"I don't see Nokia as interested in the Linux desktop"
While I understand your arguments it would now be a relatively easy way for Nokia to sneakin to that business. Before this buyout it would have been "impossible".
Don't forget that the margins of the mobile phone industry may be diminishing and that the distinction between a mobile phone and a laptop is blurred more and more. Nokia is spreading its risks. Who knows what a laptop's wireless connection will look like in five years. I don't, but I guess Nokia now is better prepared to not only know, but also to adapt and dictate.
"How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion?"
That is what some wondered too, in a company I worked at long time ago.
We were 125 employees, with about software 80 developers. We sold for about $20 million and had $30 million in expenses. We had 65 small and large contracts in 45 countries.
Then, we were bought, for about 1 billion dollars by a larger company? What did they pay for? Our profit? Our staff? Hardly. Probably our running technology, patents, and above established contracts.
I guess the situation is similar here. SUN bought the MySQL for its technology and contracts.
Sorry for the Danes, but that rise is only prominentin northern Scandinavia, with the tilting axis somewhere at the height of the northern tip of Denmark.
In fact, Denmark is sinking at the rate of up to about half a centimeter a year, while northern Scandinavia rises up to about 2 cm a year.
As you can image the contour of shallow coastal plains changes dramatically within a man's lifetime.
Wales has, for decades, been used in the UK as a standard of measurement, not just of land mass but also of population, annual rain fall, tourist numbers and exports. Every large country's size was measured in 'Wales'es. Popular media, like radio and television have used the 'Wales', mainly in news reports.
"The Americans have invaded Vietnam. This country in south east Asia is 14 times the size of Wales."
"The Falklands have been invaded! These disputed islands, half the size of Wales, have been sought after by the Argentine government for decades."
"n Sweden's 2006 general election, The Pirate Party received the 10th most popular votes, or 0.63 (just below "The Feminist Initiative")"
Heh, Jane Fonda even went to Sweden in order to support the "Feminist Initiative". While the party had a lot of media attention during the campaigns, I think the voters took them for what they are, feminists, and din't vote for them. Maybe it was a bad name choice?;)
Search on google for "Intel" and "Larrabee" if you need to know slightly more. Rumors have floated around for almost two years now about that project, with a release date estimated to 2009 or so.
Well, "The labeling system is not fundamentally important." in some respects contradicts "When you say humans are specialized fish, you're stretching the commonly-used word 'fish' so far from its ordinary meaning that it is completely unrecognizable." as you are aware. And the issue is, the mortals I guess...;)
For example, "trees" or "bushes" has no connotation of ancestry beyond they are all plants. Still, ancestry is the only criterion one is striving for in the classification today, and the "truth" strived for is the unknown, underlying evolutionary tree. "Fish" is almost of the same complexity, being all vertebrates, except the tetrapods.
And, yes, that mix of laymen terms and non-mortal terms is bewildering to most. Unfortunately, the dinosaurs have entered that domain of layman penumbral sagacity.
And, on top of that, "redefining the meanings of existing labels" is the daily work of the World's scientists I guess. I think today (in organismal classification at least), the meaning gives the label, whereas two hundred years ago (before Darwin) the label gave the meaning.
It is a confusing world, with or without labels such as actinopterygii.:)
I object, it is not I who need to be consistent in these matters...;)
Modern classification, however, does it in a consistent manner, except for a few die hard scientists from fifty years ago. They still think birds are "sufficiently different" to warrant a separate category, with a rank higher(!) than dinosaurs. There are even thick books on the subject.
Some early authors even argued that humans should be placed not among apes or mammals, or even animals, but in a Kingdom on its own - Psyche...
The similarity with object orientation and inheritance in programming is not far fetched, as you have guessed.
The principle "is a kind of" is the current paradigm, as is "you cannot change your ancestors" (as easily).
Yep! You got that correct!
In fact we belong Craniata > Vertebrata > Osteichthyes > Sarcopterygii > Tetrapoda > Mammalia > Primates > Hominidae etc. (Of course this is simplified and open to change)
Often, there is some confusion over the term "fish" and in particular "bony fish" as it is applied to two different levels at the same time. One is the Osteichthyes (which translates - bony fish) whereas the other one is the Teleostei which includes what most people would call fish (gars, bowfin, musky, tuna, seahorses etc). The latter group belong to the Osteichthyes too but is an another subgroup separate from ours, Actinopterygii.
