That's just it (god knows why people thrashed me with modding,:/) -- they got it to nuance with Civ4, whereas in 3 it was just ticky-tacky-cheesy. The jibes they work into 4 are just enough to be humorous, but not so over the top that you roll your eyes and groan. Like the poster below, that "Beep... Beep... Beep... -Sputnik" RECITED by Nemoy made me howl. It's almost as if they knew they didn't take 3 serious enough and just made it clowny, so the clowning they did pull in this one is done completely straight-faced, with just a little bit of a wink. Almost like in Starship Titanic where Adams gets John Cleese (uncredited) to voice a bomb with a robot butler who upon encountering anything _remotely_ related to Monty Python, sighs and in the most dissmissive voice just says "You just had to be there, I'm sure."
Civ 4, although tremendously resource-hogging, is glorious. It simply is what the game should be. No Elvis advisors, although Leonard Nimoy's comments occasionally get a bit tedious, but usually they add a bit of cute without being cheesy.
We have the final abolition of the presumption of innocence coming in the New Year. At least I have enough cash to move out when things get really bad.
No, I just started working in academia and worked my way into government. Everyone should give both a try. It will shatter all hopes of ever pleasing anyone, experiencing cooperation or for that matter finishing a damned thing, much less on schedule and never, ever on budget.
...is the result of trying to implement 100% of user requests. Sometimes, telling the user "no, you simply can't have that" is the best way to ensure an application isn't horribly poisoned by thousands of totally irrational, non-intuitive crap "features" each piece of which makes sense only to the person who requested it. Worse, such design-by-committee applications are invariably written interface-first, back-end last with no regard to how to actually make the goddamned thing WORK, much less work efficiently.
I agree, good software should be intuitive, but far better to be proactively engineered to be more intuitive, rather than reactively veneered to feel less unintuitive.
I have both installed, use GNOME for my WM and still use a few of the KDE apps. I just hate having a cluttered interface. If that makes me an "interface nazi," fine. I hate clutter. On my subnote, I run blackbox. Both KDE and GNOME would be massive overkill bordering on the unusable with such limited screen real estate. You'd think Linus, of all people, would recognize the utility of using the bits and pieces of different things that work, instead of finding one all-encompassing platform and discarding anything that doesn't have the brand label... Blah.
I'm curious, why is he anti-creationist rather than pro-evolutionist?
Because the rejection of one does not imply the acceptance of the other. I find it hard to believe that _anyone_ who has done any serious study of world religions would find any of them any more than an amalgamation of the mythologies that preceded them, but that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on someone's opinion about evolution. So, he's anti-intelligent-design. That doesn't mean he's anti-religion, anti-creation or pro-evolution. All three of these terms mean different things, none of which really have much to do with each other.
If you have an n-user license, it doesn't matter if it is 50 instances of the same user or 50 different users. However, in a high-traffic application, if you remove the connection pool from the mix and require every user to create a new connection, you lose a HUGE amount of scaling power.
I remember debugging a piece of this 4-tier J2EE app this other guy at the office had written and was horrified at the performance. We had a 10Gb/s link to another site where we were, basically, screen-scraping an old VT-100 app (egads, that was awful). This thing was sooooo slow it was a joke. I mean, pulling a couple 10k records, you could easily read the data as it lazily scrolled down the screen. After about a minute, we'd run out of database connections. Turns out, dude's code was opening and closing the database connection for each record--that is, roughly 116 times per second. He only really had one at a time, but latency eventually caught up and locked-up the app as the DB server was cleaning up the closed connections.
THAT is where this connection-pooling, single login business matters and makes sense. Say you have 400 users. They're each pulling up a record every, say, twenty seconds. Total transaction time from open to close is, say, five seconds. So, you need to have 100 connections to avoid maxing out. That's about as much as even a fairly substantial server can handle, but more than that, if you're using a commercial DB, that could be several hundred thousand dollars in license fees. Now, say you have a pool of 50 connections and you remove 2-3s from each transaction because you're removing the login-logout cycle. Suddenly, you only need 10 connections, having cut not only your hardware requirements, but reduced your licensing burden by probably 70-80%.
