It was also very academic in some respects, which probably explains why general audiences (read "unwashed masses") won't "get" it.
I really have a hard time believing that babbling men with French accents and strange pseudo-intellectualism makes for an "academic" trilogy. The fact that people who have "seen the other two movies along with the Animatrix a few times" can find (or perhaps invent) some sort of spiritual message is not proof that these movies are deep.
A good movie gets better when you watch it again, and often provides new insight as you study it. But if all that people who are not already Matrix devotees can see is a bunch of mindless, confusing, meaningless rhetoric, then I would hesitate to call it "academic."
What exactly is that? It seems to me that you are implying that women have some kind of inferior logical thought process (which you are "loath to admit" to following), and that it is "female" to think about spending money you have saved.
There you can learn about HR2239 and see where your Congressional Representative stands on the issue. Links to Representatives and Senators are included so you can contact them and let them know how you feel. Let's do something other than sit around and complain about Diebold!
I finally broke down and bought the textbook for my class in compilers from my school bookstore, at a price, including tax, of what amounts to nearly $110 US. Even on amazon.com, it's $84.95.
But, lo and behold, amazon.co.uk has it for the equivalent of less than $47 US!
Chris,
I have nothing against Mr. Stallman. I've never met him nor spoke to him,
though I watched the documentary "Revolutionary OS" and found him rather
engaging. He seems a man of principle, even if I believe he's too much of a
purist for his own good, and for the good of the cause.
While I appreciate your taking the time to write so thoughtful a note, I
respectfully disagree with your core point. It's an issue I've thought a
lot about. The kernel is hardly only a small part of an OS. To me what you
and Mr. Stallman are asking--that we in the media call Linux instead
GNU/Linux--is akin to suggesting that beef stew would more accurately be
called beef, carrot and potato stew. Sure, carrots and potatoes are
absolutely essential, but boiled down to its essence its beef.
For the record, I did a lot of research on this point, and didn't
non-chalantly decide to use Linux as opposed to GNU/Linux. I made a
decision--and halfway through the piece acknowledge that some would prefer
GNU/Linux.
By the by, I never said Mr. Torvalds wrote his own operating system, as your
letter suggests. Of course it was a world full of programmers who did that.
Although your article about Linus Torvalds did a nice job of
giving readers a good idea of the kind of person he is, I wonder
why you felt it necessary to devote a paragraph to bashing
Richard Stallman, with the only connection to Mr. Torvalds being
his non-response to questions regarding Mr. Stallman. Moreover,
I was disappointed by the fairly gross inaccuracies in your
bashing.
As you acknowledge, Richard Stallman is a forefather of the Free
Software movement. He leads a philosophical school of thought
that many consider to be fanatical, and he is not shy about
defending his principles. This you also acknowledge.
What you completely misrepresent, however, is his contribution
to the operating system you refer to as "Linux." He, and others
working with him (not Mr. Torvalds) developed many essential
components still used in most of the free Unix-like operating
systems used today, including all variants based on Linux. These
components include compilers and assemblers (essential for
application development), text editors, various essential
utilities, and many, many more applications. These people have,
however, failed so far in producing the most essential piece in
a working Unix subsitute: a viable replacement for the Unix
kernel. This is what Mr. Torvalds did, and that is what Linux
is: a kernel.
Thus, the 6 million lines of code in the Linux kernel form only
a small part of a complete Linux-based operating system. There
are many other components, and a large number of them are GNU
software without which the operating system would be useless.
For this Mr. Stallman would like you to call the complete
operating system a GNU/Linux system. Frankly, I don't think this
is too much to ask. Also, please note that no one demands that
you call "Torvalds' work" GNU/Linux. They simply ask that you
not use the umbrella term "Linux" to refer to everything working
with the Linux kernel (the only part which is Mr. Torvald's
work).
You write, "Torvalds released the kernel of his operating system
well before GNU produced a reliable one of its own," as if there
is some kind of competition which GNU software writers lost, and
about which they are now whining. In reality, Mr. Torvalds did
not write his own operating system; he wrote a kernel that
worked with the operating system GNU was already developing, and
today we use both together.
Many disagree with Mr. Stallman's ideals, and find him to be a
generally unlikable character, and you may be one of them. But
to deny his significant contributions to Linux-based operating
systems out of ignorance or spite is simply unacceptable
journalism.
Look, in an algorithms class, there's no good reason to be monitoring students for copying. They are (or should be) taking the class to learn. If they decide to copy other people instead of figuring out how to do things on their own, then they're wasting their own money.
A professor I had in university (for an algorithms class, no less) had this attitude: make the tests worth a lot, and make them tough. Students who copied homework will fail, and the problem corrects itself.
