Does it worry anybody to know that in the process of gaining technical knowledge of *anything* (tech industry, science at large, etc) a person *does* gain a bias of some sort along with it?
These 'experts' could easily be the next best person to buy/influence, if you can't buy the judge/jury... Also, there may be a tendency for the Judge being brainwas^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htutored to give more weight to this expert's information, regardless of how much of it is opinion...
Hopefully these experts will be less biased toward a particular case than the 'expert witnesses' called by the prosecution/defense, who are obviously puppets, chosen for the testimony they are expected to give, but I can easily see a situation where the defendant (napster, for example) calls an expert for testimony (shaun fanning, let's say) and then that person's statements are belittled by the Judge's "impartial" expert.../me worries about this being just another way to play the system...
Attaching a beetle with a good wire and then pushing it off the edge of the bridge doesnt seem to be very technical. I would have hoped that they would have done something more creative.
You certainly aren't an engineer then. Making absolutely sure that the cable won't snap like wet spaghetti, without being able to run a test, is not exactly non-technical. The dynamic loads involved are pretty significant, and non-trivial to calculate in the real world.
(what they did, any hick with a truck and an empty beetle shell could have pulled).
Any hick with a firm foundation in Strengths of Materials and Dynamics... The more difficult part is, IMHO, pulling it off without the bay traffic/bridge authority collaring them right there...
Hello? Why do we care if cluebies use OS X? Isn't that like a win/win situation? An easy to use, stable, unix-based alternative to Micro$oft that the masses can use, without the burdensome responsibility of having to hold their hands on *our* mailing lists? I'm gonna talk OS X up to every cluebie I know!
I know, right? HP is a great big company now, but the close ties brought on by Hewlett's managerial style live on. I work for the first HP spinoff, (AMT), separated in 1992, and we in turn do some work for the most recent (and recognizable) HP spinoff, Agilent, and the remnants of HP culture are still here, quite strongly... Hewlett and Packard are two who did American Business the right way -- and in a way that many geeks can appreciate, because it wasn't begun as a money grubbing venture by capitalists, but as a chance to do something technically great by some great engineering minds..
    S*it like this makes me lose even more respect for slashdot's submission editors... I'm afraid the only thing keeping them alive is the lack of a real successor, so all the readers are going down with the ship so to speak..
You aren't a math major are you?
They currently boast 23,000,000 searches per day.
Let's assume that if you had to *pay* (nevermind
the fact that it's only a penny, if you have to go to the trouble to find a way to pay them, it's easier to use someone else) the daily usage will probably fall to maybe 5 million or less. Then they are raking in $50,000/day. 365 days a year, that's over $18E6/yr -- not bad for a search engine, even at the decreased usage rate -- BUT the big thing here is not the money you have to pay -- it's the privacy issue. IF they have a method to log each time I search, and tie that info to some account with which I pay them (maybe every 1000 searches or so), then it's one short line of perl from there to associating *WHAT* I searched for with my account... right now they can of course associate your searching patterns with your IP, but most people are still unfortuneate enough that they dial into a modem pool with a bank of IP's, and thus the association becomes less meaningful. But if you have an ACCOUNT to pay them with, that gets updated each time you search, I would certainly not use google any longer, despite the fact that they are the ONLY engine I use at the moment..
While many users may consider linux more powerful, etc, they often forget to consider the learning curve. Unix systems are harder to use, lets face it.
Yeah, but I'm reminded of various fortunes/quotes:
"Unix is user-friendly -- nobody said it was learning friendly..."
"Unix is user-friendly -- it's just selective about it's friends..."
"The learning curve for *nix may be steeper, but the view is better once you scale it."
"The learning curve for *nix may be steep, but at least you only have to climb it once!
And how true that is! Unix gurus from 20 years ago can at least know where to start with linux, as opposed to a DOS user sitting down to Windows ME, 2000, etc. There is less fundamental difference between any two (or three) *nix "variants" than between any two Micro$oft OS's -- DOS, Win9x, ME, 2000, NT, WinCE (the best named MS OS ever) and now Whistler..
And I thought WINE stood for "Wine Is Not an
Emulator" but here all along it IS an emulator,
timothy just said so! Besides that, he says
it's my FAVORITE one too!
Posted by timothy on Thursday September 14,...
Reading about his house and habits reminds me of my childhood-favorite biography of Thomas Edison.
