6 out of 10 shows on the list are cable/satellite only and of those, 2 are on pay channels only. Can the big networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC compete anymore?
How can any list of the year's ten best shows not include HBO's Rome?
I mean - the dude watches BSG and he doesn't watch Rome? I'm sensing some serious cognitive dissonance here.
The older I get, the more I appreciate Poisson's summation formula:
Sn f(n) = Sn f^(n)
Hmmm... looks like the lame-ass SlashDot lameness filters forbid sub's and sup's.
Anyway, it was discovered about 150 years before its time, its [modern] proof is breath-takingly elegant, and in various incarnations [such as "Shannon's Sampling Theorem"], it governs just about every electrical device you interacted with in the twentieth century [or will interact with in the twenty-first century].
And will be in a foreseeable future. I tell you as a Russian.
Hang in there, dude.
Putin's liberal economic adviser resigns, saying Russia 'not free'
Dec 27 8:09 AM US/Eastern
President Vladimir Putin's outspoken liberal economic adviser Andrei Illarionov announced his resignation to protest what he said was an end to political freedom in Russia. "It is one thing to work in a partially free country, as Russia was six years ago. It's another when the country has stopped being politically free," Illarionov, 44, was quoted as saying by ITAR-TASS news agency on Tuesday...
It isn't Sarin, it isn't a CBW agent (although it could be used for temporary area denial). Just think of a very, very powerful stink bomb. It probably was used during a shake down by a rival outfit offering "security services".
I think most people are interpreting it as a warning: "This time something harmless, next time - who's to say?"
I hope the folks at the RIAA have a good supply of gas masks:
Gas attack on DIY stores hits dozens of shoppers
Tue 27 Dec 2005
DOZENS of Russian shoppers collapsed when a mysterious gas was released in an apparent attack by criminal gangs on four DIY stores in St Petersburg yesterday...
The attacks revived concerns about the city's mafia connections. In the 1990s, St Petersburg was known as the "gangster capital" of Russia because gangland murders eclipsed those of any other city, including Moscow. Back then, a "hostile takeover" often meant what it said, with business rivals killing each other and taking control of their markets...
And I'm even receptive to two of the pro-compression arguments:
1) The greater the compression of a particular file, the fewer sectors that particular file touches, hence the lower the probability that a single bad sector will kill that particular file. [Note that this argument only holds for in the case of a single, isolated file; in particular, THIS ARGUMENT DOES NOT NECESSARILY HOLD FOR ALL FILES IN AGGREGATE.]
2) The compression "algorithm" may include some extra error-correcting features above and beyond the error-correcting features of the file system and the underlying hardware, hence it is at least theoretically possible that the compression "algorithm" might make it easier to correct the error in situ.
Nevertheless, I have had to deal with corrupted files, and have had to write my own file-recovery software to examine and alter bad files [at the byte-level], and I can tell you that RECONSTRUCTING A CORRUPTED FILE BY HAND IS AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER - EVEN IF YOU HAVE ACCESS TO THE SOURCE CODE THAT CREATED THE FILE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Trust me - you do not ever EVER EVER want to be handed the task of re-creating a corrupted file - even if you have access to source code. 'Cause if you are given that assignment, you can just about kiss goodbye the next several weeks of your life.
And if the corrupted file was compressed with some weird-ass compression scheme [for which you may or may not have the source code], then hell - it might take you YEARS to figure out what happened. Maybe even forever.
If your data is that valuable, compressing makes it more likely to lose it.
Thanks - I was getting a little lonely there.
I think part of the problem is that most/.-ers believe that
data == pr0n
But, of course, pr0n has no inherent integrity, therefore it seems to me that maybe the concept of data integrity is essentially meaningless to the average/.-er.
No talk of the speed of compression/decompression?
Speed aside [and speed would be a huge concern if you insisted on compression], I just don't understand the desire for compression in the first place.
As the administrator, your fundamental obligation is data integrity. If you compress, and if the compressed file store is damaged [especially if the header information on a compressed file - or files - is damaged], then you will tend to lose ALL of your data.
On the other hand, if your file store is ASCII/ANSI text, then even if file headers are damaged, you can still read the raw disk sectors and recover most of your data [might take a while, but at least it's theoretically do-able].
In this day and age, when magnetic storage is like $0.50 to $0.75 per GIGABYTE, I just can't fathom why a responsible admin would risk the possible data corruption that could come with compression.
Call me a luddite, but you youngstahs should bone up on your classic SciFi* before you start joking about this shiznat.
