Is that like a high-level pally or cleric weapon? Where does it drop? Can it be multi-quested? Mana cost? Come on guys, you give us some technology you can at least provide the stats.
This sounds a lot like a deliberate strategy. Put out a proposal that's totally extreme and ridiculous to freak people out. Then when they reject it out of hand you come back with what you really wanted in the first place and it'll pass without dispute.
The term used for this strategem in Australia is the "Ambit Claim", and it's commonly used by the unions via an egregious claim against management that forces them to the table. The claims are so completely over-the-top that management must respond, which is the entire point -- forcing the dialogue to begin.
The words that matter would be the words written in constraining regulations -- that's what makes a public utility what it is, the fact that it is under the purview of a regulatory authority, i.e. some aspect of a "government".
In Australia for many years the privately held power companies had an excellent time of it -- egregious anticompetitive behaviour including cross-state price fixing on a grand scale. Look up the name "NEMMCO" for a history. It's interesting, although not terribly pretty, and not a part of our history I'm proud of.
The result of all this unconstrained trading (Oooh... the power! The Power!) did not escape the notice of the people though and regulations were written. This is what turned a number of private companies into a public utility (oddly looked after by a private company, but hey, that's Australia!).
The point I'm turning here is that Google has a huge amount of influence, and a subtle but potentially catastrophic and unbalanced control over what is seen by a segment of the population that is nearly planetary in scope. If they don't adhere closely to their "Don't be evil!" motto then they will have regulations written to constrain them.
I'm utterly convinced that this would be a bad thing, too -- I believe that Google and other search engines are the equivalent of a free press and should forever remain apart from government control -- but not all control. The best newspapers were those that knew when to tell the government to go to hell, and would stand up for their principles and their customers and content providers.
Note that word -- it's a biggie. Principles. Google has one, and it's the main reason why I've chosen to use them in preference to others. If Yahoo or Alta Vista or others of that ilk copy it (is imitation always so bad?) then perhaps I'll be more eclectic in my choices. But a free press still matters to me, and a free Internet. And the Internet is one very, very big book to try to get through without an index. "Don't be evil" is simple and unambiguious -- you might differ in what's evil and what isn't, but you'd always be able to go back to that simple statement and measure your behaviour against it. In the long run, it just might be enough to keep Google a force for good, and out of the clutches of the regulators -- if they mean it, and if they keep their self-control.
I think it makes sense in Wal-Mart land -- a planet I've never set foot upon, but I did read the story of the founder (hey I was bored) and I think the culture there is "What the customer asks for, you give him. You don't force something else on him, because he won't buy it and he'll resent the attempt".
Of course I could be entirely full of compost. Any W-M insiders there? Oh, and I work for a retailer. Not Wal-Mart, different planet altogether. We sell noodles.
Yes, but what will this reversal sound like? They look like tiny little speakers. X0R the entire disk with itself at quantum speeds! THRUmmmmmmm.. (silence as the universe implodes into an infinite void of zeros) Wow, what fidelity!
Can anybody get some estimates of the cost of training and support for a recent majour MS Office update? I figure that that should be somewhere near the cost of a switch...
Dunno, some of those new Catalyst switches from Cisco aren't that cheap...
...so like me you would have seen how much an utter disaster the attempted linux pilot was.
Not that that would have stopped them. Every new project that Telstra attempts is a disaster, including the ones I've been involved in. You are quite right about the Sun-anti-Microsoft sentiment, of course. But Ziggy was not above using his execs as pawns to push his own agenda.
Insider joke -- Telstra projects have finally run out of acronyms -- you can't open a new project unless you prefix the acronym with the number "9".
Telstra (IIRC) was going to switch to Linux until M$ offered them below normal pricing.
I can confirm that, worked for them at the time. Had a CIO poached from Sun around then, too. Bill Gates flew in to talk to Ziggy Switkowski (then CEO) and after that it was all roses between them. My opinion at the time was that it was all just a ploy to beat down Microsoft's prices, sort of the corporate version of talking to a vendor with their competitor's coffee mug on your desk.
Everything's negotiable, especially if you have 40,000 high-profile desktop licenses at stake.
