Gee, you're so wrong on so many points that it's hard to know where to begin.
I work for a fortune 20 company that develops hospital informatics, and there are hospitals that have the money to pay for it. Millions of dollars worth of it, actually, every day.
This isn't to say that money isn't tight, but that it's well spent when the software enhances the standard and safety of patient care. If an informatics system can just eliminate one paperwork or charting error in a year, it's paid for itself when measured against the cost of a liability action in court. If you can speed records retrieval for something like an Xray from 15 minutes to ten seconds, a physician can act on the information faster and make better decisions. I can give you fifty other examples, too.
As far as boards being in bed with a company, you'd be surprised at how competitive the selection process is for a hospital to select an informatics vendor. The process can, and often does, last in excess of a year. If a product is crap and isn't helping with patient care, it's not bought in the first place. These are doctors and nurses, remember. They have a keen eye for what does and does not help the patient and they do not suffer fools.
There is a widely accepted protocol for moving data between systems. It's called HL7. It's been around for years.
The hospitals don't care about providing the best tools to the doctors to provide the best care. They care more about charging higher fees and lining their individual pockets. I see in 10-15 years or so the entire US medical industry crashing under its own weight. It is being run as a big business instead of putting the patients first.
-=sigh=-
Actually, it's very difficult for hospitals to retain the best qualified doctors if they DON'T provide the best quality tools and facilities for them. The docs just pick up and leave and end up starting private practice boutique surgical centers. Providing the best care is the most important thing for a hospital because if they don't do that the patients go elsewhere. Margins are often less than a penny on the dollar. If you call that "lining their pockets", you need to have your head examined.
... and I'm fed up with people telling me what I do and do not need. Are you omniscient? Can you see the future? Are you God?
(If you are God, I'm really sorry about asking you to damn my luck last Friday at poker night, and I hope that you don't tell Santa because I'm really pulling for solid placement on the "nice" list this year.)
... ahem...
Inevitably, someone writes a tool or program that takes advantage of a lot more memory to do what it does. What might seem to be a perfectly acceptable amount of RAM under a given set of operational assumptions will inevitably become inadequate as the conditions that inform the assumptions -=change=- over time.
The "640K ought to be enough for anybody" Gates quote (which I probably mangled a little) is a charming example of how assumptions for what people need become hokey and stupid in a very short period of time. I was digging through one of my old parts bins looking for an adapter last weekend and came across a bunch of 4MB sticks of RAM. I know for a fact that I've been replacing systems every couple years or so, and I seem to be increasing (doubling, for the most part) the amount of RAM I build into each new system.
The programs change, the hardware changes and the amount of RAM you need changes. If I cram as much RAM into a box as possible, I make the machine more friendly to the changes that are going to happen whether I cram-the-RAM or not. Let's say that I decide to do a little coding on the box (not out of the question). Compiles are ALWAYS big memory hogs, and I want the quickest compile possible. Mo' betta RAM helps me with that.
I want as much RAM as I can get NOT because I think "more is better", but so that I don't have to worry about RAM being a factor in any future software choice (or development activity) I may make for that system. I buy the beefiest stick of RAM so that when a system has to be retired, I have a stick that I can put into something else.
Sure, my Mom or Dad will probably NEVER need more than 512MB. As for me, on the other hand, I don't want to "need" to buy more RAM to do anything that may come along. Since I can't see into the future, I plan for the change in demands ahead of time.
(In the event that you are God, please bring back whats left of the hockey season and some world peace would be nice, too.)
A couple of posts have pointed out that the photos are from 1985. Whether '85 or '83, a prototype/pre-sales mac would not have been out of the question for a legitimate developer of software for the Mac, like Microsoft.
... and the say that airport/bluetooth is an option on the $599 menu of features. I've never understood why Apple can't sell-and-tell (sell the extra hardware doohickey and tell you how to install it) their upgrades. Someone smarter than me prolly knows why, but I've always found it to be one of those things that made me look away from apple hardware in the past. The G5 iMac is a good example. Sure would be nice to be able to upgrade the video on that thing.
It's a very appealing little doodad. Just keeps getting more appealing the longer I look at it.
Actually, I have four XPCs and the only spendy one is my gaming box which came in at a little more than $1100. The remaining three (my media center PC, my Linux development box, and my Windows development box) all came it at less than $500 each... with some cannibalized parts (HDs and RAM, mostly) from old systems.
Your point about value is a good one, and I'd agree that the cute little machine offers a lot of bang for the buck, but none of the internals offer really eye-popping performance. It's a commodity-priced apple, with midrange componentry. The XPC gives you hundreds of different configurations available, depending on what you want and how much you value things like graphics capability/processing horespower, etc.
I'd argue that the real value of this little number comes in that it's a Mac, and you don't have to pony up 1K+ to get something that will acceptably run OSX.
I guess I don't see how this new cheap little Mac is even in the same product space as the XPC, even if its range of uses may overlap with that of a homebuilt XPC.
I'll probably buy one myself, but it certainly won't be able to replace my XPCs.
At first I thought it was pretty neat, then I saw the last pic on page four of the "How" series and I saw all that nasty cabling spouting out of the poor beast. How 'bout we check back in a couple months to assess fit and finish?
I really enjoy people's mods, but the ones I like are well-dressed. You can build a shoebox PC, but the REALLY cool shoebox (or any mod) PC will have neatly routed or concealed cables & ports.
Still, it's a great effort and a neat idea. He gets mad props from me. I just hope the thing isn't on fire when the guy gets home from work, given all the traffic it's had to handle.
I'd be interested in knowing how it's held up after slashdotting. These mini-ITX jobs are not the most useful machines in the first place, and just using one as a web server has got to be a challenge right from the top. I know that getting the pages across the pond was a real bitch. Hopefully the iGrill performs better for those in the UK. Are there any Brits out there that can offer a performance report?
He's talking about placing text/images -=tattooed=- on his forehead with non-permanent inks. Why go to a tattoo parlor anyhow, but to get tattooed? If all he's going to do is paint letters & logos with an indelible marker. -=aw darn, I should notta have said that=-, isn't the value of the ad space a little bit less?
Can someone ban indelible markers, like right now, please?
*sigh*
... ebay, find me the guy that will tattoo my slashdot ID on his forehead, please, for a low monthy payment with regular artist-supervised touch-ups, and a dozen free pairs of fruit-of-the-loom underwear...
The guy is stooopid, and I hope he gets lots of customers. Hundreds. He'll do it ONCE, I predict.
Any tattoo on your head hurts A LOT. It's one of the two most painful areas on the human body to get a tattoo.
He'll get halfway through the first letter or logo, lose control of his bowels, and we'll never hear from him again because he'll be busy sending back all that money.
I have four shuttles (all are SS51Gs -- one for gaming, one is my media center PC, one is my Linux box and the fourth is a development machine) and they're all great machines. Reliable, durable, and the three that run the cool, power-sipping celerons are pretty quiet. My gaming shuttle, sporting a 2.8 P4 and a Radeon 9800 Pro AGP card, is a lot warmer and also noisier, but still less noisy than full-size ATX boxes I've built with five fans in them.
So call me a shuttle fanboy -- I can take it. As soon as they offer a flex-ATX that takes the 64-bit AMD athlon AND has support for PCI-express, I'll upgrade the gaming box.
Some points have been raised that BTX is a more bloated form factor than the traditional shuttle flex-ATX that we've been used to, and I'd agree. I think that the increase in size is due to a couple things:
Instead of just being smaller, SFF systems are increasingly being judged on the features they incorporate. New features add heat and often need more space on-board when they're first introduced. The size of a flex-ATX board layout was probably becoming restrictive to the desire to add new features.
