It ocurrs to me that the numbers I gave in that post are misleading. The failure rate is for an average woman in the first year. I suspect the average woman has a lot more sex then just once... All the same, my point about many women getting pregnant through no real fault of their own remains valid.
If the consequences of her giving birth are that serious, it makes me wonder why she didn't elect to have a tubal ligation, instead of relying on a less perfect form of birth control.
The Marina IUD is actually 0.3% more effective then a tubal ligation, the Paraguard on the other hand is 0.1% less. Really about the same though.
As fun as it is to blame women for getting pregnant, the fact is there are always going to be a non-trivial number of women who get pregnant through no fault of their own. Even if every woman in the country got a tubal ligation and didn't have willingly have sex, we'd still see about 450 pregnancies from the 92,000 rapes that happen each year combined with the 0.5% failure rate of tubal ligations within the first year.
It's interesting that the "conservative" view here supports government spending on a project that mainly benefits Microsoft employees.
You apparently don't live in Washington. Everybody in a huge radius of this bridge wants it replaced ASAP. It causes huge traffic problems every day and is ready to sink into Lake Washington on a moments notice.
Ironically, replacing it benefits the average MSFT employee less then the average Seattle resident as the MSFT employee can scoot through on the Microsoft connector bus in the carpool lane at any time.
Tha alternative plan MS is arguing against has only two (one each way) lanes for general car use - no wonder they don't want it. Light rail and long range buses are only good if lots of people want to use them. HOV lanes are only good if people can be convinced to carpool. Apparently MS management feels the employees want to drive their own cars to work by themselves. If that's the case, making them idle in the traffic snarls created by the one general lane each way bridge will not only make everyone late to work but also really exacerbate the smog problem.
Not quite. Most of the MS employees in Seattle ride the Microsoft Connector bus in to work. The existing one carpool lane is more then sufficient to accomodate the MS busses. I live right by the 520 bridge and I'm with MS on this one. More carpool lanes and/or light rail will just increase the time and cost of the project and add little to no benefit. We need a new bridge now.
What kind of a lame-ass unit-of-measure is "power a Starbucks"???? Give it to us in football fields, Libraries of Congress, or circle the earth N times.
This sounds like just a hydrogen fuel cell. The breakthrough would be if they managed to build one without a platinum catalyst, thus lowering the price.
From the TFA "Inside the box, one disc can produce energy to "power a lightbulb" (60 W, assuming a full power lightbulb). The discs are produced from baked sand and then painted on each side with the special ink. In between the discs an inexpensive metal (not platinum) is placed. According to Mr. Sridhar, 64 discs could power a Starbucks."
That said, even without platinum, these things are damn expensive.
5 * ($800,000) = $4 Million.
At current energy prices, saving $100,000 every 9 months would mean they recoup their initial investment in about 30 years.
I'll pass.
Yeah right now the ROI (3.3%) doesn't even keep up with average anual inflation (3.4%), but I think they are cutting it some slack as it's a very new technology that has yet to benefit from mass production and innovations in the production process. Later on it could prove to be an excellent investment.
I agree that Python has some strange things about it, but look at some sample f# syntax from Wikipedia:
let rec factorial n =
match n with
| 0I -> 1I
| _ -> n * factorial (n - 1I)
What do those funny characters mean? What's the I after the numbers? Compare to the python one liner:
def factorial(n): return 1 if n == 0 else n * factorial (n-1)
That makes sense even to someone with absolutely zero experience in the language.
The problem here is with wikipedia not F#. The characters are normally a way of typecasting integer literals, however it it not necessary (nor even valid) to do that in a match statement. The wikipedia example should be:
let rec factorial n =
match n with
| 0 -> 1
| _ -> n * factorial (n - 1)
or even more simply
let rec factorial n = if n=0 then 1 else n * factorial (n-1)
Stock price probably isn't the best way to demonstrate that a firm is doing well or poorly as it is based largely on speculation. I like to look at profit per employee. If you take that metric:
Microsoft: $156, 656
Novell: - $59,083,
Red Hat: $28,107
or if you're looking to actually invest in one of these companies, price earnings ratio (smaller is better) is a useful metric:
Microsoft: 15.63
Novell: N/A
Red Hat:69.37
So you can see while Red Hat stock price is doing pretty well, Ret Hat itself isn't making a ton of money. Though it is beating the pants off Novell for what thats worth...
Good going Novell, yet another stellar business decision.