.
...automate requests with a dictionary? Make them bankrupt themselves purchasing bogus domains? Is www.fucknetworksolutions.com already taken?! I was redirected to www.gobuddy.com.
Try you too. May be someone will actually make it a permanent web page.:)
"In other terms, birds are descendants and cousins of dinosaurs, but they are not a species of dinosaur."
Sorry, but that was an example of the common misconception I was trying to point out. Contrary to your proposal, birds _are_ a group of species of dinosaurs.
If all mammals, except the bats for example, went extinct, your favorite bat would not seize or stop being a mammal. And the number of very specific adaptations of the bats would NOT set them apart (sonar, leathery wings, wrinkled noses, large ears, etc). The bats would remain inside the mammal group, just as all the bird species remain inside the dinosaurs. Bats are specialized mammals and birds are specialized dinosaurs.
If a mosquito born disease would kill all mammals, the bats would die out too. Therefore it was probably not a disease that killed all dinosaurs and spared that group we now call birds. .
Sorry, but the grand parent probably is correct here. The US dominance of the information highway "Internet" is probably not looked favorably upon by the governments mentioned.
You don't have to be very bright to see that Cyrillic and Chinese are perfectly legitimate reasons for acquiring their own DNS systems, and that they seem prepared to use those reasons. Despite the trouble it sadly WILL create, both in the short and long run.
Looking at some US statistics of R&D expenditures on a global scale it seems UK is on 18th place, calculated _per capita_. (http://nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/c4/tt04-13.htm) That would make the 17th rank well deserved.;)
Israel is number one, followed by Sweden, Finland, Japan, Iceland, and the US.
Of course the absolute magnitude is of importance here. That allows the UK to engage in research never attainable by e.g. the Icelandic however high their per capita is. With the US in at a sixth place (per capita) and with the largest economy in place, we can safely assume they can do any research they wish. And buy any computer there is. The www.top500.org is a testimony of that. http://www.top500.org/overtime/list/30/countries thus also recognizes the UK economy, and gives it a rank 4! So, the original grand grand parent should not complain. The UK is fine.
"From what I can tell the Navy doesn't give two shits about what the software runs on, so long as it works. Contractors do all of the upgrades and major overhauls anyway. Sailors just troubleshoot."
Ok, my initial lead wasn't as clear as I had thought.
Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged that the Yorktown last September experienced what they termed "an engineering local area network casualty," but denied that the ship's systems failure lasted as long as DiGiorgio said. The Yorktown was dead in the water for about two hours and 45 minutes, fleet officials said, and did not have to be towed in.
"This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion casualty involved with the control system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was frozen," Vice Adm. Henry Giffin, commander of the Atlantic Fleet's Naval Surface Force, reported in an Oct. 24, 1997, memorandum.
Giffin wrote the memo to describe "what really happened in hope of clearing the scuttlebutt" surrounding the incident, he noted.
The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.
The program administrators are trained to bypass a bad data field and change the value if such a problem occurs again, Atlantic Fleet officials said.
But "the Yorktown's failure in September 1997 was not as simple as reported," DiGiorgio said.
"If you understand computers, you know that a computer normally is immune to the character of the data it processes," he wrote in the June U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine. "Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions. It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple failure."
The Navy reduced the Yorktown crew by 10 percent and saved more than $2.8 million a year using the computers. The ship uses dual 200-MHz Pentium Pros from Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala. The PCs and server run NT 4.0 over a high-speed, fiber-optic LAN.
Despite the USS Yorktown's setbacks, the Navy plans to use Smart Ship technology on other classes of ships.
[...]
But according to DiGiorgio, who in an interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's computer problems.
NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the engines and navigate the ship when under way.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March 1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both networks and PCs as part of the Navy's Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Current guidance approved by the Navy's chief information officer calls for all new applications to run under NT.
