KVM switch (KVM standing for "Keyboard, Video, Mouse"), a hardware device that allows a user, or multiple users, to control multiple computers from a single keyboard, video monitor and mouse
K virtual machine, an extremely compact Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that is designed for small devices and has a tiny memory footprint
Kernel virtual memory, a BSD library provides a uniform interface for accessing kernel virtual memory images, including live systems and crash dumps.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine, a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware, consisting of a loadable kernel module (kvm.ko) and a userspace component
K. V. Mahadevan (before 1940), a South Indian music composer
There may be several alternative options which can work better than just filling up prisons or asylums or whatever. Locking people up would just drain community resources.
* To commit a crime takes both motive and opportunity. So if you know someone is likely to commit a crime, especially if you know what type of crime they would commit, you can monitor them and prevent them from having the opportunity. It would be more like probation.
* If medical science could isolate exactly what part of the brain causes someone to be inclined toward criminal behavior, you could make them undergo brain surgery to have that part of the brain removed or give them drugs to disable it. (Of course that reminds me of another movie in which the drug idea didn't work: Equilibrium)
... if this can support emacs. Just think of all the layouts it would have to have -- one for each prefix key in the global keymap and variants for each supported major and minor mode! And what would it do if any of those keymaps were customized?
Just this morning I received an email from a coworker which, after detailing the problem at hand, stated "see the attached document". Guess what was in the attached Word document?
You forgot to include the amount of time needed to put those parts together, test the hardware, install the OS, test the drivers for compatibility, install any 3rd party application software, and test the applications (if applicable). Not to mention any time that may be required for troubleshooting if you happen to find a problem.
I bought the parts for a new computer two months ago (I always build my own) and I'm still finding problems as I test all of my most commonly used programs. Granted, there was a delay of about 2-3 weeks waiting for the parts (the CPUs were backordered) and another delay of a week and a half waiting for the repair of a defective p/s. But in the month+ of actual use I've had of this system, I still haven't found a suitable solution for a video driver problem (I can either risk locking up the screen, run without 3D acceleration, or downgrade the OS), certain CPU-intensive software not being optimized for AMD64 (the 32-bit version runs faster), and a strange disk corruption problem that I still haven't been able to pinpoint to either a hardware failure or kernel bug.
"The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to 'develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.'"
A agree that it is about supply and demand, but I don't agree that competition has anything to do with it.
Competition is what reduces the profit margin. But a company can only go as low as its operating costs, and the cost of human resources can be quite high.
So if you have 1 tech support person (or developer) supporting a product for just 1 user, that user essentially has to pay the entire salary of the support person.
But if 1 tech support person can support a product for 100 users, which is quite feasible if those users don't require constant hand-handling and whatever problems come up can be handled once for everyone (like software bugs), then the support tech's salary can be split 100 ways, so for example you would end up paying $500 per year instead of $50,000.
It's a lot like how pricing works for software. General purpose software that has a high demand can be sold for a lower cost because the publisher makes up for it in volume. Niche software with low demand has a higher cost in order to recover the cost of development.
Another interesting item I found on the CA government web site was a letter to Diebold essentially certifying their voting systems for use in the 2006 elections with the condition that they fix the machines' security and reliability problems in the long term. The fact that the state would allow a system with known vulnerabilities to be used in this upcoming election has me worried.
Let me see if I got this right: Walmart is using their near-monopoly status to prevent movie studios from supplying Apple with movies unless Walmart get a cut of Apple's sales. Other than that, they are doing no work that deserves compensation.
Do you think that just maybe it's possible that people who spend more time at a computer have less time to listen to music?
Do you think that just maybe it's possible that some people people are becoming bored or fed up with popular music and turning to the computer for entertainment instead?
Do you think that maybe the people who are buying more computers and the people who are buying less music are two completely unrelated groups?
I think these guys are still just grasping at straws.
