Java always slows things way down, so whenever i get to a site that does have java, i get out and look for an equivalent bit of information at some other site, or if it is a merchant, i don't buy that item.
this accords with my memorys - Netscape did not work as well for me as IE. what is always lost on/. is that win2000 is actually better the macOS..if we cd have that discussion, we wd be gettng somewhere
i believe for many years ms did not have health insurance for part timers, while bill gates was worth billions... is that close to evil, the children who did not get dental care so bill or balmer or whoever cd add another zero to their bank account ?
so i guess you understand how to make your own gasoline.... what a silly thing to say, that you have to learn for yourself. really silly. I hope you are under the age of 12
maybe I am biased cause i am more used to wintel then apple, but everytime i look at my wifes mac laptop, i think poorly built, and sofware that is not any better then windows...actually, i think windows 2000 is better then mac osx... but the real serious point is that mac hardware is not better, weighing all the pros and cons.
with posts like that linux will never go anywhere. try to understand that anything more complicated then click on the icon is un acceptable, unless your program does soemthing really special...
I don't see problems that are susceptible to data mining. I suspect this view is shared by many of my colleagues. (this is similar to the view of most bio oriented scientists that desgin of experiment is not useful)
What would change the field ?
In science, what usually changes peoples minds is a BIOLOGICAL results obtained with a new technique that could not be obtained (easily) another way. this may just be restating the old truism that success breeds success, but to get biologists interested in large scale database mining sorts of thinkgs, you have to convince us that there are questions that can be anwered witht his technique that can't be answered more easily with other techniques.
The other problem is the high noise of bio experiments; you can't simply aggregate data on rats blood pressure in france with ozone levels in arkansaw and come up with hypothesises on weather and strokes; the data quality is to low, and it would be prohibitively $$ to design the experiments to have that level of quality.
a word on design of experiment: as I understand it, if you have n interelated variables (temp, pressure, time,..etc) and each variable has x levels (Temp = 20 deg, 25, 30...) a "complete" experiment would be some sort of n by x dimensional test. DOE says if this number is so large that you can't look at a significant %, you are better off changing two variables at a time to sample the space. None of hte doe people have been able to put this into comprehensible useable form, and for various reasons, most biologists don't think this sort of hting works (the variable are obvious, and the response surface is highly non linear and non smooth)
I think I know enough about this to give a rough realistic estimate of costs or the research and development side. Of course, you could do something for 10K, but not a whole lot. If you were head of a secret program in Iraq or China, you could have a nice biowarfare facility for a captial cost of around 5 - 10million; operating costs would be salary for 15 scientists, plus equipment and supplies at about50K/yr/scientist.
The problem is that a lot of the specialized stuff you need is sold by only a few vendors, so you would have a lot of costs in hiding purcahses. (sort of like Saddam's aluminium tubes [for artillery] - cheap on the open market, $$ with the double agents).
The point of this is, it does not really matter if the cost is 10K or 10 million or even 100 MM - for a govt agency, it is about the same. So basically, almost any country in the world could setup a nice little building somewhere, staff it, and start looking into making thier own little virus or anthrax or whatever.
I don't know what scaleup and delivery systems cost - that is another issue. A medium size (100 liter) fermentor is not that exspensive; certainly not doulbe the RnD budget. If you need rockets or something to deliver the agents across oceans, that is probably the most exspensive and difficult part of hte whole operation
my wife had a g4 laptop: flimsy design, keys that left rubber on the screen, stupidly designed power adaptor cable ends without enough strain relief (same problem on the ipod) stupid power adaptor that takes up two or three outlets on a strip... and the stupid icons..designed for teenagers, at best (my preteen daughter thought they were cool, which says it all)
and it was slow - and did I mention $$
I could go on, but I just don't get macs. Aside from the high price, and the flamboyant design (which i personally find distastfull, but to each his own) why on earth would anyone buy one ?
if you ask any business person about what it takes to get a consumer in any field, from the mundane (soap, ketchup) to the exotic (fourier transform resonance mass spectrometers, which start at a cool quarter million) to swithch to a new technology, they will say
its hard
the new thing has to be BETTER then the old, not just "as good" but better.