"Reproductive isolation is a major characteristic of speciation. Lions and tigers, horses and donkeys, etc are different species, but under unnatural conditions may mate and even produce offspring. Depending on how unrelated the species are, the offspring may or may not be viable."
While technically correct, i would still stay that today most would say that "Reproductive isolation is a minor characteristic of speciation".
It may sound heretic, but the fact is that only very few _diagnosable_ ("identifiable") species have been tested for "reproductive isolation", in particular genetic reproductive isolation. Other forms of isolation, especially temporal, are even more difficult to manifest. Geographic isolation, per se, may on the other hand not be very informative at all.
The farm house perspective of e.g. horses and donkeys is rarely an issue for accepting what is a species. -
Sorely missing - the abyssmal sales figures for Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3. Neither game managed to sell 100,000 copies the first month, November 2007. THAT was a big, unexpected news item considering the hype.
I think Gnome is a bit like Apple in this respect. Strange for beginners and nice to long time users. Oh thinking of it, that must be true for KDE and Windows XP and Vista, too... No, I don't believe in oranges here.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't see Nokia as interested in the Linux desktop"
While I understand your arguments it would now be a relatively easy way for Nokia to sneakin to that business. Before this buyout it would have been "impossible".
Don't forget that the margins of the mobile phone industry may be diminishing and that the distinction between a mobile phone and a laptop is blurred more and more. Nokia is spreading its risks. Who knows what a laptop's wireless connection will look like in five years. I don't, but I guess Nokia now is better prepared to not only know, but also to adapt and dictate.
-
Is she related to Sigorney Weaver? That may have unexpected consequences, in the long run. What was the name of the company treating the girl again?
"How can an open source software company with $70 million or so in revenue and no profits to speak of be worth $1 billion?"
That is what some wondered too, in a company I worked at long time ago.
We were 125 employees, with about software 80 developers. We sold for about $20 million and had $30 million in expenses. We had 65 small and large contracts in 45 countries.
Then, we were bought, for about 1 billion dollars by a larger company? What did they pay for? Our profit? Our staff? Hardly. Probably our running technology, patents, and above established contracts.
I guess the situation is similar here. SUN bought the MySQL for its technology and contracts.
Sorry for the Danes, but that rise is only prominentin northern Scandinavia, with the tilting axis somewhere at the height of the northern tip of Denmark.
In fact, Denmark is sinking at the rate of up to about half a centimeter a year, while northern Scandinavia rises up to about 2 cm a year.
As you can image the contour of shallow coastal plains changes dramatically within a man's lifetime.
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1066484
Wales has, for decades, been used in the UK as a standard of measurement, not just of land mass but also of population, annual rain fall, tourist numbers and exports. Every large country's size was measured in 'Wales'es. Popular media, like radio and television have used the 'Wales', mainly in news reports.
"The Americans have invaded Vietnam. This country in south east Asia is 14 times the size of Wales."
"The Falklands have been invaded! These disputed islands, half the size of Wales, have been sought after by the Argentine government for decades."
etc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1so1ZMgpg2w Those prosthetic legs do have the potential. But, the best thing of the clip is the enthusiastic Italian commentator. :)
"n Sweden's 2006 general election, The Pirate Party received the 10th most popular votes, or 0.63 (just below "The Feminist Initiative")"
;)
Heh, Jane Fonda even went to Sweden in order to support the "Feminist Initiative". While the party had a lot of media attention during the campaigns, I think the voters took them for what they are, feminists, and din't vote for them. Maybe it was a bad name choice?
Search on google for "Intel" and "Larrabee" if you need to know slightly more. Rumors have floated around for almost two years now about that project, with a release date estimated to 2009 or so.
Also, if you need a job in the multicore business, check out http://www.intel.com/jobs/careers/visualcomputing/
In short, visual computing (read gaming) will use all those cores mentioned in the article, word processing will not. Be so sure.
.
"This game was released for the Unix platform in or about 1990 and has been modified for inclusion in the One Laptop Per Child program."
Nice move to open it up under GPL! But sad circumstances if OLPC is dead.
