On a radio interview I heard recently, a journalist who's covered WalMart and (I believe) wrote a book about them pointed out that WalMart has threatened suppliers with having copies of their merchandise made by a Chinese supplier.
This may not be illegal, but it doesn't exactly smack of what nice guys do. It smacks a lot of what mean people do.
It's gotten to where I find something cynical to say about every TV commercial I watch, even the story lines in TV shows. People have told me how cynical I am, but I feel like I have to fight against this seething mass of industrial psychology that's shoved onto us at every opportunity.
Why don't they teach this stuff in school, so we can be educated enough to make it go away?
I'm wondering if this kind of despair hits anyone else here on slashdot. Does being a code geek create a greater sense of distance between ourselves and the external influences on our lives, so that it bothers us that much more when we're fed a sales pitch?
Here's one person at NASA who thinks it might be possible to overcome the weak magnetosphere effect, basically by creating enough extra greenhouse gases to compensate for the loss of atmosphere to solar wind. The claim appears to be that the effect is self-sustaining.
Editor's note: We recently published an article explaining how the solar wind is able to erode Mars's atmosphere because the Red Planet does not have a protective magnetosphere. Will future terraformers need to establish a global magnetic field on Mars to protect any atmosphere they create? Not necessarily. The planet Venus, for instance, has a chokingly thick atmosphere, but no magnetic field to protect it against the wind from the nearby Sun. Every planetary atmosphere is a balance between "sources and sinks." If some process (like volcanism) pumps gas into the atmosphere at a rate that substantially exceeds solar wind loses, the atmosphere will persist. The equilibrium on Venus happens to favor a thick atmosphere.
The Intel CPUs are optimized for function calls, which means that they expect stack frames to be constructed a certain way.
The typical contents of a stack frame: pointer to caller (which is what exploits try to overwrite), return value of function, function parameters, and local variables.
Code runs fastest when stack frames are small (fast to construct) and have a fixed form. Most modern CPUs have optimized hardware to deal with stacks in a fixed manner.
Do you ever collaborate with others in writing Word docs? I've heard that older versions of Word don't properly handle docs created by newer versions of Word.
I don't know how true this rumor is. I'm curious to know if you or others reading this have run into this problem, because if you have, that creates a real incentive for everyone to upgrade to the latest version.
The Air Force lab where I contracted for a while was on the verge of going with Linux + OpenOffice. The majority of people in the lab were scientists comfortable with unix. They only needed MS for Office and Outlook, both of which have linux-based alternatives now.
Their main reason for the itch to switch: they were sick of patching Outlook, IE, and Win2K. We had to install patches ourselves, sometimes 3 times a week. For the past couple of years, the Air Force has been very strict about keeping computers virus-free in the past couple of years.
Point taken, but you're asking the impossible. We can't know what the market would have been like, had MS not had a monopoly.
Sure, consumers are better off today, but that's not really saying much. MS makes the software market superficially better when it buys a software company and makes sure the software "fits" in ways competing software can't. Maybe a few features are added over time, but there's no pressure to improve it by much each release cycle.
I don't see this as a big win for consumers. It means that consumers have lost some choice in yet another market area, and competition is at a major disadvantage because of incompatibilities and bundle lockout.
Irrational behavior, IMHO, is more possible in a world where there is room for individuality and sharp differences in belief.
As the world fills up and each individual's potential impact on the rest of humanity increases, I find it hard to imagine people successfully ignoring the homogenizing effect that logically founded beliefs can have on a society.
I'm not sure I'm being clear; I'd like to continue discussion if you find social evolution an interesting topic.
Ballot verification, specifically overvoting and undervoting. In one county in Florida alone, 27,000 votes were discarded because of people who punched a presidential candidate's name and wrote the same name on the write-in line.
The line's caption: "State your choice for president".
I agree that computers don't need to be used beyond that.
The main tree is Douglas Fir. It grows quickly, but it takes a long time for the roots to stabilize the soil. This may be due to the soil composition, which is largely derived from volcanic deposits, and also partly due to somewhat steep slopes.
Here is an example photo of a clearcut. Clearcuts of this magnitude are not uncommon in Oregon.
If you have Macromedia Flash on your computer, there's a cool interactive map that shows you clearcuts from 1970 to the present. You have to click the year along the top to get the cumulative picture of all clearcuts since 1970.
