The Beeb pays notoriously bad salaries to techs. You'll find the PDA doesn't help too much trying to buy a flat in London - one of the most expensive cities on the planet.
Historically, Auntie's technical training was excellent and other employers knew it. A Beeb job looked great on your CV. People were willing to work for less than they could get from a commercial network or in telecoms. My info is a few years out of date, but I doubt things have changed too much.
... to feel like they are the pinacle of evolution. In particular, we feel superior to Americans. The current US government just makes it easier than usual.
Of course, Europeans have some 400 years of seriously poor behaviour to live down. The US still has a few million people to kill to reach European levels of achievement. In the process, perhaps Americans will shock themselves into slightly more sophisticated politics and religion.
The goal is the simplest explanation that explains the obervations. When the observations get wierd, so do the explanations. And when things get very small, they get very wierd indeed.
I see your point, but I think it's shortsighted. If IR drifts far enough from standards and content is developed only for IE then the WWW is dead, replaced by the WW-MSN. MS can then use their monopoly on content to force you to buy their software or spend vast efforts reverse-engineering a moving target. This has already happened in office software. The web standards are a precious, precious thing. Use them or lose them.
Corporations don't care about your country. They are designed not to care or be responsible for anything but share value. It's not their fault - we designed them this way. It's our government that has to look after the country. If the government fails to protect us from corporations, we should work to build a government that does.
I would guess that most people setting up Linux initially would care very much about partitioning, as they probably don't want their Windows installation trashed.
It's encouraging to see unemployeed techs finally taking advantage of all that time they spent fixing friends computers for free.
They're friends and family. We do it for free. Does your Mum charge you for sunday lunch? Does your tall uncle send you an invoice when he helps paint your ceiling? Chances are your family helped you out at school or college when you learned this stuff.
We should be proud to help people out when we can. I would not be 'encouraged' at all to see people taking advantage of their friends. Just think about this Free Software stuff we value beyond price! Not every minute of your waking day has to be billable, and it can be worth more than money.
The biggest laugh I've ever seen at a technical talk was at last year's AAAI (American Association of Artificial Intelligence) conference in Acapulco, Mexico. A young Japanese researcher described his new robot that played rock-paper-scissors with a human. At the end of the talk, someone in the audience pointed out that the robot had just a sphere for a hand - perhaps he'd missed a detail in the point in the talk, but how did the robot indicate which state he was playing? Ah, explained the presenter, the robot always plays 'rock'. Big yuks in the crowd.
It does work in Safari. You might have figured it out by now. I did a double-take myself. Read the instructions on the page linking to the presentation - use up/down arrows to flip slides.
Not to be too hard on a fella doing sterling development work on an important project, but it really isn't a great idea to break the user's expected browsing model. The slides look nice and clean, great for the presentation. But it would have been better to add some forward/backward buttons or some familiar, grokkable interface when posting these on the web.
Please, Moz developers, keep usability in mind all the time.
But you can't replace your MS Home door latch. You have to wait for the landlord to feel like doing it. You are only renting the place.
With an Free OS, you can fix the latch yourself if you want to. Lots of people won't, but you can. And you may have a choice of parts to fix it with. You have more effective ownership of the free place, yet you paid for the MS Home! This is the strange, wonderful property (ho!) of Free software.
Sokal and Bricmont choose their fight carefully. They pick some of the most highly regarded articles in the genre and point out some factual and logical errors made by the authors when appealing to 'science'. Some of these are an absolute hoot. If you have a science education, do not drink fluids while reading this stuff, or you'll snort and drown.
S&B find some people worse than others. Their most comprehensive slapping is given to Lacan, one of the most revered practitioners, famous for his apparent depth, erudition and familarity with hard science ideas. S&B point out the Lacan's bizarre misuse of such fashionable pop-science topics as quantum mechanics, chaos theory and information theory. Sometimes their exasperation is evident, and they come close to ridiculing this hero-to-many. But mostly their criticism is scholarly and dead-on.
