I understand why you'd be angry at people who said that. Clearly its a false statement given the factual reality that more heterosexuals have AIDS than homosexuals, not to mention how Christ treated those with socially unacceptable diseases in his day (e.g. leprosy).
Fundamentalism is as fundamentalism does. The underlying religion seems to make little difference.
I beg to differ on this one. It all depends on what your fundamentals are. Think about it.
--LP
WTC floor plan directory
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The Washington Post has two webpages showing a listing of all the businesses in the World Trade Center, sorted by name, but also showing which floor each business was on, both Tower 1 and Tower 2. Interesting to see the non-US companies listed there, but more grimly relevant for gauging survival probabilities of friends/acquaintances/loved ones.
It's a little more complicated in that Saddam didn't mind getting aid passed to the people of Iraq, as long as *he* controlled the distribution of it. The US and various aid organizations, having witnessed past aid in Ethiopia and other countries get diverted to soldiers and withheld from ordinary citizens said "no thanks". But yeah, I basically agree with you; I don't think the "US sanctions have killed hundreds of thousands" held much water when Saddam, having refused aid, was using his spare cash to build more palaces (and weapons).
Put another way, I think HP faced the classic "innovator's dilemma": do you cannabalize your own high-end high-margin product base by shifting to technology with lower margins, or do you let others use that cheaper technology to eat into your own base while you protect your margins? It's a tough call. Sun certainly ended up making the right choice. I'm not really clear why "not cannablizing" turned out to be the right choice, other than that it heightened their focus enormously, with engineers laser-like focused on cost, and marketing/sales able to present a very clear simple message to customers.
Believe me, HP looked at outsourcing fabrication. That does let you avoid the cost of investing multiple billions every few years in fab technology, but it still has the following problem. Your high-end RISC chips end up costing $2000-$4000 each to manufacture for performance (e.g. SPECint) that is 60-90% of Intel's comparable $1000 ones. (See Microprocessor Report for more accurate cost estimates). As your RISC chips age and go into the bigger volume portions of your product line, you can drop your costs to maybe $1000, while Intel has dropped its down to $50. And that doesn't include the $100-200 million in design costs per chip. Processor economics is all about volumes. Even the outsourced fabs only give you significant discounts when you hit certain volume targets. (Just ask the 3D chip designers.) Long term, a RISC architecture is tricky to make economically viable. (Short term, the forces of binary compatibility create a barrier to entry for your customers to shift to alternatives so it works out OK.)
Remember, when the Pentium Pro came out in December 1995, it had faster SPECint than any RISC chip out there, except for a DEC Alpha that had been fab-tweaked to run a slightly higher clock rates two weeks earlier to insure that DEC didn't lose the performance crown with Intel's announcement of Pentium Pro. Intel's performance on commercial computing jobs (which rarely use floating point) has been comparable to or better than the RISC chips for half a decade now. Building high-end servers with more economically viable components continues to make a lot of sense. HP does reduce their lock-in longterm, and agrees to engineer stuff in a more competitive IA64 landscape.
Sun made this work in three ways: one they had a larger RISC chip volume to begin with, staying focused to and committed to UNIX/SPARC made them look safer for companies with huge installed skill bases in UNIX, and three, they (correctly) gambled that if they wer able to sell enough high-end SMP servers, the chip costs could be made essentially irrelevant for at least a good portion of their server line. Selling of high-end servers was helped significantly by brandname visibility of Java and Internet leadership in general.
Sun has never claimed they had a compelling long-term strategy for dealing with Wintel's volume economics (IMHO). Scott McNealy I believe has put it something like this: We and all the other RISC/UNIX vendors are like a bunch of campers running from a hungry aggressive bear. Sun's goal is to make sure that all the other campers get eaten first, and maybe by that time we'll have the strength to take on the bear.
I'd agree that HP execs probably erred in their estimation of how fast the shift from RISC to IA would happen, (and how fast they+Intel would execute the shift), and Sun chose a "middle-ground" strategy of designing RISC chips and staying focused with "all their wood behind one arrow" that ultimately was wiser. I wouldn't call HP executives miscalculations "shocking" though.
And Windows NT turns 8 in September. It first shipped in September 1993. (Development first started in October 1988 when Dave Cutler left DEC for Microsoft.)
