This is something I feel pretty strongly about--I find any religious argument against the reduction of suffering or extension of life to be anti-humanist, ignorant and intolerant. Live how you will, but don't deny me and others the fundamental right to live what we see as better lives through the advancement of medical science.
For decades scientists and medical ethicists debated studying and using the results of experiments performed by Dr. Josef Mengele on concentration camp prisoners. One side argued that the manner through which the knowledge was gained made it so tainted that it was morally bankrupt to make any use of it. The other side argued that what was done was done and if there was knowledge in Mengele's notes that could save lives and ease suffering, it should be used, else the suffering and unwilling sacrifices of his victims would be for naught.
Both sides have a point, and that's the "sticky wicket" of medical ethics... that both sides of a touchy issue can be "right" in their own ways.
I am disgusted by the concept of harvesting stem cells from aborted fetuses. But I am heartened that stem cells might one day cure Parkinsons or Alzheimers.
Genetic engineering on humans puts me in mind of Hitler and his master race. At the same time, I inherited a predisposition to tendinitis and arteriosclerosis from my forebears, and if I could avoid passing those on to my children... give them the best of my genes, but not the worst... it's very tempting.
I've seen at least one post suggesting that the solution is to kill off a few spammers... whack 'em... and let the rest live in fear that vigilante anti-spam hit men will find them and put a very permanent end to their noxious activities.
This might slow spam, but it could easily increase spam even more. Every geek with a delusion that he's a bad-ass hacker would start trying to frame his enemies as spammers.
I wish it was as simple as intimidating spammers with the long arm of super techno-ninjas who would spike their Mountain Dew with rat poison. And said solution does have a really satisfying visceral feel. But like many things, it would be ruined by friendless queebs trying to turn it to unintended uses.
Anyway, shouldn't we save our true fanatics for attacks on the checkpoints around SCO headquarters?
The one problem I found with working from home full time is that you essentially live at the office. If you can't get office space elsewhere, try to make sure that the workspace you create in your home is an off limits area outside of work hours.
It's sort of like the old advice given to insomniacs. Some people have too much stuff (TV, computer, phone, etc.) and do too many things in their bedrooms (read, work on the computer, watch TV). It creates a zone of activity in what is supposed to be a zone of rest.
Essentially, you're conditioning yourself to be awake in the bedroom. But by removing the distractions and keeping activities there to just sleep (and sex if you're lucky), you create a more restful environment and associate that room with sleep, making it easier to fall asleep and stay asleep.
If you make your work area separate from the rest of the house/apartment and avoid it during non-work hours, it will help you deal with "living at the office" better.
Also, definitely get out regularly. A good thing to do might be to join some groups like Toastmasters that have morning meetings. It gets you out and it's also a good place to prospect for business.
Until the box that teraflop comes in is no larger than a desktop full-tower case and costs under $5,000, it's all somewhat esoteric for the average Joe.
As for what all that power is good for... Why do you need a use in advance of the power? Do you think there was some proto Les Paul sitting around in the 1700s with a solid body guitar and pick-ups, thinking "if someone would just discover electricity, this baby would wail"?
Make the power available and people will literally hurt themselves coming up with ways to exploit it.
All I see in your post is a defeatist attitude. A victim attitude.
America is full of stories of people going into disadvantageous situations and coming out on top. And the thing they all had in common was intelligence, drive, ambition, and a willingness to take risks.
Look at how many people on the Forbes 400 list didn't start out rich. Bill Gates didn't inherit Microsoft. He made it. And even with his monopoly, there are still people with business plans, with dreams, that are built on the belief that they can unseat him or at least take some of his market share.
If you have the drive, ambition, talent, skill, and pure brass balls, the entrenched prestige agencies are a hurdle to be overcome, not an insurmountable barrier to entry. At some point, most of them were started by a hungry, ambitious real estate agent who knew in his heart he could crack the high-rent market. And for each one who did, maybe a hundred failed. But it's because of those hundred who failed that the ones who succeeded aren't overpaid, because in a competitive market, a cutthroat market, they held their own. And their ability to do that entitles them to the fruits of their labors.
It wasn't so much amazing to see real estate agents listed in there as it was to see their logic.
The way they talk, anyone with a RE license could set up shop in a high-rent area and the money would start rolling in.
If it was that easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it?
You can throw out a shingle anywhere, but to make money as a RE agent, you have to do one of two things... convince homeowners to let you sell your house or convince homebuyers to let you help them find and purchase a house. And the richer those people are, the richer the deals they're making, the more competition there is to get them to sign with you.
Knowing your way around the technical labyrinth of buying and selling houses is the easy part. That merely requires study, which anyone with a brain can do. But doing the networking, selling yourself as an expert, making the good impressions, having or developing the skills to read people, get them to like you, AND get them to trust you with handling megabuck deals for them... that takes serious skill and talent.
I'm not an RE agent. But I've sold high-ticket consumer goods on commission. It was one of the hardest jobs I've ever had. Dancing around with someone is easy, but closing them is a true skill, and to work the high-rent customers you have to be a great closer. If you're not, the other agents will eat you alive, because the more lucrative the market, the more cutthroat it is.