I should have expected that from 'timothy'. Try reading more history and you'll find that Edison's biographies are often inflated ego trips for the man, and mysteriously choose to avoid talking about Nikolai Tesla. Check out
this, this,
and
this to understand why.
If it were up to Edison we'd have *no* electricity because he wanted us to use a DC system simply because it was his idea. 'NIH' (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a bad thing.
I'm late on this article, it's already "older stuff", but in case someone's looking for ideas, the best desk you can have (IMHO, of course) is to take two filing cabinets (the two-high type, not four high; and the legal document width ones are too wide, too) and put a solid wooden door across it. first sand the door a little bit (lightly) and then give it a few coats of a nice natural stain. Then 4 or 5 coats of polyurethane to seal it against the coke/coffee/etc you will be spilling on your desk. I know people who have had this type of desk for more than 20 years and they still look great, and no other design gives you so much real estate.
The following was sent to their request for feedback address.
Dear feedback reader,
First of all let me congratulate you on the development of such a fine product as the i-opener. You seem to have included all the right features and aesthetically pleasing necessities to have a real winner. Of all the 'net appliances that have been hyped and marketed in the past 18 months, I would say yours is probably the best value, and most likely to pass the 'wife test' (i.e. "Would my wife let me put one of these in the living room?") In fact, I was on my way to buying one when I read the following notice:
By purchasing the i-opener you are agreeing to use the i-opener Internet service. The fee is $21.95 a month and will be billed approximately 2 days after the i-opener is shipped to you.
i-opener Internet appliances shipped after March 20, 2000 can no longer be reconfigured in the manner described in recent reports. Modification of the i-opener in any way is in violation of our terms and conditions.
Reading this caused me to lose a great amount of respect for your organization, especially after having read your statement at http://www.netpliance.com/devcorner/ about supporting and believing in Open Source Development.
You must certainly know that anyone who belives in Open Source Development could not ever willingly buy hardware or a hardware product whose terms of sale restrict my ability and right to take the thing apart and modify it to fit _my_ life (i.e. not just some consumer profile to be marketed to, expected to stay on the couch until the next great consumer item is offered to me in return for my hard earned money)
I am very interested in your statement that you are "...looking into providing an open hardware package for the developer community." Only if buying such a package does not restrict my individual freedom to take things apart and put them back together will I consider buying one.
You must take into consideration the following:
a) If you claim to belive in Open Source Development without walking the walk, you will soon have no customers at all. This is one of the reasons Open Source works. Therefore, your licensing and purchase restrictions on the current i-Opener implementation have pretty much put you out of the running for any new-economy consumer purchases.
b) It is simply ludicrous to require a hardware purchaser to specifically not modify the hardware. Who would buy a car if the hood was welded shut? This is not an inaccurate analogy. I would buy an i-Opener simply for the chance to modify it and run Linux on it. But if you wish to restrict my freedom to modify something I have bought, you will be looking for a different type of customer. I propose to you that if you were to truly embrace Open Source not just at the software level, but hardware too, you would create a fantastically mutually beneficial relationship between yourself and the customers who can best help you develop a good product.
I fully understand that your economic modelling of how the i-Opener would be sold at an apparant loss and revenue gained through monthly internet service fees, but all this says to me is that your financial modelling needs work. If you require a purchaser to buy an i-Opener at price $x and then to pay $21.95 monthly for $y months, you have forced them into an illegal contract. You are selling hardware, not a service that can not be decoupled from the hardware. If I buy an i-Opener, how can you legally force me to pay for internet service?!? What if I have no desire for your internet service, but like the i-Opener? What if I have no phone line? Your marketing tactics would seem to be somewhat presumptious.
I hope you will come to realize the inherent conflict between your statements regarding open source development and your purchasing requirements. A company can not hope to buy into Open Source half-assed and think that it will help them. Your organization will sooner die staked to the fence you attempt to sit on. Please reconsider your purchasing policies and make some good faith effort at a more consumer-friendly financial revenue plan.
Re:More money = better grade at the end?
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
What the poster probably left out (I hope) is that the school was one that either requires each student to buy a subsidized laptop or to already own one meeting minimum specs. I don't see how a professor could possibly expect you to bring a laptop to an exam, or give those that have them that advantage, unless _everyone_ was known to have one.
"adding a 24-inch diagonal display (20" W x 12.7" H). This is about the same height as a conventional 20" monitor, but a lot wider."
