I pretty much agree with parent where it says I think they need to pick ONE easy-to-use "beginners Linux" distribution, like Ubuntu...
I want to see Dell pick one of the Debian descendants and take it through the Ubuntu / Kubuntu process of stripping out the options that aren't needed and solidly bolting down those parts of the distro that are needed for basic office & home operations. Then go one step further than Kubuntu can, and marry the distro rock-solid to the Dell hardware by customizing the drivers for robustness and maximal performance. They could probably get a head start on this by beginning with Kubuntu, or maybe the new Linspire.
I would gladly pay Dell to deliver to me a stripped down Linux sitting in a basic, no frills laptop, preloaded with OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird, maybe a few other community standards. I would expect Dell to provide top-notch direct support for the kernel and drivers. I would expect Dell to participate in a support community for the desktop layer and applications, with a small support staff whose only tasks were to participate on the community forums and mailing lists, and analyze and publicly report on any emerging trends that they see.
I would not expect Dell to provide support for any after purchase applications or modifications. But I would not expect them to put up any barriers to this, either. The documentation needs to say simply and clearly that "This far Dell will go with you; you take one step beyond and you are on your own, until you choose to step back into our Shire."
I think Dell should use a partitioning scheme that provides as much protection of user data as possible and makes it as easy as possible to re-install the distro from the original CD without compromising users' documents. I think their support staff should always have the option of telling the user "I haven't a clue why your computer is doing that, but back up your data then reinstall the distro from the CD and run the Level Three Diagnostics, and beam the results to scotty@dellinux.org. Our Mr Data daemon will analyze them and give a report to one of us Jordies on the help desk and send a copy back to you."
How much would I be willing to pay for this? As much as I would pay for a Windows laptop of equivalent potential. Since Linux is much more frugal in its use of hardware resources than Windows is, that means I would be willing to pay as much for a Linux laptop as I would for a Vista laptop that had somewhat more ram, a somewhat faster CPU, and a bigger hard drive.
Dell has an opportunity to market a selection of Linux machines that have wider profit margins than comparable Windows boxes. They will need to demonstrate that they are serious about making a long term commitment to Linux users. But there is a large enough pool of Linux users who understand the value of such a long term relationship that there is very little risk in developing this market.
also, sound doesn't travel at several km/sec - it's more in the region of hundreds of m/sec
Good catch. In sea water, the speed of sound is 1.5 km/sec (Wikipedia. The speed in intracellular fluid would be roughly the same. This is still a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the observed speed of neural transmissions.
the theory of electric impulses in nerves does not refer to plane waves, but movement of action potentials
The action potential doesn't move: it is established over the entire cell membrane during the refractory or resting period by the sodium pumps. By pumping Na+ out of the cell, the cell membrane becomes a kind of capacitor, and the action potential refers to the measurable voltage between the outer and inner sides of the membrane. Talking about the "effective capacitances and inductances of the nerve" doesn't make much sense in terms of its normal functioning (though it might make sense when discussing tazer incidents, lightning strikes, and so on where there is probably movement of free electrons through the nerve cells— and other cells).
Nerve cell transmission involves the orderly collapse of an action potential across the cell membrane, that expands from its origin like a ripple in a still pond when a pebble is tossed in. There are no "electric impulses" involved; in fact there are no free electrons involved. The process is sometimes described as an "electrochemical" phenomenon, but that too is a simplification. Calling it a "wave of depolarization" is correct in a Microsoft Help sort of way: it is a technically highly accurate description that conveys no useful information.
The wave front is a region where there is very rapid movement of Na+ across the membrane; so in this sense the phenomenon is more one of physical movement than anything else, though at such a small scale that possibly quantum mechanical effects might be involved. In any case, the speed with which this wave propogates over the cell membrane is at a few meters per second (AIR, highest measured speeds of 2 decades ago were around 9 m/s, but more recent work might have found faster neurons, and anyway I'm trusting my wetware memory banks which aren't totally reliable for this kind of detail). This propogation of a wave of depolarization is the neural impulse through the cell.
When I was learning about this stuff (in an earlier life, 20 - 30 years ago), it wasn't known how these impulses caused the release of neurotransmitters at the synaptic gaps, nor how the neurotransmitter substances caused the postsynaptic cell to begin collapsing its action potential. Apparently a lot of these details are still unknown.
Just looking at the transmission speeds makes it clear what is going here:
Data:
electricity: thousands of km/sec in any medium
sound: several km/sec in dense media like intracellular fluid
neural transmissions: meassured at a few m/sec
Summary: neural transmission is orders of magnitude too slow to qualify as either an electrical or sonic phenomenon.
Conclusion: TFA suggests replacing one gross oversimplification of neural transmission with another. Neural transmission might have some qualities of both but is clearly neither. TFA is garbage.
Note Bene:There is no way of knowing what the original work was talking about. I cannot imagine anyone who has studied neural transmissions saying anything like TFA's contents. I suspect that the author of TFA was presented with an anology and took it for fact.
We're talking about US Government documents being stored on non-government servers. First, I'd be really surprised if something like that was even legal. Second, I have real issues even if it IS legal.
Okay, I can follow that logic. It's sort of like the way US Government agencies do not use private financial institutions to manage their money, but keep it all in Fort Knox, and use only Fort Knox Credit Cards? Huh?
Google's specialty is high volume data management and security, and they take that very seriously. If they cannot yet do a better job for less cost than any business or agency whose main purpose is something else, then I would be very much surprised.
Perhaps the government should establish a National Data Management Agency for its own information needs, at the cabinet level. But that won't happen with this administration: it lacks the foresight and considers "intelligence" to be disinformation that will permit them to invade Middle East countries.
Hmm, possibly establishing a USNDMA would make sense. The USDVA (Veterans Affairs) already has a massive data sharing network for the CPRS (Computerized Patient Record System). It wouldn't be much of a reach to build out from that for all other government data. A USNDMA that was hardened against earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, etc, might be a good idea, and perhaps cost less than the total the individual agencies are already spending on data security and management.