Of course, for both NT and Linux, one could argue that the GNU portions of Linux, somewhat like the Win16-OS/2 antecedents of NT, developed earlier, before the true "birth date". (OS embryos in the womb?)
As someone using Linux since 1992, I've found this age similarity to be striking. What do *you* think is the significance of the fact that Linux is older than NT?
--LinuxParanoid
LinuxParanoid, since I remain concerned that Linux advocates aren't paranoid enough(!)
(Your link didn't work.) Nah, that's an old red herring. The adjacent biblical verses say that the vessel was a handsbreath in thickness, so if you measure from the inside you get pretty close to 3.14 depending on your assumptions about cubits, etc. See this mostly secular analysis or this more religiously-oriented site's explanation.
I know this is a rhetorical question, but having once spent a lot of time thinking about how to advise them before and during their fall, I'll give you my analysis. Some of this I saw at the time, some aspects I only saw too late. Learn from their mistakes.
Here's what went wrong:
SGI succumbed to the Innovator's Dilemna. Unwilling to canibalize their high-end graphics, they refused to enter the PC 3D graphics space and left it open for 40+ hungry competitors. Many of their engineers left for said competitors when it was clear SGI was going nowhere. (Jim Clark recognized the dilemna in 1992-1994 by the way and jumped ship himself, a harbinger of things to come.) In fairness, its hard to canabalize a 1-2 billion dollar workstation graphics market in hopes of winning a 50-200 million dollar 3D PC graphics one.
SGI refused to go to NT early on when they would have had leverage in making the move that could have forced/encouraged MS to adopt OpenGL exclusively for 3D. Instead, they said no to NT for too long, and when they said yes, it was a me-too decision that was later partially reversed in favor of Linux. Rather than recognizing and admitting they'd lost the war and pursuing the best possible terms, they chose, either conciously or through inaction, the "go down fighting, maybe we can still win" route.
SGI's bread and butter midrange workstation 3D graphics was prone to "good enough" copying by competitors, Sun and HP. SGI's engineers spent a lot of time focusing on developing unique high-performance texture mapping serving 2% of their market (the entertainment sector) rather than on improving geometry engine performance further for the benefit of the biggest 40+% market (CAD).
SGI's choice of a strategic response to PCs was poor: "We'll have highly differentiated systems" (the O2). Unfortunately, the differentiation (UMA, texture mapping, imaging, system bus architecture) was largely in areas that didn't add much value to their largest segments of customers. They built not what most of their customers wanted, but what the "cool" customers wanted. What most of their customers wanted was lower prices- that's what most of them ended up going to when dumping SGI.
SGI engineers were late. Whether through lack of focus/discipline, resistance to "impossible" marketing schedules (that turned out to be necessary), choice of agressive cutting-edge/bleeding-edge component technologies that proved hard to debug, whatever. Your pick. Key products in the timeframe you mentioned were late, late, late. The midrange IMPACT graphics were announced June 95 as shipping but in reality didn't really ship for another 6 months, more or less. (In the meantime, Wall Street lost faith in the company as a momentum stock and SGI stock price dropped from its alltime high of 45 down to mid-20s.) Subsequent products also had a tendency of being late (O2, a year later than needed, Visual PC was late, etc.) SGI engineering exhibited a lack of discipline when instead they needed increased focus to adjust from product design cycles of 4 years (traditional workstation graphics) to 6 months (90s PC graphics). In their defense, this wouldn't have been easy. But at least some there knew about this. Which brings us to the last problem I'll go into.
Arrogance. SGI was arrogant. No PC could beat us. We'll always stay ahead. Sun? HP? Ha! Yeah, we can do low-price graphics, look at Nintendo-64; see a PC beat that! etc, etc. Not everyone at SGI there was, but a heck of a lot were.
--LP
P.S. I didn't even get into their server strategy, Cray, and later events. Another time perhaps.
As a competitor to Perl (ala Python, Ruby, etc), I'm hearing more about PHP, due to things like mod_php, etc. I wonder what their comments would have been on that...
EmperorLinux also pre-installs Linux on a variety of notebook PCs. I have a friend who got the very portable Crusoe notebook from them and he was quite happy with it.