Well, you know what 3.6Ghz CPU with 1GB of RAM, CD-RW, DVD-R, USB means and that your car has ABS, GPS and a radio that will play MP3s... etc. etc. you get my point.
I always find it amazing that people have such a resistance to things that are scarcely any different in concept from the oodles of other similar things they already own and understand. Yet, still, you throw out an unfamiliar acronym and "GAH! MY BRAIN!!! YOU GEEKS ARE EVIL!!!"
No, they're just not stubborn, thick-headed dorks.
There is. The federal minimum wage exempts 15-18yos and unpaid for children under 15 working in family businesses (with time restrictions), tipped employees and allows for interns and academic work-study. For most of those, iirc, it is $2.85. States can require higher, but they cannot allow lower. Most businesses do not take advantage of that because it's just bad form and doesn't encourage much effort. However, in a work-study program, the universities only have to pay $2.85 and the federal government pays $2.30. There's PLENTY of graduation in the current system.
As for the campus routine, a university experience hardly comes close to a "real-world" experience. You're probably living in on-site subsidized housing, eating subsidized food, have subsidized medical care on-site, most likely have roommates essentially provided for you in guaranteed housing with fully paid utilities.
That's a far cry from an adequate example to prove that the minimum wage is anything but poverty level. But, $10,712 per year, yes, is enough to survive. That's the !#%ing POINT. If it was less, it would NOT be enough to survive without some other subsidy, be it the local homeless shelter, food bank, welfare, generous uncles, street johns, whatever.
The original intent of.comMMERCIAL and.orgANIZATION and.netWORK etc. etc. was that domain names were organizational entities, not individuals. If you are a business entity, your records are public in the brick-and-mortar world, why should the internet be any different? Positively NONE of the TLDs were intended to be for private, individual use, so the rules simply didn't address those issues. There are privacy services and proxy registrations that get around the problem and because of that the original rule should still stand.
Actually, yes, that IS the professional way to deal with it. Ever heard of "in-lieu-of" pay? Standard operating procedure. You give two-weeks' notice, they pay you for it and you are free to go immediately, which you do gracefully. What's unprofessional about that?
...at $5.15/hr that's $29/day ($872/month), even renting a room in most american cities, a round cost of about $300/month, that leaves $572/month. Consider, say, that that person is spending $3/day in bus fare. That's $100/month, leaving them with $472. Sure, they need a better job, but, face facts, at less than that, save for infinitessimal chance, it is nearly impossible for someone to move up from that. That's what minimum wage is for -- to ensure that the majority of people who find themselves at the bottom of the economic barrel are paid just enough to be able to lift themselves up. If they were paid less, there would be no hope. It's one thing to say "gee, get a better job" when you don't factor in how much it _costs_ to get a better job. Really reveals a great deal about the people casting stones...
There's a mythology here that the minimum wage is the driving force of inflation. It's not. If we legalized slavery, we'd still have inflation. The fact is, if you roughly doubled the minimum wage every twenty years, for nineteen of those years, employers would actually be paying LESS each year over the previous year. When the adjustment is made, they would likely still be paying less than they were the first year, since all their other revenue and costs would have been _continuously_ adjusted for inflation, minimum wage increase or not.
You got the implication of my statement quite backwards. First, a logical argument wasn't my goal. This "we don't need no stinkin' minimum wage" line is such a tired old saw, I see little need to respond with a perfectly formed sophomoric logical argument, since the offending remark certainly is anything but.
Second, yes, it was an anecdote, duh. Yes, I have a social sciences degree. I get the difference between anecdotal evidence and statistical significance, okay? Neither one negates the other.
Third, the rest of the body of your statement WAS PRECISELY MY POINT, albeit, stated purely as derision. This harkening back to the bad old days of yore with unbridled capitalism is just a laughable folly of those who wish they were rich, but most of the time aren't. They'd prefer a world where you could have slave labor, at their own peril, if only they could have slaves.