Hell, if it were up to me, that damned comet debris wouldn't be allowed within a parsec of our atmosphere - unless the intention were to incinerate it.
These businesses are using you like slaves [which, for those of you who like to ponder old parchment documents written by dead white European males, was outlawed many score of years ago].
$1000 would barely pay for one contractor day if the contractor were hired through an agency at prevailing rates:
($75/hr for the contractor + $25 overhead for the agency) X (8hrs/day) = $800/day
And believe it or not, an employee [with SS, Mdcr/Mdcd, UnEmpl Ins, Roth, 401K, Health, Dental, etc etc etc] would probably cost even more.
These people are trying to fool you into creating enterprise-level software, involving something like a man-year's worth of labor, at renumeration rates of maybe tenths of a cent per hour.
Just get two uniprocessor boxes. Dual Dual cores is overkill, and Windows 2003 has a single TCP/IP stack so dual processors are almost pointless.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the NT "kernel" [or whatever you call it - it's not a monolithic "kernel" per se, but rather a microkernel surrounded by services] had had a multi-threaded TCP/IP stack since at least Windows 2000.
So what do you mean by "a single TCP/IP stack"?
Is this some sort of a "process" -vs- "thread" kinduva thang? Or maybe a Hurd-ish "offload the process to a different box" kinduva thang?
This is just a delicate way of saying that Novell has vested too much in R&D. So sacrifice R&D to follow technologies that are already showning wide adoption. Novell has taken the lead in introducing now popular technologies like directory services, but has had trouble keeping marketshare. Why is that? Did R&D prevent prevent Novell's customers from getting something their competitors had? What is that exactly? It sounds to me like Novell is going the way of HP, but I hope they continue to make R&D enough of a priority.
It is a sad fact of life that possessing the best product in a marketplace is just a small fraction of the recipe for marketplace leadership.
So many other things are required for success: Marketing, execution [mind-numbing-ly boring stuff like making sure the trains run on time], the correctness of the underlying business model, plain old-fashioned good luck [like being in the right place at the right time]...
Very often, all you need is a minimally adequate product; after that, things like the business model, the execution of the business model, the marketing, and luck [good or bad] tend to prevail.
With Netware, if you had n servers and m clients, then your cost was proportial to n * m.
Since when did you have to purchase both an NDS license and a NetWare [or SuSE] server license?
Novell servers have been essentially free since 4.x [circa 1995]. In fact, way before the era of pf/ipfw/ipchains/iptables and whatnot, you could get a really nice low-level switch/router/packet filter/firewall/etc simply by installing a NetWare server and then removing NDS from it.
As I recall, the way M$FT killed Novell was when they put NT 4.0 Server on the "honor system": When you installed an NT 4.0 Server, you had to enter the number of clients "on your honor" [so everyone naturally installed it with like 999 clients, even if they had only purchased a 5-user license].
I.e. if you had n servers and m clients, then for about a four year period, from maybe mid-1996 until mid-2000, Netware cost on the order of m, and NT 4.0 cost on the order of "1" [and that "1" was probably a bootleg anyway].
One thing I bought where completely fake Oakleys. I knew they were fake but I didn't care. I got the glasses and had them in my car for a month before I got an e-mail from ebay warning me not to buy the product. The auction had been over for 40 days. That's some quick action... with all the money they make, maybe they could carry a little more responsibility?
I don't suppose you wondered whether those fake Oakleys offer any UV protection, did you? Cause I can guaran-damn-tee you that the communist chinese who manufactured them won't give a shiznat if they fry those pretty little American eyes of yours.
Sounds to me like eBay might care more about your eyes than you do.
In a book (and God, I wish I could remember the title of this book -- one of my faves) talking about manipulating perceptions one of the discussions centered on the fact that when all other criteria are indeterminate or unavailable, it is human nature to assign credibility and worth based on price or cost.
Many California wineries discover that they can't sell their juice at its natural pricepoint of $19.95, but if they add a few choice words to the label, like "Private Reserve", or "Luxury Cuvée", and jack the price [or at least the MSRP] up to $99.95, then the juice flies off the shelves.
[BTW, this strategy doesn't work as well for European wineries, as their clientele is, by and large, a little more cynical when it comes to things vinous.]
Set-top box maker, Scientific Atlanta's survey, noted that HDTV sets will be in approximately 16 million homes across the country by the end of the year.
PS: If Cisco 0wnz both the TCP/IP [to include VOIP] and CATV/HDTV markets, does that make them evil enough for you? Or will they also need to branch out into kitchen sinks?
