If you start using 'gratis', then to complete the picture you have to also use 'liber' (as in 'liberty' and 'library'). Then all the FOSS turns into GLOSS. Which maybe wouldn't be a bad thing.
Um, getting a loud, worldwide argument going on whether it should stay known as 'FOSS' or be changed to 'GLOSS' might be worthwhile. An effective way to end arguments with preschool children, drunks, and others with impaired reasoning abilities is to get them started arguing about something else. What middle school teacher could resist the urge to get a classroom debate going about whether it should be 'free as in speech/free as in beer', or 'liber and gratis'?
"FOSS or GLOSS?" Somebody should put that on a tee shirt. It should become the question of the decade.
"Physics" is (to simplify) the scientific study of what rules the universe operates under.
Pardon, but that seems to be way to much like 1899 classical physics.
Check out the Copenhagen convention, which says (loosely) that physics is entirely about making better models. And that how those models might relate to whatever "reality" might be is really outside the scope of physics.
I suspect that Linux usage is a teeny bit higher than Net apps tracks.
I suspect that Linux usage is quite a bit higher than Net Apps tracks.
I just looked at the Net Apps site, and as someone who recently finalized a multiyear upgrade from WinXP to Ubuntu, I don't see what Net Apps has to offer to me, or to most other SOHOs that have moved to Linux. It looks like Net Apps is addressing larger businesses that are going to take years to work their way free of the commercial solutions that they have built their IT departments around. My guess is that any monitoring that Net Apps does is going to be strongly biased against Linux since they don't seem to have any products that would interest Linux adopters.
Much of the impetus for small office / home office businesses to move to Linux is to pare down IT costs, or position themselves to be able to exploit niches that large, older firms with big IT budgets can't address effectively. A SOHO working either of these strategies is not going to be interested in Net Apps' products, nor in the kinds of products that Net Apps' customers are interested in. So I doubt very much that any Net Apps surveys are going to capture the activity of these small businesses. I think that Net Apps isn't seeing Linux because it doesn't know how to turn its head to look in that direction.
A recession is not something you can refuse to participate in. You are participating in it.
Your skills are now less saleable than they were 2 years ago. Even though you keep up. There are fewer employers out there who need your skills, and more qualified competition for your kind of work... and for the job you currently have. You need to worry about whether you have to run harder just to stay in place. Forget about that plan to ask for a raise next year. Correct your insolent behavior toward the administrative assistants, because you may have to stay with this job for a lot longer than you thought, and you might well need to have an AA do you a favor at some point.
There are an increased number of poor people around you. Some of them are not nice, and many get less nice as they get more desperate. You are going to have to deal with that.
With increasing poverty comes an increase in disease. If you have kids in public schools, you need to expect them to catch more colds this winter, because their classmates will be sicker more often. Your kids are at higher risk of strep throat, scarlet fever, infectious hepatitis, head lice, etc. Deal with it. Or deal with the cost of private schooling.
You and your family will find shopping trips are less enjoyable. You have worries over whether the fruit you are putting in the shopping cart was just handled by that filthy bag lady down the aisle. Where you used to be cheered by happy, smiling faces, you now see worried frowns, depression, anxieties on the faces in the crowds. You've got to find ways to deal with your emotions when your S.O. or your kids are spoken to by some destitute spare change artist.
There is less variety in the stores, because the stores cannot afford to stock as wide a range of items. There are fewer luxury items available.
Some of these effects you can manage by moving into a gated community, buying an arsenal of personal defense weapons, planning outings and vacations so that you and your family are always well cushioned against the harsh realities of those who are directly hit by the recession... but all of that kind of crap is a response to the recession, isn't it?
Recession means that your world has gotten suckier than it used to be. Deal with it.
Prior to 1980, estimates of unemployment in the USA were developed from broadly based assessments, including reports of agencies that were running soup kitchens, developing census data, doing public health work, and so on. In the Reagan years, the procedure was tightened up: only those people who were demanding Unemployment Insurance benefits were counted as unemployed-- which was justified as being more accurate, but was actually adopted because it made for much better looking statistics. Persons who had exhausted their UI or who never filed for it (because they knew they would not qualify for one reason or another, or the amount they would receive was too little to make the hassle worthwhile) were no longer considered to be unemployed since they were not "looking for work". Among others, this included a huge number of Vietnam vets who were homeless and jobless because their untreated PTSD left them fit for little more than collecting bottles for the refunds.
Currently, Federal USA unemployment estimates drop when people find work, but they also drop when people have been unable to find work before their UI expires, or who have to move to a different state and find the problems of re-applying for UI benefits to be insurmountable, and so on. Another instance: suppose you voluntarily leave a job where you had only earned four day's pay in the last month because they kept calling you to stay home without pay... you left voluntarily, so you don't qualify for UI. Suppose management decides to downsize your department by making conditions so unbearable (sexist, racist, religious persecution, what have you) that half the staff quits. These are voluntary exits, so nobody qualifies for UI (and the employer isn't dinged about it). Yeah, such persecution is illegal... but considering the length and cost of successfully pressing a case, the employer can be pretty damn certain that he can get away with all but the most egregious malbehavior.
There is currently no way to estimate the size of the unemployment problem in the USA. It is larger than the figures the government releases, but we don't know how much larger. Just like we don't have any idea how many people are homeless... nobody is counting such things any more. We might be sitting on a powder keg of civil unrest like the conditions in the black ghettos in the mid 1960s-- we just don't know.
The real culprit was the unregulated market in credit swaps and derivatives.
No, that was secondary. those derivatives are pyramided on the housing bubble, which was cause by the fed holding interest rates below the rate of inflation for over a decade.
Ah, yes. Let's just ignore the fact that those derivatives set us up the bomb by creating the basis for all the wild speculation in the housing market that inflated the bubble. Throughout much of the USA, housing prices were driven up by incredible short term speculation: even small time speculators who twenty years ago would not have been able to qualify for one mortgage were buying several houses over a 5 to 8 year period with near zero cost loans, to "flip" them for big profits after just holding them for a few months. Larger "investment firms" were doing the same kind of speculation on a larger scale: whole subdivisions were developed or bought entirely on speculation based on loan conditions that came into existence because of these new financial instruments.