Frankly, such people don't deserve a polite, well-reasoned, logical response.
If you earn more than $10 per hour, hiring someone else at $5 per hour to do your cleaning means more profits for your business....and I thought you just said wages have nothing to do with revenue.
Chung Mee: Opium is my business. The bridge mean more traffic. More traffic mean more money. More money mean more power. Lawrence Bourne III: Yeah, well, before I commit any of that to memory, would there be anything in this for me? Chung Mee: Speed is important in business. Time is money. Lawrence Bourne III: You said opium was money. Chung Mee: Money is Money. Lawrence Bourne III: Well then, what is time again?
Erm, the minimum wage has been over $3/hr for TWENTY-FIVE !@#%ING YEARS, BUDDY.
Now, then, going on that logic, if the owners of a business were making so little money that $3/hour was so much that their own labor was worth less, I hardly would fault the wage-earner in that equation as much as the "business" (read: lack of) owner...
In 1980, when the minimum wage exceeded $3/hour, my family business--running out of, basically, our freaking garage--paid our employees $40k/year. Yeah, the minimum wage really got in the way.
People who bitch about the minimum wage betray their utter ignorance of basic high-school level economics.
Say you (and a thousand other people) buy something for $0.99. The publisher marks it up to $3.00, you put it up for $2.99, each of the other thousand people undercut each other by $0.01... and so on, and so on until the price reaches $0.00, which will happen instantaneously--especially if there is ANY way to make an analog copy, much less re-digitize that copy, basically creating infinite supply again.
That was rather my point. If the students couldn't "afford" to pay the tuition, they wouldn't go. But, because there are fixed and variable costs (quite huge, actually) in running a university, if those students can't fork over $30k/year, those universities won't exist. The government subsidies are there not as "easy money," but as an effort to ensure we have an educated population that can increase production.
As a poster down-thread has noted, a limited number of schools have such enormous financial backing that they do not charge a dime, because they don't have to. Less than 1% of universities can do that. In a pure free-market system (no public universities, no government grants or loans --for either student or school), cost--and, ergo, quality--of education (and research) would have to drop drastically (this is "bad") or only 1-5% of people would be university educated (this is also "bad").
Put down your Penguin Books copy of Atlas Shrugged and face reality.
The vast majority of private universities could not charge the prices they do without government funding, be it Pell grants, Stafford loans, whatever--to say nothing of their dubious tax-exempt status as "non-profits." For that matter, neither could the public universities. Also, the vast majority of college students not only could not afford university study without financing, the vast majority of finance companies either could not or would not afford to finance such young debtors for so much completely unsecured credit without government security. This is a case where the "free" market simply can't provide but for an infinitessimal percentage where there are enough very well-heeled 18yo customers who can write $37,000 checks. The other 99.9% of the private universities that want all the benefits of being private and all the benefits of receiving public money and not paying any public tax on it, well, as Kathy Griffin might say, they simply need to suck it.
Consider, a page is 45 lines, an average book is 350 pages @ about 2" thick (ergo, about 15-16k books), a stack is roughly 12' wide by 6 shelves, double sided (864 books) and a row is about six stacks long (72' / 5,184 books). So, in a compactus, about 432sq/ft, to the 2,100,000sq/ft of the Madison building alone. The total linear capacity is 540 miles. Using the above assumptions, that's about 205 million books, so if printed, this repository would take up roughly 1/13,000th of the space. Imagine if your house is 2500sq/ft, the equivalent displacement would be a five-inch square. Would you even notice?
Slashdot Mirror
Hah, I loved Gore.