The degree of better varys; with fully commoditized items like soap, maybe a cheaper price will do.
but with desktops and os's cheaper is not good enough - people consider the aggravation of switching greater then the cost savings.
So, if you want people to use linux on the desktop, it has to do something that ms does not.
learn from firefox: it is successfull NOT because it is open source, or it is free, or it has some tech mumbo jumbo, but because..tabbed browsing, and cntrl plus to enlarge works, save all tabs in a folder...these are features users want.
I don't know what people want from a desktop and a office suite; but until linux can find something that people - NOT geeks or proselytizers or techno nerds, but the mass of normal people - want, linux is going no wheres.
So, if/. actually wants to get linux on the desktop, the question is, what do people want ? Perhaps it is something really simple, like the stickys program that use to come with MacOS. Perhaps it is better plug and play hardware, or good integration with voip, or...I really don't know, but I do know that I have open office and thunderbird and firefox and so far as i can tell, firefox is the only one that does soemthing for me.
one place to start is the crappy formats available in default email replys..how about an easy to customize template for your emails, that makes em look snazzy ?
or how about, in the excel part of open office, instead of default autofil functin, a window pops up, and if you have in cell a1"the grass 54K at 47 bld a1" the window asks what part of that expression you want to increment, and how... or instead of linear mouse menus that dont correspond to the ergonomics of your wrist, curved menus...
The worst looking thing i came across in a recent job search was what appeared to be a make the seeker pay to play - the ladders, which, so far as i cd tell, wanted you to pay a fee to see jobs freely listed by companies or other headhunters
I was out of work recently and using mosnter and boston.com, and one of the most annoying features is that the two or three sentances which show up on the summary screen are often wasted on usesless hr crap, like an exciting dynamic company.... when the stuff you need, like requriements, are buried down so you have to waste time looking at each job individually.
..6,800 dollars a month.. did the reporter for the post verify this..only clamwin a bitdefender can see my software....oh, i see, this is the newest gen of spy-advertising
next week, the intrepid dupes from teh mainstream media interview the credit card thief who notes that "only brandx visa cards have good security...."
all the successful ones have easy to remember and spell names. amazon did not beat barnesandnolbes cause amazon was better in ANY way except it is easier to type
so, new companies take names that are easy to remember and spell; newegg is great that way
some posters have pointed out that you can't buy a radio with an ethernet port or that internet radio streams fail, or u cant use it in the car. all true, and imho irrelevant.
there is something very, very , very simple that is killing internet radio:
the lack of a simple radio gui. we all have a very set, simple expectation of what a radio looks like: you turn a knob, and the Mhz or Khz changes, and as you pass diff stations, youre signal gets strong and weak.
to make Internet radio a success, all you have to do is provide this simple simple simple gui, a button foryour home zipcode, and make it the same and universal on all platforms, and just have a simple band swithc for the other stations that you have on the internet
most of us don't want, or at least don't want to start with 100s of stations - to much choice is NOT alwasys good (anyone who argues taht is a moron and can be safely ignored [as can the people who complain about my spelling]). what you want is something that starts SIMPLE SIMPLE SIMPLE and then allows you to explore complexity as u get comfortable (bill gates are u listening: windows media player is NOT the answer)
of course, all the radio stations are too stupid to get together and do this, so they shoot themselves in the foot....
not only that, it took me a long time to find the key labeled "any", and when I try to fax documents by holding them up to the screen, nothing happens.
You and the other people who complain about my stupidity are typical/. geeks, totally missing the marketing forest for the technical trees. the point is, most people will not understand the parent post, and if he or she had wnated to be helpful, he or she would have put it in very simple plain english.
Recall Prof Feynman's demo at the Challenger hearing: really smart, knowledgable people can explain things to a milkmaid (reputedly, Einstein's wife said this was a slur on milk maids)
PS: why should i bother to spell check, if it ain't built in. spelling on your own is so 20th century
like totally unhelpfull..I didnot understand a word of your post or the links
Surely, there is a simple answer to this question: if i scan my hardrive tonighte with avg or macafee or norton, am i protected ? where do i download the patch ?
if not, this surely demonstrates that the protection companies aint worth a tinkers damm
aint so great I live about 1/2 mile from the library, and use it frequently. The librarian may be a civil liberties hero, but at running the day to day ops of a major library (newton is a city of 90,000 odd soouls, and the massive new library, which you have to DRIVE to in a car, and which replaced all the wonderful branch libs) is not run that well. For instance, I would bet dollars to donuts that every/. if they saw the gui on the library search engine, would scream in horror
they can't even provide a decent bike rack, and the one they have is unusable due to overgrowth ofthe bushes
The library is fully computerized, and will send yo all sorts of emails, but for some reason, can't send you an overdue notice untillyour fines are 5$.
