Music and visual arts instruction were offered in most of the nation's public secondary schools (90 and 93 percent, respectively) in 1999-2000.
It would appear that the arts are largely intact. Your observation is not only irrelevant, it completely ignores my point that those programs would never have been there in the first place if education was no more than socialization for industrial labour, as you contend.
Yet they're [Walmart] the biggest employer in the U.S. Weird huh?
What's weird is that your observation completely ignores my point that education has not made the employees content to work at Walmart, as you suggested. In addition, Walmart is an example of the service economy, which is quite different from the industrial economy, which you claim that the education system was created to serve.
I suspect the biggest shock of a student's young life is when he gets his first job, but that's 'cause he doesn't qualify for many...
This statement completely contradicts your premise that the only objective of the public education system is to shape students for the work force.
The worst it does is destroy individuality and force monolithic conformity while terrorizing the students. That, and failing to provide an reasonable approximation of an education.
Are you speaking from experience here? Did the school system fail to provide you with a reasonable approximation of an education? Would you be happy working at Walmart? Were there no arts classes available at your school? Are you unqualified for most jobs that are available? Or, are you an example of "a blind pig" finding an acorn, as you put it?
Our public school system grew out of the industrial revolution's need for people to have a minimum skill set...
The U.S. school system was created when most jobs were in agriculture. That origin still survives in the tradition of the summer holidays, even in college, when students were needed for planting and harvesting.
...and be regimented from an early age to follow a bell system.
If the worst the school system did was to get employees to show up on time, it would be more of an achievement. In fact, there is a high drop out rate and the 3 month summer hiatus runs counter to the minimal vacations offered in businesses.
The schools are great at producing people with stunted reasoning skills...
The school system is also great at producing scientists and engineers that rank with the best in the world.
skills taught have eroded to the point that McDonald's now has pictures of the food on the cash register instead of text.
They're called icons and they're found on every computer screen. It has something to do with ergonomics, not education standards.
...who can be content working at Wal Mart
Last I heard, no one working at WalMart was content was the wages and many were in revolt over its management practices.
There are some political parties who just can't afford to have an informed or educated electorate (hint: they tend to cut education spending and demonize teachers...
More is now spent on public education than ever and a college education is accessible to more students than ever before.
You would expect a school system founded on industrial employment principles to have an 8 hour day, two weeks vacation, no music, phys ed, foreign languages or math beyond algegra. Students would be expelled for arriving late and get grades based on seniority rather than test scores.
I suspect the biggest shock of a student's young life is when he gets his first job and sees how little it resembles high school or college.
Maybe we can improve our initial code to make subsequent changes easier.
Fact 41 is an example of a rule that only applies to the cases for which it is true. For instance, applications that are based on legislation like tax laws or industry regulation will certainly be under revision for their lifetimes. On the other hand, utilities like backup scripts may not be revised for years.
One good programming design is to divide the project as strictly as possible into those parts where revision is inevitable and those where revision is unlikely.
Where revision is inevitable, try to write the program so that the updates can be made by non-programmers through forms.
Ideally, a program that is revised frequently shouldn't need the intervention of a programmer any more than a program that is is revised infrequently.
In the ideal situation, all programming is development and all maintenance is clerical.
Perl now has a page up on giving presentations, geared towards the shorter presentations
The best piece of advice in the Perl page is:
So it's important to put something in your slide to allow people to find out more about what you're talking about and provide a way of contacting you once you're done speaking. The biggest mistake I've made in my talks in the past is putting this information on the last slide, which of course only appears for 10 seconds and no one has time to copy down. Now I place a simple URL in the bottom corner of every slide.
A good approach is to create a Web site in concert with your presentation. The presentation itself would make a few points but its primary purpose is to direct the audience to the site to find more information.
The Web site will be a long-term repository for information that can be updated as required.
Given this approach, the Perl site's tips for making a short presentation are especially useful.
UnixWare 7.1.4, along with Red Hat, and Microsoft Windows Server, is undoubtedly one of the most stable operating systems available for the Pentium platform. It is a true version of Unix that allows you to use lower-priced hardware and get the results you would expect out of more expensive implementations.