More than any other single thing, it was teh derivatives and the way they removed risk assessment from the mortgage approval process that caused the housing bubble.
Basically, the derivatives were developed according to a traditional model of the housing market and would have worked okay had the market stayed the same as it had always been since 1946. Except the derivatives themselves changed the market so that the traditional model they were base on no longer fit, and the derivatives were not adjusted to take into account the tremendous increase in speculative buying and building that they themselves had caused. And nobody with the power to enforce corrections on these instruments was paying any attention to the way these supposed risk-reduction tools had undermined themselves.
One of the things that is clearly needed in the USA is a change in the oversight of the economy. Pure capitalism cannot work at this point in history, because the economy is changing as fast as all the other changes that are being brought about by the information revolution. The "invisible hand" of the marketplace can only react to yesterday's activities: it cannot foresee the havoc that today's changes might wreak upon the market tomorrow. We currently need a managed economy with good forward-looking oversight.
Maybe in ten or twenty years we can again look at adopting a more pure form of capitalism, but for the next few years we need to be managing today's economy according to our best projections of what tomorrow's economic conditions will be like if we do this or do that. The reactionary mechanisms of pure capitalism cannot work that way. Capitalism is a boat whose helmsman steers a straight line by always looking backward at the wake; we are now in reef-studded waters where we need lookouts in the crows nest to warn us away from shipwreck dangers.
There is some law built into us here in slashdot that says you can post two insightful paragraphs and have one final paragraph thats goes too far and reveals the posters ignorance about the subject. I've even seen myself do it without even thinking. Just an observation.
Nah. This was one one of those deliberate rocket surgery posts. It's a bit hard for some to follow, since it goes beyond what can be encapsulated in a car analogy. The old ICBM analogy does work, though: first paragraph = first stage; second paragraph = second stage; third paragraph = payload = "teh bomb".
Rocket surgery posts can have four effects on the reader:
There is a small dazzle of new insight. This is the intended effect, where after careful preparation within the consensual reality, the post transcends common beliefs to offer a brief glimmer of a different way of looking at things. Considering the attention span on slashdot, this is the most that can be done here. Longish presentations to justify the trajectory and flash-boom of the post are for blogs, not slashdot comments.
The reader gets an immediate headache and leaves with stretch marks on his brain. Possibly the concrete foundations of his thinking will be cracked a bit by the blast, and he may be one step closer to freeing himself of the consensual shackles that so limit the capacity of thought.
Or maybe not.
The reader declares that what he is not understanding is the product of the writer's ignorance. There is a lot of comfort in this approach. There is no growth, and the only challenge is to figure out a way to publicly declare the flash-boom to be swamp gas, and so do his own little bit to shore up consensual reality, with all its womb-like comforts.
No effect: the reader's life goes on as it was.
"Corporate greed" is a good general tag for what brought the US from the riches at the end of the Bill Clinton era to today's poverty. The anonymity of the corporation, that protects individuals from being held accountable for actions that they would not dare to do if their names could be attached, has been gloriously enhanced by recent Federal government policies. Corporate greed is throwing a multimillion dollar party behind the scenes while publicly asking for a $700 billion dollar bail out for your industry. Corporate greed is driving an entire manufacturing and support industry to the brink of bankruptcy by continuing to build SUVs with inflated profit margins that skirt around EPA laws instead of spending what is needed to ramp up to build the kinds of economy vehicles that we've known for a decade are going to be needed. Corporate greed is having your company pay for a private jet to fly you to Washington so you can beg for a $25 billion Care package. CORPORATE GREED is the new COMMUNISM, and we need a Joe McCarthy to root it out of America, for it is a cancer that will destroy the American Way.
Copyright law got royally screwed up a few years ago. Now its principle purpose is to protect corporations from loss of perpetual profits, which is damn close to the antithesis of its original purpose (protecting the actual creator of a work from being screwed by marketeers).
Until there is a US Congress with the guts and brains to rewrite copyright law in keeping with its original intent, there is a strong Thoreau-ish argument that violating this law, in those manifold instances where it provides no benefit at all to any individual, is an expression of patriotic civil disobedience.
Go make your e-copy for yourself, or acquire one through whatever means you can find, knowing that you are not harming any individual. If you share that e-copy with friends or anonymous acquaintances, you are going a step further in limiting, to some small degree, the culture of corporate greed that has been allowed to wreck the USA economy in eight short years.
I've noticed that most of the navigation lights on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers around Portland are now running from solar panels. And of course the use of solar power in landscaping and walkway lighting is now commonplace.
Subvocalization technology can be developed that would use throat mikes to pick up on silent whispers.
Even so, I agree that data entry will mostly be through the fingers. In general, keyboards will be the fastest and most accurate way of moving information from brain to silicon for quite a while. Pathologists and other special cases are developing good speech recognition for use in narrow, highly specialised situations, but this is not going to get into the mainstream any time soon.
However, subvocalized computer control is easy, since the vocabulary is so limited. An "oral mouse" could be done with perhaps a dozen words, and the words could be chosen so that each was distinct. "Up", "down", "right" and "left" are very distinctive. Done in unvoiced whispers, this will not disturb the office and will provide at least as much privacy as current practices.
This limited approach would boost a lot of people's productivity: to be able to control a mouse pointer without taking one's hands off the keyboard would be great thing indeed. It appears that this is within reach of today's technology. I really don't see why no one has come out with a hands-off mouse as yet.
4. Robot Shop Assistants: Marketing gimmick, might appear in a few sushi restaurants, but when people go shopping in brick and mortar stores, they want to deal with people not machines, otherwise they'd just do their shopping online.
An android shopping assistant doesn't make much sense to me. But...
