I asked Richard Dawkins a similar question while he was on a university tour shortly after 'The Blind Watchmaker' was published. My question was 'Do you think that dinosaurs evolved both warm and cold blooded varieties?'
His answer was 'I don't think so. No.'
Yes, I know I should have had something better to ask, but I was a ten year old kid giddy with the chance to ask Dawkins a question..
Since then, I have thought about it a bit, and his answer makes perfect sense. We don't have any living ancestors from the lines of true dinosaurs, and fossils only preserve bone structures for the most part. Granted, haversian canals and the joint structure are mammillian traits, (and now the heart) but we know independant eveolution of advantageous traits to have occurred time and time again. We have only the 'primitive' reptiles, cartalagenous fishes and mammillian ancestors to go by, so we really can't say. It's like saying what colour they were; No certainty, and the favoured answer waffles..
The meteor created the Gulf of Mexico!! It was equivalent to the fallout of a small scale nuclear war, for which the DoD estimates less than 1% of the human population of Earth to survive (look at Domestic effect of limited theatre nuclear engagement, 1972 for other rather frightening statistics). In the case of the event that killed the dinos, it was lucky that anything survived!!
Reasons Al Gore should be replaced with an RS/6000:
It is much more expressive. It doesn't require $500 haircuts. It doesn't come with Tipper Gore chained to it. It doesn't say nearly as much dumb stuff. Give it a 'net connection and it can attend global events virtually! Saves on $70,000 joy rides in Air Force Two. There is very little chance the RS/6000 could be swayed by Microsoft into calling the DOJ off. Now if IBM were to offer a couple new CPU's, we'd be in trouble. It doesn't waffle. Everything is yes or no, 1 or 0. No more bullshit answers.
God, I hope I didn't end up in Jon's book.. I mean, he's a decent writer and all, but 'Anonymous Coward, as quoted in the Jon Katz masterpiece' is decidedly not what I want as my one historical footnote!
True, but no nuclear power in their right mind is going to count on GPS to handle fine weapon guidance. The only people likely to pull such a stunt would be perhaps Taiwan, in the case of Chinese agression, or an independant terrorist group. For either, it's a one or two shot deal, and taking out NORAD or a couple of silos isn't likely to be high on their agenda. They're gunning for mass destruction of civilian targets!
Who the hell is going to buy a $800 electronic device ill-suited for anything other than Solitaire! Hell, even Solitaire has to be difficult to play, what with the tiny form factor and Windows interface!!
I vote we dub it 'The Microsoft Gameboy'. After all, is is just a toy compared to a Palm.
MCA was good. IBM already had MCA periphs, a mature reference, and they knew it kicked ISA's teeth out. VLB was a twinkle in someone's eye, periphs were a year or so out, and it wasn't all that spiffy. IBM needed/wanted a faster, better bus right then. So you go to the R&D people, tell them to dope up a MCA bus for a 486. IBM is happy, their customers get a better bus with faster periphs and are happy. Too bad everybody got all pissy when IBM actually wanted money to use IBM's bus design.
Bus fare: A couple of bucks. Bus ride, one hour: $20 Finding book, one hour: $20 Bus fare: A couple of bucks. Bus ride, one hour: $20
A real computer and ISP can be had as cheaply as $40/month. An appliance and ISP will cost you $30/month (cost depreciated over one year). The local phone bill we'll estimate at $40. Finding the book will take 15 minutes, at a cost of $5. If I visit the library twice a month, I'd save money by being able to retreive the digital copy from home. Plus the book I want is never 'out', I never have to contend with the weather, bus schedules, the Dewey Decimal system, or the specimens of human drek one encounters on public transportation.
But that isn't the case here. Con someone into getting you permission to use the Library of Congress (priceless). Replace the bus fare each way with a $340 zero-notice plane ticket to DC and the three hours with three days. Add one night of hotel in DC at $60. Now the cost went from $80 to $1200. Plus you only get a few hours to actually READ the book.
I'm sorry, but I don't see Microsoft Hildmann-Beyor 2001 or Microsoft Windows: UdderMaster Edition making the marketing gauntlet.