Given that they needed the additional space, adding a half-inch on each side of a shuttle isn't that big of a bloat. These machines are very compact right from the start, and the lack of ample space for some of the wider AGP cards (or vid card heatpipes/other vid card cooling solutions) has been the subject of some shuttle SFF user grousing for awhile now.
When I first started building PCs some 4 years ago, I became used to having to unravel driver and moboard firmware issues as part of the job. With each of my shuttles -- each sporting a different OS -- I've had zero issues. Linux support has been great (I've only tried Fedora Core, RedHat9 and Suse, so the sample size ain't all that large, admittedly).
For me, the biggest plusses of XPCs are that they have fewer fans (and are, hence, more quiet), are very portable, and where I used to have one biga$$ tower I can have three shuttles. If I were putting together a cluster/server farm, they'd probably be a good choice, too, because I could cram lots of them into a small space.
SFFs are getting a lot more exposure, and I think that's a good thing. That Shuttle is emerging into the BTX space is also a good thing, imho.
I really enjoy the cinematics portion of most games. The graphics are almost always better than that found in the actual game and there's a real attempt to try and convey some important thematic elements of the game in the animated cequences.
Apart from that, they're just really fun to watch.
G4 used to have this show called "cinematech" that was composed of just cinematics or gameplay excerpts. I can't say that I liked most of the gameplay shots, but the cinematics were pretty cool... even for games that I'd never play.
I think that the UT2K4 cinematics were great. I liked Warhammer, too. I still play both of those, too.
I checked out the page and the concept seems pretty neat -- kinda like painting on your own faraday cage. I wonder how well it affects the color or application of the paint. The window-tinty film is also a pretty cool concept, too, though it looks like it'd cut down on a lot of visible daylight along with keeping your wifi in. I like my sunshine.
The burning question I have (and hopefully a smarter-person-than-I can clue me in) is how is this going to affect my AM/FM/SW radio reception inside my house? It almost seems like a rooftop antenna would become a must-have, assuming that the blockage of signal would keep all those friendly informational radio waves from getting INTO my house.
I just read the article and while I can see how some folks might find what they're doing uninteresting, I got a kick out of it.
My wife and I used to "team up" to solve Tomb Raider puzzles -- it was a pretty cool thing. She's spot something I didn't, or would have a different approach to a certain action sequence. We would each keep our own solo games rolling, but the cooperative game would be our fave, always.
I guess the thing I find most cool about this article is that these are nine physically disabled people who live in an institution (a care center) and they play cooperatively in a virtual world. In that world, their avatar does not have any of their physical limitations and they can do things that they simply would not be able to do in RL. It must give them a real sense of freedom. What's more, they don't appear to anyone else in that virtual world as a person (or people, in this case) with any disability.
I worked for a couple years in a care center and things are so regimented, so planned, that a variety of new experiences is really hard for people to come by. Some folks would watch TV all day. Others would live for the morning paper. Still others would look forward for an entire week to the arrival of the library lady and new books. If I brought a few old magazines in, they'd be devoured from cover to cover and passed around from room to room. These were the people who were in the best shape. You could see (and were often told as much by the residents themselves) that they had so very little control over ANYTHING in their lives, and that many felt abandoned by their relatives to a facility that was little more than a prison. The sense of hopelessness was incredible, at times.
I'm sure that whatever qualitative issues people might have with the game they play, one has to admit that nine people acting as the same avatar is pretty incredible even for people who have no physical limitations. I'm willing to bet that each of the players probably thinks about the game when they're not playing, and that they probably dream about or in the virtual world that they play in. When they motor over to the computer to log in I'm sure it gives great satisfaction to do the things they've been thinking about since their last session, or try something they dreamt about.
If you're a resident of a care center, you're treated as an object. You're acted ON -- you're fed, you're bathed, you're clothed, you're read to, you're moved from place to place -- you control nothing except your own mind. I think it's very cool that they get to control something, some representation of themselves, for at least as long as they're logged in. For those brief periods, I'm sure that the boring beige halls and walls of the facility fade away, the wheelchairs are forgotten and time flies. How cool. How totally frickin' cool.
Agreed. Most of what's been posted is pretty helpful stuff, too, so I don't think everyone's been negative, despite your perception. I didn't see any attacks, per se.
It should be noted that a LAN party is not necessarily the easiest thing to set up. Ours (6 people) comes together and is taken apart in less than five minutes each way. That's after years of practice and gathering all the necessary equipment. We recently brought in a new guy and just getting him outfitted to play with us took a full hour. Knowing what we know now, we could probably scale up to about 30 people without too much trouble, but that's knowing what we know after doing it a couple hundred times. Doing the best you can the first time is pretty important, especially if there are fundraising ambitions.
Because you see organizations that make it look easy, it's also easy to assume that it's a simple thing to do. It's not. Making money out of it is also not so easy. When some of the posts have said that it's a very tough thing to do, and tough to make money, they were probably trying to put a reality check on his perception that it's an "effective, exciting" solution.
It's better, I think, for him to be told about some of the very real pitfalls to expect and allow him to plan accordingly. Ultimately, it's about having fun, and I think this guy's going to have a lot of fun when he gets it rolling. Once he's got a formula that works, he can repeat it and share his knowledge with someone else, which is what I think most of the respondents are doing.
You have, one might say, your work cut out for yourself. Many of the posts here allude to the challenges, but I felt like I could add some planning advice. I'm in a LAN group of about 6 people that meets weekly at various locations, and we've been doing this for years.
My first suggestion is to hold your own informal LAN party at home every week for a couple months to get a feel for the logistics. You'll get a feeling for the challenges very very quickly. If you're planning on playing for six hours and you end up spending three on machine setup, network config and game patching, your LAN party idea is doomed. You have to get people set up and ready to play in 15 minutes, so planning is important. You may be able to get five or six people to play regularly, and maybe someone else can get a different group of 5-6 players meeting this way. Share notes on what works and what doesn't, decide on the games you'd like to play and what patch level you want to be at.
You didn't say what your materials are, for one thing, and you didn't say how many people would be interested. These are BIG questions that you need to answer.
It sounds like you might have one network jack in each classroom, at least in a few rooms. Your school's network should already accommodate fast ethernet and should be able to hand out IP addresses via DHCP. Putting one 8-port switch in each room should be sufficient.
Decide what you're going to play! If you have to meet the approval of a teacher or chaperon sponsor, make sure they know what you're going to play. UT2K4 can be a great game for a larger LAN party, because it has a number of different game types. You can rotate from onslaught to CTF to assault, for example. If it's too gory or violent, then you'll have to pick from other options. As with questions others have raised about licensing, each person will have to buy their own copy of the game, unless you can get a game company to donate copies. Remember that everyone will have to have the proper patches applied, and if you plan on using add-on maps/skins, you'll have to make sure that these are also available. Burning five or six setup CDs withe the game patches and add-ons will make setting up each player's environment as easy as possible. Another thing to look at is if you're going to be running servers (such as UT2K4 or Call of Duty or Rise of Nations or whatever), bear in mind that it's often nice to have servers that are set up and named for the skill level of the players that will be playing on them. Having just one UT server with the bots cranked up to godlike abilities is not going to appeal to people that only frag every few months.
If people are going to bring their own machines, decide on what the minimum standards are for the hardware. If you pick a game that requires top-flight hardware, not everyone's parents will be interested in having to pony up 100-500 dollars for the necessary upgrades. You have to pick a game that fits the hardware constraints you have, and pick hardware constraints that will make the game you choose equally playable by everyone. One of the nice things about the XBOX suggestion posted by someone else is that the hardware is pretty standardized and the titles are probably familiar enough to most parents. If you're running servers, make sure they're well-oufitted with RAM and decent processing power to handle the load. A server meltdown can bring the whole show down very quickly.
