Americans in the 1860s were simply not used to experiencing death outside their church, their family.
You died at home. You were laid out in grandad's parlor. You were buried in a small plot on the farm where you were born.
When these most elemental of rituals and social traditions break down the consequences are never trivial.
The terrorist doesn't see a body count.
He sees a crack in the foundations.
Numbers do not tell the whole story. Numbers never tell the whole story. For that you need experience and empathy.
There is a running gag in Frank Miller's "Dark Knight" graphic novels: a succession of Left Coast geeks who can't see that anything that happens in Gotham or Metropolis really matters.
The biggest part consists of custom software in Python, of course within the SPE editor. For the visual power I used PIL and pyCairo. From time to time also Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch helped quite a bit. .
To my eyes, at least, the coin looks like a technical exercise in mechanical drawing and perspective.
Ingenious, perhaps, but not necessarily emotionally satisfying:
yeah, but still the fact that the increase of linux is almost 90% in little less than a year, it seems as though the ball has started to roll. .
What I see is Linux at 0.57% in Nov 07 and 0.91% in Sept 08. MS Vista at 9.19% in Nov 07 and 18.33% in Sept 08.
The MacIntel alone with six times the market share of Linux on the desktop. W2K with twice the market share.
Think hits to Fox News.
W2K never saw significant sales as a consumer OS.
Yet eight ? years later this industrious little workhorse still out polls Linux on the web.
Red Hat itself has made it public that the desktop market is a very difficult one. Ubuntu has made very decent inroads to the desktop market for Linux .
Yes it's sad ~3000 people died, but the same number of people die EVERY MONTH in car accidents .
But never in a single incident.
3000 accidental deaths across 3,000 miles of ground and among a population of 300 million does not strain the system. No single community has to bear the full weight of the loss.
The mid-day population of the WTC complex was about 90,000. That is small only in comparison to the population of metro New York.
That is precisely why such extreme events are studied at MCEER [Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering] It is also precisely why the military response was not restrained by the thought that the death count was not as high as it might have been.
You could argue with equal sense - or nonsense - that the naval response to Pearl Harbor was disproportionate because the carrier fleet was at sea. That the Japanese failed to meet all their objectives was certainly not for lack of trying.
As has been pointed out before in the comments here, with a direct P2P network, 1 upload = 1 download .
If you upload a uniquely "tagged" or "watermarked" file to the P2P nets you are casting your fate to the winds.
It no longer matters who references the file or who is using it as a seed. The search that returns twenty five hits for what is unmistakably the same "rip."
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid your neighbors paychecks, and give you their money. .
Nonsense.
The purpose of government is to govern.
To make decisions in the interest of the community as a whole.
The function of a classic conservative reformist like Burke is to act before anger and distress submerge the state and society in Revolution.
If that requires an expansion of the franchise or a redistribution of wealth, then you find a way to make that happen, in the interest of your own survival.
Theodore Roosevelt, in dealing with the intrangient capitalists of his own day, simply traded the mask of Tweedle-Dee for that of Tweedle-Dum.
Discovering that his advesaries didn't care about logic, they only cared about language.
I'm against Obama's plan to give tax rebates to people that do not pay federal income taxes. I'm sorry, but, if you get a rebate for something you didn't pay for, that isn't a rebate, it is welfare and income redistribution
.
That woukd include the working poor and disabled who receive the EIC credit and SSI.
You might ask yourself how some jobs get done, legally, employing workers paid below U.S. minimum wage.
I bet it means even less to all of us in America where every major data center has a secret room where the government sniffs our packets. .
The government knows 300,000,000 people who interest it more than you.
The geek is infinitely more likely to sniffed at by his boss, his neighbor, his wife and kids, his dog - assuming he has been out of the basement long enough to acquire one or all of the above.
_____
This being the season of Halloween, I have been wonderingly idly what horrors truly lie behind that false wall the Hannibal-Geek has run up in his cellar.
What cabalistic meaning he finds in "34-24-36."