FOT: Whilst looking for the comical Microsoft/dairy overlap, I came across an advertisment in one magazine that concerns me. There is a rigid arm milking product that claims to have 'windows for the ultimate in reliability and sanitation'. Lawsuit?
Wait, no. MS Windows is neither reliable or sanitary (C'mon! It needs defrag to clean up after itself!). They couldn't possibly win...
Wait, no. I forgot. I live in the Land Of the Frivilous Lawsuit, where the meritless reign and common sense is checked at the door. I think I shall be making a call to Iowa tomorrow to let them in on it.
I've seen NAS boxes exactly as you describe. Nothing more than a couple of cheap UDMA IDE drives, a GX or Winchip processor at 200, and a network card. Some of them even come preloaded with *BSD/Linux (Network Appliance), which is cheap and easy to manage. Price tages are running about $1200 for a 70Gb unit. I once figured out I could replicate them for $400-600, depending on whether I used the tiny POS board with integrated Ethernet and custom case or a conventional baby AT.
While technically possible in the short term, logistically unfeasable in the long run. Imagine keeping the last seven years of email transactions for *@*.aol.com for tax purposes. Hell, I need to wipe the logfiles from my own forwarder once a month because they eat the 500 M partition!
no way that I'm going to let someone else check my logfiles just so they can tax meI wasn't proposing the means, just the end consumer effects; That email would be taxed to reduce spam, and the tax would kill Josephine Q. Maildiva.
Only a real geek would describe making a hiss sound as a 'modem noise'.
Myself, I can do a pretty killer impression of the old Bell and Howell 120 units when suitably drunk. Otherwise, it offends my mental 'thing' about doing really dumb stuff in public.
Mailservers can't really keep track of 'who talked to who', and even if they could, I don't think many of us would like them to. ( Big Brother?;)
So, say we put a 25 cent 'tax' on every email someone sends. You really couldn't make it smaller, because the spammers are looking at a 10,000 address/day mail list with a 2% return. ($12.50 in mail for every product sold).
Now, how many email are you going to send today? I've sent fifty already, and I still have a half-full inbox. That's probably 100 email/day, or $25.. I might as well call them all long distance during peak-use! It would be as cost effective!
And what if we simply required 'spam' agencies to register and pay 'X' per email? Well, they've already shown themselves to be scum. They're not going to buy it.
{laughter} I have a field jacket with a few such pockets. I had the bad habit of needing the laptop, accesories, cellphone, spare batteries, various diag/install media, etc ALL of the time. (Job requirement).
Unfortunatly, I forget stuff. Like to grab the bag containing everything.
I started stuffing it into the pockets of my military field jacket. After cleaning out the four pockets on the jacket and noting I had everything but the laptop in them, making them useless as actual pockets, decided sewing a couple of velcro pouches under the liner wouldn't hurt. I had a sub-notebook NEC on the front left, the phone and media on the right, and the cables and batteries between the hem and the waist drawstring under my arms.
Used to freak people out when I'd rummage inside the bulge under my left arm and emerge with a laptop.
They used water/ethylene glycol for two reasons; It reduced corrosion, and in event of a power failure would prevent the exchangers from freezing and bursting.
Didn't intend to mislead.. I just happened to be using Gimp to 'retouch' a photograph. Well, retouch is a little weak. I was pasting Alan Cox's head onto Bill Gates body. (one of the photos from the 'Billy visits the White House' press event.)
It's not really a question of 'better'. It's a question of 'better for what'. Gimp aspires to be the Script-Fu wielding ninja of graphics. It can do just about everything, and in that immense functionality quite a bit of 'ease of use' is lost.
And what about feature set tuning? You can do that photo touch-up in the Gimp, scrolling through nested menu after nested menu of filters, plugins, and scripts, just to find the three filters you use, and then adjust those filters to do the standard set of stuff on the photo. Or you can use a commercial application that had its feature set tuned for photo touch-up. Only the options that make sense are present, they are all tweaked for the subject material, everything is easy to find. The tuned set is easier, quicker, and makes more sense!!