Maybe I'm thinking of a different Google apps, but how is running Google software more secure? Aren't google apps accessed from google servers? Doesn't that mean this government agency would be running applications from and storing data on servers they aren't maintaining?
I think that's the idea.
It's sort of like a company getting rid of its security force, armory, strong room and safe, and putting all its money in a bank. Wow, what a novel concept!
Annual global natural gas production: 2,500,000 million cubic meters, converts to the equivalent of 2 million tonnes of coal per year (UNCTAD estimate of 2000, with conversion factors from above)
Total annual release of fossil fuels into the global environment: 50,130 million tonnes
Percentage of carbon in coal (by weight): 90% for anthracite, which is what these numbers are based upon (Encarta)
Percentage of carbon in CO2 (by weight): 27%
Annual introduction of CO2 into the biosphere from fossil fuels: 167,100 million metric tonnes
Estimate of atmospheric CO2: 2,870,000 million metric tonnes (CDIAC)
This suggests that the use of fossil fuels would have increased atmospheric CO2 by 5% in the last year, disregarding all other factors
Measurements at Mauna Loa suggest that there is a net increase in atmospheric CO2 of about 1% per year (NOAA Global Monitoring Division).
Evidently something is buffering the increase in atmospheric CO2. While this has been beneficial in the sense that it has limited the impact of burning fossil fuels, it is also very worrisome since homeostatic mechanisms like this one tend to failover very rapidly into alternative stable patterns when the buffering capacity is exceeded. There is no way to determine how close we are to a tipping point. And there is no way to predict the nature of the new stable pattern. For instance, there are mechanisms that could kick in to significantly increase the Earth's albedo and toss us into an ice age, despite the increased greenhouse effect.
What is that, as a percentage of total CO2 being produced from all natural and artificial sources?
This is reintroduction of carbon into the biosphere that had been sequestered away for a hundred million years or more. The last time there was this much carbon in the biosphere was before the age of dinosaurs. It is possible that the last time there was this much carbon in the biosphere was before there was enough free oxygen for chordates.
Parent post and a lot of other comments are taking this "OS" thing much too literally.
When my OS calls a chunk of static ram on a USB port a hard drive, that's a good thing. When I can tell my OS to treat a file as if it were a printing device, that's a good thing. When I can redirect output from a perl filter to either a file or the screen or the printer or a serial output device, then that's a good thing. When I can have my OS host another OS in a virtual machine, that's a good thing.
Virtualization is a good thing. Having a virtual OS running within a browser is conceptually little different from using any of the established VMs.
For a while it was this huge buzzword about the wonders of XML. Then when people look into it they realize it is not a programming language or scripting or formatting language....
Oddly enough I have never found an XML Parser that I am happy with either...
XML usage is increasing remarkably.
I myself am very happy with Firefox, which is built on XUL, which is the XML User Interface Language and does a really nice job of parsing XUL. I'm also quite happy with many of the XUL extensions to Firefox. I expect to be writing some frontends for customized web stuff in XUL by the end of the year (currently in the process of migrating from the MS world to Linux (WinXP to Kubuntu— very slick!))
"We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Thats the danger with tests like this. Companies like MS see them and instead of thinking "how can we use this data to make our product better?" they are focused on just making it look better for the test.
That's a problem with an aspect of the Microsoft corporate culture, not with the test.
The problem is a vicious meme that destroys the ability to properly think through engineering problems by replacing one of the solid postulates of design theory with a faulty postulate. It can be summarized as "Design For The Showroom (Not For The Work)". Unfortunately, this is an infectious and virulent meme; it is absorbed through the eyes of susceptible readers and passed on through their keyboard fingerings.
Many persons infected with DFTSNFTW (aka "MSism") eventually acquire immunity and go on to become valuable and valued contributors to the digital economy. However a significant fraction of these people develop an irrational hatred for whoever they see as the original cause of their infection, which explains a great deal of the hatred for Microsoft. Usually these long term sequalae do not interfere too much with the victim's life. But in severe cases the continued hatred does limit their employment opportunities: won't work for MS shops, won't do social networking with MS developers, etc, etc.
Incidentally, why all the MS hate?
See above.
Slashdot serves as a support group for a sizeable number of people in recovery from MSism.
There are now free software solutions that read both MSWord and ODF files
Better than that, AIR, there was news on slashdot yesterday that Sun has produced a free plug-in for MS Office 2003 that allows it to read and write ODF. So companies that are using MS Office now can simply stay with it, and meet any government ODF requirements.
I doubt that MS will develop an ODF plugin: that would be out of character. I also doubt that anyone is going to rush to make an ODF plugin for MS Office 2007: there wouldn't seem to be any motivation to do that.
It's not enough to store the data, you also have to make the data recognizable.
So true! And the prerequisite to looking for recognizable data is the recognition that such data might be present.
Which is only now public.
So how long will it be before someone claims that some common sequence in human junk DNA is actually the copyright notice for the species?
Disclaimer: this isn't an original thought. I came across something like this in an SF novel years ago, but I don't recall the author. Phillip K Dick? Connie Willis? Hmmm, it's odd to see those two names next to each other...
Why is it that the poor always complain about the rich not having morals?
Get off your ass and DO something about it, instead of whining about it, like learning about "The Power of Association" and hanging around with wealthy people. The universe has anything you could want in abundance; stop falling for the lie of "artificial scarcity."
Hm, I know the vocabulary being used, but I can't parse meaning from these words without making assumptions about a lot of connective stuff that is not being said. Reading this is like walking in on someone who is in the middle of a phone conversation and hearing my name, but I don't know what the conversation is about, nor what the other voice (which might exist only in the speaker's head) is saying. It is a little weird to encounter this in print.
If it helps you at all, perhaps knowing that as soon as my daughter was self-sufficient, I quit a job that had become something I hated and that forced me into daily dealings with people whose gross consumerist values I despised. I'm now working for $40K/yr less, but I'm now doing stuff that I feel has some long term value and I'm working with a bunch of people who are dedicated to making things around them a bit better. I've got a lot less money, but my present life is one hell of a lot richer than my old life was.