Well, "The labeling system is not fundamentally important." in some respects contradicts "When you say humans are specialized fish, you're stretching the commonly-used word 'fish' so far from its ordinary meaning that it is completely unrecognizable." as you are aware. And the issue is, the mortals I guess... ;)
:)
For example, "trees" or "bushes" has no connotation of ancestry beyond they are all plants. Still, ancestry is the only criterion one is striving for in the classification today, and the "truth" strived for is the unknown, underlying evolutionary tree. "Fish" is almost of the same complexity, being all vertebrates, except the tetrapods.
And, yes, that mix of laymen terms and non-mortal terms is bewildering to most. Unfortunately, the dinosaurs have entered that domain of layman penumbral sagacity.
And, on top of that, "redefining the meanings of existing labels" is the daily work of the World's scientists I guess. I think today (in organismal classification at least), the meaning gives the label, whereas two hundred years ago (before Darwin) the label gave the meaning.
It is a confusing world, with or without labels such as actinopterygii.
He is out, travelling? Or just too small to be seen in that resolution?
I have no idea.
I object, it is not I who need to be consistent in these matters... ;)
Modern classification, however, does it in a consistent manner, except for a few die hard scientists from fifty years ago. They still think birds are "sufficiently different" to warrant a separate category, with a rank higher(!) than dinosaurs. There are even thick books on the subject.
Some early authors even argued that humans should be placed not among apes or mammals, or even animals, but in a Kingdom on its own - Psyche...
The similarity with object orientation and inheritance in programming is not far fetched, as you have guessed.
The principle "is a kind of" is the current paradigm, as is "you cannot change your ancestors" (as easily).
.
Yep! You got that correct! In fact we belong Craniata > Vertebrata > Osteichthyes > Sarcopterygii > Tetrapoda > Mammalia > Primates > Hominidae etc. (Of course this is simplified and open to change) Often, there is some confusion over the term "fish" and in particular "bony fish" as it is applied to two different levels at the same time. One is the Osteichthyes (which translates - bony fish) whereas the other one is the Teleostei which includes what most people would call fish (gars, bowfin, musky, tuna, seahorses etc). The latter group belong to the Osteichthyes too but is an another subgroup separate from ours, Actinopterygii. .
...automate requests with a dictionary? Make them bankrupt themselves purchasing bogus domains? Is www.fucknetworksolutions.com already taken?! I was redirected to www.gobuddy.com.Try you too. May be someone will actually make it a permanent web page.
http://www.fucknetworksolutions.com/
"In other terms, birds are descendants and cousins of dinosaurs, but they are not a species of dinosaur."
Sorry, but that was an example of the common misconception I was trying to point out. Contrary to your proposal, birds _are_ a group of species of dinosaurs.
If all mammals, except the bats for example, went extinct, your favorite bat would not seize or stop being a mammal. And the number of very specific adaptations of the bats would NOT set them apart (sonar, leathery wings, wrinkled noses, large ears, etc). The bats would remain inside the mammal group, just as all the bird species remain inside the dinosaurs. Bats are specialized mammals and birds are specialized dinosaurs.
If a mosquito born disease would kill all mammals, the bats would die out too. Therefore it was probably not a disease that killed all dinosaurs and spared that group we now call birds.
.
You are absolutely correct. The authors must have made that same old error. It is done again and again. Over and over.
Why can't people understand, birds are the dinosaurs that survived.
Birds relate to dinosaurs as bats relate to mammals. Or, birds relate to dinosaurs as butterflies relate to insects. It is as simple as that.
That, unread, article must be bad.
Sorry, but the grand parent probably is correct here. The US dominance of the information highway "Internet" is probably not looked favorably upon by the governments mentioned.
You don't have to be very bright to see that Cyrillic and Chinese are perfectly legitimate reasons for acquiring their own DNS systems, and that they seem prepared to use those reasons. Despite the trouble it sadly WILL create, both in the short and long run.
Looking at some US statistics of R&D expenditures on a global scale it seems UK is on 18th place, calculated _per capita_. ;)
(http://nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/c4/tt04-13.htm) That would make the 17th rank well deserved.
Israel is number one, followed by Sweden, Finland, Japan, Iceland, and the US.