Power is important. If you're playing with PCs, each person will need a minimum of three power outlets: 1 for monitor 1 for PC and 1 for something else (speakers, mebbe). How many power strips can you get together in one place? Remember that extension cords will become pretty valuable in getting power to each seating area
Decide in advance what people must bring to the event. Is everyone supposed to bring their own power cords/strips/monitor/PC/mouse/keyboard/joystick? One thing to remember is that people will be more likely to abuse hardware they do not own, so if you're using machines from
I differ with you, but I appreciate your sentiments. I agree that parents should be empowered to raise their children according to their wishes, but it's a power parents already have. Home schooling and private/parochial schools are good examples. If you want to raise your kids in a certain way or to abide by a set of morals of your choosing, great -- by all means please be that kind of active participant in the kids' development. Really, nobody's ever been stopped from taking the leadership role in raising their children. That's what a parent should be doing.
However, having a law out there to do what a parent should be doing -- taking a guiding role in deciding what's right for the kid -- is admission that parents have no control. I just don't buy it. Parents DO have control, and if they don't exercise it then it's their own discipline problem, not that of the states. What if you're the kind of parent that has no problem with violent video games -- you have to report to the store with your kid each and every time they want to pick up a new title? What a pain. Maybe you'll sleep better at night knowing that more permissive parents will have an additional hoop to jump through, but it's ultimately their responsible choice as to whether or not to control what their kids are buying.
I think the main reason why I'm against the idea is that it's more big-government intrusion into commerce. There's going to have to be fifty new statewide advisory boards that are responsible for setting up the criteria for age restrictions, and these boards will have to examine every title to make sure it's being handled in the way appropiate to the law, and don't forget that there's gonna have to be a new government agency created to make sure the law gets enforced, too, all of which will raise taxes. I don't want to pay tax money for something parents should be doing for themselves. I don't want big government forcing any agenda on me -- even if the agenda wraps itself in concern for children. Let my concern and my love for my children dictate the way I act and what I allow them to do.
As for your support of extending this type of age-restriction law to cover ALL media -- you're welcome to your opinion, but I don't share it because it is overly broad. Games are not books. Sure, some books deal with very troubling topics (like war, death, hatred or disease, for example) but books are not uniquely entertainment-oriented materials. Neither are periodicals. Neither are films. In general, I'm of the camp that wants to avoid as much censorship as possible, and also avoid as much big government intrusion into people's lives as possible.
Thankfully, I have posted so late in the topic that nobody will read my post, but I feel that I have to get my impressions down in ASCII text.
I watched for about 15 minutes. It was all I could take. As an avid PC gamer, and NOT a console gamer, I felt that I was completely left out. The only celebs I saw were of the supermodel/athlete/rapstar/musician variety. SnoopDog's performance sucked my dog's ass, but then again I've never understood his appeal in the first place.
I was hoping for something a little less hip-hop and something a little more technical. I didn't hear engine design talked about. I didn't see any actually game developers/producers there. I didn't see any awards for art design, RTS titles, simulators, MMORPGs or anything like that. How about best RPG-fantasy, or best RPG-modern day? How about best multiplayer? How about best FPS sequel or bonus pack? I didn't see any more evaluation of the games other than "what's really popular right now?". Where were the experts. Where was the "legacy award for the designer of "Joust", or the misty retrospective of vector graphics games. Maybe I got fed up too soon and it was there all the time if I had only stuck with it, but it just stank so bad that I had to turn away.
I think some others who have posted to this topic recognized something that I also saw: that gamers have become stereotypes -- zit-faced, controller-strangling, button-mashing, screaming red-eyed freaks. The odd part is that I noticed in a few of the audience shots that there were a few portly bespectacled guys in button-down shirts who were kind of trying to figure out whether to headbang or toe-tap while waving hands in the air for SnoopDog's "Hey! Ho! Hey! Ho!". I felt a little better, but it passed very quickly and I was nauseous again.
Jem just needs to face the fact that MS rules the generic office productivity product space and it will never be unseated. One of the keys to the castle is that there is very little innovation left in office productivity software. It's already been done and redone and refined and distilled and the weakest entrants are all dead. OpenOffice is dead, too, and that's why Sun let it go... there was nothing to improve and no new feature being asked of an office productivity suite. MSOffice is so feature-crowded precisely because MS packed every feature that people asked for into the suite. In true Borg fashion, they also bought a ton of companies that had those features and added their distinctiveness to the collective feature set. When I scan the covers of the computer/software mags, there're no headlines like:
"MS Adds a Slew of Brilliant New MS Excel Spreadsheet Features!"
"Check Out the 50 Hottest New Improvements in the All-New MS Powerpoint!"
"The New MS Word Has the 100 Crucial Advancements that Will Amaze Your Friends and Impress Your Boss!"
"Why I Finally Switched to MSOffice: A CIO's Tale"
Why is that?... it's because the product space has been boiled down to just one suite of apps -- MSOffice.
In the very beginning of my tech life, before DOS made it into my life (early 80s), I used WordStar on CP/M. Then I dabbled with apple and used BankStreetWriter, then I found DOS and used WordPerfect, and finally I landed in MSOffice. There's no reason to move out of MSOffice. It does everything I need along with a metric TON of stuff I don't need, and what's more everyone else in the world uses it, too. If they don't have it, they can find it at the local school, university/public library or kinkos or wherever.
What continues to dazzle me (and I'm guessing that Jem probably shares this observation) is that MS keeps making people pay innovation prices for what's really become a static, mature product. By all rights, you should be able to pick up the MSOffice Suite for 15 bucks in the CompUSA/BestBuy/Costco/SAMSclub bargain bin. Yet people still pay the premium because it's one suite of software you absolutely must have to work with all the other people in the world.
Anecdote: A buddy of mine "went Mac" after years of PC-style living. He got tired of dealing with Windows, mostly. I'd suggested OOo for the longest time to him as a way to cut into the cost of operating, but it didn't pass muster. The apps were still not that polished (still are) and the file formats were a problem (still a problem) and interoperability with the MS-world was sub-par (still is). What finally got him to "go Mac"? MS ported their office suite (just the few parts of it he needed) to MacOS. Kind of ironic, isn't it? It's proof, though, that even the anti-MS crowd is forced to kneel at the feet of MS. That's total dominance, and also the reason why MS shares now offer a nice little dividend.
Can we hope that MS will open up their document formats to the world and let true interoperability ensue? Yeah. There's always hope.
Oh, and the bit at the end:
... software companies die, but information lasts forever. If a company takes the secrets of unlocking your data to its grave, where will that leave you?
Microsoft will never die. It can't. Too many enterprises and governments have bought into it. Can it become less popular --> used less often? Perhaps, but the company will always be there to sell the same old products to you year after year after year. No worries.
I read Brian's piece and it seems like he's just another evangelizing solar power enthusiast. Most folks who use solar energy as a supplement to other energy sources like to share their results and enthusiasm for it. The motives are noble, I think, and Brian did a good job of drawing some parallels between the emergent consumer market for solar electricity at home and that of computing technology 30 years ago.
I guess that I don't see how it's such a good fit for Silicon Valley. I'll admit that the area is perfect for research and development and there are scads of people out there in various engineering and research capacities to draw upon. The feeling I got from Brian's piece, though, is one that the pace of development for computing and materials technology in the area is waning and there's a vacuum that needs to be filled.
(As I read it, I visualized a bunch of software and computer hardware engineers sitting around in beanbag chairs, sipping tasty beverages, gazing out the window looking at the near-empty lots in the office park and saying to each other "Whew! What a ride. Too bad we don't have something else to do. Hey, howsabout we make solar electricity cheaper?")