Objective C is not a hard language to learn: it's a sibling to C++ in that both tried to add OOP to C. ObjC as used on the Mac combines the best of both worlds -- you get pointers for low level control, *and* a nice OO framework/API and niceties like garbage collection. And of course OS X is beautifully designed, none of the back compat cruft that makes one want to stay away from Win32.
C# has pointers, a larger class library then objective C, and no dependency on the win32 apis...
You are correct that the syntactic similarities between c++, java, and c# lead to a win for C# though.
I'm still not entirely convinced that the free code + support business model works as well as the traditional licensing version. Here's some financial data from the last year.
Microsoft
employees 93,000
revenue 58.4 billion = 627 956.989 per employee
net income 14.5 billion = 155 913.978 per employee
apple
employees 35,000
revenue 32.5 = 922 857.143 per employee
net income 4.9 = 140,000 per employee
oracle
employees 73,000
revenue 23.2 billion = 317 808.219 per employee
net income 5.6 billion = 76 712.3288 per employee
red hat
employees 2,800
revenue 0.65 billion = 232 142.857 per employee
net income 0.078 billion = 27 857.1429 per employee
Even when I divide by employee's to account for the size differences, the closed source shops are making way more money then Red Hat
In other news, public schools will be doing away with the following:
Printed books: The blind cant use those either
Music programs: discriminate against the deaf
PE programs: quadriplegics can't participate
Art involving the colors red and green: the colorblind can't participate fully
Advanced mathematics: the mentally handicapped can't keep up
Milk with lunches: the lactose intolerant can't have any
I'm all for accommodating the disabled, however denying privileges to the able bodied because not everybody can participate is asinine. No matter what activity you select, there will be somebody unable to participate. Do what's best for 99% of people and then do your best to accommodate the remaining 1%.
Avatar gave me a headache, the 3D felt gimicky, and was distracting. I would never watch another 3D film after that experience.
I actually didn't have any of the traditional complaints (headache, blurry, gimmicky, etc) with Avatar in 3d. My only issue comes from me forgetting that it wasn't actually 3d, trying to focus on items in the background (or any place where the camera wasn't focusing) and finding that it wouldn't work. Most the time I naturally looked where the camera was focused, but when I didn't it was a strange sensation. In the entirely CG scenes without a traditional camera focus this issue was greatly decreased.
Between the rambling composition and dozens of typos, I'm really not sure what the point of that last post was. I'm guessing it was some sort of rebuttal to my assertation that th powerPC was a dead platform for desktop consumers.
MS is some pathetic company who can't even compile things for PowerPC, a 32/64bit CPU
Can't and won't are entirely different. Maintaining a branch of a software project takes time and money. Since very few people use powerPC now and even fewer will in the future, the project will be better off by devoting those resources to something that will actually be used. (Also, just FYI the number of bits the processor supports isn't really relevent to this discussion so you can probably skip typing it out each time:p )
their V2 dropped support for PowerPC macs which several people
So Silverlight can't possibly compete with flash because it doesn't support a hardware platform that hasn't been produced in 5 years now and already has negligible market share?
In Silverlight V3, things getting even more complex as the Win32/64 Silverlight V3 has more features than OS X 32/64 one
While mentioned, where is the iPhone/Symbian and even Windows Mobile support?
In the works . Admittedly, MSFT is dissapointingly behind schedule on this front.
Some of your complaints with Silverlight have merit. It isn't perfect yet, but it has made remarkable progress in the 2 years it has been out and most certailnly is a rival to flash. Flash had an 11 year head start and Silverlight already does just about everything it does and a few things better. Silverlight lags behind flash in market penetration and platform support, but at the rate it is going, it will catch up quite soon.
Applets got a (mostly undeserved) reputation for being slow and unwieldy and a (mostly deserved) reputation for having security/runtime issues. Javascript lacks a ton of the features flash/silverlight have, isn't really all that fast, and making it cross browser compatible can be a real bear.
Whats the problem with Silverlight other then you don't like the company that made it? It's fast, secure, full featured, and works just fine in all the browsers people actually use.
marginally works in MacOS and just doesn't work at all elsewhere just rules it out.
Every single bit of Silverlight works perfectly on the mac except for one proposed feature (com) that nobody is going to use. I'd hardly call that "marginally" working.
I really don't see why everybody is acting like the sky is falling over this. The level of cross platform compatibility is not changing in any significant way. Virtually nobody is going to use the Windows only com automation. It only works in a full trust out of browser Silverlight app. 99.5% of Silverlight use is in browser and of that remaining 0.5% most are partial trust apps. I can't think of why somebody with these requirements wouldn't just use WPF honestly.