:/) -- they got it to nuance with Civ4, whereas in 3 it was just ticky-tacky-cheesy. The jibes they work into 4 are just enough to be humorous, but not so over the top that you roll your eyes and groan. Like the poster below, that "Beep... Beep... Beep... -Sputnik" RECITED by Nemoy made me howl. It's almost as if they knew they didn't take 3 serious enough and just made it clowny, so the clowning they did pull in this one is done completely straight-faced, with just a little bit of a wink. Almost like in Starship Titanic where Adams gets John Cleese (uncredited) to voice a bomb with a robot butler who upon encountering anything _remotely_ related to Monty Python, sighs and in the most dissmissive voice just says "You just had to be there, I'm sure."
That's just it (god knows why people thrashed me with modding,
I thought Civ III was a piece of trash.
Civ 4, although tremendously resource-hogging, is glorious. It simply is what the game should be. No Elvis advisors, although Leonard Nimoy's comments occasionally get a bit tedious, but usually they add a bit of cute without being cheesy.
We have the final abolition of the presumption of innocence coming in the New Year. At least I have enough cash to move out when things get really bad.
That's just sooooooo 2002 here in the states.
In some ways I see fewer freedom and more tyranny.
Haven't been across the pond in awhile, have we?
No, I just started working in academia and worked my way into government. Everyone should give both a try. It will shatter all hopes of ever pleasing anyone, experiencing cooperation or for that matter finishing a damned thing, much less on schedule and never, ever on budget.
...is the result of trying to implement 100% of user requests. Sometimes, telling the user "no, you simply can't have that" is the best way to ensure an application isn't horribly poisoned by thousands of totally irrational, non-intuitive crap "features" each piece of which makes sense only to the person who requested it. Worse, such design-by-committee applications are invariably written interface-first, back-end last with no regard to how to actually make the goddamned thing WORK, much less work efficiently.
I agree, good software should be intuitive, but far better to be proactively engineered to be more intuitive, rather than reactively veneered to feel less unintuitive.
There are a lot (two words)
But, "A lot" is singular, ergo, it's "There IS a lot," no matter how awkward it sounds. I mean, would you say "there are a database?"
Don't taunt the grammar nazis.
I have both installed, use GNOME for my WM and still use a few of the KDE apps. I just hate having a cluttered interface. If that makes me an "interface nazi," fine. I hate clutter. On my subnote, I run blackbox. Both KDE and GNOME would be massive overkill bordering on the unusable with such limited screen real estate. You'd think Linus, of all people, would recognize the utility of using the bits and pieces of different things that work, instead of finding one all-encompassing platform and discarding anything that doesn't have the brand label... Blah.
I'm curious, why is he anti-creationist rather than pro-evolutionist?
Because the rejection of one does not imply the acceptance of the other. I find it hard to believe that _anyone_ who has done any serious study of world religions would find any of them any more than an amalgamation of the mythologies that preceded them, but that has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on someone's opinion about evolution. So, he's anti-intelligent-design. That doesn't mean he's anti-religion, anti-creation or pro-evolution. All three of these terms mean different things, none of which really have much to do with each other.
If you have an n-user license, it doesn't matter if it is 50 instances of the same user or 50 different users. However, in a high-traffic application, if you remove the connection pool from the mix and require every user to create a new connection, you lose a HUGE amount of scaling power.
I remember debugging a piece of this 4-tier J2EE app this other guy at the office had written and was horrified at the performance. We had a 10Gb/s link to another site where we were, basically, screen-scraping an old VT-100 app (egads, that was awful). This thing was sooooo slow it was a joke. I mean, pulling a couple 10k records, you could easily read the data as it lazily scrolled down the screen. After about a minute, we'd run out of database connections. Turns out, dude's code was opening and closing the database connection for each record--that is, roughly 116 times per second. He only really had one at a time, but latency eventually caught up and locked-up the app as the DB server was cleaning up the closed connections.
THAT is where this connection-pooling, single login business matters and makes sense. Say you have 400 users. They're each pulling up a record every, say, twenty seconds. Total transaction time from open to close is, say, five seconds. So, you need to have 100 connections to avoid maxing out. That's about as much as even a fairly substantial server can handle, but more than that, if you're using a commercial DB, that could be several hundred thousand dollars in license fees. Now, say you have a pool of 50 connections and you remove 2-3s from each transaction because you're removing the login-logout cycle. Suddenly, you only need 10 connections, having cut not only your hardware requirements, but reduced your licensing burden by probably 70-80%.