As such, it is a great choice if you are looking for an economic solution to a migration or new installation.
There are a lot of interesting observations in the review, including:
I tried my best to find ways to bring the operating system down and run it out of resources. For all of my attempts, I was unable to do so. It ran every legacy application that I could find from my earlier work with the operating system, and no errors cropped up. I purposely misconfigured some networking parameters in an attempt to hinder traffic, but these were immediately recognized and any administrator would have to agree that this is a solid operating system.
Re:Sheriff Joe Loses AGAIN! :)
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
·
· Score: 5, Informative
His jailhouse tactics have cost the county millions in legal fees and settlements...
An article in Harper's from April, 2001, says: "So far, the total bill for jury awards and settlements is approximately $15 million."
The article notes:
Arpaio has reduced neither the crime rate nor the rate of recidivism in Phoenix. He has had no discernible effect whatsoever. He serves only to con the public into thinking that something is being done about crime. Phoenix is bucking the national trend: as crime falls nationwide, it increases here. Especially violent crime. In 1992, 136 people were murdered in the city; in 1999, 214. There were more murders, rapes, and car theft in 1999 than in the previous year. Arpaio's defenders can argue that the population is increasing, so the statistics are misleading. But this is disingenuous. Most homicides--which have increased by nearly two thirds since 1992 while the population has grown only by a quarter--are not committed by opportunistic yuppies coming here to work dot-corn jobs. The reality is indisputable: in Phoenix, your chance of getting killed is better since Arpaio took office.
However, Arpaio has a high approval rating, is regularly re-elected and his endorsement is sought by nearly all politicians.
Mission Critical Apps and large DB's: Oracle or DB2
Mid-Range apps/Mid-sized DB's: The above + SqlServer, PostgreSQL.
I've personally seen Postgres handle stock transaction databases of over 100 million rows with several selects per second. I'm sure others could point to even larger and more active examples.
I would suggest that the one big advantage of Oracle for large databases is that is can be optimized to much finer degree than Postgres. When there's a lot of revenue at issue then there's a good business case to be made in investing the time and resources in achieving this optimization.
In addition, Oracle is so loaded with features that if you need one and there's a business case, then cost is not a factor.
The only area where Postgres is superior to Oracle is in the ease of administration, where it is substantially easier. I don't know about the very largest applications, but for many typical database applications, the cost of administration is the largest single cost. For instance, Oracle installations are so complex that no one would set up an Oracle project where there is revenue on the line without a full-time DBA. In the Postgres world, it is quite common for a programmer to double as DBA.
She then made a disparaging but very amusing comment about "rocket scientists"...
A similar and possibly authentic story is told about Einstein:
Meanwhile, like any demigod, he accreted bits of legend. That he opened a book and found an uncashed $1,500 check he had left as a bookmark (maybe--he was absent-minded about everyday affairs). That he was careless about socks, collars, slippers . . .
While Einstein was known to be unfailingly polite, Newton "had a suspicious and quarrelsome temper" and was "very irritable when contradicted."
We clerks in this world must be prepared to cut the geniuses among us some slack. If we can't learn anything from them we can at least turn the inconvenience they cause us into amusing anecdotes.
According to this site, the Communists were part of the ruling coalition starting in the 1950s and members of the party were in the cabinet from 1966 to 1982, including the Minister of the Interior at one point.
It's not very surprising that many people felt the need to distance themselves from the Nazis as much as possible, even if it meant getting "closer" to the ideology of Finland's worst enemy.
If ideology was the issue, the ideology of the Stalinists was hardly an alternative. In addition, during the Cold War, Finland engaged in some fancy diplomacy to fend off Soviet subversion and the threat of a Soviet invasion. It seem unlikely that those threats from allies of the local Communists would have made people more sympathetic.
It would be silly to call the Left Alliance people "communists"
Practically Left Alliance is a follower of the Finnish People's Democratic League, which was an "umbrella party" uniting most of the extreme left. The largest member organization of People's Democratic League, with a share close to 90%, was Communist Party of Finland, which went bankrupt in 1990. Practically all the activities were transferred to the new party.