Sure, some of the economics of the area have hit some rough spots, but there are all kinds of other research and development activities that go on in the region that don't tie directly into the consumer computing market. Sure, maybe it's a place where consumer solar electricity could be added to the mix, but why not do that somewhere, dare I say it, -=other=- than California? What about Phoenix, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Denver, Austin, Oklahoma City, Lincoln, K.C, et al.? I'm thinking sunny western states, mostly, but the point is why not foster that kind of product development in a new place?
I'm sure someone will point out to me, as I've heard it said in the past "Well, if you're going to innovate and make new products, you have to go to where the innovators and the production centers are." At one point, I'm sure it was true, but now we have the innovation and production centers in places all over the world. I'm sure that Brian wanted to keep the scope of the paper pretty narrowly pointed to California for obvious reasons: he lives there and he has a sense that the state has had a rough ride on both the electricity and computing technology fronts. Yet, since the boom in the Valley, airfares are cheaper than ever, engineers are cheaper than ever, telecommunications is cheaper than ever, and cities outside California will bend over backwards to make setting up innovative new businesses a cheap-to-free activity.
<plug_for_my_region shameless=true> Out here in the Denver-metro area, we've got square miles of unoccupied office space, an educated workforce, more sunny days than San Diego, a great telecom infrastructure, a cost of living that's 30% less,... and mountains. </plug_for_my_region>
So, while I find Brian's parallels interesting and compelling, I think the job would fit better elsewhere.
One more thing -- a few posters on this topic have asserted that because they live in cloudy places, solar would not be a good fit. I was in Tahiti a few years ago during the rainy season and while there are small diesel-generated electrical grids on most of the more populated islands, solar-electric power for water heating is pretty common out there and the water is hot even on the cloudy days. And the cloudy days can last for weeks. Daylight is pretty much all you need to keep the water hot. Where folks don't use solar hot water, they heat on-demand with liquid propane gas.
"Might makes right"? If that's how you feel, then okay. I don't feel that way, and I think you may be misenterpreting what I wrote. I was replying to oexeo's question about why we don't make war with China, given his list of reasons why we should. My short list (by no means complete, and I admitted as much) gave a few of what I thought the big reasons were. I'm not a fan of warmongering, I'll admit it. If you truly believe that the only way you can convince a nation to change its ways is to make war threats or actually attack them, I would ask you to consider that there might be other options, and that there might be very good reasons for not going to war until it's really necessary.
Oddly, apart from your first two hyperbolic sentences regarding my post, you seem to have understood my reasons pretty well in the next five lines.
We are too weak (and not strong enough to persuade every nation on the planet to make a unified front against China).
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. It's the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts.
American corporate interests supersede the imperative for peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights.
Yes, exactly. This is how our government works, regardless of who sits in the oval office.
China is getting better on their own. Let them do it at their pace.
Precisely. If they do it on their own then they can claim the success as their own and not feel that they've been coerced into something. What they create will fit their own cultural sensibilities.
It would be necessary to totally "destroy" China in order to engender substantial change.
I don't know about total destruction. (I didn't say "total" -- that's your own hyperbola talking.) Remember, the post I was replying to was asking why we don't make war on China. What wasn't stated explicitly in my short list is that if you went into war with China to eliminate all of the things in oexeo's list, you would not have China anymore -- it would be something else, something it hasn't ever been in thousands of years. China would cease to be Chinese, and would be destroyed.
China might "nuke us" if we tryied to force them in any way.
I didn't say that. What I said was that if we were to attack China, we'd be the prime candidates for nuclear retaliation and no nation in the world would disagree with them for responding in such a way. We'd be behaving just like the... you guessed right!... the Nazis!
Your last two sentences are pretty depressing, I'll admit, but you don't see us invading Russia, either, do you, and they've got many of the same problems China does. You also don't see anyone invading us. Being big and powerful has it's advantages, but it doesn't make any nation "right", including the US. Our crap stinks, too, after all.
As for Germany, if you do your homework you'll note that after annexing the Sudetenland, partnering with the Italians, grabbing Poland and France and Holland and Belgium and Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and most of North Africa, Germany WAS the largest nation in western Europe. The US had a strictly isolationist foreign policy then, and Roosevelt was very unwilling to get caught up in the war. Recall that just short of twenty years before we had lost more than a hundred thousand men in a war aginst Germany. In "the war to end all wars", France, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost more than a million men EACH. England lost almost a million. Germany was a powerful nation but it was also over-extended. Had England not asked us, with the support of the Vichy government of France, we probably would have allowed Germany to take everything they wanted. So, what you suggest in your last sentence very nearly happened. Ultimately, it was our sympathy for England and France that stoked our war fires against German imperialism. If Germany were to take England, they'd have only a short hop to go to get to us, so there was a little self-interest at work, there, too.
Actually, we have been to war with China, indirectly, a couple of times. The Korean War and the Vietnam War come to mind. In both cases, we didn't "win".
I seem to recall that there's some little technicality in the armistice we signed with North Korea that says that we're still at war, but not openly hostile anymore. If anyone can shed some light on this hazy recollection of mine, please do, but my understanding has always been that the war is still on, but cooling on a shelf at the DMZ.
Anyhoo, there are probably a number of reasons why we're not at war with China:
- Our military forces are too small for the task.
- Our leaders refuse to re-enstate the draft to swell the ranks of the military.
- Even if we drafted everyone, we still would not have enough soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen to take the place over because China is really really BIG.
- Lots of American companies have a very active and profitable presence in China.
- The Chinese are taking very slow steps towards freedom or religeon and ownership, and there's a fast-growing growing consumer culture in China for western goods.
- Once you've destroyed China, what do you do then? We don't have enough speakers of Chinese to manage a rebuilding effort of any kind.
- We know they'd nuke us back to the stone age if we started something, and every other nation in the world would agree with China that we deserved it.
That's just my own short list, but I'm sure there are at least twice as many more reasons.
I do find your post a flamebait troll, actually, though I did not do the modding. Here's why:
1) Public education is a progressive endeavor, not necessarily a liberal one. Giving women the right to vote was also a progressive effort, not necessarily a liberal one. The GI bill was a progressive act, not necessarily a liberal one. Nobody really thinks that any of these things was a bad idea. To say that public education was a product of liberalism is an insult to the progressive republican voices that participated in creating an adequate nationwide public education system. If you do your homework, you'll note that it was only created to be adequate, not fantastic or super-duper. The goal was to educate kids such that they could read, write and perform basic business calculations. That was it. At the time (the late 1920s and the 1930s), this was far ahead of most of the world, most of our population lived in rural areas and we were very much ahead of the game. Most of what the system required was standardization of grade levels such that someone in grade 6 in one part of the country could relocate with parents to another part of the country and be able to pick up at roughly the same place in a curriculum. It's not so simple, now.
2) Your assertion that liberals were in control of Congress is overblown. Congress may lean from Republican to Democratic party majority over the years, but nothing gets done on a national level without the broad consensus of all elected representatives -- regardless of whether they be "liberal" or "conservative". Take, for example, the Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). Every Libertarian and Republican shooter I know (and I know hundreds of 'em) blames the "scary liberal democrats" for that one, yet the AWB enjoyed the support of the majority of Republican legislators and would not have passed without that support. Look it up. You might be surprised to find out how many of today's neo-conservative voices were leaning liberal on that one.
3) Your experience in K.C. is interesting but probably also offtopic because it does not say anything about how well K.C. students were doing at the time. Do you have any performance data for public school students during that timeframe? If you don't have it all, maybe just the math part? The cost of a 4-year Harvard education in the mid-1980s was about 75,000. If you divide that by 12 years of schooling (which I did in longhand, fwiw) is $6,250 per year. If you include kindergarten, the number is a little less. Considering that the average new hire public schoolteacher only takes home less than four times that amount, I'd say the figures you provide are probably accurate and likely represent the true cost of educating a student in the public system. It's good value, imho. As a side note, the cost of a 4-year Harvard education has gone up a bit to somewhere around $100-110,000, but the cost of a full public school education, given inflation, has also gone up.