As a coder, I like to view as much code on my screen as possible, (so I have to hold less of it in my, um, imperfect memory). So I highly value 1600x1200 (UXGA) screen resolution, even if the fonts can be a bit small. Programmer productivity is often memory-constrained, if you know what I mean. I knew my next PC should be a notebook, yet I didn't want to "trade down" for a worse-resolution screen when buying it, so I ended up putting off buying a notebook for a couple years.
When I found out a few months ago that Dell and IBM had finally started offering notebooks with 1600x1200 (15 inch) screens, and both of them were also offering built-in CD-RW drives (my choice of successor for the floppy), I decided it was time to upgrade! That and the fact that I wanted my next home PC, which runs both Windows and Linux to be able to run the more-stable Windows 2000 rather than 95/98/ME. And I knew I couldn't procrastinate much longer or I'd end up forced to get Windows XP which i could see I wanted to avoid, due to spyware, bloat, stability-removing "features", etc.
There were just two notebooks that met this criteria: the Dell Inspiron 8000 and IBM's ThinkPad A Series A21/22p. Dell had configurations I wanted between $2000 and $2650, while IBM configs I wanted were $2700 and up, (pretty large price gap!) so I went with Dell. It's a sweet machine for a desktop replacement. NVidia GeForce2 graphics too, etc...
OK, more diligent searching turned up a couple variants of the "Bible's pi is actually more accurate than 3.0" from a non-Boatwright source, with a nice nice visual diagram.
And I also found a brief article (from a non-religious website) describing how a Jewish rabbi named Nehemiah in ~150 AD first made the argument that the diameter of the tub was 10 cubits from outer rim to outer rim, whereas the 30 cubit circumference was measured around the inner rim.
I wouldn't consider these "proofs," just provocative re-examinations.
Sorry to quote John Boatwright... Never heard of him. I just picked the first article I could find on Google that essentially made the point about handsbreadth rim arguement that I'd seen elsewhere before. I sincerely doubt it originated with Boatwright. I vaguely recall reading that some Jewish rabbi first pointed it out back, pre-1000 AD, but I'll do a followup here if I find a source that's better or the references the original source of the arguement.
Yeah. The proper term is "normal", not "random", but if the Slashdot poster/editors said that, they'd probably have gotten a lot of blank stares from the number-theory-unfamiliar people. Ah well.
You forgot verse 26: "It [the rim] was a handbreadth in thickness..."
If the circumference measurement is from inside the brim (or something like that), you get a value for pi that is 0.073% accurate, well within the significant figures used by Hebrews for measuring at that time.
Technically, it's not conjectured to be "random"; it's conjectured to be "normal", which means that there's an even distribution of the digits 0-9 (in base 10) or 0 and 1 (in base 2).
The fact that there's a algorithm for determining the Nth digit of Pi is old news. The BBP formula which does that was discovered by Bailey, Borwein, and Plouffe in 1995. (PDF paper here).
There was a distributed computing project called PiHex that lasted several years for computing the five trillionth, 40 trillionth, and the quadrillioth bit of Pi, using a variant of the Plouffe discovery, Bellard's formula.
A proof that digits of Pi are random would indeed be news, albeit not exactly a surprise; I'd comment on it but the article's link seems bad or swamped at the moment.
True, having a database of the precise hardware used by all your potential customers would be quite nice. IDC and Gartner watch out!
But also, imagine how useful it would be to have a database of the precise hardware used by each of your competitors' systems. Or the startups you were potentially interested in acquiring?
It sounds like script kiddie heaven- when any security vulnerability becomes known you have a nice map of the hundreds, thousands, millions of systems having the vulnerability.
I'm sure Microsoft is so ethical they would never use a black ops team to take advantage of such information....;)
--LP
Nightmare essay question for Bill Gates: Explain why new economy rules don't apply to software dot-coms, but do apply to software anti-trust enforcement. Describe what a hypothetical software monopoly's obligations would be under the Sherman Anti-trust Act, as you interpret it. Defend your interpretation with Supreme Court citations.
Another website offering this service (soon):
on
Books on Demand
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· Score: 3
I know somebody pursuing a very similar vision; his company is called PushButton Press.
When MS tries to educate people on the merits of two different licenses, neither of which they themselves use, beware! What they're really trying to do is divide and conquer the free software community.