Smart shopping carts that use Bluetooth to interface with your PDA or choke collar computer. You can download your shopping list to them, and they can display a map of the aisles with an optimal route from item to item. They can also display comparative shopping information on all the brands of widgets, and of course all the in-store special sales. Also, a running total of the cost of your purchases, adjusted for the coupons you've sent through its scanner, the 5% discount you get for being recognized as a "Loyal Customer", and the 3% additional discount you get for having shopped at this store two other times in the last seven days, etc, etc.
Stop at one of the sampler stations and try the taste of the highlighted cheese of the day... and the cart receives the signal that you have done so and that you now qualify for the Special of the Day price on the Imported Brie. Notice that the pork loin roasts are at a good price and ask the cart whether it knows of any recipes that would get the meat from refrigerator to table in under an hour... and what spices and whatnot are recommended?
All done with the grocery list? Ask the cart if anyone on your social network "friends" list is currently in the mall. The cart says that SuzyQ is... have the cart text message her cart: Wanna meet at the espresso bar?
When done with the shopping, roll the cart directly to the door, bypassing the check-out counters, and swipe your credit card through the cart's reader to pay your bill.
There are no unsolved technical problems here. This will happen as soon as it becomes cost effective for stores to implement this kind of thing. Which is very likely to start happening in the next five years.
3. Voice input: My first exposure to this was a demo from IBM in the mid 1990's. PCs have increased in power a lot since then and the quality of voice recognition has hardly changed, so I think it's going to take a major new discovery to make significant advances in the next five years.
I agree, wrt things like composing email, or data entry to a spreadsheet. But...
A choke collar lying flat against the throat, with appropriate sensors on the underside, a middle layer of computer chips, and an outer layer of bling (possibly doubling as radiators for the heat sink) picks up the user's subvocalized commands. The command set is a very distinct spatial jargon for controlling a mouse pointer: "Computer: main menu second column, click... third item, click... bottom item, click... over right twenty-five percent down 40 percent, rightclick... item one." The commands are subvocalized; the computer ignores anything that is actually spoken, so the user appears to be silently talking to himself. A roomful of busy office workers would be very quiet.
This is done while looking at an unrolled scroll of digital display paper which is the visual part of the interface. When not in use the display is stored in a small brassy tubular scabbard attached to a red shoulder sash, that in turn is held in place by one of the epaulettes (the other epaulette holds the gloves with the embedded stress sensor nets that are used to manipulate the virtual keyboard).
Audio is through earbuds that attach to the choke collar computer. Power is from the solar hat.
Picture a thousand people waiting on the platform for the commuter train, all quiet, some bopping to earbud music; others holding their scrolls like they were issuing Some Important Proclamation, reading the news or watching a video, a few with lips moving silently while they concentrated on some internet surfing activity.
Five years is enough time to get from where we are to that place. Except maybe for the digitizing gloves. We'll probably all be using fold up keyboards, since the gloves probably won't be ready for ten years.
1. Solar power: Noone wants to carry around their mobile devices out in the open oriented to catch the most Sun. Solar panels on houses and cars I can understand, but they will never be anything more than a marketing gimmick on mobile devices.
Nah. Hats with really big brims, often worn at an angle when sitting outside, come back into fashion. The thin power cords are sewn into the chin straps. Some models contain a microphone in the bolo slider of the chin strap, for those few who prefer an audible pickup to the necklace subvocalizers. Styles tend to sort out by latitude, with narrow brimmed hats like baseball caps with oversized bills being favored in equatorial desert climes, while broad sombreros are more common closer to the poles, and in regions that are frequently cloudy.
Faux turtleneck collars, feather boas, ascot ties, elizabethan collars, and similar neckwear become common fashion accessories that also serve wiring harness or cable control functions.
Unless, of course, the thing that you are calling a computer is really just a toy for playing games. Then you are definitely better off staying with Microsoft products. Where even the spreadsheet and word processor are just loaded to the gills with bright, shiny, useless baubles that can Dazzle and Amaze.
What I think will be more interesting is the potty mouth remarks. I doubt the monkey dancer can get through more than 30 minutes of deposition without letting his sh*t and f*ck vocabulary get loose. And of course he may be required to quote himself verbatim.
Could be interesting. As much fun maybe as the Nixon [expletive deleted] tapes.
While the meteor was visible over a wide enough area that triangulation of its location at any single instant would be possible, unfortunately it was moving kind of fast, so the timing of the separate observations becomes critical. Unfortunately, the observers neither synchronized their watches beforehand, nor in most cases recorded the exact time of their observations.
AIR, there was an ammonia tank cast off by the ISS recently that was expected to mostly burn up on reentry, but some pieces were probably going to make it to ground. Could this have been it?
Well, it being Sunday morning, I'm indulging myself in a longish slashdot comment, which is a small part of my long term effort to reshape everyone else into my image.
Diet becomes more important with age, if you want to keep sharp. Consider adding the following to your breakfast (assuming you've got normal renal and liver functions):
A "one a day" multiple vitamin pill. Just one, since some of the fat soluble vitamins could accumulate to unpleasant levels if you over do these
A "B complex plus C" vitamin pill. These are all water soluble vitamins which means that your kidneys will protect you from any excess. Choose one that provides either 500 mg or 1000 mg vitamin C, and the B vitamin amounts will be appropriate.
An additional 1000 mcg vitamin B-12 supplement. This will be a sublinqual lozenge: don't swallow it; put it under your tongue or in your cheek until dissolved. If you are lacking in B-12, you will notice an improvement in the way the world looks within hours. B-12 is destroyed if swallowed, so any B-12 in the other vitamin pills has little value.
Possibly an additional PABA pill. Para amino benzoic acid is one of the B-complex vitamins. It is very common in foods and you are probably getting an adequate amount if you are under age 35. But there are questions whether older people are able to absorb it as effectively, and there is some anecdotal evidence that PABA supplements reverse thinning hair in the elderly-- which suggests that they might reverse other cell death effects in other parts of the body, too.