Well, you know what 3.6Ghz CPU with 1GB of RAM, CD-RW, DVD-R, USB means and that your car has ABS, GPS and a radio that will play MP3s... etc. etc. you get my point.
I always find it amazing that people have such a resistance to things that are scarcely any different in concept from the oodles of other similar things they already own and understand. Yet, still, you throw out an unfamiliar acronym and "GAH! MY BRAIN!!! YOU GEEKS ARE EVIL!!!"
No, they're just not stubborn, thick-headed dorks.
There is. The federal minimum wage exempts 15-18yos and unpaid for children under 15 working in family businesses (with time restrictions), tipped employees and allows for interns and academic work-study. For most of those, iirc, it is $2.85. States can require higher, but they cannot allow lower. Most businesses do not take advantage of that because it's just bad form and doesn't encourage much effort. However, in a work-study program, the universities only have to pay $2.85 and the federal government pays $2.30. There's PLENTY of graduation in the current system.
As for the campus routine, a university experience hardly comes close to a "real-world" experience. You're probably living in on-site subsidized housing, eating subsidized food, have subsidized medical care on-site, most likely have roommates essentially provided for you in guaranteed housing with fully paid utilities.
That's a far cry from an adequate example to prove that the minimum wage is anything but poverty level. But, $10,712 per year, yes, is enough to survive. That's the !#%ing POINT. If it was less, it would NOT be enough to survive without some other subsidy, be it the local homeless shelter, food bank, welfare, generous uncles, street johns, whatever.
Oy...
.comMMERCIAL and .orgANIZATION and .netWORK etc. etc. was that domain names were organizational entities, not individuals. If you are a business entity, your records are public in the brick-and-mortar world, why should the internet be any different? Positively NONE of the TLDs were intended to be for private, individual use, so the rules simply didn't address those issues. There are privacy services and proxy registrations that get around the problem and because of that the original rule should still stand.
The original intent of
Actually, yes, that IS the professional way to deal with it. Ever heard of "in-lieu-of" pay? Standard operating procedure. You give two-weeks' notice, they pay you for it and you are free to go immediately, which you do gracefully. What's unprofessional about that?
...at $5.15/hr that's $29/day ($872/month), even renting a room in most american cities, a round cost of about $300/month, that leaves $572/month. Consider, say, that that person is spending $3/day in bus fare. That's $100/month, leaving them with $472. Sure, they need a better job, but, face facts, at less than that, save for infinitessimal chance, it is nearly impossible for someone to move up from that. That's what minimum wage is for -- to ensure that the majority of people who find themselves at the bottom of the economic barrel are paid just enough to be able to lift themselves up. If they were paid less, there would be no hope. It's one thing to say "gee, get a better job" when you don't factor in how much it _costs_ to get a better job. Really reveals a great deal about the people casting stones...
There's a mythology here that the minimum wage is the driving force of inflation. It's not. If we legalized slavery, we'd still have inflation. The fact is, if you roughly doubled the minimum wage every twenty years, for nineteen of those years, employers would actually be paying LESS each year over the previous year. When the adjustment is made, they would likely still be paying less than they were the first year, since all their other revenue and costs would have been _continuously_ adjusted for inflation, minimum wage increase or not.
You got the implication of my statement quite backwards. First, a logical argument wasn't my goal. This "we don't need no stinkin' minimum wage" line is such a tired old saw, I see little need to respond with a perfectly formed sophomoric logical argument, since the offending remark certainly is anything but.
Second, yes, it was an anecdote, duh. Yes, I have a social sciences degree. I get the difference between anecdotal evidence and statistical significance, okay? Neither one negates the other.
Third, the rest of the body of your statement WAS PRECISELY MY POINT, albeit, stated purely as derision. This harkening back to the bad old days of yore with unbridled capitalism is just a laughable folly of those who wish they were rich, but most of the time aren't. They'd prefer a world where you could have slave labor, at their own peril, if only they could have slaves.
