As a scientist and thus someone dealing with error analysis daily, I would say you have a very naive notion, much like any second born, of what statistical errors really are. Things don't scale that way in real life because one is never dealing with homogeneous samples and there are uncontrolled factors.
I think the reason dell does this is fairly obvious. Small business sales at dell have different service policies than home sales. For example they get US tech support rather than tech support outsourced to India. They have different on-site repair policies. The computer selection is different too. And of course they probably have greater risks in case of negligence with businesses. So they presumably want to dry run the linux model in the consumer market before investing in the infrastructure to support it in business. e.g. easier to temporarily hire an outsource crew that can do Linux support than to retrain your US staff.
Now as for why not accept the business credit card on the consumer web site. Well that has nothing to do with this being a linux machine. That's just their policy in general. I'm sure they'd love to make an exception for linux machines, except that the market is so tiny why bother to have policy exceptions. People would exploit them and pretty soon you'd have businesses buying the $399 consumer entry-level dells rather than the business class machines then turning around and getting angry when they get outsourced tech support.
This being slashdot, can anyone come up with a car-related analogy? Some folks like to Restore classic cars, SOme folks like to buy restored classic cars, and some people make a business out of restoring classic cars.
For longer that the US has been around, persons of wealth used to buy military commissions which often involved them taking over some pre-established regiment, naval vessel crew, or outpost. Likewise placement in religious orders, bishops and so forth, did not involve working ones way up the hierarchy but buying a position. A seat at the House of lords did not come from merit.
Why does this bother you that rich folks can pay to play. Why should they not if they can? It's the way of the world and always has been.
But I'll have a guess that it's a little like being religious, other people can tell you all sorts of bad truths about your beliefs but that still doesn't stop you believing. For example, the article is cleverly disguised to make people think it refers to apple, but it really refers to the Linux proselytizers with a persecution complex that go around saying debian is better than redhat or vica versa while all the while feeling like chistians to the lion of redmond.
Actually the place you will lose more bits is not the use of the are (25%) but the faster shutter speed. if the camera can shoot two stops faster then you 75% of the light on the RGB detectors.
Now as for losing color resolution, I think you won't lose much. The only place you are going to notice it is in dim light and it will be less than 1 bit of loss. Those would be shots you would nt have gotten anyhow because they would have been below the camera's ability.
Prior art? LCD projectors do this same trick to brighten the projectors for presentations. rgb+white on the color wheels. This is also why some projectors, designed for movie viewing, are a littel dimmer for the same wattage because they leave out the white on the wheel for better color saturation and higher wheel speed.
agreed. it depends on the degree of willful or negligent behavior. Leaving a case of beer on my front porch is, perhaps, enticing minors, leaving it on my back porch is probably not. We can't hold everyone responsible for data security but perhaps expecting them to know what a public folder is possibly like knowing the difference between the frontyard and the backyard.
They can use the address of a homeless shelter they are staying at as their legal address, provided they follow the shelter's sign-in rules, which vary from shelter to shelter. That's what Karl Rove's buddies used to disqualify loads of voters. They send out proof-of-address letters to all registered voters. Those that come back as non-recieved get challenged and purged from the rolls.
Considering the statistically unlikely percentage of planetary orbits that would naturally line up so that the planet would transit its sun from our point of view, planets must be pretty much common as dust. Either that or God was nice enough to line them up so it's easy for us to find them (possible, I hear God is a very nice person)... Maybe not so lucky. Most of the planets in our solar system (not all) have their rotational axes mostly parallel to their orbital axis. I assume there's some reason for that, perhaps simply if they are spun off of the sun then they acquire it's angular momentum. Or like the moon where tidal forces lock the orbit. In any case then, the next question is if the solar systems in our galaxy mainly orbit in the plane of the galaxies rotation. I'd assume so.
Given all that then it's not too surprising that there be a preference for this favorable occultation geometry.
Finally I note that we are not really interested in planets that don't rotate in their orbital plane since otherwise they'd be roastingly hot on one side and freezing on the other.
One file system to rule them all. I thought that was Plan-9.