Hopefully, the professors you speak of have the same philosophy. As a grader, I believe your responsibility is to decide whether the questions were answered correctly, and perhaps report blatant plagiarism to the professors the students are writing for. Policing papers for copying is a waste of your time, and demeaning to students, anyway.
But before you decide that the law should cover PayPal too, consider how much banks charge for credit card transactions. Plus they rake in huge amounts from interest and client fees. If they didn't have these huge income streams, they couldn't afford to obey the federal law -- and credit cards would be a lot harder to get.
Actually, many banks have lower rates than PayPal's in terms of percentages that the seller has to pay.
Not to mention, Paypal charges that same (large) amount for all transactions, even simple balance transfers within their system.
The plus side to PayPal, I guess, is convenience for small-time users; traditional credit card processing is hard to get if you don't have a large volume.
I don't see this convenience alone as a reason to make them exempt from laws protecting consumers and sellers from fraud. If PayPal is going to act like a bank, perform most of the services of a bank, and try to make people feel that their service is as good as one offered by a bank, why shouldn't they have to follow the laws of a bank?
Even if the students could afford to defend themselves, there is no way they could risk losing millions of dollars.
Would they actually have to pay it, though, considering that there's no way they have it? Does anyone know what happens if a student gets sued for more money than they have? Can they declare bankruptcy? Can they protect money they use for tuition? What if parents or someone else pays for tuition?
Anyway, if you don't mind the popups, some of the links are actually pretty funny, and there are a lot of current events-related humour sections.
Re:Naturally it IS price fixing
on
LCD Price Fixing?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Of course Coca-Cola could lower their prices and still make money. But if they did, then Pepsi would just lower their prices, and both companies would make less. So they both keep their prices artificially high. You can't honestly believe that carbonated sugar water costs that much to make, even with all they spend on advertising.
The same thing can easily apply to LCDs. If all the major manufacturers want to keep their profit margins high, then they can all keep their prices high.
I'm not saying it does happen. I certainly don't know. But capitalism does not on its own prevent such a thing.
I've decided that, in the interest of not becoming completely cynical, I'm just going to pretend Microsoft doesn't exist or went out of business or something. Who's with me? =P
How many Mac (pre-OS X) users out there don't remember playing great games like Maelstrom and Apeiron back in the day? Escape Velocity, too, was an awesome game, but I loved Ambrosia best for their classic games. Ambrosia made, in my opinion, the greatest shareware games for the Mac by far. Anyone who hasn't heard of them has missed out. Those were the days... =)
But as I pointed out in my post, there are other costs besides bandwidth. I believe time to be a major one. And that is easily calculated. Ask an employee how much time is wasted reading, trashing, filtering, or finding out how to filter spam mail. Multiply by hourly wage, and you know right away how much money is lost there. Also, very large companies may pay a significant amount of money to consultants, a major function of whom may be to attempt to reduce spam. Again, an easily measurable monetary value that is not insignificant.
You're right. I didn't mean to imply that the comment was directed specifically at you, but more at people in general, many of whom seem to dismiss the costs of spam. My main disagreement with your post was the statement that the cost is intangible. It is definitely there, and as tangible as wasted paper and ink, even if you have to think about it a little to discover its sources.
Whoops...my last sentence should read, "When such a large percentage of email sent every day is spam, I don't believe you can say the monetary cost is insignificant."
Sure, an email doesn't usually cost a lot to receive. But tens or even hundreds of emails a day, multiplied for instance by many employees in a business can add up to serious increases in a lot of costs.
And not just bandwidth costs. How about billing costs? You're a $300/hr consultant who has to spend half an hour a day sorting through your email trying to figure out what's spam and what's not. That's not an "intangible" cost. That's $750 a week. Sure you could find better ways to block it or sort it more efficiently or whatever, but that's another thing imposed on you by those sending the emails.
When such a large percentage of email is sent every day, I don't believe you can say the monetary cost is insignificant.
Like most people so far in this thread, I agree that Dvorak's prediction is a bit absurd...but does anyone have an explanation for the seeming development of a relationship between Apple (or at least Steve Jobs) and Intel hinted at by the three things Dvorak mentioned (Intel sales conference keynote, Pixar switching to Intel, Intel executives at Macworld)?
It makes me wonder, and I haven't read any alternate theories.
Slashdot Mirror
The 3's were supposed to be exponents, that's all.
Actually, that graph is from a study of STD transmission among high school students
Um... no, it's not. It's pretty clearly labeled as a graph of high school friendships.
It was also very academic in some respects, which probably explains why general audiences (read "unwashed masses") won't "get" it.