4) Why are all remarks about Bush considered stupid? Isn't it a little early to start getting defensive? The NCLB act is nothing but a testing effort. The tests are meant to describe a set of standards for academic achievement that all students must meet. I think it's a good idea on the face of it, frankly, because you can't improve something if you don't have any objective data about how effective your efforts are. What happens, though, after you have the data? If you have an underperforming school, is it because there are too few teachers for students?, is it because the teachers are underqualified?, is it because the texts are outdated?, is it because the teaching techniques are outdated?, is it because the school isn't being heated/cooled properly?, is it because the students lack proper materials?, is it because the parents in the community are not as involved as they should be? See, any of these things could be the cause, but the NCLB tests don't give any of this information. Instead, what you get are curricula that are geared completely to the test, much in the same way that public
Disclosure: I read the affidavit and not the article.
I take sworn affidavits pretty seriously. He's willing to swear that Mr. Feeney's office was looking into the software so that they could steer the Florida vote. If he's found to be lying (and I'm sure that forces will be marshalled to de-legitimize him), there are pretty severe penalties for filing false affidavits. The man has a lot at risk by filing this affidavit, and I'm sure he's aware that his whole life can be ruined as a result of this.
When I put on my tinfoil hat, I can see him being added to no fly lists and having his credit reports besmirched by "identity fraud". Thank goodness I only use the hat for creative purposes.
The vote there in Flo-riddah was VERY close in 2000, and I believe that it went in 2004 in exactly the 49/51 way he describes. Furthermore, Ohio went in the same proportion, too, as I recall. (corrections?)
It makes me very suspicious of close races, more than anything, and also makes me want a voter-verifiable paper trail to be created. I'd go even further to say that I'd want the actual vote count to be run off of the paper trail. (Just show the paper record to the voter and ask the voter if it matches with their computer selections.) A computerized system can be a big step forward in terms of making the act of voting easier, but the lack of verifiability gives me the willies.
I heard a number of right-wing pundits saying that this past election was the start of a 30-year dominance by the Republicans, and while I hope that isn't the case, I also hope that computerized touch-screen voting can be made as verifiable as paper ballots.
It's an old English prep school song (one of many), first sung (to the music of "Frere Jacques") primarily as a mnemonic device for remembering the esoteric name for "The line segment through a focus of a conic section, perpendicular to the major axis, which has both endpoints on the curve.", and sung most often after the geometry test because it has the word "rectum" in it. My dear old math teacher, Dr. Kelly, taught it to us back in 6th grade and I've never forgotten it.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a fortune 20 company that develops hospital informatics, and there are hospitals that have the money to pay for it. Millions of dollars worth of it, actually, every day.
This isn't to say that money isn't tight, but that it's well spent when the software enhances the standard and safety of patient care. If an informatics system can just eliminate one paperwork or charting error in a year, it's paid for itself when measured against the cost of a liability action in court. If you can speed records retrieval for something like an Xray from 15 minutes to ten seconds, a physician can act on the information faster and make better decisions. I can give you fifty other examples, too.
As far as boards being in bed with a company, you'd be surprised at how competitive the selection process is for a hospital to select an informatics vendor. The process can, and often does, last in excess of a year. If a product is crap and isn't helping with patient care, it's not bought in the first place. These are doctors and nurses, remember. They have a keen eye for what does and does not help the patient and they do not suffer fools.
There is a widely accepted protocol for moving data between systems. It's called HL7. It's been around for years.
The hospitals don't care about providing the best tools to the doctors to provide the best care. They care more about charging higher fees and lining their individual pockets. I see in 10-15 years or so the entire US medical industry crashing under its own weight. It is being run as a big business instead of putting the patients first.
-=sigh=-
Actually, it's very difficult for hospitals to retain the best qualified doctors if they DON'T provide the best quality tools and facilities for them. The docs just pick up and leave and end up starting private practice boutique surgical centers. Providing the best care is the most important thing for a hospital because if they don't do that the patients go elsewhere. Margins are often less than a penny on the dollar. If you call that "lining their pockets", you need to have your head examined.
(If you are God, I'm really sorry about asking you to damn my luck last Friday at poker night, and I hope that you don't tell Santa because I'm really pulling for solid placement on the "nice" list this year.)
Inevitably, someone writes a tool or program that takes advantage of a lot more memory to do what it does. What might seem to be a perfectly acceptable amount of RAM under a given set of operational assumptions will inevitably become inadequate as the conditions that inform the assumptions -=change=- over time.
The "640K ought to be enough for anybody" Gates quote (which I probably mangled a little) is a charming example of how assumptions for what people need become hokey and stupid in a very short period of time. I was digging through one of my old parts bins looking for an adapter last weekend and came across a bunch of 4MB sticks of RAM. I know for a fact that I've been replacing systems every couple years or so, and I seem to be increasing (doubling, for the most part) the amount of RAM I build into each new system.
The programs change, the hardware changes and the amount of RAM you need changes. If I cram as much RAM into a box as possible, I make the machine more friendly to the changes that are going to happen whether I cram-the-RAM or not. Let's say that I decide to do a little coding on the box (not out of the question). Compiles are ALWAYS big memory hogs, and I want the quickest compile possible. Mo' betta RAM helps me with that.
I want as much RAM as I can get NOT because I think "more is better", but so that I don't have to worry about RAM being a factor in any future software choice (or development activity) I may make for that system. I buy the beefiest stick of RAM so that when a system has to be retired, I have a stick that I can put into something else.
Sure, my Mom or Dad will probably NEVER need more than 512MB. As for me, on the other hand, I don't want to "need" to buy more RAM to do anything that may come along. Since I can't see into the future, I plan for the change in demands ahead of time.
(In the event that you are God, please bring back whats left of the hockey season and some world peace would be nice, too.)
He must have used the Mac as the inspiration for windows, I guess.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000590026982/
It's a very appealing little doodad. Just keeps getting more appealing the longer I look at it.
I'm going to have to hide my wallet, I think.
Your point about value is a good one, and I'd agree that the cute little machine offers a lot of bang for the buck, but none of the internals offer really eye-popping performance. It's a commodity-priced apple, with midrange componentry. The XPC gives you hundreds of different configurations available, depending on what you want and how much you value things like graphics capability/processing horespower, etc.
I'd argue that the real value of this little number comes in that it's a Mac, and you don't have to pony up 1K+ to get something that will acceptably run OSX. I guess I don't see how this new cheap little Mac is even in the same product space as the XPC, even if its range of uses may overlap with that of a homebuilt XPC.
I'll probably buy one myself, but it certainly won't be able to replace my XPCs.
I really enjoy people's mods, but the ones I like are well-dressed. You can build a shoebox PC, but the REALLY cool shoebox (or any mod) PC will have neatly routed or concealed cables & ports.
Still, it's a great effort and a neat idea. He gets mad props from me. I just hope the thing isn't on fire when the guy gets home from work, given all the traffic it's had to handle.
I'd be interested in knowing how it's held up after slashdotting. These mini-ITX jobs are not the most useful machines in the first place, and just using one as a web server has got to be a challenge right from the top. I know that getting the pages across the pond was a real bitch. Hopefully the iGrill performs better for those in the UK. Are there any Brits out there that can offer a performance report?
Very neat. Now I'm hungry for a grilled sandwich.
He's talking about placing text/images -=tattooed=- on his forehead with non-permanent inks. Why go to a tattoo parlor anyhow, but to get tattooed? If all he's going to do is paint letters & logos with an indelible marker. -=aw darn, I should notta have said that=-, isn't the value of the ad space a little bit less?