Go to an auto dealership, the ad sales department at a radio or TV station, a real estate agency... Ask any of those sales managers what a great closer is worth.
Go actually work as a commissioned salesperson, selling a high-ticket item for a month.
After a bear of a time trying to install the SuSE 9.0 AMD64 edition on my system, I have to weigh in and say that Desktop Linux still has a way to go.
It's come a long way in terms of having a decent office suite, playing video and Flash, etc. But the hardware support still needs help, and that's not going to come entirely from community efforts. It needs better OEM support in the form of drivers, and better support in the OS for separating the drivers and the kernel, so the drivers are commodity software that are as easy to install as in Windows.
My hardware isn't exotic, but to even start my SuSE install, I had to buy and install an IDE hard drive because SuSE wouldn't even regognize the drives in my on-board RAID existed. It's not that it couldn't access them. It couldn't even see them.
Once I set up a somewhat complicated dual OS, dual drive boot, it recognized my sound card and printer okay, but it wouldn't recognize the on-board LAN and I could not find an easily installable driver for that anywhere.
Between hardware mods and hunting down info on the www and usenet only to find out that drivers for my balky hardware didn't exist, it took me the better part of a day to install SuSE.
And without networking, it's a pretty useless installation.
Now, the reason Windows XP works flawlessly with my hardware is because Windows is fully supported by the OEM's, who have provided drivers for their hardware. Granted, those are 32-bit drivers and the AMD64 version of Windows is lacking in driver support too.
The difference is that Microsoft is taking time to debug and let drivers trickle in and isn't rushing an incomplete release of their AMD64 version to market for $119.95. SuSE did. Can you imagine the day when someone would point out Microsoft as being more responsible and less buggy than SuSE? It's come.
The Linux community is making a yeoman's effort to support all the hardware Windows does, but without OEM support (i.e. drivers), it's not easy, and without the hardware support, it's hard to have broad-based market penetration.
It doesn't help that SuSE, with a reputation for being easy to install, puts out a crappy, high-priced distro. I feel WAY more ripped-off and abused by SuSE than I ever have by Microsoft. Did you ever expect to hear someone say that either?
Maybe in a corporate environment with standardized hardware that has been pre-screened for Linux compatibility, desktop Linux has an immediate future. But that's not going to get Linux widely adopted in the SOHO market. People look at Linux and think horror stories like mine are the norm, not the exception to the norm, and that's because these stories are still way too common.
IMO, the Linux community and the OEMs have some serious improvements to their cooperation to execute before desktop Linux is ready for prime-time.
I am not identifying my employer's web site, because it is not fair for me to drag them into this argument. Suffice it to say, it is one of the top 150 sites on the net.
As to the people who claim there is no implied agreement or that I am calling consumers parasites... The consumers who filter ads out, take the content we paid to produce and deliver, and then give us nothing in return but the cost of their use of our site... *they* are the ones who are parasites.
A user who comes to our site, even if they ignore the ads and never click on them, so long as they allow them to be displayed, is fulfilling their part of the bargain and is not a parasite.
As for annoying ads... if we get sufficient complaints from our user base that a particular ad is too obnoxious in its content or manner of delivery, we remove it. Yes, we allow some pop-ups/unders, but we try to make them few and far between. The size and composition of our user base is what we sell to advertisers. If we drive away a significant or specific portion of that user base, we shoot ourselves in the foot, so we are constantly monitoring user response and doing our best to balance the desires of advertisers and users.
Now, having answered that, I am amazed at the hypocrisy of the posters here. Would they ask their favorite magazine or newspaper to be ad free? Few could survive on subscription/purchase price alone. What about alternative weeklies that are free? Those are entirely ad supported.
Yet if those same publications put their content on the Internet, these same people expect it to be ad free. If I was the publisher of one of those papers and I couldn't run ads on my content when I put it on the web, I'd simply not put it on the web.
If you don't like ads, then don't access the content at sites that run them. But don't claim the sites have a responsibility to provide you content ad free or go out of business. In that case, you'll be limited to PBS (which you pay for with taxes) and www.isp.com/~username sites full of pictures of my kitty and my bad poetry.
I, for one (And I'm sure there are many here) remember the Internet before it was commercial, and before there were shysters trying to convince me that advertising is what creates the medium.
Advertising doesn't create the medium, nor the content, but it darn well supports them.
I work for a web site that derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising? That salary goes to pay the salaries of about 30 employees and for the bandwidth from about 3 billion pageviews a year.
The advertisers pay the couple of million dollars a year it costs to run our site.
If you remove the advertising, you remove our site from the internet, because we're darn well not about to work full time for free, plus tap our wallets to pay for the bandwidth you're using.
There is an implicit agreement between publishers and readers. We'll provide you content you deem valuable, and in return for that value, you'll view ads. You can gloss over them, don't even have to pay attention to them, but they have to pass in front of your eyeballs along with our content.
If you pay for your net access and just want to e-mail with friends, chat on IRC, post messages on newsgroups, and access personal web sites, you should never ever have to see an ad. You're paying your ISP for the bandwidth and no one else is having to pay for the content you're enjoying.
But if you want a free mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo, want to read content on professionally produced web sites, watch streaming video, etc., you must either be willing to pay subscription fees or suffer through some banners. For many sites, a subscription model doesn't work for any number of reasons.