--LinuxParanoid
P.S. (Of course I agree that the main goal of such remarks is probably to cast FUD on the GPL; make IS managers wary about associating with something that Microsoft declares anathema. But the "keep your opponents small and fragmented" strategy is a well-recognized and even self-acknowledged MS strategy (see Alex St. John's remarks on the subject, etc.) Shouldn't Microsoft picking sides in the BSD vs. GPL vs. otherlicenses debate should send warning signals to ya?)
...for the price you're paying, a screen resolution of 1365x768 which is 61", you could make do with a *lot* cheaper LCD projector shining output on a wall or whiteboard. At least for CAD/CAM work, that's what I'd do (assuming walking in front of the projector is an avoidable issue.)
Technically, you're right. Pragmatically, you're wrong. If Microsoft controls the TCP/IP software running on 95% of the clients, from the stack up through the application layer (ie/exchange/word) to the service layer (MSN, Hailstorm), they can effectively control the Internet. The server is tougher for them, but I think they have 50%+ share if you look at commercial webservers, plus they have a pretty decent volume database strategy and marketshare.
That's just stupid. If you want to use the services and products provided by Microsoft, then do so, but there's lots of alternatives,
There aren't lots of alternatives that are data-compatible (e.g. Office-compatible) with the partners I have to share information with, nor user-interface-interchangeable with the workers I have to hire. Sure, I can train people, but there goes any savings I might have hoped for.
and if there aren't alternatives, then go write your own!
If you think I can write my own alternative software that is as feature-filled as the stuff MS has spent billions developing, with or without the help of the Free/Open Source brigade, I have a bridge to sell you.
I don't hate Microsoft, I just resent the degree of control they exert over my pragmaticly-driven choices, and the way in they foreclose my ability as a software developer to develop a successful product in a strategic new market without getting squashed like a bug.
--LinuxParanoid, who has long thought the Linux crowd wasn't paranoid of Microsoft's capabilities enough
It's generally accepted that when the monitors get to about 200 dpi, you won't be able to tell the difference with your eye. (Technically speaking, it depends how far your eye is from the display.) Right now, most monitors display at around 75-90 dpi however. So there's still reasonable room for improvement, although I'd agree that today's CRTs are "good enough" aka "just great for many applications". But then I think that my straight lines on my monitors are straight enough too...;)
Making geometries better with CRTs is an incredibly difficult technical challenge, but trivial with LCDs. If you are really picky about geometry and the newer flat-screen CRTs still aren't good enough, I'd recommend moving to an LCD display.
Slashdot Mirror
Christian fundamentalists have said:
"God made AIDS to rid the world of homosexuals."
I understand why you'd be angry at people who said that. Clearly its a false statement given the factual reality that more heterosexuals have AIDS than homosexuals, not to mention how Christ treated those with socially unacceptable diseases in his day (e.g. leprosy).
Fundamentalism is as fundamentalism does. The underlying religion seems to make little difference.
I beg to differ on this one. It all depends on what your fundamentals are. Think about it.
--LP
The Washington Post has two webpages showing a listing of all the businesses in the World Trade Center, sorted by name, but also showing which floor each business was on, both Tower 1 and Tower 2. Interesting to see the non-US companies listed there, but more grimly relevant for gauging survival probabilities of friends/acquaintances/loved ones.
--LP
It's a little more complicated in that Saddam didn't mind getting aid passed to the people of Iraq, as long as *he* controlled the distribution of it. The US and various aid organizations, having witnessed past aid in Ethiopia and other countries get diverted to soldiers and withheld from ordinary citizens said "no thanks". But yeah, I basically agree with you; I don't think the "US sanctions have killed hundreds of thousands" held much water when Saddam, having refused aid, was using his spare cash to build more palaces (and weapons).
Islamic fundamentalists say:
Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life to slay his enemies.
Christ said this:
"Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
Put another way, I think HP faced the classic "innovator's dilemma": do you cannabalize your own high-end high-margin product base by shifting to technology with lower margins, or do you let others use that cheaper technology to eat into your own base while you protect your margins? It's a tough call. Sun certainly ended up making the right choice. I'm not really clear why "not cannablizing" turned out to be the right choice, other than that it heightened their focus enormously, with engineers laser-like focused on cost, and marketing/sales able to present a very clear simple message to customers.
