Without being facetious, in reality these are the kinds of issues the so-called occupy movements should be focusing on...things like this where the average employee is all but powerless to prevent having any balance between their work lives and their personal lives.
The concept of a group of workers organizing themselves in order to achieve common goals, such as better working conditions, isn't new. That's the definition of a trade union.
Remind me again why the average US citizen is so violently opposed to the existence of trade unions, let alone joining one?
The US inflation rate in 1981 reached around 12%, largely due to the OPEC oil crisis. From then, up until '92 it rarely went below 4% and since then it floated between 2 and 4%. Therefore, without doing any math, it's safe to say that the equivalent constant inflation rate would be closer to 4% than 3%.
Nevertheless, even if you consider that nowadays the US government spends 3 times as much money on education than 20 years ago, that would mean that the sequence of governments decided to implement policies which increased the spending on education less than 2.2% a year. With this, bear in mind that school operational costs are tied to inflation, as also employee pay, all without taking into account any investment in the form of building new schools and maintaining the ones which already exist.
So, again, how is this a serious spending hike? It looks like everything has been kept the same since the 80s.
THIS. "Teachers" lie, especially when it comes to how effective/efficient they are. In the past 20 years, the "price" of education in the USA has gone up over 200% on a per-pupil basis (and the students sure as hell aren't 200% smarter to show for it).
Do you know what it means for the price going up over 200% in 20 years? It means that the average inflation rate was around 3.5%. How is that such a shocking cost hike?
The design is "conventional looking" because the Kaman K-MAX is a conventional helicopter. If you look closelly you can see the cockpit, with a human pilot seat and human pilot controls. This is a conventional commercial helicopter, specifically designed for the task of transporting heavy loads, which had some of it's production models fitted with extra gear to also be usable as an unmanned aircraft.
It may be free for me and you, but it so happens that we aren't google's clients. In fact, we are google's product. Just like facebook, these companies rely on us to grant them "eyes" for advertisements and our personal information for them to profit as they see fit.
As a more sinister aspect of this monopoly, if everyone relies on a single private company to access information then they also control what we can and cannot access. For example, google currently censors our search results in order to bury sites which google doesn't want us to access, sites such as the pirate bay, isohunt and 4shared. If we keep relying on them to access information then what today affects only harmless download sites, tomorrow may also cover sites on political parties, corruption scandals, disasters and whatever they see fit. And, of course, potential google competitors.
So, a monopoly affects a lot more than our wallet, and google is currently placing itself as both the knowledge gatekeeper and big brother. You bet it poses a serious danger to humanity.
I don't believe Razor-Qt is a KDE ripoff. As Razor-Qt doesn't force the user to run those bloated monstrocities called akonadi and nepomuk, and as it doesn't show any nasty rendering "artifacts" which plague KDE4 since the 4.0 days, it is a considerable improvement when compared to KDE.
From the article, it sounds like this is not a problem caused by cheap drugs but by piss-poor medical care. If a patient is given a specific form of Opioid which is known for stuff such as 'With little warning, patients fall asleep and don't wake up", and it does so frequently that they even gave this form of death the pet nickname, "silent death", then it does look like the only problem is that patients aren't monitored accordingly. To put it in other words, it does sound like they are putting the blame on a drug for a problem which is caused by incompetent medical staff which are routinely slacking off monitoring their patients and doing their rounds. Giving poor people sub-standard health care to the point of being considered neglect is a much more serious problem than providing cheap drugs.
I thought it was just two (General Belgrano & Sheffield) and both were much smaller than an aircraft carrier.
A half dozen ships were lost in the Falklands conflict. Besides ARA General Belgrano and HMS Sheffield, HMS Ardent, HMS Antelope, HMS Coventry and MV Atlantic Conveyor were also sunk. HMS Argonaut and HMS Brilliant were also badly damaged, and this by a military which was known to be incompetent.
Also modern aircraft carriers have significant missile defense systems and up-armoring specifically against missiles. I'm really doubtful if even deploying an array of five or ten cheap anti-ship missiles would even scratch a modern aircraft carrier.