Frankly, such people don't deserve a polite, well-reasoned, logical response.
If you earn more than $10 per hour, hiring someone else at $5 per hour to do your cleaning means more profits for your business. ...and I thought you just said wages have nothing to do with revenue.
Chung Mee: Opium is my business. The bridge mean more traffic. More traffic mean more money. More money mean more power.
Lawrence Bourne III: Yeah, well, before I commit any of that to memory, would there be anything in this for me?
Chung Mee: Speed is important in business. Time is money.
Lawrence Bourne III: You said opium was money.
Chung Mee: Money is Money.
Lawrence Bourne III: Well then, what is time again?
Erm, the minimum wage has been over $3/hr for TWENTY-FIVE !@#%ING YEARS, BUDDY.
Now, then, going on that logic, if the owners of a business were making so little money that $3/hour was so much that their own labor was worth less, I hardly would fault the wage-earner in that equation as much as the "business" (read: lack of) owner...
In 1980, when the minimum wage exceeded $3/hour, my family business--running out of, basically, our freaking garage--paid our employees $40k/year. Yeah, the minimum wage really got in the way.
People who bitch about the minimum wage betray their utter ignorance of basic high-school level economics.
Say you (and a thousand other people) buy something for $0.99. The publisher marks it up to $3.00, you put it up for $2.99, each of the other thousand people undercut each other by $0.01... and so on, and so on until the price reaches $0.00, which will happen instantaneously--especially if there is ANY way to make an analog copy, much less re-digitize that copy, basically creating infinite supply again.
That was rather my point. If the students couldn't "afford" to pay the tuition, they wouldn't go. But, because there are fixed and variable costs (quite huge, actually) in running a university, if those students can't fork over $30k/year, those universities won't exist. The government subsidies are there not as "easy money," but as an effort to ensure we have an educated population that can increase production.
As a poster down-thread has noted, a limited number of schools have such enormous financial backing that they do not charge a dime, because they don't have to. Less than 1% of universities can do that. In a pure free-market system (no public universities, no government grants or loans --for either student or school), cost--and, ergo, quality--of education (and research) would have to drop drastically (this is "bad") or only 1-5% of people would be university educated (this is also "bad").
Put down your Penguin Books copy of Atlas Shrugged and face reality.
The vast majority of private universities could not charge the prices they do without government funding, be it Pell grants, Stafford loans, whatever--to say nothing of their dubious tax-exempt status as "non-profits." For that matter, neither could the public universities. Also, the vast majority of college students not only could not afford university study without financing, the vast majority of finance companies either could not or would not afford to finance such young debtors for so much completely unsecured credit without government security. This is a case where the "free" market simply can't provide but for an infinitessimal percentage where there are enough very well-heeled 18yo customers who can write $37,000 checks. The other 99.9% of the private universities that want all the benefits of being private and all the benefits of receiving public money and not paying any public tax on it, well, as Kathy Griffin might say, they simply need to suck it.
"The one time it doesn't, you fret, but because you restart it or patch it and it works, you go right back to it, rather than exploring alternatives."
That's not like addiction. That's like every other human experience involving things that break, which would be, basically, everything.
Consider, a page is 45 lines, an average book is 350 pages @ about 2" thick (ergo, about 15-16k books), a stack is roughly 12' wide by 6 shelves, double sided (864 books) and a row is about six stacks long (72' / 5,184 books). So, in a compactus, about 432sq/ft, to the 2,100,000sq/ft of the Madison building alone. The total linear capacity is 540 miles. Using the above assumptions, that's about 205 million books, so if printed, this repository would take up roughly 1/13,000th of the space. Imagine if your house is 2500sq/ft, the equivalent displacement would be a five-inch square. Would you even notice?
Gawd, I'm bored.
EXTRA! Waste, ineptness, redundancy and laziness not limited to the private sector!