--LP
Believe me, HP looked at outsourcing fabrication. That does let you avoid the cost of investing multiple billions every few years in fab technology, but it still has the following problem. Your high-end RISC chips end up costing $2000-$4000 each to manufacture for performance (e.g. SPECint) that is 60-90% of Intel's comparable $1000 ones. (See Microprocessor Report for more accurate cost estimates). As your RISC chips age and go into the bigger volume portions of your product line, you can drop your costs to maybe $1000, while Intel has dropped its down to $50. And that doesn't include the $100-200 million in design costs per chip. Processor economics is all about volumes. Even the outsourced fabs only give you significant discounts when you hit certain volume targets. (Just ask the 3D chip designers.) Long term, a RISC architecture is tricky to make economically viable. (Short term, the forces of binary compatibility create a barrier to entry for your customers to shift to alternatives so it works out OK.)
Remember, when the Pentium Pro came out in December 1995, it had faster SPECint than any RISC chip out there, except for a DEC Alpha that had been fab-tweaked to run a slightly higher clock rates two weeks earlier to insure that DEC didn't lose the performance crown with Intel's announcement of Pentium Pro. Intel's performance on commercial computing jobs (which rarely use floating point) has been comparable to or better than the RISC chips for half a decade now. Building high-end servers with more economically viable components continues to make a lot of sense. HP does reduce their lock-in longterm, and agrees to engineer stuff in a more competitive IA64 landscape.
Sun made this work in three ways: one they had a larger RISC chip volume to begin with, staying focused to and committed to UNIX/SPARC made them look safer for companies with huge installed skill bases in UNIX, and three, they (correctly) gambled that if they wer able to sell enough high-end SMP servers, the chip costs could be made essentially irrelevant for at least a good portion of their server line. Selling of high-end servers was helped significantly by brandname visibility of Java and Internet leadership in general.
Sun has never claimed they had a compelling long-term strategy for dealing with Wintel's volume economics (IMHO). Scott McNealy I believe has put it something like this: We and all the other RISC/UNIX vendors are like a bunch of campers running from a hungry aggressive bear. Sun's goal is to make sure that all the other campers get eaten first, and maybe by that time we'll have the strength to take on the bear.
I'd agree that HP execs probably erred in their estimation of how fast the shift from RISC to IA would happen, (and how fast they+Intel would execute the shift), and Sun chose a "middle-ground" strategy of designing RISC chips and staying focused with "all their wood behind one arrow" that ultimately was wiser. I wouldn't call HP executives miscalculations "shocking" though.
--LP
And Windows NT turns 8 in September. It first shipped in September 1993. (Development first started in October 1988 when Dave Cutler left DEC for Microsoft.)
Of course, for both NT and Linux, one could argue that the GNU portions of Linux, somewhat like the Win16-OS/2 antecedents of NT, developed earlier, before the true "birth date". (OS embryos in the womb?)
As someone using Linux since 1992, I've found this age similarity to be striking. What do *you* think is the significance of the fact that Linux is older than NT?
--LinuxParanoid
LinuxParanoid, since I remain concerned that Linux advocates aren't paranoid enough(!)
(Your link didn't work.) Nah, that's an old red herring. The adjacent biblical verses say that the vessel was a handsbreath in thickness, so if you measure from the inside you get pretty close to 3.14 depending on your assumptions about cubits, etc. See this mostly secular analysis or this more religiously-oriented site's explanation.
I know this is a rhetorical question, but having once spent a lot of time thinking about how to advise them before and during their fall, I'll give you my analysis. Some of this I saw at the time, some aspects I only saw too late. Learn from their mistakes.
Here's what went wrong:
- SGI succumbed to the Innovator's Dilemna. Unwilling to canibalize their high-end graphics, they refused to enter the PC 3D graphics space and left it open for 40+ hungry competitors. Many of their engineers left for said competitors when it was clear SGI was going nowhere. (Jim Clark recognized the dilemna in 1992-1994 by the way and jumped ship himself, a harbinger of things to come.) In fairness, its hard to canabalize a 1-2 billion dollar workstation graphics market in hopes of winning a 50-200 million dollar 3D PC graphics one.
- SGI refused to go to NT early on when they would have had leverage in making the move that could have forced/encouraged MS to adopt OpenGL exclusively for 3D. Instead, they said no to NT for too long, and when they said yes, it was a me-too decision that was later partially reversed in favor of Linux. Rather than recognizing and admitting they'd lost the war and pursuing the best possible terms, they chose, either conciously or through inaction, the "go down fighting, maybe we can still win" route.