If you take an infinite supply of rednecks, with an infinite supply of pickup trucks, and an infinite supply of shotguns & an infinite supply of shotgun shells, confronting an infinite supply of "Share the Road" bikepath signs, then eventually all the world's great works of literature will be written...
When we were tunneling for the 3rd water tunnel, the rock was hitting 16,000psi - 20,000psi, if I remember correct. That's so hard that it's unbelievable.
Many people believed that the sold rock substrata was largely responsible for the legendary acoustics of the original Carnegie Hall [widely believed to have produced the most beautiful sound of any concert hall ever built].
Sadly, though, there is widespread agreement among old-timers that the acoustics were permanently ruined by the 1986 "renovation". [Or at least there was widespread agreement amongst old-timers back in 1986; now, almost 20 years later, there are precious few NYers who possess a living memory of e.g. Toscanini conducting in the old, pre-renovation hall].
What is going to happen is some start-up in Cali will offer a service, checking a person through every state and FBI database. Once that becomes profitable, forget about ever trying to get a job for more than minimum wage if you have a blemish on your record.
Dude, you're describing the situation as it existed circa 1990, or even 1980. But it's 2005 now [almost 2006 - yikes!], and everything you've foreseen has come to pass.
Compare the story of Mr. Charles "Roscoe" Heaton:
Ex-con. Emory grad. Would you hire him?
Sunday, November 27, 2005
He thought he had paid his debt to society by serving two years in prison. He thought his accomplishments since would open doors to a successful future. But nine years after his release, Roscoe has found he's a marked man. His criminal record may be a life sentence...
Rather than porting a widget set or writing my own, I was thinking about having the application talk to a web browser, and then use the browser to display the GUI, take user input, and finally push the data back to the app.
WARNING: BUZZWORD COMPLIANCE ALERT!!!
Uhh, isn't this exactly what AJAX was invented for? If his "minimal embedded OS with Open GL but no GUI library" had an eency-weency [itsy-bitsy?] little webserver, like thttpd, with some sort of an AJAX extension, then he could interactively push [& pull] all of his shiznat to a web browser that lived on a full-featured client operating system.
PS: If youse guys haven't played with it yet, the W3C DOM is the bomb when it comes to this sort of thang. You can do some stuff with the "childNodes" thingamabob that will make your jaw drop.
PPS: Isn't it a little self-contradictory to utter the phrases "minimal embedded" and "Open GL" in the same breath? Or am I missing something?
PPPS: OpenGL [or even VRML] over AJAX via thttpd - now that would be helluva project for a 40-year-old browncoat living in his Mom's basement...
PS: In the specific case of the Sudan, you might also ponder the question of whether your money ends up in the hands of the murderers [i.e. the Muslims] or the murderees [i.e. the Christians]. But that's probably too fine a point to concern most people, and, as regards the latter category of Sudanese, I suppose it also begs the question of what use your money would be to a corpse.
Slashdot Mirror
6 out of 10 shows on the list are cable/satellite only and of those, 2 are on pay channels only. Can the big networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC compete anymore?
How can any list of the year's ten best shows not include HBO's Rome?
I mean - the dude watches BSG and he doesn't watch Rome? I'm sensing some serious cognitive dissonance here.
the stuff of mathematical wet dreams
The older I get, the more I appreciate Poisson's summation formula:
Hmmm... looks like the lame-ass SlashDot lameness filters forbid sub's and sup's.Anyway, it was discovered about 150 years before its time, its [modern] proof is breath-takingly elegant, and in various incarnations [such as "Shannon's Sampling Theorem"], it governs just about every electrical device you interacted with in the twentieth century [or will interact with in the twenty-first century].
And will be in a foreseeable future. I tell you as a Russian.
Hang in there, dude.
It isn't Sarin, it isn't a CBW agent (although it could be used for temporary area denial). Just think of a very, very powerful stink bomb. It probably was used during a shake down by a rival outfit offering "security services".
I think most people are interpreting it as a warning: "This time something harmless, next time - who's to say?"
I hope the folks at the RIAA have a good supply of gas masks:
Please. Explain.
Look - I don't have an "explanation".
And I'm even receptive to two of the pro-compression arguments:
Nevertheless, I have had to deal with corrupted files, and have had to write my own file-recovery software to examine and alter bad files [at the byte-level], and I can tell you that RECONSTRUCTING A CORRUPTED FILE BY HAND IS AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER - EVEN IF YOU HAVE ACCESS TO THE SOURCE CODE THAT CREATED THE FILE IN THE FIRST PLACE.Trust me - you do not ever EVER EVER want to be handed the task of re-creating a corrupted file - even if you have access to source code. 'Cause if you are given that assignment, you can just about kiss goodbye the next several weeks of your life.