Can someone ban indelible markers, like right now, please?
*sigh*
It's a cruel world.
=- heavy sigh -=
Any tattoo on your head hurts A LOT. It's one of the two most painful areas on the human body to get a tattoo.
He'll get halfway through the first letter or logo, lose control of his bowels, and we'll never hear from him again because he'll be busy sending back all that money.
So call me a shuttle fanboy -- I can take it. As soon as they offer a flex-ATX that takes the 64-bit AMD athlon AND has support for PCI-express, I'll upgrade the gaming box.
Some points have been raised that BTX is a more bloated form factor than the traditional shuttle flex-ATX that we've been used to, and I'd agree. I think that the increase in size is due to a couple things:
When I first started building PCs some 4 years ago, I became used to having to unravel driver and moboard firmware issues as part of the job. With each of my shuttles -- each sporting a different OS -- I've had zero issues. Linux support has been great (I've only tried Fedora Core, RedHat9 and Suse, so the sample size ain't all that large, admittedly).
For me, the biggest plusses of XPCs are that they have fewer fans (and are, hence, more quiet), are very portable, and where I used to have one biga$$ tower I can have three shuttles. If I were putting together a cluster/server farm, they'd probably be a good choice, too, because I could cram lots of them into a small space.
SFFs are getting a lot more exposure, and I think that's a good thing. That Shuttle is emerging into the BTX space is also a good thing, imho.
I really enjoy the cinematics portion of most games. The graphics are almost always better than that found in the actual game and there's a real attempt to try and convey some important thematic elements of the game in the animated cequences.
Apart from that, they're just really fun to watch.
G4 used to have this show called "cinematech" that was composed of just cinematics or gameplay excerpts. I can't say that I liked most of the gameplay shots, but the cinematics were pretty cool ... even for games that I'd never play.
I think that the UT2K4 cinematics were great. I liked Warhammer, too. I still play both of those, too.
The burning question I have (and hopefully a smarter-person-than-I can clue me in) is how is this going to affect my AM/FM/SW radio reception inside my house? It almost seems like a rooftop antenna would become a must-have, assuming that the blockage of signal would keep all those friendly informational radio waves from getting INTO my house.
My wife and I used to "team up" to solve Tomb Raider puzzles -- it was a pretty cool thing. She's spot something I didn't, or would have a different approach to a certain action sequence. We would each keep our own solo games rolling, but the cooperative game would be our fave, always.
I guess the thing I find most cool about this article is that these are nine physically disabled people who live in an institution (a care center) and they play cooperatively in a virtual world. In that world, their avatar does not have any of their physical limitations and they can do things that they simply would not be able to do in RL. It must give them a real sense of freedom. What's more, they don't appear to anyone else in that virtual world as a person (or people, in this case) with any disability.
I worked for a couple years in a care center and things are so regimented, so planned, that a variety of new experiences is really hard for people to come by. Some folks would watch TV all day. Others would live for the morning paper. Still others would look forward for an entire week to the arrival of the library lady and new books. If I brought a few old magazines in, they'd be devoured from cover to cover and passed around from room to room. These were the people who were in the best shape. You could see (and were often told as much by the residents themselves) that they had so very little control over ANYTHING in their lives, and that many felt abandoned by their relatives to a facility that was little more than a prison. The sense of hopelessness was incredible, at times.
I'm sure that whatever qualitative issues people might have with the game they play, one has to admit that nine people acting as the same avatar is pretty incredible even for people who have no physical limitations. I'm willing to bet that each of the players probably thinks about the game when they're not playing, and that they probably dream about or in the virtual world that they play in. When they motor over to the computer to log in I'm sure it gives great satisfaction to do the things they've been thinking about since their last session, or try something they dreamt about.
If you're a resident of a care center, you're treated as an object. You're acted ON -- you're fed, you're bathed, you're clothed, you're read to, you're moved from place to place -- you control nothing except your own mind. I think it's very cool that they get to control something, some representation of themselves, for at least as long as they're logged in. For those brief periods, I'm sure that the boring beige halls and walls of the facility fade away, the wheelchairs are forgotten and time flies. How cool. How totally frickin' cool.
It should be noted that a LAN party is not necessarily the easiest thing to set up. Ours (6 people) comes together and is taken apart in less than five minutes each way. That's after years of practice and gathering all the necessary equipment. We recently brought in a new guy and just getting him outfitted to play with us took a full hour. Knowing what we know now, we could probably scale up to about 30 people without too much trouble, but that's knowing what we know after doing it a couple hundred times. Doing the best you can the first time is pretty important, especially if there are fundraising ambitions.
Because you see organizations that make it look easy, it's also easy to assume that it's a simple thing to do. It's not. Making money out of it is also not so easy. When some of the posts have said that it's a very tough thing to do, and tough to make money, they were probably trying to put a reality check on his perception that it's an "effective, exciting" solution.
It's better, I think, for him to be told about some of the very real pitfalls to expect and allow him to plan accordingly. Ultimately, it's about having fun, and I think this guy's going to have a lot of fun when he gets it rolling. Once he's got a formula that works, he can repeat it and share his knowledge with someone else, which is what I think most of the respondents are doing.
My first suggestion is to hold your own informal LAN party at home every week for a couple months to get a feel for the logistics. You'll get a feeling for the challenges very very quickly. If you're planning on playing for six hours and you end up spending three on machine setup, network config and game patching, your LAN party idea is doomed. You have to get people set up and ready to play in 15 minutes, so planning is important. You may be able to get five or six people to play regularly, and maybe someone else can get a different group of 5-6 players meeting this way. Share notes on what works and what doesn't, decide on the games you'd like to play and what patch level you want to be at.
You didn't say what your materials are, for one thing, and you didn't say how many people would be interested. These are BIG questions that you need to answer.
It sounds like you might have one network jack in each classroom, at least in a few rooms. Your school's network should already accommodate fast ethernet and should be able to hand out IP addresses via DHCP. Putting one 8-port switch in each room should be sufficient.
Decide what you're going to play! If you have to meet the approval of a teacher or chaperon sponsor, make sure they know what you're going to play. UT2K4 can be a great game for a larger LAN party, because it has a number of different game types. You can rotate from onslaught to CTF to assault, for example. If it's too gory or violent, then you'll have to pick from other options. As with questions others have raised about licensing, each person will have to buy their own copy of the game, unless you can get a game company to donate copies. Remember that everyone will have to have the proper patches applied, and if you plan on using add-on maps/skins, you'll have to make sure that these are also available. Burning five or six setup CDs withe the game patches and add-ons will make setting up each player's environment as easy as possible. Another thing to look at is if you're going to be running servers (such as UT2K4 or Call of Duty or Rise of Nations or whatever), bear in mind that it's often nice to have servers that are set up and named for the skill level of the players that will be playing on them. Having just one UT server with the bots cranked up to godlike abilities is not going to appeal to people that only frag every few months.
If people are going to bring their own machines, decide on what the minimum standards are for the hardware. If you pick a game that requires top-flight hardware, not everyone's parents will be interested in having to pony up 100-500 dollars for the necessary upgrades. You have to pick a game that fits the hardware constraints you have, and pick hardware constraints that will make the game you choose equally playable by everyone. One of the nice things about the XBOX suggestion posted by someone else is that the hardware is pretty standardized and the titles are probably familiar enough to most parents. If you're running servers, make sure they're well-oufitted with RAM and decent processing power to handle the load. A server meltdown can bring the whole show down very quickly.