Though it's probably nothing more than the combination to his old high school locker,
Sorry, I seem to have forgotten, could you remind us where the PPC/SPARC/Itanium/ARM/MIPS/eee701 versions of Vista are on sale? .
personally, I wouldn't care to bet against x86 and Vista/Windows 7 even in the UMPC market.
every time the geek thinks Linux has a lock on the low end of the consumer market, tech advances and prices fall to the point where Windows becomes the mass market OS of choice.
Just a day after downplaying the vulnerability that caused it to issue an out-of-cycle patch last week, Microsoft warned customers late yesterday that exploit code had gone public and was being used in additional attacks
.
How does this translate into downplaying the threat?
October 23, 2008 (IDG News Service) Microsoft Corp. fixed a critical bug in its Windows operating system Thursday, saying that it is being exploited by online criminals and could eventually be used in a widespread "worm" attack.
Microsoft took the unusual step of issuing an emergency patch for the flaw several weeks ahead of its regularly scheduled November security updates, saying that vulnerability is being exploited in "limited targeted attacks." The company had already announced plans to rush out the patch.
"It is possible that this vulnerability could be used in the crafting of a wormable exploit. If successfully exploited, an attacker could then install programs or view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights," Microsoft said in a bulletin released Thursday morning.Microsoft releases emergency Windows patch to head off worm attack {Oct 23]
Each interation of OSX seems to add performance instead of taking it. Also true for some Linux distros... Why Windows realeases can't behave the same way?
.
The "high performance" OS - or distro, if you want to be pedantic about it, supports a small subset of hardware and software.
The Windows PC can be found pretty much everywhere, doing pretty much everything, on hardware that has no standard configuration.
I refuse to buy an operating system that hobbles the performance. Most of the benchmarks show that Vista is just slower than XP
.
How old and how relevant are those benchmarks these days?
The $1500 HP Elite available from Walmart.com ships with 64 Bit Vista, a quad core Intel CPU, 8 GB RAM, a 1 GB NVIDIA 9800 GT DX10 graphics card, Blu-Ray, HDTV and 1 TB of storage.
The NVIDIA is entry level from a gamer's point of view. But is hard to picture a system with specs like these being hobbled in any meaningful way.
But any politician hearing about this unfair prosecution ought to update the "Good Samaritan Law" so it not only protects people trying to save injured persons, but also protects people trying to help schools/companies by revealing security flaws in their system.
.
You are the administrator of a system that an alleged "Good Samaritan" has been trying to hack.
The successful hack would, of course, substantially increase your employer's legal and financial exposure.
But - as a fellow geek, and the trusting soul you are - you believe his motives were as pure as the driven snow.
You believe him when he says "no harm, no foul."
You see no reason for an audit - much less a re-build from scratch.
You have a new career opportunity opening up soon as a greeter at Wal-Mart.
Dubya will pardon him on his way out
Scooter will get a full pardon too (in addition to the sentence commutation he already got)
.
W. is not the sort who forgives and forgets:
The deadline for candidate replacement or withdrawal in Alaska was September 17. If Stevens resigned immediately and promised not to serve if he is reelected next week, Gov. Palin could appoint a Republican to serve out the rest of Stevens's term.
Unfortunately, any unofficial Republican replacement candidate would have to face an insurmountable hurdle next week in asking Alaskans to vote for a convicted felon. Stevens announced in a statement this evening: "I am innocent. This verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which the Justice Department lawyers conducted this trial. I ask that Alaskans and my Senate colleagues stand with me as I pursue my rights. I remain a candidate for the United States Senate. I will come home on Wednesday and ask for your vote."Stevens Found Guilty
The 84 year old Stevens is not going to do the gentlemanly thing and put a pistol to his head in order to save a Senate seat for the Republications.
I was only speculating that a significant amount of new OpenOffice.org users switched to OpenOffice.org because of Microsoft's UI overhaul. .
I think it's fair to ask how significant, given the success of Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for the Mac.
The "ribbon" just doesn't seem to be the barrier the geek makes it out to be.