Since when is a 20" monitor about 12.7" high? I think this should read, "This is about the same width as a conventional 20" monitor, but much less high." or "This is about the same height as a conventional 13" monitor, but a lot wider".
Has anyone else had problems running Netscape with the snapshots? They have been pretty stable for me except when I run Netscape or Mozilla. Netscape won't follow links, doesn't render pages at all (but downloads all the data) and Mozilla -- well, it's still buggy (M13) but at least it follows links..
I'm interested to hear you talk about the thinking behind some of your members' involvement not just with 'grey hat' operations, but the 'black hat' groups too. Are they just schizophrenic, or are they just undecided on the moral code they wish to follow?
Isn't it funny that at the same site as Linux-Wolfenstein, there's a link at the bottom of the page for a linux CAD program hosted at the same site, right after/.'s big CAD discussion this morning?
Why is anyone surprised? Just like Katz's attempt to run linux, and his other 'pieces', (though I won't say what I think they are pieces _of_...) this is just another attempt to beat whatever drum he thinks will resound the loudest.
People who actually have a clue know not to get overly excited about the high and low points in life, but journalists rely on being able to do so...
Katz seems to be unique from other journalists only in that some of them have learned how to present a fairly unbiased view of events, and that Katz found the linux bandwagon to be a great vehicle early.
Don't interpret this to be a post against linux, Christianity, or journalism in any way! I a) am a Christian (Lutheran, specifically) b) am a Linux user (~2 years now, love it) c) prefer to read better journalism than Jon Katz's...
But NONE of those things mean that I should sensationalistically attack people who do things differently. If people don't believe in God for whatever reason, I think that's unfortunate; and if they want to know why I believe the way I do, I'm more than willing to share it, but I don't tell people they are stupid for not believing as I do...
Just when you thought responsible reporting in our media had hit it's all-time low, along comes Jon Katz
Slashdot Mirror
Does it worry anybody to know that in the process of gaining technical knowledge of *anything* (tech industry, science at large, etc) a person *does* gain a bias of some sort along with it?
...
/me worries about this being just another way to play the system...
These 'experts' could easily be the next best person to buy/influence, if you can't buy the judge/jury... Also, there may be a tendency for the Judge being brainwas^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htutored to give more weight to this expert's information, regardless of how much of it is opinion
Hopefully these experts will be less biased toward a particular case than the 'expert witnesses' called by the prosecution/defense, who are obviously puppets, chosen for the testimony they are expected to give, but I can easily see a situation where the defendant (napster, for example) calls an expert for testimony (shaun fanning, let's say) and then that person's statements are belittled by the Judge's "impartial" expert...
Attaching a beetle with a good wire and then pushing it off the edge of the bridge doesnt seem to be very technical. I would have hoped that they would have done something more creative.
You certainly aren't an engineer then. Making absolutely sure that the cable won't snap like wet spaghetti, without being able to run a test, is not exactly non-technical. The dynamic loads involved are pretty significant, and non-trivial to calculate in the real world.
(what they did, any hick with a truck and an empty beetle shell could have pulled).
Any hick with a firm foundation in Strengths of Materials and Dynamics... The more difficult part is, IMHO, pulling it off without the bay traffic/bridge authority collaring them right there...
I dont give a damn what 'industry' thinks of GNU/Linux - they can goto fucking hell.
Now that's what I call an appropriate use of 'goto'..
Hello? Why do we care if cluebies use OS X? Isn't that like a win/win situation? An easy to use, stable, unix-based alternative to Micro$oft that the masses can use, without the burdensome responsibility of having to hold their hands on *our* mailing lists? I'm gonna talk OS X up to every cluebie I know!
I know, right? HP is a great big company now, but the close ties brought on by Hewlett's managerial style live on. I work for the first HP spinoff, (AMT), separated in 1992, and we in turn do some work for the most recent (and recognizable) HP spinoff, Agilent, and the remnants of HP culture are still here, quite strongly... Hewlett and Packard are two who did American Business the right way -- and in a way that many geeks can appreciate, because it wasn't begun as a money grubbing venture by capitalists, but as a chance to do something technically great by some great engineering minds..
    S*it like this makes me lose even more respect for slashdot's submission editors... I'm afraid the only thing keeping them alive is the lack of a real successor, so all the readers are going down with the ship so to speak..
