fed that back into its decision making. I never did get all the bugs out (it had a problem with draws), but it was a fun project to work on. As you might expect, it was weakest in the middle game.
Not to pick your nits, but water+ethanol has a higher boiling point. Impurities tend to keep substances in the liquid state (lower freezing point, higher boiling point). Otherwise you're correct. Typically to get around this problem a third chemical (benzene, for example) is added to the mix allowing a pure faction of ethanol to be distilled. At least that's how it was taught to me as a ChemEng major a decade ago. In any event, distillation of ethanol is terribly inefficient. That's the biggest problem with it. Someday, I figure Monsanto will develop a very oily soybean and we'll be driving biodiesel instead. Production there is a lot simpler, anyway.
See, here's the really funny thing: You can't make a case against anyone because only the CIA knows if she was NOC and I don't think they would care to testify in court about who is and isn't NOC. Ironic, eh?
Wow, so you're paying $45/month to watch TV? Your box was then most definately not free. It's either a rental, or its part of the cost of programming. Furthermore, I bet it doesn't convert ATSC broadcast signals.
Oh, I've already experianced some pain. Disk 3 for Darklands won't read. That one died on me years ago. On the other hand, nearly all of my old 5.25 Apple ][ floppies are still readable. Except I threw out the Apple ][ when I last moved (east coast to midwest. Truck wasn't quite big enough, so something had to be cut.) A lot of items that I have on 3.5 floppy don't read anymore. In fairness, they were cheap disks. But I have felt a good deal of pain. If I ever find the time, I intend to image them all (the ones that are still readable) and archive them to CD. On the other hand, most of the games that I want to go back and play I've picked up on various CD anthologies (ie, Wasteland, Ultimas 1-6) except for the old, legendary, SSI Gold Box series.