It's easy to be a rubber-stamping president when both the executive and legislative branches of government are controlled by the same party. Especially when the leaders of both branches have been hand-picked by the party to carry out their objectives. Really, it's the party that holds all the power -- elected officials are just figureheads.
This isn't accurate. On modern Western societies there's an usual belief that justice and equanimity are for the most part one and the same thing. But the actual meaning of justice isn't that of treating everyone equally. Justice is to "adjust" things, to make them "fit" the whole, so that each and everyone know what they must and must not do so that harmony arises.
You make a good point, but in my post I was speaking of law, not justice. (I also had to make liberal use of Wikipedia to get my terms straight.) There are several interpretations of justice, with many of them intertwined with law. A simple view of the two is that the justice which is a harmony among people, as taught by plato, is a moral ideal; law can be seen as a formal declaration of how people should act in order to achieve this ideal. The idea of equal treatment under the law appears to have predated western civilization by a millenium or two.
Why is murder unfawful? Because it's intrinsically wrong? No. Because most members of society don't want some random group of people murdering them by whatever random reason they might have. So much, actually, that in some specific cases muder is allowed.
You seem to be confusing murder with execution. Murder is "The unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice." [American Heritage® Dictionary] So to put a fine point on it, murder is unlawful because it is defined as such.
If you were to ask whether killing a person is wrong, then the answer is yes, because "wrong" is defined as "An invasion or a violation of another's legal rights" [American Heritage® Dictionary] -- in this case, the right to life. Of course, this is the very reason why capital punishment is seldom used, and often is in debate.
Specifics aside, I don't believe you can call a law just or unjust simply based on the number of people who agree or disagree with it. The purpose of law is not to enforce the will of the majority (although it is sometimes misused to that end, even today), but to ensure the equal and impartial treatment of everyone, no matter whether they are part of a majority group or a minority group (although you could certainly argue that some laws are unfairly biased towards certain groups **cough**RIAA**cough**)
I would much rather pay $14 for an album filled with 14 songs that I love rather than $9 for an album that only has 3 songs I love, 4 songs that are okay, 2 songs I don't care for and 5 songs I hate.
Besides, the last time I went shopping for CD's (which was many years ago BTW), the store was charging $15-$21 per disc.
My complaint about these system's isn't that they're harder to use -- most of the ones I've tried work well, as long as you use the limited vocabulary that the computer is programmed to understand. I don't like them because they're less efficient than the keypad for numeric input, and because (in many cases, though not all) you aren't given any option other than to speak aloud.
What if you're in a busy office environment and you don't want to disturb your coworkers, or have people listening in to your conversation with a machine?
What if you're at home in the early morning or late at night and don't want to disturb the other members of the household (roommate, significant other, baby, whatever)?
What if you've lost your voice through injury or illness?
I'll agree that for a long list of multiple-choice options, voice-recognition systems are a vast improvement over numeric menus. But at least they should all leave the option of providing digital input to a computerized system.
Not only do they need to produce a win against a plaintiff in the U.S., but also against a foreign spammer. Otherwise all the spam houses have to do is move overseas.
I've tried a couple of versions of GNUCash in the past, and both times gave up on it.
My biggest concern is that I have several years worth of financial data stored in MS Money (version 4) that I don't want to lose. But MS Money's QIF export sometimes truncates transaction memos, and when I import the data into GNUCash a *lot* of the data (like memos and categories) gets lost or corrupted. (Data preservation is also the reason I haven't tried switching to Quicken.)
A secondary concern is that the user interface is significantly different from what I'm used to, and often non-intuitive. This is probably due to its being more of a double-entry business accounting program than a personal financial program. For example, income and expense categories are called "accounts" in GNUCash, and are treated as such -- for example, you take money out of your checking account and put it into your food account (WTF?); whereas in MS Money categories are simply an (optional) means of grouping related transactions. It's much easier for me to think of the preceding transaction as taking money out of your checking account and paying the grocer.