'Intellectual Impostures' will supply you with plenty of ammunition for those debates with the cigarettes&coffee francophile humanities types. More seriously, it's a very thought-provoking book. Should be required reading for post-modern critics/philosophers, and also highly useful for scientists who like to think about a little more than which kernel branch to use.
The 1000 USD home workstation has been pretty great for the last few years, but there are plenty of people who can use more power.
The science community will always suck up FLOPs. A handy rule of thumb is that a single simulation or data reduction should take less than one working day. Any more and the develop-test-debug cycle becomes too painful. You can bet that today's grad students are running 10-hour processes just as I was 10 years ago, but they can do things in that time that would have required access to Big Iron (and the attendant big budgets) back in the 90s.
Companies like WETA Digital (warning: FLASH heavy) and Google do some pretty neat things with that power, too.
Maybe Microsoft could do it, but unfortunately they've been creating illegal monopolies instead. ACME Giant Corporation Inc has many more ways to make money than good old-fashioned capitalism.
You're assuming that McBride and Co actually believe what they're saying. If they can see a strategy that leads through the courts to a pile of cash, even if it leaves SCO in a smoking ruin, it's fair game in the current corporate climate. The SCO board can decide whether to act ethically, i.e. stick to legal, decent, honest and truthful behavior, or just stick with the legal part.
Do you really think that those tobacco company reps on the TV really believe that cigarettes aren't all that bad? No, they choose to lie because they can just about get away with it, and it lines their pockets.
Apple machines don't come with Windows. They don't even come with IE any more. Use an alternative to Office and you are MS Free, plus you have some great Apple apps _and_ all the UNIX software you can, er, eat. I hope Apple step up and take the vouchers.
Slashdot Mirror
Naturally, Slashdot poster, otherwise well-informed, gets the bloody punctuation wrong.
The Beeb pays notoriously bad salaries to techs. You'll find the PDA doesn't help too much trying to buy a flat in London - one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Historically, Auntie's technical training was excellent and other employers knew it. A Beeb job looked great on your CV. People were willing to work for less than they could get from a commercial network or in telecoms. My info is a few years out of date, but I doubt things have changed too much.
Of course, Europeans have some 400 years of seriously poor behaviour to live down. The US still has a few million people to kill to reach European levels of achievement. In the process, perhaps Americans will shock themselves into slightly more sophisticated politics and religion.
The goal is the simplest explanation that explains the obervations. When the observations get wierd, so do the explanations. And when things get very small, they get very wierd indeed.
I see your point, but I think it's shortsighted. If IR drifts far enough from standards and content is developed only for IE then the WWW is dead, replaced by the WW-MSN. MS can then use their monopoly on content to force you to buy their software or spend vast efforts reverse-engineering a moving target. This has already happened in office software. The web standards are a precious, precious thing. Use them or lose them.
Corporations don't care about your country. They are designed not to care or be responsible for anything but share value. It's not their fault - we designed them this way. It's our government that has to look after the country. If the government fails to protect us from corporations, we should work to build a government that does.
I would guess that most people setting up Linux initially would care very much about partitioning, as they probably don't want their Windows installation trashed.
They're friends and family. We do it for free. Does your Mum charge you for sunday lunch? Does your tall uncle send you an invoice when he helps paint your ceiling? Chances are your family helped you out at school or college when you learned this stuff.
We should be proud to help people out when we can. I would not be 'encouraged' at all to see people taking advantage of their friends. Just think about this Free Software stuff we value beyond price! Not every minute of your waking day has to be billable, and it can be worth more than money.
I wish your comment was on a Wiki, because then I could edit it to remove all those apostrophes.
The biggest laugh I've ever seen at a technical talk was at last year's AAAI (American Association of Artificial Intelligence) conference in Acapulco, Mexico. A young Japanese researcher described his new robot that played rock-paper-scissors with a human. At the end of the talk, someone in the audience pointed out that the robot had just a sphere for a hand - perhaps he'd missed a detail in the point in the talk, but how did the robot indicate which state he was playing? Ah, explained the presenter, the robot always plays 'rock'. Big yuks in the crowd.