You could also do a lot of other dietary modifications, but the above assemblage of vitamin supplements will help assure that you get the most out of what you eat, whether you are a diet-fad-of-the-week follower, or a strict Pop Tarts consumer. Take the vitamins with a meal so that all the other substrates for cell repair are going to be present at the same time. Do this early in the day so you can take advantage of the immediate benefits.
Exercise becomes more important with age, especially wrt immediate mental functions. Before settling into work, pace or do a brisk walk for 15 minutes (about half a mile). This literally gets the blood to flow more vigorously, assuring better oxygenation of brain tissue (among a lot of other things that will also improve neural performance). This is especially valuable within an hour of taking the morning vitamins.
If you have control of the thermostat, consider setting the room temperature to 68F, which will be very comfortable after warming up with the pacing. Then take fifteen minute breaks pacing breaks from work when you start to feel a little chilly, to get you warmed again. That will probably be half of your midmorning coffee break, the last quarter of your lunch hour, and half of your mid afternoon break. So you will be pacing or walking about 2 miles a day, interleaved with your work, and you can tell anyone that asks that you are doing this for your health.
If you want to get fit as well as stay mentally sharp, carry weights while pacing or walking. Start by increasing to 110% of your weight: if you weigh 125 lb, carry 2 lb weights in each hand and 8 or 9 lbs of books in a back pack. At my weight of 205 lb, I started with 3.3 lb weights in each hand and 15 lb of cast iron pans (wrapped in towels so they wouldn't clank) in the back pack. If you want, increase your effort by gradually adding more weight, but do so in small increments, no more than about 2% of your base weight a week. I'm currently doing about 120% of my base weight and I'm happy at that level.
Start using a brain prosthesis. Use a PDA that you can carry at all times to remember all the stuff you need to know on a moment's notice, but might not need to refer to for months at a time. My Palm has a memo from back in the day about how to get into the BIOS of various computers. Its also got a memo for all those geometric equations and conversion factors that I might need once every co
In the original post, the use of "synergistically" is perfectly cromulent. The word has been a part of the pharmaceutical jargon for more than 50 years and is being used correctly in context.
Two drugs exhibit synergism when the effects of giving them together are greater than one would expect from the effects of giving each one separately. Aspirin and codeine are synergistic: when given together in moderate doses, the combined analgesic effect is greater than either given alone. This combination is often used in the early phase of mending a broken bone.
Contrast "synergism" with "potentiation": aspirin and caffeine are not considered synergistic since caffeine has no analgesic qualities by itself. However caffeine does potentiate the analgesia provided by aspirin. Two aspirin taken with a cup of coffee are more effective against headaches or sore muscles than just the aspirin alone. And cheaper than the many OTC pain relievers that are basically just aspirin and caffeine.
technology doesn't fundamentally change communication (whether it be words, pictures, video, or audio). It may change the style and method of delivery (the 'channel' and 'code') but the content of what is being communicated does not change.
Yeah, right.
Just like the development of aluminum technology wasn't a fundamental change in transportation, since the purpose of a Boeing 747 and an iron horse steam locomotive are basically the same. It all comes down to just moving people and things over long distances, eh?
Wake up! Communications has changed in a fundamental way. The Internet has now grown into actually being a World Wide Web, and that is very different from just being a supersized telephone exchange. It now has these very real characteristics:
The concept of "channels" is no longer applicable. This is a web with innumerable ways for information to propagate in every direction.
There are no natural choke points: it is now much more difficult and expensive to control information.
It is populated by both an incredible number of individuals, and by innumerable self-organizing groups with fuzzy memberships and fuzzy, but sometimes very powerful, influence.
I could go on, but why bother? Anyone with a mind open to rational thought about this can add a dozen more points easily enough. Those whose minds are still closed won't be persuaded by an exhaustive listing of points.
Science opposes neither faith nor myth; the scientist is not concerned with the beliefs of his neighbors or even his colleagues so long as those beliefs remain within the confines of the believer's skull. The scientist does oppose attempts by anyone to impose their particular beliefs on the group as a whole. Science is in opposition to most if not all the tools of evangelism, as well as attempts to silence dissidents, as well as attempts to surreptitiously bend group behavior into conformance with any specific pattern of beliefs. This can be condensed:
Science opposes intolerance.
Science is a faith unto self: it is posited upon the belief that the mechanisms of the universe, the way things work, can be comprehended by the human mind through rational thought. Science has an orthodoxy of two layers. The outer globe of it consists of beliefs in theories that can be extended from "known" regions into neighboring, unknown regions using rational processes. And at the core of scientific orthodoxy there is the belief that the theories can be developed, modified, and improved upon using rational methods of empiricism ("scientific method") and that this ongoing activity will lead to an improved understanding of the universe. However the orthodoxy of science is not a highly visible feature of this belief system, because it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to bring this creed to public attention without violating the toleration of alternative belief systems. Science has had Isaac Asimov and to some extent Carl Sagan write sensibly about scientific orthodoxy, but those essays are as loud and clear as such things are ever going to get: the voice of reason is a quiet voice. Not like the fire and brimstone bellowings from the pulpit that are common behaviors in certain other belief systems.
OTOH, science as a faith has the strongest and most public system of orthopraxy of any faith I am aware of. Orthopraxy is a term borrowed from the neopagan trads that means there is a common, well defined system of practice for the group (that may well be done jointly by individuals who hold very different creeds, subscribe to very different orthodoxies). The core of science's orthopraxy is the general description of the scientific method; its outer layer is composed of the multitude of ways in which the scientific method has been refined to address the problems of different fields of inquiry. So someone who is researching the efficacy of a new drug needs to use a properly constructed double blind experimental design, or needs to be able to show why a variant of that design is appropriate in this particular case. Otherwise their findings are suspect. Same kind of thing in all other fields of scientific research: depart from established laboratory procedures and your work will be ripped to shreds. Unless you can demonstrate that your departure was based on core principles, in which case your work will be set aside for a while, until someone else has tested the appropriateness of your deviation from orthopraxy. Orthopraxy is the reason for refereed journals.