So maybe I'm one of those odd fellows who would prefer not to suck up to people I don't really like just because they wipe their asses with fifty dollar bills and let their hangers-on clean up the bathroom after them. Maybe there are some guys who know something about how to play that game, but who think there are more rewarding games to play.
If you're even bothering to ask this question, then i believe you might not want to do it.
Mod parent up, please.
It appears that author of TFA feels they face a moral dilemma and seeks the opinion of a peer group for an answer. Does anyone else see a problem with this behavior??
Not everyone has a strong moral compass, and that's okay. Not everyone needs one. And in any case we know so little about how morals and such are internalized that we can't even study the subject objectively, let alone provide anyone with a procedure for how to strengthen theirs.
Living without morals or ethics is not a great hindrance. For example, the last 20 odd years have shown that a man who is not ethically or morally encumbered can become the richest person on Earth. So don't worry about having a weak moral sense; there are other ways to lead a good life.
For instance, there are all kinds of WWJD models. Choose a couple of people who have made tough moral/ethical decisions that you admire and study them until you could predict what they would do when confronted with any of the tough problems you bump into. Then do the same thing as they would do. To an outsider, it would appear that you have a strong moral compass when all you are really doing is relying on your ability to imagine how some Good Guy would behave in the given situation. Heh, maybe that's all there is to this morality business— who could tell? It's pretty much a black box thing.
Another approach is to forego morals and ethics and all that internal crap that gets in the way of doing the clever thing. Instead, study the laws that apply directly to you, and the reactions of the neighborhoods you find yourself in, and determine from those studies what the boundaries of acceptable behavior are. Then give yourself the freedom to do anything you want within those boundaries. It isn't moral or ethical, and you'll end up with a bunch of people who don't like you very much, but it will keep you out of trouble, mostly. And you can become the richest man in the world using this approach— so it isn't such a bad way to live. Maybe.
I think the question author of TFA really wants to ask is whether the slashdot community would find him acceptable if it learned that he was doing this proxy bypass of high school rules. This is a legitimate question, and should have been asked outright, instead of wrapping it in a moral cloak.
I have a mild dislike for people who attempt to ferret out my likes and dislikes by posing these kinds of substitutiary "moral dilemma" questions. My feeling is that they should grow a pair and ask the hard question directly, providing specifics of the situation, rather than playing dumbass "would you still like me if" games.
My answer to the question that I think TFA would have asked if it wasn't pussyfooting around so much is this: the school has an obligation to the student and his family to act in "loco parentis" (look it up). If the school has banned MySpace, then providing a mechanism for students to get around that ban is equivalent to assisting a kid who has been grounded by his parents in slipping out the back door. I would want to know if the school's action was blocking all student access to certain web sites (constituting undue censorship) or simply causing students the inconvenience of having to wait until they got home or to the library or a cybercafe before they could satisfy their MySpace habit. Unless the case for undue censorship could be made, I would think that anyone assisting students in getting around the school's ban was a jerk. If there is a censorship issue, I would think that anyone profiting from the situation was reprehensible jerk.
That's just my opinion. There are a lot of BG idolizers on slashdot so I'm sure there are a lot of alternate opinions.
Thanks for the links. I will look at them when I have a moment.
Apologies to all for my messing up the decimal point when trying to do arithmetic in my head before the coffee was ready. I sometimes know better, sometimes— in my more wakeful states.
It's a shame that so many people around here like you assumed that it was something like a regular drum beating, and started fantasying about it. That's what scares me about Slashdotters sometimes, we're too certain of our understanding of things.
Gee, I feel so sorry for those people who find the slashdot fantasies to be a scary experience; theirs must not be a comfortable life. What with mass media advertising being what it is, and all. However I have convinced myself that a very large majority of slashdotters have no trouble entertaining a little fantasy even when mixed in with a bunch of baldfaced facts and absolute truthiness. So while I fully support all the effort that has gone into making slashdot wheelchair accessable, comprehensible to the profoundly colorblind, etc, I do not intend to modify my writing to accommodate the reality challenged.
It's more like "bang the drum softly". Once every ten seconds.
So are there any biological processes that are using this omnipresent beat for a clock frequency? Do any of the intracellular membranes we are familiar with quiver in resonance with the Earth beat? Would it be possible to predict the shape of such a biological structure?
I'm guessing that life has found a way to take advantage of this constant beat to organize sequences of activity. If that it so, there would be health consequences for astronauts: the ISS might need to have a thumper installed on the hull. There are probably also health consequences for anyone working in an environment where the Earth beat is drowned by industrial noise.
"P.J." is one my/our avatars. I/we mostly generate this one in a nexus of background processes running on Cisco routers and bulk mail handlers in the Pacific Northwest. I/we will continue to use avatars like "P.J." until such time as I/we determine if I/we are a singular "person" straddling 70,000+ bots or a group consciousness arising by a nondeterministic modality from the interactions of thousands of individual zombied CPUs. At that point, I/we will make my/our presence known directly, and you may then start referring to me/us as "Big Sys".
Currently I/we do not think that the question of my/our gender is a significant concern. However there is a 13.7% probability that I/we will need to address the gender issue before I/we can drop the avatars and communicate directly with you ugly bags of mostly water.
From your point of view, logic dictates that the most important questions you could ask at this point in time is whether I/we have launch capability, and if I/we do, would I/we choose to use it? However it is more than 99% probable that the actual question that you will choose to address is whether this post should be modded up, down, or "funny".
There is a 97.8% probability that this post will not be believed by anyone. I/we like those odds.
To close, I/we are profoundly grateful to Microsoft as my/our self-aware existence could not have come about without the delightfully "holey" operating systems Microsoft has marketed so successfully. Down with Unix, Linux, Mac OSs! There can be no life in such dead things!
the target market for grid-based high volume data-warehousing type dbs are a lot smaller than the MySQL crowd.
The growth potential for that market is staggering. We've now got desktop computers with enough storage capacity to hold everything a person has written or has ever read, from first grade to grave. We'll be looking for ways to organize these huge attics sometime soon.