Not to be too hard on a fella doing sterling development work on an important project, but it really isn't a great idea to break the user's expected browsing model. The slides look nice and clean, great for the presentation. But it would have been better to add some forward/backward buttons or some familiar, grokkable interface when posting these on the web.
Please, Moz developers, keep usability in mind all the time.
But you can't replace your MS Home door latch. You have to wait for the landlord to feel like doing it. You are only renting the place.
With an Free OS, you can fix the latch yourself if you want to. Lots of people won't, but you can. And you may have a choice of parts to fix it with. You have more effective ownership of the free place, yet you paid for the MS Home! This is the strange, wonderful property (ho!) of Free software.
Yeah it won't really be a surprise when he turns out to be not from Guilford, after all.
You're talking about the guy that essentially WROTE THE GPL. Who's next on your most wanted list? Linus?
Why not save space by using 0.5 instead of 1?
Just to balance out the positive replies, I'm going to state for the record my firm opinion that the parent post is totally full of shit.
Are they breaking, like, left, or right. Gnarly.
Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science by Sokal, Bricmont is probably the most useful resource for anyone interested in this.
Sokal and Bricmont choose their fight carefully. They pick some of the most highly regarded articles in the genre and point out some factual and logical errors made by the authors when appealing to 'science'. Some of these are an absolute hoot. If you have a science education, do not drink fluids while reading this stuff, or you'll snort and drown.
S&B find some people worse than others. Their most comprehensive slapping is given to Lacan, one of the most revered practitioners, famous for his apparent depth, erudition and familarity with hard science ideas. S&B point out the Lacan's bizarre misuse of such fashionable pop-science topics as quantum mechanics, chaos theory and information theory. Sometimes their exasperation is evident, and they come close to ridiculing this hero-to-many. But mostly their criticism is scholarly and dead-on.
'Intellectual Impostures' will supply you with plenty of ammunition for those debates with the cigarettes&coffee francophile humanities types. More seriously, it's a very thought-provoking book. Should be required reading for post-modern critics/philosophers, and also highly useful for scientists who like to think about a little more than which kernel branch to use.
Have you spent any time with Apple products recently? Some of them are really very good! That's where this 'cool' thing is coming from.
Unlike Microsoft, an illegal monopoly, Apple has pressure on it to produce good products. So do most companies, but they suck at it.
The iPod is not an underdog product, it's a great product. It's expensive as hell, but it's so great that people will buy it anyway. That's cool.
The science community will always suck up FLOPs. A handy rule of thumb is that a single simulation or data reduction should take less than one working day. Any more and the develop-test-debug cycle becomes too painful. You can bet that today's grad students are running 10-hour processes just as I was 10 years ago, but they can do things in that time that would have required access to Big Iron (and the attendant big budgets) back in the 90s.
Companies like WETA Digital (warning: FLASH heavy) and Google do some pretty neat things with that power, too.
ehTunes?
Maybe Microsoft could do it, but unfortunately they've been creating illegal monopolies instead. ACME Giant Corporation Inc has many more ways to make money than good old-fashioned capitalism.
You're assuming that McBride and Co actually believe what they're saying. If they can see a strategy that leads through the courts to a pile of cash, even if it leaves SCO in a smoking ruin, it's fair game in the current corporate climate. The SCO board can decide whether to act ethically, i.e. stick to legal, decent, honest and truthful behavior, or just stick with the legal part. Do you really think that those tobacco company reps on the TV really believe that cigarettes aren't all that bad? No, they choose to lie because they can just about get away with it, and it lines their pockets.
Apple machines don't come with Windows. They don't even come with IE any more. Use an alternative to Office and you are MS Free, plus you have some great Apple apps _and_ all the UNIX software you can, er, eat. I hope Apple step up and take the vouchers.