I am not opposed to science; good science is a very good basis for a satisfactory life. And for people who are unwilling to experience the terrifying pain of stretching their minds far enough to encompass more than one religion, science is a pretty good religion.
With its recognition that some things are not yet known, and its emphasis on toleration, a society of scientists tends to be a peaceful and wealth-generating society.
Well, we thought She was doing it with regexes, some of them a thousand characters or more long, but still basically pattern matching. But now it turns out that She's doing some of it with evals and self-modifying code, which opens up an entirely different beastiary. And who can guess what other clever little tricks She is using?
Slashdot Mirror
If you start using 'gratis', then to complete the picture you have to also use 'liber' (as in 'liberty' and 'library'). Then all the FOSS turns into GLOSS. Which maybe wouldn't be a bad thing.
Um, getting a loud, worldwide argument going on whether it should stay known as 'FOSS' or be changed to 'GLOSS' might be worthwhile. An effective way to end arguments with preschool children, drunks, and others with impaired reasoning abilities is to get them started arguing about something else. What middle school teacher could resist the urge to get a classroom debate going about whether it should be 'free as in speech/free as in beer', or 'liber and gratis'?
"FOSS or GLOSS?" Somebody should put that on a tee shirt. It should become the question of the decade.
Yah, but the males that are left have 2x better odds. <sings>TWOOOOO GIRLS FOR EVERY GUY</sings>
Um, yeah, if you don't mind the "chix with dix" in that mix.
Also I'm not so keen about an environmentally induced compulsory chickover.
"Physics" is (to simplify) the scientific study of what rules the universe operates under.
Pardon, but that seems to be way to much like 1899 classical physics.
Check out the Copenhagen convention, which says (loosely) that physics is entirely about making better models. And that how those models might relate to whatever "reality" might be is really outside the scope of physics.
I suspect that Linux usage is a teeny bit higher than Net apps tracks.
I suspect that Linux usage is quite a bit higher than Net Apps tracks.
I just looked at the Net Apps site, and as someone who recently finalized a multiyear upgrade from WinXP to Ubuntu, I don't see what Net Apps has to offer to me, or to most other SOHOs that have moved to Linux. It looks like Net Apps is addressing larger businesses that are going to take years to work their way free of the commercial solutions that they have built their IT departments around. My guess is that any monitoring that Net Apps does is going to be strongly biased against Linux since they don't seem to have any products that would interest Linux adopters.
Much of the impetus for small office / home office businesses to move to Linux is to pare down IT costs, or position themselves to be able to exploit niches that large, older firms with big IT budgets can't address effectively. A SOHO working either of these strategies is not going to be interested in Net Apps' products, nor in the kinds of products that Net Apps' customers are interested in. So I doubt very much that any Net Apps surveys are going to capture the activity of these small businesses. I think that Net Apps isn't seeing Linux because it doesn't know how to turn its head to look in that direction.
A recession is not something you can refuse to participate in. You are participating in it.
Your skills are now less saleable than they were 2 years ago. Even though you keep up. There are fewer employers out there who need your skills, and more qualified competition for your kind of work... and for the job you currently have. You need to worry about whether you have to run harder just to stay in place. Forget about that plan to ask for a raise next year. Correct your insolent behavior toward the administrative assistants, because you may have to stay with this job for a lot longer than you thought, and you might well need to have an AA do you a favor at some point.
There are an increased number of poor people around you. Some of them are not nice, and many get less nice as they get more desperate. You are going to have to deal with that.
With increasing poverty comes an increase in disease. If you have kids in public schools, you need to expect them to catch more colds this winter, because their classmates will be sicker more often. Your kids are at higher risk of strep throat, scarlet fever, infectious hepatitis, head lice, etc. Deal with it. Or deal with the cost of private schooling.
You and your family will find shopping trips are less enjoyable. You have worries over whether the fruit you are putting in the shopping cart was just handled by that filthy bag lady down the aisle. Where you used to be cheered by happy, smiling faces, you now see worried frowns, depression, anxieties on the faces in the crowds. You've got to find ways to deal with your emotions when your S.O. or your kids are spoken to by some destitute spare change artist.
There is less variety in the stores, because the stores cannot afford to stock as wide a range of items. There are fewer luxury items available.
Some of these effects you can manage by moving into a gated community, buying an arsenal of personal defense weapons, planning outings and vacations so that you and your family are always well cushioned against the harsh realities of those who are directly hit by the recession... but all of that kind of crap is a response to the recession, isn't it?
Recession means that your world has gotten suckier than it used to be. Deal with it.
Prior to 1980, estimates of unemployment in the USA were developed from broadly based assessments, including reports of agencies that were running soup kitchens, developing census data, doing public health work, and so on. In the Reagan years, the procedure was tightened up: only those people who were demanding Unemployment Insurance benefits were counted as unemployed-- which was justified as being more accurate, but was actually adopted because it made for much better looking statistics. Persons who had exhausted their UI or who never filed for it (because they knew they would not qualify for one reason or another, or the amount they would receive was too little to make the hassle worthwhile) were no longer considered to be unemployed since they were not "looking for work". Among others, this included a huge number of Vietnam vets who were homeless and jobless because their untreated PTSD left them fit for little more than collecting bottles for the refunds.
Currently, Federal USA unemployment estimates drop when people find work, but they also drop when people have been unable to find work before their UI expires, or who have to move to a different state and find the problems of re-applying for UI benefits to be insurmountable, and so on. Another instance: suppose you voluntarily leave a job where you had only earned four day's pay in the last month because they kept calling you to stay home without pay... you left voluntarily, so you don't qualify for UI. Suppose management decides to downsize your department by making conditions so unbearable (sexist, racist, religious persecution, what have you) that half the staff quits. These are voluntary exits, so nobody qualifies for UI (and the employer isn't dinged about it). Yeah, such persecution is illegal... but considering the length and cost of successfully pressing a case, the employer can be pretty damn certain that he can get away with all but the most egregious malbehavior.
