It's not number of errors caught but importance
on
Murphy's Law Rules NASA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There might always be errors which you can reduce with many checks. The key is to have the checks done by someone who has an eye for potential problems. There is a particular skill set/personality that can forsee unknown problems better than say an engineer who is single minded and focussed. You can get a hundred experts to check the same work but often it's the one guy who says "why is that wheel upsidedown" that reveals a completely unanticipated problem.
I don't know, but the screenshots on the Xandros page look horrible. The text isn't even anti-aliased, the icons look like Win 3.0 and the dialog boxes are more like old DOS shell hacks. I don't know how they can say that their distro has unrivalled compatibility with Windows when it doesn't look half as good. Has no one even bothered to look at the beauty that is OS X? Different is good, but it can't suck like 1997.
I downloaded the latest Firefox version for OS X but it just doesn't cut it for me. I use Safari and I love the minimalist interface. Even the way Tabs are presented in Safari is perfectly thought out. Firefox is slowing gaining ground in the interface department but it's still too 1997. It has a few extra features but I don't have a pressing need for any of them. I also don't see any speed advantages. I wish them luck against IE for Windows world, but Safari already won that battle on OS X.
Me and My, is to You and Yours
on
Linus Interviewed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The American dream might not explicitly be about people other than you and your children having a better future but it doesn't take much to see that to have a better future yourself, you have to make sure that everyone has the same chance as you. Otherwise, the dream would just lead to class war, and destruction of society and the environment... oh wait... Well, something to think about.
The point isn't that Walmart is invincible, it's that we have crossed a point where companies have no natural limits to the level of efficiency or the scale of market capitalisation.
Capitalism used to at least have the pretence that it empowered a large middle class and that gave more leisure time and choice over personal destiny. Now, social benefit is entirely removed from Capitalism. Haven't you ever heard presidents talking about how Capitalism beat Communism? That's a social and ideological view to it. But in reality, companies beat Communism, not because of ideology but because Capitalism reached the point where it could "beat" any social organization other than itself.
Companies like Walmart have an unbridled license to privatize and control every aspect of our daily lives, communal property and environment. Worse, they have the power to resist or actively discourage government regulation which is the only vestige for injecting social responsibility back into the system. People talk about being able to choose where they shop or what they buy but that is patently untrue for a huge percentage of people around the world. Worse, many of these conglomerates are the only viable employers. In essence we have reached a point of saturation where it is nearly impossible as an individual (especially one who is poor) to resist the influence of the system. In addition, through corporate tie-ins with education, people are conditioned to accept the slave-mentality that modern day capitalism thrives on.
Just to jump back to your point: Sam Walton my not have started with a lot and it doesn't preclude someone else beating him at his own game, but all that does is switch one devil for another. The big problem is that we've gone so far, without some kind of SOCIAL regulation en masse, the end result is obvious.
This is capitalism. It's nice to believe in a rosy utopia where everyone gets what they want, but the reality is that our economy does not support that model.
And there's the problem. Capitalism used to have natural limits based mostly on the speed of delivery and money liquidity. This allowed a lot of leeway for smaller shops to find meaningful ways to compete outside of price and supply.
Now, supply is limitless, money can be exchanged instantly and all sales are computer controlled to automatically maximize profits. As a result, wealth naturally pools up amongst the people who have enough wealth to take advantage of extreme efficiency.
Basically, capitalism is now unbridled and if you were lucky enough to amass enough wealth in the past you can now take over entire markets because there are no functional restraints in either the market or through competition law.
If you read back to the writings of early capitalists and their critics, they never envisioned a world where there was unlimited (for all intents and purposes) supply and near 100% efficiency. In fact, nearly every one of them said that situation would be to the overall detriment of society and would serve only to consolidate wealth in the smallest minority.
Most independent stores I have gone to shop for music in are charing $16+ for a CD. If you're buying it for $12 and making $4+ a CD I seriously believe that you are gouging us. I don't feel bad for you.