If you use blockers to remove banners from content it is costing someone else money to produce and deliver to you, it is not the advertising that is a parasite. You are the parasite.
I've got some Win 32 bit games, but the main reason for this is that I've never owned a bleeding-edge, top-of-the-line system before. Could never afford one before.
With upcoming life events, it's unlikely I'll be able to justify something this new/hot/expensive for the next 20 years. So my wife agreed not to complain if I bought a badass system as a b-day present for myself.
So, yeah, it's a bit unjustified, maybe an early "mid-life crisis" toy. But it's better than buying a sportscar, divorcing my wife, and cruising the local community college for a 19-year-old bimbette to make me feel young.
In large-scale supercomputing applications, if the $16,500 holds, you're still better off with VT's G5 supercomputer as it's less than half the price of a comparably speedy machine based on these chips.
I don't have a question on how these chips will plug in. Most likely their card will contain 2-8 of these chips, plus a controller and specialized RAM, all interconnected by their proprietary bus (mentioned in the press release). It will do a large chunk of the processing in isolation from the CPU and other system components, sending back aggregate results through the PCI-X or Hypertransport system bus.
I can't say they'll build a world-beating supercomputer out of them. They seem like a way of bringing "sort-of supercomputer" power to environments where having a few $65k 100 gflop workstations running specialized apps makes sense.
That's, of course, if they're not vaporware designed to generate another round of VC funding before they slip the projected ship date.
I have to second Pegasus Mail. It can be used for everyday mail, but its filtering rules sets are powerful enough to use it as an ersatz mailing list server (I administered a 5,000 member list with automated subscribe and unsubscribe functions just through the filtering rules).
I have tried Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, but I keep coming back to Pegasus. Nothing, IMO, beats it for pure, unadulterated flexibility and power.
For everyday writing (lots or little), I enjoy the Pentel RSVP. It's got a nice fine point, thick barrel, rubberized grip, and it's inexpensive enough that I never have to worry about losing it.
As for handwriting... they forced me to learn and use cursive all throughout elementary school. When I reached a grade level where it was not mandatory, I switched back to printing. I just prefer it... and I always get compliments on my penmanship.
What you're seeing are the concentrations of the top "genius" schools, like Harvard, MIT, Yale, etc. There are simply more high end schools in Boston, New York, and California than there are in other places.
Good point. The top schools and big cities do help concentrate the top talent. A great artist is unlikely to stay in rural Alabama on the hopes that some art critic's car will break down while passing through their one-horse town. They're going to try to go to New York and hit it big there.
But then my question is whether this money truly has the indended effect? With their high visibility and the resources of prestigious, well-funded institutions behind them, aren't these people already given an advantage in the exercise of their genius? Might the funds be better spent in seeking out and encouraging more obscure genius in more obscure locations?
Given, this is a private foundation and they can do whatever they want with their money. They don't need my approval of their choices and I'm really just Monday-morning quarterbacking. I'm not walking a mile in the shoes of the nominating or judging committees, so I can't know what went into making these choices.
But there's a certain romance to the MacArthur Genius Grant: recognition from out of the blue of great minds laboring in obscurity that suddenly puts funds into their hands to enable them to pursue great works.
I always assumed their processes to be a bit more exhaustive, prying talent out of lesser-explored nooks and crannies, but perhaps the cream really does rise to the top and these are the areas that attract it.
As for the poster who jokingly suggested I compiled the stats as part of a campaign to get my own MacArthur grant... Unless accidentally starting an urban legend qualifies me as a MacArthur caliber genius, I doubt I'll ever generate a work or body of work worthy of such recognition.
I find it interesting that 38% of the recipients can be found in two cities (9 recipients in New York and Boston) that maybe account for 5-6% of the total U.S. population. Throw in another 2 recipients in Connecticut and Georgia and the "East Coast" accounts for nearly half of all the awards.
Probably more out of skew is 2 awards going to New Mexico residents (8.3% of the awards going to an area with 0.75% of the population).
Closer to skew is 4 awards (16.67%) going to California residents (10-11% of the population) and even more so if you count that as "West Coast" instead of just California.
When you deduct the two awards to international residents, that leaves 5 awards (20.83%) to be spread among the other 44 states. Those went to residents of Colorado, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
Does that mean the remaining 39 states do not contain sufficient genius to warrant an award? Does that mean that we have an abnormally high concentration of genius in New York and Boston? While New York and Boston residents would probably like to think so, maybe put on big foam fingers and drunkenly shout "We're Number One", the rest of the nation would likely disagree.
Going through a portion of the historical listing of winners (last names starting with A-F), we find that out of 164 winners, 70 (42.7%) resided in the states of New York or Massachusets, and 30 (18.3% of total recipients, 62.5% of all New York state recipients) were in New York City. An additional 56 (34.1%) were in California, but those were more evenly spread out with only 11 (6.7% of total, 19.6% of state) being in Los Angeles.
So historically, based on that list, you have nearly 77% of all recipients being concentrated in 3 states and over 18% of them in just one city.
I'm sure the recipients of these grants are deserving, hard-working, geniuses in their own right. I just wonder if their geographic location is giving them an unfair advantage over geniuses in the rest of the U.S.