In other European democracies, the Social Democrats almost always avoided alliances with the Communists. One would have thought that pattern would have applied even more so in Finland given the Communists' connection to Finland's worst enemy. Instead, one sees the Social Democrats in Finland forming coalitions fairly frequently without being punished by voters in subsequent elections.
Maybe if one lives in Finland it makes some kind of sense, like the alliance between liberal Republicans in the U.S.A. with white supremists in the South. However, from the outside it is highly incongruous.
Totalitarianism has a real habit of working against itself...
How does one account for the popularity and prominence of the Communists in Finland after World War?
Althought recently in decline, in the last parliamentary elections, the Left Alliance, the successor to the Communist Party, got close to 10% of the vote. It had three members of the cabinets of the recent governments of Paavo Lipponen (1995-2003).
There have been ample alternatives on the left to a party so closely associated with a foreign invader. I suppose it's possible to get 10% of the voters to support any marginal party but the fact the Communists got positions in the government seems truly strange.
It seems as likely as Quisling getting a cabinet position in Norway.
The incident occurred on June 17. There's a brief reference to it here.
Generally, the military restricts supersonic speed over land to altitudes above 30,000 feet to limit the intensity of the sonic boom. It is probably a measure of the urgency of that mission that the F-16s broke the sound barrier so soon after take off.
The number 28 appears to be a common confusion between the length of time between the same phase of the moon and the length of time it takes the moon to revolve once around the earth. . According to this site:
The period of revolution is the SIDEREAL MONTH and has mean value of 27.32166 days. The SYNODICAL MONTH is the interval of time between two identical phases and has a mean value of 29.53059 days.
It appears the moon is full about every 29 and half days, but your point still stands.
The last time there was no full moon in a month was February, 1999. The event was related to there being a Blue Moon in both January and March of that year.
Black Moon can also refer to two new moons in one month. The last time it happened was May, 2003. The next time will be December, 2005.
And let us not forget the Cheshire Moon. This name refers to a new or crescent moon where the line of the crescent looks like a smile or bowl instead of the typical "C" shape.
So, when a Crescent Moon is about to set and the Sun has already set, the Moon points down to the departed Sun: West. The horns poke up and that setting Crescent Moon "grins." If the Moon sets before the Sun, the nearby Sun creates such a glare that we can't see the setting crescent. Then it "frowns, " unseen.
Nearly the same is true of a rising Crescent Moon. If the rising Crescent rises before the Sun, the Moon points east, down towards the laggard Sun and its horns likewise stick up -- it, too grins. Otherwise, if the crescent rises after the Sun, the Moon frowns unseen.
The legendary investor Warren Buffett once said, "I'm not so impressed with managers who learn from their mistakes. I'm more impressed with managers who don't make mistakes."
Considering the relative performance of Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway and IBM, Buffett's approach may be more to the point.
One problem is that most people outside the newspaper industry don't understand the problems of meeting multiple daily deadlines. Missing a deadline cascades to other deadlines and there is no way to make up for lost time.
If a page goes to plate-making late, the press starts late, the trucks that deliver the paper leave late, the readers have left for work and never read the paper, and a whole day's effort is wasted.
The newpaper industry is almost unique in this regard. Other industries, like the medical industry, require high precision and accuracy but, outside of the operating room, if the computer fails, you just reschedule the test.
Senior IT people at newspapers who did not rise through ranks often fail to appreciate the need for redundancy and fall-back options that producing a newspaper requires. There's something visceral about meeting those deadlines. You can only appreciate it by doing it day after day without fail for years. Nothing in computer science prepares you for it.
One of their projects was to build a clock that could last a thousand years.
Their current project is to build a clock that would last 10,000 years. It would tick once per year and the cuckoo would come out on the millenium.
More successful clocks are the ones in Salisbury and Wells Calthedral. They've been in more-or-less continuous operation since the 1380s and are working now.