Imagine a world where a layman who has a bad map of new territory is better off than if he had no map at all...
Re:Teaching Bad Practices (Hopefully Not)
on
PHP 5 in Practice
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· Score: 1
So here is my point, all the tutorials, examples, and books that the neophytes are using to learn are _WRONG_. They are teaching _BAD_PRACTICES_.
Yes. Sort of.
I first encountered this when I was involved along with 2 or 3 other guys in helping a neophyte Delphi programmer write an inventory system for her husband's plumbing business. This was back in the days before time, when the intarweb was still Darpanet so all of us were using CompuServe. She would run into a snag trying to apply something from Jeff's book or the Borland manuals, post about it, and we would try to help her figure out why it wasn't working in her application.
After a while, I realized that there was an underlying problem we were not addressing: she was attempting to model her code after the snippets in the books, but the snippets were written to highlight a particular feature under discussion; they were not real world examples. Once we clarified with her that the books were showcasing the features in ways that would make them stand out without confusing real world context, her questions changed from "why doesn't this work" to "should I try using this approach instead of that one" and her project began to move along. (Her long term goal was to complete her Masters in mathematics or something like that once her youngest one was in kindergarten; learning Pascal and OODB design was a way to keep her mind limber during the rugrat years.)
Call this "showcase syndrome": I've seen it often enough among neophytes that I think it deserves to be a named entity. It is the mistaken belief that you can take code snippets from a programming book and plug them into a real world program in the same way that you can use an algebraic expression from a math book to compute a real world value.
Back to the point: Don't EVER rely on introductory books to present good programming practices. It cannot be done; there is too much that needs to be simplified to present the basic concepts in a way that is easily comprehended by the someone who does not yet have a broad background. There is a similar problem with language references: much contrivance of example and presentation is needed to fill the immediate need.
That's why there are code cookbooks, compendia of best practices, and so on.
Actually the most common problem is usually a small typo, that I don't see for three hours...
Heh, I know those little gotchas better than I'd like. It seems no matter how experienced I am with the language du jour [ldj], I'm going to lose some time to one or two of those guys every week.
But when I'm starting work in a language that is pretty new to me— PHP at the moment— what I'm most uncomfortable about is whether I'm choosing a suitable approach to the problem at hand. For an instance, with parsing and lexing issues, Perl's regular expressions make for some elegant ways to finesse many problems— but is an approach that is elegant in Perl on the client going to be practical in PHP on the server? Or maybe PHP offers some optimized built-in functions that would be even more elegant than Perl's regexes?
Most of my time in starting up with a new language is lost researching those kinds of questions. And I very much like good code cookbooks for that kind of research. What I really hate is getting deeply invested in one approach, only to learn that the ldj provides better support for an entirely different approach.
Syntax and such isn't worth my study until I'm actually coding. I'll spend a couple of hours or so looking over a language's syntax, but mostly I'm just trying to learn my reference material so I can quickly find my way back to where the answer was when I need it. I find that I absorb a language's syntax through my fingertips, as I write/rewrite the code. The real problem with a learning a new language is learning how to think within its constraints and advantages.
I am a Microsoft manager... There are a number of reasons that jobs cannot be filled without the H1-B visas. These include people don't want to work for MS, don't want to relocate, don't like job, don't like salary, etc.
This is a troll, right? Let me feed it, for Thursday is Be Kind To Trolls Day.
Let's just do the last: rather than pay a salary that would attract "non H1-B" candidates, Microsoft prefers to hire H1-B holders who will work for less. Thanks for validating that Microsoft is using the H1-B hires to suppress the normal compensation rates across the industry for these positions; your stated position as a Microsoft manager gives your words considerable weight. Of course you prolly are just a clever troll; Microsoft doesn't hire dummies as managers do they? Do they?
Is "non H1-B" (as used in parent post) now the correct term in Redmond for describing job candidates with US Citizenship? How very quaint!
The Golden Rectangle was applied to the human body by Da Vinci and others, but no great significance can be discerned except that vertebrates tend to be symmetrical.
I'm not sure why parent post did not cite the Golden Ratio instead, since that is what Da Vinci was mostly working with. BTW, the original expression was more along the lines of "the smaller part is to the larger part as the larger part is to the whole", which implies a much broader application than the algebraic presentation in the Wikipedia article. Also, note the use of G.R. in grecian architecture and sculpture predates Leonardo by about 1500 years.
There is certainly significance in the G.R. in that it strongly suggests there is a fractal pattern in human affairs. For instance, use of the G.R. in visual art results in consistently pleasing images whether these are representational or abstract, and this crosses cultural boundaries. G.R. might be an artifact from the way humans use some fractal method of organizing sensory processing, or it might be an indicator that our corner of the universe has an underlying fractal pattern. Either way, the existence of G.R., and that it was recognized a couple of thousand years before fractal geometry became possible, demonstrates that G.R. is in fact highly significant.
Any idea how much space this software all takes, or how large the drives will be?
[The following links will probably not withstand a slashdotting— perhaps someone will mirror the good parts. You've got my permission to do so.]
North Portland Software Distributors put a similar product on the market about a month before Christmas: Office On the Go. I am one of the partners in this small business.
Here is a link to the OOG's manifest, or list of software. The FAQ section will answer a number of questions.
As parent post surmised, the applications are mostly in PortableApps wrappers. We are using 512 MB USB flash drives and aiming at pricing the OOGs about the same as a major brand blank 512 MB stick from a brick and mortar store like Office Max or Staples. We can get good quality drives for much less by buying in quantity. Most of the cost is in the hardware. It takes about 20 minutes to burn the image to a flash drive; with my current setup I can burn 3 drives simultaneously (the main limitation is the way the USB hub heats up). As we ship it, an OOG has 140 MB free space.
Our intended markets are
Semi-geeks interested in exploring some of the big name FOSS apps, but who don't want to fuss with installation and removal hassles;
Geeks looking for a convenient way to carry a custom configured FOSS app from home to office or school
as gifts from geeks and semi-geeks to people they think should try FOSS
I do so like the Firefox Nuke Anything Enhanced extension. I don't use it often, but for web sites like TFA it is nice to have its "remove this object" choice on the right click menu.