There is currently no way to estimate the size of the unemployment problem in the USA. It is larger than the figures the government releases, but we don't know how much larger. Just like we don't have any idea how many people are homeless... nobody is counting such things any more. We might be sitting on a powder keg of civil unrest like the conditions in the black ghettos in the mid 1960s-- we just don't know.
The real culprit was the unregulated market in credit swaps and derivatives.
No, that was secondary. those derivatives are pyramided on the housing bubble, which was cause by the fed holding interest rates below the rate of inflation for over a decade.
Ah, yes. Let's just ignore the fact that those derivatives set us up the bomb by creating the basis for all the wild speculation in the housing market that inflated the bubble. Throughout much of the USA, housing prices were driven up by incredible short term speculation: even small time speculators who twenty years ago would not have been able to qualify for one mortgage were buying several houses over a 5 to 8 year period with near zero cost loans, to "flip" them for big profits after just holding them for a few months. Larger "investment firms" were doing the same kind of speculation on a larger scale: whole subdivisions were developed or bought entirely on speculation based on loan conditions that came into existence because of these new financial instruments.
More than any other single thing, it was teh derivatives and the way they removed risk assessment from the mortgage approval process that caused the housing bubble.
Basically, the derivatives were developed according to a traditional model of the housing market and would have worked okay had the market stayed the same as it had always been since 1946. Except the derivatives themselves changed the market so that the traditional model they were base on no longer fit, and the derivatives were not adjusted to take into account the tremendous increase in speculative buying and building that they themselves had caused. And nobody with the power to enforce corrections on these instruments was paying any attention to the way these supposed risk-reduction tools had undermined themselves.
One of the things that is clearly needed in the USA is a change in the oversight of the economy. Pure capitalism cannot work at this point in history, because the economy is changing as fast as all the other changes that are being brought about by the information revolution. The "invisible hand" of the marketplace can only react to yesterday's activities: it cannot foresee the havoc that today's changes might wreak upon the market tomorrow. We currently need a managed economy with good forward-looking oversight.
Maybe in ten or twenty years we can again look at adopting a more pure form of capitalism, but for the next few years we need to be managing today's economy according to our best projections of what tomorrow's economic conditions will be like if we do this or do that. The reactionary mechanisms of pure capitalism cannot work that way. Capitalism is a boat whose helmsman steers a straight line by always looking backward at the wake; we are now in reef-studded waters where we need lookouts in the crows nest to warn us away from shipwreck dangers.
There is some law built into us here in slashdot that says you can post two insightful paragraphs and have one final paragraph thats goes too far and reveals the posters ignorance about the subject. I've even seen myself do it without even thinking. Just an observation.
Nah. This was one one of those deliberate rocket surgery posts. It's a bit hard for some to follow, since it goes beyond what can be encapsulated in a car analogy. The old ICBM analogy does work, though: first paragraph = first stage; second paragraph = second stage; third paragraph = payload = "teh bomb".
Rocket surgery posts can have four effects on the reader:
Or maybe not.
"Corporate greed" is a good general tag for what brought the US from the riches at the end of the Bill Clinton era to today's poverty. The anonymity of the corporation, that protects individuals from being held accountable for actions that they would not dare to do if their names could be attached, has been gloriously enhanced by recent Federal government policies. Corporate greed is throwing a multimillion dollar party behind the scenes while publicly asking for a $700 billion dollar bail out for your industry. Corporate greed is driving an entire manufacturing and support industry to the brink of bankruptcy by continuing to build SUVs with inflated profit margins that skirt around EPA laws instead of spending what is needed to ramp up to build the kinds of economy vehicles that we've known for a decade are going to be needed. Corporate greed is having your company pay for a private jet to fly you to Washington so you can beg for a $25 billion Care package. CORPORATE GREED is the new COMMUNISM, and we need a Joe McCarthy to root it out of America, for it is a cancer that will destroy the American Way.
Ok. That last bit was a little over the top.
Boomer: I agree.
Copyright law got royally screwed up a few years ago. Now its principle purpose is to protect corporations from loss of perpetual profits, which is damn close to the antithesis of its original purpose (protecting the actual creator of a work from being screwed by marketeers).
Until there is a US Congress with the guts and brains to rewrite copyright law in keeping with its original intent, there is a strong Thoreau-ish argument that violating this law, in those manifold instances where it provides no benefit at all to any individual, is an expression of patriotic civil disobedience.
Go make your e-copy for yourself, or acquire one through whatever means you can find, knowing that you are not harming any individual. If you share that e-copy with friends or anonymous acquaintances, you are going a step further in limiting, to some small degree, the culture of corporate greed that has been allowed to wreck the USA economy in eight short years.
Where's the year of the linux desktop?
That is so last year.
Get with the program! Your choice: Ubuntu, or Kubuntu.
The New Ten by Six From Stetson!
10 watts at 6 volts, from the hatters who made your great granddaddy's ten gallon hat!
I've noticed that most of the navigation lights on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers around Portland are now running from solar panels. And of course the use of solar power in landscaping and walkway lighting is now commonplace.
Subvocalization technology can be developed that would use throat mikes to pick up on silent whispers.
Even so, I agree that data entry will mostly be through the fingers. In general, keyboards will be the fastest and most accurate way of moving information from brain to silicon for quite a while. Pathologists and other special cases are developing good speech recognition for use in narrow, highly specialised situations, but this is not going to get into the mainstream any time soon.
However, subvocalized computer control is easy, since the vocabulary is so limited. An "oral mouse" could be done with perhaps a dozen words, and the words could be chosen so that each was distinct. "Up", "down", "right" and "left" are very distinctive. Done in unvoiced whispers, this will not disturb the office and will provide at least as much privacy as current practices.