May I suggest 'The Boxer' (Simon and Garfunkel, from 'Bridge over Troubled Water') as a mutational targer into 'The Poster'??
Re:Possible Uses of the Gathered Data
on
Linux on the Brain
·
· Score: 5
If only for myself and Mr. sorehands, I hope so.
Unfortunatly, as a programmer, I feel the quality of my code will fall drastically. I think three times faster than I type, and that 'delay' allows me to finalize the stream of cerebral crap into usable data. I can see it now:
copen(//slashdot refresh//"/usr/local/drsfile","NT sucks.. Why am I 0", nodenum/2, fucking trolls 71227) = data Where did I put that #2 Phillips ;
Re:Possible Uses of the Gathered Data
on
Linux on the Brain
·
· Score: 1
I can validate Enzondio's account.. It was on about four weeks ago at 10-11PM EST. I think it was after a program on emergency medical techs, but I was primarily watching the Cartoon Network and flipping during commercials..
Lincoln did much the same thing until the late sixties.. Cadillac started claiming specs after the song 'Little Nash Rambler' hit the AM airwaves in 1956 or so (Rambler pulls along side a proud Caddy owner topped out at 120 and asks how to get out of second gear)
Unlike comparing the Ford 460 to the GM 427, now IBM uses commodity processors for most of its machines; You can directly compare, by virtue of the speed and number of processors,(minus the OS and microcode fudge factor) an IBM mini to a SMP PIII, or a Altivec-enabled Mac, or a Alpha. Big Blue's mainframes still use somewhat in-house powerplants, but knowing that the 2001 390 is 1.25 times faster than the last revision isn't going to help you make a purchasing decision between it and a small Alpha cluster..
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I asked Richard Dawkins a similar question while he was on a university tour shortly after 'The Blind Watchmaker' was published. My question was 'Do you think that dinosaurs evolved both warm and cold blooded varieties?'
His answer was 'I don't think so. No.'
Yes, I know I should have had something better to ask, but I was a ten year old kid giddy with the chance to ask Dawkins a question..
Since then, I have thought about it a bit, and his answer makes perfect sense. We don't have any living ancestors from the lines of true dinosaurs, and fossils only preserve bone structures for the most part. Granted, haversian canals and the joint structure are mammillian traits, (and now the heart) but we know independant eveolution of advantageous traits to have occurred time and time again. We have only the 'primitive' reptiles, cartalagenous fishes and mammillian ancestors to go by, so we really can't say. It's like saying what colour they were; No certainty, and the favoured answer waffles..
The meteor created the Gulf of Mexico!! It was equivalent to the fallout of a small scale nuclear war, for which the DoD estimates less than 1% of the human population of Earth to survive (look at Domestic effect of limited theatre nuclear engagement, 1972 for other rather frightening statistics). In the case of the event that killed the dinos, it was lucky that anything survived!!
Reasons Al Gore should be replaced with an RS/6000:
It is much more expressive.
It doesn't require $500 haircuts.
It doesn't come with Tipper Gore chained to it.
It doesn't say nearly as much dumb stuff.
Give it a 'net connection and it can attend global events virtually! Saves on $70,000 joy rides in Air Force Two.
There is very little chance the RS/6000 could be swayed by Microsoft into calling the DOJ off. Now if IBM were to offer a couple new CPU's, we'd be in trouble.
It doesn't waffle. Everything is yes or no, 1 or 0. No more bullshit answers.
God, I hope I didn't end up in Jon's book..
I mean, he's a decent writer and all, but 'Anonymous Coward, as quoted in the Jon Katz masterpiece' is decidedly not what I want as my one historical footnote!
[laughs his ass off] Thank you.. Another gem!
True, but no nuclear power in their right mind is going to count on GPS to handle fine weapon guidance. The only people likely to pull such a stunt would be perhaps Taiwan, in the case of Chinese agression, or an independant terrorist group. For either, it's a one or two shot deal, and taking out NORAD or a couple of silos isn't likely to be high on their agenda. They're gunning for mass destruction of civilian targets!