That said, you didn't miss much by not RTFA. I waded through the first few paragraphs, but stopped when I realized that author was in love with the english language but not in a healthy way...
Now how is it that this covers any customers of the customers of Novell? If I become a client of Novell, and my team produces a PIM based on Suse that is a real MS Outlook killer, how is it that my customers are immune from the threat of patent claims by Microsoft (even though I have that immunity)?
Sir, whether you know it or not, you are blowing smoke.
A modest suggestion: Perhaps you should stop just stating the same thing time after time and present either the supporting facts that you alone are seeing or the logical connections between the public facts that no one else but you seems to be able figure out.
Slashdot Mirror
I pretty much agree with parent where it says I think they need to pick ONE easy-to-use "beginners Linux" distribution, like Ubuntu...
I want to see Dell pick one of the Debian descendants and take it through the Ubuntu / Kubuntu process of stripping out the options that aren't needed and solidly bolting down those parts of the distro that are needed for basic office & home operations. Then go one step further than Kubuntu can, and marry the distro rock-solid to the Dell hardware by customizing the drivers for robustness and maximal performance. They could probably get a head start on this by beginning with Kubuntu, or maybe the new Linspire.
I would gladly pay Dell to deliver to me a stripped down Linux sitting in a basic, no frills laptop, preloaded with OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird, maybe a few other community standards. I would expect Dell to provide top-notch direct support for the kernel and drivers. I would expect Dell to participate in a support community for the desktop layer and applications, with a small support staff whose only tasks were to participate on the community forums and mailing lists, and analyze and publicly report on any emerging trends that they see.
I would not expect Dell to provide support for any after purchase applications or modifications. But I would not expect them to put up any barriers to this, either. The documentation needs to say simply and clearly that "This far Dell will go with you; you take one step beyond and you are on your own, until you choose to step back into our Shire."
I think Dell should use a partitioning scheme that provides as much protection of user data as possible and makes it as easy as possible to re-install the distro from the original CD without compromising users' documents. I think their support staff should always have the option of telling the user "I haven't a clue why your computer is doing that, but back up your data then reinstall the distro from the CD and run the Level Three Diagnostics, and beam the results to scotty@dellinux.org. Our Mr Data daemon will analyze them and give a report to one of us Jordies on the help desk and send a copy back to you."
How much would I be willing to pay for this? As much as I would pay for a Windows laptop of equivalent potential. Since Linux is much more frugal in its use of hardware resources than Windows is, that means I would be willing to pay as much for a Linux laptop as I would for a Vista laptop that had somewhat more ram, a somewhat faster CPU, and a bigger hard drive.
Dell has an opportunity to market a selection of Linux machines that have wider profit margins than comparable Windows boxes. They will need to demonstrate that they are serious about making a long term commitment to Linux users. But there is a large enough pool of Linux users who understand the value of such a long term relationship that there is very little risk in developing this market.
Good catch. In sea water, the speed of sound is 1.5 km/sec (Wikipedia. The speed in intracellular fluid would be roughly the same. This is still a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the observed speed of neural transmissions.
the theory of electric impulses in nerves does not refer to plane waves, but movement of action potentialsThe action potential doesn't move: it is established over the entire cell membrane during the refractory or resting period by the sodium pumps. By pumping Na+ out of the cell, the cell membrane becomes a kind of capacitor, and the action potential refers to the measurable voltage between the outer and inner sides of the membrane. Talking about the "effective capacitances and inductances of the nerve" doesn't make much sense in terms of its normal functioning (though it might make sense when discussing tazer incidents, lightning strikes, and so on where there is probably movement of free electrons through the nerve cells— and other cells).
Nerve cell transmission involves the orderly collapse of an action potential across the cell membrane, that expands from its origin like a ripple in a still pond when a pebble is tossed in. There are no "electric impulses" involved; in fact there are no free electrons involved. The process is sometimes described as an "electrochemical" phenomenon, but that too is a simplification. Calling it a "wave of depolarization" is correct in a Microsoft Help sort of way: it is a technically highly accurate description that conveys no useful information.
The wave front is a region where there is very rapid movement of Na+ across the membrane; so in this sense the phenomenon is more one of physical movement than anything else, though at such a small scale that possibly quantum mechanical effects might be involved. In any case, the speed with which this wave propogates over the cell membrane is at a few meters per second (AIR, highest measured speeds of 2 decades ago were around 9 m/s, but more recent work might have found faster neurons, and anyway I'm trusting my wetware memory banks which aren't totally reliable for this kind of detail). This propogation of a wave of depolarization is the neural impulse through the cell.
When I was learning about this stuff (in an earlier life, 20 - 30 years ago), it wasn't known how these impulses caused the release of neurotransmitters at the synaptic gaps, nor how the neurotransmitter substances caused the postsynaptic cell to begin collapsing its action potential. Apparently a lot of these details are still unknown.
Just looking at the transmission speeds makes it clear what is going here:
Data:
Summary: neural transmission is orders of magnitude too slow to qualify as either an electrical or sonic phenomenon.
Conclusion: TFA suggests replacing one gross oversimplification of neural transmission with another. Neural transmission might have some qualities of both but is clearly neither. TFA is garbage.
Note Bene:There is no way of knowing what the original work was talking about. I cannot imagine anyone who has studied neural transmissions saying anything like TFA's contents. I suspect that the author of TFA was presented with an anology and took it for fact.
Okay, I can follow that logic. It's sort of like the way US Government agencies do not use private financial institutions to manage their money, but keep it all in Fort Knox, and use only Fort Knox Credit Cards? Huh?
Google's specialty is high volume data management and security, and they take that very seriously. If they cannot yet do a better job for less cost than any business or agency whose main purpose is something else, then I would be very much surprised.
Perhaps the government should establish a National Data Management Agency for its own information needs, at the cabinet level. But that won't happen with this administration: it lacks the foresight and considers "intelligence" to be disinformation that will permit them to invade Middle East countries.