You certainly don't understand retail then. Most stores aim for a 100% markup on their goods, especially on high priced goods. You need this kind of markup to cover real-world costs like rent, wages, insurance, utilities, supplies, shipping, etc. $4 on a $16 CD is actually pretty horrible if you're anything less than the size of say Target. You just can't make up your fixed costs because there isn't the volume. That's why many small stores are going out of business not just with music but any consumer good.
If you're concerned with the cost of CDs, blame the labels and the price they charge. How will you ever buy CDs for $12 if that's the cost the labels sell to stores at?
That is one of the ugliest gadget I've ever seen. It looks like a 10 calculator from the "soft-button" era crossed with the world's worst cell phone. Who's going to want to show off that poor mutant child?
Unfortunately your argument that wealthy/free nations reduce pollution and discourage terrorism is only for the short term. Most of them got to be wealthy through force, environmental pillage, or through running up huge debts to increase the standard of living. Resources run out and debts eventually get called. At that point, it all turns back to force. If you're thinking that we have so many enlightened nations now compared to the past, remember that most of it is from a mortgaged future. The only way to have long term prosperity is to concentrate on extreme efficiency, thoughtful reuse and recycling and clean energy sources. Then the social prosperity can have a meaningful base.
Why don't all the candidates get together and agree on series of 20 questions, then take out a few pages in the New York Times (or similar) so that they can have their own form of equal debate. TV is great for certain things but without a more applicable selection process there could never be a real televised debate of all the candidates. Even if it was physically possible no one would watch the whole thing.
I'd always take quality over resolution. When something is finely balanced (pictures, sound, food) you think less about the pure scale of it and more about the experience. The worst is high resolution with poor quality because the flaws are way more apparent.
Maybe Macs are different but I've never known anyone to lose data due to a hard drive flaking out. I've got almost 4 years on my PBG4 400 and it never gets shut down.
I agree it's a good idea to be prepared. But, a gun is in essence designed to kill in the quickest and unbiased way. You barely have to think to pull the trigger. In fact, none of the issues of actually killing or protecting yourself in a physical sense apply. The issue I'm raising is that a gun's propensity to escalate a situation to the point where either you or someone else is killed is very high. Take other forms of protection as an example: a baseball bat, a can of mace, a bowl of vinegar, a shoelace. They are all suitable to protect you and yet they offer a lot of leeway in terms of fatality compared to a gun. I'm not even talking about accidents. I think that preparedness has to be balanced with reasonable levels of eventuality and frankly I think having a gun jumps straight to the worst outcome every time for the attacker and the victim.
To paraphrase another reply, you buy bottled water before a hurricane, but you don't buy 10,000 bottles, 20 or 30 is plenty even in the unlikely event that your water is contaminated. 10,000 bottles creates more problems than is justified by the preparedness, just like a gun.
I disagree that you never had to know anything. In fact, I would propose that most people prior to the 1960s were extremely knowledgeable and could make far more intuitive and quick judgement than most people today who require the quick ability to look things up. The difference is that a good base of knowledge is really "history" so you can place your knowledge amongst the tested knowledge of time. You may know less, but everything you learn afterwards is put in context. In a social sense, this allows knowledge to be cumulative and is especially important when viewed in the light of social organization and awareness. Having infinite access to quick facts and opinions to a large degree undermines the legitimacy of time tested rote knowledge. People today may have more of the quick answers to meaningless facts, but they don't realize that many of the important things that happen in life and society were figured out hundreds or thousands of years ago. In many ways, the access to limitless information has just separated people by removing the need for concise oral and written history.
In the extremely unlikely situation that someone breaks into your house while you're there, follow these steps:
1. Yell "I have called 911 and the police are on their way." There are very few people that aren't going to turn and run.
2. If they aren't scared away try to escape and call police from a neighbour's house.
There are so few home invasions to start with and so few that are with intent to physically harm, the miniscule amount left over could be discounted as freak occurrences. People have a way of seizing on the worst case outcome no matter how rare and using that as a justification. Realistically, neither the event, nor the overblown countermeasure will ever be tested.