Try developing some stuff in Silverlight and see if you can claim using the above technologies is anywhere near as fast/easy/reliable/etc with a straight face. XHTML+CSS is a huge pain in the ass compared to Xaml. Javascript is slower, harder to maintain, and has less features then C# +.Net.
I've been a Silverlight developer for a year now and can't believe I used to use anything else.
The Xbox 360 can stream tv/movies/music using a Zune pass, tv/movies using a Netflix subscription, and it plays CDs/DVDs. You don't need to hack it at all.
The platform that Microsoft (and others) provide is one in which they don't respect that cold hard fact. They refuse to respect it. In physical terms, it would be like renting a place and the landlord can come in and take out furniture and property at their whim. Sure, Microsoft is offering a refund. I don't care. I still had to come home to find my couches missing.
If your landlord finds water streaming out from under your doors into the hallway, s/he will go in and disable whatever water related appliance is causing the issue. Your right to flood your living space is superseded by everybody else's right to not be flooded. Similarly, if a computer application is causing wide spread problems for other people, I won't shed tears for people having that app taken away and a refund given. This sort of system can be abused, but as it is currently intended, it should be fine.
You aren't ever going to win the battle against weeds by cutting the leaves off. You need to pull the plant out by the root.
I'm no botanist, but I'm pretty sure most plants die if you cut all their leaves off.
But yes I agree with your larger point. Unless a legitimate trade can be established, this will do nothing to stop the illegitimate trade.
and you're 1/300 millionth the cause of this nations financial problems.
If everybody bitches about 100% of taxes and only 20% of expenditures, we'll still have 80% of the expenses which eventually we'll have to pay for. Only because we bitched about every tax, good taxes won't get passed significantly more then bad taxes.
Contrast that with a system whereby people bitch about 50% of expenditures and 50% of taxes. We would then have 50% of the expenses to be paid, and they would be funded by the 50% of the tax proposals that made sense and didn't get bitched about.
The amount the government spends is based on the number of projects people approve. Trying to starve the government into inaction by complaining about taxes will just give you a screwed up tax system, a lot of debt, and no appreciable reduction in spending.
Slashdot Mirror
It ocurrs to me that the numbers I gave in that post are misleading. The failure rate is for an average woman in the first year. I suspect the average woman has a lot more sex then just once... All the same, my point about many women getting pregnant through no real fault of their own remains valid.
If the consequences of her giving birth are that serious, it makes me wonder why she didn't elect to have a tubal ligation, instead of relying on a less perfect form of birth control.
The Marina IUD is actually 0.3% more effective then a tubal ligation, the Paraguard on the other hand is 0.1% less. Really about the same though.
As fun as it is to blame women for getting pregnant, the fact is there are always going to be a non-trivial number of women who get pregnant through no fault of their own. Even if every woman in the country got a tubal ligation and didn't have willingly have sex, we'd still see about 450 pregnancies from the 92,000 rapes that happen each year combined with the 0.5% failure rate of tubal ligations within the first year.
It's interesting that the "conservative" view here supports government spending on a project that mainly benefits Microsoft employees.
You apparently don't live in Washington. Everybody in a huge radius of this bridge wants it replaced ASAP. It causes huge traffic problems every day and is ready to sink into Lake Washington on a moments notice.
Ironically, replacing it benefits the average MSFT employee less then the average Seattle resident as the MSFT employee can scoot through on the Microsoft connector bus in the carpool lane at any time.
Tha alternative plan MS is arguing against has only two (one each way) lanes for general car use - no wonder they don't want it. Light rail and long range buses are only good if lots of people want to use them. HOV lanes are only good if people can be convinced to carpool. Apparently MS management feels the employees want to drive their own cars to work by themselves. If that's the case, making them idle in the traffic snarls created by the one general lane each way bridge will not only make everyone late to work but also really exacerbate the smog problem.
Not quite. Most of the MS employees in Seattle ride the Microsoft Connector bus in to work. The existing one carpool lane is more then sufficient to accomodate the MS busses. I live right by the 520 bridge and I'm with MS on this one. More carpool lanes and/or light rail will just increase the time and cost of the project and add little to no benefit. We need a new bridge now.
What kind of a lame-ass unit-of-measure is "power a Starbucks"???? Give it to us in football fields, Libraries of Congress, or circle the earth N times.
Or better yet a car analogy!