- Greg
, though that still weights Cali's share of the awards above its share of the , just short of half of the recipients (11) are on the East Coast, 9 of them in New York or Massachusets (the other 2 are in Connecticut and Georgia).
Companies could possibly use something like this under certain circumstances (consulting firms that already "hotel" employees) to avoid having people lug around laptops -- give 'em a PDA with a CF card and set them loose. The home "hotel" could have plain old dummy terminals that would just require the user to plug in the CF card to start rolling.
Actually, Business 2.0 recently had an interview with Scott McNealy (The Rodney Dangerfield of Technology) and he was talking about how something like this was being piloted at Sun with smartcards. People would carry smart cards around that would allow them to bring up their personal desktop at any hotel station. He's planning to have "roaming" of this sort enabled at every Sun facility worldwide by the end of the year.
This is server-based instead of putting everything (including the OS) on CF, but it's along similar lines.
What Harvard did the debunking physicist come from? Harvard, Kansas?
First, never talk in absolutes about theory.
Second, Clark didn't say that we'll accellerate a mass to c+1, just that we'll travel faster than light. Any Sci-Fi fan knows 3-4 ideas for FTL that don't involve accellerating a mass beyond c.
They're all theoretical or even just imaginary, but the speed limit of c is still theoretical until we get better at accelerating our masses.
The criticisms of Clark sound like a physicist playing politics, and being good at neither.
> This is old news, was in Wired at least 2 months ago and at that point they had thousands of users worldwide already.
The news is that they reached the 500-course mark, not that they opened up the library. That news was released yesterday.
This is actually a very neat proposition, but it requires a lot of DIY go-getter attitude. Though some may get responses from MIT professors, you have no access to MIT facilities (try some of the Physics/Chem/Engineering labs at home) and no guarantee of access to profs or TA's to answer your questions.
And also remember that none of the information in these courses is stuff that the world never knew before. It gathers it together and provides a framework for self-study. The lecture notes and the professors' insights in them add value. But these do not make this a quantum leap above just burying your nose in books at the library.
I had a Lit prof in college. In communist China, it was decided he was not university material and he was sent to work on a farm. While there he taught himself English and Russian, read voraciously, and wrote critical papers of such quality that his self-directed, spare-time work was sufficient to be considered equivalent to full undergrad studies. He was eventually admitted to a graduate program in Literature, skipping an undergraduate university program.
This is the kind of person - with the intelligence, attitude, and drive to take advantage of this - for whom MIT's open courseware would be a Godsend. But people like him would still do a lot of it with or without the MIT materials available.
For most of the public, i.e. the ones who weren't self-teaching themselves before, it is and will remain merely a curiosity.
There are a number of IP lawyers with a bachelor's or even a master's in computers, engineering, or another technical field before they get their law degree. A friend of mine has a BS in EE, a JD (law degree), and then additional post-grad law studies in IP to top it off. He works for a patent law firm that will not even interview anyone without a tech degree in addition to their law degree.
Law school grads with tech degrees can often command a premium over grads who have their bachelors in political science or another "pre-law" major.
Some level of technical competence is a must for the more successful tech lawyers. Even the guys who are handling SCO... they may not win, but they're getting paid. They know what to show and what not to show, and how to spin the technobabble so they can keep dragging this thing out.
The developer's forum still runs today. They could be saving a Prescott-related announcement until today to go out with a bang.
Of course, if they make no announcement, their silence may be even more of a bang, as it will prompt all sorts of speculation.
As for the Xtreme... I just don't see it selling for too much more than the regular P4 3.2. If its max speed boost (due to cache) is 20%, who would pay a 150-300% premium over the other P4, regardless of how hardcore they are?
Intel's probably modeled the price sensitivity of its target market three ways from Sunday and set the price in the upper ranges of what they think will work, but still... It's probably going to have to street for $1000 or less for it to move in any sort of quantity
All I can say is that I'm ready for a hardware upgrade, but have been waiting for both Prescott and Athlon 64 to release, so all the hardcores can do their benchmarks and argue which one is superior. I could lurk, read, and figure out which chip I want.
But if Intel continues to play coy with the Prescott release date, reference systems for reviewers, and competitive info... F'em. I'm not buying the P4 XTreme.
I can afford to upgrade once every couple of years and I'm jonesing for a big dose of new. If AMD's ofering a pure fix while Intel's just cutting the product with cache... I may just shift my buying over to AMD's street corner.
This is a G5 compiler thread, whose trolling? Your preaching to the wrong choir. While the cost of software is a factor, the cost in productivity outweighs it. A G5 is a multi-media dream PC. Real time renders and all that will make for better output, giving the G5 user the edge over the competition. All the big shops, the real pros and the major movie and multimedia production houses are drooling over the G5...
I was responding to all the people posting about how this will affect benchmarks, cause people to switch, about pricing Opteron boxes vs. G5 boxes, etc... which were dominant topics.
If you're ready to dump your dual 875mhz G4, then yeah, you're going to drool over the dual 2ghz G5 and it's going to have a significant impact on your productivity.