The point is to reduce shear drag. It's effectively the same thing as dimples on golf balls, or pits on a wing surface. Break up the boundary layer a bit because a turbulent layer is easier to shear than an adhesive fluid.
Hang them and let the bodies rot in public so every other IP leech out there knows what their fate will be.
Tough, but fair.
This is what happens when the lawyers move in on a company. When they move out, there's this shell that looks like a bug, but the bug has long since moved on...
...works for me, I'm 57 and arthritic. Pace of the game is adjustable based on how you feel like playing. I'd suggest playing one of the pet classes -- my main's a mage, and all the hard running around is done by my elemental pet. Melee classes are a little harder, bit more keyboarding. And don't try a bard...
The black has to be as close as possible to absolute. Otherwise you'll be picked up on scanners from a long way away. You have to make your speedster totally non-ferrous, too, right down to the windings in the Bergenholm.
...thus, by tracking back to which epicycles were extant in the cosmos at that time, we were able to pinpoint the moment of the crime (a piracy, perhaps?).
Actually this story is a little old, people have had the Antikythera device scoped out for a couple of years now. It's a sort of geared astrolabe using an epicyclic model (an astronomical paradigm adopted in Ptolomy's ptime) and the parts inside the corroded find were derived by some good ol'fashioned NMI scanning.
An astrolabe is basically a clock -- an analogue computer that correlates time, star position and latitude. Look 'em up -- they're beautiful instruments and very logically constructed. Each point indicates a star, the off-centre circles (al'mucanthers) are the projections of the celestial latitudes from the polar axis (think of a bunch of hoops on one spindle of a Tower of Hanoi model, then crank the spindle off the perpendicular by a few degrees, to give you an idea of the projection. Light source on top, your shadow rings are the al'mucanthers). Move the star pointer to one of those circles, then read the index off the rim of the device (the Mater). Because of their simplicity and elegance (the mathematical model, not the construction!) they were used up until Columbus' time. If the Antikythera device had been a better predictor, we might well have seen more of them. And a lot more gears. The only thing we still use from the development of the astrolabe today is the flat head screw, seen on one model in 1565.
There's a big difference between ANONYMOUS COWARDS and people willing to SIGN THEIR WORK as it appears the former like to SHOUT IN ALL CAPS TO UNDERSCORE THEIR OPINIONS with only enough non-shouty text to get past the LAMENESS FILTERS.
Similarly, if I met someone who still believed that disease was caused by demonic possession, I'd mock them, too.
Mock me not! I have seen evidence of this! Someone showed me this little tube I could look through and there they were, swimming around waving their cilia in scandalous and unholy abandon!
Still, they did look a little Noodly, but they weren't the rightsort of Noodly. And there weren't any pirates, even though I was looking through a tube.
The reason they're anti-science is because all established religions throughout history have wanted a monopoly on magic. Clarke's Law is especially applicable here.
>It seems like it might be. You extract energy from differentials.
Very true, and any thermocouple solution has to pump the heat somewhere.
Seems like I read somewhere long ago that thermionic cooling could be achieved in a different way than the simple thermocouple, however. Something about using an ion stream to break up the boundary effect of a hot surface in air, allowing better convective dissipation of the local bubble of hot gas that tends to act as an insulator. Would a mild ion source directed at the hot chips achieve better cooling by getting more use out of the existing air flow? And if it could be a board-mount device aimed at the cpu/gpu, it might solve some space and noise problems. Anyone able to shed some light on this?
Oh, and cars are often powered, in part, by their own exhausts -- not directly, of course, but there's this thing called the "turbocharger"... it's not so much a rat farm approach (Pratchett/Vetinari) but the approach that reduces the amount of expensive heat lost in the overall process.
Sometimes it takes a long time to filter through all the features in a product before you find the one you need. From there you have to see if it works the way you want it. Lots of wasted time that way, but Sturgeon's Law applies in software too.
Few years ago I visited the USA and was taken to a hamburger place that sold only hamburgers, fries and a soft drink -- nothing else. You could order big or small. It was cheap, the food was fresh (very low shelf latency!) and they had people lining up for half a block to get in.