I just don't get the jobs/apple thing - he puts out so many bad products admidst the gems. the whole apple computer line - please, someone put it out of its misery.
people seem to think he is a tech guy WRONG he is an artist. if you think about it,everything good that has evercome from apple is artistry.
Lets say apples cause a 0.1% lifetime increase in your risk for cancer. Unless you did a detailed study around this specific question, you would never pick this up - but in the realm of artificial chemicals, such an effect would be considered HUGE.
there is a long history in sci fi of how people can be stupid when the computers get smart enough seriously, why do we need to know math ? for 99% of the population, you really don't need to know more then how to check your calculator (im being serious here - this is NOT a troll).
KNowing math is like knowing how to guage the age of a horse by its tooth length - usefull for some vanishingly small % of the population.
Of course, one can argue that we all know that things like resoluiton by partial fractions and trig are completely useless for most people,a nd we just do it as a filter for the ed system, to keep the wankers out of professions where you have to have some intelligence, like surgeon, airline pilot or the guy who lays out the software spec.
esp re lego I have heard many geek types in their 70s wonder in the same vain about how todays kids are going to take stuff apart so they can bet interested in being engineers and scientists I guess the answer is linux - it is not really a commercial product, but serves mainly to train the next gen of scientists and engineers and tinkerers, adn does it in the same way- showing how you can take something apart an dput it back to gether again
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Java always slows things way down, so whenever i get to a site that does have java, i get out and look for an equivalent bit of information at some other site, or if it is a merchant, i don't buy that item.
this accords with my memorys - Netscape did not work as well for me as IE.
what is always lost on/. is that win2000 is actually better the macOS..if we cd have that discussion, we wd be gettng somewhere
i believe for many years ms did not have health insurance for part timers, while bill gates was worth billions... is that close to evil, the children who did not get dental care so bill or balmer or whoever cd add another zero to their bank account ?
so i guess you understand how to make your own gasoline.... what a silly thing to say, that you have to learn for yourself. really silly. I hope you are under the age of 12
maybe I am biased cause i am more used to wintel then apple, but everytime i look at my wifes mac laptop, i think poorly built, and sofware that is not any better then windows...actually, i think windows 2000 is better then mac osx...
but the real serious point is that mac hardware is not better, weighing all the pros and cons.
with posts like that linux will never go anywhere. try to understand that anything more complicated then click on the icon is un acceptable, unless your program does soemthing really special...
I don't see problems that are susceptible to data mining. I suspect this view is shared by many of my colleagues. (this is similar to the view of most bio oriented scientists that desgin of experiment is not useful)
..etc) and each variable has x levels (Temp = 20 deg, 25, 30...) a "complete" experiment would be some sort of n by x dimensional test. DOE says if this number is so large that you can't look at a significant %, you are better off changing two variables at a time to sample the space. None of hte doe people have been able to put this into comprehensible useable form, and for various reasons, most biologists don't think this sort of hting works (the variable are obvious, and the response surface is highly non linear and non smooth)
What would change the field ?
In science, what usually changes peoples minds is a BIOLOGICAL results obtained with a new technique that could not be obtained (easily) another way.
this may just be restating the old truism that success breeds success, but to get biologists interested in large scale database mining sorts of thinkgs, you have to convince us that there are questions that can be anwered witht his technique that can't be answered more easily with other techniques.
The other problem is the high noise of bio experiments; you can't simply aggregate data on rats blood pressure in france with ozone levels in arkansaw and come up with hypothesises on weather and strokes; the data quality is to low, and it would be prohibitively $$ to design the experiments to have that level of quality.
a word on design of experiment: as I understand it, if you have n interelated variables (temp, pressure, time,
I think I know enough about this to give a rough realistic estimate of costs or the research and development side. Of course, you could do something for 10K, but not a whole lot. If you were head of a secret program in Iraq or China, you could have a nice biowarfare facility for a captial cost of around 5 - 10million; operating costs would be salary for 15 scientists, plus equipment and supplies at about50K/yr/scientist.