Another very useful feature I have in MS Money that I didn't see in GNUCash (as of a year ago) is a payment calender, to remind me when recurring bills are supposed to arrive. It saves me a lot of hassle if the mail is late or a bill gets lost.
Finally, MS Money has a lot of charts and graphs available, again geared towards personal finances, which I prefer over the limited business charts in GNUCash.
A very interesting proposition. And I think it is becoming more and more pertinent as the world becomes more interconnected and borders become less relevant. Of course there are still and will always be matters of local concern for which you would want representatives of an evident geographic area, but I think we could leave that to the Senate.
I've often thought it would make more sense for each state to choose a mix of electorate in proportion to the number of votes received for each candidate. Extending this concept to the House of Representatives makes sense too. Extending it further to apply nation-wide instead of state-wide may take a bit more thought, but I'd be willing to try it out.
At first it may just be Nintendo spam. But they may open it up to let 3rd party game publishers send spam of their own. And how long do you think it will be before someone figures ot how to upload data to the Wii from anywhere?
Yes, you can groom new talent for the future, but I don't think you can exactly replace vision. Vision is a unique perspective of an individual, and comes from that individual's particular lifetime of knowledge, experience, and dreams. In this respect, no two people are are alike, or even similar, and it would be rare to find a pair who are even close.
Once Steve Jobs is gone, the next CEO of Apple is going to have a different vision. It may be just as good as Steve's, or better, or worse, but odds are it will not be the same.
I have that first book: Enterprise / The First Adventure, by Vonda N. McIntyre. It clearly tells that Kirk first met Spock when he received command of the Enterprise after Pike was promoted to Commodore. Pike's first officer had been promoted as well which left science officer Spock to fill the position, which put Kirk at odds with him because he had requested Gary Mitchell ("Where No Man Has Gone Before") as first officer.
God, I hope they don't base the movie on that book!
Slashdot Mirror
Since kvm.qumranet.com appears to be slashdotted at the moment, would someone care to explain what KVM means in this context?
There may be several alternative options which can work better than just filling up prisons or asylums or whatever. Locking people up would just drain community resources.
* To commit a crime takes both motive and opportunity. So if you know someone is likely to commit a crime, especially if you know what type of crime they would commit, you can monitor them and prevent them from having the opportunity. It would be more like probation.
* If medical science could isolate exactly what part of the brain causes someone to be inclined toward criminal behavior, you could make them undergo brain surgery to have that part of the brain removed or give them drugs to disable it. (Of course that reminds me of another movie in which the drug idea didn't work: Equilibrium)
... if this can support emacs. Just think of all the layouts it would have to have -- one for each prefix key in the global keymap and variants for each supported major and minor mode! And what would it do if any of those keymaps were customized?
You jest, but I kept writing code throughout my times on summer break, unemployment, flipping burgers, and (ick!) doing technical support.
Getting paid for doing what you love is a nice bonus, but a true hacker does what he loves even if he has to do something else to make a living.
Is anyone surprised that problems with voting machines happen to be reported in swing states?
I predicted a revolution was coming back in 2004. George Bush can smell it coming now.
Just this morning I received an email from a coworker which, after detailing the problem at hand, stated "see the attached document". Guess what was in the attached Word document?
The entire text of the email. Verbatim.
I kid you not.
You forgot to include the amount of time needed to put those parts together, test the hardware, install the OS, test the drivers for compatibility, install any 3rd party application software, and test the applications (if applicable). Not to mention any time that may be required for troubleshooting if you happen to find a problem.
I bought the parts for a new computer two months ago (I always build my own) and I'm still finding problems as I test all of my most commonly used programs. Granted, there was a delay of about 2-3 weeks waiting for the parts (the CPUs were backordered) and another delay of a week and a half waiting for the repair of a defective p/s. But in the month+ of actual use I've had of this system, I still haven't found a suitable solution for a video driver problem (I can either risk locking up the screen, run without 3D acceleration, or downgrade the OS), certain CPU-intensive software not being optimized for AMD64 (the 32-bit version runs faster), and a strange disk corruption problem that I still haven't been able to pinpoint to either a hardware failure or kernel bug.