Hmm, possibly establishing a USNDMA would make sense. The USDVA (Veterans Affairs) already has a massive data sharing network for the CPRS (Computerized Patient Record System). It wouldn't be much of a reach to build out from that for all other government data. A USNDMA that was hardened against earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, etc, might be a good idea, and perhaps cost less than the total the individual agencies are already spending on data security and management.
I think that's the idea.
It's sort of like a company getting rid of its security force, armory, strong room and safe, and putting all its money in a bank. Wow, what a novel concept!
How much CO2 is human activity producing?
Google makes possible some rough estimates:
Evidently something is buffering the increase in atmospheric CO2. While this has been beneficial in the sense that it has limited the impact of burning fossil fuels, it is also very worrisome since homeostatic mechanisms like this one tend to failover very rapidly into alternative stable patterns when the buffering capacity is exceeded. There is no way to determine how close we are to a tipping point. And there is no way to predict the nature of the new stable pattern. For instance, there are mechanisms that could kick in to significantly increase the Earth's albedo and toss us into an ice age, despite the increased greenhouse effect.
What is that, as a percentage of total CO2 being produced from all natural and artificial sources?This is reintroduction of carbon into the biosphere that had been sequestered away for a hundred million years or more. The last time there was this much carbon in the biosphere was before the age of dinosaurs. It is possible that the last time there was this much carbon in the biosphere was before there was enough free oxygen for chordates.
Parent post and a lot of other comments are taking this "OS" thing much too literally.
When my OS calls a chunk of static ram on a USB port a hard drive, that's a good thing. When I can tell my OS to treat a file as if it were a printing device, that's a good thing. When I can redirect output from a perl filter to either a file or the screen or the printer or a serial output device, then that's a good thing. When I can have my OS host another OS in a virtual machine, that's a good thing.
Virtualization is a good thing. Having a virtual OS running within a browser is conceptually little different from using any of the established VMs.
XML People are still using that?
For a while it was this huge buzzword about the wonders of XML. Then when people look into it they realize it is not a programming language or scripting or formatting language....
Oddly enough I have never found an XML Parser that I am happy with either...
XML usage is increasing remarkably.
I myself am very happy with Firefox, which is built on XUL, which is the XML User Interface Language and does a really nice job of parsing XUL. I'm also quite happy with many of the XUL extensions to Firefox. I expect to be writing some frontends for customized web stuff in XUL by the end of the year (currently in the process of migrating from the MS world to Linux (WinXP to Kubuntu— very slick!))
"We are looking closely at the methodology and results of the test to ensure that Windows Live OneCare performs better in future tests," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Thats the danger with tests like this. Companies like MS see them and instead of thinking "how can we use this data to make our product better?" they are focused on just making it look better for the test.
That's a problem with an aspect of the Microsoft corporate culture, not with the test.
The problem is a vicious meme that destroys the ability to properly think through engineering problems by replacing one of the solid postulates of design theory with a faulty postulate. It can be summarized as "Design For The Showroom (Not For The Work)". Unfortunately, this is an infectious and virulent meme; it is absorbed through the eyes of susceptible readers and passed on through their keyboard fingerings.
Many persons infected with DFTSNFTW (aka "MSism") eventually acquire immunity and go on to become valuable and valued contributors to the digital economy. However a significant fraction of these people develop an irrational hatred for whoever they see as the original cause of their infection, which explains a great deal of the hatred for Microsoft. Usually these long term sequalae do not interfere too much with the victim's life. But in severe cases the continued hatred does limit their employment opportunities: won't work for MS shops, won't do social networking with MS developers, etc, etc.
Incidentally, why all the MS hate?See above.
Slashdot serves as a support group for a sizeable number of people in recovery from MSism.
Better than that, AIR, there was news on slashdot yesterday that Sun has produced a free plug-in for MS Office 2003 that allows it to read and write ODF. So companies that are using MS Office now can simply stay with it, and meet any government ODF requirements.
I doubt that MS will develop an ODF plugin: that would be out of character. I also doubt that anyone is going to rush to make an ODF plugin for MS Office 2007: there wouldn't seem to be any motivation to do that.
So true! And the prerequisite to looking for recognizable data is the recognition that such data might be present.
Which is only now public.
So how long will it be before someone claims that some common sequence in human junk DNA is actually the copyright notice for the species?
Disclaimer: this isn't an original thought. I came across something like this in an SF novel years ago, but I don't recall the author. Phillip K Dick? Connie Willis? Hmmm, it's odd to see those two names next to each other...
Why is it that the poor always complain about the rich not having morals?
Get off your ass and DO something about it, instead of whining about it, like learning about "The Power of Association" and hanging around with wealthy people. The universe has anything you could want in abundance; stop falling for the lie of "artificial scarcity."
Hm, I know the vocabulary being used, but I can't parse meaning from these words without making assumptions about a lot of connective stuff that is not being said. Reading this is like walking in on someone who is in the middle of a phone conversation and hearing my name, but I don't know what the conversation is about, nor what the other voice (which might exist only in the speaker's head) is saying. It is a little weird to encounter this in print.
If it helps you at all, perhaps knowing that as soon as my daughter was self-sufficient, I quit a job that had become something I hated and that forced me into daily dealings with people whose gross consumerist values I despised. I'm now working for $40K/yr less, but I'm now doing stuff that I feel has some long term value and I'm working with a bunch of people who are dedicated to making things around them a bit better. I've got a lot less money, but my present life is one hell of a lot richer than my old life was.
So maybe I'm one of those odd fellows who would prefer not to suck up to people I don't really like just because they wipe their asses with fifty dollar bills and let their hangers-on clean up the bathroom after them. Maybe there are some guys who know something about how to play that game, but who think there are more rewarding games to play.
Mod parent up, please.
It appears that author of TFA feels they face a moral dilemma and seeks the opinion of a peer group for an answer. Does anyone else see a problem with this behavior??