The problem is that a lot of the specialized stuff you need is sold by only a few vendors, so you would have a lot of costs in hiding purcahses. (sort of like Saddam's aluminium tubes [for artillery] - cheap on the open market, $$ with the double agents).
The point of this is, it does not really matter if the cost is 10K or 10 million or even 100 MM - for a govt agency, it is about the same. So basically, almost any country in the world could setup a nice little building somewhere, staff it, and start looking into making thier own little virus or anthrax or whatever.
I don't know what scaleup and delivery systems cost - that is another issue. A medium size (100 liter) fermentor is not that exspensive; certainly not doulbe the RnD budget. If you need rockets or something to deliver the agents across oceans, that is probably the most exspensive and difficult part of hte whole operation
my wife had a g4 laptop: flimsy design, keys that left rubber on the screen, stupidly designed power adaptor cable ends without enough strain relief (same problem on the ipod) stupid power adaptor that takes up two or three outlets on a strip... ..designed for teenagers, at best (my preteen daughter thought they were cool, which says it all)
and the stupid icons
and it was slow - and did I mention $$
I could go on, but I just don't get macs. Aside from the high price, and the flamboyant design (which i personally find distastfull, but to each his own) why on earth would anyone buy one ?
not only that, the color of the button is 71.25% grey fill, and i refuse to use nay os without 71.24% greyfill...
/. cd find some little reason not to like ANY OS
talk about whining..I bet dollars to doughnuts tht every single person on
if you ask any business person about what it takes to get a consumer in any field, from the mundane (soap, ketchup) to the exotic (fourier transform resonance mass spectrometers, which start at a cool quarter million) to swithch to a new technology, they will say
/. actually wants to get linux on the desktop, the question is, what do people want ? ...I really don't know, but I do know that I have open office and thunderbird and firefox and so far as i can tell, firefox is the only one that does soemthing for me.
its hard
the new thing has to be BETTER then the old, not just "as good" but better.
The degree of better varys; with fully commoditized items like soap, maybe a cheaper price will do.
but with desktops and os's cheaper is not good enough - people consider the aggravation of switching greater then the cost savings.
So, if you want people to use linux on the desktop, it has to do something that ms does not.
learn from firefox: it is successfull NOT because it is open source, or it is free, or it has some tech mumbo jumbo, but because..tabbed browsing, and cntrl plus to enlarge works, save all tabs in a folder...these are features users want.
I don't know what people want from a desktop and a office suite; but until linux can find something that people - NOT geeks or proselytizers or techno nerds, but the mass of normal people - want, linux is going no wheres.
So, if
Perhaps it is something really simple, like the stickys program that use to come with MacOS. Perhaps it is better plug and play hardware, or good integration with voip, or
one place to start is the crappy formats available in default email replys..how about an easy to customize template for your emails, that makes em look snazzy ?
or how about, in the excel part of open office, instead of default autofil functin, a window pops up, and if you have in cell a1"the grass 54K at 47 bld a1" the window asks what part of that expression you want to increment, and how... or instead of linear mouse menus that dont correspond to the ergonomics of your wrist, curved menus...
The worst looking thing i came across in a recent job search was what appeared to be a make the seeker pay to play - the ladders, which, so far as i cd tell, wanted you to pay a fee to see jobs freely listed by companies or other headhunters
I was out of work recently and using mosnter and boston.com, and one of the most annoying features is that the two or three sentances which show up on the summary screen are often wasted on usesless hr crap, like an exciting dynamic company....
when the stuff you need, like requriements, are buried down so you have to waste time looking at each job individually.
dont know bout xp, but the i cant kill a process indicates extreme newby in windows2000
(right click my computer, manage, services...)