This sounds like just a hydrogen fuel cell. The breakthrough would be if they managed to build one without a platinum catalyst, thus lowering the price.
From the TFA "Inside the box, one disc can produce energy to "power a lightbulb" (60 W, assuming a full power lightbulb). The discs are produced from baked sand and then painted on each side with the special ink. In between the discs an inexpensive metal (not platinum) is placed. According to Mr. Sridhar, 64 discs could power a Starbucks."
That said, even without platinum, these things are damn expensive.
5 * ($800,000) = $4 Million. At current energy prices, saving $100,000 every 9 months would mean they recoup their initial investment in about 30 years. I'll pass.
Yeah right now the ROI (3.3%) doesn't even keep up with average anual inflation (3.4%), but I think they are cutting it some slack as it's a very new technology that has yet to benefit from mass production and innovations in the production process. Later on it could prove to be an excellent investment.
I agree that Python has some strange things about it, but look at some sample f# syntax from Wikipedia:
let rec factorial n =
match n with
| 0I -> 1I
| _ -> n * factorial (n - 1I)
What do those funny characters mean? What's the I after the numbers? Compare to the python one liner:
def factorial(n): return 1 if n == 0 else n * factorial (n-1)
That makes sense even to someone with absolutely zero experience in the language.
The problem here is with wikipedia not F#. The characters are normally a way of typecasting integer literals, however it it not necessary (nor even valid) to do that in a match statement. The wikipedia example should be:
let rec factorial n =
match n with
| 0 -> 1
| _ -> n * factorial (n - 1)
or even more simply
let rec factorial n = if n=0 then 1 else n * factorial (n-1)
Novell stock has lost 30%
Microsoft stock has lost 1%
Redhat stock has gained 78%
Stock price probably isn't the best way to demonstrate that a firm is doing well or poorly as it is based largely on speculation. I like to look at profit per employee. If you take that metric:
Microsoft: $156, 656
Novell: - $59,083,
Red Hat: $28,107
or if you're looking to actually invest in one of these companies, price earnings ratio (smaller is better) is a useful metric:
Microsoft: 15.63
Novell: N/A
Red Hat:69.37
So you can see while Red Hat stock price is doing pretty well, Ret Hat itself isn't making a ton of money. Though it is beating the pants off Novell for what thats worth...
Good going Novell, yet another stellar business decision.
agreed
Objective C is not a hard language to learn: it's a sibling to C++ in that both tried to add OOP to C. ObjC as used on the Mac combines the best of both worlds -- you get pointers for low level control, *and* a nice OO framework/API and niceties like garbage collection. And of course OS X is beautifully designed, none of the back compat cruft that makes one want to stay away from Win32.
C# has pointers, a larger class library then objective C, and no dependency on the win32 apis... You are correct that the syntactic similarities between c++, java, and c# lead to a win for C# though.
Microsoft
employees 93,000
revenue 58.4 billion = 627 956.989 per employee
net income 14.5 billion = 155 913.978 per employee
apple
employees 35,000
revenue 32.5 = 922 857.143 per employee
net income 4.9 = 140,000 per employee
oracle
employees 73,000
revenue 23.2 billion = 317 808.219 per employee
net income 5.6 billion = 76 712.3288 per employee
red hat
employees 2,800
revenue 0.65 billion = 232 142.857 per employee
net income 0.078 billion = 27 857.1429 per employee
Even when I divide by employee's to account for the size differences, the closed source shops are making way more money then Red Hat
targeted attacks and the publication of exploit code for a 'browse and you're owned' vulnerability in its flagship Web browser
IE 6 hasn't been Microsoft's flagship browser for 4 years.
I'm all for accommodating the disabled, however denying privileges to the able bodied because not everybody can participate is asinine. No matter what activity you select, there will be somebody unable to participate. Do what's best for 99% of people and then do your best to accommodate the remaining 1%.
Avatar gave me a headache, the 3D felt gimicky, and was distracting. I would never watch another 3D film after that experience.
I actually didn't have any of the traditional complaints (headache, blurry, gimmicky, etc) with Avatar in 3d. My only issue comes from me forgetting that it wasn't actually 3d, trying to focus on items in the background (or any place where the camera wasn't focusing) and finding that it wouldn't work. Most the time I naturally looked where the camera was focused, but when I didn't it was a strange sensation. In the entirely CG scenes without a traditional camera focus this issue was greatly decreased.