But if the dual Opteron was equivalently priced and 4% faster, would you dump Mac and jump over to a dual Opteron? Would you be that ready to jump platforms - and incur all the other associated costs - for a 4% speed bump?
When Intel did beat Apple on speed... and they have... did you switch then?
I'm not going to weigh in on which platform is superior. Didn't want to, tried not to. I like Mac. My point is that if you're planning to upgrade in the near future, as I am, which system takes the speed crown by a few hairs is going to be much lower on decision ladder than other factors.
I read this thread originally to see if this new compiler brought advantages such as increased stability or something "golly, gee whiz" that made a better argument for Mac than making the Mac an extra quarter of a percent faster on benchmarks. It's going to take something "golly, gee whiz" to make me incur the extra costs to change platforms.
But all I saw was "speed" and "switch" and "cost of Opteron" messages. So I wrote in answer to them.
- Greg
P.S.: The major movie houses are drooling over thin clients connected to big centrally-managed racks, not G5s on the desktop.
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For decades scientists and medical ethicists debated studying and using the results of experiments performed by Dr. Josef Mengele on concentration camp prisoners. One side argued that the manner through which the knowledge was gained made it so tainted that it was morally bankrupt to make any use of it. The other side argued that what was done was done and if there was knowledge in Mengele's notes that could save lives and ease suffering, it should be used, else the suffering and unwilling sacrifices of his victims would be for naught.
Both sides have a point, and that's the "sticky wicket" of medical ethics... that both sides of a touchy issue can be "right" in their own ways.
I am disgusted by the concept of harvesting stem cells from aborted fetuses. But I am heartened that stem cells might one day cure Parkinsons or Alzheimers.
Genetic engineering on humans puts me in mind of Hitler and his master race. At the same time, I inherited a predisposition to tendinitis and arteriosclerosis from my forebears, and if I could avoid passing those on to my children... give them the best of my genes, but not the worst... it's very tempting.
This might slow spam, but it could easily increase spam even more. Every geek with a delusion that he's a bad-ass hacker would start trying to frame his enemies as spammers.
I wish it was as simple as intimidating spammers with the long arm of super techno-ninjas who would spike their Mountain Dew with rat poison. And said solution does have a really satisfying visceral feel. But like many things, it would be ruined by friendless queebs trying to turn it to unintended uses.
Anyway, shouldn't we save our true fanatics for attacks on the checkpoints around SCO headquarters?
Greg
It's sort of like the old advice given to insomniacs. Some people have too much stuff (TV, computer, phone, etc.) and do too many things in their bedrooms (read, work on the computer, watch TV). It creates a zone of activity in what is supposed to be a zone of rest.
Essentially, you're conditioning yourself to be awake in the bedroom. But by removing the distractions and keeping activities there to just sleep (and sex if you're lucky), you create a more restful environment and associate that room with sleep, making it easier to fall asleep and stay asleep.
If you make your work area separate from the rest of the house/apartment and avoid it during non-work hours, it will help you deal with "living at the office" better.
Also, definitely get out regularly. A good thing to do might be to join some groups like Toastmasters that have morning meetings. It gets you out and it's also a good place to prospect for business.
- Greg
As for what all that power is good for... Why do you need a use in advance of the power? Do you think there was some proto Les Paul sitting around in the 1700s with a solid body guitar and pick-ups, thinking "if someone would just discover electricity, this baby would wail"?
Make the power available and people will literally hurt themselves coming up with ways to exploit it.
- G
All I see in your post is a defeatist attitude. A victim attitude.
America is full of stories of people going into disadvantageous situations and coming out on top. And the thing they all had in common was intelligence, drive, ambition, and a willingness to take risks.
Look at how many people on the Forbes 400 list didn't start out rich. Bill Gates didn't inherit Microsoft. He made it. And even with his monopoly, there are still people with business plans, with dreams, that are built on the belief that they can unseat him or at least take some of his market share.
If you have the drive, ambition, talent, skill, and pure brass balls, the entrenched prestige agencies are a hurdle to be overcome, not an insurmountable barrier to entry. At some point, most of them were started by a hungry, ambitious real estate agent who knew in his heart he could crack the high-rent market. And for each one who did, maybe a hundred failed. But it's because of those hundred who failed that the ones who succeeded aren't overpaid, because in a competitive market, a cutthroat market, they held their own. And their ability to do that entitles them to the fruits of their labors.
- Greg
The way they talk, anyone with a RE license could set up shop in a high-rent area and the money would start rolling in.
If it was that easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it?
You can throw out a shingle anywhere, but to make money as a RE agent, you have to do one of two things... convince homeowners to let you sell your house or convince homebuyers to let you help them find and purchase a house. And the richer those people are, the richer the deals they're making, the more competition there is to get them to sign with you.
Knowing your way around the technical labyrinth of buying and selling houses is the easy part. That merely requires study, which anyone with a brain can do. But doing the networking, selling yourself as an expert, making the good impressions, having or developing the skills to read people, get them to like you, AND get them to trust you with handling megabuck deals for them... that takes serious skill and talent.
I'm not an RE agent. But I've sold high-ticket consumer goods on commission. It was one of the hardest jobs I've ever had. Dancing around with someone is easy, but closing them is a true skill, and to work the high-rent customers you have to be a great closer. If you're not, the other agents will eat you alive, because the more lucrative the market, the more cutthroat it is.