This isn't about science...
This is about more war.
A agree that it is about supply and demand, but I don't agree that competition has anything to do with it.
Competition is what reduces the profit margin. But a company can only go as low as its operating costs, and the cost of human resources can be quite high.
So if you have 1 tech support person (or developer) supporting a product for just 1 user, that user essentially has to pay the entire salary of the support person.
But if 1 tech support person can support a product for 100 users, which is quite feasible if those users don't require constant hand-handling and whatever problems come up can be handled once for everyone (like software bugs), then the support tech's salary can be split 100 ways, so for example you would end up paying $500 per year instead of $50,000.
It's a lot like how pricing works for software. General purpose software that has a high demand can be sold for a lower cost because the publisher makes up for it in volume. Niche software with low demand has a higher cost in order to recover the cost of development.
After reading JFK Jr.'s article, I went to the CA state voter information web page to see whether my state had any plans on implementing electronic voting systems. I was a bit surprised and dismayed to find that 51.6% of Californians voted to "upgrade" our voting systems in the 2002 primary elections. What was even more surprising though was that in this primary election, a slim majority of the votes were Republican (roughly 51% vs. 47%), whereas in the 2002 general election a far greater majority of the votes were Democrat (about 48% vs. 42%). To be fair, the incumbent usually enjoys a swing of votes in his or her favor between the primary and general elections.
Another interesting item I found on the CA government web site was a letter to Diebold essentially certifying their voting systems for use in the 2006 elections with the condition that they fix the machines' security and reliability problems in the long term. The fact that the state would allow a system with known vulnerabilities to be used in this upcoming election has me worried.
Let me see if I got this right: Walmart is using their near-monopoly status to prevent movie studios from supplying Apple with movies unless Walmart get a cut of Apple's sales. Other than that, they are doing no work that deserves compensation.
Sounds like extortion to me.
Do you think that just maybe it's possible that people who spend more time at a computer have less time to listen to music?
Do you think that just maybe it's possible that some people people are becoming bored or fed up with popular music and turning to the computer for entertainment instead?
Do you think that maybe the people who are buying more computers and the people who are buying less music are two completely unrelated groups?
I think these guys are still just grasping at straws.
It's easy to be a rubber-stamping president when both the executive and legislative branches of government are controlled by the same party. Especially when the leaders of both branches have been hand-picked by the party to carry out their objectives. Really, it's the party that holds all the power -- elected officials are just figureheads.
Sieg Heil!
(No, I'm not cynical. Really!)
You make a good point, but in my post I was speaking of law, not justice. (I also had to make liberal use of Wikipedia to get my terms straight.) There are several interpretations of justice, with many of them intertwined with law. A simple view of the two is that the justice which is a harmony among people, as taught by plato, is a moral ideal; law can be seen as a formal declaration of how people should act in order to achieve this ideal. The idea of equal treatment under the law appears to have predated western civilization by a millenium or two.
You seem to be confusing murder with execution. Murder is "The unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice." [American Heritage® Dictionary] So to put a fine point on it, murder is unlawful because it is defined as such.
If you were to ask whether killing a person is wrong, then the answer is yes, because "wrong" is defined as "An invasion or a violation of another's legal rights" [American Heritage® Dictionary] -- in this case, the right to life. Of course, this is the very reason why capital punishment is seldom used, and often is in debate.
Specifics aside, I don't believe you can call a law just or unjust simply based on the number of people who agree or disagree with it. The purpose of law is not to enforce the will of the majority (although it is sometimes misused to that end, even today), but to ensure the equal and impartial treatment of everyone, no matter whether they are part of a majority group or a minority group (although you could certainly argue that some laws are unfairly biased towards certain groups **cough**RIAA**cough**)
I would much rather pay $14 for an album filled with 14 songs that I love rather than $9 for an album that only has 3 songs I love, 4 songs that are okay, 2 songs I don't care for and 5 songs I hate.