MS is some pathetic company who can't even compile things for PowerPC, a 32/64bit CPU
Can't and won't are entirely different. Maintaining a branch of a software project takes time and money. Since very few people use powerPC now and even fewer will in the future, the project will be better off by devoting those resources to something that will actually be used. (Also, just FYI the number of bits the processor supports isn't really relevent to this discussion so you can probably skip typing it out each time :p )
their V2 dropped support for PowerPC macs which several people
So Silverlight can't possibly compete with flash because it doesn't support a hardware platform that hasn't been produced in 5 years now and already has negligible market share?
In Silverlight V3, things getting even more complex as the Win32/64 Silverlight V3 has more features than OS X 32/64 one
The only differences I'm aware of between mac and windows silverlight 3 are quite trivial
While mentioned, where is the iPhone/Symbian and even Windows Mobile support?
In the works . Admittedly, MSFT is dissapointingly behind schedule on this front.
Some of your complaints with Silverlight have merit. It isn't perfect yet, but it has made remarkable progress in the 2 years it has been out and most certailnly is a rival to flash. Flash had an 11 year head start and Silverlight already does just about everything it does and a few things better. Silverlight lags behind flash in market penetration and platform support, but at the rate it is going, it will catch up quite soon.
Whatever happened to applets and javascript?
Applets got a (mostly undeserved) reputation for being slow and unwieldy and a (mostly deserved) reputation for having security/runtime issues. Javascript lacks a ton of the features flash/silverlight have, isn't really all that fast, and making it cross browser compatible can be a real bear.
Whats the problem with Silverlight other then you don't like the company that made it? It's fast, secure, full featured, and works just fine in all the browsers people actually use.
marginally works in MacOS and just doesn't work at all elsewhere just rules it out.
Every single bit of Silverlight works perfectly on the mac except for one proposed feature (com) that nobody is going to use. I'd hardly call that "marginally" working.
I really don't see why everybody is acting like the sky is falling over this. The level of cross platform compatibility is not changing in any significant way. Virtually nobody is going to use the Windows only com automation. It only works in a full trust out of browser Silverlight app. 99.5% of Silverlight use is in browser and of that remaining 0.5% most are partial trust apps. I can't think of why somebody with these requirements wouldn't just use WPF honestly.
Here's a more comprehensive listing of the changes to come.
Try developing some stuff in Silverlight and see if you can claim using the above technologies is anywhere near as fast/easy/reliable/etc with a straight face. XHTML+CSS is a huge pain in the ass compared to Xaml. Javascript is slower, harder to maintain, and has less features then C# + .Net.
I've been a Silverlight developer for a year now and can't believe I used to use anything else.
Hulu manages to deal with it much better than Netflix via Silverlight..
I've had the exact opposite experience. The Silverlight Netflix player beats the crap out of every Flash based player (inc hulu) I've used.
The Xbox 360 can stream tv/movies/music using a Zune pass, tv/movies using a Netflix subscription, and it plays CDs/DVDs. You don't need to hack it at all.
The platform that Microsoft (and others) provide is one in which they don't respect that cold hard fact. They refuse to respect it. In physical terms, it would be like renting a place and the landlord can come in and take out furniture and property at their whim. Sure, Microsoft is offering a refund. I don't care. I still had to come home to find my couches missing.
If your landlord finds water streaming out from under your doors into the hallway, s/he will go in and disable whatever water related appliance is causing the issue. Your right to flood your living space is superseded by everybody else's right to not be flooded. Similarly, if a computer application is causing wide spread problems for other people, I won't shed tears for people having that app taken away and a refund given. This sort of system can be abused, but as it is currently intended, it should be fine.
You aren't ever going to win the battle against weeds by cutting the leaves off. You need to pull the plant out by the root.
I'm no botanist, but I'm pretty sure most plants die if you cut all their leaves off. But yes I agree with your larger point. Unless a legitimate trade can be established, this will do nothing to stop the illegitimate trade.
and you're 1/300 millionth the cause of this nations financial problems.
If everybody bitches about 100% of taxes and only 20% of expenditures, we'll still have 80% of the expenses which eventually we'll have to pay for. Only because we bitched about every tax, good taxes won't get passed significantly more then bad taxes.
Contrast that with a system whereby people bitch about 50% of expenditures and 50% of taxes. We would then have 50% of the expenses to be paid, and they would be funded by the 50% of the tax proposals that made sense and didn't get bitched about.
The amount the government spends is based on the number of projects people approve. Trying to starve the government into inaction by complaining about taxes will just give you a screwed up tax system, a lot of debt, and no appreciable reduction in spending.