The Wells clock looks like it was more ambitious than the Long Now project. "As well as telling the time on a 24-hour dial, it shows the motion of the Sun and Moon in the sky, the phase of the Moon and the number of days since the last new Moon."
The lesson for the Long Now folks is that if you want to build something that runs forever, build it out of cast iron and replace the parts every few hundred years.
So it is still too early to judge whether most players act rationally or not...
Other limitations on rational behavior are:
Insufficient or inaccurate knowledge of available options
Invalid assumptions
Conflicting objectives
Changing conditions
Inadequate resources
Random failures
Uncertain outcome and tolerance for risk
Imperfect feedback
Urgent pressure to act
Under these limitations, it may be impossible to decide on a rational course of action. It may be impossible for an observer to decide if observed behavior is rational or irrational. A person's behavior or motivation (rational or irrational) may be the least important factor in determining the outcome of a series of actions.
If Windows is really so bad as many people claim, why does it have so many users?
It used to be said that applications drive adoption of operating systems. Windows had more applications so it was adopted more often.
However, in the last few years I've found that corporate policy has become more important. IT departments are arguing that the cost of supporting different OSs is too high. The entire corporation should therefore standardize on one operating system and set of applications.
The cost argument may be correct from the IT department's point of view, but from the point of view of the divisions, it can be a disaster. It may cost the division substantially more to use a Windows's application when a Linux and Macintosh application is actually better. Development cost on Linux can be substantially lower than Windows, particularly when the division already has some expertise in Linux development.
Support cost is easier to quantify than opportunity cost but by concentrating on support cost, IT department may be stiffling the growth and efficiency of the divisions they support.
One result is the divisions by-pass their IT departments by outsourcing some of their IT services to Linux consultants. Or, they develop skunkworks off the books in defiance of corporate policy.
In a corporate environment, adopting a particular platform is becoming or has become primarily a political decision. The division heads who are most affected by short-sighted IT policies are generally not up for the fight.
The report does not say where these extra 400 million are coming.
The article says:
Poole said Microsoft expects the demand to come from enterprises in developed countries, all sizes of companies in developing markets and from OEMs that tailor Windows for specific markets.
Even within Microsoft's existing market there is room for the growth needed to reach a billion installations:
Education market. There's currently far less than one computer per student.
Home market. One computer per child is becoming the standard.
Home servers. Household networks should become more common
Multiple computers per person. Many more people will have both a home computer and a laptop.
Corporate servers. As the cost of hardware continues to drop and administering servers becomes easier, the number of corporate servers tends to proliferate.
These are areas for growth for alternate operating systems as well. However, despite the penetration of PCs into all areas of activity, we could still be in the early stages of the adoption of microcomputers.
In this context, it's short for et alia, "html" being a thing. et alii is for people.
Latin abbreviations are typically not pronounced. They're translated into the language of the speaker. et al. might be spoken as "and things like it" or "among others".
The original poster's use of "et. all" may come from hearing it pronounced "eht ahl"
These rules of egoless programming have been circulating on various sites:
The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
1. Understand and accept that you will make mistakes. The point is to find them early, before they make it into production.
2. You are not your code. Remember that the entire point of a review is to find problems, and problems will be found. Don't take it personally when one is uncovered.
3. No matter how much "karate" you know, someone else will always know more. Such an individual can teach you some new moves if you ask. Seek and accept input from others, especially when you think it's not needed.
4. Don't rewrite code without consultation. There's a fine line between "fixing code" and "rewriting code." Know the difference, and pursue stylistic changes within the framework of a code review, not as a lone enforcer.
5. Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience.
6. The only constant in the world is change. Be open to it and accept it with a smile.
7. The only true authority stems from knowledge, not from position.
8. Fight for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat.
9. Don't be "the guy in the room." Don't be the guy coding in the dark office emerging only to buy cola. The guy in the room is out of touch, out of sight, and out of control and has no place in an open, collaborative environment.
10. Critique code instead of people -- be kind to the coder, not to the code.
Like most platitudes, they apply in some situations and not in others and there are plenty of valid exceptions.
