Re:More meaningless Darl soundbites
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Your argument is flawed. You seem to overlook that fact that windows does not cluster, has low processing thoughput, is riddled with security problems, and is unstable.
Your argument is flawed. You seem to overlook the fact that it does, does not, no longer is and hasn't been since the days of Windows 98 and NT 4.
They fear retaliation. Their numbers are dropping, and those who are in want out. Look at what is happening in Baghdad and Tikrit. One by one, Saddam's supporters are either dying or promising to lay down their arms. One by one, they see their comrades get shot to pieces or tracked down mercilessly and hunted like rabbits. Soon, there will be no more of Saddam or Osama's supporters in Iraq. If there are, they will be hiding again, no longer setting off car bombs or laying ambushes for supply trucks carrying medicine and school supplies. And when they go back to hiding and stop blowing our children up, then we will have won the war on terror.
"There are no terrorists in Iraq. The Al Qaeda supporters are thousands of miles away, committing suicide as we speak. There will be everlasting peace in the Middle East, and the evil terrorists will be totally defeated shortly after November, President Bush willing. The WMDs will be confiscated. We will prevail."
From the article The asteroid's close flyby, first spied late Monday, poses no risk, NASA astronomers stressed. "It's a guaranteed miss," said astronomer Paul Chodas, of the near-Earth object office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Makes me hope Paul at the lab made good grades in math:P
"According to my calculations the robots won't go berzerk for at least 24 hours...Oh I forgot to, ah, carry the one."
"The integral of the divergence of a vector field over the entire volume is equal to the normal-oriented integral of the vector field over the surface area"?
Michael Jackson's apparent fondness for little boys aside, does this bother you? In other words, do you resent it when people make what could be considered to be too much money?
Artists' compensation for intellectual property is a social contract. There is no inherent value in music or literature (they are not natural resources nor unique items), but society has decided that it has a worth and has created a system where authors are compensated for releasing their works to the public.
By adjusting the compensation given to artists we could increase the amount of new art being produced - favor those who produce original, fresh material. Instead we reward those who recorded a few popular albums years ago and sold a lot of plastic disks that no longer exist. Worse, we reward the people who had nothing to do with the art but managed to negotiate the rights to other people's works of art.
Quite right! If we were truly a democracy, we could vote all sorts of evil upon any group too small to gather 50.1% of the electorate!
This is one of the common idiocies some Americans keep spouting. Truthfully, the system of American democrary in politics is not all that different from the European version. Except that the two-party system gives disproportionate power to one side, which almost borderlines on aristocracy. I wonder what would happen were it not for the powerful US courts that keep the politicians in check? But then again, the highest level judges are appointed by the politicians themselves...
And if referendums are such an evil, why do many US states hold them? Have you seen any "Vote YES on 63 to kill all Muslims" plaques around?
If the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
How about starting by turning the royalty system from a cashcow from the rich to an incentive to the working musician?
Do Beatles^H^H^H^H^H^HMichael Jackson need any more money out of the Beatles recordings made in the sixties? Why are dusty recordings by dead people more valuable than new, innovative stuff recorded today? Why do artists have expectations of recording one album and living off the proceeds for 30 years when nobody else has that kind of realistic expectations about their own work?
I'm not saying "old" means "bad", I have loads of albums and MP3's from the fifties and sixties, I'm saying that maybe more of the current compensation should go to people who are still alive and making their living out of music. The people who had one hit 20 years ago can frankly go find another job rather than expect to leech off the public forever.
One idea: create a system that rewards musicians who allow live recordings of their performances to be distributed for free or for low cost.
When I was going to College, the biggest influence in my confidence and people skills was a job in retail.
Other benefits:
1. Money. I mean, who couldn't use some more money? You can buy clothes, haircuts, women, toys; hell, he could even buy a gold brick if there's nothing else he wants.
[...]
4. You will learn that a company will stab you in the back, then figure out if it's cheaper to pull out the knife and stab you again, or use a new knife. That's a VERY valuable lesson.
So your advice is to become a bitter shoe-salesman and visit hookers? Great life advice there, Al.
The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written. This deep, dark forest of mathematical symbols, interspersed with ungrammatical English
I thought it looked quite similar to other famous "analysis Bibles" like Rudin etc. Personally I can't stand the touchy-feely coloring book calculus tomes that keep surfacing.
Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course?
No. It reads to me like an analysis textbook written for future math majors. A decent one at that.
The presence of end-of-chapter homework problems would seem to imply that it was.