You aren't a math major are you? They currently boast 23,000,000 searches per day. Let's assume that if you had to *pay* (nevermind the fact that it's only a penny, if you have to go to the trouble to find a way to pay them, it's easier to use someone else) the daily usage will probably fall to maybe 5 million or less. Then they are raking in $50,000/day. 365 days a year, that's over $18E6/yr -- not bad for a search engine, even at the decreased usage rate -- BUT the big thing here is not the money you have to pay -- it's the privacy issue. IF they have a method to log each time I search, and tie that info to some account with which I pay them (maybe every 1000 searches or so), then it's one short line of perl from there to associating *WHAT* I searched for with my account... right now they can of course associate your searching patterns with your IP, but most people are still unfortuneate enough that they dial into a modem pool with a bank of IP's, and thus the association becomes less meaningful. But if you have an ACCOUNT to pay them with, that gets updated each time you search, I would certainly not use google any longer, despite the fact that they are the ONLY engine I use at the moment..
Yeah, but I'm reminded of various fortunes/quotes:
And how true that is! Unix gurus from 20 years ago can at least know where to start with linux, as opposed to a DOS user sitting down to Windows ME, 2000, etc. There is less fundamental difference between any two (or three) *nix "variants" than between any two Micro$oft OS's -- DOS, Win9x, ME, 2000, NT, WinCE (the best named MS OS ever) and now Whistler..
And I thought WINE stood for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" but here all along it IS an emulator, timothy just said so! Besides that, he says it's my FAVORITE one too!
Posted by timothy on Thursday September 14,...
Reading about his house and habits reminds me of my childhood-favorite biography of Thomas Edison.
I should have expected that from 'timothy'. Try reading more history and you'll find that Edison's biographies are often inflated ego trips for the man, and mysteriously choose to avoid talking about Nikolai Tesla. Check out this, this, and this to understand why. If it were up to Edison we'd have *no* electricity because he wanted us to use a DC system simply because it was his idea. 'NIH' (Not Invented Here) syndrome is a bad thing.
I'm late on this article, it's already "older stuff", but in case someone's looking for ideas, the best desk you can have (IMHO, of course) is to take two filing cabinets (the two-high type, not four high; and the legal document width ones are too wide, too) and put a solid wooden door across it. first sand the door a little bit (lightly) and then give it a few coats of a nice natural stain. Then 4 or 5 coats of polyurethane to seal it against the coke/coffee/etc you will be spilling on your desk. I know people who have had this type of desk for more than 20 years and they still look great, and no other design gives you so much real estate.
Maybe they're hoping someone will write them a new encryption algorithm...
Now all we need is Dual Head support for the G400 MAX DH
Sorry, but haven't better than 50% of these quickies been on /. in the past 12 months? C'mon, don't you even _check_ anymore? .
The following was sent to their request for feedback address.
Dear feedback reader,
First of all let me congratulate you on the development of such a
fine product as the i-opener. You seem to have included all the right
features and aesthetically pleasing necessities to have a real winner. Of
all the 'net appliances that have been hyped and marketed in the past 18
months, I would say yours is probably the best value, and most likely to
pass the 'wife test' (i.e. "Would my wife let me put one of these in the
living room?") In fact, I was on my way to buying one when I read the
following notice:
By purchasing the i-opener you are agreeing to use the i-opener Internet
service. The fee is $21.95 a month and will be billed approximately 2 days
after the i-opener is shipped to you.
i-opener Internet appliances shipped after March 20, 2000 can no longer be
reconfigured in the manner described in recent reports. Modification of
the i-opener in any way is in violation of our terms and conditions.
Reading this caused me to lose a great amount of respect for your
organization, especially after having read your statement at
http://www.netpliance.com/devcorner/
about supporting and believing in Open Source Development.
You must certainly know that anyone who belives in Open Source
Development could not ever willingly buy hardware or a hardware product
whose terms of sale restrict my ability and right to take the thing apart
and modify it to fit _my_ life (i.e. not just some consumer profile to be
marketed to, expected to stay on the couch until the next great consumer
item is offered to me in return for my hard earned money)
I am very interested in your statement that you are "...looking
into providing an open hardware package for the developer community."
Only if buying such a package does not restrict my individual freedom to
take things apart and put them back together will I consider buying one.