I guess if you actually do zero in on what people want, you can succeed by narrowing your offering a bit and focusing in on what's needed.
Utilities like Beyond Compare (I'm using that this morning) do one thing very well -- in this case directory synch across platforms. It would suck as a word processor, so there's none of that functionality in it -- but I really appreciate the one job it does very well. And I think I would distrust a word processor that had directory synch technology built into it...
Yep, poster is right, simpler remains better. Very good systems can be constructed by combining well-ordered simplicities.
Slashdot Mirror
The Caduceus is the Rod of Asclepius?
Is that like a high-level pally or cleric weapon? Where does it drop? Can it be multi-quested? Mana cost? Come on guys, you give us some technology you can at least provide the stats.
The term used for this strategem in Australia is the "Ambit Claim", and it's commonly used by the unions via an egregious claim against management that forces them to the table. The claims are so completely over-the-top that management must respond, which is the entire point -- forcing the dialogue to begin.
In Australia for many years the privately held power companies had an excellent time of it -- egregious anticompetitive behaviour including cross-state price fixing on a grand scale. Look up the name "NEMMCO" for a history. It's interesting, although not terribly pretty, and not a part of our history I'm proud of.
The result of all this unconstrained trading (Oooh... the power! The Power!) did not escape the notice of the people though and regulations were written. This is what turned a number of private companies into a public utility (oddly looked after by a private company, but hey, that's Australia!).
The point I'm turning here is that Google has a huge amount of influence, and a subtle but potentially catastrophic and unbalanced control over what is seen by a segment of the population that is nearly planetary in scope. If they don't adhere closely to their "Don't be evil!" motto then they will have regulations written to constrain them.
I'm utterly convinced that this would be a bad thing, too -- I believe that Google and other search engines are the equivalent of a free press and should forever remain apart from government control -- but not all control. The best newspapers were those that knew when to tell the government to go to hell, and would stand up for their principles and their customers and content providers.
Note that word -- it's a biggie. Principles. Google has one, and it's the main reason why I've chosen to use them in preference to others. If Yahoo or Alta Vista or others of that ilk copy it (is imitation always so bad?) then perhaps I'll be more eclectic in my choices. But a free press still matters to me, and a free Internet. And the Internet is one very, very big book to try to get through without an index. "Don't be evil" is simple and unambiguious -- you might differ in what's evil and what isn't, but you'd always be able to go back to that simple statement and measure your behaviour against it. In the long run, it just might be enough to keep Google a force for good, and out of the clutches of the regulators -- if they mean it, and if they keep their self-control.
We miss you, Zig. Sol's a realist, but he ain't Telstra.
Of course I could be entirely full of compost. Any W-M insiders there? Oh, and I work for a retailer. Not Wal-Mart, different planet altogether. We sell noodles.
Yes, but how many EQ accounts are you boxing?
Yes, but what will this reversal sound like? They look like tiny little speakers. X0R the entire disk with itself at quantum speeds! THRUmmmmmmm.. (silence as the universe implodes into an infinite void of zeros) Wow, what fidelity!
Dunno, some of those new Catalyst switches from Cisco aren't that cheap...
Not that that would have stopped them. Every new project that Telstra attempts is a disaster, including the ones I've been involved in. You are quite right about the Sun-anti-Microsoft sentiment, of course. But Ziggy was not above using his execs as pawns to push his own agenda.
Insider joke -- Telstra projects have finally run out of acronyms -- you can't open a new project unless you prefix the acronym with the number "9".
I can confirm that, worked for them at the time. Had a CIO poached from Sun around then, too. Bill Gates flew in to talk to Ziggy Switkowski (then CEO) and after that it was all roses between them. My opinion at the time was that it was all just a ploy to beat down Microsoft's prices, sort of the corporate version of talking to a vendor with their competitor's coffee mug on your desk.
Everything's negotiable, especially if you have 40,000 high-profile desktop licenses at stake.
...and hydrofoils -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofoils
The point is to reduce shear drag. It's effectively the same thing as dimples on golf balls, or pits on a wing surface. Break up the boundary layer a bit because a turbulent layer is easier to shear than an adhesive fluid.