If anyone's being shrill, it's you. I didn't assign blame nor spout any radical agenda. I happen to know a few facts about Oregon's history. The first link in my original post is to a scientific paper. Take any claims of "pablum" to the authors, not me.
Judging from your belief that Oregon is "extremely liberal", I'd say please do everyone a favor and STFU instead of talking out of your ass.
Where do you live? In the northern hemisphere, winter causes most trees to look dead. The pine trees are the exception. Hence they are a symbol of hope for people freezing their asses off.
In ancient times, pine trees were not cut and hauled into homes to celebrate yuletide. They were decorated outside. I daresay there are places in the world where this is still true.
Pagans who were forced to choose between becoming Christians or being burned at the stake nevertheless continued the tradition. Hence the happy Christmas tree.
For those of you reading this who are not from the U.S., it is a widespread practice for suburban Americans to pay $15-$45 in a parking lot for a cut pine tree standing 2-3 meters tall, so that it can be placed inside their home, where it slowly becomes a major fire hazard as it dries out. Most trees originate from private "tree farms" in the Western U.S.; trees are hauled via diesel truck all over the country to satisfy this strange thirst for indoor pine trees.
I also daresay that nearly all Americans blissfully believe that this tradition happens everywhere people are fortunate enough to afford a tree, like them.
Take it from someone who's walked through the Oregon backwoods:
98% of the forests in Oregon have been clearcut at least once. Only the more mountainous parts of Oregon have returned to forest, which has caused the near extinction of the lowland rainforest.
Most of the clearcuts happened with the advent of the chainsaw (they're less than 50 years old). This makes it actually more likely to see a clearcut than not when you're on top of a hill.
Even old clearcuts still look like clearcuts and will for as long as I'm alive.
Here's a site with a few cool photos of the Valley of the Giants, a 51 acre "oasis" of lowland rainforest that still remains. It is probably the largest such stand remaining. Note how long it takes to drive there; it's in one of the most remote logging areas in the state. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren may eventually live to see trees like this somewhere else.
* Ask the user to insert a CD with the nVidia/ATI drivers (tell the user where/how to download if necessary and exit to let user create CD), or: * Have the user point to the downloaded drivers on some read-only harddrive, or: * Test for a valid connection to the outside world and download/install the drivers automatically, or: * Just use the default video drivers if nothing else works.
* Test for soundcard type and cycle through a list of possible soundcard drivers. Ask the user for feedback on whether sound works before moving on to the next possibility.
I want to believe that knoppix can allow someone to (BOOM) see how cool a linux game on the their Windows box can be. How far can Knoppix go toward this goal?
Anyone know enough about knoppix to say whether it's possible for a knoppix distro to:
* Ask the user to insert a CD with the nVidia/ATI drivers * Test for a valid connection to the outside world and download/install the drivers automatically * Just use the default video drivers if nothing else works.
* Test for soundcard type and cycle through a list of possible soundcard drivers. Ask the user for feedback on whether sound works before moving on to the next possibility.
I want to believe that knoppix can allow someone to (BOOM) see how cool a linux game on the their Windows box can be
Slashdot Mirror
On a radio interview I heard recently, a journalist who's covered WalMart and (I believe) wrote a book about them pointed out that WalMart has threatened suppliers with having copies of their merchandise made by a Chinese supplier.
This may not be illegal, but it doesn't exactly smack of what nice guys do. It smacks a lot of what mean people do.
I can't stand sales pitches.
It's gotten to where I find something cynical to say about every TV commercial I watch, even the story lines in TV shows. People have told me how cynical I am, but I feel like I have to fight against this seething mass of industrial psychology that's shoved onto us at every opportunity.
Why don't they teach this stuff in school, so we can be educated enough to make it go away?
I'm wondering if this kind of despair hits anyone else here on slashdot. Does being a code geek create a greater sense of distance between ourselves and the external influences on our lives, so that it bothers us that much more when we're fed a sales pitch?
Man, that's cool. I'm grooving to concept.
I hope the bike traffic is well controlled. I've had a couple of "over the handlebar" experiences in my lifetime because of bike collisions.
You reminded me of my recent rediscovery of Roseanne on Nick@Night.