Who the hell is going to buy a $800 electronic device ill-suited for anything other than Solitaire! Hell, even Solitaire has to be difficult to play, what with the tiny form factor and Windows interface!!
I vote we dub it 'The Microsoft Gameboy'. After all, is is just a toy compared to a Palm.
MCA was good. IBM already had MCA periphs, a mature reference, and they knew it kicked ISA's teeth out. VLB was a twinkle in someone's eye, periphs were a year or so out, and it wasn't all that spiffy. IBM needed/wanted a faster, better bus right then. So you go to the R&D people, tell them to dope up a MCA bus for a 486. IBM is happy, their customers get a better bus with faster periphs and are happy. Too bad everybody got all pissy when IBM actually wanted money to use IBM's bus design.
Cheaper if and only if your time is free.
Bus fare: A couple of bucks.
Bus ride, one hour: $20
Finding book, one hour: $20
Bus fare: A couple of bucks.
Bus ride, one hour: $20
A real computer and ISP can be had as cheaply as $40/month. An appliance and ISP will cost you $30/month (cost depreciated over one year). The local phone bill we'll estimate at $40. Finding the book will take 15 minutes, at a cost of $5. If I visit the library twice a month, I'd save money by being able to retreive the digital copy from home. Plus the book I want is never 'out', I never have to contend with the weather, bus schedules, the Dewey Decimal system, or the specimens of human drek one encounters on public transportation.
But that isn't the case here. Con someone into getting you permission to use the Library of Congress (priceless). Replace the bus fare each way with a $340 zero-notice plane ticket to DC and the three hours with three days. Add one night of hotel in DC at $60. Now the cost went from $80 to $1200. Plus you only get a few hours to actually READ the book.
All prices include insurance at replacement value and are for shipments within the Continental US.
Cost of overnighting bare Espresso: $11.36
Cost of overnighting Dell Latitude: $27.19
Cost of overnighting Dell Optiplex G1: $62.71
But the real acid test is this: Overnighting round trip from a regional office, in this case Toronto.
Cost of overnighting bare Espresso: $26.92
Cost of overnighting Dell Latitude: $58.12
I'm sorry, but I don't see Microsoft Hildmann-Beyor 2001 or Microsoft Windows: UdderMaster Edition making the marketing gauntlet.
FOT: Whilst looking for the comical Microsoft/dairy overlap, I came across an advertisment in one magazine that concerns me. There is a rigid arm milking product that claims to have 'windows for the ultimate in reliability and sanitation'. Lawsuit?
Wait, no. MS Windows is neither reliable or sanitary (C'mon! It needs defrag to clean up after itself!). They couldn't possibly win...
Wait, no. I forgot. I live in the Land Of the Frivilous Lawsuit, where the meritless reign and common sense is checked at the door. I think I shall be making a call to Iowa tomorrow to let them in on it.
I've seen NAS boxes exactly as you describe. Nothing more than a couple of cheap UDMA IDE drives, a GX or Winchip processor at 200, and a network card. Some of them even come preloaded with *BSD/Linux (Network Appliance), which is cheap and easy to manage. Price tages are running about $1200 for a 70Gb unit. I once figured out I could replicate them for $400-600, depending on whether I used the tiny POS board with integrated Ethernet and custom case or a conventional baby AT.
While technically possible in the short term, logistically unfeasable in the long run. Imagine keeping the last seven years of email transactions for *@*.aol.com for tax purposes. Hell, I need to wipe the logfiles from my own forwarder once a month because they eat the 500 M partition!
no way that I'm going to let someone else check my logfiles just so they can tax meI wasn't proposing the means, just the end consumer effects; That email would be taxed to reduce spam, and the tax would kill Josephine Q. Maildiva.
Only a real geek would describe making a hiss sound as a 'modem noise'.
Myself, I can do a pretty killer impression of the old Bell and Howell 120 units when suitably drunk. Otherwise, it offends my mental 'thing' about doing really dumb stuff in public.