Besides, the last time I went shopping for CD's (which was many years ago BTW), the store was charging $15-$21 per disc.
My complaint about these system's isn't that they're harder to use -- most of the ones I've tried work well, as long as you use the limited vocabulary that the computer is programmed to understand. I don't like them because they're less efficient than the keypad for numeric input, and because (in many cases, though not all) you aren't given any option other than to speak aloud.
What if you're in a busy office environment and you don't want to disturb your coworkers, or have people listening in to your conversation with a machine?
What if you're at home in the early morning or late at night and don't want to disturb the other members of the household (roommate, significant other, baby, whatever)?
What if you've lost your voice through injury or illness?
I'll agree that for a long list of multiple-choice options, voice-recognition systems are a vast improvement over numeric menus. But at least they should all leave the option of providing digital input to a computerized system.
It's been covered right here on Slashdot almost exactly a year ago: Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
Not only do they need to produce a win against a plaintiff in the U.S., but also against a foreign spammer. Otherwise all the spam houses have to do is move overseas.
I've tried a couple of versions of GNUCash in the past, and both times gave up on it.
My biggest concern is that I have several years worth of financial data stored in MS Money (version 4) that I don't want to lose. But MS Money's QIF export sometimes truncates transaction memos, and when I import the data into GNUCash a *lot* of the data (like memos and categories) gets lost or corrupted. (Data preservation is also the reason I haven't tried switching to Quicken.)
A secondary concern is that the user interface is significantly different from what I'm used to, and often non-intuitive. This is probably due to its being more of a double-entry business accounting program than a personal financial program. For example, income and expense categories are called "accounts" in GNUCash, and are treated as such -- for example, you take money out of your checking account and put it into your food account (WTF?); whereas in MS Money categories are simply an (optional) means of grouping related transactions. It's much easier for me to think of the preceding transaction as taking money out of your checking account and paying the grocer.
Another very useful feature I have in MS Money that I didn't see in GNUCash (as of a year ago) is a payment calender, to remind me when recurring bills are supposed to arrive. It saves me a lot of hassle if the mail is late or a bill gets lost.
Finally, MS Money has a lot of charts and graphs available, again geared towards personal finances, which I prefer over the limited business charts in GNUCash.
A very interesting proposition. And I think it is becoming more and more pertinent as the world becomes more interconnected and borders become less relevant. Of course there are still and will always be matters of local concern for which you would want representatives of an evident geographic area, but I think we could leave that to the Senate.
I've often thought it would make more sense for each state to choose a mix of electorate in proportion to the number of votes received for each candidate. Extending this concept to the House of Representatives makes sense too. Extending it further to apply nation-wide instead of state-wide may take a bit more thought, but I'd be willing to try it out.
... towards becoming Borg.
Wii spam.
At first it may just be Nintendo spam. But they may open it up to let 3rd party game publishers send spam of their own. And how long do you think it will be before someone figures ot how to upload data to the Wii from anywhere?
Yes, you can groom new talent for the future, but I don't think you can exactly replace vision. Vision is a unique perspective of an individual, and comes from that individual's particular lifetime of knowledge, experience, and dreams. In this respect, no two people are are alike, or even similar, and it would be rare to find a pair who are even close.
Once Steve Jobs is gone, the next CEO of Apple is going to have a different vision. It may be just as good as Steve's, or better, or worse, but odds are it will not be the same.
I have that first book: Enterprise / The First Adventure, by Vonda N. McIntyre. It clearly tells that Kirk first met Spock when he received command of the Enterprise after Pike was promoted to Commodore. Pike's first officer had been promoted as well which left science officer Spock to fill the position, which put Kirk at odds with him because he had requested Gary Mitchell ("Where No Man Has Gone Before") as first officer.
God, I hope they don't base the movie on that book!