- SGI's bread and butter midrange workstation 3D graphics was prone to "good enough" copying by competitors, Sun and HP. SGI's engineers spent a lot of time focusing on developing unique high-performance texture mapping serving 2% of their market (the entertainment sector) rather than on improving geometry engine performance further for the benefit of the biggest 40+% market (CAD).
- SGI's choice of a strategic response to PCs was poor: "We'll have highly differentiated systems" (the O2). Unfortunately, the differentiation (UMA, texture mapping, imaging, system bus architecture) was largely in areas that didn't add much value to their largest segments of customers. They built not what most of their customers wanted, but what the "cool" customers wanted. What most of their customers wanted was lower prices- that's what most of them ended up going to when dumping SGI.
- SGI engineers were late. Whether through lack of focus/discipline, resistance to "impossible" marketing schedules (that turned out to be necessary), choice of agressive cutting-edge/bleeding-edge component technologies that proved hard to debug, whatever. Your pick. Key products in the timeframe you mentioned were late, late, late. The midrange IMPACT graphics were announced June 95 as shipping but in reality didn't really ship for another 6 months, more or less. (In the meantime, Wall Street lost faith in the company as a momentum stock and SGI stock price dropped from its alltime high of 45 down to mid-20s.) Subsequent products also had a tendency of being late (O2, a year later than needed, Visual PC was late, etc.) SGI engineering exhibited a lack of discipline when instead they needed increased focus to adjust from product design cycles of 4 years (traditional workstation graphics) to 6 months (90s PC graphics). In their defense, this wouldn't have been easy. But at least some there knew about this. Which brings us to the last problem I'll go into.
- Arrogance. SGI was arrogant. No PC could beat us. We'll always stay ahead. Sun? HP? Ha! Yeah, we can do low-price graphics, look at Nintendo-64; see a PC beat that! etc, etc. Not everyone at SGI there was, but a heck of a lot were.
--LPP.S. I didn't even get into their server strategy, Cray, and later events. Another time perhaps.
As a competitor to Perl (ala Python, Ruby, etc), I'm hearing more about PHP, due to things like mod_php, etc. I wonder what their comments would have been on that...
--LP
--LP
As a coder, I like to view as much code on my screen as possible, (so I have to hold less of it in my, um, imperfect memory). So I highly value 1600x1200 (UXGA) screen resolution, even if the fonts can be a bit small. Programmer productivity is often memory-constrained, if you know what I mean. I knew my next PC should be a notebook, yet I didn't want to "trade down" for a worse-resolution screen when buying it, so I ended up putting off buying a notebook for a couple years.
When I found out a few months ago that Dell and IBM had finally started offering notebooks with 1600x1200 (15 inch) screens, and both of them were also offering built-in CD-RW drives (my choice of successor for the floppy), I decided it was time to upgrade! That and the fact that I wanted my next home PC, which runs both Windows and Linux to be able to run the more-stable Windows 2000 rather than 95/98/ME. And I knew I couldn't procrastinate much longer or I'd end up forced to get Windows XP which i could see I wanted to avoid, due to spyware, bloat, stability-removing "features", etc.
There were just two notebooks that met this criteria: the Dell Inspiron 8000 and IBM's ThinkPad A Series A21/22p. Dell had configurations I wanted between $2000 and $2650, while IBM configs I wanted were $2700 and up, (pretty large price gap!) so I went with Dell. It's a sweet machine for a desktop replacement. NVidia GeForce2 graphics too, etc...
--LPAnd I also found a brief article (from a non-religious website) describing how a Jewish rabbi named Nehemiah in ~150 AD first made the argument that the diameter of the tub was 10 cubits from outer rim to outer rim, whereas the 30 cubit circumference was measured around the inner rim.
I wouldn't consider these "proofs," just provocative re-examinations.
--LP
Sorry to quote John Boatwright... Never heard of him. I just picked the first article I could find on Google that essentially made the point about handsbreadth rim arguement that I'd seen elsewhere before. I sincerely doubt it originated with Boatwright. I vaguely recall reading that some Jewish rabbi first pointed it out back, pre-1000 AD, but I'll do a followup here if I find a source that's better or the references the original source of the arguement.