You have a point. I would conjecture that the dissimilarities of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007 are one of the driving factors in OpenOffice.org's adoption. .
MS Office 2007 has been doing quite well in the real world:
20% growth in one quarter. If the tech sector as a whole is in the ICU with double pneumonia, Microsoft has a case of the sniffles.
Microsoft Office 2007/8 holds 4 of top 25 slots in software sales at Amazon.com.
In the retail market, Microsoft Office is bigger than games.
It is bigger than anything.
"Here's the really interesting statistic," said Chris Swenson, NPD's director of Software Industry Analysis. "Over two-thirds of the dollar volume growth in the U.S. retail PC software market in 2007 can be attributed to Microsoft Office. The ratio of Office dollar growth to total PC software growth is 67 percent."The Year of Office 2007
The geek tends to quote the max price for the retail box that he can find - and it can be useful to insert a correction.
Office Home & Student is about $100 at Amazon.com, with a three seat license.
The price of four ink jet cartridges - and if you can't afford the consumables, you can't afford the office suite, at any price.
The direct sale academic price for Office Ultimate is $60. The Ultimate Steal If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, Office for home use is the price of the media plus S&H. Home Use Program
Tell that to Google, who has consoles, arcade games, pool tables, foosball, swimming pools, and just about everything else you can imagine. They seem to be doing okay as a company. .
wretched excess is the sign of a bubble about to burst.
The productivity of the geek may be difficult to measure. but there is something to be said for not putting temptation in his path.
That $150,000 is an investment in her campaign plain and simple. If she stood up there in K-mart clothes people would have perceived her as less sophisticated. .
In his 1952 "Checkers" speech, Nixon spoke of his wife Pat's "respectable Republican cloth coat."
Today, it is Goodbye, Joe The Plumber and Hello, Neiman Marcus - and "CHARGE IT!!!"
$150K is eighty years worth of clothing for an average American family. 50 years of six-packs for the geek gone Blotto.
Not the story you want to air when campaigning in an atmosphere of primal fear among the middle class.
Slashdot Mirror
.
The bold is a accident.
I needed darker and larger text for editing on this display.
The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is the most significant book about death and society to appear in years.
Americans in the 1860s were simply not used to experiencing death outside their church, their family.
You died at home. You were laid out in grandad's parlor. You were buried in a small plot on the farm where you were born.
When these most elemental of rituals and social traditions break down the consequences are never trivial.
The terrorist doesn't see a body count.
He sees a crack in the foundations.
Numbers do not tell the whole story. Numbers never tell the whole story. For that you need experience and empathy.
There is a running gag in Frank Miller's "Dark Knight" graphic novels: a succession of Left Coast geeks who can't see that anything that happens in Gotham or Metropolis really matters.
.
To my eyes, at least, the coin looks like a technical exercise in mechanical drawing and perspective.
Ingenious, perhaps, but not necessarily emotionally satisfying:
benedick
.
In rounded numbers:
Jan 08 XP 75% + Vista 12% + W2K 3% = 90%
Sep 08 XP 69% + Vista 18% + W2K 2% = 89%
Win NT, Win 98, Win ME and the stray Win 95 system retain a combined share of 1% [rounded]:
Operating System Market Share
Which makes the net loss 0%.
.
What I see is Linux at 0.57% in Nov 07 and 0.91% in Sept 08. MS Vista at 9.19% in Nov 07 and 18.33% in Sept 08.
The MacIntel alone with six times the market share of Linux on the desktop. W2K with twice the market share.
Think hits to Fox News.
W2K never saw significant sales as a consumer OS.
Yet eight ? years later this industrious little workhorse still out polls Linux on the web.
.
It depends, I suppose, on how low your expectations are. Top Operating System Share Trend
.
But never in a single incident.
3000 accidental deaths across 3,000 miles of ground and among a population of 300 million does not strain the system. No single community has to bear the full weight of the loss.
The mid-day population of the WTC complex was about 90,000. That is small only in comparison to the population of metro New York.