Now that I have my own kids, I can't believe how funny and real that show really is.
Then he follows that up with:
"The audience is growing and growing, and growing..."
Here's one person at NASA who thinks it might be possible to overcome the weak magnetosphere effect, basically by creating enough extra greenhouse gases to compensate for the loss of atmosphere to solar wind. The claim appears to be that the effect is self-sustaining.
_ 1.htm
From an article on NASA and Mars terraforming
( http://www.southpole.com/headlines/y2001/ast09feb
):
Editor's note: We recently published an article explaining how the solar wind is able to erode Mars's atmosphere because the Red Planet does not have a protective magnetosphere. Will future terraformers need to establish a global magnetic field on Mars to protect any atmosphere they create? Not necessarily. The planet Venus, for instance, has a chokingly thick atmosphere, but no magnetic field to protect it against the wind from the nearby Sun. Every planetary atmosphere is a balance between "sources and sinks." If some process (like volcanism) pumps gas into the atmosphere at a rate that substantially exceeds solar wind loses, the atmosphere will persist. The equilibrium on Venus happens to favor a thick atmosphere.
Maybe this step from the previous reply's link is important:
"Now you have installed the kernel, you have to remove
The Intel CPUs are optimized for function calls, which means that they expect stack frames to be constructed a certain way.
The typical contents of a stack frame: pointer to caller (which is what exploits try to overwrite), return value of function, function parameters, and local variables.
Code runs fastest when stack frames are small (fast to construct) and have a fixed form. Most modern CPUs have optimized hardware to deal with stacks in a fixed manner.
Do you ever collaborate with others in writing Word docs? I've heard that older versions of Word don't properly handle docs created by newer versions of Word.
I don't know how true this rumor is. I'm curious to know if you or others reading this have run into this problem, because if you have, that creates a real incentive for everyone to upgrade to the latest version.
The Air Force lab where I contracted for a while was on the verge of going with Linux + OpenOffice. The majority of people in the lab were scientists comfortable with unix. They only needed MS for Office and Outlook, both of which have linux-based alternatives now.
Their main reason for the itch to switch: they were sick of patching Outlook, IE, and Win2K. We had to install patches ourselves, sometimes 3 times a week. For the past couple of years, the Air Force has been very strict about keeping computers virus-free in the past couple of years.
The reverse is also true: I absolutely love the eqn editor in OO.o, but the equations I make with it aren't read by MS Word properly.
Note how the non-MS software bears burden of translation in both directions.
I completely agree! All we ever do is talk, talk, talk. It's about time we get up and actually DO something!
Being good at theory means:
* You're good at abstract thinking.
* You love CS.
* You're not distracted by silly things like girls
The people with strong theory backgrounds will be able to grok the changes in languages and protocols that are bound to happen.
Point taken, but you're asking the impossible. We can't know what the market would have been like, had MS not had a monopoly.
Sure, consumers are better off today, but that's not really saying much. MS makes the software market superficially better when it buys a software company and makes sure the software "fits" in ways competing software can't. Maybe a few features are added over time, but there's no pressure to improve it by much each release cycle.
I don't see this as a big win for consumers. It means that consumers have lost some choice in yet another market area, and competition is at a major disadvantage because of incompatibilities and bundle lockout.
Irrational behavior, IMHO, is more possible in a world where there is room for individuality and sharp differences in belief.
As the world fills up and each individual's potential impact on the rest of humanity increases, I find it hard to imagine people successfully ignoring the homogenizing effect that logically founded beliefs can have on a society.
I'm not sure I'm being clear; I'd like to continue discussion if you find social evolution an interesting topic.
Only if the distro is debian Woody! I hear that it's really good at managing to open and close ports.
For those of you who've already seen the Woody joke, I apologize profusely.
Ballot verification, specifically overvoting and undervoting. In one county in Florida alone, 27,000 votes were discarded because of people who punched a presidential candidate's name and wrote the same name on the write-in line.
The line's caption: "State your choice for president".
I agree that computers don't need to be used beyond that.