For instance: Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience -- but don't let them tell you how to do your job.
Or: Fight for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat -- and when you turn out to have been right, don't let anyone forget it.
I agree completely that the historical record is massively distorted. Nonetheless, it's good for analyzing general patterns...
I don't see how you can resolve the problem of the massively distorted historical record simply by saying "Nonetheless". The distortion must substantially impair the ability to see valid patterns.
Historians develop theories of history to correct for the distortion but the number of competing theories and their poor predictive power suggests that the effort to find historical patterns is inherently limited.
One thing history tells us quite clearly is that what is going on is almost never what the general public thinks is going on at the time.
I also don't see how you can argue that history can help the general public understand the present and at the same time say the public's knowledge of the present is usually wrong. What then is history helping us understand?
Darwin derived the theory of evolution by collecting and comparing living specimens. The theory then proved quite powerful in explaining the fossil record (which is quite fragmentary like historical documents). The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is derived from observing events happening in the present. In these examples, the present can be known more reliably than the past and our understanding of the present can be useful in explaining the past.
I would suggest we could reliably apply a similar methodology to observe historical forces active in the present and use the observations to explain what happened in history.
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" is a satirical quote from Oscar Wilde.
The quote appears to be from Shaw's "Maxims for Revolutionists" (line 36, "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."), which is an appendix to the play "Man and Superman".
It's doubtful that any of the aphorisms in the work reflect Shaw's own opinion outside of playful skepticism.
...so stydy of the past helps us to understand what's going on right now.
A common misconception. Of all the reasons for studying history, illuminating the present is probably the most tenuous.
For the past to be useful for undertstanding anything you first have be sure of what actually happened in the past. History is reconstructed from documents, memories, and artifacts that survive by chance and by the desire of history's winners to preserve their side of the story and obscure the side of history's losers. As a result, the historical record is incomplete and deliberately distorted.
In addition, chance plays a role in history but no one agrees on how much.
In so far as we can have any idea what happened in the past, one could argue that it is the present that illuminates the past. We get to see with some degree of certainty the outcome of all those projects, initiatives and schemes to gain national advantage and improve mankind.
Slashdot Mirror
All these "optional" programs are favorite budget cutting targets...
According to this report:
It would appear that the arts are largely intact. Your observation is not only irrelevant, it completely ignores my point that those programs would never have been there in the first place if education was no more than socialization for industrial labour, as you contend.
Yet they're [Walmart] the biggest employer in the U.S. Weird huh?
What's weird is that your observation completely ignores my point that education has not made the employees content to work at Walmart, as you suggested. In addition, Walmart is an example of the service economy, which is quite different from the industrial economy, which you claim that the education system was created to serve.
I suspect the biggest shock of a student's young life is when he gets his first job, but that's 'cause he doesn't qualify for many...
This statement completely contradicts your premise that the only objective of the public education system is to shape students for the work force.
The worst it does is destroy individuality and force monolithic conformity while terrorizing the students. That, and failing to provide an reasonable approximation of an education.
Are you speaking from experience here? Did the school system fail to provide you with a reasonable approximation of an education? Would you be happy working at Walmart? Were there no arts classes available at your school? Are you unqualified for most jobs that are available? Or, are you an example of "a blind pig" finding an acorn, as you put it?
Wrong on all counts.
Our public school system grew out of the industrial revolution's need for people to have a minimum skill set...
The U.S. school system was created when most jobs were in agriculture. That origin still survives in the tradition of the summer holidays, even in college, when students were needed for planting and harvesting.
If the worst the school system did was to get employees to show up on time, it would be more of an achievement. In fact, there is a high drop out rate and the 3 month summer hiatus runs counter to the minimal vacations offered in businesses.
The schools are great at producing people with stunted reasoning skills...
The school system is also great at producing scientists and engineers that rank with the best in the world.
skills taught have eroded to the point that McDonald's now has pictures of the food on the cash register instead of text.
They're called icons and they're found on every computer screen. It has something to do with ergonomics, not education standards.