I really have a hard time believing that babbling men with French accents and strange pseudo-intellectualism makes for an "academic" trilogy. The fact that people who have "seen the other two movies along with the Animatrix a few times" can find (or perhaps invent) some sort of spiritual message is not proof that these movies are deep.
A good movie gets better when you watch it again, and often provides new insight as you study it. But if all that people who are not already Matrix devotees can see is a bunch of mindless, confusing, meaningless rhetoric, then I would hesitate to call it "academic."
What exactly is that? It seems to me that you are implying that women have some kind of inferior logical thought process (which you are "loath to admit" to following), and that it is "female" to think about spending money you have saved.
This appears rather sexist to me.
See the Verified Voting web site.
There you can learn about HR2239 and see where your Congressional Representative stands on the issue. Links to Representatives and Senators are included so you can contact them and let them know how you feel. Let's do something other than sit around and complain about Diebold!
No right turns there, either. It's the only city in the state where it's illegal, just like Montreal is the only one in the province.
I finally broke down and bought the textbook for my class in compilers from my school bookstore, at a price, including tax, of what amounts to nearly $110 US. Even on amazon.com, it's $84.95.
But, lo and behold, amazon.co.uk has it for the equivalent of less than $47 US!
Good thing I still have my receipt!
Chris, I have nothing against Mr. Stallman. I've never met him nor spoke to him, though I watched the documentary "Revolutionary OS" and found him rather engaging. He seems a man of principle, even if I believe he's too much of a purist for his own good, and for the good of the cause.
While I appreciate your taking the time to write so thoughtful a note, I respectfully disagree with your core point. It's an issue I've thought a lot about. The kernel is hardly only a small part of an OS. To me what you and Mr. Stallman are asking--that we in the media call Linux instead GNU/Linux--is akin to suggesting that beef stew would more accurately be called beef, carrot and potato stew. Sure, carrots and potatoes are absolutely essential, but boiled down to its essence its beef.
For the record, I did a lot of research on this point, and didn't non-chalantly decide to use Linux as opposed to GNU/Linux. I made a decision--and halfway through the piece acknowledge that some would prefer GNU/Linux.
By the by, I never said Mr. Torvalds wrote his own operating system, as your letter suggests. Of course it was a world full of programmers who did that.
Thanks for taking the time to write,
Gary Rivlin
Although your article about Linus Torvalds did a nice job of giving readers a good idea of the kind of person he is, I wonder why you felt it necessary to devote a paragraph to bashing Richard Stallman, with the only connection to Mr. Torvalds being his non-response to questions regarding Mr. Stallman. Moreover, I was disappointed by the fairly gross inaccuracies in your bashing. As you acknowledge, Richard Stallman is a forefather of the Free Software movement. He leads a philosophical school of thought that many consider to be fanatical, and he is not shy about defending his principles. This you also acknowledge.
What you completely misrepresent, however, is his contribution to the operating system you refer to as "Linux." He, and others working with him (not Mr. Torvalds) developed many essential components still used in most of the free Unix-like operating systems used today, including all variants based on Linux. These components include compilers and assemblers (essential for application development), text editors, various essential utilities, and many, many more applications. These people have, however, failed so far in producing the most essential piece in a working Unix subsitute: a viable replacement for the Unix kernel. This is what Mr. Torvalds did, and that is what Linux is: a kernel.
Thus, the 6 million lines of code in the Linux kernel form only a small part of a complete Linux-based operating system. There are many other components, and a large number of them are GNU software without which the operating system would be useless. For this Mr. Stallman would like you to call the complete operating system a GNU/Linux system. Frankly, I don't think this is too much to ask. Also, please note that no one demands that you call "Torvalds' work" GNU/Linux. They simply ask that you not use the umbrella term "Linux" to refer to everything working with the Linux kernel (the only part which is Mr. Torvald's work).
You write, "Torvalds released the kernel of his operating system well before GNU produced a reliable one of its own," as if there is some kind of competition which GNU software writers lost, and about which they are now whining. In reality, Mr. Torvalds did not write his own operating system; he wrote a kernel that worked with the operating system GNU was already developing, and today we use both together.
Many disagree with Mr. Stallman's ideals, and find him to be a generally unlikable character, and you may be one of them. But to deny his significant contributions to Linux-based operating systems out of ignorance or spite is simply unacceptable journalism.
Look, in an algorithms class, there's no good reason to be monitoring students for copying. They are (or should be) taking the class to learn. If they decide to copy other people instead of figuring out how to do things on their own, then they're wasting their own money.