The british also believed that when they sent their navy to the Falklands, and not only did they begged the french to stop supplying the argentinians with Exocets, they were also desperate enough to put the SAS on a suicide mission just to eliminate the hand full Exocets available to Argentina. And the Exocet was designed to target small war ships, and since then 30 years of science and technology have passed, with a lot of smart people spending their time designing better anti-ship missiles which pack a bigger punch. So, to expect the US navy to be invincible when they get routinely beaten in NATO war games by navies with inferior equipment is a bit naive and dangerous.
Why? Not all conflicts are against enemies who have the wherewithal to attack you from 1000 miles away. If you're going up against a small country in another part of the world, you can park it far enough away that they can't bring it down with their resources and you can still fly your aircraft over them with impunity.
You don't need to be 1000 miles away to throw one of these missiles at one of those carriers, as those missiles can be shot from planes and submarines. Even in the Falklands war the puny, ill-equipped and ill-prepared Argentine navy was able to sink four UK warships, two of them with Exocet missiles. So, if these big old ships are vulnerable to ill-equipped navies then why is the US insisting in building these massive targets? Is the US navy spending billions of dollars to fight an enemy which isn't able to pull together a rudimentary air force?
And as additional food for thought, consider this: nowadays there are cruise missiles specifically designed to take down supercarriers being sold for around 2 million euros a pop, such as Russia/India's BrahMos. This means that for the price of a single US fighter, any enemy can purchase two dozens or so missiles capable of sinking a multi-billion dollar supercarrier such as those from the Gerald Ford-class. These are missiles which can pretty much be launched from anything, from submarines to planes and possibly a donkey cart as well. So, why is it a good idea to waste money on these massive bullseyes?
Why should they waste their money on Reagan-class aircraft carriers if it has ben routinely demonstrated that they are easily sunk by conventional diesel submarines and even non-conventional ones? I mean, they may cost billion dollars to build, but why bother wasting money on them if they are destined to be sunk?
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Lazy programmers aren't writing efficient code, they're just relying on Moore's Law to push them through. Of course, I don't think the average consumers understand much about efficiency, seeing as eyecandy is so popular, even a selling point.
Your comment is either naive or disingenuous. There are plenty of reasons that lead a specific software to do a good job under a specific scenario but do poorly under another which is completely different, and all this without incompetence being a factor. Let me explain.
Consider one of the most basic subjects which is taught right at the start of any programming 101 course: writing data to a file. For that task, a programmer relies on standard interfaces, either de-facto standards such as platform-specific interfaces or those defined in international standards such as POSIX. This means that a programmer tends to not be aware of any specification regarding the file system or even the underlying hardware when developing a routine that dumps data to a file. Basically, what tends to be taught is to open a file, write to it and then close it. This tends to be acceptable in most scenarios, but this is a dangerous thing to do. After all, just because some data is written to a file it doesn't mean the data is immediately written to that file. The underlying platform may rely on IO buffers to be able to run things with a bit more efficiency. This means that even though your call to write() does succeed, and even though your program can successfully read your data back, that data isn't in fact stored in your file system. This means that if your program is killed/crashed or if your computer dies then you risk losing your data and corrupting the file. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
This problem can be mitigated by flushing the data to a file. Yet, calling flush() doesn't guarantee that every single bit of your data will be successfully stored in your file system. The thing is, this only guarantees that, when flush() returns, the data is flushed. If the system dies while your program is still writing away your data then you quite possibly lose all your data, and no call to flush() can save you from that. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
Some clever people took a bit of time to think about this, and came up with some techniques which avoided any the risk of corrupting your data. One of the techniques is to dump the data to temporary files and then, after they succeed in saving the data, the old file is deleted/renamed to a backup file name and the newly created temporary file is renamed back to the original name. With this technique, even if the system dies then the only file which might have been corrupted is the newly created temporary file, while the original file is kept in its original state. With this approach, the programmer guarantees that the user's data is preserved. Yet, this also has the nasty consequence of storing what's essentially the same file in entirely different inodes. This screws with a lot of stuff. For example, it renders hard links useless and screws around with the way versioning file systems work. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
So, no. This hasn't anything to do with what you arrogantly referred to as "lazy programmers" or even incompetence. Times change, technical requirements change, hardware requirements change, systems change.... And you expect that the software someone designed a couple of years ago will run flawlessly and avoid each and every issue which are only being discovered today and might only be discovered tomorrow. How can programmers avoid these issues, if they don't even have a working crystal ball? This isn't realistic, and you can only make such claims by being completely clueless and out of touch with reality. So, please tone down your arrogance and spend a moment thinking about this issue.