You were looking at the potential erasure of an entire American city - with all its core economic and physical infrastructure. World Trade Center and Pentagon Attacks of 9/11/2001 Sources
That is precisely why such extreme events are studied at MCEER [Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering] It is also precisely why the military response was not restrained by the thought that the death count was not as high as it might have been.
You could argue with equal sense - or nonsense - that the naval response to Pearl Harbor was disproportionate because the carrier fleet was at sea. That the Japanese failed to meet all their objectives was certainly not for lack of trying.
.
If you upload a uniquely "tagged" or "watermarked" file to the P2P nets you are casting your fate to the winds.
It no longer matters who references the file or who is using it as a seed. The search that returns twenty five hits for what is unmistakably the same "rip."
24-7-365
The rip that you unleashed into the wild.
.
But that song does not come with a license to redistribute.
You cannot, without consequences, and as a charitable gesture, simply burn 10,000 copies and airdrop them onto a city park.
Assume for the moment that a download could be tagged to its ultimate source - meaning you.
Assume for the moment that traffic in that file could be monitored or estimated in a way that would be persuasive to a civil judge and jury.
Where expert testimony is generally admissible and the burden of proof on the plaintiff is slight.
The files you uploaded have been out there for months. Do you really, really want the damages to be assessed at 99 cents a track?
As compensatory damages - which are generally unlimited?
.
Nonsense.
The purpose of government is to govern.
To make decisions in the interest of the community as a whole.
The function of a classic conservative reformist like Burke is to act before anger and distress submerge the state and society in Revolution.
If that requires an expansion of the franchise or a redistribution of wealth, then you find a way to make that happen, in the interest of your own survival.
Theodore Roosevelt, in dealing with the intrangient capitalists of his own day, simply traded the mask of Tweedle-Dee for that of Tweedle-Dum.
Discovering that his advesaries didn't care about logic, they only cared about language.
.
That woukd include the working poor and disabled who receive the EIC credit and SSI.
You might ask yourself how some jobs get done, legally, employing workers paid below U.S. minimum wage.
I'll give you a hint:
It doesn't all happen in China.
.
The government knows 300,000,000 people who interest it more than you.
The geek is infinitely more likely to sniffed at by his boss, his neighbor, his wife and kids, his dog - assuming he has been out of the basement long enough to acquire one or all of the above.
_____
This being the season of Halloween, I have been wonderingly idly what horrors truly lie behind that false wall the Hannibal-Geek has run up in his cellar.
What cabalistic meaning he finds in "34-24-36."
Though it's probably nothing more than the combination to his old high school locker,
.
personally, I wouldn't care to bet against x86 and Vista/Windows 7 even in the UMPC market.
every time the geek thinks Linux has a lock on the low end of the consumer market, tech advances and prices fall to the point where Windows becomes the mass market OS of choice.
.
How does this translate into downplaying the threat?
October 23, 2008 (IDG News Service) Microsoft Corp. fixed a critical bug in its Windows operating system Thursday, saying that it is being exploited by online criminals and could eventually be used in a widespread "worm" attack.
Microsoft took the unusual step of issuing an emergency patch for the flaw several weeks ahead of its regularly scheduled November security updates, saying that vulnerability is being exploited in "limited targeted attacks." The company had already announced plans to rush out the patch.
"It is possible that this vulnerability could be used in the crafting of a wormable exploit. If successfully exploited, an attacker could then install programs or view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights," Microsoft said in a bulletin released Thursday morning. Microsoft releases emergency Windows patch to head off worm attack {Oct 23]
New Windows bug differs from 2006 flaw, Microsoft says [Oct 27]
.
That isn't the problem.
The problem is the geek playing cowboy - and thinking that the ten gallon hat absolves him of all responsibility,
.
The "high performance" OS - or distro, if you want to be pedantic about it, supports a small subset of hardware and software.
The Windows PC can be found pretty much everywhere, doing pretty much everything, on hardware that has no standard configuration.
.
How old and how relevant are those benchmarks these days?