Like I said in the parent post, install a security camera or get a dog. Both are social deterrents that in time will dissuade thieves from trying anything as risky as home invasion
If the person is going to shoot you, a warning shot is only going to give them more time to do it while you reload or re-aim your gun. If you're ballsy enough to have a gun at all, you better be prepared to use it because 99% of the time it's going to make the situation so tense that if you don't you will be killed.
All that aside, if you were ever forced with a home intruder there are a million ways to get out of the situation unharmed. No one really wants to shoot you no matter how crazy they are. Given the smallest choice, they'll choose NOT to. Shout, run away, quietly call 911, they 're all effective.
Personally, I think it's completely asinine to put such value in your personal possessions that you'd want a gun around to protect them. If you're so concerned, install a security camera and get the intruder on video. It'll be short trial.
I usually keep one address for the few people I really want to talk to and never tell anyone else. It's fundamentally the same as having a closed network and costs nothing. A new technology that requires approval to send mail is cool, but we already have IM which requires the same. Friendster is also essentially a friend-only communications device too.
Of the people outside of work I know, none use Linux. About 90% use Windows and 10% Macs, and most of my friends are designers. Of the two camps, I can't ever see any Windows users switching to Linux, while a large percentage will likely switch to Macs because of the iPod influence. Of the Mac users, perhaps one or two will eventually switch to Linux for political reasons but the majority will stay Mac users forever.
Re:Why this article is flawed somewhat.
on
Why We Fall Apart
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· Score: 1
The interesting part is more how the failure rate can be predicted by a kind of standard failure rate curve, as well as noting that humans start off with flaws from the start. With large redundancy to catch errors.
The war on terrorism is like a war on Winter. You can do all you want to protect yourself with fancy clothes and have insulated transport and shelters but in the end it's still cold outside. The last thing you'd want to do is expose yourself and run far away from your house. Hell, stay home, work on your social graces and soon some friends might even come over to share your company.
The biggest reason I don't carry any kind of device around is that my prime reason to use it is to have access to e-mail and the web. Blackberry's are okay for their limited function, but I want to see my e-mail in a rich form like when I'm at my desktop. I want something that's all screen, about 5 x 3 inches and is always connected to the net no matter where I am. Beyond that, I want the connection to be very cheap or free.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still waiting for the flying toaster.
There might always be errors which you can reduce with many checks. The key is to have the checks done by someone who has an eye for potential problems. There is a particular skill set/personality that can forsee unknown problems better than say an engineer who is single minded and focussed. You can get a hundred experts to check the same work but often it's the one guy who says "why is that wheel upsidedown" that reveals a completely unanticipated problem.
I don't know, but the screenshots on the Xandros page look horrible. The text isn't even anti-aliased, the icons look like Win 3.0 and the dialog boxes are more like old DOS shell hacks. I don't know how they can say that their distro has unrivalled compatibility with Windows when it doesn't look half as good. Has no one even bothered to look at the beauty that is OS X? Different is good, but it can't suck like 1997.
I downloaded the latest Firefox version for OS X but it just doesn't cut it for me. I use Safari and I love the minimalist interface. Even the way Tabs are presented in Safari is perfectly thought out. Firefox is slowing gaining ground in the interface department but it's still too 1997. It has a few extra features but I don't have a pressing need for any of them. I also don't see any speed advantages. I wish them luck against IE for Windows world, but Safari already won that battle on OS X.
The American dream might not explicitly be about people other than you and your children having a better future but it doesn't take much to see that to have a better future yourself, you have to make sure that everyone has the same chance as you. Otherwise, the dream would just lead to class war, and destruction of society and the environment... oh wait... Well, something to think about.
The point isn't that Walmart is invincible, it's that we have crossed a point where companies have no natural limits to the level of efficiency or the scale of market capitalisation.
Capitalism used to at least have the pretence that it empowered a large middle class and that gave more leisure time and choice over personal destiny. Now, social benefit is entirely removed from Capitalism. Haven't you ever heard presidents talking about how Capitalism beat Communism? That's a social and ideological view to it. But in reality, companies beat Communism, not because of ideology but because Capitalism reached the point where it could "beat" any social organization other than itself.