And if the corrupted file was compressed with some weird-ass compression scheme [for which you may or may not have the source code], then hell - it might take you YEARS to figure out what happened. Maybe even forever.
If your data is that valuable, compressing makes it more likely to lose it.
Thanks - I was getting a little lonely there.
I think part of the problem is that most /.-ers believe that
But, of course, pr0n has no inherent integrity, therefore it seems to me that maybe the concept of data integrity is essentially meaningless to the averageSpeed aside [and speed would be a huge concern if you insisted on compression], I just don't understand the desire for compression in the first place.
As the administrator, your fundamental obligation is data integrity. If you compress, and if the compressed file store is damaged [especially if the header information on a compressed file - or files - is damaged], then you will tend to lose ALL of your data.
On the other hand, if your file store is ASCII/ANSI text, then even if file headers are damaged, you can still read the raw disk sectors and recover most of your data [might take a while, but at least it's theoretically do-able].
In this day and age, when magnetic storage is like $0.50 to $0.75 per GIGABYTE, I just can't fathom why a responsible admin would risk the possible data corruption that could come with compression.
Call me a luddite, but you youngstahs should bone up on your classic SciFi* before you start joking about this shiznat.
Hell, if it were up to me, that damned comet debris wouldn't be allowed within a parsec of our atmosphere - unless the intention were to incinerate it.
*Cf the work of Vincent Price and Charlton Heston.
These businesses are using you like slaves [which, for those of you who like to ponder old parchment documents written by dead white European males, was outlawed many score of years ago].
$1000 would barely pay for one contractor day if the contractor were hired through an agency at prevailing rates:
And believe it or not, an employee [with SS, Mdcr/Mdcd, UnEmpl Ins, Roth, 401K, Health, Dental, etc etc etc] would probably cost even more.These people are trying to fool you into creating enterprise-level software, involving something like a man-year's worth of labor, at renumeration rates of maybe tenths of a cent per hour.
PLEASE WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!!!
Even /.-ers can't be this stupid, can they?
Just get two uniprocessor boxes. Dual Dual cores is overkill, and Windows 2003 has a single TCP/IP stack so dual processors are almost pointless.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the NT "kernel" [or whatever you call it - it's not a monolithic "kernel" per se, but rather a microkernel surrounded by services] had had a multi-threaded TCP/IP stack since at least Windows 2000.
So what do you mean by "a single TCP/IP stack"?
Is this some sort of a "process" -vs- "thread" kinduva thang? Or maybe a Hurd-ish "offload the process to a different box" kinduva thang?
Now if only they could find Willzyx.
This is just a delicate way of saying that Novell has vested too much in R&D. So sacrifice R&D to follow technologies that are already showning wide adoption. Novell has taken the lead in introducing now popular technologies like directory services, but has had trouble keeping marketshare. Why is that? Did R&D prevent prevent Novell's customers from getting something their competitors had? What is that exactly? It sounds to me like Novell is going the way of HP, but I hope they continue to make R&D enough of a priority.
It is a sad fact of life that possessing the best product in a marketplace is just a small fraction of the recipe for marketplace leadership.
So many other things are required for success: Marketing, execution [mind-numbing-ly boring stuff like making sure the trains run on time], the correctness of the underlying business model, plain old-fashioned good luck [like being in the right place at the right time]...
Very often, all you need is a minimally adequate product; after that, things like the business model, the execution of the business model, the marketing, and luck [good or bad] tend to prevail.
I take it that NTP is not the same thing as "Network Time Protocol".
Because if ever there were a software paradigm worthy of patenting, NTP would be it.
With Netware, if you had n servers and m clients, then your cost was proportial to n * m.
Since when did you have to purchase both an NDS license and a NetWare [or SuSE] server license?
Novell servers have been essentially free since 4.x [circa 1995]. In fact, way before the era of pf/ipfw/ipchains/iptables and whatnot, you could get a really nice low-level switch/router/packet filter/firewall/etc simply by installing a NetWare server and then removing NDS from it.
As I recall, the way M$FT killed Novell was when they put NT 4.0 Server on the "honor system": When you installed an NT 4.0 Server, you had to enter the number of clients "on your honor" [so everyone naturally installed it with like 999 clients, even if they had only purchased a 5-user license].
I.e. if you had n servers and m clients, then for about a four year period, from maybe mid-1996 until mid-2000, Netware cost on the order of m, and NT 4.0 cost on the order of "1" [and that "1" was probably a bootleg anyway].