A professor I had in university (for an algorithms class, no less) had this attitude: make the tests worth a lot, and make them tough. Students who copied homework will fail, and the problem corrects itself.
Hopefully, the professors you speak of have the same philosophy. As a grader, I believe your responsibility is to decide whether the questions were answered correctly, and perhaps report blatant plagiarism to the professors the students are writing for. Policing papers for copying is a waste of your time, and demeaning to students, anyway.
But before you decide that the law should cover PayPal too, consider how much banks charge for credit card transactions. Plus they rake in huge amounts from interest and client fees. If they didn't have these huge income streams, they couldn't afford to obey the federal law -- and credit cards would be a lot harder to get.
Actually, many banks have lower rates than PayPal's in terms of percentages that the seller has to pay.
Not to mention, Paypal charges that same (large) amount for all transactions, even simple balance transfers within their system.
The plus side to PayPal, I guess, is convenience for small-time users; traditional credit card processing is hard to get if you don't have a large volume.
I don't see this convenience alone as a reason to make them exempt from laws protecting consumers and sellers from fraud. If PayPal is going to act like a bank, perform most of the services of a bank, and try to make people feel that their service is as good as one offered by a bank, why shouldn't they have to follow the laws of a bank?
Actually, he put lines over the zeroes, meaning infinite repetition of them. Much less than 0.000000000000001%.
Even if the students could afford to defend themselves, there is no way they could risk losing millions of dollars.
Would they actually have to pay it, though, considering that there's no way they have it? Does anyone know what happens if a student gets sued for more money than they have? Can they declare bankruptcy? Can they protect money they use for tuition? What if parents or someone else pays for tuition?
Unsurprisingly, about.com has a current events satiric humour section. Anything they don't have a section on?
Anyway, if you don't mind the popups, some of the links are actually pretty funny, and there are a lot of current events-related humour sections.
Of course Coca-Cola could lower their prices and still make money. But if they did, then Pepsi would just lower their prices, and both companies would make less. So they both keep their prices artificially high. You can't honestly believe that carbonated sugar water costs that much to make, even with all they spend on advertising.
The same thing can easily apply to LCDs. If all the major manufacturers want to keep their profit margins high, then they can all keep their prices high.
I'm not saying it does happen. I certainly don't know. But capitalism does not on its own prevent such a thing.
I've decided that, in the interest of not becoming completely cynical, I'm just going to pretend Microsoft doesn't exist or went out of business or something. Who's with me? =P
Another troll posting useless information...as already stated, the real topic is the AMD logo next to the item.
It's Maelstrom.
How many Mac (pre-OS X) users out there don't remember playing great games like Maelstrom and Apeiron back in the day? Escape Velocity, too, was an awesome game, but I loved Ambrosia best for their classic games. Ambrosia made, in my opinion, the greatest shareware games for the Mac by far. Anyone who hasn't heard of them has missed out. Those were the days... =)
But as I pointed out in my post, there are other costs besides bandwidth. I believe time to be a major one. And that is easily calculated. Ask an employee how much time is wasted reading, trashing, filtering, or finding out how to filter spam mail. Multiply by hourly wage, and you know right away how much money is lost there. Also, very large companies may pay a significant amount of money to consultants, a major function of whom may be to attempt to reduce spam. Again, an easily measurable monetary value that is not insignificant.
You're right. I didn't mean to imply that the comment was directed specifically at you, but more at people in general, many of whom seem to dismiss the costs of spam. My main disagreement with your post was the statement that the cost is intangible. It is definitely there, and as tangible as wasted paper and ink, even if you have to think about it a little to discover its sources.
Whoops...my last sentence should read, "When such a large percentage of email sent every day is spam, I don't believe you can say the monetary cost is insignificant."
Sure, an email doesn't usually cost a lot to receive. But tens or even hundreds of emails a day, multiplied for instance by many employees in a business can add up to serious increases in a lot of costs.
And not just bandwidth costs. How about billing costs? You're a $300/hr consultant who has to spend half an hour a day sorting through your email trying to figure out what's spam and what's not. That's not an "intangible" cost. That's $750 a week. Sure you could find better ways to block it or sort it more efficiently or whatever, but that's another thing imposed on you by those sending the emails.
When such a large percentage of email is sent every day, I don't believe you can say the monetary cost is insignificant.
Like most people so far in this thread, I agree that Dvorak's prediction is a bit absurd...but does anyone have an explanation for the seeming development of a relationship between Apple (or at least Steve Jobs) and Intel hinted at by the three things Dvorak mentioned (Intel sales conference keynote, Pixar switching to Intel, Intel executives at Macworld)?
It makes me wonder, and I haven't read any alternate theories.
whereis hdparm