If they really want to look ahead why not look to plan-9
Taxing the internet can be good but has a peril
on
Internet Tax Imminent?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The current situation where brick and mortar stores must pay state taxes and on-line stores do not is clearly wrong and must be remedied. Tax loopholes like this create unintended public policy pressure. I just bought a bike from performance Bike shop. If I had bought it a week earlier I would not have had to pay sales tax. But that week the e-tailer opened a brick mortar store 200 mines away from me in my state. Suddenly I can't shop on-line from that company just because they have a store in the state that's too far from me to be practical. Liewise for apple products. These are unintended artifacts of this botched internet tax free zone law.
All internet retailers should have to pay the appropriate state taxes. Even this will not be perfect, since given differences in how states tax it's not clear how to tax an e-tailer that operates out of a property tax driven state when they sell to a customer in a sales tax driven state. But this is a much lesser evil to remedy than the current situation.
Now let's turn to the peril. Right now we have an easy to apply rule. No taxes on internet sales unless there is a brick and mortar presence in the state. Once we get rid of that then legislators may covet levying all sorts of other taxes on internet sales. Sort of like how our phone and other telecom bills get larded up with hard to spot taxes and "fees". Some states might adopt protectionist provisions to protect local stores from national ones. That's not neccessarily bad in it self--it's a state's prerogative to do so short on interfering with interstate commerce. But that tort of meddling is likely to leave open all sorts of tax abuse opportunities.
Thus the parent poster is totally wrong that more taxes are bad. Indeed the more ways to tax people the more possible it is to work out fair tax structures than minimize artifactual consequences. But the parent poster's paranoia is justified. given more ways to tax states sometimes will tax more. The solution to the latter problem is quite simple. have the state set a maximum tax revenue figure that is the combination of all sources. then the state is left to argue over how to distribute that figure over the sources of taxes rather than rasing the final sum.
The god question and quantum computing
on
A Mighty Number Falls
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· Score: 2, Interesting
An old theology joke goes like this: "if god is omnipotent, can he make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?"
But for quantum computers the question has a resonance. Can a quantum computer create prime numbers so large that another quantum computer could not factor the composite?
I realize that there's always quantum crypto. But for most folks we need to be able to use RSA not some new scheme for the privileged.
While your first post was a joke, it's actually on topic and unkowingly insightful
It's simply insane to use general purpose computer clusters to factor prime numbers when specialized devices built for factoring prime numbers can do the job thousands of times faster per node. These stunts are meaningless. All money funds for those waste of times should be put into developing better purpose built devices and more clever algorithms.
here's an example pdf of one such device. It's a tin can with single chip that has LED's integrated onto a shift register and a light detector at one end. costs about the same as one super computer node and is faster than a large cluster. Note that it's designed by the S in RSA so this is not baloney. it's not perfect and it needs technology refinement to scale to numbers larger than about 512 bits. That's where money wasted on this stunt should have been spent.
What's even stupider is that the calculations themselves serve no purpose. Anyone with an napkin and a pencil can tell you whether or not the calculation is feasible on a given size computer cluster. The expected time to crack in a brute force application of a seive is entirely predictable. So what does cracking one prove?
People who do this are more than harmless idiots. They waste money.
How do we know that the $50 laptop isn't possible unless there's competition against the guy offering the $100 laptop. 6 minute abs is crazy talk. Everyone knows you can't get great abs in 6 minutes. has to be 7.
Some of the reasons the costs are lower than an mp3 player are because only governments can by this in bulk
1) pass on all distribution, shipping, marketing costs to the government. 2) likewise no warrantee or after sales service. 3) only volume pre-orders. so their is no risk to the manfacturer on scale of production. All ecnomoies of scale are achieved on the first order. 4) Other than the software there's no expensive cutting edge components. 5) no retail stores, no middlemen, no warehouses. 6) no sales floor packaging.
Presumably those costs account for the majority of costs in the sales price of your MP3, which if it lacked any of those you would not buy it.
OLPC is like apple, it's and end-to-end specification. I forget which CPU they are using, I assume it's a VIA since the whole thing is 4 watts. But even if it were an Intel CPU it's a grave danger.