I'm worried what the future is going to hold when the average desktop comes with an SSD drive. Already I've already seem some development companies demo financial software on striped SSD's as if that's what everyone runs these days.
By any chance do those companies also sell the hardware where their software is supposed to run at peak efficiency? And do those companies also sell support contracts to maintain and tweak those systems? Because if they do then I bet dollars to doughnuts that their main motivation isn't technical perfection but the maximization of their company's bottom line.
I don't know what you mean by "iPad killer" but, to me, a large tablet is a huge turn-off, as is a pharaonic price tag for what' essentially a simple discount computer used as a secondary machine. To me, a 7-inch tablet selling for 100 euros beats a 10-inch selling for over 500 euros in every single meaningful comparison point. I believe I'm far from being the single one thinking like this, as this is essentially the same argument which pins the iPhone Vs android phones, and currently Android leads the smartphone market with a market share which goes well over 50%.
If you are really interested to know that then you should simply pick up any random benchmark from the web and compare prices. For example, in some benchmarks the AMD FX-8150 processor, which goes for about 220 euros, outperforms Intel Core i7-2860QM systems, which sells for around 500 euros. And in the nearest mom&pop store, an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T goes for 178 euros while the Intel Core i7 870 goes for 240 euros.
But seriously, pop up any random benchmark between recent intel and AMD processors and compare their performance and their price. You will notice that AMD either come out ahead or are head-to-head.
Your assumption that you can simply ignore AMD's influence in the CPU market and still end up with a relevant model to explain and predict its outcome is both naive and disingenuous. AMD does have products which outperform equivalent Intel products, even when not accounting with Intel shenanigans such as relying on funny compiler tricks, and AMD happens to price them quite attractively. If you haven't considered any AMD offering on any budget for any serious desktop and instead opted to rely only on Intel products then you are both clueless and economically-challenged.
Funny enough, that already happened. In 1811 a similar underwater eruption near the Azores archipelago caught the eye of a captain of a HMS Sabrina, a British warship. After noticing that the underwater volcanic eruption formed a small island, HMS Sabrina's captain decided to claim it for Britain through the cunning use of flags, in essence stealing portuguese land from under them and thumbing the nose at the Portuguese crown, which also happened to be an allied state. They named the new island Sabrina island and proceeded to have a diplomatic row over this small episode. In the end the joke was on Britain, as the newly formed island crumbled into the sea.
Portugal had a number of engineers in it's top spot. António Guterres, former Portuguese prime-minister and current United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is also an electrical engineer. Another one is José Sócrates, former Portuguese prime-minister and President of the European Council, which is supposed to be a civil engineer but allegedly his degree was attained through shady backroom clerical works from corrupt business associates.
If you need to auto-delete files after $TIME then schedule a cron job to delete the file in a specific date. You don't need a completely refurbished file system that hijacks your files in order to do trivial tasks.
Lisp is a fascinating language with honored history in AI, but let me ask you this: is it used now in some important applications? Does modern AI software use Lisp a lot? I am under impression that it is more used in theory than in applications.
Autodesk's AutoCAD relies on AutoLisp for a lot of it's features, and also employs it as a scripting language.
As for AutoCAD being considered an "important application", it is the de facto standard for CAD work in engineering, particularly in civil/structural engineering.
Both this Slashdot story and TFA have a very misleading title. ONE MEP is thinking about this insane idea. It is not even in Parliament for discussion. Another MEP already vehemently spoke against it.