Last I heard, no one working at WalMart was content was the wages and many were in revolt over its management practices.
There are some political parties who just can't afford to have an informed or educated electorate (hint: they tend to cut education spending and demonize teachers...
More is now spent on public education than ever and a college education is accessible to more students than ever before.
You would expect a school system founded on industrial employment principles to have an 8 hour day, two weeks vacation, no music, phys ed, foreign languages or math beyond algegra. Students would be expelled for arriving late and get grades based on seniority rather than test scores.
I suspect the biggest shock of a student's young life is when he gets his first job and sees how little it resembles high school or college.
Maybe we can improve our initial code to make subsequent changes easier.
Fact 41 is an example of a rule that only applies to the cases for which it is true. For instance, applications that are based on legislation like tax laws or industry regulation will certainly be under revision for their lifetimes. On the other hand, utilities like backup scripts may not be revised for years.
One good programming design is to divide the project as strictly as possible into those parts where revision is inevitable and those where revision is unlikely.
Where revision is inevitable, try to write the program so that the updates can be made by non-programmers through forms.
Ideally, a program that is revised frequently shouldn't need the intervention of a programmer any more than a program that is is revised infrequently.
In the ideal situation, all programming is development and all maintenance is clerical.
Perl now has a page up on giving presentations, geared towards the shorter presentations
The best piece of advice in the Perl page is:
A good approach is to create a Web site in concert with your presentation. The presentation itself would make a few points but its primary purpose is to direct the audience to the site to find more information.
The Web site will be a long-term repository for information that can be updated as required.
Given this approach, the Perl site's tips for making a short presentation are especially useful.
There are a lot of interesting observations in the review, including:
His jailhouse tactics have cost the county millions in legal fees and settlements...
An article in Harper's from April, 2001, says: "So far, the total bill for jury awards and settlements is approximately $15 million."
The article notes:
However, Arpaio has a high approval rating, is regularly re-elected and his endorsement is sought by nearly all politicians.
Mission Critical Apps and large DB's: Oracle or DB2
Mid-Range apps/Mid-sized DB's: The above + SqlServer, PostgreSQL.
I've personally seen Postgres handle stock transaction databases of over 100 million rows with several selects per second. I'm sure others could point to even larger and more active examples.
I would suggest that the one big advantage of Oracle for large databases is that is can be optimized to much finer degree than Postgres. When there's a lot of revenue at issue then there's a good business case to be made in investing the time and resources in achieving this optimization.
In addition, Oracle is so loaded with features that if you need one and there's a business case, then cost is not a factor.
The only area where Postgres is superior to Oracle is in the ease of administration, where it is substantially easier. I don't know about the very largest applications, but for many typical database applications, the cost of administration is the largest single cost. For instance, Oracle installations are so complex that no one would set up an Oracle project where there is revenue on the line without a full-time DBA. In the Postgres world, it is quite common for a programmer to double as DBA.
She then made a disparaging but very amusing comment about "rocket scientists"...
A similar and possibly authentic story is told about Einstein:
While Einstein was known to be unfailingly polite, Newton "had a suspicious and quarrelsome temper" and was "very irritable when contradicted."
We clerks in this world must be prepared to cut the geniuses among us some slack. If we can't learn anything from them we can at least turn the inconvenience they cause us into amusing anecdotes.
Err... what prominence?
According to this site, the Communists were part of the ruling coalition starting in the 1950s and members of the party were in the cabinet from 1966 to 1982, including the Minister of the Interior at one point.
It's not very surprising that many people felt the need to distance themselves from the Nazis as much as possible, even if it meant getting "closer" to the ideology of Finland's worst enemy.
If ideology was the issue, the ideology of the Stalinists was hardly an alternative. In addition, during the Cold War, Finland engaged in some fancy diplomacy to fend off Soviet subversion and the threat of a Soviet invasion. It seem unlikely that those threats from allies of the local Communists would have made people more sympathetic.