1) Like apple they could choose to change processors at any time. Thus they could move away from X86 if they wished. 2) they will establish a huge software market that does not use intel specific advancements. 3) It will use graphics other then Intel graphics
In short by creating an enourmous consumer market for generic lowest common demoninator software, it removes a tremendous amount of product differentiation the INtel sells. To see this think back about 8 years ago when you had a choice of buying an intel P4 or P3 or buying whatever AMD was selling. You were not really sure if all your code optimizers would work on AMD, not sure if certain drivers would fail on AMD. It was a gamble. The answer was in most cases there was no problems at all. But we all had seen examples of problems. Intel was the safe bet. Plus when optimizations using SSE or analogs came out they were written for intel first. And lord save you if you bought Via or god forbid, transmeta.
With a giant market in non-intel optimizations out there this advantage will be nullified. Software will respect the generic CPU needs. That hurts intel's premium price advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
As a scientist and thus someone dealing with error analysis daily, I would say you have a very naive notion, much like any second born, of what statistical errors really are. Things don't scale that way in real life because one is never dealing with homogeneous samples and there are uncontrolled factors.
A C++ binding for YAML
What's on your wish list?
I think the reason dell does this is fairly obvious. Small business sales at dell have different service policies than home sales. For example they get US tech support rather than tech support outsourced to India. They have different on-site repair policies. The computer selection is different too. And of course they probably have greater risks in case of negligence with businesses. So they presumably want to dry run the linux model in the consumer market before investing in the infrastructure to support it in business. e.g. easier to temporarily hire an outsource crew that can do Linux support than to retrain your US staff.
Now as for why not accept the business credit card on the consumer web site. Well that has nothing to do with this being a linux machine. That's just their policy in general. I'm sure they'd love to make an exception for linux machines, except that the market is so tiny why bother to have policy exceptions. People would exploit them and pretty soon you'd have businesses buying the $399 consumer entry-level dells rather than the business class machines then turning around and getting angry when they get outsourced tech support.
Most sensible rebuttal I received. Thanks.
For longer that the US has been around, persons of wealth used to buy military commissions which often involved them taking over some pre-established regiment, naval vessel crew, or outpost. Likewise placement in religious orders, bishops and so forth, did not involve working ones way up the hierarchy but buying a position. A seat at the House of lords did not come from merit.
Why does this bother you that rich folks can pay to play. Why should they not if they can? It's the way of the world and always has been.
Like plastics (including poly carbonate) there's optical quality and non-optical quality. It's not a hard concept.
Now as for losing color resolution, I think you won't lose much. The only place you are going to notice it is in dim light and it will be less than 1 bit of loss. Those would be shots you would nt have gotten anyhow because they would have been below the camera's ability.
Prior art? LCD projectors do this same trick to brighten the projectors for presentations. rgb+white on the color wheels. This is also why some projectors, designed for movie viewing, are a littel dimmer for the same wattage because they leave out the white on the wheel for better color saturation and higher wheel speed.
Belch at the wrong time any you one-click purchased a lot 1000 beanie babys on e-bay. Farts cause a seg fault.
agreed. it depends on the degree of willful or negligent behavior. Leaving a case of beer on my front porch is, perhaps, enticing minors, leaving it on my back porch is probably not. We can't hold everyone responsible for data security but perhaps expecting them to know what a public folder is possibly like knowing the difference between the frontyard and the backyard.
Duh. Isn't that what network connections are for, distributing data? He has no case.
Perhaps we're traveling at 99.999% the speed of light and the matter in question is stationary? No wonder time seems to fly by these days.
Given all that then it's not too surprising that there be a preference for this favorable occultation geometry.
Finally I note that we are not really interested in planets that don't rotate in their orbital plane since otherwise they'd be roastingly hot on one side and freezing on the other.
The current situation where brick and mortar stores must pay state taxes and on-line stores do not is clearly wrong and must be remedied. Tax loopholes like this create unintended public policy pressure. I just bought a bike from performance Bike shop. If I had bought it a week earlier I would not have had to pay sales tax. But that week the e-tailer opened a brick mortar store 200 mines away from me in my state. Suddenly I can't shop on-line from that company just because they have a store in the state that's too far from me to be practical. Liewise for apple products. These are unintended artifacts of this botched internet tax free zone law.