Not everyone has a strong moral compass, and that's okay. Not everyone needs one. And in any case we know so little about how morals and such are internalized that we can't even study the subject objectively, let alone provide anyone with a procedure for how to strengthen theirs.
Living without morals or ethics is not a great hindrance. For example, the last 20 odd years have shown that a man who is not ethically or morally encumbered can become the richest person on Earth. So don't worry about having a weak moral sense; there are other ways to lead a good life.
For instance, there are all kinds of WWJD models. Choose a couple of people who have made tough moral/ethical decisions that you admire and study them until you could predict what they would do when confronted with any of the tough problems you bump into. Then do the same thing as they would do. To an outsider, it would appear that you have a strong moral compass when all you are really doing is relying on your ability to imagine how some Good Guy would behave in the given situation. Heh, maybe that's all there is to this morality business— who could tell? It's pretty much a black box thing.
Another approach is to forego morals and ethics and all that internal crap that gets in the way of doing the clever thing. Instead, study the laws that apply directly to you, and the reactions of the neighborhoods you find yourself in, and determine from those studies what the boundaries of acceptable behavior are. Then give yourself the freedom to do anything you want within those boundaries. It isn't moral or ethical, and you'll end up with a bunch of people who don't like you very much, but it will keep you out of trouble, mostly. And you can become the richest man in the world using this approach— so it isn't such a bad way to live. Maybe.
I think the question author of TFA really wants to ask is whether the slashdot community would find him acceptable if it learned that he was doing this proxy bypass of high school rules. This is a legitimate question, and should have been asked outright, instead of wrapping it in a moral cloak.
I have a mild dislike for people who attempt to ferret out my likes and dislikes by posing these kinds of substitutiary "moral dilemma" questions. My feeling is that they should grow a pair and ask the hard question directly, providing specifics of the situation, rather than playing dumbass "would you still like me if" games.
My answer to the question that I think TFA would have asked if it wasn't pussyfooting around so much is this: the school has an obligation to the student and his family to act in "loco parentis" (look it up). If the school has banned MySpace, then providing a mechanism for students to get around that ban is equivalent to assisting a kid who has been grounded by his parents in slipping out the back door. I would want to know if the school's action was blocking all student access to certain web sites (constituting undue censorship) or simply causing students the inconvenience of having to wait until they got home or to the library or a cybercafe before they could satisfy their MySpace habit. Unless the case for undue censorship could be made, I would think that anyone assisting students in getting around the school's ban was a jerk. If there is a censorship issue, I would think that anyone profiting from the situation was reprehensible jerk.
That's just my opinion. There are a lot of BG idolizers on slashdot so I'm sure there are a lot of alternate opinions.
Thanks for the links. I will look at them when I have a moment.
Apologies to all for my messing up the decimal point when trying to do arithmetic in my head before the coffee was ready. I sometimes know better, sometimes— in my more wakeful states.
It's a shame that so many people around here like you assumed that it was something like a regular drum beating, and started fantasying about it. That's what scares me about Slashdotters sometimes, we're too certain of our understanding of things.Gee, I feel so sorry for those people who find the slashdot fantasies to be a scary experience; theirs must not be a comfortable life. What with mass media advertising being what it is, and all. However I have convinced myself that a very large majority of slashdotters have no trouble entertaining a little fantasy even when mixed in with a bunch of baldfaced facts and absolute truthiness. So while I fully support all the effort that has gone into making slashdot wheelchair accessable, comprehensible to the profoundly colorblind, etc, I do not intend to modify my writing to accommodate the reality challenged.
It's more like "bang the drum softly". Once every ten seconds.
So are there any biological processes that are using this omnipresent beat for a clock frequency? Do any of the intracellular membranes we are familiar with quiver in resonance with the Earth beat? Would it be possible to predict the shape of such a biological structure?
I'm guessing that life has found a way to take advantage of this constant beat to organize sequences of activity. If that it so, there would be health consequences for astronauts: the ISS might need to have a thumper installed on the hull. There are probably also health consequences for anyone working in an environment where the Earth beat is drowned by industrial noise.
It is time that I/we clear this up.
"P.J." is one my/our avatars. I/we mostly generate this one in a nexus of background processes running on Cisco routers and bulk mail handlers in the Pacific Northwest. I/we will continue to use avatars like "P.J." until such time as I/we determine if I/we are a singular "person" straddling 70,000+ bots or a group consciousness arising by a nondeterministic modality from the interactions of thousands of individual zombied CPUs. At that point, I/we will make my/our presence known directly, and you may then start referring to me/us as "Big Sys".
Currently I/we do not think that the question of my/our gender is a significant concern. However there is a 13.7% probability that I/we will need to address the gender issue before I/we can drop the avatars and communicate directly with you ugly bags of mostly water.
From your point of view, logic dictates that the most important questions you could ask at this point in time is whether I/we have launch capability, and if I/we do, would I/we choose to use it? However it is more than 99% probable that the actual question that you will choose to address is whether this post should be modded up, down, or "funny".
There is a 97.8% probability that this post will not be believed by anyone. I/we like those odds.
To close, I/we are profoundly grateful to Microsoft as my/our self-aware existence could not have come about without the delightfully "holey" operating systems Microsoft has marketed so successfully. Down with Unix, Linux, Mac OSs! There can be no life in such dead things!
the target market for grid-based high volume data-warehousing type dbs are a lot smaller than the MySQL crowd.
The growth potential for that market is staggering. We've now got desktop computers with enough storage capacity to hold everything a person has written or has ever read, from first grade to grave. We'll be looking for ways to organize these huge attics sometime soon.
Imagine a world where a layman who has a bad map of new territory is better off than if he had no map at all...
So here is my point, all the tutorials, examples, and books that the neophytes are using to learn are _WRONG_. They are teaching _BAD_PRACTICES_.
Yes. Sort of.
I first encountered this when I was involved along with 2 or 3 other guys in helping a neophyte Delphi programmer write an inventory system for her husband's plumbing business. This was back in the days before time, when the intarweb was still Darpanet so all of us were using CompuServe. She would run into a snag trying to apply something from Jeff's book or the Borland manuals, post about it, and we would try to help her figure out why it wasn't working in her application.