It would be silly to call the Left Alliance people "communists"
According to this site:
In other European democracies, the Social Democrats almost always avoided alliances with the Communists. One would have thought that pattern would have applied even more so in Finland given the Communists' connection to Finland's worst enemy. Instead, one sees the Social Democrats in Finland forming coalitions fairly frequently without being punished by voters in subsequent elections.
Maybe if one lives in Finland it makes some kind of sense, like the alliance between liberal Republicans in the U.S.A. with white supremists in the South. However, from the outside it is highly incongruous.
Totalitarianism has a real habit of working against itself...
How does one account for the popularity and prominence of the Communists in Finland after World War?
Althought recently in decline, in the last parliamentary elections, the Left Alliance, the successor to the Communist Party, got close to 10% of the vote. It had three members of the cabinets of the recent governments of Paavo Lipponen (1995-2003).
There have been ample alternatives on the left to a party so closely associated with a foreign invader. I suppose it's possible to get 10% of the voters to support any marginal party but the fact the Communists got positions in the government seems truly strange.
It seems as likely as Quisling getting a cabinet position in Norway.
I can't find any news article about it any more
The incident occurred on June 17. There's a brief reference to it here.
Generally, the military restricts supersonic speed over land to altitudes above 30,000 feet to limit the intensity of the sonic boom. It is probably a measure of the urgency of that mission that the F-16s broke the sound barrier so soon after take off.
The moon is full every 28 days...
The number 28 appears to be a common confusion between the length of time between the same phase of the moon and the length of time it takes the moon to revolve once around the earth. . According to this site:
It appears the moon is full about every 29 and half days, but your point still stands.
The last time there was no full moon in a month was February, 1999. The event was related to there being a Blue Moon in both January and March of that year.
Black Moon can also refer to two new moons in one month. The last time it happened was May, 2003. The next time will be December, 2005.
And let us not forget the Cheshire Moon. This name refers to a new or crescent moon where the line of the crescent looks like a smile or bowl instead of the typical "C" shape.
The explanation given here:
I just spent $10 million educating you!
The legendary investor Warren Buffett once said, "I'm not so impressed with managers who learn from their mistakes. I'm more impressed with managers who don't make mistakes."
Considering the relative performance of Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway and IBM, Buffett's approach may be more to the point.
Is there _no_ professionalism anymore?
One problem is that most people outside the newspaper industry don't understand the problems of meeting multiple daily deadlines. Missing a deadline cascades to other deadlines and there is no way to make up for lost time.
If a page goes to plate-making late, the press starts late, the trucks that deliver the paper leave late, the readers have left for work and never read the paper, and a whole day's effort is wasted.
The newpaper industry is almost unique in this regard. Other industries, like the medical industry, require high precision and accuracy but, outside of the operating room, if the computer fails, you just reschedule the test.
Senior IT people at newspapers who did not rise through ranks often fail to appreciate the need for redundancy and fall-back options that producing a newspaper requires. There's something visceral about meeting those deadlines. You can only appreciate it by doing it day after day without fail for years. Nothing in computer science prepares you for it.
One of their projects was to build a clock that could last a thousand years.
Their current project is to build a clock that would last 10,000 years. It would tick once per year and the cuckoo would come out on the millenium.
More successful clocks are the ones in Salisbury and Wells Calthedral. They've been in more-or-less continuous operation since the 1380s and are working now.
The Wells clock looks like it was more ambitious than the Long Now project. "As well as telling the time on a 24-hour dial, it shows the motion of the Sun and Moon in the sky, the phase of the Moon and the number of days since the last new Moon."
The lesson for the Long Now folks is that if you want to build something that runs forever, build it out of cast iron and replace the parts every few hundred years.
So it is still too early to judge whether most players act rationally or not...
Other limitations on rational behavior are:
Under these limitations, it may be impossible to decide on a rational course of action. It may be impossible for an observer to decide if observed behavior is rational or irrational. A person's behavior or motivation (rational or irrational) may be the least important factor in determining the outcome of a series of actions.
If Windows is really so bad as many people claim, why does it have so many users?
It used to be said that applications drive adoption of operating systems. Windows had more applications so it was adopted more often.