The main tree is Douglas Fir. It grows quickly, but it takes a long time for the roots to stabilize the soil. This may be due to the soil composition, which is largely derived from volcanic deposits, and also partly due to somewhat steep slopes.
l l/ roadsMed.jpg
w .h tml
Here is an example photo of a clearcut. Clearcuts of this magnitude are not uncommon in Oregon.
http://www.saveamericasforests.org/CorzineGooda
If you have Macromedia Flash on your computer, there's a cool interactive map that shows you clearcuts from 1970 to the present. You have to click the year along the top to get the cumulative picture of all clearcuts since 1970.
http://www.northwestwatch.org/scorecard/overvie
You'll have to delete the spaces in the two links above that the slashcode inserts.
If anyone's being shrill, it's you. I didn't assign blame nor spout any radical agenda. I happen to know a few facts about Oregon's history. The first link in my original post is to a scientific paper. Take any claims of "pablum" to the authors, not me.
Judging from your belief that Oregon is "extremely liberal", I'd say please do everyone a favor and STFU instead of talking out of your ass.
Where do you live? In the northern hemisphere, winter causes most trees to look dead. The pine trees are the exception. Hence they are a symbol of hope for people freezing their asses off.
In ancient times, pine trees were not cut and hauled into homes to celebrate yuletide. They were decorated outside. I daresay there are places in the world where this is still true.
Pagans who were forced to choose between becoming Christians or being burned at the stake nevertheless continued the tradition. Hence the happy Christmas tree.
For those of you reading this who are not from the U.S., it is a widespread practice for suburban Americans to pay $15-$45 in a parking lot for a cut pine tree standing 2-3 meters tall, so that it can be placed inside their home, where it slowly becomes a major fire hazard as it dries out. Most trees originate from private "tree farms" in the Western U.S.; trees are hauled via diesel truck all over the country to satisfy this strange thirst for indoor pine trees.
I also daresay that nearly all Americans blissfully believe that this tradition happens everywhere people are fortunate enough to afford a tree, like them.
Here's a really cool example of how we often learn something after it's already too late.
A report on widespread landslides in 1996, almost all due to clearcuts Clearcuts that were created up to 50 years ago slid away, destroying whatever trees happened to be growing there. This was a year where in rained a bit more than it had in a while.Take it from someone who's walked through the Oregon backwoods:
98% of the forests in Oregon have been clearcut at least once. Only the more mountainous parts of Oregon have returned to forest, which has caused the near extinction of the lowland rainforest.
Most of the clearcuts happened with the advent of the chainsaw (they're less than 50 years old). This makes it actually more likely to see a clearcut than not when you're on top of a hill.
Even old clearcuts still look like clearcuts and will for as long as I'm alive.
Here's a site with a few cool photos of the Valley of the Giants, a 51 acre "oasis" of lowland rainforest that still remains. It is probably the largest such stand remaining. Note how long it takes to drive there; it's in one of the most remote logging areas in the state. Your great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren may eventually live to see trees like this somewhere else.
Here's a really cool example of how we often learn something after it's already too late.
A report on widespread landslides in 1996First, establish the precedent with a fine that isn't outlandish. Wait for the appeals to go away.
Then fine MS for abusing their monopoly powers in other areas. I can hear the cash register, can't you?
"That'll be one internet browser violation ($1 billion), one office suite violation ($3 billion)..."
word processor, internet browser,
Is it possible to design a knoppix distro to:
* Ask the user to insert a CD with the nVidia/ATI drivers (tell the user where/how to download if necessary and exit to let user create CD), or:
* Have the user point to the downloaded drivers on some read-only harddrive, or:
* Test for a valid connection to the outside world and download/install the drivers automatically, or:
* Just use the default video drivers if nothing else works.
* Test for soundcard type and cycle through a list of possible soundcard drivers. Ask the user for feedback on whether sound works before moving on to the next possibility.
I want to believe that knoppix can allow someone to (BOOM) see how cool a linux game on the their Windows box can be. How far can Knoppix go toward this goal?
Anyone know enough about knoppix to say whether it's possible for a knoppix distro to:
* Ask the user to insert a CD with the nVidia/ATI drivers
* Test for a valid connection to the outside world and download/install the drivers automatically
* Just use the default video drivers if nothing else works.
* Test for soundcard type and cycle through a list of possible soundcard drivers. Ask the user for feedback on whether sound works before moving on to the next possibility.
I want to believe that knoppix can allow someone to (BOOM) see how cool a linux game on the their Windows box can be