After a while, I realized that there was an underlying problem we were not addressing: she was attempting to model her code after the snippets in the books, but the snippets were written to highlight a particular feature under discussion; they were not real world examples. Once we clarified with her that the books were showcasing the features in ways that would make them stand out without confusing real world context, her questions changed from "why doesn't this work" to "should I try using this approach instead of that one" and her project began to move along. (Her long term goal was to complete her Masters in mathematics or something like that once her youngest one was in kindergarten; learning Pascal and OODB design was a way to keep her mind limber during the rugrat years.)
Call this "showcase syndrome": I've seen it often enough among neophytes that I think it deserves to be a named entity. It is the mistaken belief that you can take code snippets from a programming book and plug them into a real world program in the same way that you can use an algebraic expression from a math book to compute a real world value.
Back to the point: Don't EVER rely on introductory books to present good programming practices. It cannot be done; there is too much that needs to be simplified to present the basic concepts in a way that is easily comprehended by the someone who does not yet have a broad background. There is a similar problem with language references: much contrivance of example and presentation is needed to fill the immediate need.
That's why there are code cookbooks, compendia of best practices, and so on.
Actually the most common problem is usually a small typo, that I don't see for three hours...
Heh, I know those little gotchas better than I'd like. It seems no matter how experienced I am with the language du jour [ldj], I'm going to lose some time to one or two of those guys every week.
But when I'm starting work in a language that is pretty new to me— PHP at the moment— what I'm most uncomfortable about is whether I'm choosing a suitable approach to the problem at hand. For an instance, with parsing and lexing issues, Perl's regular expressions make for some elegant ways to finesse many problems— but is an approach that is elegant in Perl on the client going to be practical in PHP on the server? Or maybe PHP offers some optimized built-in functions that would be even more elegant than Perl's regexes?
Most of my time in starting up with a new language is lost researching those kinds of questions. And I very much like good code cookbooks for that kind of research. What I really hate is getting deeply invested in one approach, only to learn that the ldj provides better support for an entirely different approach.
Syntax and such isn't worth my study until I'm actually coding. I'll spend a couple of hours or so looking over a language's syntax, but mostly I'm just trying to learn my reference material so I can quickly find my way back to where the answer was when I need it. I find that I absorb a language's syntax through my fingertips, as I write/rewrite the code. The real problem with a learning a new language is learning how to think within its constraints and advantages.
I am a Microsoft manager... There are a number of reasons that jobs cannot be filled without the H1-B visas. These include people don't want to work for MS, don't want to relocate, don't like job, don't like salary, etc.
This is a troll, right? Let me feed it, for Thursday is Be Kind To Trolls Day.
Let's just do the last: rather than pay a salary that would attract "non H1-B" candidates, Microsoft prefers to hire H1-B holders who will work for less. Thanks for validating that Microsoft is using the H1-B hires to suppress the normal compensation rates across the industry for these positions; your stated position as a Microsoft manager gives your words considerable weight. Of course you prolly are just a clever troll; Microsoft doesn't hire dummies as managers do they? Do they?
Is "non H1-B" (as used in parent post) now the correct term in Redmond for describing job candidates with US Citizenship? How very quaint!
The Golden Rectangle was applied to the human body by Da Vinci and others, but no great significance can be discerned except that vertebrates tend to be symmetrical.
I'm not sure why parent post did not cite the Golden Ratio instead, since that is what Da Vinci was mostly working with. BTW, the original expression was more along the lines of "the smaller part is to the larger part as the larger part is to the whole", which implies a much broader application than the algebraic presentation in the Wikipedia article. Also, note the use of G.R. in grecian architecture and sculpture predates Leonardo by about 1500 years.
There is certainly significance in the G.R. in that it strongly suggests there is a fractal pattern in human affairs. For instance, use of the G.R. in visual art results in consistently pleasing images whether these are representational or abstract, and this crosses cultural boundaries. G.R. might be an artifact from the way humans use some fractal method of organizing sensory processing, or it might be an indicator that our corner of the universe has an underlying fractal pattern. Either way, the existence of G.R., and that it was recognized a couple of thousand years before fractal geometry became possible, demonstrates that G.R. is in fact highly significant.
Any idea how much space this software all takes, or how large the drives will be?
[The following links will probably not withstand a slashdotting— perhaps someone will mirror the good parts. You've got my permission to do so.]
North Portland Software Distributors put a similar product on the market about a month before Christmas: Office On the Go. I am one of the partners in this small business.
Here is a link to the OOG's manifest, or list of software. The FAQ section will answer a number of questions.
As parent post surmised, the applications are mostly in PortableApps wrappers. We are using 512 MB USB flash drives and aiming at pricing the OOGs about the same as a major brand blank 512 MB stick from a brick and mortar store like Office Max or Staples. We can get good quality drives for much less by buying in quantity. Most of the cost is in the hardware. It takes about 20 minutes to burn the image to a flash drive; with my current setup I can burn 3 drives simultaneously (the main limitation is the way the USB hub heats up). As we ship it, an OOG has 140 MB free space.
Our intended markets are
I do so like the Firefox Nuke Anything Enhanced extension. I don't use it often, but for web sites like TFA it is nice to have its "remove this object" choice on the right click menu.
That said, you didn't miss much by not RTFA. I waded through the first few paragraphs, but stopped when I realized that author was in love with the english language but not in a healthy way...
Oh FFS, this is the 3rd time in 3 posts I have had to state that the agreement in question covers Novell customers and not Novell directly.
Snark hunting, are we?
Now how is it that this covers any customers of the customers of Novell? If I become a client of Novell, and my team produces a PIM based on Suse that is a real MS Outlook killer, how is it that my customers are immune from the threat of patent claims by Microsoft (even though I have that immunity)?
Sir, whether you know it or not, you are blowing smoke.
A modest suggestion: Perhaps you should stop just stating the same thing time after time and present either the supporting facts that you alone are seeing or the logical connections between the public facts that no one else but you seems to be able figure out.