One thing I bought where completely fake Oakleys. I knew they were fake but I didn't care. I got the glasses and had them in my car for a month before I got an e-mail from ebay warning me not to buy the product. The auction had been over for 40 days. That's some quick action
I don't suppose you wondered whether those fake Oakleys offer any UV protection, did you? Cause I can guaran-damn-tee you that the communist chinese who manufactured them won't give a shiznat if they fry those pretty little American eyes of yours.
Sounds to me like eBay might care more about your eyes than you do.
A leak could lead to a fire or even an explosion in flight.
My goodness, that would be just terrible! What would we do if we were to lose a space shuttle?!?
In a book (and God, I wish I could remember the title of this book -- one of my faves) talking about manipulating perceptions one of the discussions centered on the fact that when all other criteria are indeterminate or unavailable, it is human nature to assign credibility and worth based on price or cost.
Many California wineries discover that they can't sell their juice at its natural pricepoint of $19.95, but if they add a few choice words to the label, like "Private Reserve", or "Luxury Cuvée", and jack the price [or at least the MSRP] up to $99.95, then the juice flies off the shelves.
[BTW, this strategy doesn't work as well for European wineries, as their clientele is, by and large, a little more cynical when it comes to things vinous.]
From Cowboy Neal's posting of Ant's summary: Just in case youse guys have been surfing Maui for the last week or two, that would be future Cisco subsidiary, Scientific Atlanta.
PS: If Cisco 0wnz both the TCP/IP [to include VOIP] and CATV/HDTV markets, does that make them evil enough for you? Or will they also need to branch out into kitchen sinks?
If you take an infinite supply of rednecks, with an infinite supply of pickup trucks, and an infinite supply of shotguns & an infinite supply of shotgun shells, confronting an infinite supply of "Share the Road" bikepath signs, then eventually all the world's great works of literature will be written...
When we were tunneling for the 3rd water tunnel, the rock was hitting 16,000psi - 20,000psi, if I remember correct. That's so hard that it's unbelievable.
Many people believed that the sold rock substrata was largely responsible for the legendary acoustics of the original Carnegie Hall [widely believed to have produced the most beautiful sound of any concert hall ever built].
Sadly, though, there is widespread agreement among old-timers that the acoustics were permanently ruined by the 1986 "renovation". [Or at least there was widespread agreement amongst old-timers back in 1986; now, almost 20 years later, there are precious few NYers who possess a living memory of e.g. Toscanini conducting in the old, pre-renovation hall].
What is going to happen is some start-up in Cali will offer a service, checking a person through every state and FBI database. Once that becomes profitable, forget about ever trying to get a job for more than minimum wage if you have a blemish on your record.
Dude, you're describing the situation as it existed circa 1990, or even 1980. But it's 2005 now [almost 2006 - yikes!], and everything you've foreseen has come to pass.
Compare the story of Mr. Charles "Roscoe" Heaton:
To his credit, Neal Boortz has been all over this story [see also here].They own the trademark on the name of the game...
Well that's easy enough: Just rename it to something like JNR, which would stand for "JNR's Not Risk!"
Or maybe GRNR: "Google Risk's Not Risk!"
Rather than porting a widget set or writing my own, I was thinking about having the application talk to a web browser, and then use the browser to display the GUI, take user input, and finally push the data back to the app.
WARNING: BUZZWORD COMPLIANCE ALERT!!!
Uhh, isn't this exactly what AJAX was invented for? If his "minimal embedded OS with Open GL but no GUI library" had an eency-weency [itsy-bitsy?] little webserver, like thttpd, with some sort of an AJAX extension, then he could interactively push [& pull] all of his shiznat to a web browser that lived on a full-featured client operating system.
PS: If youse guys haven't played with it yet, the W3C DOM is the bomb when it comes to this sort of thang. You can do some stuff with the "childNodes" thingamabob that will make your jaw drop.
PPS: Isn't it a little self-contradictory to utter the phrases "minimal embedded" and "Open GL" in the same breath? Or am I missing something?
PPPS: OpenGL [or even VRML] over AJAX via thttpd - now that would be helluva project for a 40-year-old browncoat living in his Mom's basement...
$100 goes further in Sudan than it does in Appalachia.
That's assuming that any of it gets there in the first place.
PS: In the specific case of the Sudan, you might also ponder the question of whether your money ends up in the hands of the murderers [i.e. the Muslims] or the murderees [i.e. the Christians]. But that's probably too fine a point to concern most people, and, as regards the latter category of Sudanese, I suppose it also begs the question of what use your money would be to a corpse.