Go to an auto dealership, the ad sales department at a radio or TV station, a real estate agency... Ask any of those sales managers what a great closer is worth.
Go actually work as a commissioned salesperson, selling a high-ticket item for a month.
Then tell me if real estate agents are overpaid.
Sheesh.
- Greg
It's come a long way in terms of having a decent office suite, playing video and Flash, etc. But the hardware support still needs help, and that's not going to come entirely from community efforts. It needs better OEM support in the form of drivers, and better support in the OS for separating the drivers and the kernel, so the drivers are commodity software that are as easy to install as in Windows.
My hardware isn't exotic, but to even start my SuSE install, I had to buy and install an IDE hard drive because SuSE wouldn't even regognize the drives in my on-board RAID existed. It's not that it couldn't access them. It couldn't even see them.
Once I set up a somewhat complicated dual OS, dual drive boot, it recognized my sound card and printer okay, but it wouldn't recognize the on-board LAN and I could not find an easily installable driver for that anywhere.
Between hardware mods and hunting down info on the www and usenet only to find out that drivers for my balky hardware didn't exist, it took me the better part of a day to install SuSE.
And without networking, it's a pretty useless installation.
Now, the reason Windows XP works flawlessly with my hardware is because Windows is fully supported by the OEM's, who have provided drivers for their hardware. Granted, those are 32-bit drivers and the AMD64 version of Windows is lacking in driver support too.
The difference is that Microsoft is taking time to debug and let drivers trickle in and isn't rushing an incomplete release of their AMD64 version to market for $119.95. SuSE did. Can you imagine the day when someone would point out Microsoft as being more responsible and less buggy than SuSE? It's come.
The Linux community is making a yeoman's effort to support all the hardware Windows does, but without OEM support (i.e. drivers), it's not easy, and without the hardware support, it's hard to have broad-based market penetration.
It doesn't help that SuSE, with a reputation for being easy to install, puts out a crappy, high-priced distro. I feel WAY more ripped-off and abused by SuSE than I ever have by Microsoft. Did you ever expect to hear someone say that either?
Maybe in a corporate environment with standardized hardware that has been pre-screened for Linux compatibility, desktop Linux has an immediate future. But that's not going to get Linux widely adopted in the SOHO market. People look at Linux and think horror stories like mine are the norm, not the exception to the norm, and that's because these stories are still way too common.
IMO, the Linux community and the OEMs have some serious improvements to their cooperation to execute before desktop Linux is ready for prime-time.
-- Greg
Ah, those shameless Europeans. :-)
And now, with fish-leather thongs, I can see millions of women saying "no, honestly honey, the smell's from my bikini."
I am not identifying my employer's web site, because it is not fair for me to drag them into this argument. Suffice it to say, it is one of the top 150 sites on the net.
As to the people who claim there is no implied agreement or that I am calling consumers parasites... The consumers who filter ads out, take the content we paid to produce and deliver, and then give us nothing in return but the cost of their use of our site... *they* are the ones who are parasites.
A user who comes to our site, even if they ignore the ads and never click on them, so long as they allow them to be displayed, is fulfilling their part of the bargain and is not a parasite.
As for annoying ads... if we get sufficient complaints from our user base that a particular ad is too obnoxious in its content or manner of delivery, we remove it. Yes, we allow some pop-ups/unders, but we try to make them few and far between. The size and composition of our user base is what we sell to advertisers. If we drive away a significant or specific portion of that user base, we shoot ourselves in the foot, so we are constantly monitoring user response and doing our best to balance the desires of advertisers and users.
Now, having answered that, I am amazed at the hypocrisy of the posters here. Would they ask their favorite magazine or newspaper to be ad free? Few could survive on subscription/purchase price alone. What about alternative weeklies that are free? Those are entirely ad supported.
Yet if those same publications put their content on the Internet, these same people expect it to be ad free. If I was the publisher of one of those papers and I couldn't run ads on my content when I put it on the web, I'd simply not put it on the web.
If you don't like ads, then don't access the content at sites that run them. But don't claim the sites have a responsibility to provide you content ad free or go out of business. In that case, you'll be limited to PBS (which you pay for with taxes) and www.isp.com/~username sites full of pictures of my kitty and my bad poetry.
- Greg
Advertising doesn't create the medium, nor the content, but it darn well supports them.
I work for a web site that derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising? That salary goes to pay the salaries of about 30 employees and for the bandwidth from about 3 billion pageviews a year.The advertisers pay the couple of million dollars a year it costs to run our site.
If you remove the advertising, you remove our site from the internet, because we're darn well not about to work full time for free, plus tap our wallets to pay for the bandwidth you're using.
There is an implicit agreement between publishers and readers. We'll provide you content you deem valuable, and in return for that value, you'll view ads. You can gloss over them, don't even have to pay attention to them, but they have to pass in front of your eyeballs along with our content.
If you pay for your net access and just want to e-mail with friends, chat on IRC, post messages on newsgroups, and access personal web sites, you should never ever have to see an ad. You're paying your ISP for the bandwidth and no one else is having to pay for the content you're enjoying.