Huh? Almost all textbooks have problems. Even ones aimed at graduate students. That's how you're supposed to learn. By doing.
Most of the problems begin with the words "Prove that...," and neither the text nor the problems give any of the standard applications to biology, economics, physics, etc.
Blah. It's a math book. The students are supposed to learn to prove things that might appear abstract and useless. Not everybody learns math just to become a fizzicist.
In an unprecedented move today, an international body of scientists declared in a press conference the findings of their latest array of studies. The scientists surprisingly
came to a conclusion that they had finally managed to not find anything that is in any
way detrimental to your health and stated that people should just live the way they
like and not care about potential consequences to their health.
The results of the study have raised some rare disagreements amongst the community of scientists, but the consensus seems to be that all our health and nutrition related problems are over. The board of directors at the tobacco-giant Philip Morris, as well as CEOs of multinational food and beverage corporations such as Pepsi and McDonalds heralded
the results as groundbreaking.
When interviewed after the press conference, one of the scientists involved in the study revealed that he had some misgivings about drawing such near-sighted and overtly optimistic conclusions, but also stressed that the benefits of letting people finally do what the fuck they want and slowly kill themselves in the process were much preferred to the endless bickering and whining about whether something is good for you or not. The scientists concluded his statement by saying that: "Every one of us has to leave this
world at some point or other", but that "the fat pig over there munching Cheetos is gonna be one of the first ones to go".
Several other scientists were quoted as not giving a fuck about it either.
According to CNN's exit poll for Georgia Kerry should have a lead over Edwards of more than 6.5% - an amount usually considered outside the statistical margin of error.
Depends on the number of people polled vs. number of votes cast.
However, the result coming in reverses that trend with Edward polling at 46% and Kerry at 43%.
That is a whopping 9.5% margine of error in the exit poll!
Even if the exit poll has a confidence interval less than the margin between the two candidates, that interval is still accurate for only 95% of the time. There's a five percent chance that the real figures are something outside that confidence interval. The public is being deceived whenever polls are advertised as being accurate to +-x %.
We don't have Arab Americans knocking down the CIA's door to go to work for them. And white people just don't blend in everywhere.
How about the old joke about US espionage in Soviet Union?
"A CIA agent had been trained for years to infiltrate the KGB. He had learned fluent Russian, knew everything there was to know about living and working in Russia etc. Then they smuggled him across the border.
He arrived at a small town on the countryside and asked the first person he could find for directions. The man listened for half a sentence, then carefully asked: 'You're an American, right?' The CIA agent was baffled. 'How'd you figure it out?!?'
'You see, we hardly ever see black people around here.'"
Wrong! Look at Disney as an example. Independent investors only make up a little over 30% stake in the company:
Disney Corp. is a family business so unsurprisingly is controlled by a small bunch of majority shareholders. As such your example won't generalize very well through the NYSE.
The main reason the more recent episodes of SG-1 have been less good (but still very enjoyable in my opinion) then the previous seasons is mainly because of Richard Dean Anderson (jack) being unwilling to spend as much time on the show, every season he says he wants to quit to spend more time with his daughter and every season they negotiate a nice package for him which means less work. IIRC he works about 3 days a week now which is why there are so many episodes that he barely appears in or in some cases doesn't appear in at all.
You know it's gotten too far when he only appears during the last five minutes, builds some contraption out of bubblegum, strips torn from plastic bags and some tent poles, and saves the day.
Programming is, in my humble opinion, closer to pure mathematics than either calculus or boolean algebra.
Some specific parts might be considered applied mathematics but let's face it, 90% of programming as it's known is tedious gruntwork that requires neither mathematical understanding nor much logic. I know how horrible most calculus curriculums are but I'd hardly call programming in general "pure mathematics".
I call myself a "Programmer", rather than using the official title "Software Engineer"- because I consider "Programmer" to be more prestigious.
You must be a rare breed. In my opinion, most non-programmers think of "programmers" as code-monkeys who twiddle endlessly with computers and maybe eventually produce programs that don't work like they should and are full of bugs.
If I need to pick up some math to complete a project, I just go and do it. Knowing how to learn continuously is more important than having done it once upon a time.
The problem is, if you didn't take rigorous math classes in college or have forgotten all about the topics, it's fairly hard to pick up a state-of-the-art contemporary math paper and try to understand what it says. Which leads to people implementing home-grown, less than optimal solutions because they don't know or understand why their solution if sub-optimal.
We have 2 space shuttles. We've lost two recently.