You must take into consideration the following:
a) If you claim to belive in Open Source Development without
walking the walk, you will soon have no customers at all. This
is one of the reasons Open Source works. Therefore, your
licensing and purchase restrictions on the current i-Opener
implementation have pretty much put you out of the running for
any new-economy consumer purchases.
b) It is simply ludicrous to require a hardware purchaser to
specifically not modify the hardware. Who would buy a car if
the hood was welded shut? This is not an inaccurate analogy.
I would buy an i-Opener simply for the chance to modify it and
run Linux on it. But if you wish to restrict my freedom to
modify something I have bought, you will be looking for a
different type of customer. I propose to you that if you were
to truly embrace Open Source not just at the software level, but
hardware too, you would create a fantastically mutually beneficial
relationship between yourself and the customers who can best help
you develop a good product.
I fully understand that your economic modelling of how the
i-Opener would be sold at an apparant loss and revenue gained through
monthly internet service fees, but all this says to me is that your
financial modelling needs work. If you require a purchaser to buy an
i-Opener at price $x and then to pay $21.95 monthly for $y months, you
have forced them into an illegal contract. You are selling hardware, not
a service that can not be decoupled from the hardware. If I buy an
i-Opener, how can you legally force me to pay for internet service?!?
What if I have no desire for your internet service, but like the i-Opener?
What if I have no phone line? Your marketing tactics would seem to be
somewhat presumptious.
I hope you will come to realize the inherent conflict between your
statements regarding open source development and your purchasing
requirements. A company can not hope to buy into Open Source half-assed
and think that it will help them. Your organization will sooner die
staked to the fence you attempt to sit on. Please reconsider your
purchasing policies and make some good faith effort at a more
consumer-friendly financial revenue plan.
What the poster probably left out (I hope) is that the school was one that either requires each student to buy a subsidized laptop or to already own one meeting minimum specs. I don't see how a professor could possibly expect you to bring a laptop to an exam, or give those that have them that advantage, unless _everyone_ was known to have one.
"most webpages and background images are made for the standard resolutions. "
if you had a huge screen you wouldn't open your browser maximized.
"adding a 24-inch diagonal display (20" W x 12.7" H). This is about the same height as a conventional 20" monitor, but a lot wider."
Since when is a 20" monitor about 12.7" high? I think this should read, "This is about the same width as a conventional 20" monitor, but much less high." or "This is about the same height as a conventional 13" monitor, but a lot wider".
Right?
Has anyone else had problems running Netscape with the snapshots? They have been pretty stable for me except when I run Netscape or Mozilla. Netscape won't follow links, doesn't render pages at all (but downloads all the data) and Mozilla -- well, it's still buggy (M13) but at least it follows links..
Or does this guy remind you of the old
curmudgeonly banker in "It's a Wonderful Life",
Mr Potter?
NO DVD for YOU!
Gigabit Ethernet. Wire the city, make sure it's well supported.. :)
I get this:
This account has too many processes running. Please try again later.
when I try to submit my signature...
Nate
I'm interested to hear you talk about the thinking behind some of your members' involvement not just with 'grey hat' operations, but the 'black hat' groups too. Are they just schizophrenic, or are they just undecided on the moral code they wish to follow?
Isn't it funny that at the same site as Linux-Wolfenstein, there's a link at the bottom of the page for a linux CAD program hosted at the same site, right after /.'s big CAD discussion this morning?
Well I thought it was funny...
Why is anyone surprised? Just like Katz's attempt to run linux, and his other 'pieces', (though I won't say what I think they are pieces _of_...) this is just another attempt to beat whatever drum he thinks will resound the loudest.
People who actually have a clue know not to get overly excited about the high and low points in life, but journalists rely on being able to do so...
Katz seems to be unique from other journalists only in that some of them have learned how to present a fairly unbiased view of events, and that Katz found the linux bandwagon to be a great vehicle early.
Don't interpret this to be a post against linux, Christianity, or journalism in any way! I
a) am a Christian (Lutheran, specifically)
b) am a Linux user (~2 years now, love it)
c) prefer to read better journalism than Jon Katz's...
But NONE of those things mean that I should sensationalistically attack people who do things differently. If people don't believe in God for whatever reason, I think that's unfortunate; and if they want to know why I believe the way I do, I'm more than willing to share it, but I don't tell people they are stupid for not believing as I do...
Just when you thought responsible reporting in our media had hit it's all-time low, along comes Jon Katz
for Debugging: "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" - U2, Joshua Tree
for Coding: "Clubbed2Death - Kurayamino Mix" - Rob D, Soundtrack - The Matrix