But if you want a free mail account with Hotmail or Yahoo, want to read content on professionally produced web sites, watch streaming video, etc., you must either be willing to pay subscription fees or suffer through some banners. For many sites, a subscription model doesn't work for any number of reasons.
If you use blockers to remove banners from content it is costing someone else money to produce and deliver to you, it is not the advertising that is a parasite. You are the parasite.
- Greg
I've got some Win 32 bit games, but the main reason for this is that I've never owned a bleeding-edge, top-of-the-line system before. Could never afford one before.
With upcoming life events, it's unlikely I'll be able to justify something this new/hot/expensive for the next 20 years. So my wife agreed not to complain if I bought a badass system as a b-day present for myself.
So, yeah, it's a bit unjustified, maybe an early "mid-life crisis" toy. But it's better than buying a sportscar, divorcing my wife, and cruising the local community college for a 19-year-old bimbette to make me feel young.
- G
I don't have a question on how these chips will plug in. Most likely their card will contain 2-8 of these chips, plus a controller and specialized RAM, all interconnected by their proprietary bus (mentioned in the press release). It will do a large chunk of the processing in isolation from the CPU and other system components, sending back aggregate results through the PCI-X or Hypertransport system bus.
I can't say they'll build a world-beating supercomputer out of them. They seem like a way of bringing "sort-of supercomputer" power to environments where having a few $65k 100 gflop workstations running specialized apps makes sense.
That's, of course, if they're not vaporware designed to generate another round of VC funding before they slip the projected ship date.
- Greg
I envision nightmarish scenes out of "Small Soldiers"... lilliputian armies of talking Barbies, chasing people down and carving them up.
I don't know about you, but the day my Palm Tungsten's calendar shows I've got a 4 p.m. meeting with Death, I'm a headin' for the hills.
- Greg
I have tried Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, but I keep coming back to Pegasus. Nothing, IMO, beats it for pure, unadulterated flexibility and power.
Plus it's free.
As for handwriting... they forced me to learn and use cursive all throughout elementary school. When I reached a grade level where it was not mandatory, I switched back to printing. I just prefer it... and I always get compliments on my penmanship.
- Greg
Good point. The top schools and big cities do help concentrate the top talent. A great artist is unlikely to stay in rural Alabama on the hopes that some art critic's car will break down while passing through their one-horse town. They're going to try to go to New York and hit it big there.
But then my question is whether this money truly has the indended effect? With their high visibility and the resources of prestigious, well-funded institutions behind them, aren't these people already given an advantage in the exercise of their genius? Might the funds be better spent in seeking out and encouraging more obscure genius in more obscure locations?
Given, this is a private foundation and they can do whatever they want with their money. They don't need my approval of their choices and I'm really just Monday-morning quarterbacking. I'm not walking a mile in the shoes of the nominating or judging committees, so I can't know what went into making these choices.
But there's a certain romance to the MacArthur Genius Grant: recognition from out of the blue of great minds laboring in obscurity that suddenly puts funds into their hands to enable them to pursue great works.
I always assumed their processes to be a bit more exhaustive, prying talent out of lesser-explored nooks and crannies, but perhaps the cream really does rise to the top and these are the areas that attract it.
As for the poster who jokingly suggested I compiled the stats as part of a campaign to get my own MacArthur grant... Unless accidentally starting an urban legend qualifies me as a MacArthur caliber genius, I doubt I'll ever generate a work or body of work worthy of such recognition.
- Greg
Probably more out of skew is 2 awards going to New Mexico residents (8.3% of the awards going to an area with 0.75% of the population).
Closer to skew is 4 awards (16.67%) going to California residents (10-11% of the population) and even more so if you count that as "West Coast" instead of just California.
When you deduct the two awards to international residents, that leaves 5 awards (20.83%) to be spread among the other 44 states. Those went to residents of Colorado, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
Does that mean the remaining 39 states do not contain sufficient genius to warrant an award? Does that mean that we have an abnormally high concentration of genius in New York and Boston? While New York and Boston residents would probably like to think so, maybe put on big foam fingers and drunkenly shout "We're Number One", the rest of the nation would likely disagree.
Going through a portion of the historical listing of winners (last names starting with A-F), we find that out of 164 winners, 70 (42.7%) resided in the states of New York or Massachusets, and 30 (18.3% of total recipients, 62.5% of all New York state recipients) were in New York City. An additional 56 (34.1%) were in California, but those were more evenly spread out with only 11 (6.7% of total, 19.6% of state) being in Los Angeles.
So historically, based on that list, you have nearly 77% of all recipients being concentrated in 3 states and over 18% of them in just one city.
I'm sure the recipients of these grants are deserving, hard-working, geniuses in their own right. I just wonder if their geographic location is giving them an unfair advantage over geniuses in the rest of the U.S.
- Greg , though that still weights Cali's share of the awards above its share of the , just short of half of the recipients (11) are on the East Coast, 9 of them in New York or Massachusets (the other 2 are in Connecticut and Georgia).
Companies could possibly use something like this under certain circumstances (consulting firms that already "hotel" employees) to avoid having people lug around laptops -- give 'em a PDA with a CF card and set them loose. The home "hotel" could have plain old dummy terminals that would just require the user to plug in the CF card to start rolling.
