Linux is more than the window manager and applications. The file system, process scheduling algorithm and other kernel-level features are significant. So to is the ability to change a behavior if they need to.
* Quietly removing Quarterdeck's Extended Memory Manager from CONFIG.SYS, claiming it was for compatability reasons. If you simply renamed the file from QEMM.SYS to QEMM386.SYS and updated CONFIG.SYS accordingly, everything would work fine. MS and QuarterDeck played cat-and-mouse for a year or two. Everytime MS added a QEMM file name to the "hit list" in their installer, Quarterdeck would issue an update with yet another file name. Note that the installer (at the time) didn't ask if you wanted to keep the original memory manager.
Indeed, in our current post-Enron, post-Worldcom climate of "corporate accountability", we'd be happy to see a company that even seemed to show some fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. At least if we establish a culture of corporate self-interest, we can then build on that to reach Rand's "enlightened self-interest."
It seems to me the "evil monster" corporation is the result of corporations looking out for the personal interests of the CEO, not the interests of the corporation itself. The lack of trust between Wall Street and the boardroom drives money managers to look upon any sign of short term bad news as an indicator of unrevealed problems. Therefore even mildly bad news, such as missing your "whisper number" by a penny can result in huge swings in stock price. Stock price volatility causes a stock price to decline. Since the CEO's compensation is tied to the stock price (a bad, simplistic practice, IMO), the CEO has to "manage earnings," which leads to a lack of trust, which leads to..... It's a viscious circle.
We need to return "enlightenment" to "enlightened self-interest." Then we'd see corporations that behave as corporate citizens of the country and of the world.
Has anyone else noticed that Scientific American seems to be going downhill? It's getting less and less scientific. What was that recent cover article, "Are You a Hologram?". Please.
On the other hand, Science News is going pretty strong. Let's hear it for good science!
If that's true, then SCO is shooting themselves in the foot. Once the GPL is declared invalid, then SCO loses the ability to use any GPLed software until they make other licensing arrangements with the people who control/own that GPLed software.
SCO is shooting themselves in the foot because they don't need their feet any more. Someone on life support in a hospital bed, who will never walk again, is free to shoot their foot and then sue the hospital for lack of security.
I'm sure Darl and SCO's board of directors looked at their options, decided they couldn't survive the honorable way, and so decided to take this route. They passed the point of no return BEFORE they filed the law suits.
OTOH, if you set your DNS to spoof "download.microsoft.com" and point it to an unproxied web server which gives it a different executable file instead of the patch it tries to pull, it will run that executable just dandy.
How is that more ethical than writing a worm? You're still executing code on someone else's computer without their permission and not under their control.
It seems pretty obvious. Ask yourself, if you got 1200 emails a day, 50 of which came with e-checks attached, and you had no other reason to look at one versus another, which emails would YOU open first?
1. A good bullet-point one pager delivered to an overworked staffer (and they're all overworked) who's analyzing an issue is an effective way to get one's viewpoint across.
2. Writing an effective bullet-point one-pager - one that is informative and persuasive - is hard.
3. Selecting the right overworked staffer and getting said one-pager in front of him or her is also hard.
You pay a lobbyist for their efforts in pursuit of items 2 & 3 above.
If you also make a significant donation to the "right" representative's reelection campaign, #3 gets easier. A lobbyist can provide you with advice on which representative will (a) be sympathetic to your viewpoint, and (b) be effective in furthering what you think is the "right" answer.
The only thing that's ethically questionable in all this is the part about representatives being more receptive to entities (people, corporations, PACs, etc.) who support them. But let's not argue that money shouldn't buy access and then accuse Morgan of being an idealist!
I don't buy the "money buys votes" argument, at least not directly. It does buy access.
Re:What about teachin them some math, physics and
on
Wi-Fi Woods
·
· Score: 1
I've been interviewing teachers for a project I'm working on. Much to many teachers' frustration, it's often the parents who insist on ineffective teaching techniques. ("If it's not hard and unpleasant, then they can't be learning anything.") As a result, the best opportunities for learning are missing from most classrooms.
The phrase "giving them some real knowledge and skills" indicates a common but misguided understanding of how people learn. You can't unzip a kid's head, pour in some knowledge from the "math jug", the "Spanish jug" or whatever. Kids discover knowledge. Schools are properly places of "guided discovery" not "dispensing knowledge."
For a pretty good look at proven educational practices, click here.
Don't get me wrong. There are some schools that are equally wrong in the other direction. I don't get a comfortable feeling that the Ambient Woods Project is well-grounded, judging by their web site.
-- Skip
"Tell me, and I'll forget. Show me, and I'll understand. Involve me, and I'll remember."
-attributed variously to Confucious, Aristotle and Native Americans
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind."
-Plato
"An educated person is one who has gained the power of reflective attention,
the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind. Without this, the
mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions." -Dewey
Despite another poster's math, it's actually about 100 sq. miles (260 * 0.6214 * 0.6214). According to the CIA fact book, it's actually one of the world's largest coral islands.