Not quite. Two MEPs suggested this insane idea, and 371 MEPs signed it. This isn't about discussing an insane idea. This is about implementing an insane idea.
Only two MEPs, Tiziano Motti and Anna Záborská, might have suggested this, but 371 members supported it. And the fact that "no one is debating anything" is because the vote was passed way back in 2010-06-23.
Slashdot Mirror
That, and amazon also sells them for a equally idiotic price.
The concept of a group of workers organizing themselves in order to achieve common goals, such as better working conditions, isn't new. That's the definition of a trade union.
Remind me again why the average US citizen is so violently opposed to the existence of trade unions, let alone joining one?
The US inflation rate in 1981 reached around 12%, largely due to the OPEC oil crisis. From then, up until '92 it rarely went below 4% and since then it floated between 2 and 4%. Therefore, without doing any math, it's safe to say that the equivalent constant inflation rate would be closer to 4% than 3%.
Nevertheless, even if you consider that nowadays the US government spends 3 times as much money on education than 20 years ago, that would mean that the sequence of governments decided to implement policies which increased the spending on education less than 2.2% a year. With this, bear in mind that school operational costs are tied to inflation, as also employee pay, all without taking into account any investment in the form of building new schools and maintaining the ones which already exist.
So, again, how is this a serious spending hike? It looks like everything has been kept the same since the 80s.
Do you know what it means for the price going up over 200% in 20 years? It means that the average inflation rate was around 3.5%. How is that such a shocking cost hike?
The design is "conventional looking" because the Kaman K-MAX is a conventional helicopter. If you look closelly you can see the cockpit, with a human pilot seat and human pilot controls. This is a conventional commercial helicopter, specifically designed for the task of transporting heavy loads, which had some of it's production models fitted with extra gear to also be usable as an unmanned aircraft.
It may be free for me and you, but it so happens that we aren't google's clients. In fact, we are google's product. Just like facebook, these companies rely on us to grant them "eyes" for advertisements and our personal information for them to profit as they see fit.
As a more sinister aspect of this monopoly, if everyone relies on a single private company to access information then they also control what we can and cannot access. For example, google currently censors our search results in order to bury sites which google doesn't want us to access, sites such as the pirate bay, isohunt and 4shared. If we keep relying on them to access information then what today affects only harmless download sites, tomorrow may also cover sites on political parties, corruption scandals, disasters and whatever they see fit. And, of course, potential google competitors.
So, a monopoly affects a lot more than our wallet, and google is currently placing itself as both the knowledge gatekeeper and big brother. You bet it poses a serious danger to humanity.
Pssst.....
Hey....
Ratpoison runs on linux.
Damn facts, getting in the way of a perfectly good sanctimonious rant.
I don't believe Razor-Qt is a KDE ripoff. As Razor-Qt doesn't force the user to run those bloated monstrocities called akonadi and nepomuk, and as it doesn't show any nasty rendering "artifacts" which plague KDE4 since the 4.0 days, it is a considerable improvement when compared to KDE.
If only it had a network/wifi manager...
From the article, it sounds like this is not a problem caused by cheap drugs but by piss-poor medical care. If a patient is given a specific form of Opioid which is known for stuff such as 'With little warning, patients fall asleep and don't wake up", and it does so frequently that they even gave this form of death the pet nickname, "silent death", then it does look like the only problem is that patients aren't monitored accordingly. To put it in other words, it does sound like they are putting the blame on a drug for a problem which is caused by incompetent medical staff which are routinely slacking off monitoring their patients and doing their rounds. Giving poor people sub-standard health care to the point of being considered neglect is a much more serious problem than providing cheap drugs.
A half dozen ships were lost in the Falklands conflict. Besides ARA General Belgrano and HMS Sheffield, HMS Ardent, HMS Antelope, HMS Coventry and MV Atlantic Conveyor were also sunk. HMS Argonaut and HMS Brilliant were also badly damaged, and this by a military which was known to be incompetent.