Is 18 years ago "recently"? And why are there multiple posts claiming that the US has only two shuttles, when it has three ("Endeavour", "Atlantis" and "Discovery")? I know Americans are used to having multiples of everything but surely it should be possible to figure out how many space shuttles you have.
Another failed shuttle with a dead crew would likely lead to a dramatic toll being taken on NASA. Or possibly the end of NASA as it is known.
Why don't you ask an extremely knowledgeable professional or two if you work for such a money-rich company?!?! You're asking a bunch of/.'ers how we've dealt with structuring a Fortune 500's OSS strategy???
Maybe that was his strategy for cost savings.
1.Replace Gartner analysis with Ask Slashdot.
2.???
3.Profit.
Consider the cost of 60,000 Windows workstations vs. 60,000 Linux or FreeBSD workstations. Do some calculations based upon the Windows licensing scheme vs. "free." The differences will undoubtedly be astronomical.
You forget that for 60,000 installations Microsoft will dump down the price to make it worthwhile. Do you think such clients pay $100 for each copy of Office and another $200 for every installation of Windows? Think again.
The problem with the financial argument is that, at least till recently, Unix specialists have been in more demand than MS specialists (owing to the devaluation of MS specialists due to excessive MCSE programs) and thus command higher pay. This increases the by far largest amount of any IT budget, namely staff expenses, which outweighs any savings done on licensing or mitigated risk of service outages.
Of course, if the cheapest way to run things would necessarily be the best, then it would make sense to ship your IT staff to India. I think many people on Slashdot would have powerful opinions on the sensibility of that strategy.
Any open source OS will still come out way ahead, even with the cost of switching.
Got any math to back that up? I'm not trolling, I'd just like to see some numbers to back up these claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument is flawed. You seem to overlook that fact that windows does not cluster, has low processing thoughput, is riddled with security problems, and is unstable.
Your argument is flawed. You seem to overlook the fact that it does, does not, no longer is and hasn't been since the days of Windows 98 and NT 4.
They fear retaliation. Their numbers are dropping, and those who are in want out. Look at what is happening in Baghdad and Tikrit. One by one, Saddam's supporters are either dying or promising to lay down their arms. One by one, they see their comrades get shot to pieces or tracked down mercilessly and hunted like rabbits. Soon, there will be no more of Saddam or Osama's supporters in Iraq. If there are, they will be hiding again, no longer setting off car bombs or laying ambushes for supply trucks carrying medicine and school supplies. And when they go back to hiding and stop blowing our children up, then we will have won the war on terror.
"There are no terrorists in Iraq. The Al Qaeda supporters are thousands of miles away, committing suicide as we speak. There will be everlasting peace in the Middle East, and the evil terrorists will be totally defeated shortly after November, President Bush willing. The WMDs will be confiscated. We will prevail."
--Donald Rumsfeld, America Information Minister
When the economy is good, fileswapping increases the sale of CDs.
When the economy is bad, fileswapping decreases the sale of CDs.
Of course, you could substitute "herding unicorns" for "fileswapping" in the two sentences above and still arrive at the same conclusion.
Makes me hope Paul at the lab made good grades in math:P
"According to my calculations the robots won't go berzerk for at least 24 hours...Oh I forgot to, ah, carry the one."
You forgot Gauss's theorem.
"The integral of the divergence of a vector field over the entire volume is equal to the normal-oriented integral of the vector field over the surface area"?
Or did you mean Gauss's Law?
Michael Jackson's apparent fondness for little boys aside, does this bother you? In other words, do you resent it when people make what could be considered to be too much money?
Artists' compensation for intellectual property is a social contract. There is no inherent value in music or literature (they are not natural resources nor unique items), but society has decided that it has a worth and has created a system where authors are compensated for releasing their works to the public.
By adjusting the compensation given to artists we could increase the amount of new art being produced - favor those who produce original, fresh material. Instead we reward those who recorded a few popular albums years ago and sold a lot of plastic disks that no longer exist. Worse, we reward the people who had nothing to do with the art but managed to negotiate the rights to other people's works of art.
Quite right! If we were truly a democracy, we could vote all sorts of evil upon any group too small to gather 50.1% of the electorate!
This is one of the common idiocies some Americans keep spouting. Truthfully, the system of American democrary in politics is not all that different from the European version. Except that the two-party system gives disproportionate power to one side, which almost borderlines on aristocracy. I wonder what would happen were it not for the powerful US courts that keep the politicians in check? But then again, the highest level judges are appointed by the politicians themselves...
And if referendums are such an evil, why do many US states hold them? Have you seen any "Vote YES on 63 to kill all Muslims" plaques around?