However, in the last few years I've found that corporate policy has become more important. IT departments are arguing that the cost of supporting different OSs is too high. The entire corporation should therefore standardize on one operating system and set of applications.
The cost argument may be correct from the IT department's point of view, but from the point of view of the divisions, it can be a disaster. It may cost the division substantially more to use a Windows's application when a Linux and Macintosh application is actually better. Development cost on Linux can be substantially lower than Windows, particularly when the division already has some expertise in Linux development.
Support cost is easier to quantify than opportunity cost but by concentrating on support cost, IT department may be stiffling the growth and efficiency of the divisions they support.
One result is the divisions by-pass their IT departments by outsourcing some of their IT services to Linux consultants. Or, they develop skunkworks off the books in defiance of corporate policy.
In a corporate environment, adopting a particular platform is becoming or has become primarily a political decision. The division heads who are most affected by short-sighted IT policies are generally not up for the fight.
The report does not say where these extra 400 million are coming.
The article says:
Even within Microsoft's existing market there is room for the growth needed to reach a billion installations:These are areas for growth for alternate operating systems as well. However, despite the penetration of PCs into all areas of activity, we could still be in the early stages of the adoption of microcomputers.
In this context, it's short for et alia, "html" being a thing. et alii is for people.
Latin abbreviations are typically not pronounced. They're translated into the language of the speaker. et al. might be spoken as "and things like it" or "among others".
The original poster's use of "et. all" may come from hearing it pronounced "eht ahl"
In any case, he probably meant "etc."
I've been using an inexpensive program that's called Labels Unlimited 2
Get it here for US$13.95.
MyLabels for US$19.95 is also popular.
This site lists 100 label-making products for Windows.
These rules of egoless programming have been circulating on various sites:
Like most platitudes, they apply in some situations and not in others and there are plenty of valid exceptions.
For instance: Treat people who know less than you with respect, deference, and patience -- but don't let them tell you how to do your job.
Or: Fight for what you believe, but gracefully accept defeat -- and when you turn out to have been right, don't let anyone forget it.
I agree completely that the historical record is massively distorted. Nonetheless, it's good for analyzing general patterns...
I don't see how you can resolve the problem of the massively distorted historical record simply by saying "Nonetheless". The distortion must substantially impair the ability to see valid patterns.
Historians develop theories of history to correct for the distortion but the number of competing theories and their poor predictive power suggests that the effort to find historical patterns is inherently limited.
One thing history tells us quite clearly is that what is going on is almost never what the general public thinks is going on at the time.
I also don't see how you can argue that history can help the general public understand the present and at the same time say the public's knowledge of the present is usually wrong. What then is history helping us understand?
Darwin derived the theory of evolution by collecting and comparing living specimens. The theory then proved quite powerful in explaining the fossil record (which is quite fragmentary like historical documents). The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is derived from observing events happening in the present. In these examples, the present can be known more reliably than the past and our understanding of the present can be useful in explaining the past.
I would suggest we could reliably apply a similar methodology to observe historical forces active in the present and use the observations to explain what happened in history.
"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" is a satirical quote from Oscar Wilde.
The quote appears to be from Shaw's "Maxims for Revolutionists" (line 36, "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."), which is an appendix to the play "Man and Superman".
It's doubtful that any of the aphorisms in the work reflect Shaw's own opinion outside of playful skepticism.
A common misconception. Of all the reasons for studying history, illuminating the present is probably the most tenuous.
For the past to be useful for undertstanding anything you first have be sure of what actually happened in the past. History is reconstructed from documents, memories, and artifacts that survive by chance and by the desire of history's winners to preserve their side of the story and obscure the side of history's losers. As a result, the historical record is incomplete and deliberately distorted.
In addition, chance plays a role in history but no one agrees on how much.
In so far as we can have any idea what happened in the past, one could argue that it is the present that illuminates the past. We get to see with some degree of certainty the outcome of all those projects, initiatives and schemes to gain national advantage and improve mankind.
The phrase sic transit gloria mundi neatly sums up most of what you can learn from the past.