..6,800 dollars a month.. did the reporter for the post verify this ..only clamwin a bitdefender can see my software....oh, i see, this is the newest gen of spy-advertising
next week, the intrepid dupes from teh mainstream media interview the credit card thief who notes that "only brandx visa cards have good security...."
all the successful ones have easy to remember and spell names. amazon did not beat barnesandnolbes cause amazon was better in ANY way except it is easier to type
so, new companies take names that are easy to remember and spell; newegg is great that way
can be found herem ail/mail359.html#fusion
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2
some posters have pointed out that you can't buy a radio with an ethernet port or that internet radio streams fail, or u cant use it in the car.
all true, and imho irrelevant.
there is something very, very , very simple that is killing internet radio:
the lack of a simple radio gui.
we all have a very set, simple expectation of what a radio looks like: you turn a knob, and the Mhz or Khz changes, and as you pass diff stations, youre signal gets strong and weak.
to make Internet radio a success, all you have to do is provide this simple simple simple gui, a button foryour home zipcode, and make it the same and universal on all platforms, and just have a simple band swithc for the other stations that you have on the internet
most of us don't want, or at least don't want to start with 100s of stations - to much choice is NOT alwasys good (anyone who argues taht is a moron and can be safely ignored [as can the people who complain about my spelling]). what you want is something that starts SIMPLE SIMPLE SIMPLE and then allows you to explore complexity as u get comfortable (bill gates are u listening: windows media player is NOT the answer)
of course, all the radio stations are too stupid to get together and do this, so they shoot themselves in the foot....
good point... IN the world of perfect posts, the parent would have had two parts, a for morons like me , and b for /.s...
not only that, it took me a long time to find the key labeled "any", and when I try to fax documents by holding them up to the screen, nothing happens.
/. geeks, totally missing the marketing forest for the technical trees.
You and the other people who complain about my stupidity are typical
the point is, most people will not understand the parent post, and if he or she had wnated to be helpful, he or she would have put it in very simple plain english.
Recall Prof Feynman's demo at the Challenger hearing: really smart, knowledgable people can explain things to a milkmaid (reputedly, Einstein's wife said this was a slur on milk maids)
PS: why should i bother to spell check, if it ain't built in. spelling on your own is so 20th century
like totally unhelpfull..I didnot understand a word of your post or the links
Surely, there is a simple answer to this question:
if i scan my hardrive tonighte with avg or macafee or norton, am i protected ?
where do i download the patch ?
if not, this surely demonstrates that the protection companies aint worth a tinkers damm
aint so great /. if they saw the gui on the library search engine, would scream in horror
I live about 1/2 mile from the library, and use it frequently.
The librarian may be a civil liberties hero, but at running the day to day ops of a major library (newton is a city of 90,000 odd soouls, and the massive new library, which you have to DRIVE to in a car, and which replaced all the wonderful branch libs) is not run that well.
For instance, I would bet dollars to donuts that every
they can't even provide a decent bike rack, and the one they have is unusable due to overgrowth ofthe bushes
The library is fully computerized, and will send yo all sorts of emails, but for some reason, can't send you an overdue notice untillyour fines are 5$.
I could go on, but whats the point.
I just don't get the jobs/apple thing - he puts out so many bad products admidst the gems.
the whole apple computer line - please, someone put it out of its misery.
people seem to think he is a tech guy WRONG
he is an artist. if you think about it,everything good that has evercome from apple is artistry.
How on earth do you know this ?
Lets say apples cause a 0.1% lifetime increase in your risk for cancer. Unless you did a detailed study around this specific question, you would never pick this up - but in the realm of artificial chemicals, such an effect would be considered HUGE.
there is a long history in sci fi of how people can be stupid when the computers get smart enough
seriously, why do we need to know math ? for 99% of the population, you really don't need to know more then how to check your calculator (im being serious here - this is NOT a troll).
KNowing math is like knowing how to guage the age of a horse by its tooth length - usefull for some vanishingly small % of the population.
Of course, one can argue that we all know that things like resoluiton by partial fractions and trig are completely useless for most people,a nd we just do it as a filter for the ed system, to keep the wankers out of professions where you have to have some intelligence, like surgeon, airline pilot or the guy who lays out the software spec.
esp re lego
I have heard many geek types in their 70s wonder in the same vain about how todays kids are going to take stuff apart so they can bet interested in being engineers and scientists
I guess the answer is linux - it is not really a commercial product, but serves mainly to train the next gen of scientists and engineers and tinkerers, adn does it in the same way- showing how you can take something apart an dput it back to gether again