If the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
How about starting by turning the royalty system from a cashcow from the rich to an incentive to the working musician?
Do Beatles^H^H^H^H^H^HMichael Jackson need any more money out of the Beatles recordings made in the sixties? Why are dusty recordings by dead people more valuable than new, innovative stuff recorded today? Why do artists have expectations of recording one album and living off the proceeds for 30 years when nobody else has that kind of realistic expectations about their own work?
I'm not saying "old" means "bad", I have loads of albums and MP3's from the fifties and sixties, I'm saying that maybe more of the current compensation should go to people who are still alive and making their living out of music. The people who had one hit 20 years ago can frankly go find another job rather than expect to leech off the public forever.
One idea: create a system that rewards musicians who allow live recordings of their performances to be distributed for free or for low cost.
When I was going to College, the biggest influence in my confidence and people skills was a job in retail.
Other benefits:
1. Money. I mean, who couldn't use some more money? You can buy clothes, haircuts, women, toys; hell, he could even buy a gold brick if there's nothing else he wants.
[...]
4. You will learn that a company will stab you in the back, then figure out if it's cheaper to pull out the knife and stab you again, or use a new knife. That's a VERY valuable lesson.
So your advice is to become a bitter shoe-salesman and visit hookers? Great life advice there, Al.
The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written. This deep, dark forest of mathematical symbols, interspersed with ungrammatical English
I thought it looked quite similar to other famous "analysis Bibles" like Rudin etc. Personally I can't stand the touchy-feely coloring book calculus tomes that keep surfacing.
Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course?
No. It reads to me like an analysis textbook written for future math majors. A decent one at that.
The presence of end-of-chapter homework problems would seem to imply that it was.
Huh? Almost all textbooks have problems. Even ones aimed at graduate students. That's how you're supposed to learn. By doing.
Most of the problems begin with the words "Prove that...," and neither the text nor the problems give any of the standard applications to biology, economics, physics, etc.
Blah. It's a math book. The students are supposed to learn to prove things that might appear abstract and useless. Not everybody learns math just to become a fizzicist.
In an unprecedented move today, an international body of scientists declared in a press conference the findings of their latest array of studies. The scientists surprisingly came to a conclusion that they had finally managed to not find anything that is in any way detrimental to your health and stated that people should just live the way they like and not care about potential consequences to their health.
The results of the study have raised some rare disagreements amongst the community of scientists, but the consensus seems to be that all our health and nutrition related problems are over. The board of directors at the tobacco-giant Philip Morris, as well as CEOs of multinational food and beverage corporations such as Pepsi and McDonalds heralded the results as groundbreaking.
When interviewed after the press conference, one of the scientists involved in the study revealed that he had some misgivings about drawing such near-sighted and overtly optimistic conclusions, but also stressed that the benefits of letting people finally do what the fuck they want and slowly kill themselves in the process were much preferred to the endless bickering and whining about whether something is good for you or not. The scientists concluded his statement by saying that: "Every one of us has to leave this world at some point or other", but that "the fat pig over there munching Cheetos is gonna be one of the first ones to go".
Several other scientists were quoted as not giving a fuck about it either.
I think that as linux sits right at this moment, it does make one smarting to be using it
Apparently this effect is not noticeable in writing.
Solaris isn't really the sort of system where you tend to have untrustworthy users.
Really? How about universities? Thousands of people with valid log-ins, generally poor information security, too many computers, not enough IT staff.
According to CNN's exit poll for Georgia Kerry should have a lead over Edwards of more than 6.5% - an amount usually considered outside the statistical margin of error.
Depends on the number of people polled vs. number of votes cast.
However, the result coming in reverses that trend with Edward polling at 46% and Kerry at 43%.
That is a whopping 9.5% margine of error in the exit poll!
Even if the exit poll has a confidence interval less than the margin between the two candidates, that interval is still accurate for only 95% of the time. There's a five percent chance that the real figures are something outside that confidence interval. The public is being deceived whenever polls are advertised as being accurate to +-x %.
We don't have Arab Americans knocking down the CIA's door to go to work for them. And white people just don't blend in everywhere.
How about the old joke about US espionage in Soviet Union?
"A CIA agent had been trained for years to infiltrate the KGB. He had learned fluent Russian, knew everything there was to know about living and working in Russia etc. Then they smuggled him across the border.
He arrived at a small town on the countryside and asked the first person he could find for directions. The man listened for half a sentence, then carefully asked: 'You're an American, right?' The CIA agent was baffled. 'How'd you figure it out?!?'