The $1500 HP Elite available from Walmart.com ships with 64 Bit Vista, a quad core Intel CPU, 8 GB RAM, a 1 GB NVIDIA 9800 GT DX10 graphics card, Blu-Ray, HDTV and 1 TB of storage.
The NVIDIA is entry level from a gamer's point of view. But is hard to picture a system with specs like these being hobbled in any meaningful way.
.
Your scripts run 10% faster.
But - given all the things that can bog down a user accessing your web site - will anyone know or care?
.
You are the administrator of a system that an alleged "Good Samaritan" has been trying to hack.
The successful hack would, of course, substantially increase your employer's legal and financial exposure.
But - as a fellow geek, and the trusting soul you are - you believe his motives were as pure as the driven snow.
You believe him when he says "no harm, no foul."
You see no reason for an audit - much less a re-build from scratch.
You have a new career opportunity opening up soon as a greeter at Wal-Mart.
Scooter will get a full pardon too (in addition to the sentence commutation he already got)
.
W. is not the sort who forgives and forgets:
The deadline for candidate replacement or withdrawal in Alaska was September 17. If Stevens resigned immediately and promised not to serve if he is reelected next week, Gov. Palin could appoint a Republican to serve out the rest of Stevens's term.
Unfortunately, any unofficial Republican replacement candidate would have to face an insurmountable hurdle next week in asking Alaskans to vote for a convicted felon. Stevens announced in a statement this evening: "I am innocent. This verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which the Justice Department lawyers conducted this trial. I ask that Alaskans and my Senate colleagues stand with me as I pursue my rights. I remain a candidate for the United States Senate. I will come home on Wednesday and ask for your vote." Stevens Found Guilty
The 84 year old Stevens is not going to do the gentlemanly thing and put a pistol to his head in order to save a Senate seat for the Republications.
.
I think it's fair to ask how significant, given the success of Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for the Mac.
The "ribbon" just doesn't seem to be the barrier the geek makes it out to be.
.
MS Office 2007 has been doing quite well in the real world:
The Microsoft business division, which includes the Office suite of software, grew 20% to $4.95 billion. Microsoft's Profit Rises, But Outlook Is Damped [October 24]
20% growth in one quarter. If the tech sector as a whole is in the ICU with double pneumonia, Microsoft has a case of the sniffles.
Microsoft Office 2007/8 holds 4 of top 25 slots in software sales at Amazon.com.
In the retail market, Microsoft Office is bigger than games.
It is bigger than anything.
"Here's the really interesting statistic," said Chris Swenson, NPD's director of Software Industry Analysis. "Over two-thirds of the dollar volume growth in the U.S. retail PC software market in 2007 can be attributed to Microsoft Office. The ratio of Office dollar growth to total PC software growth is 67 percent." The Year of Office 2007
The geek tends to quote the max price for the retail box that he can find - and it can be useful to insert a correction.
Office Home & Student is about $100 at Amazon.com, with a three seat license.
The price of four ink jet cartridges - and if you can't afford the consumables, you can't afford the office suite, at any price.
The direct sale academic price for Office Ultimate is $60. The Ultimate Steal If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, Office for home use is the price of the media plus S&H. Home Use Program
.
wretched excess is the sign of a bubble about to burst.
The productivity of the geek may be difficult to measure. but there is something to be said for not putting temptation in his path.
.
In his 1952 "Checkers" speech, Nixon spoke of his wife Pat's "respectable Republican cloth coat."
Today, it is Goodbye, Joe The Plumber and Hello, Neiman Marcus - and "CHARGE IT!!!"
$150K is eighty years worth of clothing for an average American family. 50 years of six-packs for the geek gone Blotto.
Not the story you want to air when campaigning in an atmosphere of primal fear among the middle class.
.
"The test of time?"
We are not so very far distant from the 30th year of MSDOS and Windows. Office 1 was released in 1990. The XBox in 2001.
MSDOS and Windows began as a client OS.
That Microsoft is strongly competitive in the server market leaves the geek with something more to explain.
Trade and communications were easy from the beginning. The climate was moderated by large bodies of water.