All internet retailers should have to pay the appropriate state taxes. Even this will not be perfect, since given differences in how states tax it's not clear how to tax an e-tailer that operates out of a property tax driven state when they sell to a customer in a sales tax driven state. But this is a much lesser evil to remedy than the current situation.
Now let's turn to the peril. Right now we have an easy to apply rule. No taxes on internet sales unless there is a brick and mortar presence in the state. Once we get rid of that then legislators may covet levying all sorts of other taxes on internet sales. Sort of like how our phone and other telecom bills get larded up with hard to spot taxes and "fees". Some states might adopt protectionist provisions to protect local stores from national ones. That's not neccessarily bad in it self--it's a state's prerogative to do so short on interfering with interstate commerce. But that tort of meddling is likely to leave open all sorts of tax abuse opportunities.
Thus the parent poster is totally wrong that more taxes are bad. Indeed the more ways to tax people the more possible it is to work out fair tax structures than minimize artifactual consequences. But the parent poster's paranoia is justified. given more ways to tax states sometimes will tax more. The solution to the latter problem is quite simple. have the state set a maximum tax revenue figure that is the combination of all sources. then the state is left to argue over how to distribute that figure over the sources of taxes rather than rasing the final sum.
An old theology joke goes like this: "if god is omnipotent, can he make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?"
But for quantum computers the question has a resonance. Can a quantum computer create prime numbers so large that another quantum computer could not factor the composite?
I realize that there's always quantum crypto. But for most folks we need to be able to use RSA not some new scheme for the privileged.
Twinkle, an older version of twirl, has a better wikipedia entry
oops here's a working link
It's simply insane to use general purpose computer clusters to factor prime numbers when specialized devices built for factoring prime numbers can do the job thousands of times faster per node. These stunts are meaningless. All money funds for those waste of times should be put into developing better purpose built devices and more clever algorithms.
here's an example pdf of one such device. It's a tin can with single chip that has LED's integrated onto a shift register and a light detector at one end. costs about the same as one super computer node and is faster than a large cluster. Note that it's designed by the S in RSA so this is not baloney. it's not perfect and it needs technology refinement to scale to numbers larger than about 512 bits. That's where money wasted on this stunt should have been spent.
What's even stupider is that the calculations themselves serve no purpose. Anyone with an napkin and a pencil can tell you whether or not the calculation is feasible on a given size computer cluster. The expected time to crack in a brute force application of a seive is entirely predictable. So what does cracking one prove?
People who do this are more than harmless idiots. They waste money.
Some of the reasons the costs are lower than an mp3 player are because only governments can by this in bulk
1) pass on all distribution, shipping, marketing costs to the government.
2) likewise no warrantee or after sales service.
3) only volume pre-orders. so their is no risk to the manfacturer on scale of production. All ecnomoies of scale are achieved on the first order.
4) Other than the software there's no expensive cutting edge components.
5) no retail stores, no middlemen, no warehouses.
6) no sales floor packaging.
Presumably those costs account for the majority of costs in the sales price of your MP3, which if it lacked any of those you would not buy it.
Updating my own post: it's a Geode from AMD not a Via. But that does not change my argument. Indeed it only makes it worse for intel.
OLPC is like apple, it's and end-to-end specification. I forget which CPU they are using, I assume it's a VIA since the whole thing is 4 watts. But even if it were an Intel CPU it's a grave danger.
1) Like apple they could choose to change processors at any time. Thus they could move away from X86 if they wished.
2) they will establish a huge software market that does not use intel specific advancements.
3) It will use graphics other then Intel graphics
In short by creating an enourmous consumer market for generic lowest common demoninator software, it removes a tremendous amount of product differentiation the INtel sells. To see this think back about 8 years ago when you had a choice of buying an intel P4 or P3 or buying whatever AMD was selling. You were not really sure if all your code optimizers would work on AMD, not sure if certain drivers would fail on AMD. It was a gamble. The answer was in most cases there was no problems at all. But we all had seen examples of problems. Intel was the safe bet. Plus when optimizations using SSE or analogs came out they were written for intel first. And lord save you if you bought Via or god forbid, transmeta.
With a giant market in non-intel optimizations out there this advantage will be nullified. Software will respect the generic CPU needs. That hurts intel's premium price advantage.