'You see, we hardly ever see black people around here.'"
Wrong! Look at Disney as an example. Independent investors only make up a little over 30% stake in the company:
Disney Corp. is a family business so unsurprisingly is controlled by a small bunch of majority shareholders. As such your example won't generalize very well through the NYSE.
The main reason the more recent episodes of SG-1 have been less good (but still very enjoyable in my opinion) then the previous seasons is mainly because of Richard Dean Anderson (jack) being unwilling to spend as much time on the show, every season he says he wants to quit to spend more time with his daughter and every season they negotiate a nice package for him which means less work. IIRC he works about 3 days a week now which is why there are so many episodes that he barely appears in or in some cases doesn't appear in at all.
You know it's gotten too far when he only appears during the last five minutes, builds some contraption out of bubblegum, strips torn from plastic bags and some tent poles, and saves the day.
Programming is, in my humble opinion, closer to pure mathematics than either calculus or boolean algebra.
Some specific parts might be considered applied mathematics but let's face it, 90% of programming as it's known is tedious gruntwork that requires neither mathematical understanding nor much logic. I know how horrible most calculus curriculums are but I'd hardly call programming in general "pure mathematics".
I call myself a "Programmer", rather than using the official title "Software Engineer"- because I consider "Programmer" to be more prestigious.
You must be a rare breed. In my opinion, most non-programmers think of "programmers" as code-monkeys who twiddle endlessly with computers and maybe eventually produce programs that don't work like they should and are full of bugs.
If I need to pick up some math to complete a project, I just go and do it. Knowing how to learn continuously is more important than having done it once upon a time.
The problem is, if you didn't take rigorous math classes in college or have forgotten all about the topics, it's fairly hard to pick up a state-of-the-art contemporary math paper and try to understand what it says. Which leads to people implementing home-grown, less than optimal solutions because they don't know or understand why their solution if sub-optimal.
We have 2 space shuttles. We've lost two recently.
Is 18 years ago "recently"? And why are there multiple posts claiming that the US has only two shuttles, when it has three ("Endeavour", "Atlantis" and "Discovery")? I know Americans are used to having multiples of everything but surely it should be possible to figure out how many space shuttles you have.
Another failed shuttle with a dead crew would likely lead to a dramatic toll being taken on NASA. Or possibly the end of NASA as it is known.
Uh-huh.
Heck, that Georgia place in the CIS probably didn't even exist before 1989?
Only for about 2300 years! History of Georgia
"Constantinople" was like 600 years ago.
Maybe a better comparison would have been Leningrad or Saigon. And I think many people still call it Bombay, even inside India.
Why don't you ask an extremely knowledgeable professional or two if you work for such a money-rich company?!?! You're asking a bunch of /.'ers how we've dealt with structuring a Fortune 500's OSS strategy???
Maybe that was his strategy for cost savings.
1.Replace Gartner analysis with Ask Slashdot.
2.???
3.Profit.
Consider the cost of 60,000 Windows workstations vs. 60,000 Linux or FreeBSD workstations. Do some calculations based upon the Windows licensing scheme vs. "free." The differences will undoubtedly be astronomical.
You forget that for 60,000 installations Microsoft will dump down the price to make it worthwhile. Do you think such clients pay $100 for each copy of Office and another $200 for every installation of Windows? Think again.
The problem with the financial argument is that, at least till recently, Unix specialists have been in more demand than MS specialists (owing to the devaluation of MS specialists due to excessive MCSE programs) and thus command higher pay. This increases the by far largest amount of any IT budget, namely staff expenses, which outweighs any savings done on licensing or mitigated risk of service outages.
Of course, if the cheapest way to run things would necessarily be the best, then it would make sense to ship your IT staff to India. I think many people on Slashdot would have powerful opinions on the sensibility of that strategy.
Any open source OS will still come out way ahead, even with the cost of switching.
Got any math to back that up? I'm not trolling, I'd just like to see some numbers to back up these claims.
Today's viruses are absolutely pathetic compared to some of the older stuff.
Agreed. Remember CIH? Yet some idiot always declares the latest massmailing worm as the "worst virus ever". Sheesh.
Also, I doubt lightning is THAT loud. Where did you get that number?
Comparison of Various Noise Sources in the Ocean:
Lightning Strike on Water Surface
260 dB (approximately) (1)
From: Hill, R.D. 1985. Investigation of lightning strikes to water surface. JASA 78(6):2096-2099.
An estimated conversion from dB under water to dB in air is to subtract 62 dB, so that would come out as about 200 dB.