Actually, Business 2.0 recently had an interview with Scott McNealy ( The Rodney Dangerfield of Technology ) and he was talking about how something like this was being piloted at Sun with smartcards. People would carry smart cards around that would allow them to bring up their personal desktop at any hotel station. He's planning to have "roaming" of this sort enabled at every Sun facility worldwide by the end of the year.This is server-based instead of putting everything (including the OS) on CF, but it's along similar lines.
- Greg
First, never talk in absolutes about theory.
Second, Clark didn't say that we'll accellerate a mass to c+1, just that we'll travel faster than light. Any Sci-Fi fan knows 3-4 ideas for FTL that don't involve accellerating a mass beyond c.
They're all theoretical or even just imaginary, but the speed limit of c is still theoretical until we get better at accelerating our masses.
The criticisms of Clark sound like a physicist playing politics, and being good at neither.
Greg
The news is that they reached the 500-course mark, not that they opened up the library. That news was released yesterday.
This is actually a very neat proposition, but it requires a lot of DIY go-getter attitude. Though some may get responses from MIT professors, you have no access to MIT facilities (try some of the Physics/Chem/Engineering labs at home) and no guarantee of access to profs or TA's to answer your questions.
And also remember that none of the information in these courses is stuff that the world never knew before. It gathers it together and provides a framework for self-study. The lecture notes and the professors' insights in them add value. But these do not make this a quantum leap above just burying your nose in books at the library.
I had a Lit prof in college. In communist China, it was decided he was not university material and he was sent to work on a farm. While there he taught himself English and Russian, read voraciously, and wrote critical papers of such quality that his self-directed, spare-time work was sufficient to be considered equivalent to full undergrad studies. He was eventually admitted to a graduate program in Literature, skipping an undergraduate university program.
This is the kind of person - with the intelligence, attitude, and drive to take advantage of this - for whom MIT's open courseware would be a Godsend. But people like him would still do a lot of it with or without the MIT materials available.
For most of the public, i.e. the ones who weren't self-teaching themselves before, it is and will remain merely a curiosity.
Greg
Windows 200 Pro and XP have software RAID 0 and RAID 1 capabilities built in. Should be no problem with FireWire drives (though I haven't tried it).
- Greg
$79.50 at new-egg.
$169.98 each at cooldrives.com.
$230 each according to Pricewatch.
Total: $1339.46 plus Tax and/or S&H
- Greg
Law school grads with tech degrees can often command a premium over grads who have their bachelors in political science or another "pre-law" major.
Some level of technical competence is a must for the more successful tech lawyers. Even the guys who are handling SCO... they may not win, but they're getting paid. They know what to show and what not to show, and how to spin the technobabble so they can keep dragging this thing out.
- Greg
Of course, if they make no announcement, their silence may be even more of a bang, as it will prompt all sorts of speculation.
As for the Xtreme... I just don't see it selling for too much more than the regular P4 3.2. If its max speed boost (due to cache) is 20%, who would pay a 150-300% premium over the other P4, regardless of how hardcore they are?
Intel's probably modeled the price sensitivity of its target market three ways from Sunday and set the price in the upper ranges of what they think will work, but still... It's probably going to have to street for $1000 or less for it to move in any sort of quantity
BTW, xicomputer.com is taking orders for Athlon 64 systems already. They're not providing any specs about the chip, but they're selling it.
All I can say is that I'm ready for a hardware upgrade, but have been waiting for both Prescott and Athlon 64 to release, so all the hardcores can do their benchmarks and argue which one is superior. I could lurk, read, and figure out which chip I want.
But if Intel continues to play coy with the Prescott release date, reference systems for reviewers, and competitive info... F'em. I'm not buying the P4 XTreme.
I can afford to upgrade once every couple of years and I'm jonesing for a big dose of new. If AMD's ofering a pure fix while Intel's just cutting the product with cache... I may just shift my buying over to AMD's street corner.
- Greg
I was responding to all the people posting about how this will affect benchmarks, cause people to switch, about pricing Opteron boxes vs. G5 boxes, etc... which were dominant topics.
If you're ready to dump your dual 875mhz G4, then yeah, you're going to drool over the dual 2ghz G5 and it's going to have a significant impact on your productivity.
But if the dual Opteron was equivalently priced and 4% faster, would you dump Mac and jump over to a dual Opteron? Would you be that ready to jump platforms - and incur all the other associated costs - for a 4% speed bump?
When Intel did beat Apple on speed... and they have... did you switch then?
I'm not going to weigh in on which platform is superior. Didn't want to, tried not to. I like Mac. My point is that if you're planning to upgrade in the near future, as I am, which system takes the speed crown by a few hairs is going to be much lower on decision ladder than other factors.
I read this thread originally to see if this new compiler brought advantages such as increased stability or something "golly, gee whiz" that made a better argument for Mac than making the Mac an extra quarter of a percent faster on benchmarks. It's going to take something "golly, gee whiz" to make me incur the extra costs to change platforms.
But all I saw was "speed" and "switch" and "cost of Opteron" messages. So I wrote in answer to them.
- Greg
P.S.: The major movie houses are drooling over thin clients connected to big centrally-managed racks, not G5s on the desktop.