Power is important. If you're playing with PCs, each person will need a minimum of three power outlets: 1 for monitor 1 for PC and 1 for something else (speakers, mebbe). How many power strips can you get together in one place? Remember that extension cords will become pretty valuable in getting power to each seating area
Decide in advance what people must bring to the event. Is everyone supposed to bring their own power cords/strips/monitor/PC/mouse/keyboard/joystick? One thing to remember is that people will be more likely to abuse hardware they do not own, so if you're using machines from
However, having a law out there to do what a parent should be doing -- taking a guiding role in deciding what's right for the kid -- is admission that parents have no control. I just don't buy it. Parents DO have control, and if they don't exercise it then it's their own discipline problem, not that of the states. What if you're the kind of parent that has no problem with violent video games -- you have to report to the store with your kid each and every time they want to pick up a new title? What a pain. Maybe you'll sleep better at night knowing that more permissive parents will have an additional hoop to jump through, but it's ultimately their responsible choice as to whether or not to control what their kids are buying.
I think the main reason why I'm against the idea is that it's more big-government intrusion into commerce. There's going to have to be fifty new statewide advisory boards that are responsible for setting up the criteria for age restrictions, and these boards will have to examine every title to make sure it's being handled in the way appropiate to the law, and don't forget that there's gonna have to be a new government agency created to make sure the law gets enforced, too, all of which will raise taxes. I don't want to pay tax money for something parents should be doing for themselves. I don't want big government forcing any agenda on me -- even if the agenda wraps itself in concern for children. Let my concern and my love for my children dictate the way I act and what I allow them to do.
As for your support of extending this type of age-restriction law to cover ALL media -- you're welcome to your opinion, but I don't share it because it is overly broad. Games are not books. Sure, some books deal with very troubling topics (like war, death, hatred or disease, for example) but books are not uniquely entertainment-oriented materials. Neither are periodicals. Neither are films. In general, I'm of the camp that wants to avoid as much censorship as possible, and also avoid as much big government intrusion into people's lives as possible.
I watched for about 15 minutes. It was all I could take. As an avid PC gamer, and NOT a console gamer, I felt that I was completely left out. The only celebs I saw were of the supermodel/athlete/rapstar/musician variety. SnoopDog's performance sucked my dog's ass, but then again I've never understood his appeal in the first place.
I was hoping for something a little less hip-hop and something a little more technical. I didn't hear engine design talked about. I didn't see any actually game developers/producers there. I didn't see any awards for art design, RTS titles, simulators, MMORPGs or anything like that. How about best RPG-fantasy, or best RPG-modern day? How about best multiplayer? How about best FPS sequel or bonus pack? I didn't see any more evaluation of the games other than "what's really popular right now?". Where were the experts. Where was the "legacy award for the designer of "Joust", or the misty retrospective of vector graphics games. Maybe I got fed up too soon and it was there all the time if I had only stuck with it, but it just stank so bad that I had to turn away.
I think some others who have posted to this topic recognized something that I also saw: that gamers have become stereotypes -- zit-faced, controller-strangling, button-mashing, screaming red-eyed freaks. The odd part is that I noticed in a few of the audience shots that there were a few portly bespectacled guys in button-down shirts who were kind of trying to figure out whether to headbang or toe-tap while waving hands in the air for SnoopDog's "Hey! Ho! Hey! Ho!". I felt a little better, but it passed very quickly and I was nauseous again.
It was such a waste.
A. Why you would have a maximum number of votes for a machine AT ALL.
B. Why you would have something like a memory contraint AT ALL in these days of cheaper-than-dirt storage.
C. Why you would have either or both of A and B if you wanted a fair election.
Can someone fill me in?
- "MS Adds a Slew of Brilliant New MS Excel Spreadsheet Features!"
- "Check Out the 50 Hottest New Improvements in the All-New MS Powerpoint!"
- "The New MS Word Has the 100 Crucial Advancements that Will Amaze Your Friends and Impress Your Boss!"
- "Why I Finally Switched to MSOffice: A CIO's Tale"
Why is that?In the very beginning of my tech life, before DOS made it into my life (early 80s), I used WordStar on CP/M. Then I dabbled with apple and used BankStreetWriter, then I found DOS and used WordPerfect, and finally I landed in MSOffice. There's no reason to move out of MSOffice. It does everything I need along with a metric TON of stuff I don't need, and what's more everyone else in the world uses it, too. If they don't have it, they can find it at the local school, university/public library or kinkos or wherever.
What continues to dazzle me (and I'm guessing that Jem probably shares this observation) is that MS keeps making people pay innovation prices for what's really become a static, mature product. By all rights, you should be able to pick up the MSOffice Suite for 15 bucks in the CompUSA/BestBuy/Costco/SAMSclub bargain bin. Yet people still pay the premium because it's one suite of software you absolutely must have to work with all the other people in the world.
Anecdote: A buddy of mine "went Mac" after years of PC-style living. He got tired of dealing with Windows, mostly. I'd suggested OOo for the longest time to him as a way to cut into the cost of operating, but it didn't pass muster. The apps were still not that polished (still are) and the file formats were a problem (still a problem) and interoperability with the MS-world was sub-par (still is). What finally got him to "go Mac"? MS ported their office suite (just the few parts of it he needed) to MacOS. Kind of ironic, isn't it? It's proof, though, that even the anti-MS crowd is forced to kneel at the feet of MS. That's total dominance, and also the reason why MS shares now offer a nice little dividend.
Can we hope that MS will open up their document formats to the world and let true interoperability ensue? Yeah. There's always hope.
Oh, and the bit at the end:
Microsoft will never die. It can't. Too many enterprises and governments have bought into it. Can it become less popular --> used less often? Perhaps, but the company will always be there to sell the same old products to you year after year after year. No worries.
I guess that I don't see how it's such a good fit for Silicon Valley. I'll admit that the area is perfect for research and development and there are scads of people out there in various engineering and research capacities to draw upon. The feeling I got from Brian's piece, though, is one that the pace of development for computing and materials technology in the area is waning and there's a vacuum that needs to be filled.
(As I read it, I visualized a bunch of software and computer hardware engineers sitting around in beanbag chairs, sipping tasty beverages, gazing out the window looking at the near-empty lots in the office park and saying to each other "Whew! What a ride. Too bad we don't have something else to do. Hey, howsabout we make solar electricity cheaper?")
Sure, some of the economics of the area have hit some rough spots, but there are all kinds of other research and development activities that go on in the region that don't tie directly into the consumer computing market. Sure, maybe it's a place where consumer solar electricity could be added to the mix, but why not do that somewhere, dare I say it, -=other=- than California? What about Phoenix, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Denver, Austin, Oklahoma City, Lincoln, K.C, et al.? I'm thinking sunny western states, mostly, but the point is why not foster that kind of product development in a new place?
I'm sure someone will point out to me, as I've heard it said in the past "Well, if you're going to innovate and make new products, you have to go to where the innovators and the production centers are." At one point, I'm sure it was true, but now we have the innovation and production centers in places all over the world. I'm sure that Brian wanted to keep the scope of the paper pretty narrowly pointed to California for obvious reasons: he lives there and he has a sense that the state has had a rough ride on both the electricity and computing technology fronts. Yet, since the boom in the Valley, airfares are cheaper than ever, engineers are cheaper than ever, telecommunications is cheaper than ever, and cities outside California will bend over backwards to make setting up innovative new businesses a cheap-to-free activity.
So, while I find Brian's parallels interesting and compelling, I think the job would fit better elsewhere.
One more thing -- a few posters on this topic have asserted that because they live in cloudy places, solar would not be a good fit. I was in Tahiti a few years ago during the rainy season and while there are small diesel-generated electrical grids on most of the more populated islands, solar-electric power for water heating is pretty common out there and the water is hot even on the cloudy days. And the cloudy days can last for weeks. Daylight is pretty much all you need to keep the water hot. Where folks don't use solar hot water, they heat on-demand with liquid propane gas.