This limited approach would boost a lot of people's productivity: to be able to control a mouse pointer without taking one's hands off the keyboard would be great thing indeed. It appears that this is within reach of today's technology. I really don't see why no one has come out with a hands-off mouse as yet.
4. Robot Shop Assistants: Marketing gimmick, might appear in a few sushi restaurants, but when people go shopping in brick and mortar stores, they want to deal with people not machines, otherwise they'd just do their shopping online.
An android shopping assistant doesn't make much sense to me. But...
Smart shopping carts that use Bluetooth to interface with your PDA or choke collar computer. You can download your shopping list to them, and they can display a map of the aisles with an optimal route from item to item. They can also display comparative shopping information on all the brands of widgets, and of course all the in-store special sales. Also, a running total of the cost of your purchases, adjusted for the coupons you've sent through its scanner, the 5% discount you get for being recognized as a "Loyal Customer", and the 3% additional discount you get for having shopped at this store two other times in the last seven days, etc, etc.
Stop at one of the sampler stations and try the taste of the highlighted cheese of the day... and the cart receives the signal that you have done so and that you now qualify for the Special of the Day price on the Imported Brie. Notice that the pork loin roasts are at a good price and ask the cart whether it knows of any recipes that would get the meat from refrigerator to table in under an hour... and what spices and whatnot are recommended?
All done with the grocery list? Ask the cart if anyone on your social network "friends" list is currently in the mall. The cart says that SuzyQ is... have the cart text message her cart: Wanna meet at the espresso bar?
When done with the shopping, roll the cart directly to the door, bypassing the check-out counters, and swipe your credit card through the cart's reader to pay your bill.
There are no unsolved technical problems here. This will happen as soon as it becomes cost effective for stores to implement this kind of thing. Which is very likely to start happening in the next five years.
3. Voice input: My first exposure to this was a demo from IBM in the mid 1990's. PCs have increased in power a lot since then and the quality of voice recognition has hardly changed, so I think it's going to take a major new discovery to make significant advances in the next five years.
I agree, wrt things like composing email, or data entry to a spreadsheet. But...
A choke collar lying flat against the throat, with appropriate sensors on the underside, a middle layer of computer chips, and an outer layer of bling (possibly doubling as radiators for the heat sink) picks up the user's subvocalized commands. The command set is a very distinct spatial jargon for controlling a mouse pointer: "Computer: main menu second column, click... third item, click... bottom item, click... over right twenty-five percent down 40 percent, rightclick... item one." The commands are subvocalized; the computer ignores anything that is actually spoken, so the user appears to be silently talking to himself. A roomful of busy office workers would be very quiet.
This is done while looking at an unrolled scroll of digital display paper which is the visual part of the interface. When not in use the display is stored in a small brassy tubular scabbard attached to a red shoulder sash, that in turn is held in place by one of the epaulettes (the other epaulette holds the gloves with the embedded stress sensor nets that are used to manipulate the virtual keyboard).
Audio is through earbuds that attach to the choke collar computer. Power is from the solar hat.
Picture a thousand people waiting on the platform for the commuter train, all quiet, some bopping to earbud music; others holding their scrolls like they were issuing Some Important Proclamation, reading the news or watching a video, a few with lips moving silently while they concentrated on some internet surfing activity.
Five years is enough time to get from where we are to that place. Except maybe for the digitizing gloves. We'll probably all be using fold up keyboards, since the gloves probably won't be ready for ten years.
1. Solar power: Noone wants to carry around their mobile devices out in the open oriented to catch the most Sun. Solar panels on houses and cars I can understand, but they will never be anything more than a marketing gimmick on mobile devices.
Nah. Hats with really big brims, often worn at an angle when sitting outside, come back into fashion. The thin power cords are sewn into the chin straps. Some models contain a microphone in the bolo slider of the chin strap, for those few who prefer an audible pickup to the necklace subvocalizers. Styles tend to sort out by latitude, with narrow brimmed hats like baseball caps with oversized bills being favored in equatorial desert climes, while broad sombreros are more common closer to the poles, and in regions that are frequently cloudy.
Faux turtleneck collars, feather boas, ascot ties, elizabethan collars, and similar neckwear become common fashion accessories that also serve wiring harness or cable control functions.
It's simpler to just install Ubuntu.
Unless, of course, the thing that you are calling a computer is really just a toy for playing games. Then you are definitely better off staying with Microsoft products. Where even the spreadsheet and word processor are just loaded to the gills with bright, shiny, useless baubles that can Dazzle and Amaze.
Yeah, give the chair-throwing a rest.
What I think will be more interesting is the potty mouth remarks. I doubt the monkey dancer can get through more than 30 minutes of deposition without letting his sh*t and f*ck vocabulary get loose. And of course he may be required to quote himself verbatim.
Could be interesting. As much fun maybe as the Nixon [expletive deleted] tapes.
While the meteor was visible over a wide enough area that triangulation of its location at any single instant would be possible, unfortunately it was moving kind of fast, so the timing of the separate observations becomes critical. Unfortunately, the observers neither synchronized their watches beforehand, nor in most cases recorded the exact time of their observations.
AIR, there was an ammonia tank cast off by the ISS recently that was expected to mostly burn up on reentry, but some pieces were probably going to make it to ground. Could this have been it?
Well, it being Sunday morning, I'm indulging myself in a longish slashdot comment, which is a small part of my long term effort to reshape everyone else into my image.
Diet becomes more important with age, if you want to keep sharp. Consider adding the following to your breakfast (assuming you've got normal renal and liver functions):
You could also do a lot of other dietary modifications, but the above assemblage of vitamin supplements will help assure that you get the most out of what you eat, whether you are a diet-fad-of-the-week follower, or a strict Pop Tarts consumer. Take the vitamins with a meal so that all the other substrates for cell repair are going to be present at the same time. Do this early in the day so you can take advantage of the immediate benefits.