Still, with an estimated population of 2134 as of July 2002, it has fewer people than our local high school, so by that measure it's pretty darn small. A typical desktop class computer could process the tax returns for the entire country.
Thanks for the UCSD link. It's very informative. Looking further up in that article, we see that these "left-handed materials" are much less exotic than might have been supposed from the original article. What we're talking about is ordinary material that has been assembled in an unordinary way.
Many readers are familiar with Fresnel lenses. You might have seen one at the back of some buses where they provide a "wide angle" view of what's behind the bus. At a gross scale, they look flat, but they are in fact etched glass or plastic. I mention them not because they're made out of so-called metamaterials, but because they're another example of small scale engineering having a large scale effect.
The researchers have etched small structures (smaller than the wavelength of interest) into normal materials. The two main differences between this "metamaterial" and a Fresnel lens are
The structures are small than the wavelength of light being used, and
They use a unit replication pattern rather than a circular symmetry pattern.
It's a neat piece of engineering, but it hardly changes our understanding of the universe.
Incidentally, on the "light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge" comment, an ordinary Fresnel lense is only one example of a flat structure that will accomplish this. Another example is a perfectly flat glass plate with an index of refraction that decreases and then increases. The other comments I've read have assumed a constant index of refraction.
This reminds me of a conversation I had in 1983.
Him: Who needs 10 Mbps Ethernet to the desktop? You'd fill up the disk in just a few seconds, assuming the disk could write it that fast, which it can't. Serial is fast enough.
Me: Uhh. Oh nevermind.
(I wasn't much of a conversationalist.) PC hard disks were 10-20 MB in those days. His comment was correct, except for the last sentence.
I would be very hesitant to assume I knew anything about life as experienced by someone outside my own personal demographic. (The operative word is "assume". I don't wish to discount the work of those who have actually done research.)
An article in today's San Jose Mercury News lends support to the premise that racial profiling is alive and well. CHP is accused of stopping only Latinos in Pacheco Pass and jailing MacArthur Washington for the "crime" of being African-American while driving away from a convenience store in the pre-dawn hours. No admission of guilt was made in this settlement.
I can kind of understand pulling over Latinos when trying to stop a drug running operation led by Latinos, if that's what was going on, but I can't fathom stopping an African-American "because everyone knows that blacks get drunk" as the officers might have assumed.
While it would not be fair to assume that all police officers are prejudiced pigs, etc; history and my personal experience shows that power corrupts, and the police have a fair amount of power in their realm.
-- Skip
Slashdot Mirror
Walmart has long been a leader in the field of business intelligence and data warehousing. They wrote the book on it, literally. Long before Tesco.
It's not that I like shopping at Walmart. It doesn't appeal to me, but I admire their technology prowess.
Linux is more than the window manager and applications. The file system, process scheduling algorithm and other kernel-level features are significant. So to is the ability to change a behavior if they need to.
Don't worry. Microsoft is in its last throes.
Another for the list:
* Quietly removing Quarterdeck's Extended Memory Manager from CONFIG.SYS, claiming it was for compatability reasons. If you simply renamed the file from QEMM.SYS to QEMM386.SYS and updated CONFIG.SYS accordingly, everything would work fine. MS and QuarterDeck played cat-and-mouse for a year or two. Everytime MS added a QEMM file name to the "hit list" in their installer, Quarterdeck would issue an update with yet another file name. Note that the installer (at the time) didn't ask if you wanted to keep the original memory manager.
Indeed, in our current post-Enron, post-Worldcom climate of "corporate accountability", we'd be happy to see a company that even seemed to show some fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. At least if we establish a culture of corporate self-interest, we can then build on that to reach Rand's "enlightened self-interest."
It seems to me the "evil monster" corporation is the result of corporations looking out for the personal interests of the CEO, not the interests of the corporation itself. The lack of trust between Wall Street and the boardroom drives money managers to look upon any sign of short term bad news as an indicator of unrevealed problems. Therefore even mildly bad news, such as missing your "whisper number" by a penny can result in huge swings in stock price. Stock price volatility causes a stock price to decline. Since the CEO's compensation is tied to the stock price (a bad, simplistic practice, IMO), the CEO has to "manage earnings," which leads to a lack of trust, which leads to..... It's a viscious circle.
We need to return "enlightenment" to "enlightened self-interest." Then we'd see corporations that behave as corporate citizens of the country and of the world.
Has anyone else noticed that Scientific American seems to be going downhill? It's getting less and less scientific. What was that recent cover article, "Are You a Hologram?". Please.
On the other hand, Science News is going pretty strong. Let's hear it for good science!
SCO is shooting themselves in the foot because they don't need their feet any more. Someone on life support in a hospital bed, who will never walk again, is free to shoot their foot and then sue the hospital for lack of security.
I'm sure Darl and SCO's board of directors looked at their options, decided they couldn't survive the honorable way, and so decided to take this route. They passed the point of no return BEFORE they filed the law suits.
-- Skip
How is that more ethical than writing a worm? You're still executing code on someone else's computer without their permission and not under their control.