Mailservers can't really keep track of 'who talked to who', and even if they could, I don't think many of us would like them to. ( Big Brother? ;)
So, say we put a 25 cent 'tax' on every email someone sends. You really couldn't make it smaller, because the spammers are looking at a 10,000 address/day mail list with a 2% return. ($12.50 in mail for every product sold).
Now, how many email are you going to send today? I've sent fifty already, and I still have a half-full inbox. That's probably 100 email/day, or $25.. I might as well call them all long distance during peak-use! It would be as cost effective!
And what if we simply required 'spam' agencies to register and pay 'X' per email? Well, they've already shown themselves to be scum. They're not going to buy it.
{laughter} I have a field jacket with a few such pockets. I had the bad habit of needing the laptop, accesories, cellphone, spare batteries, various diag/install media, etc ALL of the time. (Job requirement).
Unfortunatly, I forget stuff. Like to grab the bag containing everything.
I started stuffing it into the pockets of my military field jacket. After cleaning out the four pockets on the jacket and noting I had everything but the laptop in them, making them useless as actual pockets, decided sewing a couple of velcro pouches under the liner wouldn't hurt. I had a sub-notebook NEC on the front left, the phone and media on the right, and the cables and batteries between the hem and the waist drawstring under my arms.
Used to freak people out when I'd rummage inside the bulge under my left arm and emerge with a laptop.
They used water/ethylene glycol for two reasons; It reduced corrosion, and in event of a power failure would prevent the exchangers from freezing and bursting.
Didn't intend to mislead.. I just happened to be using Gimp to 'retouch' a photograph. Well, retouch is a little weak. I was pasting Alan Cox's head onto Bill Gates body. (one of the photos from the 'Billy visits the White House' press event.)
Gah! The world is awash with a sea of dirty minds!
GNU and the GPL are RMS's creations. That would be a little like asking you which child you liked better, your own son or the neighbors daughter..
It's not really a question of 'better'. It's a question of 'better for what'. Gimp aspires to be the Script-Fu wielding ninja of graphics. It can do just about everything, and in that immense functionality quite a bit of 'ease of use' is lost.
And what about feature set tuning? You can do that photo touch-up in the Gimp, scrolling through nested menu after nested menu of filters, plugins, and scripts, just to find the three filters you use, and then adjust those filters to do the standard set of stuff on the photo. Or you can use a commercial application that had its feature set tuned for photo touch-up. Only the options that make sense are present, they are all tweaked for the subject material, everything is easy to find. The tuned set is easier, quicker, and makes more sense!!
Definitly one of your best ones..
May I suggest 'The Boxer' (Simon and Garfunkel, from 'Bridge over Troubled Water') as a mutational targer into 'The Poster'??
If only for myself and Mr. sorehands, I hope so.
Unfortunatly, as a programmer, I feel the quality of my code will fall drastically. I think three times faster than I type, and that 'delay' allows me to finalize the stream of cerebral crap into usable data. I can see it now:
copen(//slashdot refresh//"/usr/local/drsfile","NT sucks.. Why am I 0", nodenum/2, fucking trolls 71227) = data Where did I put that #2 Phillips ;
I can validate Enzondio's account.. It was on about four weeks ago at 10-11PM EST. I think it was after a program on emergency medical techs, but I was primarily watching the Cartoon Network and flipping during commercials..
Lincoln did much the same thing until the late sixties.. Cadillac started claiming specs after the song 'Little Nash Rambler' hit the AM airwaves in 1956 or so (Rambler pulls along side a proud Caddy owner topped out at 120 and asks how to get out of second gear)
Unlike comparing the Ford 460 to the GM 427, now IBM uses commodity processors for most of its machines; You can directly compare, by virtue of the speed and number of processors,(minus the OS and microcode fudge factor) an IBM mini to a SMP PIII, or a Altivec-enabled Mac, or a Alpha. Big Blue's mainframes still use somewhat in-house powerplants, but knowing that the 2001 390 is 1.25 times faster than the last revision isn't going to help you make a purchasing decision between it and a small Alpha cluster..