Of course the absolute magnitude is of importance here. That allows the UK to engage in research never attainable by e.g. the Icelandic however high their per capita is. With the US in at a sixth place (per capita) and with the largest economy in place, we can safely assume they can do any research they wish. And buy any computer there is. The www.top500.org is a testimony of that. http://www.top500.org/overtime/list/30/countries thus also recognizes the UK economy, and gives it a rank 4! So, the original grand grand parent should not complain. The UK is fine.
"From what I can tell the Navy doesn't give two shits about what the software runs on, so long as it works. Contractors do all of the upgrades and major overhauls anyway. Sailors just troubleshoot."
Ok, my initial lead wasn't as clear as I had thought.
-
.
From a 1998 article ( http://www.gcn.com/print/17_17/33727-1.html )
Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged that the Yorktown last September experienced what they termed "an engineering local area network casualty," but denied that the ship's systems failure lasted as long as DiGiorgio said. The Yorktown was dead in the water for about two hours and 45 minutes, fleet officials said, and did not have to be towed in.
"This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion casualty involved with the control system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was frozen," Vice Adm. Henry Giffin, commander of the Atlantic Fleet's Naval Surface Force, reported in an Oct. 24, 1997, memorandum.
Giffin wrote the memo to describe "what really happened in hope of clearing the scuttlebutt" surrounding the incident, he noted.
The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.
The program administrators are trained to bypass a bad data field and change the value if such a problem occurs again, Atlantic Fleet officials said.
But "the Yorktown's failure in September 1997 was not as simple as reported," DiGiorgio said.
"If you understand computers, you know that a computer normally is immune to the character of the data it processes," he wrote in the June U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings Magazine. "Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions. It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple failure."
The Navy reduced the Yorktown crew by 10 percent and saved more than $2.8 million a year using the computers. The ship uses dual 200-MHz Pentium Pros from Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala. The PCs and server run NT 4.0 over a high-speed, fiber-optic LAN.
Despite the USS Yorktown's setbacks, the Navy plans to use Smart Ship technology on other classes of ships.
[...]
But according to DiGiorgio, who in an interview said he has serviced automated control systems on Navy ships for the past 26 years, the NT operating system is the source of the Yorktown's computer problems.
NT applications aboard the Yorktown provide damage control, run the ship's control center on the bridge, monitor the engines and navigate the ship when under way.
"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said.
Pacific and Atlantic fleets in March 1997 selected NT 4.0 as the standard OS for both networks and PCs as part of the Navy's Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Current guidance approved by the Navy's chief information officer calls for all new applications to run under NT.
NT 4.0 and US naval ships...
I think Linux floats here. Just check www.top500.org
I can't guarantee that all other open source projects will float as well. But, who could?
"Reproductive isolation is a major characteristic of speciation. Lions and tigers, horses and donkeys, etc are different species, but under unnatural conditions may mate and even produce offspring. Depending on how unrelated the species are, the offspring may or may not be viable."
While technically correct, i would still stay that today most would say that "Reproductive isolation is a minor characteristic of speciation".
It may sound heretic, but the fact is that only very few _diagnosable_ ("identifiable") species have been tested for "reproductive isolation", in particular genetic reproductive isolation. Other forms of isolation, especially temporal, are even more difficult to manifest. Geographic isolation, per se, may on the other hand not be very informative at all.
The farm house perspective of e.g. horses and donkeys is rarely an issue for accepting what is a species.
-
Sorely missing - the abyssmal sales figures for Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3. Neither game managed to sell 100,000 copies the first month, November 2007. THAT was a big, unexpected news item considering the hype.
Read, e.g. "Crysis and UTIII sales bomb" at http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=177667
Most speculations on why concern too demanding graphics.
The Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology put the first Cray 1 sold in Sweden on display yesterday (18 Dec 2007). It has the serial number 9!
While not as old as the IBM machine, Cray always had a special aura of super-duper-power-ueber-performance to me. -
Excuse us non-native English speakers, what does "pinkfud-fuckers" stand for? I could not find it on Google.
.
I think Gnome is a bit like Apple in this respect. Strange for beginners and nice to long time users. Oh thinking of it, that must be true for KDE and Windows XP and Vista, too... No, I don't believe in oranges here.