The british also believed that when they sent their navy to the Falklands, and not only did they begged the french to stop supplying the argentinians with Exocets, they were also desperate enough to put the SAS on a suicide mission just to eliminate the hand full Exocets available to Argentina. And the Exocet was designed to target small war ships, and since then 30 years of science and technology have passed, with a lot of smart people spending their time designing better anti-ship missiles which pack a bigger punch. So, to expect the US navy to be invincible when they get routinely beaten in NATO war games by navies with inferior equipment is a bit naive and dangerous.
You don't need to be 1000 miles away to throw one of these missiles at one of those carriers, as those missiles can be shot from planes and submarines. Even in the Falklands war the puny, ill-equipped and ill-prepared Argentine navy was able to sink four UK warships, two of them with Exocet missiles. So, if these big old ships are vulnerable to ill-equipped navies then why is the US insisting in building these massive targets? Is the US navy spending billions of dollars to fight an enemy which isn't able to pull together a rudimentary air force?
And as additional food for thought, consider this: nowadays there are cruise missiles specifically designed to take down supercarriers being sold for around 2 million euros a pop, such as Russia/India's BrahMos. This means that for the price of a single US fighter, any enemy can purchase two dozens or so missiles capable of sinking a multi-billion dollar supercarrier such as those from the Gerald Ford-class. These are missiles which can pretty much be launched from anything, from submarines to planes and possibly a donkey cart as well. So, why is it a good idea to waste money on these massive bullseyes?
Why should they waste their money on Reagan-class aircraft carriers if it has ben routinely demonstrated that they are easily sunk by conventional diesel submarines and even non-conventional ones? I mean, they may cost billion dollars to build, but why bother wasting money on them if they are destined to be sunk?
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Lazy programmers aren't writing efficient code, they're just relying on Moore's Law to push them through. Of course, I don't think the average consumers understand much about efficiency, seeing as eyecandy is so popular, even a selling point.
Your comment is either naive or disingenuous. There are plenty of reasons that lead a specific software to do a good job under a specific scenario but do poorly under another which is completely different, and all this without incompetence being a factor. Let me explain.
Consider one of the most basic subjects which is taught right at the start of any programming 101 course: writing data to a file. For that task, a programmer relies on standard interfaces, either de-facto standards such as platform-specific interfaces or those defined in international standards such as POSIX. This means that a programmer tends to not be aware of any specification regarding the file system or even the underlying hardware when developing a routine that dumps data to a file. Basically, what tends to be taught is to open a file, write to it and then close it. This tends to be acceptable in most scenarios, but this is a dangerous thing to do. After all, just because some data is written to a file it doesn't mean the data is immediately written to that file. The underlying platform may rely on IO buffers to be able to run things with a bit more efficiency. This means that even though your call to write() does succeed, and even though your program can successfully read your data back, that data isn't in fact stored in your file system. This means that if your program is killed/crashed or if your computer dies then you risk losing your data and corrupting the file. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
This problem can be mitigated by flushing the data to a file. Yet, calling flush() doesn't guarantee that every single bit of your data will be successfully stored in your file system. The thing is, this only guarantees that, when flush() returns, the data is flushed. If the system dies while your program is still writing away your data then you quite possibly lose all your data, and no call to flush() can save you from that. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
Some clever people took a bit of time to think about this, and came up with some techniques which avoided any the risk of corrupting your data. One of the techniques is to dump the data to temporary files and then, after they succeed in saving the data, the old file is deleted/renamed to a backup file name and the newly created temporary file is renamed back to the original name. With this technique, even if the system dies then the only file which might have been corrupted is the newly created temporary file, while the original file is kept in its original state. With this approach, the programmer guarantees that the user's data is preserved. Yet, this also has the nasty consequence of storing what's essentially the same file in entirely different inodes. This screws with a lot of stuff. For example, it renders hard links useless and screws around with the way versioning file systems work. If this happens, does it mean that the programmer is incompetent?
So, no. This hasn't anything to do with what you arrogantly referred to as "lazy programmers" or even incompetence. Times change, technical requirements change, hardware requirements change, systems change.... And you expect that the software someone designed a couple of years ago will run flawlessly and avoid each and every issue which are only being discovered today and might only be discovered tomorrow. How can programmers avoid these issues, if they don't even have a working crystal ball? This isn't realistic, and you can only make such claims by being completely clueless and out of touch with reality. So, please tone down your arrogance and spend a moment thinking about this issue.