It seems pretty obvious. Ask yourself, if you got 1200 emails a day, 50 of which came with e-checks attached, and you had no other reason to look at one versus another, which emails would YOU open first?
1. A good bullet-point one pager delivered to an overworked staffer (and they're all overworked) who's analyzing an issue is an effective way to get one's viewpoint across.
2. Writing an effective bullet-point one-pager - one that is informative and persuasive - is hard.
3. Selecting the right overworked staffer and getting said one-pager in front of him or her is also hard.
You pay a lobbyist for their efforts in pursuit of items 2 & 3 above.
If you also make a significant donation to the "right" representative's reelection campaign, #3 gets easier. A lobbyist can provide you with advice on which representative will (a) be sympathetic to your viewpoint, and (b) be effective in furthering what you think is the "right" answer.
The only thing that's ethically questionable in all this is the part about representatives being more receptive to entities (people, corporations, PACs, etc.) who support them. But let's not argue that money shouldn't buy access and then accuse Morgan of being an idealist!
I don't buy the "money buys votes" argument, at least not directly. It does buy access.
I've been interviewing teachers for a project I'm working on. Much to many teachers' frustration, it's often the parents who insist on ineffective teaching techniques. ("If it's not hard and unpleasant, then they can't be learning anything.") As a result, the best opportunities for learning are missing from most classrooms.
The phrase "giving them some real knowledge and skills" indicates a common but misguided understanding of how people learn. You can't unzip a kid's head, pour in some knowledge from the "math jug", the "Spanish jug" or whatever. Kids discover knowledge. Schools are properly places of "guided discovery" not "dispensing knowledge."
For a pretty good look at proven educational practices, click here.
Don't get me wrong. There are some schools that are equally wrong in the other direction. I don't get a comfortable feeling that the Ambient Woods Project is well-grounded, judging by their web site.
-- Skip
"Tell me, and I'll forget. Show me, and I'll understand. Involve me, and I'll remember."
-attributed variously to Confucious, Aristotle and Native Americans
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind."
-Plato
"An educated person is one who has gained the power of reflective attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind. Without this, the mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions."
-Dewey
Despite another poster's math, it's actually about 100 sq. miles (260 * 0.6214 * 0.6214). According to the CIA fact book, it's actually one of the world's largest coral islands.
Still, with an estimated population of 2134 as of July 2002, it has fewer people than our local high school, so by that measure it's pretty darn small. A typical desktop class computer could process the tax returns for the entire country.
Thanks for the UCSD link. It's very informative. Looking further up in that article, we see that these "left-handed materials" are much less exotic than might have been supposed from the original article. What we're talking about is ordinary material that has been assembled in an unordinary way.
Many readers are familiar with Fresnel lenses. You might have seen one at the back of some buses where they provide a "wide angle" view of what's behind the bus. At a gross scale, they look flat, but they are in fact etched glass or plastic. I mention them not because they're made out of so-called metamaterials, but because they're another example of small scale engineering having a large scale effect.
The researchers have etched small structures (smaller than the wavelength of interest) into normal materials. The two main differences between this "metamaterial" and a Fresnel lens are
It's a neat piece of engineering, but it hardly changes our understanding of the universe.
Incidentally, on the "light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge" comment, an ordinary Fresnel lense is only one example of a flat structure that will accomplish this. Another example is a perfectly flat glass plate with an index of refraction that decreases and then increases. The other comments I've read have assumed a constant index of refraction.
This reminds me of a conversation I had in 1983. Him: Who needs 10 Mbps Ethernet to the desktop? You'd fill up the disk in just a few seconds, assuming the disk could write it that fast, which it can't. Serial is fast enough. Me: Uhh. Oh nevermind. (I wasn't much of a conversationalist.) PC hard disks were 10-20 MB in those days. His comment was correct, except for the last sentence.
I would be very hesitant to assume I knew anything about life as experienced by someone outside my own personal demographic. (The operative word is "assume". I don't wish to discount the work of those who have actually done research.) An article in today's San Jose Mercury News lends support to the premise that racial profiling is alive and well. CHP is accused of stopping only Latinos in Pacheco Pass and jailing MacArthur Washington for the "crime" of being African-American while driving away from a convenience store in the pre-dawn hours. No admission of guilt was made in this settlement. I can kind of understand pulling over Latinos when trying to stop a drug running operation led by Latinos, if that's what was going on, but I can't fathom stopping an African-American "because everyone knows that blacks get drunk" as the officers might have assumed. While it would not be fair to assume that all police officers are prejudiced pigs, etc; history and my personal experience shows that power corrupts, and the police have a fair amount of power in their realm. -- Skip
One difference between then and now, however, is the culture at NASA. NASA today is much more open to self-examination.
Sony gets my vote for best ad. See it again. It was novel and funny, it made a point, and it was effective.
While $15,000 is indeed the cost to get trained, don't confuse the design cost with the incremental cost to build sub n+1. That's not necessarily $1M.
-- Skip