Exercise becomes more important with age, especially wrt immediate mental functions. Before settling into work, pace or do a brisk walk for 15 minutes (about half a mile). This literally gets the blood to flow more vigorously, assuring better oxygenation of brain tissue (among a lot of other things that will also improve neural performance). This is especially valuable within an hour of taking the morning vitamins.
If you have control of the thermostat, consider setting the room temperature to 68F, which will be very comfortable after warming up with the pacing. Then take fifteen minute breaks pacing breaks from work when you start to feel a little chilly, to get you warmed again. That will probably be half of your midmorning coffee break, the last quarter of your lunch hour, and half of your mid afternoon break. So you will be pacing or walking about 2 miles a day, interleaved with your work, and you can tell anyone that asks that you are doing this for your health.
If you want to get fit as well as stay mentally sharp, carry weights while pacing or walking. Start by increasing to 110% of your weight: if you weigh 125 lb, carry 2 lb weights in each hand and 8 or 9 lbs of books in a back pack. At my weight of 205 lb, I started with 3.3 lb weights in each hand and 15 lb of cast iron pans (wrapped in towels so they wouldn't clank) in the back pack. If you want, increase your effort by gradually adding more weight, but do so in small increments, no more than about 2% of your base weight a week. I'm currently doing about 120% of my base weight and I'm happy at that level.
Start using a brain prosthesis. Use a PDA that you can carry at all times to remember all the stuff you need to know on a moment's notice, but might not need to refer to for months at a time. My Palm has a memo from back in the day about how to get into the BIOS of various computers. Its also got a memo for all those geometric equations and conversion factors that I might need once every co
In the original post, the use of "synergistically" is perfectly cromulent. The word has been a part of the pharmaceutical jargon for more than 50 years and is being used correctly in context.
Two drugs exhibit synergism when the effects of giving them together are greater than one would expect from the effects of giving each one separately. Aspirin and codeine are synergistic: when given together in moderate doses, the combined analgesic effect is greater than either given alone. This combination is often used in the early phase of mending a broken bone.
Contrast "synergism" with "potentiation": aspirin and caffeine are not considered synergistic since caffeine has no analgesic qualities by itself. However caffeine does potentiate the analgesia provided by aspirin. Two aspirin taken with a cup of coffee are more effective against headaches or sore muscles than just the aspirin alone. And cheaper than the many OTC pain relievers that are basically just aspirin and caffeine.
technology doesn't fundamentally change communication (whether it be words, pictures, video, or audio). It may change the style and method of delivery (the 'channel' and 'code') but the content of what is being communicated does not change.
Yeah, right.
Just like the development of aluminum technology wasn't a fundamental change in transportation, since the purpose of a Boeing 747 and an iron horse steam locomotive are basically the same. It all comes down to just moving people and things over long distances, eh?
Wake up! Communications has changed in a fundamental way. The Internet has now grown into actually being a World Wide Web, and that is very different from just being a supersized telephone exchange. It now has these very real characteristics:
Science opposes neither faith nor myth; the scientist is not concerned with the beliefs of his neighbors or even his colleagues so long as those beliefs remain within the confines of the believer's skull. The scientist does oppose attempts by anyone to impose their particular beliefs on the group as a whole. Science is in opposition to most if not all the tools of evangelism, as well as attempts to silence dissidents, as well as attempts to surreptitiously bend group behavior into conformance with any specific pattern of beliefs. This can be condensed:
Science opposes intolerance.
Science is a faith unto self: it is posited upon the belief that the mechanisms of the universe, the way things work, can be comprehended by the human mind through rational thought. Science has an orthodoxy of two layers. The outer globe of it consists of beliefs in theories that can be extended from "known" regions into neighboring, unknown regions using rational processes. And at the core of scientific orthodoxy there is the belief that the theories can be developed, modified, and improved upon using rational methods of empiricism ("scientific method") and that this ongoing activity will lead to an improved understanding of the universe. However the orthodoxy of science is not a highly visible feature of this belief system, because it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to bring this creed to public attention without violating the toleration of alternative belief systems. Science has had Isaac Asimov and to some extent Carl Sagan write sensibly about scientific orthodoxy, but those essays are as loud and clear as such things are ever going to get: the voice of reason is a quiet voice. Not like the fire and brimstone bellowings from the pulpit that are common behaviors in certain other belief systems.
OTOH, science as a faith has the strongest and most public system of orthopraxy of any faith I am aware of. Orthopraxy is a term borrowed from the neopagan trads that means there is a common, well defined system of practice for the group (that may well be done jointly by individuals who hold very different creeds, subscribe to very different orthodoxies). The core of science's orthopraxy is the general description of the scientific method; its outer layer is composed of the multitude of ways in which the scientific method has been refined to address the problems of different fields of inquiry. So someone who is researching the efficacy of a new drug needs to use a properly constructed double blind experimental design, or needs to be able to show why a variant of that design is appropriate in this particular case. Otherwise their findings are suspect. Same kind of thing in all other fields of scientific research: depart from established laboratory procedures and your work will be ripped to shreds. Unless you can demonstrate that your departure was based on core principles, in which case your work will be set aside for a while, until someone else has tested the appropriateness of your deviation from orthopraxy. Orthopraxy is the reason for refereed journals.
I am not opposed to science; good science is a very good basis for a satisfactory life. And for people who are unwilling to experience the terrifying pain of stretching their minds far enough to encompass more than one religion, science is a pretty good religion.
With its recognition that some things are not yet known, and its emphasis on toleration, a society of scientists tends to be a peaceful and wealth-generating society.
</rant>
Well, we thought She was doing it with regexes, some of them a thousand characters or more long, but still basically pattern matching. But now it turns out that She's doing some of it with evals and self-modifying code, which opens up an entirely different beastiary. And who can guess what other clever little tricks She is using?
The gene is dead. NYT confirms it...
One State's absolutely necessary aircraft carrier is pork barrel politics in other States. That's all I'm saying here.