I'm worried what the future is going to hold when the average desktop comes with an SSD drive. Already I've already seem some development companies demo financial software on striped SSD's as if that's what everyone runs these days.
By any chance do those companies also sell the hardware where their software is supposed to run at peak efficiency? And do those companies also sell support contracts to maintain and tweak those systems? Because if they do then I bet dollars to doughnuts that their main motivation isn't technical perfection but the maximization of their company's bottom line.
I don't know what you mean by "iPad killer" but, to me, a large tablet is a huge turn-off, as is a pharaonic price tag for what' essentially a simple discount computer used as a secondary machine. To me, a 7-inch tablet selling for 100 euros beats a 10-inch selling for over 500 euros in every single meaningful comparison point. I believe I'm far from being the single one thinking like this, as this is essentially the same argument which pins the iPhone Vs android phones, and currently Android leads the smartphone market with a market share which goes well over 50%.
Intel i5 661: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115217&Tpk=i5%20661
According to these benchmarks, we have:
And this doesn't account for the money spent on a motherboard, which adds a hefty price to any intel offering.
So, looks like you botched your careful number check.
If you are really interested to know that then you should simply pick up any random benchmark from the web and compare prices. For example, in some benchmarks the AMD FX-8150 processor, which goes for about 220 euros, outperforms Intel Core i7-2860QM systems, which sells for around 500 euros. And in the nearest mom&pop store, an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T goes for 178 euros while the Intel Core i7 870 goes for 240 euros.
But seriously, pop up any random benchmark between recent intel and AMD processors and compare their performance and their price. You will notice that AMD either come out ahead or are head-to-head.
Your assumption that you can simply ignore AMD's influence in the CPU market and still end up with a relevant model to explain and predict its outcome is both naive and disingenuous. AMD does have products which outperform equivalent Intel products, even when not accounting with Intel shenanigans such as relying on funny compiler tricks, and AMD happens to price them quite attractively. If you haven't considered any AMD offering on any budget for any serious desktop and instead opted to rely only on Intel products then you are both clueless and economically-challenged.
Funny enough, that already happened. In 1811 a similar underwater eruption near the Azores archipelago caught the eye of a captain of a HMS Sabrina, a British warship. After noticing that the underwater volcanic eruption formed a small island, HMS Sabrina's captain decided to claim it for Britain through the cunning use of flags, in essence stealing portuguese land from under them and thumbing the nose at the Portuguese crown, which also happened to be an allied state. They named the new island Sabrina island and proceeded to have a diplomatic row over this small episode. In the end the joke was on Britain, as the newly formed island crumbled into the sea.
Portugal had a number of engineers in it's top spot. António Guterres, former Portuguese prime-minister and current United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, is also an electrical engineer. Another one is José Sócrates, former Portuguese prime-minister and President of the European Council, which is supposed to be a civil engineer but allegedly his degree was attained through shady backroom clerical works from corrupt business associates.
If you need to auto-delete files after $TIME then schedule a cron job to delete the file in a specific date. You don't need a completely refurbished file system that hijacks your files in order to do trivial tasks.
Lisp is a fascinating language with honored history in AI, but let me ask you this: is it used now in some important applications? Does modern AI software use Lisp a lot? I am under impression that it is more used in theory than in applications.
Autodesk's AutoCAD relies on AutoLisp for a lot of it's features, and also employs it as a scripting language.
As for AutoCAD being considered an "important application", it is the de facto standard for CAD work in engineering, particularly in civil/structural engineering.
Not quite. Two MEPs suggested this insane idea, and 371 MEPs signed it. This isn't about discussing an insane idea. This is about implementing an insane idea.
Only two MEPs, Tiziano Motti and Anna Záborská, might have suggested this, but 371 members supported it. And the fact that "no one is debating anything" is because the vote was passed way back in 2010-06-23.
This is how EU does democracy.