Companies like Walmart have an unbridled license to privatize and control every aspect of our daily lives, communal property and environment. Worse, they have the power to resist or actively discourage government regulation which is the only vestige for injecting social responsibility back into the system. People talk about being able to choose where they shop or what they buy but that is patently untrue for a huge percentage of people around the world. Worse, many of these conglomerates are the only viable employers. In essence we have reached a point of saturation where it is nearly impossible as an individual (especially one who is poor) to resist the influence of the system. In addition, through corporate tie-ins with education, people are conditioned to accept the slave-mentality that modern day capitalism thrives on.
Just to jump back to your point: Sam Walton my not have started with a lot and it doesn't preclude someone else beating him at his own game, but all that does is switch one devil for another. The big problem is that we've gone so far, without some kind of SOCIAL regulation en masse, the end result is obvious.
This is capitalism. It's nice to believe in a rosy utopia where everyone gets what they want, but the reality is that our economy does not support that model.
And there's the problem. Capitalism used to have natural limits based mostly on the speed of delivery and money liquidity. This allowed a lot of leeway for smaller shops to find meaningful ways to compete outside of price and supply.
Now, supply is limitless, money can be exchanged instantly and all sales are computer controlled to automatically maximize profits. As a result, wealth naturally pools up amongst the people who have enough wealth to take advantage of extreme efficiency.
Basically, capitalism is now unbridled and if you were lucky enough to amass enough wealth in the past you can now take over entire markets because there are no functional restraints in either the market or through competition law.
If you read back to the writings of early capitalists and their critics, they never envisioned a world where there was unlimited (for all intents and purposes) supply and near 100% efficiency. In fact, nearly every one of them said that situation would be to the overall detriment of society and would serve only to consolidate wealth in the smallest minority.
If you're concerned with the cost of CDs, blame the labels and the price they charge. How will you ever buy CDs for $12 if that's the cost the labels sell to stores at?
That is one of the ugliest gadget I've ever seen. It looks like a 10 calculator from the "soft-button" era crossed with the world's worst cell phone. Who's going to want to show off that poor mutant child?
Unfortunately your argument that wealthy/free nations reduce pollution and discourage terrorism is only for the short term. Most of them got to be wealthy through force, environmental pillage, or through running up huge debts to increase the standard of living. Resources run out and debts eventually get called. At that point, it all turns back to force. If you're thinking that we have so many enlightened nations now compared to the past, remember that most of it is from a mortgaged future. The only way to have long term prosperity is to concentrate on extreme efficiency, thoughtful reuse and recycling and clean energy sources. Then the social prosperity can have a meaningful base.
Why don't all the candidates get together and agree on series of 20 questions, then take out a few pages in the New York Times (or similar) so that they can have their own form of equal debate. TV is great for certain things but without a more applicable selection process there could never be a real televised debate of all the candidates. Even if it was physically possible no one would watch the whole thing.
I'd always take quality over resolution. When something is finely balanced (pictures, sound, food) you think less about the pure scale of it and more about the experience. The worst is high resolution with poor quality because the flaws are way more apparent.
Maybe Macs are different but I've never known anyone to lose data due to a hard drive flaking out. I've got almost 4 years on my PBG4 400 and it never gets shut down.
I agree it's a good idea to be prepared. But, a gun is in essence designed to kill in the quickest and unbiased way. You barely have to think to pull the trigger. In fact, none of the issues of actually killing or protecting yourself in a physical sense apply. The issue I'm raising is that a gun's propensity to escalate a situation to the point where either you or someone else is killed is very high. Take other forms of protection as an example: a baseball bat, a can of mace, a bowl of vinegar, a shoelace. They are all suitable to protect you and yet they offer a lot of leeway in terms of fatality compared to a gun. I'm not even talking about accidents. I think that preparedness has to be balanced with reasonable levels of eventuality and frankly I think having a gun jumps straight to the worst outcome every time for the attacker and the victim.