Oddly, apart from your first two hyperbolic sentences regarding my post, you seem to have understood my reasons pretty well in the next five lines.
We are too weak (and not strong enough to persuade every nation on the planet to make a unified front against China).
Yes, that's exactly what I meant. It's the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts.
American corporate interests supersede the imperative for peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights.
Yes, exactly. This is how our government works, regardless of who sits in the oval office.
China is getting better on their own. Let them do it at their pace.
Precisely. If they do it on their own then they can claim the success as their own and not feel that they've been coerced into something. What they create will fit their own cultural sensibilities.
It would be necessary to totally "destroy" China in order to engender substantial change.
I don't know about total destruction. (I didn't say "total" -- that's your own hyperbola talking.) Remember, the post I was replying to was asking why we don't make war on China. What wasn't stated explicitly in my short list is that if you went into war with China to eliminate all of the things in oexeo's list, you would not have China anymore -- it would be something else, something it hasn't ever been in thousands of years. China would cease to be Chinese, and would be destroyed.
China might "nuke us" if we tryied to force them in any way. ... you guessed right! ... the Nazis!
I didn't say that. What I said was that if we were to attack China, we'd be the prime candidates for nuclear retaliation and no nation in the world would disagree with them for responding in such a way. We'd be behaving just like the
Your last two sentences are pretty depressing, I'll admit, but you don't see us invading Russia, either, do you, and they've got many of the same problems China does. You also don't see anyone invading us. Being big and powerful has it's advantages, but it doesn't make any nation "right", including the US. Our crap stinks, too, after all.
As for Germany, if you do your homework you'll note that after annexing the Sudetenland, partnering with the Italians, grabbing Poland and France and Holland and Belgium and Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and most of North Africa, Germany WAS the largest nation in western Europe. The US had a strictly isolationist foreign policy then, and Roosevelt was very unwilling to get caught up in the war. Recall that just short of twenty years before we had lost more than a hundred thousand men in a war aginst Germany. In "the war to end all wars", France, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost more than a million men EACH. England lost almost a million. Germany was a powerful nation but it was also over-extended. Had England not asked us, with the support of the Vichy government of France, we probably would have allowed Germany to take everything they wanted. So, what you suggest in your last sentence very nearly happened. Ultimately, it was our sympathy for England and France that stoked our war fires against German imperialism. If Germany were to take England, they'd have only a short hop to go to get to us, so there was a little self-interest at work, there, too.
I seem to recall that there's some little technicality in the armistice we signed with North Korea that says that we're still at war, but not openly hostile anymore. If anyone can shed some light on this hazy recollection of mine, please do, but my understanding has always been that the war is still on, but cooling on a shelf at the DMZ.
Anyhoo, there are probably a number of reasons why we're not at war with China:
- Our military forces are too small for the task.
- Our leaders refuse to re-enstate the draft to swell the ranks of the military.
- Even if we drafted everyone, we still would not have enough soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen to take the place over because China is really really BIG.
- Lots of American companies have a very active and profitable presence in China.
- The Chinese are taking very slow steps towards freedom or religeon and ownership, and there's a fast-growing growing consumer culture in China for western goods.
- Once you've destroyed China, what do you do then? We don't have enough speakers of Chinese to manage a rebuilding effort of any kind.
- We know they'd nuke us back to the stone age if we started something, and every other nation in the world would agree with China that we deserved it.
That's just my own short list, but I'm sure there are at least twice as many more reasons.
1) Public education is a progressive endeavor, not necessarily a liberal one. Giving women the right to vote was also a progressive effort, not necessarily a liberal one. The GI bill was a progressive act, not necessarily a liberal one. Nobody really thinks that any of these things was a bad idea. To say that public education was a product of liberalism is an insult to the progressive republican voices that participated in creating an adequate nationwide public education system. If you do your homework, you'll note that it was only created to be adequate, not fantastic or super-duper. The goal was to educate kids such that they could read, write and perform basic business calculations. That was it. At the time (the late 1920s and the 1930s), this was far ahead of most of the world, most of our population lived in rural areas and we were very much ahead of the game. Most of what the system required was standardization of grade levels such that someone in grade 6 in one part of the country could relocate with parents to another part of the country and be able to pick up at roughly the same place in a curriculum. It's not so simple, now.
2) Your assertion that liberals were in control of Congress is overblown. Congress may lean from Republican to Democratic party majority over the years, but nothing gets done on a national level without the broad consensus of all elected representatives -- regardless of whether they be "liberal" or "conservative". Take, for example, the Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). Every Libertarian and Republican shooter I know (and I know hundreds of 'em) blames the "scary liberal democrats" for that one, yet the AWB enjoyed the support of the majority of Republican legislators and would not have passed without that support. Look it up. You might be surprised to find out how many of today's neo-conservative voices were leaning liberal on that one.
3) Your experience in K.C. is interesting but probably also offtopic because it does not say anything about how well K.C. students were doing at the time. Do you have any performance data for public school students during that timeframe? If you don't have it all, maybe just the math part? The cost of a 4-year Harvard education in the mid-1980s was about 75,000. If you divide that by 12 years of schooling (which I did in longhand, fwiw) is $6,250 per year. If you include kindergarten, the number is a little less. Considering that the average new hire public schoolteacher only takes home less than four times that amount, I'd say the figures you provide are probably accurate and likely represent the true cost of educating a student in the public system. It's good value, imho. As a side note, the cost of a 4-year Harvard education has gone up a bit to somewhere around $100-110,000, but the cost of a full public school education, given inflation, has also gone up.
4) Why are all remarks about Bush considered stupid? Isn't it a little early to start getting defensive? The NCLB act is nothing but a testing effort. The tests are meant to describe a set of standards for academic achievement that all students must meet. I think it's a good idea on the face of it, frankly, because you can't improve something if you don't have any objective data about how effective your efforts are. What happens, though, after you have the data? If you have an underperforming school, is it because there are too few teachers for students?, is it because the teachers are underqualified?, is it because the texts are outdated?, is it because the teaching techniques are outdated?, is it because the school isn't being heated/cooled properly?, is it because the students lack proper materials?, is it because the parents in the community are not as involved as they should be? See, any of these things could be the cause, but the NCLB tests don't give any of this information. Instead, what you get are curricula that are geared completely to the test, much in the same way that public
I take sworn affidavits pretty seriously. He's willing to swear that Mr. Feeney's office was looking into the software so that they could steer the Florida vote. If he's found to be lying (and I'm sure that forces will be marshalled to de-legitimize him), there are pretty severe penalties for filing false affidavits. The man has a lot at risk by filing this affidavit, and I'm sure he's aware that his whole life can be ruined as a result of this.
When I put on my tinfoil hat, I can see him being added to no fly lists and having his credit reports besmirched by "identity fraud". Thank goodness I only use the hat for creative purposes.
The vote there in Flo-riddah was VERY close in 2000, and I believe that it went in 2004 in exactly the 49/51 way he describes. Furthermore, Ohio went in the same proportion, too, as I recall. (corrections?)
It makes me very suspicious of close races, more than anything, and also makes me want a voter-verifiable paper trail to be created. I'd go even further to say that I'd want the actual vote count to be run off of the paper trail. (Just show the paper record to the voter and ask the voter if it matches with their computer selections.) A computerized system can be a big step forward in terms of making the act of voting easier, but the lack of verifiability gives me the willies.
I heard a number of right-wing pundits saying that this past election was the start of a 30-year dominance by the Republicans, and while I hope that isn't the case, I also hope that computerized touch-screen voting can be made as verifiable as paper ballots.
Why is it that we can't use paper ballots anyway?
*sigh*
Thanks for asking.