... iirc the bottle-nosed dolphin uses a layer of bubbles when they need a burst of speed. Works for them.
Tough, but fair.
This is what happens when the lawyers move in on a company. When they move out, there's this shell that looks like a bug, but the bug has long since moved on...
Dang, I sure miss core memory.
...works for me, I'm 57 and arthritic. Pace of the game is adjustable based on how you feel like playing. I'd suggest playing one of the pet classes -- my main's a mage, and all the hard running around is done by my elemental pet. Melee classes are a little harder, bit more keyboarding. And don't try a bard...
The black has to be as close as possible to absolute. Otherwise you'll be picked up on scanners from a long way away. You have to make your speedster totally non-ferrous, too, right down to the windings in the Bergenholm.
"It was obviously an item of worship, because it certainly doesn't seem to be an item of technology"
Actually this story is a little old, people have had the Antikythera device scoped out for a couple of years now. It's a sort of geared astrolabe using an epicyclic model (an astronomical paradigm adopted in Ptolomy's ptime) and the parts inside the corroded find were derived by some good ol'fashioned NMI scanning.
An astrolabe is basically a clock -- an analogue computer that correlates time, star position and latitude. Look 'em up -- they're beautiful instruments and very logically constructed. Each point indicates a star, the off-centre circles (al'mucanthers) are the projections of the celestial latitudes from the polar axis (think of a bunch of hoops on one spindle of a Tower of Hanoi model, then crank the spindle off the perpendicular by a few degrees, to give you an idea of the projection. Light source on top, your shadow rings are the al'mucanthers). Move the star pointer to one of those circles, then read the index off the rim of the device (the Mater). Because of their simplicity and elegance (the mathematical model, not the construction!) they were used up until Columbus' time. If the Antikythera device had been a better predictor, we might well have seen more of them. And a lot more gears. The only thing we still use from the development of the astrolabe today is the flat head screw, seen on one model in 1565.
There's a big difference between ANONYMOUS COWARDS and people willing to SIGN THEIR WORK as it appears the former like to SHOUT IN ALL CAPS TO UNDERSCORE THEIR OPINIONS with only enough non-shouty text to get past the LAMENESS FILTERS.
Mock me not! I have seen evidence of this! Someone showed me this little tube I could look through and there they were, swimming around waving their cilia in scandalous and unholy abandon!
Still, they did look a little Noodly, but they weren't the rightsort of Noodly. And there weren't any pirates, even though I was looking through a tube.
The reason they're anti-science is because all established religions throughout history have wanted a monopoly on magic. Clarke's Law is especially applicable here.
-- Henry Higgens
>It seems like it might be. You extract energy from differentials.
Very true, and any thermocouple solution has to pump the heat somewhere.
Seems like I read somewhere long ago that thermionic cooling could be achieved in a different way than the simple thermocouple, however. Something about using an ion stream to break up the boundary effect of a hot surface in air, allowing better convective dissipation of the local bubble of hot gas that tends to act as an insulator. Would a mild ion source directed at the hot chips achieve better cooling by getting more use out of the existing air flow? And if it could be a board-mount device aimed at the cpu/gpu, it might solve some space and noise problems. Anyone able to shed some light on this?
Oh, and cars are often powered, in part, by their own exhausts -- not directly, of course, but there's this thing called the "turbocharger"... it's not so much a rat farm approach (Pratchett/Vetinari) but the approach that reduces the amount of expensive heat lost in the overall process.
Few years ago I visited the USA and was taken to a hamburger place that sold only hamburgers, fries and a soft drink -- nothing else. You could order big or small. It was cheap, the food was fresh (very low shelf latency!) and they had people lining up for half a block to get in.
I guess if you actually do zero in on what people want, you can succeed by narrowing your offering a bit and focusing in on what's needed.
Utilities like Beyond Compare (I'm using that this morning) do one thing very well -- in this case directory synch across platforms. It would suck as a word processor, so there's none of that functionality in it -- but I really appreciate the one job it does very well. And I think I would distrust a word processor that had directory synch technology built into it...
Yep, poster is right, simpler remains better. Very good systems can be constructed by combining well-ordered simplicities.