To paraphrase another reply, you buy bottled water before a hurricane, but you don't buy 10,000 bottles, 20 or 30 is plenty even in the unlikely event that your water is contaminated. 10,000 bottles creates more problems than is justified by the preparedness, just like a gun.
I disagree that you never had to know anything. In fact, I would propose that most people prior to the 1960s were extremely knowledgeable and could make far more intuitive and quick judgement than most people today who require the quick ability to look things up. The difference is that a good base of knowledge is really "history" so you can place your knowledge amongst the tested knowledge of time. You may know less, but everything you learn afterwards is put in context. In a social sense, this allows knowledge to be cumulative and is especially important when viewed in the light of social organization and awareness. Having infinite access to quick facts and opinions to a large degree undermines the legitimacy of time tested rote knowledge. People today may have more of the quick answers to meaningless facts, but they don't realize that many of the important things that happen in life and society were figured out hundreds or thousands of years ago. In many ways, the access to limitless information has just separated people by removing the need for concise oral and written history.
In the extremely unlikely situation that someone breaks into your house while you're there, follow these steps:
1. Yell "I have called 911 and the police are on their way." There are very few people that aren't going to turn and run.
2. If they aren't scared away try to escape and call police from a neighbour's house.
There are so few home invasions to start with and so few that are with intent to physically harm, the miniscule amount left over could be discounted as freak occurrences. People have a way of seizing on the worst case outcome no matter how rare and using that as a justification. Realistically, neither the event, nor the overblown countermeasure will ever be tested.
Like I said in the parent post, install a security camera or get a dog. Both are social deterrents that in time will dissuade thieves from trying anything as risky as home invasion
If the person is going to shoot you, a warning shot is only going to give them more time to do it while you reload or re-aim your gun. If you're ballsy enough to have a gun at all, you better be prepared to use it because 99% of the time it's going to make the situation so tense that if you don't you will be killed.
All that aside, if you were ever forced with a home intruder there are a million ways to get out of the situation unharmed. No one really wants to shoot you no matter how crazy they are. Given the smallest choice, they'll choose NOT to. Shout, run away, quietly call 911, they 're all effective.
Personally, I think it's completely asinine to put such value in your personal possessions that you'd want a gun around to protect them. If you're so concerned, install a security camera and get the intruder on video. It'll be short trial.
I usually keep one address for the few people I really want to talk to and never tell anyone else. It's fundamentally the same as having a closed network and costs nothing. A new technology that requires approval to send mail is cool, but we already have IM which requires the same. Friendster is also essentially a friend-only communications device too.
I estimate the site to be toast in about 1 second.
Of the people outside of work I know, none use Linux. About 90% use Windows and 10% Macs, and most of my friends are designers. Of the two camps, I can't ever see any Windows users switching to Linux, while a large percentage will likely switch to Macs because of the iPod influence. Of the Mac users, perhaps one or two will eventually switch to Linux for political reasons but the majority will stay Mac users forever.
The interesting part is more how the failure rate can be predicted by a kind of standard failure rate curve, as well as noting that humans start off with flaws from the start. With large redundancy to catch errors.
Ah, the secret to Microsoft's longevity.
The war on terrorism is like a war on Winter. You can do all you want to protect yourself with fancy clothes and have insulated transport and shelters but in the end it's still cold outside. The last thing you'd want to do is expose yourself and run far away from your house. Hell, stay home, work on your social graces and soon some friends might even come over to share your company.
what's your point?
The biggest reason I don't carry any kind of device around is that my prime reason to use it is to have access to e-mail and the web. Blackberry's are okay for their limited function, but I want to see my e-mail in a rich form like when I'm at my desktop. I want something that's all screen, about 5 x 3 inches and is always connected to the net no matter where I am. Beyond that, I want the connection to be very cheap or free.
Am the only one who saw "A small Santa Claus-based company" I guess after seeing 96 processors under your desktop, that's what first came to mind.