--LP
Yeah. The proper term is "normal", not "random", but if the Slashdot poster/editors said that, they'd probably have gotten a lot of blank stares from the number-theory-unfamiliar people. Ah well.
If the circumference measurement is from inside the brim (or something like that), you get a value for pi that is 0.073% accurate, well within the significant figures used by Hebrews for measuring at that time.
Not that the bible is a Mathematics text...
--LP
Technically, it's not conjectured to be "random"; it's conjectured to be "normal", which means that there's an even distribution of the digits 0-9 (in base 10) or 0 and 1 (in base 2).
--LP
There was a distributed computing project called PiHex that lasted several years for computing the five trillionth, 40 trillionth, and the quadrillioth bit of Pi, using a variant of the Plouffe discovery, Bellard's formula.
A proof that digits of Pi are random would indeed be news, albeit not exactly a surprise; I'd comment on it but the article's link seems bad or swamped at the moment.
--LP
P.S. Google has a nice list of Pi links.
But also, imagine how useful it would be to have a database of the precise hardware used by each of your competitors' systems. Or the startups you were potentially interested in acquiring?
It sounds like script kiddie heaven- when any security vulnerability becomes known you have a nice map of the hundreds, thousands, millions of systems having the vulnerability.
I'm sure Microsoft is so ethical they would never use a black ops team to take advantage of such information.... ;)
--LP
Nightmare essay question for Bill Gates: Explain why new economy rules don't apply to software dot-coms, but do apply to software anti-trust enforcement. Describe what a hypothetical software monopoly's obligations would be under the Sherman Anti-trust Act, as you interpret it. Defend your interpretation with Supreme Court citations.
--LP
--LinuxParanoid
P.S. (Of course I agree that the main goal of such remarks is probably to cast FUD on the GPL; make IS managers wary about associating with something that Microsoft declares anathema. But the "keep your opponents small and fragmented" strategy is a well-recognized and even self-acknowledged MS strategy (see Alex St. John's remarks on the subject, etc.) Shouldn't Microsoft picking sides in the BSD vs. GPL vs. otherlicenses debate should send warning signals to ya?)
My hat (tinfoil?) is off to you, sir. Nice critique.
...for the price you're paying, a screen resolution of 1365x768 which is 61", you could make do with a *lot* cheaper LCD projector shining output on a wall or whiteboard. At least for CAD/CAM work, that's what I'd do (assuming walking in front of the projector is an avoidable issue.)
--LP
Technically, you're right. Pragmatically, you're wrong. If Microsoft controls the TCP/IP software running on 95% of the clients, from the stack up through the application layer (ie/exchange/word) to the service layer (MSN, Hailstorm), they can effectively control the Internet. The server is tougher for them, but I think they have 50%+ share if you look at commercial webservers, plus they have a pretty decent volume database strategy and marketshare.
That's just stupid. If you want to use the services and products provided by Microsoft, then do so, but there's lots of alternatives,
There aren't lots of alternatives that are data-compatible (e.g. Office-compatible) with the partners I have to share information with, nor user-interface-interchangeable with the workers I have to hire. Sure, I can train people, but there goes any savings I might have hoped for.
and if there aren't alternatives, then go write your own!
If you think I can write my own alternative software that is as feature-filled as the stuff MS has spent billions developing, with or without the help of the Free/Open Source brigade, I have a bridge to sell you.
I don't hate Microsoft, I just resent the degree of control they exert over my pragmaticly-driven choices, and the way in they foreclose my ability as a software developer to develop a successful product in a strategic new market without getting squashed like a bug.
--LinuxParanoid, who has long thought the Linux crowd wasn't paranoid of Microsoft's capabilities enough
It's generally accepted that when the monitors get to about 200 dpi, you won't be able to tell the difference with your eye. (Technically speaking, it depends how far your eye is from the display.) Right now, most monitors display at around 75-90 dpi however. So there's still reasonable room for improvement, although I'd agree that today's CRTs are "good enough" aka "just great for many applications". But then I think that my straight lines on my monitors are straight enough too... ;)
Making geometries better with CRTs is an incredibly difficult technical challenge, but trivial with LCDs. If you are really picky about geometry and the newer flat-screen CRTs still aren't good enough, I'd recommend moving to an LCD display.
--LP